1) Many people, unchurched and churched alike, have never actually looked in any detail at multiple Bible translations and therefore don’t have a good feel for just how different and similar they are. As a result, they tend to think they are actually far more different than they really are, leading to strange questions like, “With so many different English translations, how do we know which one or ones, if any, we can trust.” The short and most basic answer is, except for those produced by unorthodox sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New World Translation or Joseph Smith’s personal Joseph Smith Translation,  or those deliberately designed to be a paraphrase and not a bona fide translation at all (like The Message or the old Living Bible Paraphrased), you can trust ALL of them. Not one will ever flawlessly come up with the very best rendering in every passage, but not one will ever lead you astray on any important matter of faith and practice. Do yourself the favor of getting the software that allows you to compare a couple dozen major English translations for a representative cross-section of Bible verses or passages of your choice and prove it to yourself!

2) Because of the passion with which some scholars and church leaders have advocated one of the bona fide translations above others or criticized one or more of those translations, way too many people both inside and outside of the church have the misimpression that you can’t trust all of them the way point 1) above phrases it. It’s time for those scholars and church leaders to come clean and correct these misimpressions. With the wealth and luxury of so many options in the English-speaking world, it’s time to put a lot less money and effort into internecine argumentation and a lot more into letting the world know the magnificent wonders of this collection of books we call the Bible, regardless of what translation one prefers!

3) We must help our people, and others, understand the difference between formal equivalence, dynamic equivalence, and mediating approaches. To oversimplify but to make the point, the more literal the translation is, the harder it will be for the general population at large to understand it. The more readable for one particular subculture the translation, the less literal it will be. It is simply inaccurate and thus irresponsible to say that the more literal a translation, the better, for all situations. The most literal translation of all is an interlinear, which is indecipherable to most people. The most readable, understandable and accurate, all in one package, will always be those translations that do not consistently aim for either formal equivalence (word-for-word renderings) or dynamic equivalence (thought-for-thought), but aim at a middle ground between the two—as literal as possible while still being as fluent and understandable by the greatest number of people as possible.

4) In light of this last point, and completely apart from debates about inclusive language, the tradition of translating represented by the NIV-TNIV continues to achieve this balance most consistently. The next best options aren’t even close.

It was an intriguing list. There were a few names I didn’t recognize that I had to look up, but most were indeed ancient writers from one of those three cultures. The trouble was that only about a third of them could be legitimately called historians. One was an ancient taxonomist who wrote about flora and fauna. A couple were writers on medicine or ancient science. Two were geographers. Several were poets and playwrights.

Of those who were truly historians, several did indeed live “around the time of Christ” but just a little bit before him. Gee, I wonder why they never mentioned him! Several others were actually second- or third-century writers not writing about life in Israel at all but about other parts of the Roman empire. In short, there wasn’t a single name on the list for which there would have been good reason for Jesus even to have been mentioned.

At least this blogger had the wherewithal to acknowledge that the first-century Jewish historian does twice refer to Jesus and that early second-century Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius do too. He obviously just had no idea who all these other folks were, and, in fact, acknowledged that he had taken the list from some obscure book published early in the twentieth century.

In our age of growing disinterest in history and classics (i.e., Greek and Roman language, history and literature) more generally, his faux pas isn’t surprising I guess. What is surprising to me, but perhaps it shouldn’t be either, are the number of people who ask why, even granted these late-first- and early-second-century witnesses, historians who wrote closer in time to Jesus’ ministry (probably 27 or 28 through 30 A.D.) didn’t refer to Jesus.

The question I always want to ask is “And which individuals are these who you think should have referred to Jesus?” The fact is that we no longer have in existence the writings of a single Jewish, Greek or Roman historian who wrote about life in Israel during the first third of the first century. And  even those whose names we know about, because later authors refer to them, are precious few in number, and we typically know little if anything of the contents of their writings. It’s hard for non-existent sources to reference Christ, or anyone else for that matter.

So why do so many atheists “buy” this meaningless argument from silence without even questioning whether sources exist in which we should expect to find something about Jesus but don’t. The only answer I can think of is that they really aren’t interested in learning truth, only in challenging it, and that without even being curious to find out what they don’t know that they don’t know!

G. K. Chesterton put it well a century ago. When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything!

Last weekend I was in Athens as part of a group of 40 on Denver Seminary’s every-other-year trip “In the Path of Paul”.  It was the climax of two weeks of traveling around Turkey and Greece seeing many magnificent ruins (as well as smaller ones), teaching and learning about the sites Paul visited.

Of course, in Athens we visited the Parthenon and other sites on the Acropolis, the reconstructed Stoa of Attalus, and the famous Areopagus (Mars Hill).  We read and discussed Paul’s famous address there (Acts 17:22-31, which is also inscribed in Greek on a plaque on the side of a rock at the bottom of the hill.  It is a well known sermon to be sure.

But how many of us remember how Luke begins his narrative of Paul’s time in Athens?  Verse 16 makes clear Paul’s reaction when he saw so many temples and shrines dedicated to the various gods, goddesses and emperors:  “he was greatly distressed.”  The verb is from paroxunomai, which can also mean “inwardly aroused, “ “greatly upset,” or “provoked to wrath.”  It is the root from which we get the English word “paroxysm.”

Of course we had to take in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, ranked by some as among the top ten museums of its kind in the world.  And the next day we had a stopover in London for time at the British Museum, which certainly ranks in that category.  People understandably go to ancient ruins and modern museums and marvel of the architectural feats of the ancients.  Do we also stop and reflect on how disproportionately large a percentage of those edifices came about in order to worship false gods or deified human rulers?  Do we agonize over the massive amounts of slave labor employed in back-breaking work over decades to create these monuments to idolatry?  Paul did and it broke his heart.  Little wonder he did everything he could to point the Athenians in a very different direction.

It’s not surprising that in this context part of his message would include the reminder, stressed already by Solomon, that God does not dwell in temples constructed by humans.  Even Solomon’s temple was not God’s first plan but a response to the desire of the people to be like the pagan nations surrounding them.  His initial plan was the still beautiful but more modest and portable tabernacle.  In the New Testament, Jesus makes clear in John 4:20-24 that locations or buildings aren’t what worship is all about but worshiping God “in spirit and in truth”.

The Protestant Reformers rightly criticized Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism for at times spending too much money and focusing too much attention on creating ornate buildings rather than promoting true worship of Jesus.  Until some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s, evangelicals were in general known for their more modest buildings than liberal Protestantism, but in the last thirty years that state of affairs has, in general, been reversed.  At what point do our facilities become our idols?  Would Paul be greatly distressed if he came to Denver and saw the number of large churches and the millions of dollars their people pour into their buildings that could be better spent elsewhere?

There were, of course, numerous examples of people and institutions doing precisely this, which made the case persuasive to many.  What was ignored was the long-standing rejection of inerrancy in the former British commonwealth, combined with a robust affirmation of the inspiration and authority of Scripture and the fundamentals of the faith in evangelical circles in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc.  Ignored also were those who had "climbed back up" part or all of the slippery slope, most notably Karl Barth and neo-orthodoxy, moving from thoroughgoing liberalism to something much closer to though not quite full-fledged evangelical thought.

I remember once talking to D. A. Carson when I was his student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School about the consummate published version of this slippery slope argument, by Harold Lindsell, in his book The Battle for the Bible.  I think I can still quote him verbatim.  Carson replied, "Lindsell is on the side of the angels, but it's a bad, bad book."  Human responses are just too diverse to package them into a "one-size-fits-all" model with respect to the apparent contradictions in and harder-to-accept parts of Scripture.

Ironically, Bart Ehrman's account of his pilgrimage from evangelicalism to agnosticism, in his introduction to Misquoting Jesus, offers support for Lindsell and his followers.  On one occasion a professor at Princeton, responding to a paper Ehrman wrote trying to harmonize Mark's reference to Abiathar in Mark 2:26 with the OT character in question (Ahimelech), inquired of Ehrman why he didn't just accept that Mark made a mistake.  Already well aware of the fact that we do not have the original autographs of any of the books of the Bible, and that minor (and once in a great while, larger) changes were introduced by scribes in the copying process, Ehrman now felt free to apply the same language of "mistakes" to what the writers of those autographs themselves may have done.  Oversimplifying the rest of his autobiography, but remaining true to its gist, we may then summarize what he says happened after that as one domino of his faith after another being knocked down until he came to call himself an agnostic.

Why do I call this ironic?  Because when I was an undergraduate in a liberal college department of religion, it was all the liberals who consistently pooh-poohed this all-or-nothing mentality.  The professors at that institution hold the same view today. Plenty of professors at Princeton when Ehrman was a student there, and again still today, would have agreed.  It was always those rigid, inflexible fundamentalists who couldn't see the many viable options for genuine Christian belief apart from the inerrancy of Scripture.  But then Ehrman went to a fairly rigid, inflexible fundamentalist school for his undergraduate studies, so perhaps he had not previously heard those claims; I don't know.

What I do know is that in the blogworld, among the so-called new atheists (by which is usually meant newly aggressive, unusually scornful of and discourteous toward believers), and in their small but influential collection of published works (particularly from Prometheus books), I keep running into this same all-or-nothing mentality.  I get e-mails from unbelievers who can't accept this idea that ancient writers were satisfied with reporting accurately the "gist" of someone's words, in a world before the invention of the quotation mark or any felt-need for it, and it reminds me of Christian fundamentalists' responses.  I have non-Christian friends tell me they've read some strange uses of the Old Testament in the New (who hasn't?) and before they even start looking to see if there is some legitimate explanation for this, they say they are almost ready to give up on considering that the Bible as reliable anywhere.  As many observers in other realms have pointed out, truly there is a fundamentalism of the left as well as of the right!

If trends continue, thoughtful inerrantists may discover they have greater allies in non-inerrantist wings of Christianity than they thought, and that they have far more in common with them than they do with those who hold the "all-or-nothing" mentality outside or inside the church!

Four years ago, my then 14-year-old daughter Rachel was watching me put together some power-point slides for class and asked if she could make one.  I told her to make me something for Titus, since I didn't have much of anything creative for that often neglected of Pauline epistles.  The result was a slide with several bullet-point entries like, "I like Titus."  "Titus is short,"  "You should read it, too."  She insisted I include it in my class presentation which I did every year since.  Students always laughed.

Last summer she asked to revise the slide.  She took out the bullet points and substituted one large all-capitals, stylized, red-letter slogan:  "Don't be a Cretan!"  The more I thought about it, the more it struck me that such a summary could well hold its own in competition for the "big idea" of the letter.  Titus is pastoring one or more churches on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean sea, beset by problems related to a Judaizing heresy, perhaps with other local syncretistic elements mixed in.  The Christians are quite young, many probably from rough and rustic backgrounds, so godly and mature leaders are hard to come by.  In this context it is not surprising that the first two main topics Paul addresses after a rich, theologically detailed greeting (1:1-4) are the criteria for choosing elders/overseers (vv. 5-9) and rebuking the false teachers (vv. 10-16).  Into this last section, he inserts the verse quoted above on the evils of being a Cretan.

Already in pre-Christian Greek philosophy the "liar's paradox" was well-known.  If I truthfully declare that Andreas always lies, and then Andreas pipes up by saying, "I am lying," is he telling the truth or lying?  If he is telling the truth, then his statement that he is lying is true, which means he has to be lying rather than telling the truth.  If Andreas' statement is false, which it should be if he always lies, then it is false that he is lying which means he is telling the truth, which is what he can't be doing.  So there is no way to answer the question as to whether Andreas is lying or telling the truth!  Everybody still with me?  :)  (This is why I don't teach philosophy for a living!)

So now substitute Paul for me and the Cretans for Andreas.  (Since Andreas is a Greek name and one I picked at random for the purposes of illustration, it's easy to make him be a Cretan).  The reason Cretans got the reputation that they did was because they boasted that they housed the tomb of Zeus.  But as head of the Olympic pantheon of Greek gods, Zeus could not die.  So the Cretans' claim must be a lie. The Cretan philosopher Epimenides then coined the slogan that Paul quotes and endorses here.

Most commentators have simply assumed that Paul, like Epimenides, was employing hyperbole.  He knows it is logically impossible for all of them to lie all the time.  But as a broad generalization, he was able to use this well-known quotation to reinforce for Titus the seriousness of sorting out the problems in the Cretan churches.  And the Cretans can't get too mad at Paul because all he is doing is citing their own writer back to them.  Besides Epimenides' slogan had become somewhat humorous in the Hellenistic world; it wasn't necessarily even meant to cause offense, so much as poke fun at the silly claim about Zeus.  Perhaps it wasn't too much worse, culturally speaking, than someone who might remind lifelong Cubs fans like me at the start of a new baseball season, "Cubs are always losers, always letting their fans down, lovable and laughable though they might be."  Especially if a Cubs fan was being quoted, and since there is a core truth behind the quotation, it's hard to get too upset.

But English scholar Anthony Thiselton suggests that Paul is actually trying to point out how self-defeating it is to live in ways that do not match one's ideology or, in this case, religious commitments.  This would certainly make the passage much more widely relevant and applicable, not only to situations that resemble Crete's but to all of us. 

We've just finished celebrating Good Friday and Easter Sunday, powerful annual reminders of the need for cruciform, selfless, servant lifestyles buttressed by the spiritual power already ours now to live above our circumstances and one day to triumph over death with resurrection bodies for life everlasting, wonderful beyond imagination.  Are we demonstrating to the world around us that these spiritual truths are indeed realities in our lives, or are we creating our own liars' paradoxes, leading some to think, "Christians are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons"?  Telling the truth, doing good, avoiding boorishness and violence, working hard and not overindulging our appetites for anything we are tempted to covet are crucial priorities for one who would bear Jesus' name before today's mockers and skeptics.

I remember when the preparations for war in Iraq gave way to the intense, initial bombing of Baghdad, dubbed "Shock and Awe." A preacher I heard, who usually displays good exegetical acumen and theological insight, announced, in essence, "Up until now, it was important for Americans to debate the issue of war in Iraq from all perspectives. Now that our government has made its decision, Romans 13:1 teaches us as Christians that we must support the war effort. That's all there is to it."

I was shocked and not at all in awe. That's it? That's all there is to it? One solitary Bible verse settles it all? What about the immediate context of Romans 13:1? What about the actual meaning of Romans 13:1, to say nothing of the rest of Scripture?

The chapter break between Romans 12 and 13 is one of the more unfortunate, though understandable ones, in the Bible. Romans 12:9-21 is united by the theme of love. Verses 14-21 keep coming back to the theme of loving one's enemies. Verses 17-21 never leave the topic.

Pacifists have often seen these verses as a mandate for governments. If governments won't follow them, then at least individuals Christians should be conscientious objectors and refuse to participate in war, even when their governments declare it. Those believing in just-war theory focus on 13:1-7 instead. Not only should believers obey their governments, it is argued, but God has ordained violence, at times, as means of peacekeeping or peace-restoring. Hence verse 4b: "rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God's servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer."

There are many points about both of these back-to-back sections in Romans that must be made before using either in service of a theory about violence or non-violence. I have briefly sketched a number of them in From Pentecost to Patmos in my treatment of this part of Romans. Here I simply want to remind us who Paul's most immediate audience is-the gathered community of believers in Rome.

It is unlikely any government officials read Romans when it was first written. It is unlikely any Christians in Rome had any access to influence government decision-making. So it is doubtful that Paul envisioned his letter in any way changing emperor Nero's mind about anything. He knew, already in 57, the most likely year in which Romans was written, that the emperor blasphemously asserted divine prerogatives and disliked Christians, hostility that would lead to full-blown persecution of them starting in 64. So it cannot directly have been intended to influence governments' behavior.

Martin Luther recognized that 12:14-21 and 13:1-7 did not contradict one another, but harmonized the two by arguing that the former represented the individual Christian's responsibility, as a private citizen, as it were, while the latter reflected the state's responsibility. This was part of what came to be known as his "two-kingdoms" approach to church-state relationships.

But it is unlikely that the Roman Christians would have thought first of their individual responsibilities before their responsibilities as part of the group of Jesus followers in Rome. Theirs, like the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world, was one in which people thought of group loyalties before individual rights or responsibilities. Most likely, in Romans 12, Paul has the church as a community first of all in mind. Whatever governments may ask their subjects (or citizens) to do, wherever individual Christians may draw the boundaries beyond which they personally cannot proceed without violating their own conscience's understanding of the principle enunciated so well by Peter ("we must obey God rather than human beings"-Acts 5:29), the church has the responsibility to love her enemies, and to be seen by the world as doing so.

So whether we as individuals today see, with the Republicans, Iraq and Iran as the biggest threats to peace in the Middle East and elsewhere, or see, with the Democrats, Pakistan and Afghanistan as the biggest threats, whether we enlist in our military or promote pacifism, the church of Jesus Christ in America and around the world has the responsibility of separating itself sufficiently from both parties, indeed from our government more generally, so that the watching world can see that our highest priority on issues like these is loving our enemies-providing them with humanitarian aid in Jesus' name and then providing them with Jesus' name--the gospel itself.

Neither evangelicals or liberals are anywhere close, collectively, to that mandate today. Little wonder that each new dead American civilian in various Asian countries is found with his corpse left out in the open and a sign affixed to it saying "CIA." Do the terrorists who so label our dead countrymen know they are lying? Perhaps. But many ordinary people don't. Not until we as the church give them clear reason for distinguishing us from our governments and their spies can we expect anything to change.

I was amazed during the waning weeks of the Bush administration how little protest I heard from evangelicals of the $700,000,000,000 + bailout plan. I am amazed how much complaint I hear now of the only slightly bigger bailout plan of the Obama administration, and especially how rarely the critique is based on biblical principles. Seems this is just one more case of partisan politics, keeping the country polarized and in financial crisis.

Consult the literature of any of the major Christian organizations that focus on teaching good stewardship or wise handling of money matters and one of their cardinal principles is to stay or get out of debt as much as possible. So how can going deeper into trillion-dollar debt be the right answer for a Christian take on politics and economics, whether it is supported by the Republicans or the Democrats?

The answer recently came to me abruptly when I saw the title of an on-line article: "Can Savers Ruin the Recovery?" The gist of this secular writer's point was that to get the stock market significantly higher again, to get banks lending and people borrowing freely, we have to start spending money liberally again, which of course means we have to have the jobs back, the salaries raised, and the confidence in the market to start that kind of spending. But consumers burned by the collapse of their investments will take a long time, perhaps years, to regain that confidence. Meanwhile they will look for the safest places to save their money rather than to risk any potentially volatile (read money-earning or money-losing) investments.

I'm not enough of an economist to know if that's inevitable, but it makes sense. But to restore the economy in that fashion appears to fly directly in the face of biblical economic principles, well summarized centuries ago by John Wesley: "Make all you can, save all you can, and give all you can." I'm reminded, too, of the dramatic contrast between the national response to the Great Depression as it led into World War II--the calls first to save and then to give--and the Bush appeal a few years ago to spend money, thereby fueling the economy, as an act of patriotism! Again, I can only imagine how a Democratic president saying such a thing would have come in for scorn and outrage from the very evangelicals who were silent while a Republican president was saying it.

If it is inevitable that living within our means, spending only that which we have, and saving frugally while continuing to give generously ruins the recovery, then so be it. It is biblical stewardship. Worshiping at the shrines of materialism and instant gratification played a large role in getting us into the economic mess we are in, so it can scarcely be the answer to getting us out!

Translators debate the exact meaning of Romans 13:8a. A highly literal translation would read, "Owe no one anything except to love one another." Most translations say something similar to that. But a minority are more akin to the NIV and TNIV quoted above. They recognize that there was a limited borrowing and lending economy in both Jewish and Greco-Roman circles in the first century which Jesus (and Paul elsewhere) never called into question. In the context of Romans, Paul has just endorsed Jesus' teaching on the need to pay taxes, also an entrenched part of both Jewish and Greco-Roman economic systems. The present tense verbs in the sentence may well denote the continuous sense of action implied by "remain outstanding" and "continuing."

In other words, there may be rare occasions where borrowing money does make sense, and is not unbiblical, as, for example, with a home loan, when a person has enough for a significant down payment and when the mortgage payments are substantially less than renting options available and there is good reason to believe the person can pay off the mortgage comparatively quickly and at reasonable interest rates. There may be times when one is close to the end of a degree program and it is good stewardship to borrow the last little bit for educational costs. But cars, major church and parachurch building projects, indeed most everything else, should probably be saved for and paid for by cash. Credit card debt, because of the extortionary interest rates involved, should almost never be entered into.

Will some think this unpatriotic? Will it slow the road to recovery? Will it force us to delay gratification of our desires? Irrespective of the answers to these questions, it may be time for Christians to declare sense and sensibility, by biblical standards, loudly and clearly! That may be the true biblical economic stimulus plan.

I remember my father (who was 37 when I was born) and his older sister (13 years older than him) describing young adulthood in the 1920s and 1930s. Women wore one-piece bathing suits that went down to the ankles. Non-Christians felt at least some guilt or shame if they had premarital sex, and in Christian circles virginity was the norm, with rare exceptions.

I had the "privilege" of having my adolescence span the turbulent period of the late 60s and early 70s when some women burned bras, Woodstock celebrated free air and love (i.e., a lot of public, outdoor sex) and Helen Reddy sang, "I am woman, hear me roar!" But still evangelical Christian leaders unequivocably upheld the historic Christian teaching on abstinence before marriage, even as not all of their young adult charges followed suit. Josh McDowell was still young, though, and spoke to rapt audiences of teens about "Maximum Sex"--i.e., saved for a heterosexual spouse.

Today, I regularly hear youth pastors saying that most of the "Christian" kids to whom they minister have had premarital sex. I hear well-read Christians of various ages admitting they're not sure the Bible really excludes the practice, since most of its prohibitions involve adultery--breaking the marriage covenant. I hear still others insisting that it doesn't matter what the Bible says about sex, it's as outmoded on the virtues of virginity as it is on gender roles in home and church. There's nothing wrong and a lot right about sexual relationships between consenting adults, they allege.  

The Bible hasn't changed, nor has God's Spirit, which enables humans to obey Scripture. So why are we giving up (or giving in) so ridiculously easily and prematurely in this area?

Then one reads 1 Corinthians 6:16 and just scratches one's head.  What? "Sexual immorality" (porneia or "fornication"--sexual relations with anyone other than a heterosexual spouse) is a unique sin against one's own body? What about cutting? What about alcohol or drugs? And surely suicide is the ultimate sin against one's body!

All very true, so long as "body" (sōma) is taken as meaning just the tangible or fleshly part of a human being. But the scholars who have researched the term in depth tell us it can also mean the human person in his or her most intimate acts of communication or communion with others. I suddenly start to understand a little better why the word "intercourse" is used both for conversation and for sex!

Now verse 16 makes sense. Plenty of sins damage one's own body but don't affect the bodies of other people. Sexual intercourse, by definition, requires two people. It is the most intimate of expressions of self-giving love; two people naked before each other, in postures and position that are meant to express ultimate vulnerability and therefore trust and ultimate allegiance, at least at the human level. Someone once said that what is most wrong with sex outside of marriage is not the risk of pregnancy or STDs, much as those remain even in our highly sexually educated society because people continue to refuse "protection." Rather, what's most wrong is that it takes from someone else what was designed to reflect the most intimate of human commitments without being willing to promise the ultimate loyalty intended to go along with that intimacy. Actually, they said it more succinctly and memorably, but I can't exactly remember how or where!

Augustine in his Confessions explained that once he got his sex life under control, he turned to his gluttony, because the same kind of drives were at work in each case, and the same solution required: delayed gratification. Maybe our obesity as a nation and our sexual incontinence are linked!

I will not repeat all of the details of that harmonization here. I am more intrigued by Kenton Sparks' two-page response to it in his new book, God's Word in Human Words (pp. 162-64). Sparks, who teaches biblical studies at Eastern University, has penned a work in which he encourages evangelicals to take more seriously standard critical approaches to such classic debates as the meaning of the creation narratives, the genre of Jonah, the authorship of Isaiah and Daniel, and so on. Sparks is clearly much more at home in Old Testament studies than in New Testament ones. I am sympathetic to his approach with some of his illustrations though not with all. But what he does in response to me, I confess, seems passing strange.

First, he thinks my view requires one to believe that John was portraying a Passover meal in John 13-16, while going "out of his way to dissociate John's final meal from the Passover." But, in fact, I argue that the best reading of 13:1-2 is to indicate that this was the Passover. It is true, John does not include the Words of Institution over the bread and cup as in the Synoptics, but then neither does he describe Jesus' baptism in John 1, while telling us everything else surrounding it. These phenomena have regularly been observed and given a variety of explanations from John being non-sacramentalist to him seeing all of life as sacramental, but no one argues that John has changed the chronology with respect to Jesus' encounter with John the Baptist. Maybe I have not interpreted John 13:1-2 correctly, but that is a separate matter.

Second, Sparks wonders if it is even likely that John's audience would have recognized this as a Passover meal, even if 13:1-2 isn't meant to suggest that. In other words, how familiar were they with the Synoptic traditions? Sparks doesn't interact with Richard Bauckham's well-known treatment in The Gospels for All Christians that suggests they would very much have been familiar with them. But he insists that the audience would have picked up from the passing reference in John 19:14 that it was "about the sixth hour" (i.e., noon) when Jesus was crucified that this was the same time that the Passover lambs were being slaughtered for that evening's supper to come. The audience doesn't know the basic account of the Last Supper, already central to Christian liturgy, but they, largely Gentile, are expected to know the details of the time of the slaughter of the lambs in a Jewish festival and to assume that was what John was stressing merely by giving the time of day with no actual mention of any sacrifices? This seems entirely backwards to me. 

In fact, Sparks seems to be trying much too hard; he writes that John "juxtaposes in blatant fashion [the crucifixion] with the day of preparation of the Passover; it was about the sixth hour." But 19:31 clarifies that the Day of Preparation was not for the Passover, it was for the Sabbath (Saturday) during Passover week. And where is there any blatant juxtaposition? The crucifixion is not mentioned for another two verses and Jesus doesn't actually die until verse 30, well after noon and the proper time for the supposed allusion to the Passover lambs to fit very closely.

Third, Sparks complains that I don't tell what my backup theory would be if my harmonization between Mark's third hour and John's sixth hour for Jesus being put on the cross were wrong--namely by assuming the time was somewhere between 9:00 and noon. But how often do scholars make a habit of telling readers each time they propose a theory what they would opt for if that theory were shown to be wrong? That would make most books double the length they already are! Sparks rarely does it in his book. But I guess my answer would be to opt for the approach Westcott and others well argued, that John was following Roman reckoning rather than Jewish, though admittedly that approach has problems of its own as well.

Fourth, Sparks claims I don't discuss the problem of 13:1 saying that the meal took place before the festival. Apparently he didn't read my comments under 13:1, because I very much do explain this, in both books! I argue that 13:1 forms a small paragraph in itself, as indeed many English translations punctuate it. It was indeed "just before the Passover" meal when Jesus knew his time to leave was at hand and nevertheless determined to love his disciples to the end by carrying through with his mission. What the critical view always fails to explain is what other meal any first-century reader would have imagined John was talking about when, in the next verse/paragraph, he proceeds to refer to an evening meal now occurring. Wouldn't they naturally assume that now the Passover was at hand, especially since it began with an evening meal? Maybe. Maybe not. But how can Sparks say I don't deal with the question at all?

Finally, Sparks adopts the standard critical position that because "Lamb of God" is a distinctive feature of John's Gospel, we should expect him to have the Passover lambs in view with the reference to the sixth hour back in 19:14. At first glance, this appears eminently plausible. But while "Lamb" is a distinctive feature of John's Christology (in the sense that it does not occur in the Synoptics), it is certainly not a dominant one. It occurs exactly twice in the Gospel, in 1:29 and 35, both times on the lips of John the Baptist, and never again after that first chapter in the entire Gospel. Would a congregation hearing the Gospel read from start to finish, with so many other major Christological emphases in between, even remember these two references eighteen chapters later? If they did, would they consider them to have constituted so pervasive a theme that it must lie behind a reference that is most naturally taken as just telling us the time of day something happened?

But what is particularly puzzling, even distressing, is Sparks' rhetoric and exaggerated language throughout his discussion. The problem he claims I do not address about 13:1 that I do is a "glaring" problem. My arguments "fail entirely, or hang by the slender thread of. . .speculative and somewhat problematic assumptions." My thesis "is based largely on conjecture and with so many dangling questions." I have "no hard evidence" behind my view (I guess textual data like 19:31 isn't hard evidence). Finally, harmonizations like mine "cannot pass as serious scholarly readings of the biblical text," especially "because their authors present their very improbable reconstructions as if they are likely or even highly probable." In short, harmonizations like these "fail, and fail badly."

I have no desire to defend all harmonizations. Some are good, some are bad, and some are hard to assess. If mine is a bad one, I need to abandon it. But if it is bad, then I am really missing something that I just don't see. I invite my readers to weigh in on the issue. At the moment, it appears that Sparks has not read me carefully at all, and in key places not at all. Can his approach therefore pass as a serious scholarly reading? Are these lacunae not what really make a position "fail, and fail badly"? Methinks Sparks doth protest too much.

It is an amazing story. Before the fall of the iron curtain, only twenty years ago, there were no known Christians of any kind--Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox--in the little Soviet bloc country of Albania. Albania was the only country in the world where it was actually illegal to believe in God (though how could anyone enforce it unless it led to some outward demonstration?). Thanks to creative and assertive evangelism from the West very soon after Albania opened up, new converts quickly sprang up. Especially where the church or parachurch ministries have been indigenized, remarkable growth has occurred. Nowhere is this more evident than with Campus Crusade for Christ in Albania, which now has one hundred staff workers, almost all of them Albanians, under the skilled leadership of national director Ylli Doci, a Denver Seminary graduate from 2002.

Ylli estimates there are now about 40,000 evangelical Christians in a country of roughly 4,000,000, approximately one percent of the population. The Campus Crusade staff, with the help of many foreign short-term volunteers, have taken the Jesus film and shown it in every one of the several hundred villages of the country. By far and away the people most touched have been the young adults. Ylli says he knows of maybe five or six believers in the entire country over the age of 40 (he is 39). This of course has its drawbacks, when it comes to trying to influence politicians or businesspeople or university professors. But lack of energy, enthusiasm, vision and action are not among those drawbacks.

I had the privilege to teach the Book of Revelation over about a 25-hour period of time spread out over five days, at Ylli's invitation, to the whole Crusade staff team and spouses and a smattering of other Christian leaders during the second week of January. Seldom have I seen a group as attentive, interested, questioning, and appreciative over a sustained period of time like that. As in the famous play and movie, "The Mouse that Roared," here is a tiny country turning an astonishing about-face, not just religiously, but politically, economically and technologically. This year they hope to be able to join NATO. The Christian community there, however, reminds me of 1 Corinthians 1:26-29--not many were wise by human standards or influential or of noble birth, but God chose them to make foolish the things of the world and to shame the strong.

Of course, to those who are perishing, it all still seems foolish, as in 1 Corinthians 1:18. But those who are being saved recognize that it is the power of God. Albanian believers have already begun to send a handful of missionaries to other spiritually needy parts of the world, including Kosovo, where many Albanian Kosovars reside; Turkey, a neighboring, technically secular but historically Muslim country, and elsewhere.

There are some orange flags going up, however. The more prosperous the country becomes, the more interest in the gospel among many starts to wane. Materialism is so stifling of faithful, energetic service for Christ. But that also fits what Paul is talking about in 1 Cor. 1:18-31. God help us overcome our enslavement to "stuff" and recover an unflagging zeal for God's word and sharing it with others!

I continue to think a lot about apostasy. No, not as an option for me (!), but trying to make sense of the experiences and decisions of others. I also recently finished Robert Yarbrough's new Baker Exegetical Commentary on 1-3 John and gave it a glowing review (see under Denver Journal for 2009 on our website). John has a lot to say about the topic in these little letters and the verse quoted above may be the most well known of all he has to say.

Ironically, his main point in this context is to encourage his congregations to pray for those who have committed all other kinds of sins besides the one that leads to death (vv. 16a, 17). But by setting up the contrast between the two kinds of sins, he naturally piques our curiosity about the more heinous of the two.

It is unlikely that John is talking about sins that lead to physical death, as with Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1-11. Every other use of "life" (zoÄ“) or "death" (thanatos) in the Epistles of John refers to spiritual life or death. In light of 2:19 (see also my last blog), it is unlikely that John thinks of these people who sin unto death as ever having been true Christians, though they may have fooled others and even themselves (the kind of deceit that should preclude us ever treating ‘eternal security" glibly or casually and that should ever keep us pronouncing with 100% assurance on the spiritual condition of anyone else).

1 John 3:10 offers us considerable help here: "This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Those who do not do what is right are not God's children; nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters." No, the kind of help I'm thinking of is not what some might immediately think of-that professions of faith must be complemented and thereby demonstrated by love and obedience to the commandments, though that is a central theme of John. Rather it is the simpler but subtler observation that those whom one category of "fake Christians" fail to love are called adelphoi ("brothers and sisters," or "siblings" for those who prefer an accurate, one-word English equivalent).

But the way this term of biological or spiritual kinship is used involves reciprocity. I never call someone my brother who cannot in turn call me his brother. So that means that the fake Christians in John's community would have also been called brothers (or sisters). Thus when this same language of siblingship reappears in 5:16, we dare not assume that it proves John has true believers in mind. He is simply echoing the language of the community itself as they refer to one another as brothers and sisters. Tragically, some who have these terms applied to them and perhaps apply them to themselves as well may turn out to have been masquerading, wittingly or unwittingly.

Are we therefore never to pray for such people? As Paul would say, mē genoito ("by no means," or for Denver Seminary grads who had Elodie Emig or me for Greek, you'll know the more accurate though dynamically equivalent translation that might offend some readers)! One has to recall that Greeks didn't put their negations in misleading places in their sentences like we do. John very intentionally says that he is not telling them, on this occasion, to pray for those who sin unto death. This is quite different from him telling them not to pray for them! He's simply saying that he's not talking about the sin unto death in this context but those sins that aren't unto death.

Of course, if we knew who those people were who had so hardened their hearts that they had committed what Jesus calls blasphemy against the Spirit (Matt. 12:32-32) so that God gives them over to their depravity (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28), we could stop praying for them, knowing it was pointless. But we don't have such knowledge and when we guess as to who such people might be we often guess wrongly. So we dare never stop praying for anyone no matter how much it seems like they might be sinning unto death. Deathbed conversions remain surprisingly common even today, including by some of the once-most-hardened atheists and "believers"-turned atheists!

So what is the sin leading to death? Yarbrough puts it well: it "is to have a heart unchanged by God's love in Christ and so to persist in convictions and acts and commitments like those John and his readers know to exist among ostensibly Christian people of their acquaintance, some of whom have now left those whom John addresses" (p. 311). The assurance John offers is always for those who are presently believers (1 John 5:13), not for those who have repudiated their professions of faith. But as long as the breath of life remains in a person, repentance unto eternal life is always possible. The only unforgivable sin is the sin of unwillingness, in the final analysis, to repent and come to Christ.

One of my most memorable assignments in seminary was to write a paper discussing Calvinist and Arminian interpretations of a number of the key passages in the Bible that each group most cites to buttress their understanding of perseverance. We were particularly to focus on how Calvinists dealt with texts, like the warning passages in Hebrews, which most strongly seemed to teach the possibility of forfeiting salvation. We were likewise to focus on how Arminians dealt with texts, like the Johannine promises of security, which most strongly seemed to teach that God would always preserve his flock. A kairos moment of sorts hit me when I came to 1 John 2:19, cited above. This put all the pieces of the puzzle together for me. Phenomenologically, apostasy happens. Theologically, John explains how to interpret it. People can fool others and probably even fool themselves, up to a point. Yet only where they wind up at the end of their lives ultimately determines their final destiny -- and their true spiritual nature all along. One can defend "eternal security," but only for those who are truly Christ's. And only with 20-20 hindsight can we fully determine who truly were his.

Sadly, I have watched people abandon professions of faith in Christ at a variety of times in my life. I have heard others tell their stories, whom I have encountered only after the fact. Over my 22 years of teaching at Denver Seminary, I am aware of four of our graduates who have done this; these are the stories that hurt the most. There are no doubt a handful of others I don't know about, though overall the graduates I do hear from, like the survey results we receive from more systematic canvassing of our graduates, are extremely heartening.

As I have become more familiar with the blogworld, I have discovered that there are plenty of websites devoted to attacking Christianity or at least to pointing out everything that makes it hard for various people to accept it. Some are intellectually quite rigorous. I have had some fascinating response when I have joined in the conversations on such blogs-some encouraging, others less so. Not surprisingly, a disproportionate amount of the passion exercised against Christianity, especially historic, orthodox Christianity, seems to come from ex-evangelicals.

It would be easy to lash out with a torrent of invective against such individuals. After all, doesn't John call them "antichrists" in 2:18 and 22? Yes, but he is not directly addressing them. If they are the ones who have left the church, then by definition they are not the ones present when this letter is read out to the local congregation of those who have "abided" or "remained" faithful to the truth. It is one thing to warn "the flock" in strong language against those who would ravage them; it is quite another to speak this way to the "wolves" themselves. In the blogworld, however, this seems to be Christians' preferred modus operandi, and I can assure you from personal conversations with the ex-Christians, skeptics and atheists that this does absolutely nothing but alienate them further and convince them their decisions were the right ones.

Robert Yarbrough's outstanding new Baker Exegetical Commentary on 1-3 John has some profound reflections on 1 John 2:19. A woodenly literal translation of the last third of this verse reads "but in order that it might be shown that they are not all of us." The thought is incomplete; the elliptical sentence has to be finished with something like "they went out." The NIV, TNIV, NRSV, NAB and NLT mask entirely that there is purpose clause (using hina) here. The NJB and NET hint at the idea of purpose, but turn the passive voice verb "be shown" into an active one, easily creating the impression that the people leaving the church did so intentionally to demonstrate who they really were, when in fact John's point is that this is God's intention in the context, irrespective of the specific human motivations. For this verse, the HCSB, ESV, NASB and RSV get it right. Yarbrough explains, "God is continually at work showing forth his glory, and for his people this means their ongoing sifting and purifying. . .When ostensible members of the people of God turn away from the beliefs and practices authorized by God and subsequently depart the community, God is glorified in that the truth of who are his and who are not is revealed" (pp. 147-48).

But that can't be where we stop. Just as not all who profess Christ are truly his, not all who claim to have given up the faith have truly defected. 2 Timothy 2:25-26 shows Paul holding out hope that some will return to the fold. In other instances, those who never were truly Christ's will become so, now truly, for the first time. "The pain of an open parting of the ways. . .can be the necessary prelude to a higher level of community cohesion and doctrinal integrity" (p. 148), including among some who once were among us, left us and later came back. We have frequently seen this at Scum of the Earth Church in Denver with its particularly transient and needy population.

 Yogi Berra had it right, "It ain't over till it's over." Let's keep that in mind for ourselves, for our fellow church members and for all people elsewhere. There may be an unforgivable sin, but only God knows who has crossed that threshold. Our task is to speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15) to everyone. Just as we are surprised by some who apostatize, we will be surprised by some who repent.

Don't cheat and look them up in your Bible! When you've given it your best shot, if you want to see the answers, scroll down.

All are false. Magi were a cross between what we would call astronomers and astrologers. They brought three gifts so there may have been three of them but we are never told that. If, by the Orient, one means the Far East, then no, they weren't Orientals. They were most likely from Persia or Arabia. The magi would have arrived well after Jesus' birth and they found him in a house. A manger was a feeding trough for animals. Swaddling clothes kept the baby's limbs firmly against his or her body, inhibiting mobility. Babies often disliked them. The only animals the Bible mentions are the sheep out in the fields. The angels might have sung, but the verb Luke uses before their words is "said." Shepherds were the gypsies of the day, nomadic, sometimes thieves, and generally despised.

Anybody need to read Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 again, with or without their study notes?

Merry Christmas!

The blog was extreme, but the use of Galatians 1:8 was not unusual. There is a large segment of very conservative evangelicalism or fundamentalism that regularly appeals to the seemingly harsh language of the New Testament in combating false teachers, whether in Galatians, or in 2 Corinthians 10-11, or in Philippians 3, or in 2 Peter 2 or in Jude to justify using harsh invective against those with whom they disagree. How can anyone object? They are following inspired, inerrant models!

One can and should object for at least five reasons. First, such rhetoric was more common and acceptable in the first century than it is today. Read the Old Testament prophets, the diatribes at Qumran, or the full text of the Hippocratic Oath and Paul seems almost mild in comparison. Yet this language was understood as neither ad hoc nor ad hominem but conventional, culturally acceptable ways of strongly disassociating oneself from certain perspectives.

Second, even in Paul's world one had to balance this text against his quite different command in Galatians 6:1-"if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently."

Third, as I showed in a paper published in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2002, the harshest, condemning language in the New Testament is consistently reserved for those who challenge the very heart of the saving message of Jesus Christ. Unless a false teacher's beliefs or behavior, if imbibed, would prove so damaging that a person would actually be lost who adopted them, then the inspired authors' tones remain quite different.

Fourth, even when it is a core doctrine that is at stake, it is those who have distorted the gospel in an overly conservative, legalistic, works-righteousness direction who come in for the strong denunciation, not those who are flirting with "left-leaning" boundaries.

Finally, the only acceptable reasons for such rhetoric can be the sincere hope that it will win the offending person or persons (back) to the Lord and/or keep others from following suit. In today's Western world, the latter almost never occurs when one replicates such harsh tones. Indeed, one's opponents are simply alienated even further and their antagonism is reinforced. Increasingly, especially among those not yet middle-aged, even Christians recognize that this flies in the face of the centrality of the command to love one's neighbor and even one's enemy. Those who weren't in any danger of doing so become likely to throw the baby out with the bathwater and reject Christianity altogether when they observe Christians who are characteristically combative.

That ought to be more than enough to warn all of us who care about what God thinks and wants in this world to be extremely wary of ever sounding like Paul in Galatians 1:8 -- except, ironically, in the occasional need to censor people like the writer of the blog I stumbled across, since his legalistic theology actually turned out to be a close replica of the Judaizers Paul censored in Galatia!

He or she who has hears to hear, let them hear...

Of course these words don't apply to us! In the context of James these are most likely the rich non-Christian who were oppressing the largely impoverished congregations James pastored, made up of day-laborers, akin to our modern-day migrant workers, in agricultural settings. By not receiving their agreed-on wages at the end of each day, the workers might not have enough money to buy food for themselves and their families. If this happened often enough, they would have to borrow money in order to avoid starvation. But they would sometimes be unable to repay their debts and eventually could be thrown into debtors' prison. There they would have no way of earning any money. Unless they had friends, they would not eat in prison because ancient Roman prisoners did not bother to feed prisoners. But friends from outside could bring prisoners things to eat. Unless a well-to-do benefactor came to their aid from outside, they would languish in prison for life, a life often drastically shortened by the cruel conditions. It is this sense in which the rich oppressors were condemning and murdering innocent people.

The Sunday before Election day, I preached in the only Evangelical church of Meynooth, Ireland, home to the theological college that trains Ireland's Catholic priests and, until six years ago, was bereft of evangelical churches altogether. It was a small gathering of about one hundred people meeting in a large classroom of a secondary school. But what a wonderful gathering of people it was, welcoming, friendly, and yet serious about their faith. As has regularly been my experience in Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand (but rarely in the United States except after special disasters or tragedies), part of the worship service was devoted to praying for the world and the nation in some detail, by a leader very abreast of the news of the week. The children's sermon even involved an explanation of American politics, the election, and the significance of the outcome in a very even-handed, unbiased fashion and with more political savvy than I often experience in American evangelical churches.

I shouldn't have been surprised. Most countries in the world spent a disproportionate amount of their recent news on the American elections, not because they were enamored with America, but because they realized that in our global village their political and economic well-being is closely tied to what the U.S. does. I was reminded once again of how evangelicals even in the comparatively prosperous nations of Western Europe (and Ireland had the fastest growing economy in the world at one point in the last decade until the recent financial downturn) still lag noticeably behind even the average middle-class American Christian. Not in a critical but merely in an informative way, the pastor in Meynooth reminded his Irish congregation before I spoke that 50% of all the military spending in the entire world was done by Americans in the last year, that Americans have one of the highest percentage of homeless people in the "developed" world, and that Americans still consume more of the world's resources than any other country on the planet, even though the Chinese have between four and five times as many people as we do.

How do we know that the rich in James 5:1-6 are non-Christian? The two main answers are (1) because of the behavior described of them, and (2) because God pronounces only judgment against them. But then if we are honest, we have to say that, by global standards, we are the ones who have lived in luxury and self-indulgence, especially in what we spend on our homes and on our churches, in how much we eat and how much we throw away on recreation and entertainment. At some point presumably this disqualifies any profession of faith in Jesus we might otherwise make. I wish I knew where that line was.

But that would only tempt me to get as close to the line as possible. Since I don't know, I have to consistently ask myself how I can do more and more to move away from the danger of being anywhere close to such a line. After all, the earnings on the investments I didn't give away in the last ten years have all disappeared in the last few months due to the financial crisis. Will I ever learn the lesson?

I suppose the only good thing about this translation of this verse is that it might have dissuaded a few antebellum Christians from becoming slaveowners if they were sitting on the fence! 

The word rendered "masters" in Elizabethan English, however, is correctly rendered in all modern translations as "teachers." But of course that raises major questions for people like me. Did James really think that all teachers, or at least all teachers in the church would be condemned? Surely not. Lest there be any doubt at all, James includes himself as one of the teachers involved, but it would be strange theology (and history) that viewed James as condemning himself, especially when condemnation in the Bible usually refers to hell!

Again, modern translations rectify the problem by typically rendering the final words in accurate twentieth or twenty-first century English as "judged with stricter judgment" or "judged more strictly." But I'm still not entirely assuaged by being told that those who teach God's word will be judged more strictly, especially when I see some commentators still trying to relate this to degrees of reward in heaven. Of course, I decided a long time ago that Martin Luther had the better side of the Reformation-era debate over that disputed doctrine in denying differences in believers' status or state in heaven beyond the inevitable differences they would experience as they stood before God on Judgment Day. I even wrote an article published in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society way back in 1992 to that effect (long before anybody made digital copies, I might add, just in case somebody might be hoping that I could e-mail them one).

But then what is the stricter judgment of which I should beware? The larger context of James 3:1-12 is all about the power of the tongue for both good and evil. Teachers in James' day, even more than in our own, relied on speech. In fact, what typically distinguished the teacher from other forms of leaders or speakers was that they were responsible for passing on a fixed body of catechetical tradition related to the subject at hand. Many times this information was carefully memorized and students were expected to memorize it as well. The rabbis often argued that until you had a passage of Scripture committed to memory you could not discuss it because you might misrepresent it. Ah, if we could reinstate that in our churches ... :-) But it won't happen, I know.

The point is that teachers were committed to a higher standard of accuracy than others because they were the bearers of the tradition. But teachers were also expected to practice what they preached. In ways not nearly as frequently true in our modern, Western world, students were meant to observe their teachers in every situation of life, so that they could learn how to act in all those situations, including those in which a person sinned and had to repent. So the second way in which teachers could incur stricter judgment was in the poor choice of words they spoke (or in the way they spoke them) in contexts outside of rote memorization. Teachers, both ancient and modern, inhabit settings in which they experience virtually every kind of temptation to speak sinfully: "arrogance and domination over students; anger and pettiness at contradiction or inattention; slander and meanness toward absent opponents; flattery of students for the sake of vainglory" (Luke Johnson, The Letter of James, 263).

Why are these sins more serious when committed by teachers rather than by other people? (1) More people may be affected. (2) A closer relationship of trust may be violated. (3) The very person who should be the student's best model fails in that capacity. (4) The resulting hurt may be greater. Apologies can be made and errors can be corrected but the damage from untruthful or unloving words may not be able to be fully eradicated. Forgiveness may, in some instances, come quickly, but trust always takes longer to be re-earned. The stricter judgment against which James warns may, therefore, at least in large part, have to do with negative consequences of the teachers' sins in this life.

This election campaign has involved some of the most vicious rhetoric I can recall in my lifetime. No, not primarily by the candidates, but often by Christian leaders and teachers anathematizing one of the candidates and anyone who would vote for them. The blogworld, on just about any topic, seems to bring out the worst in people, including Christian leaders and teachers, perhaps because of the impersonal and distance-creating nature of the medium. People say things and say them in ways they would never say to someone's face. E-mail and Facebook create the same temptations. The non-evangelical world already thinks far too many of us are far too combative. Let's take James 3:1 to heart and work hard at a much kinder, gentler character.

More recently, another close Christian friend, a Ph.D. in New Testament studies no less, and a long-time educator, left his wife for another woman, who herself was seminary trained and a pastor, by saying to his wife, "I haven't loved you for the last seven years." What he meant, of course, was that he didn't have the same kind of feelings he once had for her. But in the Bible love is primarily a commitment, obedience to God's commands, rather than an emotion.

Just this fall, a former student and long-time pastor told me about how had "made a mistake" and cheated on his wife. In fact, he used the expression several times in our conversation. Never once did I hear the word "sin," however.

I guess in a world in which politicians "misspeak" when they lie, in which athletes "make bad choices" when they commit crimes, and prostitutes are called "sex workers," I shouldn't be so surprised.

But how about the innocuous and even heart-warming, "I fell in love"? As sweet as it sounds, it's not a biblical expression. And if you can claim you've fallen in love, then you can say you've fallen out of love, as lots of people do. In a country in which even many Christians think the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right (no, just because the American Constitution declares it so doesn't make it true), is it any wonder that people justify leaving their spouses because they just don't feel good any more?

Paul, in his famous love chapter, writes in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7: "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." Notice the use of "always" a few times? And the adjectives and verbs used to characterize love don't have that much to do with emotion, except perhaps when they refer to keeping it under control.

Twice in my life, I've had friends who were in the process of divorcing their spouses who looked me straight in the face, and admitted, "I know, I'm reneging on my wedding vows." At least they were honest. So were Bill McCartney and company when they challenged us to be promise-keepers. That's what it's really all about--promise keeping.

If I can't trust someone to remain true to their word when they have made the most solemn pledge of their entire lives before God, spouse, and a Christian congregation, why should I trust them for anything else? 

Now, of course, God is a God of amazing grace, wonderful forgiveness and countless fresh starts. And I have dear friends who sinned miserably with their first spouses and are having godly, inspiring second marriages.

But they repented. They called sin sin. They confessed to God and fellow humans. They prayed for forgiveness. They received godly counsel and, often, counseling. Their lives genuinely changed. The words we use for labeling concepts do matter.

Most countries and cultures in the history of the world that have practiced arranged marriages have had extremely low divorce rates. At least those couples recognized that it wasn't feelings or emotions that made or unmade marriages. They were also less likely to define love as a feeling or an emotion in the first place.

1 Corinthians 13 ends with the famous verse 13: "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." If love is eternal and love is the greatest of the attributes we will share throughout eternity, maybe we'd better start paying more attention in this life to what it truly involves. Richard Walker, a former pastor of mine and founder of AMOR Ministries, working with Brazilians in the Upper Amazon basin, put it well, "Love is the giving of the very best you have on behalf of another regardless of response."--even when it's thrown back in your face. Isn't that what Jesus did with and for us?

OK, OK, cut the fancy terminology and tell us what you are talking about, you're saying! Right. Here goes. Middle knowledge is a proposed solution to predestination vs. free will, to divine sovereignty and human responsibility, going all the way back to the medieval Jesuit priest Molina (so sometimes it's also called Molinism).

Classic Calvinists, properly concerned to safeguard divine sovereignty, have typically rejected any theological system that bases God's predestining activity on the basis merely of his foreknowledge of how humans will respond to the gospel, because they're convinced that makes human free choice the ultimate determiner. Romans 8:29, of course, does base predestination on God's foreknowledge, but the Calvinist typically argues that the Greek prōginoskō ("foreknow") there begins already to shade over into the idea of election because in the Old Testament the Hebrew yādā‘ ("know") often appears roughly synonymous with "choose." That would explain why Paul doesn't say just that those whom God foreknew he also predestined, which could be seen as tautologous, but "predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son."

Classic Arminians and Wesleyans, properly concerned to safeguard human freedom and accountability, have typically rejected any theological system that bases God's predestining activity on the basis merely of his gratuitous election, because they're convinced that makes human free choice ultimately a chimera. They often point out that prōginoskō is not the same verb as just ginoskō (which the LXX uses to translate yādā‘ and that in Greek it most commonly means simple knowledge in advance. Thus predestination is based on God's foreknowledge.

Middle knowledge argues for both! If open theism in recent years has diminished divine omniscience more than orthodoxy has classically permitted, middle knowledge magnifies or expands God's omniscience beyond what most people have thought about. But it makes good sense: middle knowledge claims that God's perfect, infinite knowledge must be able to know not only what sentient creatures will freely choose in all situations in their lives but what everyone would do in every possible situation that they could confront. Even more magnificently, divine and unlimited knowledge must be able to discern what all possibly created beings would do in all possible situations (or, as philosophers like to say, all possible worlds).

So far so good, I hope. Now here's the rub. Because there will only ever have been a finite number of humans created before God brings this world as we know it to an end, that means there remain countless uncreated beings that he could have chosen to create but didn't. So God's very choice to create you and me and not various other people he could have is an act of his sovereign election utterly prior to our existence. Calvinists should be happy. But it is based on knowing what we will and would do in all actual and all possible situations. Arminians should be happy. Thus, William Lane Craig in The Only Wise God defends this view from a libertarian Arminian perspective; Alvin Plantinga in a chapel talk at Denver Seminary years ago did the same from a libertarian Calvinist perspective, and Terrance Tiessen in Providence and Prayer does so from a compatibilist Calvinist perspective.

Nor is all this some high brow theoretical exercise. It has massive, practical pastoral ramifications. You or some one you care about has just experienced an incredible tragedy. How do we deal with it? Is God still sovereign? Absolutely! Did he know in advance this would happen? Yes. Is Romans 8:28 (just one verse before v. 29--you noticed that, right?) still true that "in all things God works for the good for those who love him" (correctly NIV/TNIV, contra KJV's "all things work together for good. . ."-no, they don't!)? Yes, God is in this situation somewhere bringing good out of it. Did God cause the tragedy? No, he is not the author of evil (James 1:13). Why did he allow it? Because it was part of what was required if he was to create a universe with true human freedom and the freedom to allow the consequences of sin, both directly and indirectly (as in "life in a fallen world") without overruling them except on very rare occasions (which is why we call them miracles when he does).

And both Calvinists and Arminians are right in what they affirm about Romans 8:29 and wrong in what they deny. Both/and wins again!

My professional counselor friends have often told me this is the area their clients are least equipped to deal with, irrespective of their religious affiliation.

At an international evangelical consultation on contextualizing the gospel this summer in Oxford, the Asian representatives agreed that one of the biggest theological differences between Asian and American Christianity was that Asians assumed suffering was a normal part of life, especially if you were a believer, whereas Americans were always trying to avoid it or end it. One Chinese theologian explained, "The typical Chinese Christian, when suffering, asks, "How may I acquit myself in a God-pleasing way as I suffer?" The typical American Christian asks, "How may I get rid of the suffering?"

When was the last time you heard a public list of Christian prayer requests that included prayers for people to be good witnesses in the midst of their suffering rather than for God to take away everything from terminal cancer to the common cold?

A graduate of Denver Seminary of only a few years ago had some prolonged conversations this summer with me from out of town. A "failed" church plant and the suicide of a family member left him barely believing if there was a God any longer and it certainly sounds as if he's abandoned Christianity. Without denying the immense pain of his experience, I confess seeing an utter theological disconnect here. Imagine Paul saying after his horrific catalogs of sufferings in 2 Corinthians 4, 6 and 11, "So I gave it all up." Instead he describes Christ's direct word of comfort on how God's power is made perfect in weakness and his grace is sufficient for him (2 Cor. 12:9). Apparently, we failed our grad at the Seminary, as did his previous churches and parachurch ministries. Or else he blew us off. Most likely, it was some of each.

The so-called prosperity gospel (a.k.a. "health-wealth," "name it and claim it," etc.) only makes matters worse with its truncated, one-sided message that leaves countless people around the world believing that if a person just has enough faith God will heal them of whatever hurts they currently suffer. Yet, the death rate is still 100%. Sooner or later, there is something every one of us doesn't recover from and it has nothing to do with the amount of our faith or obedience! Billy Graham has had Parkinson's disease for several years. By some people's theology, if anyone should live to 200, it would be he, but he won't.

Second Timothy 3:12 declares explicitly that whoever would live a godly life in Christ will be persecuted. This is more than suffering; this is suffering for one's faith. How many of us are persecuted for our faith and, if not, is it because nobody knows that we have any? There are enemies aplenty, even in the good old USA, even when we are as winsome and tactful as possible, who are ready to blast us for our Christian perspectives. Sadly, a number of them are in evangelical churches. Just check out the blogosphere for examples of both kinds! More out of curiosity than anything else, I replied as kindly and matter-of-factly to a King James Only supporter in the blogworld recently to correct what were almost entirely factual errors in a recent post, and he told me I was of the devil! At least the aggressive atheist bloggers don't say that to me, since they don't believe in God or the devil!

Jesus commands us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Luke 6:28). And both of those commands are clearly predicated on the assumption that we will experience hostility for our faith. Some of us are experiencing that as we share our political convictions, whether "red" or "blue," this fall. And again, winsome as we may try to be in expressing those convictions, the attacks may just as likely come from inside the church as outside. The "culture wars" have made our country a pretty dysfunctional place in which to try to engage in convicted civility in public discourse. And they have made many churches, on both the right and the left, even more tragically, equally if not more dysfunctional.

When we suffer for our faith, let's make sure it's in spite of every best effort to follow 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 in being all things to all people, and not primarily because we are tactless, misinformed, or both. When we suffer in other ways, let's turn back to Paul and let God remind us that when we are weak, then we are strong (2 Cor. 12:10). And let's flee (and help others to flee) every hint of anything that calls itself the Christian gospel that denies these precious, central truths of the faith.

Is this easy? Of course, not. I can often be a real wimp when I experience chronic pain. Just ask my wife, who more closely resembles the great martyr-saints! But our sustenance always comes by turning to Jesus, not away from him, and imitating his model of responding to suffering, drawing on his comfort, strength and grace.

In fact, given all the biblical texts about Christ's return coming like a thief in the night, catching people by surprise, occurring when run-of-the-mill activity is proceeding normally, and the like, it's tempting to say that when a particular year draws unusual attention from one swath of Christians as the supposedly probable time for Christ's return, that very attention makes it even less likely to be the true time.

Even on sheer probabilistic grounds, the odds of being able to guess correctly the timing of the end is infinitesimally miniscule.  Bernard McGinn's Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994; New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) traces all the different predictions about who the Antichrist would be and when and how the end of this age would come throughout church history.  It is a fascinating book indeed, but the account is also a little depressing.  Hundreds of failed predictions dot the centuries yet, with every new interesting cluster of current events that ingenious minds can find some way of linking with Scriptural texts, far too many people forget this one simple truth:  to date, 100% of all predictions about the timing of the end have proved false!  Surely that should teach us to give up the exercise altogether.

But no, we're told in the news recently that premier end-times fiction writer Tim LaHaye is pretty sure that the end will come within eighty years.  At least he's a bit more modest than his predecessor, Hal Lindsey, who used to speak of one generation after the foundation of the state of Israel (1948) and who, in separate contexts, described a generation as no more than forty years.  1988 came and went, notwithstanding the remarkable booklet published early in that year by a retired NASA scientist on eighty-eight reasons Christ would come back in 1988.  I've heard other Christians try to salvage Lindsey's prophecy by saying that it was really 1967 from which the forty years should be counted, because only after the Six-Day War in that year did Israel occupy all the land.  But 2007 has now come and gone as well.

Doesn't anybody remember that great Y2K non-event?  And six of the ten best-selling Christian books of "non-fiction" (the category has obviously become quite broad) at one point in 1999 predicted how the earth-shattering debacles beginning on January 1, 2000 would herald the beginning of the end.  Thank goodness we don't stone Christians for false prophecy like the ancient Israelites were supposed to.

So now I'm teaching at a local church and a man asks me if I've heard about how 2012 is a key year in the Mayan calendar, ending one long cycle of time and inaugurating a new one.  He wonders if that could tie in with biblical prophecy and notes that it will be the end of President Obama's first term in office.  The bloggers are quite taken with the topic, he assures me. I checked; they are! Interesting that he (they?) know(s) the outcome of the election before it's happened!  But the media also note that Tim LaHaye has assured us Obama cannot be the Antichrist, because nowhere in the Bible is the Antichrist linked to the United States.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  Of course, there's nothing about the Antichrist linked to the U.S. or to Australia or to Uruguay or to Zimbabwe or to Sweden or to the Seychelles.  Nobody in biblical times and places even knew those locations existed, and it would have made sense to no one to talk about a part of the planet that no one had ever heard of.  But if that's what it takes to delete at least one piece of the smear campaign against Obama, then I guess I should be glad.  (I wonder if anyone watching the two weeks of political conventions computed the amount of time spent by all speakers put together talking positively about what they or their candidates would try to do if elected, with any specificity.  I'm guessing it was about ten percent of the time.)

But even more distressing is the fact that Christians should give any credence to a pagan calendar.  What on earth does that have to do with understanding Christian revelation?  It's utterly irrelevant.

End-times prophecy in Scripture was given for one main reason:  to promote alert, consistent, faithful Christian living, because the end could come at any time.  See especially the whole sweep of parables in Matthew 24:37-25:46 immediately after Matthew's account of Christ's teaching about no one knowing the time of the end (24:36).  If anyone has completely obeyed all of Christ's commands to faithful living, evangelism, discipleship, social action, deeds of mercy, and so on, perhaps they may have the freedom to indulge in a little end-times speculation (though I doubt it).  But until then, let's leave all the works of fiction on Christian prophecy shelves behind and get about the real work of the kingdom.

One excellent alternative, in which I am participating, involves group efforts.  The "Prime Time Jesus" blog is a site contributed to by about dozen evangelical historical Jesus scholars, particularly in view of events (or pseudo-events) that garner media attention, and I participate at least quarterly in that blog. Zondervan publishers have started something similar for a selection of their authors and again I have agreed to produce something at least quarterly.

Now Denver Seminary is initiating another model. On our website, which people will visit for all kinds of reasons, will be various blogs that authors can contribute to every two, three or four weeks. That kind of frequency is manageable for me and hopefully by not trying to say something more often than that, I will have something worth saying. My theme will be no more and no less unified than topics that can be tied to a New Testament text or theme, because that is the area of my specialization, training, teaching and research.

So what should I start with? Something short, obviously, since I've spent half my space just introducing my blog in general! We're in the middle of the Democratic National Convention in Denver as I am writing this, so a quick reminder about a key text from John that gets cited a lot every time elections draw near may be appropriate. When Jesus was speaking with Pontius Pilate, he responded to the questions about his kingship by declaring, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). But what does this mean?

Probably the most common way this text has been used (but abused) in the modern world is to assume that Jesus was speaking only of an otherworldly or spiritual kingdom. But Greek students who have studied even just a little of the language quickly learn that there are several Greek words that can be translated "of" in English, not to mention the genitive case endings put on nouns which suggest a whole range of possible uses: "directed toward," "produced by," "belonging to," "stemming from," "which is," and so on.

In John 18:36, however, there is less ambiguity. Here John uses the preposition ek, which normally means "of" in the sense of "out of" or "from," denoting the source or origin of something. So the point Jesus is making is that his kingship has an otherworldly origin; it does not come from or have its source in this world. We may not read into his language that his kingdom does not have implications for life in this world, including political life.

In fact, the heavenly origin of Jesus' kingdom harks back to numerous other texts in the Gospels in which he teaches about God's kingly reign. Perhaps as relevant as any is the clause in the Lord's Prayer, "Your kingdom come; your will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10). Our participation in the political processes of this world, when we have that option, should always be consistent with God's kingdom, which reflects his will. As Matthew 6:33 goes on to add, we must seek first his kingdom and its "righteousness" (a term that refers to God's standards of justice and morality), and vote for candidates or support legislation that as far as we can tell will most likely implement the largest array of those concerns that permeate Scripture, irrespective of the political party with which we may be affiliated at any given time.

This in turn requires detailed familiarity with the whole counsel of God, not just one or two issues that we hear other people, even those we may respect highly, talk a lot about. Let's use these next two months and a bit to familiarize or re-familiarize ourselves with the full array of ethical concerns found in the Bible and then pray for great wisdom as we vote. For more on this last thought, see my latest contribution to our website's "Dialogue on Contemporary Issues."

Craig Blomberg