Old Square Toes: Sympathy for the Devil

It looks like studio executives at Fox have decided to give the devil his due, at least for one more year.

Now in its second season, the TV show “Lucifer” builds its premise around an idea originally presented in “The Sandman,” an award-winning comic book by Neil Gaiman. In the TV show, as in the comic, the devil has grown tired of overseeing the torments of the damned. He has abandoned the war with heaven, moved to California, and opened a nightclub. In order to hang a weekly series around this concept with Lucifer as the main character,  20th Century Fox made it a police show.

I first heard of the show mid-season last year, when I read that the American Family Association and its affiliated web site One Million Moms had objected. I object too, but not that the show has sown “spiritual confusion,” as the association claims. My concern is that the show has been squandering a great idea. I mean, a police procedural? Really?

In “The Sandman,” Lucifer marked his abdication by throwing the damned out of hell along with their tormentors. The next time we see him, he is lounging on a beach in Perth, Australia, admiring the sunset. Later, in the penultimate story arc to the comic, we find him running his nightclub and playing Cole Porter tunes on the piano.

Try and tell me that you don't find that idea at least a little amusing.

When we first read “Seasons of Mist,” my best friend and I spent days imagining other career paths the devil could have opted for. Plenty of possibilities suggested themselves. Studio engineer or record producer for a major record label. President of a fantasy roleplaying game company.

For a while we even pictured him as the managing editor of a local newspaper who would enjoy playing folk music on his acoustic guitar during open mike nights at the local coffee house. As a bonus, he would be oblivious to the bar fights that unfailingly would break out during his set.

It wouldn't matter whether he sang “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance,” or “Oh My Darling Clementine”; conflict was inevitable. The devil might be tired of running hell, but we were less optimistic than Gaiman about his ability to quit being who he is, no matter how hard he tried.

One thing we were sure of, though: Lucifer Morningstar would never seek political office. There are some depths even the devil won't sink to.

Amusing as all of this may be, and as fascinating a story as it can be in the hands of a talented writer, none of this exactly matches the traditional story of the devil as understood in popular culture. And that is without doubt the source of some of the opprobrium the American Family Association has directed at the show.

In traditional understanding, Lucifer was first in the order of creation. Of all beings, he was second only to God in power and majesty. He was captain of the other angels, the light-bearer and leader of worship in heaven. He was proud, and he was beautiful. There was none like him.

When Lucifer discovered that God intended to create humanity, and to elevate humans to a place of honor higher than the angels themselves, it was too much to take. He disagreed with God so sharply that he actually rebelled, intending to depose the Almighty and take the throne from him. Such was his beauty and magnificence that fully a third of the other angels joined him.

The rebellion went the only way it could. A match would have had greater success extinguishing a hurricane than Lucifer had against God. The angel was cast into hell, and all his followers fell with him.

Since then, Lucifer has been Satan, the Adversary. The very avatar of evil, he has continued to war with heaven, determined to mar Creation as thoroughly as possible. Christians see him as the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve to disobedience in the Garden of Eden, and often perceive his hand in the slaughter of Hebrew infants in the time of Moses, and in the Massacre of the Innocents in the gospel of Matthew.

In the devil's war with heaven, earth is the battleground and the souls of mortals are the prize. Every soul that finds itself in hell is a victory in his campaign against God Almighty. But in the end, of course, the final victory goes to God, along with all the glory. The story ends in the book of Revelation when the devil is thrown into the lake of fire, and God makes his dwelling with humans, as he had planned all along.

As stories go, this is one of the best. Obvious themes include the majesty, sovereignty and glory of God; the dangers of arrogance and pride in one's position; and the folly of resisting God's purposes and will. By incarnating sin and evil in the person of the devil, the story presents us with a moral lesson about sin and rebellion so that his story serves as a warning to us.

Add a motivation – some people say Satan rebelled because he was jealous that God intended humanity to be higher than the angels, though I've also heard suggestions that he disagreed with God's notions of justice – and you have a character in an eternal drama who serves as a potential rebuke to our own sense of entitlement and moral absolutism.

The “Lucifer” writers have turned this into a weekly police procedural where the devil is a funny but likeable social misfit who, instead of marring Creation, helps the cops solve drive-by killings and kidnappings. Rather than opposing the will of the Almighty, his chief concern is that the officer he works with keeps rejecting his advances. It should surprise no one that a petition on the American Family Association web site to stop the show garnered a reported 134,331 signatures before the first season pilot even had aired.

There's just one problem with outrage over “Lucifer.” The story about Satan's rebellion and subsquent fall from heaven is found nowhere in Scripture. It's all told in a poem by John Milton called “Paradise Lost.”

Once we understand that, we stand to gain a lot more spiritual clarity than we ever would have lost from a simple TV show.



Copyright 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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A load of dolumbs

A couple months ago, a friend of mine and I noticed that the word verification mechanism at Blogger increasingly was using strings of characters that either were really words, or at least came close.

One of the more interesting logisms was dolumbs. I say this primarily because Brucker noted that dolumbs looks like a word, but means nothing. But as I contended, it's easy to deduce the meaning of such a logism in context, and trotted out several possible uses:

1. The crew was overcome by a severe case of dolumbs.
2. It was a difficult operation, but fortunately the patient had come to a state-of-the-art hospital where doctors had all the necessary equipment, even a set of dolumbs.
3. The salad bar was full of everything Freddie would need for his meal. There were plump red cherry tomatoes and mounds of grated cheese, the bins were heaped with mounds of croutons and delicious bacon bits. But when Freddie saw the dolumbs, he knew he truly had found the holy grail of salad bars.
4. "Whoa!" Pete cried, elbowing Vern in the chest. "Check out the dolumbs on that babe!"
5. The gym teacher was furious. He'd seen some useless students in his day, but this class had to be the biggest set of dolumbs he had ever come across in 36 years of public education.
6. "I might be a dolumb," thought Melvin, "but at least I'm no rathro like Kevin."

In each examples, the intended meaning is fairly obvious and easy to determine. As used, dolumbs means boredom or perhaps an illness; a piece of surgical equipment; something eaten with a salad; some aspect of a woman, presumably one that makes her attractive, although it could be something else, like jewelry or an article of clothing; an unimpressive or uninspiring student; and lastly, some undesirable appellation, like loser or dork. Interestingly, one could argue that the word refers to the same thing in all six sentences, though I have no idea what possibly could fit such a wide range of uses.

The truth of the matter, naturally, is that dolumbs is essentially meaningless because it is not a word. We can run it up one flagpole or another and assume a meaning from the way it flutters in the breeze, but a shift in the wind or the use of a different flagpole is all that it would take to wrench it away from that assumed meaning and send it blowing away.

It lacks the weight of a thousand years of usage to shape its definition; the force of the mass consent that defines the words contained in the English lexicon, the experience of hearing it and speaking it; and the vast tomes of poetry, drama, essays and other literature that give words meaning in any language. In short, it lacks the necessary context to be a real word, and not just a neologism.

I don't mean to belabor the point, but it's an important one. In the third example, Freddie recognized the eatery as the holy grail of salad bars. The Holy Grail refers to the legendary cup that Christ drank from at the Last Supper. A thousand years or so of English and Continental literature have established the Grail as the most sacred of relics, capable of bestowing immortality or other great treasures on anyone worthy enough to find it.

The weight of that literary, cultural, and historical context allows us to use the phrase holy grail in a metaphorical sense; i.e., this is the salad bar before all other salad bars. For the aficionado of salads, there is no better place to be than the restaurant with this salad bar.

The word even holds up to being used as a verb. Were I to write "Stephen has gone a'holy-grailing," most English speakers will grasp the sense immediately. Conversely, the meaning of "Holy Grail" is so fixed in our minds that a sentence like "Frank took his Holy Grail for a walk" is just nonsense. I might use Holy Grail in place of the word dog, just as a salesman might refer to mattresses as dog kennels, but the misuse of the term throws the meaning of the sentence into doubt and imbues the discussion with a surreal, Pythonesque feel.

If this is true of words we speak, it is even truer of the stories we fashion from them. We understand stories firstly from the context of our own experience. In the case of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," I've encountered people whose reactions ranged from the intended enthusiasm for Scrooge's redemption to scoffing at the story for empty-headed sentimentalism, to disapproval at its liberal message that Scrooge should pay Bob Cratchitt any more than what he is contracted to pay him.

The strangest take on it I ever heard was a psychosexual one: that Scrooge didn't need the spirits of Christmas to change him, he just needed to have sex. (No, I'm not making that up.)

Aswineherder in a remote South American village would have no reaction at all. If he had no knowledge of Victorian England and Christmas, or if his ghost lore allows no room for helpful spirits, the story is likely to be completely meaningless to him. So meaningless, in fact, that it would be impossible to translate it directly.

It's possible for us to derive some meaning from our own context, and if we're close enough to the source of the story, we might even get a semblance of the meaning, but the further we are from the philological, historical and cultural roots of the story, the more likely we are to get it wrong. One dramatic example of this is recounted in the missions biography "Peace Child."

In this story, author and missionary Don Richardson explains that among the Sawi people whom he was living with, treachery was seen as an admirable behavior. Someone who could act like your friend and then destroy you, was hailed as a hero by his clan.

Thus, when Richardson presented the story of Jesus to the Sawi people, the man they admired wasn't Jesus. It was the traitor Judas Iscariot, hardly the hero Richardson had hoped they would embrace. (Richardson eventually discovered a meaningful cultural context among the Sawi that enabled him to reinterpret the story to them so that they perceived the same inherent meaning that he did.)

The Sawi case presents an extreme and obvious example of missed contextual clues, but if we're willing to admit it, the truth is that we ourselves often misunderstand the stories and misconstrue the message of the Bible ourselves. We do not speak the languages the Bible was written in, we lack the premodern mindset of its authors, and we do not share the cultural mores that they took for granted.

Nor, ultimately, do we possess a knowledge of the extrabiblical literature that helped to shape the mindset of the Bible writers, such as the histories of the kings of Judah. When we do possess such literature, we rarely avail ourselves of it. Relatively few American Christians bother to read the book of Enoch, even though the book of Jude quotes it by name.

One of the greatest problems the American church has in terms of biblical literacy is our assumed familiarity with the text. We all know the Haggadah, how Moses came to Pharaoh and demanded that he free the Israelites, and when Pharaoh refused, how God struck him with a series of plagues. Many Americans would be surprised to discover the significant role that Aaron has in this story, just as they might be surprised to discover that Pharaoh would have been Moses' uncle and not his brother.

It goes on from there. Aside from the many ways Hollywood has mined the rich vein of Bible stories, there are many stories that have been told and retold so frequently that they have been reduced to children's tales, with the result that religious folk feel we know not only the story but the moral we're supposed to draw from it.

Why were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego saved from the furnace? Because God rescues people who are true to him. Why was Joseph treating his brothers so harshly when they came to Egypt to buy grain? Because he wanted to test them to see if they had become as mature as he had always been. Who is the Parable of the Prodigal Son about? Clearly, it's about the son who squanders his inheritance in a faroff land and then comes to his senses and comes home.

In each of those three stories, those lessons  I have just shared are commonly taught, but it's fairly clear from the actual biblical passages that none of those is the main point.

Perhaps the biggest loser in this too-familiar approach to hermeneutics is Jesus himself. Among evangelicals in particular, the message of Jesus has been reduced to a simple conversion appeal that is shocking in its absence from the actual teachings of Christ found in the gospels.

The repent/confess/believe message has been preached so widely and so thoroughly in America that we often miss the heart of his message, which was a call to a much deeper spiritual revolution than one of simply changing where we go to church and which label we affix to our set of religious beliefs.

What we need -- all of us -- is to return to a sound basis for Bible study. Christianity has bigger PR problems than the Exxon Valdez because of the boorishness of many of our appointed representatives, but we also have bigger credibility problems than a town hall of politicians in no small part because we've forgotten how to read a text intelligently.

That's been fairly evident the past few weeks as the scientific community has taken time to mark the 200th anniverary of the birth of Charles Darwin. There's scarcely a news article without a snark about the creationists who insist on reading Genesis 1-3 as a scientific treatise on the origin of species and the formation of planets.

That text is beautiful, affirming the transcendent qualities of God and declaring the value of the life of each ecosystem, from the smallest vernal pool to the deeps of the ocean, but let's remember what it is. It's a myth, doing what all great myths do: explaining the relationships among humanity, the world, and the creator of both. The text continues to relate the moral dimension of God, that he approves of certain behaviors and not of others, and it warns that walking out of faith with God can have disastrous consequences.

These are, in all probability, not stories that originated with the Hebrews, although the Hebrew Scriptures reinterpret each one in a manner that is positively revolutionary. The ancient Sumerians told a story virtually identical to the Noah tale found in Genesis, but there the Deluge was brought about by the vagaries of a god who was tired of the noise people made while he was trying to sleep.

The Babylonians told the story of the world's creation as the result of a conflict between Tiamat and Marduk. Only in the Hebrew Scriptures is there a depiction of a God outside the world, who calls it into being by his own authority, and who regards the people he has put there with affection rather than with a tolerance that often borders on annoyance.

There's a lot about the Bible that can be understood just by reading it casually, and I wish many more Christians would do at least that much. But any responsible reading is going to involve a fair amount of study.

To know what the authors were saying, we need to study more ourselves about their values, their beliefs, and their other literature. It may take our faith to places we never imagined we would go, but in the end it's all worth it.

Otherwise, we might as well just be reading a page full of dolumbs.



Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The problem with biblical prophecy about Jesus

The preacher at church issued Sunday what he called The Bible Challenge. It's where you read a passage of Scripture from one religious tradition, and then read a passage of Scripture from another religious tradition, and see if you can tell from the flavor of the Scripture which is actually from your religion.

Well no, not really, but that would be fun. He did do something similar, where he had 10 quotes projected onto the screen and we had to figure out which ones actually were from Scripture and which ones weren't. Among the most popular goofs were the Karl Marx quote "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" and two proverbs: one that says a righteous man cares for his animals but the wicked abuses them; and a second that urges giving strong drink to those who are in mortal pain. Some others I think were thrown off by a quote from a pastoral letter, where Paul lays out the requirements for a "bishop."

The longer-term idea is to combat biblical illiteracy by challenging us to read five chapters of Scripture a day, and then to journal about them, as though journal were a verb and not a noun. If anyone gerunds it into journaling -- i.e., "Did you do your journaling today?" -- I may have to resort to lethal force, at which point I promptly will withhold strong drink from those who are perishing.

Monday's passages are Matthew 1-2 and Acts 1-3.

First, the genealogy. Everyone knows that this genealogy flatly contradicts the genealogy given in Luke's gospel, so I won't even pretend I'm saying anything new here. I've heard some people say that Luke's gospel is the genealogy of Mary, but it certainly doesn't say that in Luke's genealogy. They're both patrilineal.

Matthew builds his genealogy around two key figures from Israelite history. The first is Abraham, from whom the Jewish people claim descent; and the second is David, whom the Tanakh treats as the gold standard for kings. Thus Matthew is linking Jesus to the Abraham, the man whom God made his covenant with; and with David, whom God make a second covenant with.

Astute readers are sure to make the connection and see how Matthew is casting Jesus as a new Abraham, representative of a new covenant; and also to see the claim that Jesus, as a direct descendant of David, is heir to the promise that God would make David's throne an everlasting one.

The third leg of Matthew's genealogy is the time after the Babylonian exile. I'm not sure what he's attempting here, unless it's tying Jesus back into the joy of returning from captivity -- something I'm sure Matthew's contemporaries probably felt they could understand, as the Jewish people were scattered all across the Roman world at this point, and even in Judea, they were under the rule of a foreign power, with a king who was not even one of them. (Herod was a half-Edomite.)

So that's the genealogy. Jesus as the author of a new covenant between God and man, Jesus as heir of the promise to David, and Jesus as the promised homecoming. All that makes sense, since Matthew's gospel was written for the Jewish reader.

Moving along, we come to what for me has long been one of the iffy parts of Matthew. It really seems like he's cherrypicking the verses he wants to cite as prophecies about Jesus, doesn't it? He quotes Isaiah 7:4, the virgin will be with child; Micah 5:2, out of Bethlehem will come a ruler; Hosea 11:1, "out of Egypt I called my son"; and Jeremiah 31:15, a voice heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her childern.

And then he has one about "He shall be called a Nazarene," but no one really knows where he got that one. I've heard it linked to a few, including one about a branching bush in Isaiah, but each one's a stretch.

Which, of course, some of the others are as well.

"Out of Egypt I called my son," is a pretty good example, when you recall that passage continues "and the more I called him, the more he turned away." Hosea of course was describing the relationship between God and Israel in the Tanakh, where God literally called Israel out of slavery in Egypt and then, as the Scriptures recount, watched as the people engaged in one form of idolatry after another. The next verse says "They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images."

And this is supposed to be a prophecy about Jesus? Yikes!

I really don't know what Matthew was thinking with this one. Hosea tells a beautiful story through the tragedy of his own life, of marrying a prostitute and watching as she had children with men other than him -- and then, rather than divorcing her, redeeming her and restoring her to his side.

It's a parable about what God was saying he would do with Israel, and through a christocentric lens, it's easy to see Hosea's behavior as a foreshadowing of Christ's behavior. But Matthew for some reason links Jesus not to Hosea, the hero of the story, but to Gomer.

A little earlier in the passage, Matthew cites the prophecy about "the virgin will be with child, and you shall call his name Immanuel." That's a great Christmastime verse, but there's two problems with it. One is that Isaiah actually said the almah will be with child, almah being the Hebrew word for "young woman," and "virgin" being only a tertiary meaning, according to the scholars I've read.

We can cut Matthew some slack on this one, since he's quoting the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Scriptures made sometime in the previous few centuries, and the rabbis who translated it from Hebrew and Aramaic presumably had no pro-Christian bias at work in the translation process. Evidently they felt that parthenos, the Greek word for "virgin" was close enough to the sense of almah that they would use it, instead of the Greek word for "young woman," and so they went with it, however much contemporary Hebrew scholars disagree.

But if you read the prophecy in the original context, it's pretty clear that Isaiah was talking about the more immediate situation facing King Hezekiah, namely the army that was laying siege to Jerusalem. Isaiah spells it out in 7:16, when he says that the land of the two kings besetting Judah will be laid waste. As the chapter goes on, Isaiah gets specific about Egypt and Assyria attacking the two kings. So it's hard to see this as a particularly messianic passage either.

I don't subscribe to an American view of prophecy, where the prophecy must refer specifically to one and only one event; I realize that these things often have layers of meaning and relevance, like an onion. David's psalm about being betrayed by a friend finds its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus' betrayal by Jesus, and yet it had meaning to David's life as well, and undoubtedly to the rest of us as well.

But come on. I'm not even touching the passages in Micah or Jeremiah, but I think there still are some interesting questions that I've never heard addressed satisfactorily from a pulpit about Matthew's approach to prophecy. Ernie Trask, formerly the pastor at St. Andrew's on the Roundabout in Rotorua, New Zealand, did mention the Hosea 11:1 prophecy in this vein once, but his commentary on it essentially boiled down to "What are you going to do?"

So what gives?

Luke chooses his Scriptures a little more judiciously when he puts them into Peter's mouth. They're not cited as prophecies, but merely as Scriptural guides for the sort of situation they're in, because of the whole Ish-Kerioth affair.

Anyway, it's late, and I haven't much else to say about Acts. Matthew 1-2 showed the lead-up to Jesus' big debut, and the first three chapters of Acts show the lead-in and debut of the church. Luke reinforces the parallels to David by connecting Judas' betrayal of Jesus to a psalm David wrote about being betrayed; and he connects Pentecost to the promises given in the book of Joel.

One other tidbit I've thought of lately is that Pentecost shows God's continued commitment to undoing all that is wrong with the world. Christ's resurrection shows that even death is being undone; Pentecost reflects a lifting or unraveling of the Babel curse.

At Babel, languages were confused and the people were broken up into 70 different nations. On the Day of Pentecost, there surely were many nations unrepresented, but the people who were there miraculously heard the early church worshiping in languages that the speakers couldn't know but the listeners understood completely. It's a reversal of Babel, and a sign that God wants to put the human race back together again, through Jesus.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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old square toes

I have a question for readers of this blog, both casual and committed. Where do you stand on this whole Satan thing?

Many, if not most, Christians in America regard Satan as chief among the fallen; that is, they believe that Lucifer was created as the highest of all angels, second in power and authority only to God. His status led to pride, and Lucifer led a third of the heavenly host in rebellion against God. They failed, were cast out of heaven, and while they await final judgment, they do what they can to mar God's creation. In short, Lucifer became Satan, the devil; and the angels who rebelled with him became demons.

The difficult thing about this is that it's largely extrabiblical if not unbiblical. The story I just summarized is found in the book "Paradise Lost," by John Milton, and not any of the 66 biblical books Protestant Christians consider to be canon.

The ancient Hebrews considered the Satan to be an agent of God, rather than an evil creature bent on the ruin of God's plans. His job was to take a contrary view so that the truth could be determined through thorough cross-examination, a role much like the "Devil's advocate" we use in argument today.

We see this principally in the book of Job, where ha-Satan comes before the Presence. There is no remonstration or hostility expressed, just the question, "Have you considered my servant Job?" and the response, "Does Job love you for nothing? Look at all you've given him." The result of this challenge is the process just described: God removes all that Job has, and Job continues to worship him.

The role also surfaces in the parallel accounts of the census David took in the latter days of his reign, in 2 Samuel and in 1 Chronicles. In 2 Samuel 24, God incites David to take the census and then smites him; in 1 Chronicles 21, it is Satan who makes the suggestion. You also can see this notion of a heavenly court with advisers in 1 Kings 22, when the prophet Micaiah describes an angel that suggests putting a lying spirit into the mouths of Ahab's prophets so that Ahab will go to battle and be slain.

That view of ha-Satan is not entirely what we see in the New Testament, but that that is largely because we read the New Testament with preconceptions about who Satan is. The tempting in the wilderness is similar in nature to the testing of Job, to see what Jesus is made of.

Even when the Bible tells us about Jesus casting demons out of people, the term is better rendered as "unclean spirits," as the footnotes in the New International Version indicate. The afflictions described in the gospels -- epileptic fits, self-inflicted injury, aphasia -- can be seen as coming from a medical or psychological condition, which also would qualify as an "unclean spirit" in a poetic sense.

As a matter of religious history, the view of Satan as subservient to God did shift to the more familiar dualistic one during the intertestamental "silent period." During this period, Judaism acquired the noton of a devil from Zoroastrianism, another Eastern religion practiced near Judea. It lost the concept shortly after the destruction after the Second Temple, and resumed its previous view, namely that ha-Satan was an officer of the heavenly court, subservient to God.

Precisely because it is late in coming, I think we need to view such a dualist God/Satan view of the world with some suspicion. Don't we say that older revelation is the standard by which we gauge newer revelation?

If it weren't for passages of Scripture like Isaiah 49, which speak of God's desire to bring the Gentiles into his kingdom, or for places like Zechariah 12, which Christians believe foretell the Crucifixion, it would be harder to see a connection between the Tanakh and Christianity as we know it and practice it today.

So tell me, whether you're a regular guest here or a new visitor, what you think. Does the Bible actually teach about a devil, or that somethng we misunderstood and have all wrong?


Copyright 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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open theism and prophecy

1) Certain things inescapably are brought about by the will of God; i.e., they are predestined. The Incarnation was one of those, since I believe God always intended that he would walk among us and share our lives; the Crucifixion was a response to sin, so that Christ would identify with us in our deaths so that we could identify with him in his Resurrection. This is Christus Victor theology, and is nothing new. If God predestines it, then he knows it will happen, even if it takes some unexpected shapes.

2) Even if God does not know exactly what shape the future will take, he knows how to read the signs. I felt the air getting cold today, and saw clouds gathering and said, "It's going to rain." If I had told Rachel about it, she doubtless could have impressed her friends with her prognosticatory abilities.

Thus God can see trouble brewing in the empires, hatred stewing for Paul, and know with certainty "Thus-and-such will happen." If God knows all that can be known, he can still hazard a pretty good guess about things are going to work out in the forseeable future, right? Many of them would fall under "absolute certainty."

3) I'm not describing the Almighty as a clockmaker who created the world and is letting it run down on its own. He is an Author who remains inextricably involved with his story, and who is capable of nudging things in whatever direction he chooses to send them.

He is a Musician leading a free-form jam session, guided by the rules and structure that separate music from mere noise, yet still capable of guiding the band through crescendos and decrescendos, across movements and toward a final fermata where he wants it.

He is a Choreographer, set upon the stage with his troupe in an improvisational dance; yet though he dances among them, they follow his lead through moves we have no name for. History remains his to guide and direct, and he can do that through a miracle that sounds as a trumpet blast that tears the caps off mountains, or through the quiet voice that whispers in our hearts.

If he wants something to happen, he can make it do so.

4) Many prophecies concerning Christ were not solely concerned with him. The prophecy "The almah [maiden, virgin] shall be with child," for instance, referred to the events in the reign of Ahaz; later, the gospels writers saw something in that that spoke to them of Christ, and they included it. That we associate it primarily with the birth of Jesus and not with the promise of deliverance from the Assyrians that Isaiah made, is due to the emphasis our liturgical calendar places on that verse in light of its citation as a messianic prophecy.

Psalm 22 unquestionably resonates with the experience of Christ on the Cross, but so do virtually all the psalms about how the psalmist feels abandoned by God.

I don't know what David was thinking when he wrote that psalm -- it could easily have been written about his experience fleeing from Absalom after the prince had wrested the kingdom from him -- but my point remains the same: David's suffering and anguish over being defenseless before his enemies resonates with Christ's suffering and anguish on the Cross, much in the same way that we can identify with his suffering when the chips are rock-bottom down for us.

joseph and potiphar's wife

Genesis 39:7-15
7. And after a time his master's wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, "Lie with me."
8. But he refused and said to his master's wife, "Look, with me here, my master has no concern about anything in the house, and he has put everything that he has in my hand.
9. He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except yourself, because you are his wife. How then could I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?"
10. And although she spoke to Joseph day after day, he would not consent to lie beside her or to be with her.
11. One day, however, when he went into the house to do his work, and while no one else was in the house,
12. she caught hold of his garment, saying, "Lie with me!" But he left his garment in her hand, and fled and ran outside.
13. When she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and had fled outside,
14. she called out to the members of her household and said to them, "See, my husband has brought among us a Hebrew to insult us! He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice;
15. and when he heard me raise my voice and cry out, he left his garment beside me, and fled outside."

So, what happened between Joseph and Potiphar's wife? Did she accuse him of rape when she couldn't seduce him? Or did he accuse her of seduction when he couldn't rape her?

Scripture is pretty forward on the subject; still, you have to admit that it's hardly uncommon for men who rape or try to rape women, to blame it on the woman as though she seduced or pressured him into having sex, and then accused him of rape later.

I recall an incident like this about 20 years ago at the University of Pittsburgh, I've heard a reporter (!) express it in the news room about a case that was making headlines, and I've encountered instances where lawyers use this tactic in the courtroom, particularly when the offender is a police officer or has some other respected position in the community.

Not saying that happened here. Merely asking what people think.

searching out proper ethic principles

"As you know I am an extreme pacifist but if God asked me to do something that ran across that, I would obey God (now, if only I can differentiate God's voice from the other ones in my head) because God is God and I am not."

I'm sure you also have strong feelings on children's welfare. If God told you to horribly abuse a group of preschoolers sexually and physically, would you do it?

Of course you wouldn't -- because you recognize that such an instruction wouldn't be from God. We all feel that we know the voice of God well enough to differentiate what comes from him, and what does not.

Yet without a doubt much of this knowledge and understanding of God's voice has its roots in what our culture or particular subculture says is correct or moral. Few (healthy) people in any Western culture could kill another person without feeling some guilt, even if the act was completely justified; yet there are Christians from other cultures who would find killing in some contexts to be not only morally permissble but morally laudable.

It's precisely those cultural differences that should to some extent us cautious about developing a "biblical mindset"; the ancient Israelites had a decidedly premodern mindset, while Western society is twixt modern and premodern mindsets. We have radically different ideas on slavery, women's rights, the nature of God, and so on from what the authors of the Bible believed. While it doubtless is correct to say that those differences don't necessarily speak well of us, I think it's fair to say that a number of them do, and many of the others merely indicate differences in our social glue, rather than fault or merit in one society or the other.

So God is bigger than us. No question. His ways are higher than ours. Also agreed. But to what extent are those ways reflected in the lives of the ancient Israelites and their culture as recorded in Scripture? The ancients equated obedience to God with wealth and worldly success, but by the time Job was added to the canon, their understanding of God had reached the point where they concluded that such an equation was too facile an understanding of God.

I'm sure I make some people uncomfortable with the questions I'm asking these days, and even with the conclusions I'm starting to find, but I don't think I've strayed into any heresy. Just into uncertain gray areas, but I'm used to living there.

understanding ezra

Here is the essential conflict in discussion of how to understand Ezra correctly: It's one how to interpret scripture wisely and responsibly. Some would posit that the Quran is the Muslim "Bible"; that may be, but I would argue that we err in viewing the Bible as a Christian Quran, dictated in all its wordsby God himself.

The view of Scripture I'm coming to is one where I understand the Bible as a collection of writings of people who were feeling their way in the dark toward God. Thus we see echoed in Scripture the same struggles that we deal with ourselves as a society and a church, viz. how much to assimilate and how much to retreat from "foreign" ways. That Ezra acted in the way he did, even though the book affirms his actions, does not mean that his position is solidly rooted in God as much as it is solidily rooted in his understanding of God within his socio-cultural context.

I think the man was a misogynist and a racist, whatever virtues may rightly be attributed to him, and so I object to his action. Questioning the rightness of his action, even as I understand the reasons for doing so, leads me to a deeper inquiry into my understanding of God and the ways my experiences and culture act as a filter; it also leads me into a deeper exploration of Scripture itself.

Others have views different from mine. But it leads them on a parallel odyssey of the spirit, as they see the contrasting voices in Scripture and meditate on the same issues and conflicts, and move toward a deeper understanding of God. On the way, we run into each other, disagree (sometimes sharply) and hopefully learn from one another. I see this as a good thing, though stubborn know-it-all that I am, I probably don't come across that way.

still messy, still faithful

Got some pretty nice feedback today on my "A Messy Faith" mailing list, owing to the most recent entry, "Trapeze Act." In that particular piece, I write about realizing that I've reached a turning point in my faith, principally that it's gone from being something dogmatic or intellectual in nature to one where it's matured into that relationship thing we talked about in college but I don't think I ever really understood at the time.

I remember in particular how nuts it used to drive me when someone said the Bible was inconsistent. When I was a member of the Assemblies of God, I remember hearing several times from the pulpit that the Bible is not a history text, a science text or what have you, but when it speaks on those points, it is infallible and inerrant. I can't buy that, I'm afraid; the Bible is a collection of stories about God, and there's little evidence that the ancient Hebrews regarded it in the vein of infallibility that American fundamentalists, evangelicals and Pentecostals do.

There's enough inconsistency in the details -- how many angels were at Christ's tomb, how many demoniacs went by the name Legion, whether it was a Canaanite or a Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was afflicted with a demon -- that I can't believe it's completely accurate as a historical document, down to every detail, as it's often presented by believers. Leviticus and Deuteronomy, for instance, describe the same exact sacrifice and each one specifically says that the other's way of preparing the sacrifice is wrong. (One says the meat must be boiled, the other says it must be baked.)

We're right to point out that these are small things, and they don't contradict anysignificant doctrines about God, Christ or anything big like that -- but they're still there, and that raises questions about more fantastic elements of Scripture. What about Noah's Ark? What about Jonah? I don't know. By faith, I'm a creationist, but I no longer feel a need to pretend that creationism is scientific; it's just something I accept on faith, even though I can present you with intelligent arguments about how a creation model fits data that evolution doesn't, as well as much of the data that is held up as support for proof of evolution.

I choose on faith to believe that the events of the Fall, however mythic, still happened. Death entering the world through the sin of Adam is an important point as Paul relates it in Romans. If death already existed as part of the pre-Fallen world, I can't see that there's much hope for a world without death after the Second Coming, since it's already part of God's creation. But that's a faith-based argument rather than one based on science.

I think I really reached the turning point when it was obvious we were going to lose Chris. I was on the phone with my best friend, a total bonehead named David McCandless, and I was in tears I was so upset. I said point-blank that if this was how God treated kids like Chris, I really wasn't sure I wanted any part of him. David asked, without any judgment or rancor in his voice, where I would go then, and I realized just how thoroughly screwed I was -- there was nowhere else I could go. I'd seen enough of the real thing, and had enough of full-contact Christianity to know that even if this wasn't as bad as it could get, Christ was still worth following.

But I've never viewed Christ the same way since. He's grown inestimably bigger in my sight.

One of the lessons that's stuck with me since has been the role of community. The entire experience with Christian was rougher on my wife than on me in part because our church fell apart and she was left without a real community to support us as we were going through everything. I still had McCandless and my fellow weirdoes over at CHRefugee, though even then things like my job at WCN became a way to escape the pain (which of course made things worse for my wife).

There were mercifully few people who told me to buck up and have faith that God would work things out -- although there are always a couple people like that waiting in the wings.

One of the holiest responses I received was that September or October, just before the ax fell. We were trying out/helping out a little at a new church in the Princeton area, and a friend of ours from our old church was also there. Maura asked how things were, and when I started to tell her, she must have seen some of the pain in my face even though I kept it from my voice, because her heart broke right then and she gave me a hug. I started bawling on the spot because of the honest compassion and concern she was expressing. That, I think is what Christ does. He doesn't tell us how to behave or give us proper perspective. He sees that we're in pain, even if we won't admit it to ourselves, and he lets us cry.

McCandless, whose opinion of my writing I hold in tremendous estimation, writes, "Just wanted to let you know that you are doing an excellent job writing your articles... They're very good. Perhaps someday you'll have enough that you could compile them and see if my agent wants to market it as a book."

Actually, as I admitted to him, that's one of the reasons why I'm doing this as a blog/mailing sort of thing. I'm hoping that the writing will market itself to an extent, as people forward links and articles to one another. I put the link in my signature file, but that's about the extent of the marketing I'm doing. When I started this, I invited about fifteen people to sign on,and that was about the extent of the promotion. Only seven people signed up right away, and one person has joined since. I've pretty much taken the view that if God intends to use it, he will, and trying to push it is more likely to bring frustration to myself and other people. I'm reminded somewhat of David, who ran from Saul with no intention of building an army to fight him, but soon found himself surrounded by men who would prove to be the basis of his army when he became king later on. He just hid in the wilderness, and people flocked to him.

So far, it's paying off a little. I'm keeping track of the traffic through Stat Counter, and I'm noticing that there are a few people coming to the site through links in their e-mail, and a number of people are taking the time to read more than one blog entry at a time. And when they leave comments on the blog, I make sure I keep them there. Later on, I figure I can use those posted comments as evidence that I have a readership/platform/audience.

what's it to ya?

Let's look at one of the little mysteries of Scripture.
In the very last verses of the gospel of John, Jesus and Peter are walking along the shore and have their chat about whether Peter loves him. At the end of the conversation, Peter looks back and sees John, and asks, "Lord, what about him?"

Jesus responds, "If I want him to remain until I return, what is it to you?"

John goes on to add that because of this, the rumor started to spread among the believers that John would not die, but Jesus did not say he would die. He merely said "If I want him to remain until I return, what is it to you?"

I believe that every word in Scripture has meaning on at least one level, but usually on more. If Jesus meant simply, "It's none of your business what happens to John," he could have said so in a bazillion different ways.

So what did he mean by "If I want him to remain until I return, what is it to you?" If all he meant was "It's none of your beeswax" -- and I believe that not only is a valid interpretation, but one of the layers of meaning -- then why not say, "It's none of your business?" Or, if he wanted to be poetic, why not say, "If I want him to grow antlers and sing at bar mitzvahs, what is that to you?"

Good literary analysis holds that the choice of words in a passage, particularly when it's cryptic or suggestive like this is, there's more than one layer of meaning.

I compare it to the fate of Enoch, when the author of Genesis writes "Enoch walked with the Lord, and then he was no more for the Lord took him away." On the face of it, that means Enoch died, end of the story, game over. But it's such a clever way to say it -- and it differs from all the other deaths in that genealogy, where the author writes "And then he died," so it's completely reasonable to assume that Enoch didn't just die, but was translated.

In Acts 1, the disciples ask Jesus if he's going to restore the Kingdom of Israel. What is it Jesus says? Not "If I want to wait a couple millennia to do it, what is that to you?" but "It is not for you to know the times and dates the Father has set by his own authority."

There you have it. Point-blank, in-your-face "This is none of your business." But that's NOT how he answered Peter's question. Which means to me that that wasn't his whole intent.

The Revelation explanation -- that John was physically present for a vision of the End Times, and hence was "alive until I return" -- is one I heard back in college, but I don't quite buy it.

That seems to be suggesting that John saw futuristic events but didn't understand them, so he developed weird images like locusts that sting like scorpions, and green mice that run uphill in the moonlight. That just sounds ridiculous, particularly when you consider how much of the imagery of Revelation is found in earlier prophetic books, particularly from the Tanakh.

I wouldn't be surprised if the closing verses in John are partly the basis for the old legend about the Wandering Jew.

Good Bible study involve asking "Why did it happen this way?" I find I get the most understanding of Scripture and what Christ does in us when I try to understand the people and the dynamics involved. Knowing more about a seder makes lights come on during a reading of the Last Supper that would have stayed off if I hadn't read the haggadah before last Easter.

And as I said, good literary analysis involves looking at cases where a simpler response wasn't used, particularly when you consider that Jesus had other occasions where he spoke quite plainly: "Then neither will I tell you by whose authority I am doing these things" or "It is not for you to know the times and dates the Father has set by his own authority."

That Jesus said anything beyond "What is it to you?" makes his comments worth considering; that John heavily implies that Jesus didn't mean John would never die makes it doubly intriguing to think about.

Given the context of the quote, I think tjos take on it is the best one: that Jesus is saying it's going to be a while until he returns, and John will outlive all the others. Jesus just told Peter how he would die -- when you are old you will stretch out your hands and be taken where you do not wish to go -- so it makes sense that Jesus is saying something about John's fate.

Our college IVCF staff worker was big on the idea that Christ's prophesied "coming on the clouds in judgment" was a reference to A.D. 70, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and that other prophecies we consider to be End Times refer to the Last Days of the covenant with Israel. (I do not subscribe to this belief.)

In that sense, you could argue that John lived until Jesus came again, since he was not martyred, but lived to see the church become an increasingly Gentile body, saw the sack of Jerusalem under Vespasian and also witnessed the end of the Caesars, when Nero, last of the Julio-Claudians, was killed.

genocide in the bible

A friend of mine wrote a very intriguing piece on two of the genocides mentioned in the book of Judges, specifically the slaughters of the Canaanites and of Amalekites, that used to be on his now-defunct About.com web site. I don't remember all the nitty-gritty, but he tackled the subject from the perspective of graded absolutism.

A simple example of graded absolutism: Violence is wrong. Letting someone be beat to death also is wrong. If you see someone being beat to death, are you justified in using force to stop the assailants? Of course you are, and depending on the circumstances, you probably could even see your way to using lethal force.

As I recall, the contention of Greg's piece -- and if it's still online, I don't know where it would be -- was that for God to order the destruction of the Amalekites and Canaanites, their sin was so grievous there was no other way to handle it. He also gave the whole thing an important perspective: the command to wholesale destruction of a people were not given as frequently as people usually think.

Me, I still feel uncomfortable thinking of those orders.