A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • Making all things new

    During my vacation I finished Craig Hill’s In God’s Time and wanted to offer some concluding thoughts on it. (See previous posts here and here.)

    Hill, wisely in my view, declines to meet the popular “end times” view of conservative dispensationalism on its own turf by countering one proof-text with another. He recognizes that different views of eschatology arise from fundamentally different approaches to the Bible. He names these the “deductive” and “inductive” approaches.

    A deductive approach takes it as axiomatic that the Bible is the perfect, inerrant word of God and therefore it provides an internally consistent and true map of the end times. Thus books that may at first blush seem inconsistent (e.g., the gospels, Paul’s letters, and Revelation) are “harmonized,” often in what seem to outsiders as outlandishly complicated or implausible ways. Nothing is allowed to count as counter-evidence to the Bible’s perfect, factual accuracy and consistency.

    By contrast, an inductive approach takes the Bible to be a collection of witnesses to God’s self-revelation, but ones that offer complementary–and not always consistent–perspectives on that revelation. The inductive approach begins with the particularity of the varied biblical witnesses and tries to arrive at some general truths. For this view, Jesus Christ always stands “behind” scripture as the ultimate norm, albeit one that we only have access to through the biblical witnesses.

    Hill also offers to ways of thinking about how the Bible functions in the life of the believing community. We can think of the Bible as something we must conform to, or we can think of it as something that models the life of faith for us, providing “archetypes of Christian thinking and living” (p. 27).

    Recognizing this fundamental division, and taking his stand with an inductive, modeling approach to the Bible, Hill is free to look at the eschatological and apocalyptic texts in the Bible (as well as extra-canonical sources) in all their bewildering diversity. For instance, he points out that the extra-canonical Jewish text I Enoch shares many specific themes with Revelation, and may even have influenced it. In fact, one significant outcome of Hill’s survey is to show how close Jewish and early Christian thinking about the end was. The common assumption that Jesus presented a way of being the Messiah that broke starkly with Jewish messianic expectations overlooks the rich diversity of 1st-century Jewish apocalyptic thought.

    Hill also offers close readings of Daniel and Revelation itself, as well as a survey of Paul’s thought on eschatology, and a succinct, but convincing, rebuttal to historical Jesus scholars (e.g., the Jesus Seminar) who seek to “de-eschatologize” Jesus.

    The upshot is that these visions of God’s ultimate victory are both rooted in a specific historical context (a hostile Roman Empire in the case of Revelation) and also convey profound theological truths that have application beyond that context. Hill thus seeks to avoid the extremes of viewing the text as only of historical interest or as something that is speaking exclusively about some future time (usually the interpreter’s own).

    This plurality of images can play itself in a variety of ways within Christian thought; Hill notes particularly the tension between future and realized eschatologies in the New Testament, and the theologies, forms of church, and social ethics that tend to go with them. He sees this division working itself out within Paul’s thinking–which oscillates between a theology of the cross that sees Christian life as one of patient suffering while holding to a future expectation of fulfillment and a theology of glory (my term, not Hill’s) that is more optimistic about the possibilities for transformed human life here and now.

    Hill concludes that the Bible “provides us with numerous models of hopeful expectation,” which should caution us “against holding too-certain ideas about what lies ahead” (p. 197).

    At its core, eschatology is about the character of God. If God can be trusted, then the future can be trusted with God. (p. 197)

    While we should sit loose to the details of what God’s ultimate victory will look like, our vocation is clear: it’s “insofar as possible, to bring the eschatological future into the present” (p. 197). This is the polar opposite of the attitude (in)famously displayed by Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior James Watt, who said that there was no point in protecting the environment or conserving nature since Jesus was coming back soon anyway. On the contrary, says Hill: it’s precisely the eschatological message and mission of Jesus that provide the urgency to the call to discipleship. Because God is “making all things new,” we are called to live into that new future.

  • The problem and necessity of eschatology

    (See my previous post on Craig Hill’s In God’s Time.)

    Hill goes on to identify some of the obstacles to a retrieval of eschatology for non-fundamentalist Christians. While he recognizes that significant work has been done in recent theology to put eschatology back at the center of the faith (he cites Moltmann and Pannenberg among others), he also notes the ongoing scholarly efforts to drive a wedge between the historical Jesus and the eschatological outlook of the New Testament. Hill also observes, “I have heard hundreds of Sunday-morning sermons in ‘mainline’ churches; I cannot recall one that dealt squarely with the subject of the future” (p. 7).

    Nevertheless, the problem isn’t just academic fashion, embarrassment, or the fact that preachers have other favorite topics. There are real differences between us and the first few generations of Christians that make it difficult for us to inhabit New Testament eschatology in any straightforward way. These differences fall broadly under the umbrella of reconciling faith with science.

    Early Christian hopes were expressed in ways that assumed that the earth was the center of a relatively small universe, that it had existed for at most a few thousand years, and that prior to “the fall” humanity and creation existed in a state of sinless harmony. Within this framework, it was relatively straightforward to imagine what “a new heaven and a new earth” meant. But many of us at least no longer share these views, and it’s unclear how or whether a belief in the triumph of God’s purposes can be re-expressed in ways more consistent with a contemporary world-view. Hill also cites the fact that many early Christians, including Paul, and possibly even Jesus himself believed–mistakenly as it turns out–that the world would end in their lifetime. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to jettison the whole idea?

    The problem with that move is that eschatology is “basic” to Christian faith. To get rid of it would undermine the entire structure. He points out that Christianity without eschatology wouldn’t really be Christianity at all, since Jesus, if he was not raised, would not be the Christ, but at best an inspiring ethical teacher and social reformer. Moreover, Jesus’ ethic itself was eschatologically grounded and not obviously valid as a free-floating ethical system: “because the coming reign of God has a certain character and value, says Jesus, one would be sensible to respond to it in certain specific ways” (p. 8).

    Instead of abandoning eschatology, we need to reevaluate it, starting with coming to grips with the history, purpose, and context of eschatological thought in the Bible. That’s the task Hill turns to next.

  • God wins

    No, this isn’t a riff on Rob Bell’s latest book. The expression is Craig Hill’s two-word summary of what eschatology is all about in his book In God’s Time: The Bible and the Future (published in 2002). Hill is a professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary, and his book is an attempt to counter the lurid fantasies of popular Left Behind-style apocalyptic thinking with a more biblically informed view.

    Regarding the meaning of eschatology, Hill writes:

    When all is said and done…the essential point of eschatology is quite simple. In two words: God wins. God’s purposes ultimately will succeed; God’s character finally will be vindicated. At heart, all eschatologies are responses if not quite answers to the problem of evil. Are injustice, suffering, and death the final realities in our world? Is human history, both individual and corporate, purposeful? Is all this talk about the goodness, love, and justice of God just pie in the sky? Eschatologies differ in how they conceptualize God’s triumph, but they are essentially alike in asserting God’s victory as the supreme reality against which all seemingly contrary realities are to be judged. (p. 4)

    Echoing Karl Barth, Hill insists that Christianity is “irreducibly eschatological.” He is thus taking issue not only with the eschatological views of Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, and their ilk, but also with liberal Christians who downplay, or deny altogether, the eschatological significance of Jesus and his mission. (I suspect he has in mind here Jesus Seminar types.) We might also add theologians who qualify God’s power to such a degree that God’s victory is no longer assured.

    Hill maintains that the heart of Christianity is eschatological because it is based on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

    In his resurrection, the early Christians saw the vindication of Jesus, who despite crucifixion was shown to be God’s Messiah. Even more, they saw in his resurrection the vindication of God. All of this talk of future hope, of God’s final justice and triumph, really is true. They knew it would happen to them because they had already seen it happen to Jesus. (p. 5)

    As we’ve recently seen, it’s easy for Christians of a more moderate or liberal bent join their secular friends in mocking Rapture believers and the like. But what’s not easy, as Hill shows, is to separate Christianity from eschatology altogether, even though there are many ways of conceptualizing it. Mainline Christians tend to be uncomfortable discussing things like the end of the world and life after death. these things are inseparable from what we believe God is like and whether God will “win” in the sense that the divine purposes will ultimately triumph over sin, suffering, and death.

  • Friday links

    –Ta-Nehisi Coates on Moby-Dick.

    –Amy-Jill Levine: “A Critique of Recent Christian Statements on Israel”

    –From Jeremy at Don’t Be Hasty: Why the church can’t take the place of the welfare state.

    –A discussion of “summer spirituality” with Fr. James Martin, S.J., author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything.

    –A review of Keith Ward’s recent book More than Matter?

    —Lady Gaga: “Iron Maiden changed my life.”

    –Grist’s David Roberts has been writing a series on “great places” as a reorienting focus for progressive politics: see the first installments here, here, and here. Also see this reflection from Ned Resnikoff.

    –Four different demo versions of Metallica’s early tune “Hit the Lights” (with some, ahem, interesting vocal experimentation by a young James Hetfield).

  • Keith Ward on the sacrifice of Jesus

    In his book What the Bible Really Teaches, Keith Ward spends a chapter on “the sacrifice of Jesus.” He wants to contest the popular view that Jesus had to die as a kind of blood sacrifice to appease or deflect God’s wrath–a view, Ward argues, that’s at odds with the biblical view of what sacrifice is.

    According to Ward, sacrifices in the Old Testament are not inherently efficacious. That is, there’s nothing inherent in shedding animal blood or sending a goat into the wilderness that compels God to act or be disposed toward us in a particular way. To think this is to confuse religion with magic, and to adhere to a view of sacrifice that the Bible condemns as idolatry.

    Instead, says Ward, the sacrificial rituals of the OT are divinely established means for renewing fellowship and communion between God and human beings. They “work” because–and only because–they are appointed by God for this purpose. The value of these sacrifices consists in our symbolic identification with what is sacrificed as a form of whole-hearted self-offering to God. The forms these take are, in a sense, irrelevant. Hence the prophets’ condemnation of punctilious observation of the ritual law when it is not animated by the spirit of justice and compassion.

    These include sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving, as well as atonement for sin–and the latter are mainly concerned with unintentional infractions of the ritual law. There is no suggestion, Ward argues, of an atonement-sacrifice that can cancel out intentional sin. “Biblical sacrifices for sin do not pay the punishment due to sin, nor do they remove such a punishment” (p. 122).

    If this is true, then how should we think about Jesus’ sacrifice? In line with the biblical view of sacrifice, Ward says, Jesus’ sacrifice should be understood as his total self-offering to God, a self-offering that is the divinely appointed means for uniting humanity to the divine life:

    What Jesus offers [in his sacrifice] is not an animal-substitute, but himself. He expresses the heart of true sacrifice, the total offering of a life to God. This does not in itself entail that Jesus should die. But Jesus was prepared to face death as the price of his obedience to the divine will in a world that had turned from God. The death of the cross is the final, most complete expression of Jesus’ self-offering to God. It is not that the shedding of blood was necessary before humans could be united to God. That would be to revert to a magical transaction view of sacrifice. It is rather that his whole life, and his loyalty to his vocation even to death, was a full offering of humanity to God, so that God could unite humanity to the divine completely in him. (p. 124)

    But Jesus was more than a martyr, and his life was more than a perfect act of self-offering to God. His obedience “has a double significance”:

    It exposes the hostility of the “world” (the world which rejects God) to God. And it expresses the sharing by God of the suffering of that estranged world. Because the world rejects God, it rejects Jesus, the incarnation of God. The cross represents what the world does to God. Jesus, in freely accepting obedience to God’s will, becomes the expression of God’s suffering, accepted at the hands of disobedient humanity. Jesus’ obedience draws upon himself the disobedience of estranged humanity. In this sense, God does require that Jesus dies–but only because God knows that a complete obedience, in a disobedient world, will inevitably lead to rejection and death. (pp. 124-5)

    Ward continues,

    the death of Jesus is not the placation of an angry God. It is the opposite. It is the expression of the unrestricted love of God. It is the full expression of human obedience to the divine calling, and at the same time of the divine humility that shares the human condition. (p. 125)

    In the death of Jesus, God bears the hostility of disobedient humanity, but in the resurrection God demonstrates that such hostility doesn’t have the final word. Jesus’ life of self-offering is a “perfect prayer” to which God responds with the resurrection and outpouring of the Spirit. This is the means, ordained by God, for restoring relationship between God and an estranged humanity.

    I’m very sympathetic to this overall view, but I might make one slight qualification. Sometimes, maybe because of his desire to distinguish biblical sacrifice from “magical” notions, Ward almost seems to imply that it’s completely arbitrary what means God chooses to restore the human-divine relationship. In part, this is a salutary reminder that the Incarnation is rooted in God’s love and freedom; it’s not something that compels God to be merciful. But surely most Christians (including Professor Ward) would want to say that there’s something especially fitting about this restoration occurring by means of a human life that enacts, in history, the eternal love of God and the perfect human response to that love.

  • Friday Links

    –Ludwig von Mises versus Christianity.

    –20-plus years of Willie Nelson’s political endorsements.

    –The media has stopped covering the unemployement crisis.

    –The Stockholm Syndrome theory of long novels.

    –An interview with Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City.

    –Why universal salvation is an evangelical option.

    –A debate over Intelligent Design ensares an academic journal of philosophy.

    –Goodbye birtherism, hello “otherism“?

    –Chain restaurants try to adapt to the classic-cocktail renaissance.

    –Everything you need to know about the apocalypse.

  • Cursing our enemies before God

    Given the debate over the last few days about whether it’s appropriate to be happy about, and even celebrate, the death of Osama bin Laden, I thought it would be worth revisiting Ellen Davis’s discussion of the cursing (imprecatory) psalms in her book Getting Involved with God. These psalms, which call God’s wrath down upon the psalmist’s enemies in what often seems like a very unchristian spirit, are frequently glossed over or heavily edited, if not extirpated entirely from contemporary Christian worship.

    However, Davis argues that “the cursing psalms are in fact a crucial resource for our spiritual growth, indispensable if we are to come before God with rigorous honesty” (pp. 24-5).

    The cursing psalms help us to hold our anger in good faith. Sadly, most of us feel about our enemies more like the psalmist does than Jesus did. We must pray to be healed from our hardness of heart, but healing will not come through a cover-up. Healing for ourselves and even for our enemies requires that we acknowledge our bitter feelings and yet not yield to their tyranny. Rather we must offer them, along with our more attractive gifts, for God’s work of transformation. In several ways, the cursing psalms give us strong practical guidance in making that offering of anger. (pp. 25-6)

    What is this practical guidance? Davis says that it comes in three forms. First, the cursing psalms give us words to express our anger. And not only do they provide a means for venting our anger when we are betrayed or victimized, they can help us move past anger. By giving us words with which to externalize our anger, they allow us to look at it more objectively and, perhaps, to recognize the element of self-righteousness it contains. “For the cursing psalms confront us with one of our most persistent idolatries, to which neither Israel nor the church has ever been immune: the belief that God has as little use for our enemies as we do, the desire to reduce God to an extension of our own embattled and wounded egos” (p. 26).

    Second, the cursing psalms can be modes of access to God. They teach us that God is known in judgment on evil as well as in mercy. “The God who created us for life together (Genesis 2:18) is, like us, outraged by those who violate trust and rupture community” (pp. 26-7). It is part of our baptismal vows to name evil when we see it and to reject it wholeheartedly.

    Finally, and most importantly, these psalms direct us to give the desire for vengeance or payback over to God. “[T]he cry for vengeance,” Davis says, “invariably takes the form of an appeal for God to act” (p. 27). The cursing psalms don’t authorize us to take matters into our own hands. “On the contrary, the validity of any punishing action that may occur depends entirely on its being God’s action, not ours” (p. 27). Moreover, leaving vengeance in the hands of the Lord means relinquishing control of the outcome:

    Through these psalms we demand that our enemies be driven into God’s hands. But who can say what will happen to them there? For God is manifest in judgment of our enemies but also, alas, in mercy toward them. Thus these vengeful psalms have a relationship with other forms of prayer for our enemies. (p. 27)

    So, if there’s a lesson here for us, maybe it’s that we ought to bring our feelings about enemies like bin Laden–whatever they are–before God. If I’m happy about bin Laden’s death, then I should say that to God in prayer. But doing so in the spirit of the psalms means that I may come to recognize an element of self-righteousness in my righteous anger and satisfaction. It means naming the evil that he was responsible for and our anger about it. But it also means giving up the position of ultimate judge of his, or anyone else’s, fate. (It’s noteworthy, though not particularly surprising, how many people are confident in consigning bin Laden to hell.) Human justice may have required bin Laden to be killed, or at least to be sufficiently disabled to prevent him from wreaking more terror. But ultimate judgment remains beyond us. Navy SEALs might have been the instrument that drove bin Laden into the hands of the living God, but what happens once he gets there remains a mystery.

  • The prayer of suffering

    Another insightful passage from Ellen Davis on the Psalms:

    The preponderance of laments in the Book of Praises is a fruitful contradiction from which we can learn much. But we live with a second discrepancy that should trouble us more than it does; namely, the contrast between the biblical models of prayer and our own contemporary practices in the church. It seems that ancient Israel believed that the kind of prayer in which we most need fluency is the loud groan, and they have bequeathed us a lot of material on which to practice. Therefore it is troubling that most Christians are almost completely unfamiliar with the lament psalms. Except on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, these psalms almost never appear in worship services. Evidently modern Christian liturgists define the business of worship more narrowly than did ancient Israel, and as a result our lives as individual believers and as a church are impoverished. The shape of the Psalter–the fact that the laments are brought to the fore–suggests that our own worship is deformed by our failure to bring the language of suffering into the sanctuary as an integral part of our weekly liturgy. (“With My Tears I Melt My Mattress,” Getting Involved with God, pp. 15-16)

    There’s a tendency among Christians to see the expressions of raw emotion in the Psalms–including despair, anger, and longing for vengeance–as sub-Christian and to conclude that they have no place in public worship or private prayer. But as Davis points out, most of the psalms of lament have an internal movement that finishes in praise. “[T]he lament psalms regularly trace a movement from complaint to confidence in God, from desperate petition to anticipatory praise” (pp. 20-21). Bringing the experience of suffering into God’s presence is necessary for that suffering to begin to be healed.

  • The First Amendment of faith

    The problem with [many common] notions of prayer is that we cannot have an intimate relationship with someone to whom we cannot speak honestly–that is, someone to whom we cannot show our ugly side, or those large clay feet of ours. We in this culture are all psychologically astute enough to know that honest, unguarded speaking is essential to the health of family life or close friendship. But do we realize that the same thing applies to our relationship with God? That is what the Psalms are about: speaking our mind honestly and fully before God. The Psalms are a kind of First Amendment for the faithful. They guarantee us complete freedom of speech before God, and then (something no secular constitution would ever do) they give us a detailed model of how to exercise that freedom, even up to its dangerous limits, to the very brink of rebellion.

    -Ellen F. Davis, “Improving our Aim: Praying the Psalms,” Getting Involved with God, pp. 8-9

  • The binding of Isaac and the binding of God

    I’m reading a wonderful book by Duke Divinity School professor Ellen F. Davis called Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. It’s a series of loosely connected essays and meditations on various OT books and stories, what she calls an “unsystematic introduction.” Davis’s purpose, she says, is to provide an alternative to the way Christians usually approach the OT. Conservative Christians may read it primarily as a moral rulebook or a set of prophecies of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, while liberal Christians, if they read it at all, tend to view the OT as morally and spiritually primitive, fully superseded by the New Testament. In contrast to either of these approaches, Davis commends a “spiritually engaged” reading of the OT, focusing on “what the Old Testament tells us about intimate life with God” (p. 2).

    As her title suggests, a common theme running throughout the book is that the God of the Bible is unique among ancient deities in that he is deeply concerned and involved with the plight of humanity. “God’s life is bound up inextricably with ours” (p. 1). As she says a little later, “the fundamental article of biblical religion [is] that God’s life, God’s glory, even God’s well-being, are indissolubly linked with our lives. For Christians, the sublime expression of that indissoluble linkage between God’s glory and frail human life is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ” (p. 19). God actually takes a risk in entering into a covenant with creation–the success of this covenant depends in part upon the free response of human beings.

    Which brings us to the story of the Binding of Isaac, which Davis rightly calls one of the most terrifying stories in the Bible. She notes that modern “enlightened” Christians are deeply uncomfortable with this story, and she identifies two strategies they use to get around it. One is to simply reject it as an expression of an archaic, sub-Christian conception of God. (Davis says she heard one preacher emphatically declare that “I do not worship the God of Abraham”!) The second strategy is to see the story of the aborted sacrifice of Isaac as a symbolic representation of ancient Israel’s leap beyond the widespread practice of infant sacrifice and its transition to “ethical religion.”

    But, Davis says, neither of these approaches take the Bible and this story with full seriousness. She proposes a closer reading to see what’s really going on here. What this story is about, she argues, is God and God’s plan for blessing to creation. “Genesis is primarily a book about God, and secondarily about human beings encountering God” (p. 58). Davis notes that previously in Genesis we’ve seen God’s plans for humanity go awry time and again: first in the garden of Eden, then in humanity’s descent into violence culminating in the flood, and finally in the Tower of Babel incident. God’s new strategy in the remainder of Genesis (and the whole Bible for that matter) is to bless all of humanity by creating a covenant with a particular people. “At this point, God gives up on trying to work a blessing directly upon all humankind. From now on, God will work through one man, one family, one people, in order to reach all people” (60).

    For this to work, however, God has to find out what kind of man he’s dealing with in Abraham. That’s the purpose of God’s test in asking Abraham to sacrifice his son. After seeing that Abraham is willing to go through with it, “God knows something now that God did not know before. Genesis offers little support for a doctrine of divine omniscience, if by that we mean that God knows everything we are going to do before we do it” (p. 58).

    God’s new strategy is hardly surefire. We should not be surprised if adopting it makes God anxious, for now everything depends on the faithfulness of this one man Abraham. God, having been badly and repeatedly burned by human sin throughout the first chapters of Genesis yet still passionately desirous of working blessing in the world, now chooses to become totally vulnerable on the point of this one man’s faithfulness. It is, to say the least, a counter-intuitive solution to a problem. (p. 60)

    One reason this story appears so early in the Bible, Davis thinks, is that it teaches us something fundamental about Israel’s “complex witness” to God.

    The Binding of Isaac shows us a God who is vulnerable, terribly and terrifyingly so, in the context of covenant relationship. We are more comfortable using the “omni” words–omnipotent, omniscient–to describe God. Yet if we properly understand the dynamics of covenant relationship, then we are confronted with a God who is vulnerable. For, as both Testaments maintain, the covenant with God is fundamentally an unbreakable bond of love (hesed). And ordinary experience teaches that love and vulnerability are inextricably linked; we are most vulnerable to emotional pain when the well-being and the faithfulness of those we love are at stake. And as we have seen, the Bible shows that the faithfulness of even the best of God’s covenant partners is always up for grabs. So it follows that God’s vulnerability in love is an essential element of covenant relationship. (p. 62)

    This is one reason that the Binding of Isaac resonates so strongly with the story of Jesus’ Passion (which brings us to today):

    It is in Christ hanging on the cross that we see, for once in history, the two sides of this story fully joined in one person. In Jesus Christ we see a son of Abraham sparing nothing, totally faithful in covenant relationship with God. At the same time, we see in Jesus God’s total faithfulness, expressed now as excruciating vulnerability, even to death on a cross. These two images–Abraham binding Isaac, Christ nailed on a cross–are the supporting structures for the long convoluted story of sin and salvation. When reason fails, as it does at least one Friday each year, then we must listen to the stories with our hearts. (pp. 63-4)