The blog I wrote that has received the most response over the last few months had to do with why believers need to be involved in local churches.  Since I wrote that, I have run across still more friends of mine, of a variety of ages, including Denver Seminary graduates or employees, who are not attending church.  Again, we’re not talking about those who were traumatized by abusive churches or people, but those who simply find it inconvenient, or who have become disillusioned with the institution, or who miss a good church from their past and can’t find a close equivalent.  And so the excuses continue.

When you talk with these people, they continue strongly to affirm their Christian beliefs.  Some have substituted church on TV or listening to Christian tapes or reading good devotional literature for live fellowship and worship with other believers.  They continue to be involved in acts of service to their world and community and are wonderfully nice people to be around.  What could be bad or wrong about that?

As long as the discussion remains centered around “me” and what “I” or “we” get out of or take away from church, possibly nothing.  In our high-tech age that allows me to download MP3s of great sermons, cheaply purchase the most meaningful worship music for myself from itunes, and read prayers by others that better articulate my feelings than what I could compose myself, it’s hard for the local church to compete.  Live music, preaching and extemporaneous prayers, quite frankly, may not be as good.  Of course, I miss out on fellowship with other believers, but I can get that from friends, a small group, Christian co-workers, and so on.

What is missing in this conversation is what Paul discusses in Ephesians 4:11-13.  All believers are given one or more spiritual gifts (v. 11; cf. also 1 Cor. 12:7, 11).  The stated purpose of these gifts is to equip the rest of the people of God so that the Church as a whole may become increasingly mature (v. 12).  Works of service to the world and community are important, but equipping believers who are not engaged in such works is also crucial.  The unity of the Church is another recurring New Testament theme that is sadly lacking in too many places in modern Christianity.  Our spiritual gifts need to be exercised toward that end as well.  Those of us who know Jesus well enough to cope for awhile without the Church are precisely those who should be helping the rest of the Church to grow “in the knowledge of the Son of God” (v. 13a).  All of this can be summed up, Paul concludes, as helping one another, as a corporate body, attain “to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (v. 13b).  Clearly the Church at home and abroad has enough growing and maturing to do that we can’t afford a single Christian to sideline this use of their spiritual gifts by not being a part of a regular Christian fellowship.

The people I’ve talked to since my last blog about church who aren’t currently involved anywhere are among some of the most gifted and talented Christians I know.  They have the spiritual reserves, so to speak, to get by probably for a good, long while without “needing” church themselves.  The problem is the church desperately needs them.  Maybe John Kennedy’s oft-quoted words about not asking what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country need to be applied to the church as well.  After all, Jesus himself insisted it was better to give than to receive (Acts 20:35).  And boy did he model it!

Here’s what I wrote her in reply:

“Ah, the perils of using the KJV (or the NKJV)! :) The translators of the KJV did a marvelous job for their day with the couple dozen manuscripts available to them. But now we have rediscovered thousands, including dozens earlier and more reliable than what the KJV translators had access to. What is remarkable is how carefully preserved in general the Bible was, but there are differences.

The NKJV updated the language of the KJV but intentionally didn't change the manuscript base from which they worked (trying to appeal to the KJV only folks, but give them at least something they could read and understand). Some editions of the NKJV have footnotes alerting readers to the places where all other modern translations use a different textual basis but not all editions do this.

So, with that long-winded introduction, the short answer to your question is that ‘eagle’ and ‘angel’ DON'T both come from the same Greek word! The dozens of oldest and most reliable manuscripts have aetos, which means ‘eagle’. A handful of manuscripts, used by the KJV and NKJV, have angelos, which means angel.  And a large number of very late manuscripts, reflecting scribal indecision and an attempt to harmonize the two readings, have henos angelos hos aetos, which means ‘one angel like an eagle’!”

I’ve had enough experience with instances where the KJV and NKJV alone have one reading and all other translations of any recent vintage have a different one that I was pretty sure of my answer before evening turning to my reference works.  But for pastors and students used to working exclusively with the UBS (United Bible Societies’) Greek New Testament, you’ll find nothing at Revelation 8:13 to disclose any textual variants.  Remember that the UBS includes only about 1400 of what they deem to be the very most important or interesting variants out of a much larger number that they could have used.)  The NA (Nestle-Aland) Greek New Testament, on the other hand, gives many more variants but, to conserve space, offers only very selective manuscript evidence to go along with each.  The Word Biblical Commentary series also tends to give more detailed textual-critical information than any other commentary series today do, in small print, right after the translation of each passage and before the actual commentary proper on a passage begins.  David Aune’s 3-volume masterpiece in the WBC gives as full a collection of textual variants as any volume in the NT part of the series (David Clines wins the award for his work on Job in the OT WBC volumes).  So Aune gave me the information I was able to provide for my friend in the above quoted paragraphs.

The NIV has way outsold other English translations of the Bible since it first appeared in 1978.  Before the proliferation of several new translations that appeared in the last decade, it accounted for as many as 42% of all English Bibles purchased worldwide, though more recently it has dipped to closer to 30%.  The KJV has frequently come in at about 20%, with the NKJV sometimes almost as high though usually in the mid-teens.  The NLT has also often hovered around 20%, with no other translation even in double digits, percentagewise, of the “market share” in the last decade, though the ESV is starting to come close.

 But why does the NKJV get this much attention?  If you’re really in to the Elizabethan style of the KJV, it ruins it.  If you can’t understand the KJV or simply value more modern English, there are a plethora of options for you.  The only reason for retaining the NKJV is if you are among the less than one-tenth of one percent of all textual critics in the world who actually think the KJV and NKJV did use the better manuscripts.  But lots more people than that have for some reason decided that the NKJV is for them.  May I respectfully suggest they are misled.

Time to put the NKJV on the shelf if you own one and get a modern translation that uses an accurate textual base.

(Perceptive readers may recall previous blogs in which I argued that we should stop so much squabbling about the modern translations because they all have a place and something to contribute.  I’m not contradicting myself in this blog, merely clarifying that, even though the English got updated in the NKJV, and even though it was published in the 1970s, it does not qualify as one of the truly “modern” translations that I was thinking about.)

I well remember in 1978, when the entire NIV translation of the Bible was completed and published, a series of clever network TV ads, with a man dressed up to look like a Reformation-era British king, using the slogan, “If King James were alive today, he’d use the NIV!”  The ads were either successful or prophetic, because the NIV has become the most distributed and best selling Bible in the world over the thirty-two intervening years, with more than 300,000,000 copies printed, far outstripping the King James Version during that period of time, to say nothing of any other English translation of the Bible.

An updated 2011 edition of the NIV is now slated for release, hopefully by this coming Easter, with the possibility of part or all of the text becoming available in on-line format even earlier.  2011, of course, is the 400th anniversary of the appearance of the KJV.  I have absolutely no insider information on what the marketing of the NIV, or any other translation of the Bible, will look like in 2011, but I will be shocked if more than one publisher does not try to exploit the special date somehow.

As I occasionally surf the Christian blog world, I am continually amazed at how few issues ruffle people’s feathers more than a writer asserting his or her preferences for Bible translations.  One Irish Anglican clergyman currently visiting the US whom I recently met on-line likened them to cult followings, spurred on by Americans’ notoriety for crass commercialism.  I disputed both generalizations with respect to modern translations (though not perhaps the cult-following label for the KJV ONLY folks).  But I can see why visitors might start to think in these ways, especially if they are encountering some of the most forceful American spokespersons for or against certain versions and are unaware of how many Bibles the major Bible-publishing organizations give away free at home and abroad or at very reduced costs.

There are three major philosophies in Bible translation, as I have pointed out here and elsewhere in the past.  Each has its merits and its drawbacks.  Some translations make the highest priority of what is popularly called a highly literal translation or, more technically, a formally equivalent one.  Of course, the absolute end of this spectrum leaves one with the unintelligibility of an interlinear Bible, in which, for example, James 3:3 becomes, “If but of the horses the bridles into the mouths we throw so that the to be persuaded them by us and whole the body their we guide”!  So even the formally equivalent translations like the KJV, New KJV, Revised Standard, New Revised Standard, New American Standard, and English Standard have to use proper English syntax in order to be understandable.  The ESV, for example, renders James 3:3 as, “If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well.”

At the other end of the spectrum is dynamic or functional equivalence.  Here the goal is for the greatest amount of clarity and fluency in English.  It is less clear if there is an absolute end to this spectrum.  One might envision paraphrases like Eugene Peterson’s The Message or translations that give several options for key words like the Amplified Bible, but it is not obvious that they are always even as clear as proper functionally equivalent translations like the New Living Translation, Contemporary English Version, Good News Bible, or God’s Word, and certainly they are far less literal.  The Message for James 3:3 reads, “A bit in the mouth of a horse controls the whole horse.”  The NLT, in comparison, has, “We can make a large horse go wherever we want by means of a small bit in its mouth.”

In between these two clusters of translations are those who aim for a “sweet spot” that maximizes both hearing the Scripture as it was originally written (and subsequently delivered orally) and understanding it as it was originally meant, i.e., both accuracy and fluency, recognizing that at any given point achieving one may require a slight sacrifice in the other and vice-versa.  The NIV, Today’s NIV, Holman Christian Standard , NET Bible, and New American Bible all fall into this category, with the Revised English Bible and New Jerusalem Bible being just a little freer but also more literary.  The NIV for James 3:3 reads, “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal.”  Similarly, the HCSB has, “Now when we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we also guide the whole animal.”

Every single translation serves an important purpose.  Each must be evaluated according to its goals and purposes, along with its target audiences.  Some have achieved a much greater readership than was first envisioned; others have not done as well as hoped.  Readers of multiple translations of Scripture will frequently find a favorite or recognize the greater usefulness of one version in one context and another in a different context.  There is no such thing as one best translation for all settings.  By definition, however, those Bibles that achieve the greatest reliability and understandability simultaneously will normally prove most useful in the broadest cross-section of contexts, especially in preaching and teaching for large, heterogeneous audiences.  But notice that none of the versions cited for James 3:3 above mislead anyone.  It’s clear that they are all renderings of the same verse in Scripture!

As one who has put in long hours over the last three years on the Committee for Bible Translation for the 2011 NIV, I am naturally biased in its favor.  But I have also worked, at varying levels, on the ESV, HCSB and NLT and appreciate the distinctive strengths of each of those three translations and the philosophies behind them.

Let’s celebrate, not least in 2011, the privilege we have in English to have access to so many good translations and put down the weaponry that has led so many to exalt certain versions, bad-mouth others, and leave the watching, non-Christian world wrongly convinced that the Bible must not be translated very accurately anywhere, and that, like on so many other issues, all Christians can do is squabble!

“Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ...” (NIV)

“Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ...” (RSV, ESV)

“Whatever happens, as citizens of heaven live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ” (TNIV)

What’s in a word? In Elizabethan English, the word “conversation” could mean “conduct.” The Greek verb, politeuomai, in Philippians 1:27, has nothing whatsoever to do with speaking, per se, so the translators of the King James Version in 1611 were clearly talking about behavior when they penned, “only let your conversation be as it becometh the gospel of Christ.” Anybody who insists on reading an unrevised KJV today is highly unlikely to catch this nuance, unless someone has specifically taught them this, or they are avid readers of Shakespeare!

The majority of modern translations thus use words having to do with behavior, conduct, or manner of living. The old RSV spoke of one’s “manner of life,” and the ESV, which is an updating of the RSV, saw no need to change it here. The NIV speaks explicitly about conduct. The HCSB and NRSV likewise read “live your life in a manner...” while the NET and NASB mirror the NIV and use “conduct yourselves.”

But NLT, like the TNIV printed above, speaks of living “as citizens of heaven.” Where does this come from? The noun that is cognate to (i.e., from the same root as) politeuomai is politeuma and means citizenship. In Philippians 3:20, Paul uses this noun to declare explicitly that “our citizenship is in heaven, from which we eagerly await a Savior, Jesus Christ.” All of the versions I’ve mentioned so far use “citizenship” here except the RSV, which used “commonwealth” and the KJV which again used “conversation” in the old Elizabethan sense.

Is Paul already anticipating his discussion of 3:20 in 1:27? Is he investing a little extra meaning into the verb politeuomai in this earlier passage in Philippians than is usually implied by the term? The only other place the verb occurs in the New Testament is in Acts 23:1, in which Luke cites Paul affirming his good conduct throughout his life as a Christian. All the other occurrences in the Greek Bible (i.e., the Septuagint) come in the Apocrypha, once in the Additions to Esther and seven times in 2nd through 4th Maccabees, and never is the idea of citizenship present. Completely extra-biblical sources offer some support for the concept of citizenship, but it’s seldom the main point of the word.

What about “of heaven” in 1:27 in the NLT and TNIV? This expression corresponds to nothing in the Greek, even on the assumption that politeuomai does carry the sense of “live as citizens” here. But of course, Paul isn’t talking about following the laws of the Roman colony of Philippi, but of obeying God’s standards as revealed in the gospel, in God’s kingdom. And the affirmation that “our citizenship is in heaven” will explicitly appear in 3:20. So to clarify the distinction, translators who introduce citizenship into 1:27 have to go on and add something like “of heaven” to distinguish the two kinds of citizenship.

But then the danger is to view Paul’s command as ascetic, separatist or otherworldly: “live as though you were already in heaven and not on earth” or something like that, which is not Paul’s point at all! Quite the opposite, Paul was very much talking about how to live on this earth, just not saying to follow merely human or secular standards of ethics. So the translations that speak only of good conduct in Philippians 1:27 are both the safest and the least confusing. Better to save citizenship in heaven for chapter 3.

It’s also another good reminder that, if you can’t read the Greek or Hebrew, always consult two or three translations, not just one. There is no translation anywhere that has always made the best choices in every passage!

The Denver Post had a cover story in its “Lifestyle” section recently on how older, long-married wives are increasingly divorcing their husbands. “Unhappiness, emotional estrangement and drifting apart are among the reasons more boomers are single than any previous cohort of 40-60 somethings” (Sheba R. Wheeler, “A gray area for women” [July 21, 2010], section D, page 1).

Debates over divorce and/or remarriage in Christian circles have tended to focus on the meanings of what have come to be known as Jesus’ exception clause (Matt. 19:9; divorce and remarriage can be considered in the case of adultery) and the Pauline privilege (1 Cor. 7:15-16; if a non-Christian partner wants to leave). Some Christian exegetes and/or therapists have argued for other similar worst-case scenarios to provide acceptable grounds for divorce—serious physical abuse, prolonged unrepentant addictions, life imprisonment, irreversible Alzheimer’s and the like.

Virtually no disagreement has existed, however, over the fact that, from a biblical perspective, mere “unhappiness, emotional estrangement and drifting apart” hardly qualify as acceptable reasons for divorce. All of these can be reversed if both partners make a good faith effort. But nothing in this newspaper article suggests these three reasons are limited to non-Christians, and personal experience shows that they are certainly not so limited.

One suburban Denver woman is quoted as saying, “The biggest thing was knowing I was approaching 50 and thinking I didn’t want to live the rest of my life married to someone I no longer loved” (section D, page 10). As is so endemic in our cultures and our churches, “love” is used here to describe a feeling. If you can fall in love, then you can fall out of love (or at least climb out of it)! If love, as in the Bible, is a choice, a commitment, then there is no falling. There is nothing that just happens to us outside of our control. Little wonder that cultures with arranged marriages (like many in biblical times) have microscopic divorce rates. The partners understand that it’s about how you behave toward one another, not about how you feel, that is most foundational to a marriage.

One might ask why this is “news” for the Denver Post in 2010. The article makes that answer clear also. Graying-haired men have been divorcing their wives in record numbers for some time now, often for “trophy wives”—noticeably younger, more attractive women who apparently care more about what their new, older partners can provide economically or socially in the short term than anything else, since second marriages on average dissolve faster than first ones. (Funny how in all the alleged interest in family values in the last presidential election, conservative Christians made next to nothing of the fact that this was precisely what the nominee of many of those voters’ choice had done years ago, whereas the other candidate had proved an exemplary husband and father. Guess the race really was about politics after all—which is probably what it should be—let’s just be honest about what we’re doing. But I digress.)

It’s not news either that most marriages that are going to end in divorce do so within their first eight years. What made this article worthy of publication was that the last bastion of faithfulness is falling. With younger men, younger women, and older men all leaving their spouses in record numbers for reasons far beyond anything remotely biblical, the only category of people left to join the bandwagon are older women. And now they have jumped on board.

It’s time to return to basics. Love is a commitment, not a feeling. Feelings follow from godly actions, not vice-versa. Wedding vows are promises: “till death do us part.” A divorcee by definition is a promise-breaker. Occasionally, it is impossible to keep promises no matter how much one wants to do so, because “it takes two to tango.” I cannot stay married if my spouse refuses to do so. But taking the initiative to divorce, and for no better reason than lack of personal fulfillment, simply cannot by any stretch of the Christian imagination ever be right.

I remember being shocked as a young adult by some Hollywood wedding (a true story) in which the traditional vows were replaced with promises to be faithful “until the death of love parts us.” That’s really what has become the norm today, even if we’re not honest enough to admit it. How many Christians getting married in 2010 would be prepared to go through with the wedding if those were the words they were told to repeat? Those who would be so prepared should save their money and skip the ceremony altogether. Especially for those already living together, wedding vows add nothing to what already exists unless they promise permanence. Might as well just keep “shacking up” with each other, to use some slang from my father’s lifetime, because it doesn’t take a promise to be faithful when good feelings are present. As C. S. Lewis put it years ago in objecting to shotgun weddings, why compound the sin of fornication with the sin of perjury? The whole point of wedding vows is to seal the relationship for the hard times. 

Those who wouldn’t be prepared to have a wedding with such trivial promises need to think long and hard about what they are promising with the traditional vows. And keep thinking about it every week, month and year of their lives thereafter.

The organization Bill McCartney founded had it right. It boils down to whether or not we are going to be promise keepers. And if I can’t trust someone in the most solemn pronouncement they will ever make in their lives, why should I trust them in anything else?

In our consumer culture, I shouldn’t be surprised that people treat church like a product. But I confess I continue to be surprised how long time, faithful churchgoers can suddenly “kick the habit” with seemingly little regret! Whether it’s a recent, young Denver Seminary graduate who was training to be a church leader or a middle-aged individual who just got tired of putting up with someone or something undesirable in their local congregation, people are abandoning regular church attendance in record numbers.

Hebrews 10, however, takes such a departure very seriously indeed. In the context of growing persecution of Christians in Rome in the early-to-mis, one could almost understand why Jewish believers might want to play down their distinctives as followers of Yeshua and retreat to a form of worship indistinguishable from orthodox Judaism. They would thus retain their unique privilege as a religio licita, and not be forced to offer a pinch of incense in honor of Caesar as “Lord and God” as everyone else had to do. Once Nero unleashed his official, state-sponsored persecution against Christians in 64, they would be immune from imprisonment and martyrdom. Today, one can empathize with believers from North Korea and China to Iran and Afghanistan to Morocco and the Maldives, who might similarly hide their Christian identities and not gather regularly for worship and instruction with other believers, lest they be arrested and/or killed.

Ironically, it is precisely in such contexts where we also hear stories of great faith, great perseverance and great sacrifice for the sake of Christ and fellow Christians, including for gathering together with them. It’s here in the U.S., in the Western world more generally, where so much less is at stake that we offer up such pathetic reasons (at least I suspect God considers them pathetic) for not joining together with fellow believers on a regular, weekly basis. And almost all of the excuses are anthropocentric rather than Christocentric. That’s a fancy way of saying we’ve in essence reworded the well-known praise song to make it say, “It’s all about me, Lord,” rather than “It’s all about you, Jesus!”

We all know the excuses. We don’t like the style of worship or music. We don’t like the preaching. We don’t like the new time for Sunday School. We don’t like the way the church spends our money. More seriously, we don’t like certain people we have to see when we go. The list seems almost endless. Yet the other irony is that we in the West, especially in the United States, have far more choices of churches than anybody has ever had anywhere else in the history of the world! Before the advent of modern transportation, the two major criteria for why a given person belonged to church x (rather than church y) was because it was (a) the closest church to where they lived (b) in their denomination. Before the Protestant Reformation, only (a) applied, except in those comparatively few places where both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy existed side-by-side. One generally learned to work things out with the same group of people over a long period of time.

Today we are victims of our plethora of choices. Now hear me well. I’m grateful for those choices. There do come times when churches have substantially changed their beliefs or practices that for a person to be faithful to their own basic convictions they must move to a different congregation. If that happens, then move! But don’t just stop going anywhere.

Hear me, too, please, when I say that “church” as the New Testament defines it can be a house-church, it can be independent of all denominational affiliation, and it can take many creative forms and gather at many different times. I’m not saying all believers have to gather on Sunday morning, in a distinctive church building, with one prescribed liturgy or order of service. Not by a long shot. But consider the implied hubris (a fancy Greek word for “arrogance”) implied by the person who claims to be a Christian, claims to be in submission in Scripture, and yet also claims that no existing expressions of Christianity anywhere close to them are sufficiently God-pleasing for them to favor those gatherings with their presence!

Hebrews supplies the key to how to change one’s attitude in such situations. One goes to church not for what one can get but what one can give. Spur one another on toward love and good works and encourage one another. One of the occupational hazards of having studied the Scriptures to the extent that I have, and having visited as many diverse expressions of God’s family of faith worldwide as I have, is that it’s hard for any given worship service to affect me emotionally at the very core of my being with something that fairly jumps out at me and says, “yes, that’s exactly how we should be doing things.” I occasionally experience a little something along those lines, but I stress the words “a little.”

But it doesn’t take much at all to get me pumped with the idea of going to see friends and acquaintances, and to meet new people, whom I can encourage and love and teach. If I keep track of how much attention, gratitude and concern I am showed in return, I usually go away depressed (except when I’m a guest speaker somewhere, because at least some people have been trained to do such things). But if I remind myself that I shouldn’t be trying to keep track of such things, then I usually feel fulfilled. But even that is an anthropocentric criterion. I need to keep reminding myself that I go and do what I do simply because that’s what God wants and it’s what he has made me for.

“How much do you charge for preaching?” “What kind of honorarium will it take to get you to come and speak to us?” “What is your fee?”

I hear these kinds of questions frequently. I know that many Christian speakers give straightforward dollar-based answers to them. I recently learned of one very popular, very rhetorically gifted Bible professor who told a local pastor who was inquiring about the possibility of him coming to his church for a special event that he never spoke for less than $5000 per talk. I was stunned. I wasn’t sure which I was more amazed at—that he charged so much or that people were willing to give him so much, because he is very much in demand and speaks all over the country with great regularity.

Paul vigorously argues in 1 Corinthians 9:1-18 that Christian ministers should have their material needs met by those among whom they minister. In doing so, he broke sharply from rabbinic practice that generally forbade receiving money for ministry, lest it compromise one’s motives. Paul adds, though, that with the Corinthians he has not availed himself of this privilege. Some historical background shed light on his behavior. Wealthy patrons regularly supported itinerant teachers and philosophers in the Greco-Roman world but then expected they could “call the shots” as to what those speakers did and did not proclaim. Paul would have no “strings attached” to his presentation of the gospel or of God’s word to a specific audience. But when he could be sure that no strings were attached, he was happy to receive support—hence his thank you note that we call the letter to the Philippians.

What, then, is the point of his comment that he and his traveling companions “do not peddle the word for profit” in 2 Corinthians 2:17? Great orators and rhetoricians in Corinth and other Greco-Roman centers of public speaking commanded hefty sums for their speeches. In Corinth, particularly offensive to Paul were the Sophists whose emphasis on form and style over substance and content has bequeathed the term Sophistry even to the English language of today.

Paul’s point is that the motivation for Christian ministry should not be whatever remuneration may accompany it. Countless pastors around the world today are bi-vocational because their churches cannot afford to pay them enough to live on. How tragic, then, when some Americans refuse a ministry simply because the pay isn’t adequate. Of course, given the opportunity to devote full-time energy to a ministry because the people are able to pay me a wage on which I can live, I may choose to do that over a ministry that does not produce the same wage because it is the best stewardship of my time and efforts. But I have to regularly ensure that those are my true motives. And Paul always ties ministry to spiritual giftedness. If someone is called and gifted to preach or teach, they must find outlets for doing so in the context of the community of God’s people for their growth, whether or not they ever get paid or have some formal staff position in a church or organization.

So what do I say to the question of what I charge for a speaking engagement? I tell people I understand that different churches and organizations have different resources and that it isn’t fair to create a “one size fits all” answer to that question. I tell them that I would just ask that they would treat me at least as generously as they would anyone else they would invite to engage in a similar ministry. (For the past several years, I’ve often also told people that I’m trying to help put two daughters through private universities, but, Lord willing, in two more years, I won’t be able to say that anymore!) And then I do my best to be content with whatever, if anything, I receive. I sometimes don’t succeed as well as I’d like to, especially when I know I’ve gotten a fairly stingy honorarium by today’s standards. But I suspect something along these lines is what Paul had in mind.

It was the summer of 1992. Denver Seminary was on the verge of completing its five-year participation in a program known as the globalization of theological education. We had two weeks of specially called summertime faculty meetings to work through all the implications of this for our mission, vision, values, and curriculum. One morning, a local pastor, who was also an adjunct professor at the seminary and a longtime friend of the school, addressed the faculty with about an hour-long presentation on everything seminaries were doing wrong, or at least inadequately, around the country.

It was a thoroughly depressing experience for all of us. Fortunately, the pastor had a second, later session in which he sketched his vision for how to rectify a good chunk of these matters—a mentoring program in which students wrote individualized learning contracts in the areas of ministry skills and spiritual formation. Two years later, we actually piloted a program that incorporated many of his dreams, known as CASE—Church Assisted Seminary Education. Two years after that, the seminary began the planning process that led to something not unlike our mentoring program today. But it took about seven years from beginning to end to create something that was always plagued with a certain amount of inertia that could be traced to that first gathering in which we felt we had all been whipped.

After all, we wouldn’t have been having the special meetings in the first place if we didn’t know we needed to make some changes. We also knew we were doing a lot of good things right. Many problems that characterized other seminaries weren’t our problems, though no doubt we had a few distinctive ones of our own. How much easier and shorter the whole transition would have been had we begun with a session that complimented us and encouraged us with the many good things we were doing well and with good faith efforts even in areas that were not going so well, before our speaker moved into the barrage of everything that convinced him of a need for a seminary overhaul.

Paul models precisely this approach to Corinth. By the end of 1 Corinthians, it is clear that this church holds the record for the number of problems among those who received apostolic letters, at least that we know of. Many of those problems surrounded their combative and divisive use of spiritual gifts, especially those of knowledge (wisdom) and speech—prophecy and tongues and their interpretation (chs. 12-14). Yet, in this opening prayer, which he allows the Corinthians to overhear, he thanks God for the very giftings that have caused so many of the problems. Obviously, he would much prefer to work with a group of people who are trying hard to serve Christ even if not always in the right ways, than those who are totally lifeless. And it is clear that it is God’s power and faithfulness that he trusts to bring the Corinthians around that allows him to be so upbeat before he begins to address the specific issues that need correcting.

How often have Christian employers, managers, pastors, supervisors, and leaders of many other kinds not followed Paul’s model? Just jump in with a group of people you don’t know very well, begin by sketching how dire the situation is, make those who have worked so hard to keep the organization afloat feel like their efforts are largely misguided, tell everybody they are going to have to change significantly the way they are doing things, or worse—that you’re about to clean house and start all over with a new team. The business world does that often enough that the church and parachurch organizations seem to feel they must imitate it. But, especially in Christian circles, I have yet to see it work in building morale or even in turning things around quickly. I seriously doubt it’s what God ever intends. The old “praise sandwich” (praise sandwiched around any criticism necessary) still works best. Paul knew. People matter more than programs or performance.

“Don’t settle for the easy Christian life by just staying at home. Listen for God’s call to overseas missions.”

“Living in the suburbs is way too easy. You need to move to the city. Get involved in urban ministry.”

“Have you been in the same job for a long time? Life is short; do you really want to be stuck in one place for most of it? Time to risk doing something different, moving somewhere new!”

How often have we heard these and similar well-intentioned remarks by Christian speakers, mentors or friends? How often have we used lines like these ourselves to advise others? I know I have.

But no matter how many times I read the last chapter of 1 Corinthians, I still find verses 8-9 bring me up short. Paul has already been ministering in Ephesus longer than in any community we know of throughout his apostolic missionary career. He has already promised the Christians in the churches of Greece, including the Corinthians, that he will be visiting them again. What’s the hold up? The answer is twofold and the two answers create a seeming paradox: Paul recognizes plenty of remaining opportunity for significant ministry and he recognizes the strength of the opposition.

How can both of these at the same time be incentives for Paul to stay on longer in Ephesus? Consider the alternatives. If all he received was opposition without any success, sooner or later he would need to obey Jesus’ words and shake the dust off his feet (an ancient public gesture of rejection) and move on (Matt. 10:14). If all he experienced was success without any opposition, eventually he would need to question if he were really remaining publicly faithful to teaching the full counsel of God’s will, because Paul also knew that the godly follower of Christ would eventually experience persecution, in some form or another (2 Tim. 3:12).

The only remaining option, then, is some combination of success and opposition. But how much is there of each? A significant amount, it would seem. Paul says that a “great” door has opened, but also that there are “many” who oppose him. If the ministry were advancing mightily with only a small amount of hostility, Paul could easily have assumed it was safe in Timothy’s hands and in the hands of the local elders (see 1 Tim. 1, 3 and 5). If there were a little fruit but major attacks, Paul might well not have felt free to leave even after Pentecost, which as an annual festival had to have been less than a year down the road. But if there were both significant growth and great opposition, then it made very good sense for Paul to want to stay long enough to try to quell the hostility and yet still eventually continue his itinerant ministry to which he had been called.

As recently as forty years ago, it was more common than not in this country for adults to work one main job throughout their professional career and for people to live in fairly close proximity to where they grew up. Today both of those prove the exception and not the norm. Forty years ago, the challenges reflected in the quotes at the beginning of this blog were frequently needed. Today, the most needed challenges may be for believers, once they find a good place for effective ministry (whether professional or lay), to stay put, to offer some stability in a transient world, to stop the perennial quest to climb the professional ladder, and that even as opposition waxes and wanes, ebbs and flows.

Years ago my wife and I owned a coffee cup which had on it the slogan, “Don’t let the turkeys get you down!” After almost 24 years of ministry at Denver Seminary, I think somebody needs to make a companion mug that says, “Just stay put. You can outlast the turkeys!” At least that’s been my experience here. But I know it can’t be generalized. My dad taught in one public school district his entire professional life, most of it at the one high school in the district. Not long after he began at that school, a slightly younger colleague was hired in his department who would stay there until after my dad retired. For years, she was his nemesis in numerous respects, but he eventually learned with the right combination of kindness and avoidance how to get along reasonably well with her.

Of course there will be times when God leads one to change jobs, ministries, or churches. But given the speed and frequency of such changes by most in the twenty-first century Western world, I suspect our default mode ought to be that we will stay where we are—bloom where we are planted, so to speak (cf. 1 Cor. 7:17-24)—until we have a sure, prolonged, and clear call from God to the contrary, and that we have as good a reason as possible under the circumstances to believe we are leaving our work and ministry in good hands before we depart. There will be exceptions, but I suspect they should be the exceptions and not the norm. I suspect on Judgment Day that God will be far more impressed with faithfulness and loyalty to a group of people or a ministry than with climbing a professional ladder or fulfilling our own dreams or personal desires—that “self-actualization” that our therapeutic culture so values but puts so many people at odds with each other and leaves a trail of damaged relationships in its wake.

I was startled recently to read on a friend’s blog that it was a sermon on 2 Corinthians 1-2 which was part of what convinced him that it was OK to renege on a promise that he had made. Indeed, he was convinced God was guiding him to back out of a commitment he had made to a large group of people that would have wide-reaching effects on them in favor of a new opportunity that would be personally more fulfilling. He had just not had a peace about the previous commitment but now felt completely at peace.

Of course, I don’t know what was said in the sermon that proved influential. Presumably it had something to do with the passage, quoted above, in which Paul justifies changing his travel plans to Corinth. Paul was in Ephesus at the time (1 Cor. 16:8), on the west coast of what we would call Turkey. He initially envisaged traveling across the Aegean Sea by boat to Corinth in the province of Achaia, which formed the southern half of Greece. Then he would head up the northern half of the peninsula, to Macedonia, visit the cities he had evangelized there (like Berea, Philippi and Thessalonica), retrace his steps to the south, back through Corinth, and then by boat across the Mediterranean Sea all the way to Israel. The geography of 2 Corinthians 1:15-17 makes perfect sense if this is what Paul had in mind.

2 Corinthians 1:23-2:4, however, makes it clear that Paul chose to abandon those plans. As he goes on to explain, he did not want to make another painful visit to Corinth. Instead, he wanted to wait until he was assured that they had dealt with a certain individual there who was causing all kinds of problems—possibly the incestuous offender of 1 Corinthians 5:1-5. Now, however, Paul has learned that this man has repented (2 Cor. 2:5-11). Paul is therefore on his way to Corinth, but traveling over land instead, along the northern shore of the Aegean to Macedonia and then making his way down south in Greece to Corinth (2:12-13, 7:5-7).

Apparently, this change of travel plans provoked criticism from someone in Corinth. Paul appears to have been accused of not being trustworthy, like the person who says “yes, yes” to something at one moment and then says “no, no” the next. Paul emphatically denies that this is the case (2 Cor. 1:18-22). All along he had wanted his next visit to Corinth to be one of mutual encouragement and if that meant postponing his trip and altering his itinerary, then so be it. The constancy was not at the level of the timing of the trip or who else Paul would visit en route before or after Corinth, but that he would indeed come again and do so when the Corinthians had mended their ways.

But neither was Paul breaking any promises. Paul says he “wanted” to visit them twice according to a certain itinerary (Gk. eboulomēn—v. 15), not that he ever actually said he would definitely do things this way. The verb appears twice again in this passage, both times in verse 17, translated by the TNIV as “intended” and “did. . .make plans.” And the reason for Paul’s change of plans had nothing to do with his own personal fulfillment. His concern was entirely for what was in the best interests of the Corinthians.

But what about 2 Corinthians 2:12-13? Paul has now left Ephesus, heading overland to Greece, to meet up with Titus who has been in Corinth and find out if things were better with the church there. Apparently, the two have an agreed-upon travel route, each coming from opposite directions, and they are not sure at what point they will meet up. As he always does as he travels, Paul will also preach the gospel in the communities through which he passes. He does so at Troas, in what we would today call northwestern Turkey. Apparently, there was a good enough response there and perhaps invitations to stay longer than he had originally planned so that Paul can write “that the Lord had opened a door for me.” 

But the main purpose of his trip is to meet up with Titus, in hopes of hearing that things are well enough in Corinth for him to continue on to that city. Paul’s lack of peace comes from not encountering Titus and thus from not yet receiving that good news. So he continues on his journey. This is a far cry from making a promise to engage in ministry at one location, subsequently not having a peace about it, and so going elsewhere. It is the exact opposite. The lack of peace comes because Paul’s original and primary commitment has not yet been fulfilled. He must remain faithful to that and not be tempted to go back on it in favor of a new opportunity, however alluring it must have been to stay in Troas to lead more to Christ.

I’m afraid the sermon my friend heard must have exactly inverted Paul’s original meaning. 2 Corinthians 1-2 is all about promise-keeping and in no way justifies promise-breaking because of new, unforeseen opportunities that are more personally appealing.

When people want to lament the decline in morals in this country, they typically point out upswings in violence (especially to the unborn), promiscuous sex (of both hetero- and homo- varieties), and perhaps our enslavement to greed and consumerism. Without denying any of those trends, I wonder if more attention needs to be paid to being people of integrity—whose word and promises can be trusted. After all, the Ten Commandments include not only prohibitions against murder, adultery and coveting but also against bearing false witness.

The passage in James 5 is a quotation from the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:37). The context in both cases is about taking oaths (not about cussing). The point is not so much a prohibition, as our Quaker and Mennonite friends have often thought, against solemnly swearing in a lawcourt that something is true, but rather against the notion that certain kinds of oaths are less binding than others (see Matt. 5:33-36). If that was the problem afflicting some of the Pharisees, Jesus explains, then don’t use oaths at all. Just be so trustworthy that if you say you will do something, then you will do it.

My grandfather was a very successful businessman in a small-to-medium-sized town in Iowa. He died in 1984 at the age of 84, when I was 29. I remember him more than once talking about how back before World War II, in his community, there were few of the elaborate contracts of today, just friends’ words to each other. You promise to buy this land by such-and-such a date and you have the money to the seller on time. You promise to deliver certain goods to a retailer and you never shortchange them. The vast majority of the time the system worked, whether the person was a Christian or not.

After the war, my grandpa would continue, some people started to renege often enough on such deals that now they needed to be sealed with a handshake. Then, somewhere in the mis, as he was getting ready to retire, more and more formal contracts were coming to be written for people to sign, because handshakes weren’t always a reliable guide to people’s follow-through on their commitments. Today, even signatures mean little in some circles, so we have endless litigation by people suing those who have reneged on formal contracts.

I had a disturbing conversation with a group of Christians recently that I led in a case study about a situation in which a Christian job applicant reneged on a promise to accept a job if offered it, in favor of a more attractive offer that had subsequently emerged. About half of the group saw nothing wrong with that, since no contract had yet been signed. Even more disturbing was the fact that some saw nothing wrong with leaving a brand-new job after just having signed a contract and after having made a verbal multi-year commitment (not in the contract), again in favor of a more attractive position.

Is it any wonder so many marriages these days end in divorce, not as they used to after years of struggle and hurt, but at the slightest sign of personal inconvenience? I met a divorcee in her mid-thirties recently who initiated proceedings after only a two-year marriage because her husband failed to keep a tidy home and this showed his “profound disrespect for her,” because she had repeatedly asked him to keep things cleaner. I probed to see if there wasn’t anything more serious than that but there wasn’t. I asked if they had tried counseling and she replied, “Oh yes, as soon as he heard I was talking about divorce, he insisted we go for counseling. We went a few times. But my heart had already checked out, so I didn’t see any point in continuing.”

What I wanted to ask but didn’t was “So why should anyone ever believe you again when you promise to do something for them, especially if it is something much less solemn than a promise to stay in a marriage for life?”

James and Jesus teach is that if we promise to do something and have it within our power to carry it out, then we are to do it, period. End of discussion. Become known as somebody so trustworthy that you don’t even need to shake hands, much less sign a contract. People know you’re a person of your word. And it’s striking how strongly they phrase the alternative: In James: “otherwise you will be condemned.” In Matthew: “anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” Ouch!

Not long after the 2004 tsunami that devastated Indonesia and neighboring countries, a document was circulating on the internet, purportedly showing a dramatic rise in earthquakes in recent years and using that to fuel fervor that Christ’s return was imminent. Now we have watched the horrific earthquake in Haiti, followed frighteningly closely by another in Chile, even stronger on the Richter scale. Less damage done was directly related to attempts in that country to build structures better able to withstand giant quakes, a caution virtually ignored in Haiti. Then this morning, there are reports that a 6.0 earthquake has hit eastern Turkey.

Doubtless somewhere people will again start to use such disasters as signs that we are living in the last days. Or to put it more accurately, since the New Testament consistently insists the last days began with Christ’s first coming, they will insist that we are living in the last days of the last days!

But wait. How often do we go back and read what the Bible actually says? Revelation, of course, depicts apocalyptic earthquakes during the tribulation itself of a greater magnitude than anything the world has ever seen. But the place in Scripture where people turn to make a link between “ordinary” earthquakes and the nearness of the end is Jesus’ Olivet Discourse. I’ve excerpted the relevant verses above. Along with earthquakes are mentioned several other kinds of plagues on humanity.

What’s crucial is to read the text carefully. Wars and rumors of wars should not alarm God’s people. The end is still to come. The Greek reads all’ oupō to telos, literally, “but the end is not yet” (as, e.g., in the RSV, HCSB, ESV and NKJV). Such portents do not herald the end! Amazing how the Christian grapevine, fueled by popular scaremongering novels, can disseminate a tradition of exactly the opposite of what the Bible actually says.

But what about earthquakes and famines? These are merely “the beginning of birthpangs.” This statement is asyndetically connected to the preceding one (i.e., without a Greek conjunction where one would be expected), so that the two statements are tied even more closely together than they would have otherwise been. In English, though, we need a conjunction for the translation to sound fluent; hence, “this is/these are but the beginning of birth pangs/pains” (RSV, NRSV, ESV, NET).

In other words, just as labor pains remind a pregnant mother that there is a baby inside her that the body wants to bring into the world, so too do these various earthly disasters remind believers that Christ will return, bringing an end to human history as we now know it. But my how unreliable those labor pains can be, sometimes coming months ahead of the actual due date, sometimes weeks in advance. They remind us that we are getting closer to the climactic day, but we knew that already just because of the passing of time. They turn out to be singularly unhelpful in predicting the actual moment of delivery. So, too, with disasters and the Parousia. In fact, given all the scriptural predictions about Christ’s return coming by surprise, like a thief in the night, and so on, I suspect he will choose a time that very few people have predicted and when there is very little apocalyptic fervor in the air!

In context, Peter is explaining that the apparent delay in Christ’s return should not be viewed from a human vantage point with respect to time. God’s timing is not our timing. From the viewpoint of eternity, even a thousand years can seem as quick as a day. God isn’t slow at all in bringing the end but wants to give people as much time as possible to repent (v. 9).

Extrapolating from the immediate context, there are many unanswerable questions about time and eternity with which philosophers wrestle. The end of Revelation 10:6, in older translations, was sometimes rendered, “time will be no more,” leading to the notion that the eternal state does not include a succession of moments. But modern translations recognize that this clause means, “There will be no more delay,” that is, before the end of human history as we know it. It may be that time is not something God created but simply an inherent part of the existence of any form of consciousness. We just don’t know.

What does seem clear is that, if I borrow models from mathematics and think about a line extending to infinity, then even the longest finite period of time is just a miniscule blip in that graph. Technically speaking, it can’t be graphed, because any definable segment of the line would still be too long! In more poetic forms that is what Peter was saying. And he wasn’t inventing the idea; he was quoting Psalm 90:4, a marvelous prayer of Moses reflecting on God’s sovereignty as he considered how fleeting life was.

Yesterday (Feb. 23), Denver Seminary’s Chapel was filled to overflowing with worshipers for Dr. Bruce Shelley’s funeral. For over 52 years, he had blessed and influenced thousands upon thousands of people through his Denver-based ministry of teaching, writing, preaching and mentoring. What a marvelous encouragement he always was to me ever since I came here in 1986. No one employed by our seminry apart from our patriarch, Dr. Vernon Grounds, has touched so many (though Dr. Gordon Lewis has perhaps come close). We are reminded of the two verses immediately after Psalm 90:4: “Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—they are like the new grass of the morning: In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered.” And yet we will be reunited with Bruce, and so many other loved ones who have gone before us, and countless others we will be thrilled to meet, for an eternity of reveling in God’s and each others’ company.

How much more can we look forward to never-ending, grand reunions with living Christians we wish were closer. How many baby boomers like me imagined when our high-school and college-graduating classes said their tearful goodbyes to people they thought they might never see again, that e-mail and facebook would make that abundantly possible decades later? How many foreign missionaries of past eras setting sail from their homelands never to talk to their families again could have even fantasized as science-fiction developments like Skype and webcams that now can put people in instant communication with each other from virtually anywhere in the world? How much more will we cherish eternal life that eliminates all barriers among God’s people, and most important of all, the barriers we cause ourselves through human sin, keeping relationships from being as perfectly loving and joyful as possible.

I often tell people that the hardest thing about my job is saying goodbye to ¼ of my closest friends every year. Maybe there’s a little exaggeration there, but not much. I love getting to know students. Few other jobs could possibly put one in touch with so many phenomenal servants of God. I wish I could develop a close relationship with every one of them but of course that is impossible. Circumstances lead one to acquaintance with many but deep friendships with only a few.

One of those graduates I counted as a close friend from several years ago had the opportunity to accept a ministry in Denver recently but was also being wooed by a ministry in another country. After months of waiting, with all signs suggesting that my friend would accept the call to Denver, at the last minute, with my excitement building to a fever pitch, the choice was made for the other ministry. I was stunned—both at the choice and how I was experiencing all four stages of grief simultaneously: disbelief, anger (especially at the other ministry for its “theft” of my friend), sorrow and, yes, also acceptance.

Ecclesiastes 4:10 says that God “has set eternity in the human heart.” I don’t pretend to understand much of what that involves, but I’m convinced a part of it has to do with the fact that even when we are physically present with our closest friends, every celebration, every special event, every happy memory goes by all to fleetingly. We are creatures who understand, however dimly, something of the unending sinless fellowship that we were made to have with God and each other and we long for it. When even feeble approximations of that fellowship are rudely snatched away from us in this life, whether through death or through departure, we intuitively recognize how wrong that is. Praise the Lord that one day this separation will be rectified—forever. And that’s a whole lot more than even a thousand years!

“Judgment in our time may well be the despised doctrine,” writes Klyne Snodgrass, professor of New Testament at North Park Seminary in Chicago and author of a recent magnum opus on interpreting the parables, entitled Stories with Intent (p. 491). All you have to do is read recent non-evangelical feminist and liberationist parable exposition to find examples. Vicky Balabanski, in an essay entitled, “Opening the Closed Door: A Feminist Rereading of the ‘Wise and Foolish Virgins’ (Mt. 25.1-13),” in The Lost Coin: Parables of Women, Work and Wisdom, edited by Mary Ann Beavis, objects to the ending of the parable of the ten bridesmaids. Imagine, half of these naïve young women excluded from the wedding reception for something as innocent as not accurately estimating the amount of oil they needed to have for their lamps for the evening. Exactly what one would expect from the heavy-handed patriarchal God of Jews and Christians. Balabanski insists that we shout back that we do not know such a God. For the Bible to be truly liberating, especially for women, the story must be rewritten so that the foolish bridesmaids are forgiven and welcomed in to the party!

You can imagine what critics from this perspective do to other parables that actually have harsher metaphors for final judgment than just a shut door, such as weeping and gnashing of teeth. Snodgrass is right. In an age of demanding one’s rights, of entitlement, of self-actualization, and even at times of religion that calls itself Christian but centers on me-first rather than others-first attitudes, the idea that God would ever finally exclude someone from his blessings is anathema. Hyper-Reformed formulations and/or misunderstandings of the biblical doctrine of predestination can exacerbate the situation more.

But here is a telling quotation from Ulrich Luz, liberal German commentator on Matthew, leader of many interfaith ventures and hardly a spokesman for soteriological restrictivism. After acknowledging that he longs for God’s love to have the final word in this parable (as we all should if we have tender hearts), he adds, “However, there is also the question whether a story of God’s pure love [such as the ending Balabanski demands] would not cause people to depend on the love in their own calculations and thus not take the holy God seriously. That is indeed what the foolish women have done.” To go a step further, if no beliefs or behaviors can ever damn a person, then there really is no finally compelling reason to pay any attention to God at all.

The wording Jesus has the bridegroom use in this story is telling. He insists he does not know the late-arriving bridesmaids. At the level of a wedding party, this makes no sense. The young couple deliberately chooses attendants who are close family members or friends. At the spiritual level, however, the reply makes perfect sense. These are not naïve young women innocently making a miscalculation; they are those who have claimed to be God’s people without really knowing God. One is reminded of Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount to those who masqueraded as his followers, even as church leaders: “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23).

It may not be biblical to say, “God helps those who help themselves,” but it does seem to be fair to Scripture to say, “God excludes those who exclude themselves.” Anyone who shouts in God’s face that they will not know him unless he abandons all forms of final judgment should be recoiling in terror of what they are creating for themselves on Judgment Day. Conversely, with Daniel Castelo in the Journal for the Theological Interpretation of Scripture (2008: 160), “Fearing God is the only viable theological modus operandi, the only adequate ‘foundation’ that suggests conditionedness, tentativeness, and a terrorizing yet joyful disposition to refuse ‘control’. In this respect, theologians would be wise to follow the example of the two Marys, who unlike the guards, were able to leave the tomb with “fear and great joy” (Matt 28:8), and in doing so, they came face to face with Jesus himself along the way.”

Pat Robertson is reported as having declared the earthquake in Haiti part of God’s judgment on that nation—esp. for its corruption and false religions. I don’t know if the report is accurate, but it appears he’s said things like that before, most notably after the tsunami in Indonesia a few years back. He managed to get the American missionaries kicked out of Venezuela when he said he thought the U.S. should take out Chavez. I suspect it’s past time for him to stop making public statements on world events altogether!

Of course, any time one nation, culture or part of the world experiences a “natural disaster,” some Christians are going to assume God’s judgment on them. And this is always possible. Interestingly, however, in the Bible, more often than not it is God’s people whom he judges through such events, not foreigners or those of other religions. Plus, the New Testament does not particularly reinforce the unique Old Testament arrangement with Israel—blessing for obedience and punishment for disobedience—by directly applying it to the church. Even in the Old Testament it was not a covenantal arrangement God made with any other nation besides Israel.

Jesus’ words quoted above are the most directly relevant New Testament teaching anywhere to how to respond to public tragedies and accidents, yet they seem surprisingly little known and cited. We don’t know the specifics of the incidents Jesus cites. Josephus reports several massacres Pilate inflicted on people under his jurisdiction, so the slaughter referred to here is very conceivable. But it may have been on too small a scale to make it into the other history books of the day. Nor do we know anything about the accident in Siloam. Again, given the lack of technology the ancients had, there must have been many buildings that fell or crumbled, often creating even higher casualties.

But we don’t need any further detail to understand Jesus’ point. He is directly disputing the view that humans can usually discern a degree of wickedness greater among those suffering such tragedies than among others. Instead, he uses it as a timely reminder of the fact that all of us our mortal and will all face final judgment one day. If we have never repented and become right with God, or if we have let our faith or faithfulness lapse and we need to return to him, such horrible events should be important trigger points to help us do precisely that.

One of the most discouraging things about high-profile individuals whose misguided views on disasters are widely cited is the scorn that skeptics and critics subsequently unleash with renewed vigor against Christians more generally. If one’s goal really is for the lost to repent, this kind of pontification after a disaster proves dramatically counterproductive.

What Robertson needs to do, according to Jesus—what we all need to do—is take personal stock of our own lives, not those of anyone else, and ask what we need to repent of. Are we taking for granted that we have tomorrow to make amends, when we really know we can’t know that for sure?

What is the significance of a non-Christian retailer saying “Merry Christmas” to a non-Christian shopper? At best, not much, just another rote way of exchanging pleasantries. At worst, a sense of participating in a hypocritical exercise, since neither believes in the true meaning of Christmas.

What about a non-Christian retailer greeting a Christian customer that way? Hopefully, the Christian doesn’t need those who don’t believe in Jesus to use a Christian word in order to have the holiday be fully meaningful to them, though they might have the (misplaced) satisfaction in having won a small cultural battle. But at what price? How likely is the non-Christian to draw closer to the threshold of faith by being mandated to use “Merry Christmas” when they realize it’s being done entirely for economic reasons, i.e., so as not to unnecessarily alienate the Christian shopper. Not likely, if anything they’re likely to move further away.

What about a Christian retailer greeting a non-Christian customer with “Merry Christmas”? The Christian could feel like the company has not impinged on their freedoms as much in allowing them to use their preferred form of greeting. But unless they are given the freedom to share their faith in more detail (not likely, ideologically or pragmatically—with long lines of shoppers waiting to check out!), will that simple greeting lead anyone closer to the Lord? If it’s combined with an unusual friendliness and excellent service, it might be one small factor in making them think again, but otherwise probably not. And the chance that practicing Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Wiccan and ideologically strident atheists might feel their minority status more acutely and be moved a little bit further from faith is probably again somewhat greater.

That leaves a Christian greeting a Christian with “M. C.” Perhaps each will get a brief warm fuzzy, but we have our churches and Christian fellowships where we can say the magic words to each other as often as we need to in order to get our full complement of warm fuzzies.

So is there any reason why Christians should want retailers to mandate “Merry Christmas”? Not, as far as I can see, if our main goal remains the salvation of as many people as possible. In fact, it seems likely the whole exercise will prove counterproductive if that is our goal. I wonder why so few people take the time to think things through from this angle! Maybe it’s because they still think the holiday is all about shopping—about spending and making money? Perhaps a third greeting option should be required so we all face up to what we’re really doing in the stores: “Happy Capitalism!”

Ancient genealogies often did not include any mothers’ names. Fathers alone were sufficient to demonstrate someone’s lineage. So why do five mothers appear, nestled within the forty-two generations Matthew provides to connect Jesus with David and Abraham (cf. v. 1)? Some have suggested it was because the first four were Gentiles, for whom the Messiah came as well as for Jews. But Mary’s Jewish credentials were impeccable. Others suggest it was because of sexual sin on the part of all of them, but this requires disbelieving the story of the virginal conception and putting the worst possible spin on Ruth’s coming to Boaz in the middle of the night at the threshing floor, which was more likely her proposal of marriage. What all five did have in common, however, was the suspicion of illegitimate sexual behavior and the stigma attached to that, whether or not it was deserved. Tamar played the prostitute once, with Jacob, to raise up an heir. Rahab was a prostitute. Not all would have believed that Boaz and Ruth remained pure that night. Bathsheba was the victim of David’s adultery. And Mary’s story was far more incredible than Ruth’s in the minds of many.

I published a short article on Matthew 1-2 that includes this material, expanded, in the Biblical Theology Bulletin way back in 1991, so I will not elaborate it here. But what are we to make of this as part of the Christmas story, especially this time of year? The answer is clear, as all of his ministry would corroborate: Jesus is a Messiah for outcasts, whether or not they deserve the stigma others attach to them.

Growing up in a wonderful Christian home, I have almost exclusively happy memories of Christmastime. It was a family time, often involving relatives we saw only once or twice a year. It was a time filled with lots of “warm fuzzies”. Although my parents were very generous to a variety of poorer friends and in giving to charities that cared for the poor, Christmas was not a time during which we involved them in our lives.

My first three years of married life were also the first three in which neither my wife’s nor my families were with us at Christmas, because we had moved to Scotland for grad school. It was there that we first learned about celebrating the holiday with others who had no families accessible. In the years since, Christmas day gatherings have been very unpredictable—sometimes with extended family, sometimes just with a few close friends, sometimes with a big gathering of “castaways,” and sometimes mixing “castaways” with close friends—often an adventure, sometimes a challenge, and seldom a dull moment. One constant has been that my wife’s and my relatives have always remained far enough away that we have not automatically been with them at Christmastime. When we haven’t, we then ask, “then who”? And we’ve asked that sometimes even when we have been with them, at least when it’s been on “our turf.”

What does your Christmas portend this year? If you have the choice, try to include some folks who can’t be guaranteed “warm fuzzies” at Christmas and try to give them some. They’re the kind of people who made it into Jesus’ genealogy. They’re the kind of people Matthew went out of his way to have us remember in his Christmas story. Perhaps that’s part of what it means to wish each other a “Merry Christmas.”

Every other one of my blogs has begun with a New Testament quotation from the TNIV. For my Thanksgiving 2009 blog, I have chosen as my headline the KJV, not because it is the best translation here, but because it is the way many people know the verse. I learned it in this version because there was a popular Christian chorus when I was a young adult that used this wording.

As one scans the major contemporary English translations, one discovers three main approaches to this verse. First, some preserve basically the KJV wording (most notably the NKJV, HCSB, NASB and NET), which is one literal rendering of the Greek en (which can mean “in,” “on,” “at,” “to,” “for,” “with” or “by” depending on the context) plus the dative panti (meaning either “everything” or “every person”). But it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Is Paul subtly saying actually to give thanks for everything, even evil? Is “everything” to be qualified in some way? Or is there some other insight we are missing to be sure we are making sense of Paul?

A second option answers my first question above with an unambiguous “yes.” The New Jerusalem Bible explicitly reads, “and for all things give thanks.” But no other Bible verse ever sanctions giving thanks for the devil, or his minions, or the evil that results on earth because of the Fall that he precipitated. God’s Word to the Nations reads “Whatever happens, give thanks,” which may not be intended to mean what the NJB says, but could certainly be taken that way.

The third and best option is that followed by the ESV, NAB, NIV, NLT, NRSV and TNIV: we are called to give thanks “in all circumstances.” The neuter plural regularly has that meaning in a variety of Greek contexts, including a variety of New Testament ones. This is consistent with the best rendering of Romans 8:28 that God works “in all things” for the good of those who love him. God does not cause evil (Jas. 1:13) nor does he merely respond to it by countering it with something good but is working in the very same events that create evil, sometimes by evil people, for good ends (Gen. 50:20).

In this vein, what am I thankful for this Thanksgiving season. My list will inevitably be very partial. I am thankful for salvation in the midst of a fallen world. I am thankful for a wonderful family, a wife and two daughters who love Jesus, are engaged in meaningful work and service for him even if this will be the first Christmas in twenty-three years that our older daughter will not be with us (but with her English husband’s family south of London). I am grateful for incredibly rewarding, challenging and meaningful work at Denver Seminary and everything else that is related to being a New Testament professor, even if the full-time faculty numbers (20 for barely 400 students when I came in 1986) have barely risen at all while the student body has more than doubled (26 for 940 students today) and the work load grown commensurately. I am grateful for generally good health, and all the advances in modern medicine, so that I can look forward someday to a knee replacement rather than simply anticipate increased pain as arthritis sufferers did in past eras. I am grateful for so many wonderful friends, including many graduates who have kept in touch, even though I know a few who claim to have renounced their faith in favor of agnosticism or atheism, which grieves my heart terribly. And I am profoundly grateful for the immense freedom of religion we still have in this country and the huge percentage of evangelical Christians compared to most countries in the world, even if we don’t always appreciate the extent of our blessings or use our freedom in the most tactful, loving ways possible. 

I wonder how many remember (or ever learned) Katherine Lee Bates’ second through fourth verses to “America the Beautiful,” including: “Oh beautiful for pilgrim feet whose stern, impassioned stress a thoroughfare of freedom beat across the wilderness. America, America, God mend thine every flaw. Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law,” “Oh beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved and mercy more than life. America, America, May God thy gold refine till all success be nobleness and ever y gain divine,” and “Oh beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years. Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears. America, America, God shed his grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” 

Appropriate thoughts indeed at this time of year.

Timothy George wrote an excellent book exploring the similarities and differences between central Christian and Muslim beliefs, published in 2002, and provocatively entitled Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? Among other things, George observed that Old Testament Jews were strict monotheists, much like Muslims. Without an explicit concept of the Trinity, prior to the coming of Christ and New Testament revelation, their doctrine of God closely resembled Muslim understanding of Allah. In fact, the etymologies of Allah and El (or Elohim), a common Hebrew name for God in the Old Testament are probably related in pre-Arabic, pre-Hebraic Semitic tongues. Jews who did not become followers of Jesus often stumbled over the very thing Muslims do, the notion of the deity of Jesus or of a Triune God more generally. So perhaps Muslim views of Allah approximate pre-Christian Jewish understandings of Yahweh. Because the New Testament can properly speak of  Yahweh, the Lord God of Israel, as Jesus’ father, then maybe the Father of Jesus is the God of Muhammad.

George, however, concludes that this is going too far. The God of the Old Testament was a Triune God from all eternity past, whether most Jews ever realized it or not. There are at least hints of a plurality within the Godhead in the Old Testament in ways there are not in the Qur’an. There is nothing in the Old Testament that unequivocally states that God cannot have a Son, as repeatedly appears in the holy book of Islam. Read both the Jewish Scriptures and the Qur’an and despite the occasional picture of Allah as compassionate, the dominant impression one gets is of an all-powerful, all-knowing being whose mood is almost always one of judgment, primarily on outsiders to Islam. Read the Old Testament—actually read the whole thing and don’t just trust someone else’s simplistic summary—and Yahweh, God of Israel, is predominantly a God of love. When judgment does appear, most of the time it is against God’s own people. The major exception, with the inhabitants of Canaan in the days of Joshua, came only after centuries of God’s patience, until their sins had reached “full measure” (Gen. 15:16).

But one of our readers asks me to address this issue via a slightly different question: Can Allah and God ever be used interchangeably? Here I would agree with many missiologists, especially some who have served in Muslim contexts, that the answer is yes, so long as one goes on to define one’s terms carefully.

That’s exactly what Paul did on Mars Hill. Using theos, the general term for G/god in the Greek language, and based on an inscription to an unknown theos, he proceeded to define the term for the Athenians more accurately. But he never abandoned the term. “God” is an exceedingly common word for God in the Bible! There are plenty of accounts from the history of Christian missions of missionaries insisting on using a foreign word for God, or even creating a new word, in a given language because they cannot accept any indigenous word as close enough in meaning to the God of Scripture. Inevitably, additional barriers have been erected for the acceptance of the Gospel. Now in some instances, this may have been unavoidable, if no term exists that is not inherently polytheistic.

But in Arabic, Allah is as monotheistic as words come. Arabic Christians, before Islam was even birthed in the seventh century, used Allah to translate the biblical words for God. Here is a history we can draw on. Theos, of course, was used by Greek translators of the Septuagint, long before the coming of Christ, despite it being a term very susceptible to polytheistic overtones, but not inherently so.

So it all depends on context. If one can use Allah and explain what one means by it and this is a bridge for sharing Christian beliefs, by all means use it. If among a different group of people, it is inextricable from distinctively Islamic tenets, one may have to abandon it.  Great discernment is needed either way.

I had read the verse countless times. Probably due to messages I had heard, my attention was always drawn to the first half. Timothy was comparatively young and inexperienced in ministry, but that was no reason for others not to respect him or for him to be afraid even when others didn’t. But I hadn’t reflected on the second half of the verse nearly as much—not nearly enough.

How do Christian leaders follow God’s leading and call in difficult situations where fundamental biblical principles are being violated by others, whether doctrinal or ethical? How do they stand the best chance of succeeding when others are self-centered, demanding their own way, cantankerous, divisive, misled, jealous or troublemaking? Paul gathers together three key terms here that most people don’t naturally think of as belonging with each other. Any one of them by itself is usually not enough. Two of them together are much better. But all three are necessary for a full-orbed personality of godly leadership.

My father was the best teacher I ever had of any subject at any level of my schooling. He was a lifelong Spanish teacher, with most of his career spent in the public high school in Rock Island, Illinois. I had him for third- and fourth-year Spanish in the early seventies. He modeled all three of these character traits, most of the time, in a very excellent blend. The same was true of him as a parent. It took an awful lot to get him mad, either in the classroom or at home, but no one ever doubted that he was in charge or that he cared deeply about his children and his students. His power was balanced by love and normally kept in check by self-control.

But every once in a great while he would “blow.” You didn’t want to be around when he got angry. Yet his positions were almost always justified. When he unleashed his invective at someone else, he would often explain to me afterwards, “Sometimes you just have to turn up the volume!” What he meant was that sometimes people needed to see how upset they had made you; it wasn’t good enough just to keep your emotions under wraps. Somehow, carefully choosing his times to “explode,” my father would almost always get what he wanted.

Over the years of my adult life, I have occasionally tried to imitate Dad. For whatever reason, the process has seldom worked as well for me. Maybe it’s because he taught in a secular context and I teach in a Christian context, where people are far less used to seeing leaders get visibly upset. Maybe it’s because we don’t think long and hard about what occasions triggered Jesus’ and the apostles’ anger. (Answer: when legalistic insiders to the faith made a sham of their religion and deserved rebuke; the evangelical world, in contrast, tends to kowtow to such people and reserves its rage for non-Christians when they discover them acting like non-Christians!)

Maybe there’s a third reason as well. I have known leaders, with whom I’ve worked closely over a prolonged period of time, who just never get visibly mad. There is no question they are in a position of authority and know how to exercise it, but their self-discipline is so honed that even when they have to mete out unpleasant consequences to persistently intransigent people defying the policies of the institution, they do so calmly, exercising self-restraint. And meting out such consequences is always a very last resort; meanwhile, they consistently look for “win-win” situations when people under them are ensnared in division or simply can’t agree with their own views. I can’t confirm that these people have never gotten visibly angry in their entire Christian lives; if that were true they’d have done better than both Paul and Jesus! It’s just that it’s so rare that I’ve never seen or heard about it.

The older I get, the more I aspire to that model. I still blow it, more often than I care to admit, but not as often as I used to, so I think I’ve made some progress—power balanced by love and both held in check, with proper boundaries, by self-control. Why hadn’t I noticed that earlier in 2 Timothy 1:7?

The problem with answering it is that there is not much in the New Testament that directly addresses questions of government. Best known, no doubt, is Romans 13, in which authorities are said to be ordained by God. But Revelation 13 reminds us that it can become demonic as well. This would be a flat-out contradiction if Christian thought understood God and the devil as equal, opposing forces. But, as in the Judaism that birthed it, New Testament Christianity consistently viewed Satan as a subordinate, created being, dependent and contingent on God’s permissive will. As with submission to husbands, parents, masters and church leaders, then, submission to governing authorities must never be absolutized. When governments demand that Christians behave in ways that contradict his expressed will, Christians must respectfully disobey. The midwives in Moses’ day knew this, Daniel understood this, and Peter and the Twelve in Acts appealed to this principle against the Sanhedrin more than once.

But short of direct conflict between God and the government, how should Christians understand the relationship between church and state. The early Christian, pre-Constantinian response to pagan Rome was largely one of withdrawal. Christians did not participate in the army or serve in government. They found too many entangling alliances and too little opportunity to work to change “the system.” After Constantine and the legalization of Christianity in the fourth century, trends began in the Catholic Church that would eventually produce the so-called “holy Roman empire.” From a Protestant perspective, too often popes and kings throughout the Middle Ages were too closely aligned. Whether or not that was the case, the church’s goal was frequently clear: to impose its will on the world through the existing government.

Martin Luther strongly opposed this notion, articulating his two-kingdoms theory that would prove influential centuries later in the development of the American doctrine of separation of church and state. But Luther did not take things that far. Lutheran kingdoms developed in Germany and Scandinavia, but Lutheran church members were taught that sometimes they had to behave one way as individual Christians even if the (church-led) government had to act differently. The country might have to go to war, but individual believers could still try to love their enemies.

John Calvin was much closer to prevailing Catholic thought as he sought to create a government for Geneva, Switzerland, consistent with his specific form of Protestant thought. The Anglicans likened the role of church to state to that of prophet to king in the Old Testament—an important servant of the government when it ruled nobly and a crucial critic when it didn’t. The Anabaptists, the so-called Radical Reformers, reacted against this by once again urging much fuller withdrawal from society. The church was to become a countercultural model of the kingdom of God on earth in ways that no mixed communities of believers and unbelievers living together could.

All of these models can find New Testament support and it is not clear that only one of them is right for all situations. In democracies like ours, Christians as citizens have the right and responsibility to work toward electing politicians, enacting legislation and appointing justices whose views are consistent with theirs, and hopefully consistent with the Bible, just as all other members of society do. Unfortunately, within the last generation of evangelicalism and liberalism, each side has chosen to apply this strategy very selectively. So one group is eager to use government in support of its views concerning abortion and homosexual behavior but then abdicates its responsibility to use the same mechanisms for helping the poor or providing adequate health care. The other group excels at times with the latter but often fails with the former. Ron Sider’s long-standing vision of Christians seeking a “completely pro-life” platform inculcating biblical values on all of these (and other) issues seems more lacking today than ever.

Friday night my wife and I went to see the newly released movie, “Surrogates.” I doubt it will win any awards, but it was fun. It does raise some interesting questions for Christians to think about.

I don’t want to spoil the plot for those who will still be going to see it, so I won’t say much beyond what you could have learned from the previews: Our society has invented the capability for a person to stay home all the time, but plug oneself, for however long one wants to, into a machine that enables one to control one or more life-size mannequins, who look just like real people, to do whatever you want them to do, simply by thinking the appropriate thoughts. These mannequins, which contain a myriad of electrical devices and cords underneath their “skin” and clothing, then virtually live life for a person. If they are hurt, even “killed,” the people are not, so society becomes much safer and people appear to have freedom to become anything they want to be with scarcely any limitations--at least until the plot becomes more complicated.

Enough about the movie. The question that fascinates me is in what ways, even if quite differently, human beings in the 21st century already rely on surrogates. Powerful people have relied on underlings to do their bidding, particularly all the undesirable tasks of life for millennia. Sometimes such underlings have been formal slaves. Today they are more likely to be immigrants, legal or illegal, disproportionately from certain ethnic groups, whom we pay, though often not much, to do the jobs we’d rather not do.

But, as in the movie, surrogacy also involves machines. The current state of internet technology allows bloggers and their respondents to choose, if they wish, not to disclose their full identities or even anything about their real identities at all. The same is true of people who contact you by e-mail. By these and related methods stalkers anonymously and deceptively seek out victims on-line and law-enforcement personnel seek out the stalkers by the same duplicitous methods, though somehow we feel the one is right and the other is wrong. I wonder if we should.

Much of the vitriol and discourtesy that plagues the blogworld comes from the complete lack of accountability that some people have created by disguising or at least not disclosing their true identities. And if one artificial identity after awhile displeases, one can start all over again with a new one. How long does it take before that becomes one’s approach to the real world? Church hopping is at an all-time record high, for a whole host of reasons, but one of the worst involves those who don’t want to be held accountable for resolving their problems or problems they have with others in a given church and so they just leave and start over. And no one asks them any hard questions. Or they stop going to church altogether. Or they claim to give up the faith altogether.

How often have we heard testimonies about people who tried one religious or world-view option after another before coming to Christianity? Because we hear their testimonies in Christian contexts, it sounds like at last they’ve settled on something that will be different and lasting. And sometimes it is. But the more personas they have tried in the past, the easier it is for them to try Christianity for a time and then give it up, and we may never know about it, unless, for example, we go to websites that boast about such pilgrimages.

We treat our friends, even our lovers, the same way. It’s been empirically demonstrated that the more sexual relationships we have before marriage, the harder it is to form and preserving a lasting intimate relationship in marriage. The more we see our identity as something optional and changeable, the more we will practice what has been called serial polygamy—not multiple spouses at once, just one after the other.

The Christian should be dramatically different. Whatever else Paul means in the context of Colossians 3:3, he means that when we truly trust in Jesus, we have new identities that are so protected by him and secure in him that it is as if they are hidden away until their full revelation at the time of his return. Serving Jesus as Lord is an absolute commitment that by definition cannot be opted out of. If we do, we show that we never truly understood it in the first place, and thus were never truly in. But the negative consequences, especially in eternity, make such a choice the worst one a person can ever make.

Away, then, with surrogacy (in these senses)!

Many thanks to those who wrote in response to DJ Turner’s invitation on Facebook for suggestions for topics for this blog. There was only one topic that two people mentioned, so I will begin with it. But, intriguingly, one person requested it and the other one called it “not interesting.” And that I find interesting!

I could envision someone saying health care and the New Testament was too complex a topic for a short blog. I could imagine someone saying it wasn’t as high a priority as some other issue. I could anticipate someone recognizing it really is more of a topic for systematic theology, since there are no Scriptural texts that explicitly address what kind of health care a nation should or shouldn’t have. But not interesting? Surely you jest. :) Such a person must be quite healthy. If they were seriously ill, or chronically disabled, I suspect the reaction would be very different.

Since it was decided that health care should be this year’s topic for the Vernon Grounds Institute of Public Ethics, centered on our campus, I really ought to say something about it.  But from what text?

Recently, I was asked to fill in at a local church for one of our graduates who was out of town. He had been preaching through 1 Corinthians and had asked me to plug into the series by speaking on 15:35-58. It, like all of 1 Corinthians 15, is an exhilarating chapter, presenting the truth and glory of the bodily resurrection, first of Jesus and then of all believers. But what do you say by way of application from a text on resurrection for Christian living in the here and now?

Certainly, one common topic among commentators and theologians has yet to be overused in local pulpits: We are to model, individually and as churches, however imperfectly in this age, the kind of resurrection life that will one day be ours perfectly, for the sake of a watching world. If unbelievers can see believers living in a transformed way in this world, at least some will want what we have and come to the Lord. That was one of the big impetuses for my salvation, in high school, when I saw my peers through a Campus Life club talking about Jesus as making a difference in their daily lives and living in ways that made it visible

So what in the world does that have to do with health care? If we are created as embodied beings and if our eternal destiny is to be embodied, then our bodies matter. Of course, we remain lost forever if we live record long and physically healthy lives and die without Christ. But if we take Christ’s ministry of physical healing seriously, we will be concerned about the physical health of all in our world.

Occasionally, God heals miraculously. But those are the exceptional instances. We wouldn’t call them miracles if they happened often! There’s absolutely nothing wrong with praying for a miracle; there’s everything wrong with counting on one, promising one, or trying to manipulate God to grant us, or someone else, one. In the ancient world as well as the modern one, God has worked the vast majority of times through doctors, medicine, and natural healing processes.

None of this determines what is the best mechanism by which to give the greatest amount of affordable health care to the greatest number of people in any society. As with all political questions, people including Christian people, will probably always proposal multiple models and debate their relative merits. But caring for the physically sick should always be a priority for God’s people, even if not necessarily the highest priority. If our current system is increasingly unaffordable for increasing numbers of people (and it is)and if the gap is growing between the haves and the have-nots, even among the insured, as to who can have what quality of health care (and it is), then every Christian should want to reform the system in a way likely to create more help for more people.

If that’s not at the very least interesting to say nothing of downright urgent, it’s time for a heart check.

I hear the comment so often, in one form or another. It boils down to the question:  “How can I judge someone else for what I think is their sin, when I commit plenty of sins myself?” There are numerous ways the Christian should respond. One answer is because Jesus told us to do so—see Matthew 18:15-18. A second involves definitions. If by “judge,” someone means being unnecessarily harsh or “judgmental,” then no, I shouldn’t act that way. That was Jesus’ point in Matthew 7:1. But Christ and the apostles regularly “judged” in the sense of analyzing what was right and wrong and declaring what fell into which category.

But in this blog I’m more interested in the issue behind this question which seems to suggest that all sins are somehow equal. One person commits adultery, but probably all of us lust, so how can we criticize the adulterer or engage in church discipline with them? After all doesn’t Jesus equate lust and adultery in the Sermon on the Mount? No, not exactly. He says that both bring us in danger of judgment. Every sin separates us from God, and every sin requires forgiveness. So in the sense that every sin creates a problem that needs to be dealt with, yes one can say that the Bible equates various sins.

But that hardly makes all of them equally bad! I would vastly prefer that my wife harbor inappropriate thoughts about another man but never act on them than that she commit adultery! I would even more prefer that people who dislike me think hateful things about me but not act on them than that they murder me! In terms of the severity of consequences for oneself and for others, especially in this life, there is a huge difference as to how bad different sins are.

And that is no doubt a big part of what Jesus meant when he criticized the Jewish leaders in Matthew 23 for scrupulously tithing, even down to the tiniest garden herb, but neglecting what he calls the “weightier” or “more important” matters of the Law. He immediately adds that they should have done the one without neglecting the other, thereby showing that he is not challenging any of the Law, at least not before his crucifixion, resurrection and sending of the Spirit at Pentecost would fulfill and thereby do away with the need for his followers literally to obey the civil and ceremonial laws of Israel. But even while the whole Law of Moses was still in force, there were issues that were much more important than others. Echoing the language of Micah 6:8, Jesus could sum these up with the terms “justice, mercy and faithfulness.”

An older fundamentalism often seemed obsessed with railing against inappropriate sex, drink and drugs. Today some Christians seem to revel in the degree to which they tolerate others who overindulge in any or all of these areas or actually themselves have sexual partners to whom they are not (heterosexually) married, or get drunk or are addicted to non-prescription drugs. But I wonder, have both groups overestimated how “weighty” these matters are compared with the neglect of social justice, concerning which Micah berated Israel?

What would happen if we exercised church discipline over those who did not care for the poor and needy in their midst? After all, Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 says it is precisely those people who should not take the Lord’s Supper! What if we were concerned to treat the alien and sojourner in the land with the same mercy as the native born, as the Law so often commanded? And if someone protests that we must distinguish between legal and illegal aliens, were there any legal aliens in Israel? If God had bequeathed the land to the Jews, weren’t they all illegal? I don’t pretend to know what system will give the best health care to our growing ranks of uninsured, but shouldn’t that issue be at the forefront of every Christian’s agenda? Or are we still tithing dill, mint and cumin and neglecting the weightier matters of the Law?

“You believe Christ gave Peter the keys to the kingdom, as in Matthew 16:16-19?” they had asked.  “Yes,” she had replied.  “You also believe that the Catholic Church in the second century began to drift away from the pure teaching of the gospel, so that eventually there was need for a Reformation, right?”  “Yes, of course.”  “But the Reformation didn’t restore the authority that had been given to Peter, because there is no one Protestant church, but hundreds.  So no one received that authority until it was given to Joseph Smith.”  At this point my friend was somewhat puzzled as to how to respond.

The simplest way I can explain in theological terms what Joseph Smith did, consciously or unconsciously is to try to meld together Roman Catholic views of church authority with Protestant views of Roman Catholicism!  But it doesn’t work; you can’t have your cake and eat it too. 

The LDS regularly speak of a great apostasy that began after the Twelve apostles had all died off, at about the turn from the first to the second century.  Protestants typically don’t see the falling away occurring nearly as quickly or as extensively, but we do agree that already in the second century certain non-biblical teachings began to creep into the church, which began to grow, with others added in later centuries, so that by Luther’s day a Reformation was very much in order.

But we look in vain in the New Testament for any authority given to Peter or the first generation of apostles that was intended to be passed on, or that in fact was ever described as being passed on to subsequent generations or centuries.  The authority conferred on Peter is left largely undefined in Matthew, save for the elaboration that what he bound on earth would be bound in heaven and what he loosed on earth would be loosed on heaven.  A very similar promise is given to all the Twelve in Matthew 18:18-20.

When we turn to Acts and the epistles, we see Peter as the leader of the Twelve, at times, and all the Twelve as leaders in the church.  Given their role in confirming or disconfirming that people really were Christians in the book of Acts, it is this evangelistic role that probably was in mind with Jesus’ metaphor about the keys opening and closing doors, as it were, to the kingdom.

It is true, moreover, that Peter insisted in Acts 1 that Judas be replaced, preserving the number of fledgling apostles as twelve, doubtless to correspond to the twelve tribes of Israel (cf. Matt. 19:28).  But when the apostle James is martyred in Acts 12, not a word appears about any replacement, nor is there any extra-biblical tradition about such occurring.  Nor is there any hint inside or outside the New Testament about any other disciple dying and being replaced by anyone, except for Peter himself, once he became the overseer (or bishop) of the church of Rome.  Even here, however, the oldest Christian traditions just speak of his successors as subsequent bishops of Rome.  It is not until the fourth century that one begins to see the emergence of anything like the subsequent papacy.

The proper response to the LDS claims on this topic is, therefore, that you can’t combine mutually exclusive Protestant and Catholic claims at this juncture.  There are only two options.  The first is that God was working through the church’s leadership in the early centuries after the apostolic age to create a more elaborate hierarchy with a greater authority than anything supportable from the New Testament alone or that such a hierarchy was part of the falling away, the apostasy, the deviation of the church from the simpler first-century gospel.  If you want the kind of authority Joseph Smith was looking for and claimed to receive, you won’t find it in the New Testament, only in subsequent Catholicism.  But then you can’t say the Catholic church was apostate at that juncture, since then you wouldn’t want to adopt their take on the keys to the kingdom that they developed.

The second, Protestant option, is that there is no God-given support for apostolic succession or a papacy (whether of the Catholic or Mormon kind), not in the New Testament, nor in any subsequent Christian tradition faithful to the New Testament.  In this case, there is nothing to be restored that the Reformation didn’t restore.  I opt for this approach.

“That’s great; congratulations,” comes the reply.  Then after an awkward pause, I’m asked some kind of question that basically amounts to “But if you write a textbook about Jesus and the Gospels, what’s there to revise?  Has ancient history changed?”  The question is understandable, but still a little surprising.  After all, any high school graduate who has ever paid attention to the history textbooks they’ve used over the years will have seen one or more works in their second, fifth or even eighth editions.  I suspect there is something about the aura of the person of Jesus (after all wasn’t he divine) and of the Gospels (weren’t they inerrant) that makes us not think of revised editions of books about them as being as natural.

So what is different about the new edition of my book?  First, it’s about 15% longer.  Particularly in the sections on social-scientific study of the ancient Mediterranean world, on literary criticism of the Gospels, on background to the Gospel of John, on the historicity of the Gospels more generally, on the quest of the historical Jesus, and on the Gnostic and other apocryphal Gospels, I have added extra material.  These are areas on which there has been an intense flurry of scholarship in the last twelve years, since the first edition came out.

Second, I have reread every word in the manuscript, leaving many sentences unchanged, but always asking the question of whether or not I can express myself any more clearly, and often making minor, stylistic changes hopefully to improve the work on that score.  Third, I have replaced a substantial majority of the footnotes predating the late 1980s with their equivalents from more recent publications and occasionally updated even slightly more recent footnotes.  Fourth, I have completely reworked the bibliographies to include the latest and best scholarship available on each topic surveyed.  Finally, the publishers have created a brand-new cover, a nicer-looking font, and the maps and charts are a little smaller and definitely more professional looking, at least in my opinion.

In case someone is wondering, no, I haven’t changed my mind on anything of any great importance.  But as long as biblical scholarship continues to produce such a vast, diverse of array of publications, there will always be the need for revised works, especially textbooks, to be aware of, interact with and/or incorporate the most influential and/or valid insights of the latest rounds of research.  Who would have expected twelve years ago that the first decade of the new millennium would bring us The Da Vinci Code, the Gospel of Judas, or the Talpiot tomb with its claims to be the family mausoleum of Jesus?  Who could have predicted the so-called new atheism with its unfounded but vigorously argued claims that Jesus never even existed?  Who’d have guessed the swift decline of approaches such as canon criticism, structuralism and deconstruction or their rapid replacement by historically impossible claims about the formation of the canon, the proliferation of narrative criticism and the skyrocketing amounts of sociological analysis?  And we were already overloaded with excellent commentaries twelve years ago, but the number of good, new series begun since then has grown at a record pace.

So I’m grateful for this chance to keep a well-used textbook as useful as possible.  Check it out!

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