Class, Week 5: Loving the Law?

If there is any part of the Old Testament less liked than the uncomfortable stories about God-ordained genocide and child sacrifice, it’s the law. It has all the theologically squirm-inducing components (stone your rebellious children; if your wife has a daughter, she is unclean for twice as long as if she has a son) minus the easy-to-read plot.

While I’m still kicking around the idea that perhaps the stories about God are simply not accurate representations – historiography, not history – the law is harder because these are supposed to be the words of God himself, not just words about God. And there’s some stuff in there that is difficult to understand, uncomfortable to read or, perhaps worse, been used to spread hatred and violence against women, gays and minorities in the name of God.

But perhaps the law is something else. Perhaps it’s a code of ethics calling us to social justice, morality and deeper relationship with God and others. After all, Jesus himself summed up the entirety of the law in just two commandments, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength,” and, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

My professor opened his discussion of the law yesterday with the above clip from Episode 7 of Firefly, in which Shepherd Book tells River, “You don’t fix faith. Faith fixes you.”

The implication: We can’t fix the Bible; we can only let it fix us.

Guardian Angels

I had a post all set to write this morning, and then I saw this one from Richard Beck:

I think every Christ-following church should start talking to their youth groups, saying unambiguously: We want you to be a wall of protection for kids like Jamey. Seek out and protect–emotionally and socially–every weird, weak, nerdy, lonely, queer kid at your school. We don’t care if they are a goth, or a druggy, or a queer. Doesn’t matter. Protect these kids. Churches should train their youth groups to be angels of protection, teaching them to find these kids and say, “Hey, I love you. Jesus loves you. So no one’s going to bully you. Not on my watch. Come sit with me at lunch.” That’s what I think. I think every Christ-following church should start Guardian Angel programs like this, teaching their kids to stick up for kids like Jamey. Not with violence. But with welcome and solidarity. Because it’s hard to bully a group. So let’s welcome these kids into a halo of protection and friendship.

That’s what I think Christians should be doing to change our public schools. We shouldn’t be fighting battles over stuff like school prayer. Because you know what I think God thinks about our battles regarding school prayer? I think God is shouting from the heavens, “Why don’t you shut the hell up about school prayer and start sticking up for Jamey?”

And if you think my language is strong, sensitive reader, know that I’m just paraphrasing the prophets. Read how the prophets speak about prayer, song, and worship when the People of God allow injustice at the gates. You want God in our public schools? So do I. But guess what? God is already inside our public schools. Standing by kids like Jamey.

Read the whole thing.

Lost in the American Church

Over at Jesus Creed, Scot McKnight has started a new book discussion, this time about You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church … and Rethinking Faith by David Kinnaman.

Everyone has their own pet theories about why young people are leaving the church, and they usually happen to line up exactly with their own beliefs about how the church should function. In the not-so-recent past, I would have said people are leaving the church because it’s not judgmental enough. Don’t laugh. I might not have said it in quite those terms (probably something more like presenting a stark choice about the realities of heaven and hell), but that’s what I would have thought.

Kinnaman’s theory is probably a little bit sounder. According to McKnight, Kinnaman finds three overriding traits of modern young people, and as a self-described modern young person, I think these sound right:

1. Access: Immediate, pervasive ability to access information, which means gatekeepers are increasingly irrelevant.
2. Alienation: Families are less close-knit while at the same time adulthood is harder to achieve (I would add a large part of this is probably because the economic conditions are worse for young people than for anyone else in the country), which leads to skepticism of traditional institutions.
3. Authority: “There is a profound skepticism of authority,” including that of Christianity and the church.

Here’s the thing though: None of these things should be dangerous for the church.

Class, Week 4: The Unfair God

The other day in class (or maybe it was two weeks ago), my professor noted that in the Old Testament intro class he took as a grad student, a classmate at the end of the semester announced that because of the things he had learned there, he could no longer be a Christian.

My professor told the story to encourage us to come to him or make it known if the things we are learning about the nature of the text of the Old Testament cause us to doubt, but he added: “If you’re going to lose your faith, do it over something more worthwhile, like the problem of suffering in the world or because people in the church are jerks.”

It was a light touch, but a true one. Because, if anything, learning about the human fingerprints all over the Old Testament has freed me to appreciate God’s message in the text more. At the beginning of class, you might recall, I described the OT as a “crazy uncle” who embarrasses me in public and for whom I have to apologize later.

As I’ve said before, learning that the Bible is not a pristine book handed down immaculately from God to humanity, but rather a messy collection of legends, stories, laws and theology written down many centuries after they are supposed to have taken place, has freed me to look at the broader truths of the story. I don’t have to defend this ugly passage about murdering infants or that unscientific reference to the foundations of the earth and the waters of the deep.

And yet.

Perhaps it’s my own literalist baggage, but I still struggle with exactly how much leeway God gave the Old Testament authors, whomever they were. After all, this is God’s Word, right? “God-breathed and useful,” according to the author of 2 Timothy.

So we should expect the Old Testament to give us a reasonably accurate view of the character of God, shouldn’t we? Surely, God wouldn’t allow that part to get screwed up. I can get on board with the idea that he probably isn’t interested in breaking the news about biological evolution to ancient Israelites who wouldn’t understand it, and that their own experience with exile and return colored their view of the law and holiness, so I understand that we can safely view a lot of the Pentateuch through those lenses.

But, let’s face it, God in the Old Testament is not just vengeful, he is unfair.

Friday Psalm: Declaring the Glory of God

Friday mornings are tough. It’s the day after class, the end of the week, and I’m usually faced with the prospect of a late night covering high school football. So usually I’m tired, and I don’t really feel like blogging.

Therefore, I’m going to try out my first semipermanent feature for all seven of you out there reading this: the Friday psalm.

One of our class requirements is a psalm prayer journal, in which we write about a psalm, assigned by the professor, every day for a week. With me doing my journal in the mornings and class on Thursday afternoons, that means Friday morning is the debut of a new psalm for the next week. Why not share it with you? Perhaps you’ll get something out of it, too.

This week’s psalm is Psalm 19.

I won’t post the whole thing (you can click the link above), but here is an excerpt I like:

¹ The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
² Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
³ They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
⁴ Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world. 

Summit Day 2: Books, Celebrity and a Dash of Polygamy

I almost wrote a book once.

Back in my previous life as a journalist, I was the lead reporter for our newspaper on the sensational raid by Texas Child Protective Services of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints compound south of Eldorado (pronounced with a long “a,” if you’re not from the area). Hundreds of children were removed.

It was the largest such action ever taken in the history of the United States, it was based on a hoax phone call, and it was overturned by the Texas Supreme Court weeks later, but it resulted in convictions and long prison terms for several men who had taken child brides, and ultimately a life sentence for the sect’s leader, Warren Jeffs.

Anyway, I was around for the first year of that process, which was crazy and intense and, for a couple of weeks anyway, the focus of national media attention. Suddenly, two or three of us reporters for the li’l ol’ San Angelo Standard-Times were competing with the likes of CNN, the Salt Lake Tribune, The Associated Press and even The New York Times for stories and interviews (and winning, I might add).

So, I figured, a lot of people seem to be interested in this, and someone should write a book, and why not me?

But it’s hard to write a book. Writing 2,000 words for a Sunday in-depth news story? No problem.

Finding an agent and carving aside time once a week to produce a manuscript of indeterminate length? Problem.

With kids and other responsibilities, including switching jobs and ultimately changing cities, pressing in, I ended up abandoning the project. But I still think there’s a book in me, probably not about that, but about something, though I have no idea what.

All that to say, I have great respect for those who actually have written books, especially ones I’ve heard of, and especially especially ones I and other people I know have heard of. I’m kind of in awe of people who have done that, actually.

And when those people write books that, if not precisely change my life, at least solidify and confirm that the direction it’s taking is the right one? Well, that’s even cooler.

And so it was pretty awesome to meet Rachel Held Evans yesterday.

Summit, Day 1: The Toxic Process

It’s Summit here on campus, which means three days of lectures and classes about pretty much any Bible-related topic you can imagine. The organizers have done a better job recently – certainly better than when I was an undergrad – of making the event more interesting to students and younger attendees, and as a result some real superstars of Christianity (oxymoron?) have been on stage, or soon will be. People like Shane Claiborne last year and Rachel Held Evans and alumnus Max Lucado this year.

Yesterday, however, it was Barron Jones’ turn. Jones preaches is a former minister (see correction in the comments) at Laurel Street Church of Christ in San Antonio, and he had some thought-provoking comments on the nature of the church and its involvement with politics.

“The church has formed an unholy and ungodly alliance with Washington, D.C.,” he said. “We are the fools who go along for the ride.”

For those on the right, he launched a volley of inflammatory comments:

“Some of you white people are afraid the president is a black man,” he said. “And you say, ‘Oh no, I just don’t like his politics.’ Please. That’s like saying, ‘I have two black friends, so there’s no way I can be racist. I’ve been to a black church once.'”

“The dead babies are dead, and unfortunately it’s legal to kill them in this country, but the dead babies are gone. What are you going to do for the live ones? … I see a lot more excitement in our churches for hiring preachers and paving parking lots than feeding orphans. What if the church shut up about abortion and every Christian family adopted a foster child in the name of Jesus Christ?”

The Problem of Prayer 2: Bee Stings and Eczema

My older daughter is 3, and the other day she asked my wife the following question:

Why did God make bees if they sting us?

It’s an easy enough question to answer – bees serve a valuable role in the ecosystem, and they have a stinger to protect their honey from animals who might want to eat it. But it’s still a little sad; it marks the beginning of what will probably be a lifelong struggle over the contradiction between the existence of pain and the presence of an omnipotent, loving God.

We finished Rachel Held Evans‘ Evolving in Monkey Town (just in time! We’ll be seeing her speak tomorrow) last night, and she opens the final chapter with a story from her childhood, asking her father why God didn’t heal her eczema.

I remember that he had tears in his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said after clearing his throat. “But I know that he loves you.”

Which brought to mind a thought-provoking blog post from Shawn Smucker, whose own daughter deals with a similar affliction.

She was much more patient with God than I normally am. She never so much as raised a question as to why, night after night, we prayed for her bumps and they didn’t go away. Every evening she asked for the same two things: her bunny and a prayer.

Then, a few nights ago, as Maile tried to put some salve on the bumps to keep them from itching, Lucy asked her through the tired tears:

“Mama, why doesn’t God take away the bumps? We pray for them every night.”

Bee stings and eczema. I fervently pray these are the types of problems with which my daughter has to wrestle. That would be so much easier than cancer or death.

Class, Week 3: The Head and the Heart

You know you’re in grad school when you start using words you’ve known for less than 24 hours in everyday conversation.

Which is probably why, during a Thursday night worship service, I was mulling the synchronic attributes of God and how that affects our diachronic lives.

During class yesterday, we discussed the Pentateuch and its likely multiple authorship. Scholars break into two camps – those who read the Bible’s first five books synchronically, that is, as having one unified message from beginning to end, no matter the number of authors involved. And there are others, like my professor, who read it diachronically, which means they see read it in the context of multiple authorship at different times with messages tailored to fit those specific times and authors.

I favor a diachronic approach. I don’t think you can divorce the context and authorship of a piece from its message and purpose. One student in our class essentially asked, “What does it matter” if the Pentateuch was written by several authors over a long period of time or by Moses in the desert with an enormous scroll and writing skills it’s not clear he could have possessed? The message is the same either way. I disagree because, at least to me, it’s clear that while perhaps there are overall universal truths to be gleaned from the books as a whole, the messages of the individual stories and books contradict, or to use a nicer term: have diversity, or “tensions.”

This doesn’t bother me as much as I would have thought it might. As our professor said: Churches are messy. Christians are messy. Life is messy. Why do we expect the Bible to be perfect? Is it because it’s a haven from the otherwise-messy world? But there’s no evidence God works that way; he has never done anything but meet people where they are and used them to (imperfectly) carry out his plans.

Finding Refuge in the Pentateuch

A narrative of the Flood:

YHWH saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. So YHWH said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth – men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air – for I am grieved that I have made them. Seven days from now, I will send rain on the earth for 40 days and 40 nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.”

YHWH then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and two of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive on the earth.”

And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood. Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground, male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as YHWH had commanded Noah. And rain fell on the earth 40 days and 40 nights.

For 40 days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that moved along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth.

The rain stopped falling from the sky. The water receded steadily from the earth.

After 40 days, Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find no place to set its feet because there was water all over the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

Then Noah built an altar to YHWH and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. YHWH smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart, “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.”

Hmm. Seems like something is missing.