Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
When A Life Comes Down To One Moment
One day, many years ago, I woke up one morning and had this strange pull to a Unitarian-Universalist church near where I lived. It was the strangest experience, I just felt like God was calling me to this place. Now I knew nothing about the UUs, but I couldn't just shake this feeling like I absolutely had to go there. And so I did go, and joined in a religious studies group there. They were studying a book that would mark my life, MYSTERY WITHOUT MAGIC.
I had been studying both Christianity and Taoism, and taking online Bible College classes to learn more about the former. I didn't fully know what I believed or why. It was there that I met a man named Jason Pullen, and started a friendship with him that would also mark my life.
Jason seemed to me to be everything I wanted to be: self-controlled, faithful, moral, and highly intelligent. He had a sense of purpose in life and a good idea of how to realize that purpose. He was a self-realized human being. I cannot overstate how important this relationship was to me. It was from Jason that I appropriated the worldview that dominates me today, though I have drifted my own direction in certain ways (I am Christocentric and Trinitarian in a way Jason is not). But when it comes to the basic outline of what I believe, much of it is directly from, or inspired by, him and what he believes.
So much of what I am today is due to Jason, the books he gave me, our conversations, and the love of him and his family. I would spend Sunday mornings at the UU church, and then eat lunch at his house as we discussed all manner of things. It was Jason who first suggested I become a youth minister. It was Jason who suggested I offer my services to a church for free, and hope that it would lead to a paid position. This plan indeed is the one that worked, I became a youth minister in part because Jason suggested it, and I was able to become one because of the plan he laid out for me. His father taught me about finances, and his mother and I are very close friends as well.
I met other people at that Church, among them Carol Phillips and Peter Taylor. These people facilitated the only relationship in my life more important than the one I had with Jason, and that is with my wife. They introduced me to Angelic, who further pushed me down the path of rebirth. This relationship changed everything. My wife taught me to drive (yes, at 25 years old). She helped me get my paid youth ministry position at St. Timothy's, and later at St. Thomas. I would have very little of what I do today without her, and I would not be the man I am today without her love. I cannot imagine loving someone more than I do her, and her love inspires me to new heights every day.
This is, in many ways, the story of my being born again. Yet it is not a story like one is apt to hear at church. Oh, the story of a man who had a serious drug problem, and lived the life of a criminal, is a familiar one. But I had pretty much made a decision to get passed all that before I started down the religious path. Religion, and I mean that in the broadest sense of that word, was my therapy. But to really learn how to live a life, that took the involvement of certain people. It all began with the craziest of thoughts: "God wants me to do this."
A coincidence you say? Just dumb luck, you say? Think about this people, this isn't just a matter of one single event that went right for me. This is a whole life determined by a single moment, by a single experience. This is a series of "coincidences" so wide and so numerous it boggles the mind. The whole of the story has the look of a conversation, of Someone telling me something. Yes, a billion monkeys typing a billion hours may be able to come up with the greatest novel of all time, but if I find that novel am I insane for supposing it was written by someone, and not the result of chance? Why is the latter more likely than the former?
And it isn't just a matter of the look of the thing. This is how it was experienced, it came to me AS a Grace. Think about what it would mean if I had not received that message, or ignored it? I would not be the man I am today, of that I have no doubt. The whole of my existence, everything I am and my very soul coming down to a single moment of decision. It isn't just the matter of a changed person. In a very real sense, I am a completely DIFFERENT person than I was back then, because of this one wacky strange feeling and the choice to follow it. I would not exist but for that Joshua trusting that moment of insanity or insight. It is a religious experience just to think about it.
I had been studying both Christianity and Taoism, and taking online Bible College classes to learn more about the former. I didn't fully know what I believed or why. It was there that I met a man named Jason Pullen, and started a friendship with him that would also mark my life.
Jason seemed to me to be everything I wanted to be: self-controlled, faithful, moral, and highly intelligent. He had a sense of purpose in life and a good idea of how to realize that purpose. He was a self-realized human being. I cannot overstate how important this relationship was to me. It was from Jason that I appropriated the worldview that dominates me today, though I have drifted my own direction in certain ways (I am Christocentric and Trinitarian in a way Jason is not). But when it comes to the basic outline of what I believe, much of it is directly from, or inspired by, him and what he believes.
So much of what I am today is due to Jason, the books he gave me, our conversations, and the love of him and his family. I would spend Sunday mornings at the UU church, and then eat lunch at his house as we discussed all manner of things. It was Jason who first suggested I become a youth minister. It was Jason who suggested I offer my services to a church for free, and hope that it would lead to a paid position. This plan indeed is the one that worked, I became a youth minister in part because Jason suggested it, and I was able to become one because of the plan he laid out for me. His father taught me about finances, and his mother and I are very close friends as well.
I met other people at that Church, among them Carol Phillips and Peter Taylor. These people facilitated the only relationship in my life more important than the one I had with Jason, and that is with my wife. They introduced me to Angelic, who further pushed me down the path of rebirth. This relationship changed everything. My wife taught me to drive (yes, at 25 years old). She helped me get my paid youth ministry position at St. Timothy's, and later at St. Thomas. I would have very little of what I do today without her, and I would not be the man I am today without her love. I cannot imagine loving someone more than I do her, and her love inspires me to new heights every day.
This is, in many ways, the story of my being born again. Yet it is not a story like one is apt to hear at church. Oh, the story of a man who had a serious drug problem, and lived the life of a criminal, is a familiar one. But I had pretty much made a decision to get passed all that before I started down the religious path. Religion, and I mean that in the broadest sense of that word, was my therapy. But to really learn how to live a life, that took the involvement of certain people. It all began with the craziest of thoughts: "God wants me to do this."
A coincidence you say? Just dumb luck, you say? Think about this people, this isn't just a matter of one single event that went right for me. This is a whole life determined by a single moment, by a single experience. This is a series of "coincidences" so wide and so numerous it boggles the mind. The whole of the story has the look of a conversation, of Someone telling me something. Yes, a billion monkeys typing a billion hours may be able to come up with the greatest novel of all time, but if I find that novel am I insane for supposing it was written by someone, and not the result of chance? Why is the latter more likely than the former?
And it isn't just a matter of the look of the thing. This is how it was experienced, it came to me AS a Grace. Think about what it would mean if I had not received that message, or ignored it? I would not be the man I am today, of that I have no doubt. The whole of my existence, everything I am and my very soul coming down to a single moment of decision. It isn't just the matter of a changed person. In a very real sense, I am a completely DIFFERENT person than I was back then, because of this one wacky strange feeling and the choice to follow it. I would not exist but for that Joshua trusting that moment of insanity or insight. It is a religious experience just to think about it.
Monday, July 29, 2013
The Quest For The Historical Jesus
There is a book making the rounds right now, ZEALOT: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JESUS OF NAZARETH, and it is yet another attempt to give a 'historically accurate' account of the Jesus who eventually became the focus of the movement that would eventually become Christianity.
Now I haven't read the book, and I am not likely to. Not because I have any problem with the idea, but because I have read literally mountains of books on this subject. I've seen historians approach the "Historical Jesus" from every different direction: Buddhist convert, literal embodiment of the Gospel picture, the first hippy, the last prophet, the founder of a new religion or the defender of an old religion. The suggestion that Jesus was a standard 1st Century Jewish revolutionary is not, ironically, a revolutionary idea. It has been put forth many times by many gifted historians, and a few not-so-gifted historians.
I have read Jesus commentaries by Bart Ehrman and he is an atheist, by Hyam Maccoby and he's a Jew who smeared Paul, and on and on. I enjoy historical studies of Jesus, they are instructive and add to my life. I just don't see anything in the excerpts or reviews I've read that lead me to believe this book is all that groundbreaking, nor that the author's particular scholarly approach is very different than anyone else's.
Look, people, the simple fact of the matter is that we don't really "know" in the most scientific sense of that word much about very many historical figures who lived before the invention of modern media. The truth of the matter is that in most cases, when it comes to really important figures, we are reliant on second or third hand accounts that are more about advancing some particular ideological agenda. There was a time when the general historical move was to be skeptical of these kinds of sources. But over time, historians have gravitated more towards the view that the general outlines of these accounts are generally correct. The historians job is really to come up with a kind of narrative...a story that is more or less likely true as it coheres with other things we know from other sources. So, for instance, a historian can never, as a historian, take seriously the accounts of miracles because they don't cohere with other things we know from the hard sciences. Of course a historian may be a person of faith, but they can only engage life as a person of faith when they have taken their historian's hat off, lest their faith be given the air of scientific knowledge.
A good corollary to the Jesus situation is Socrates. We know almost nothing about Socrates except what other people wrote about him. And all of those people had ideological agendas. But the number of people who put forth theories that Socrates was a RADICALLY different person from who those sources present him as are few and far between.
My own construction of Jesus' life, and message, and self-understanding, as presented in my book CONVERSATIONAL THEOLOGY, is not strictly in line with most Christian sensibilities. In fact, it is far afield from those sensibilities, and it is indebted heavily to works not unlike the one under discussion here. But everyone needs to understand that ANY such construction is a narrative, and one can only be more or less confident of the veracity of that narrative. It is not simply the matter of a historical construction being true or false, because we know little about the truth or falsity of the matter.
Engaging in historical review of the life of Jesus is important and theologically useful, but there are a few things to remember:
1) Historians who write books are also trying to sell books. A historian will push a particular vision as being more certain than it is in order to gain a following. Do not assume that because someone is a PhD they always know what they are talking about, even in their own field. And don't assume that just because they sound certain that they are, or have reason to be.
2) Historical knowledge is best gained by looking over the broadest range of information sources. Don't be taken in by one particular historical account. Read many authors, especially conflicting authors, and then rely on your own common sense to try to come up with your own personal understanding of who YOU THINK Jesus was.
3) The Gospels must be looked at critically but not skeptically. They are not just the best accounts we have of who Jesus was: they are really the only accounts we have. Don't assume the Gospels are some kind of newspaper report that was about 'just the facts and only the facts.' But don't assume that they are nothing more than fantasies or political diatribes either. They are both what happened and a polemical interpretation of what happened.
4) Beware of people who rely too heavily on the social and political realities of the times. The historical locus of the person is very important, but nobody is simply the produce of their cultural environment. People stand out in part because they live differently than others around them. Socrates was a very Greek man, and understanding Greek culture can help you understand who he was. But Socrates was also a very unusual man, who stood apart from other Greeks and Greek thinkers. If a person simply projects a prevailing attitude onto a particular person BECAUSE it was a prevailing attitude, that is to deny the complexity of what it means to be a person.
5) Alongside #4, be VERY skeptical when someone tries to reduce a historical figure down to one particular idea, thought, action, attitude, or belief. Most people believe a lot of things, and indeed contradictory things. What's more, people's beliefs and attitudes change over time. A person is not reducible to a single image, and this is especially true of those people who are socially significant.
6) Look at all sources critically. Be critical of everything everyone says. Don't think that just because someone has letters after their name what they say is the very Word of God. It isn't.
7*) 1-6 is true for anyone, believer or atheist, Buddhist or Christian who is interested in the life of Jesus and people like him. But #7 is for my Christian brothers and sisters: Don't be afraid of wearing your faith hat. All knowledge has limits. Science has limits, and historical knowledge even more so. Faith has a place. Don't shy away from the rigors of scientific inquiry, even when it comes to the historical foundations of your faith. But when historical study ends, faith can begin. If you begin a study of the life of Jesus with the conviction, and I mean the faith conviction, that anything you discover can only deepen your understanding of the nature of God, then you can fully embrace all the world of the mind has to offer, and continue on the adventure that can only be found in the world of the soul.
Now I haven't read the book, and I am not likely to. Not because I have any problem with the idea, but because I have read literally mountains of books on this subject. I've seen historians approach the "Historical Jesus" from every different direction: Buddhist convert, literal embodiment of the Gospel picture, the first hippy, the last prophet, the founder of a new religion or the defender of an old religion. The suggestion that Jesus was a standard 1st Century Jewish revolutionary is not, ironically, a revolutionary idea. It has been put forth many times by many gifted historians, and a few not-so-gifted historians.
I have read Jesus commentaries by Bart Ehrman and he is an atheist, by Hyam Maccoby and he's a Jew who smeared Paul, and on and on. I enjoy historical studies of Jesus, they are instructive and add to my life. I just don't see anything in the excerpts or reviews I've read that lead me to believe this book is all that groundbreaking, nor that the author's particular scholarly approach is very different than anyone else's.
Look, people, the simple fact of the matter is that we don't really "know" in the most scientific sense of that word much about very many historical figures who lived before the invention of modern media. The truth of the matter is that in most cases, when it comes to really important figures, we are reliant on second or third hand accounts that are more about advancing some particular ideological agenda. There was a time when the general historical move was to be skeptical of these kinds of sources. But over time, historians have gravitated more towards the view that the general outlines of these accounts are generally correct. The historians job is really to come up with a kind of narrative...a story that is more or less likely true as it coheres with other things we know from other sources. So, for instance, a historian can never, as a historian, take seriously the accounts of miracles because they don't cohere with other things we know from the hard sciences. Of course a historian may be a person of faith, but they can only engage life as a person of faith when they have taken their historian's hat off, lest their faith be given the air of scientific knowledge.
A good corollary to the Jesus situation is Socrates. We know almost nothing about Socrates except what other people wrote about him. And all of those people had ideological agendas. But the number of people who put forth theories that Socrates was a RADICALLY different person from who those sources present him as are few and far between.
My own construction of Jesus' life, and message, and self-understanding, as presented in my book CONVERSATIONAL THEOLOGY, is not strictly in line with most Christian sensibilities. In fact, it is far afield from those sensibilities, and it is indebted heavily to works not unlike the one under discussion here. But everyone needs to understand that ANY such construction is a narrative, and one can only be more or less confident of the veracity of that narrative. It is not simply the matter of a historical construction being true or false, because we know little about the truth or falsity of the matter.
Engaging in historical review of the life of Jesus is important and theologically useful, but there are a few things to remember:
1) Historians who write books are also trying to sell books. A historian will push a particular vision as being more certain than it is in order to gain a following. Do not assume that because someone is a PhD they always know what they are talking about, even in their own field. And don't assume that just because they sound certain that they are, or have reason to be.
2) Historical knowledge is best gained by looking over the broadest range of information sources. Don't be taken in by one particular historical account. Read many authors, especially conflicting authors, and then rely on your own common sense to try to come up with your own personal understanding of who YOU THINK Jesus was.
3) The Gospels must be looked at critically but not skeptically. They are not just the best accounts we have of who Jesus was: they are really the only accounts we have. Don't assume the Gospels are some kind of newspaper report that was about 'just the facts and only the facts.' But don't assume that they are nothing more than fantasies or political diatribes either. They are both what happened and a polemical interpretation of what happened.
4) Beware of people who rely too heavily on the social and political realities of the times. The historical locus of the person is very important, but nobody is simply the produce of their cultural environment. People stand out in part because they live differently than others around them. Socrates was a very Greek man, and understanding Greek culture can help you understand who he was. But Socrates was also a very unusual man, who stood apart from other Greeks and Greek thinkers. If a person simply projects a prevailing attitude onto a particular person BECAUSE it was a prevailing attitude, that is to deny the complexity of what it means to be a person.
5) Alongside #4, be VERY skeptical when someone tries to reduce a historical figure down to one particular idea, thought, action, attitude, or belief. Most people believe a lot of things, and indeed contradictory things. What's more, people's beliefs and attitudes change over time. A person is not reducible to a single image, and this is especially true of those people who are socially significant.
6) Look at all sources critically. Be critical of everything everyone says. Don't think that just because someone has letters after their name what they say is the very Word of God. It isn't.
7*) 1-6 is true for anyone, believer or atheist, Buddhist or Christian who is interested in the life of Jesus and people like him. But #7 is for my Christian brothers and sisters: Don't be afraid of wearing your faith hat. All knowledge has limits. Science has limits, and historical knowledge even more so. Faith has a place. Don't shy away from the rigors of scientific inquiry, even when it comes to the historical foundations of your faith. But when historical study ends, faith can begin. If you begin a study of the life of Jesus with the conviction, and I mean the faith conviction, that anything you discover can only deepen your understanding of the nature of God, then you can fully embrace all the world of the mind has to offer, and continue on the adventure that can only be found in the world of the soul.
Some Good Stuff Going On Over At MavPhil
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2013/07/the-strength-of-a-weak-will.html
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2013/07/on-the-abysmal-depth-of-philosophical-disagreement.html
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2013/07/safe-speech.html
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2013/07/on-the-abysmal-depth-of-philosophical-disagreement.html
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2013/07/safe-speech.html
Frustration
I am with so many of my secular friends fed up with much of Christianity. I am fed up of pat and simple answers to complex questions. I am sick and tired of mystery being traded for certainty, and adventure for false security.
The God I worship is so much bigger than the one many other Christians seem to worship. Secular ideologies often seem deeper and closer to the God I know than much of what I hear from Christian leaders. When I hear scientists go on and on about the wonders of the universe, that has more religious significance for me than much of what I have heard from the pulpit in my life. The glory of the infinite coming to us in the particular, the truth that Christ IS, is replaced by the simplistic vision of God's sacrificial lamb.
The glory of creation, of the complexities of God's relationship with the entire universe, is replaced by a clock maker building a clay house in a pool of water.
I see so much potential in faith in Jesus. I know that it can expand our minds, open our hearts, and lead to a community of people that truly can change the world. I've seen it, I KNOW it. But how often is Jesus Christ replaced...replaced with a clock maker who tinkers with a toy? "God is in control...everything happens for a reason...God never closes a door without opening a window...God never sends us more than we can handle" and on and on all I hear is SLOGANS, slogans that are designed to make people feel good, not to give glory to Ultimate Reality.
Ultimate Reality, y'all. That is what it is all about. Jesus is Ultimate Reality laid bare. He is the whole end of the evolutionary process, the secret unity behind the multiplicity. That is what Christianity should be all about. It should be mind expanding, leading us to adventure and away from security, safety and indeed even certainty. It is about living life as it actually is and not as we want it to be. It is no escapism, but embrace-ism. Jesus is God's 'yes and amen' to the human project...what we do MATTERS. That is the promise, that is the hope, that is the truth.
The hope for eternal life is an extension of the love of life, not an opposition to it. We must not fall into some cheap and simple marketing scheme, some vain attempt to control the vicissitudes of life and to control people. People are meant to be set free by Jesus Christ, not controlled.
I know it can be done. I know that Christianity has the potential to expand the mind rather than shrink it, to open people up beyond the limits of secularism or of traditional 'religiosity'. I have seen it. But it is hard sometimes, it is hard in this world where certainty is an easy sell, and love is hard work.
The God I worship is so much bigger than the one many other Christians seem to worship. Secular ideologies often seem deeper and closer to the God I know than much of what I hear from Christian leaders. When I hear scientists go on and on about the wonders of the universe, that has more religious significance for me than much of what I have heard from the pulpit in my life. The glory of the infinite coming to us in the particular, the truth that Christ IS, is replaced by the simplistic vision of God's sacrificial lamb.
The glory of creation, of the complexities of God's relationship with the entire universe, is replaced by a clock maker building a clay house in a pool of water.
I see so much potential in faith in Jesus. I know that it can expand our minds, open our hearts, and lead to a community of people that truly can change the world. I've seen it, I KNOW it. But how often is Jesus Christ replaced...replaced with a clock maker who tinkers with a toy? "God is in control...everything happens for a reason...God never closes a door without opening a window...God never sends us more than we can handle" and on and on all I hear is SLOGANS, slogans that are designed to make people feel good, not to give glory to Ultimate Reality.
Ultimate Reality, y'all. That is what it is all about. Jesus is Ultimate Reality laid bare. He is the whole end of the evolutionary process, the secret unity behind the multiplicity. That is what Christianity should be all about. It should be mind expanding, leading us to adventure and away from security, safety and indeed even certainty. It is about living life as it actually is and not as we want it to be. It is no escapism, but embrace-ism. Jesus is God's 'yes and amen' to the human project...what we do MATTERS. That is the promise, that is the hope, that is the truth.
The hope for eternal life is an extension of the love of life, not an opposition to it. We must not fall into some cheap and simple marketing scheme, some vain attempt to control the vicissitudes of life and to control people. People are meant to be set free by Jesus Christ, not controlled.
I know it can be done. I know that Christianity has the potential to expand the mind rather than shrink it, to open people up beyond the limits of secularism or of traditional 'religiosity'. I have seen it. But it is hard sometimes, it is hard in this world where certainty is an easy sell, and love is hard work.
Not Really Off-Topic: Batman & Superman
In so many ways these two are vastly different characters. One is dark, and gritty, and refuses to see the world for anything other than what it is now. The other is the light, a child of the Sun. He sees the world not for what it is, but for what it could be. One works at the boundaries of the law, and is willing to step over those boundaries if necessary, the other works strictly within them, and never even tests them, choosing to let himself be limited by those walls humanity puts up for him.
But in other ways the two men are very much alike. Bruce and Clark are both orphans, and in both cases their entire families died. The loss of their blood relations turned them into strangers in the world. Neither really fully 'fits in' and both have reached out to other people to help create new families to replace the ones they lost. Both are in positions of power, and they choose to descend from those positions to help the common man. In many ways, both people idealize the common folk, seeing humanity as a community that is worth saving. Finally, both men have an intractable sense of right and wrong...of justice!
It is for these reasons that these characters almost always find a way to be more than friends. Indeed, in many ways each looks at the other as a brother. True friendship is often found by shared hardship and shared pain. We each exist in our own Batcave, and our own Fortress of Solitude, but from within that place of loneliness a sharing can be found. Empathy is possible between two lost souls that isn't possible between the broken and the supposedly 'complete'. Second only to shared pain is shared values. By having a common sense of the good and a common commitment to it, even the worst of enemies can find common ground. If two people oppose each other ideologically, they can yet find kinship if each knows the other is truly doing what they believe to be right.
Isn't this an important part of the Gospel message? Perhaps the only way God could relate to a finite being was through a shared brokenness. God becomes the solitary soul so that all solitary souls could find oneness with Him. Further, we know now, after the cross, that God indeed seeks the best for us. God and humanity share a common struggle for the right, and that also binds us together.
It should be remembered, however, that Batman and Superman did not like each other at first. They fought before they became friends. Is it because of their similarities or their differences that they struggled at first? I am apt to think more the former. We often have problems looking in a mirror. Is there a religious lesson in that as well? Does one first struggle with God before discovering kinship with Him? After all, Jacob was renamed Israel, which means roughly, 'struggles with God'.
But in other ways the two men are very much alike. Bruce and Clark are both orphans, and in both cases their entire families died. The loss of their blood relations turned them into strangers in the world. Neither really fully 'fits in' and both have reached out to other people to help create new families to replace the ones they lost. Both are in positions of power, and they choose to descend from those positions to help the common man. In many ways, both people idealize the common folk, seeing humanity as a community that is worth saving. Finally, both men have an intractable sense of right and wrong...of justice!
It is for these reasons that these characters almost always find a way to be more than friends. Indeed, in many ways each looks at the other as a brother. True friendship is often found by shared hardship and shared pain. We each exist in our own Batcave, and our own Fortress of Solitude, but from within that place of loneliness a sharing can be found. Empathy is possible between two lost souls that isn't possible between the broken and the supposedly 'complete'. Second only to shared pain is shared values. By having a common sense of the good and a common commitment to it, even the worst of enemies can find common ground. If two people oppose each other ideologically, they can yet find kinship if each knows the other is truly doing what they believe to be right.
Isn't this an important part of the Gospel message? Perhaps the only way God could relate to a finite being was through a shared brokenness. God becomes the solitary soul so that all solitary souls could find oneness with Him. Further, we know now, after the cross, that God indeed seeks the best for us. God and humanity share a common struggle for the right, and that also binds us together.
It should be remembered, however, that Batman and Superman did not like each other at first. They fought before they became friends. Is it because of their similarities or their differences that they struggled at first? I am apt to think more the former. We often have problems looking in a mirror. Is there a religious lesson in that as well? Does one first struggle with God before discovering kinship with Him? After all, Jacob was renamed Israel, which means roughly, 'struggles with God'.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Me Vs Kirk Cameron
As with so many public Christian figures, I find myself often in agreement, and often in violent disagreement with one Kirk Cameron. There is much about his faith that I admire and respect. But the formulation of that faith often turns me off. Here is an example that is making the rounds on the web:
"If you had the cure to cancer wouldn't you share it? ... You have the cure to death ... get out there and share it."- Kirk Cameron
Okay, there is a lot that is good here. Being open and sharing one's faith, this is a good thing. I advise it. Be out there, tell people what you believe and why, good on you. But here's the problem: I don't think the message of Christianity is that *I* have the cure for death. This is in so many ways to deny the very center of Christianity: that it is not all about you, it is all about God.
Over and over again, Jesus eschewed the idea that He should be the center of people's attention. He constantly puts the focus back on God even when He Himself is Divine. Why? Because it is in Jesus' very rejection of the desire to BE God that He proves that He IS, in fact God. The essential sin, the true founding sin, the ORIGINAL sin, is the desire to be one's own god, to replace God as the center of our experiential universe. Any ideas about atonement or salvation that make man the center or vehicle of that salvation usurps the place of God, and turns us back into a legalistic process whereby some particular human act or belief brings about that salvation.
We do not "have" the cure for sin. Jesus cured sin. We do not "have" the cure for death. Jesus overcame death. Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, is the focus of our lives, and of our salvation. Christians need to be out there with the message, they need to proclaim the good news... evangelize my brothers and sisters! But the Good News is NOT that we have some special cure for death. It is that death has been defeated. Christ's Cross destroyed death, not our proclamation. We tell people the Good News of what God has done for them, and that they have been adopted into the family of God. Faith is people's response to what God has done, not the vehicle by which God acts.
With this message in hand, we can be the proclaimers we are meant to be without falling into the trap of thinking that salvation is somehow our special possession.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Off-Topic: Saturday Blogging
On Saturday my only Internet access is through my IPad. My blogging suffers for it. But sometimes just getting stuff up has to be enough.
10,000 Mark
This blog just passed 10,000 page views. Thanks to my sister who pushed me to get serious about blogging, and to all of my readers. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.
On Miracles
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/07/24/morgan-lake-story-dramatic-reminder-that-god-is-real-miracles-happen/
This was a good article. But it presents a problem for me. As you know, I don't believe in a God that goes around picking winners and losers, working miracles at some times and not at others. Yet people experience certain moments as miraculous, just the same. Is there no place for the miraculous in my system? Well, of you are so inclined, you can be process-oriented and believe in miracles of the sort defined above. I maintain that God doesn't have omnipotence as classically conceived. But to say God is all-powerful is not to say God is powerless. God's power is to EMPOWER. God gives both a goal (initial ideal aim) and the power to complete that goal. But control of power is in the hands of the other. There is a long line of events that must be put in place and must choose correctly to bring about a particular goal. Sometimes God tries but cannot bring about the best possible event, because the things of the world do not respond fully to God's influence. Further, the original goal is conditioned by the past choices of the world. God can't create an initial aim completely divorced from the past.
Simply put God ALWAYS tries to bring about the result. But the world doesn't always do its part. I address this in more detail in my unpublished book on the Holy Spirit. I may put that up online soon.
Friday, July 26, 2013
What Did Whitehead Mean by That?
"The power of God is the worship he inspires."- A N Whitehead
One of the most important things to remember about Alfred N Whitehead's philosophy of religion is that he does not think that religion itself is an unambiguous good. Religion is good or bad depending on how a particular religion conceptualizes God and His relationship with the world. For Whitehead religion itself is power, it is a particular example of the most important value in his system: zest. Zest, simply stated, is the joy of becoming, the joy of trying to be 'the most me' I can be. It is self-fulfillment, depth of experience. It is a matter of 'impressing' oneself into the world, of making my existence more real. This is done by acting upon others in significant ways, and by opening myself up to the present moment, making this moment more real and more substantive for me as an individual.
Such an act of impression, taken by itself, is not necessarily good. Without the additional awareness of oneness, that I am a part of a greater whole, this value of zest can easily be corrupted, becoming a kind of cancer on the rest of the universe. A serial killer who tortures his victims is actualizing this value, but he has no awareness of the interconnection between him and his victim. The two truths that Whitehead thinks are essential to life is the truths of zest or 'depth of experience' and the truth of oneness, or the idea that the greatest zest is found in my fulfillment of my 'true self' which is inclusive of the whole of reality.
Religion is one particular form of zest in the human condition. Other forms include play and art. In RELIGION IN THE MAKING, Whitehead lays out what I think is the best account of the development of religion in history both natural and cultural that can be found anywhere. I will comment on it in great detail at some later date, in another contribution to this series. Consider this extended passage:
"Flocks of birds perform their ritual evolutions in the sky. In Europe rooks and starlings are notable examples of this fact. Ritual is the primitive outcome of superfluous energy and leisure. It exemplifies the tendency of living bodies to repeat their own actions. Thus the actions necessary in hunting for food, or in other useful pursuits, are repeated for their own sakes; and their repetition also repeats the joy of exercise and the emotion of success.
In this way emotion waits upon ritual; and then ritual is repeated and elaborated for the sake of its attendant emotions. Mankind became artists in ritual. It was a tremendous discovery-how to excite emotions for their own sake, apart from some imperious biological necessity. But emotions sensitize the organism. Thus the unintended effect was produced of sensitizing the human organism in a variety of ways diverse from what would have been produced by the necessary work of life."
A hunter creates a game to re-experience the joy of the hunt. Having played the game his whole life, the joy of the hunt is increased when actually engaged in. Religion is power, it is a way to deepen our experience of the world. By attenuating that power a certain direction, by living out the zest that a particular religion represents, one creates a particular way of life. God's power is the seeding of the world with ideas, but ideas are more or less conducive to zest. Worship is our way of attenuating our lives to God, of seeking the very source of what makes life deep and meaningful. God's ability to inspire men to such a depth of experience as worship is the very power of God. The inspiration is the power, the worship is the expression of that power. But this power exists whether or not it is properly attenuated.
Whitehead, in that same book says, "Accordingly, what should emerge from religion is individual worth of character. But worth is positive or negative, good or bad. Religion is by no means necessarily good. It may be very evil. The fact of evil, interwoven with the texture of the world, shows that in the nature of things there remains effectiveness for degradation. In your religious experience the God with whom you have made terms may be the God of destruction, the God who leaves in his wake the loss of the greater reality.
In considering religion, we should not be obsesses by the idea of its necessary goodness. This is a dangerous delusion. The point to notice is its transcendent importance; and the fact of this importance is abundantly made evident by the appeal to history."
The action of worship is an action of supreme depth. But it is good or bad to the degree it reflects the character of the one one brought about the inspiration. Simply put, the emotional depth religion is capable of engendering is the real power of God in our lives. To the degree one's entire life becomes an act of worship, to that degree one's entire life will embody the quality of zest. But worship need not be attenuated to the source of the inspiration.
There is another level here that must be mentioned. Remember Whitehead's panpsychism. We are not the special recipients of freedom. Freedom is inherent in the things of the world: to be is to become, to become is to self-create. Thus the inspiration to worship in mankind manifests itself in other ways at other levels of organization. The birds mentioned earlier play in the air. Atoms dance in a display of beauty. Galaxies similarly express aesthetic value. All value-creation is, in part, the result of a will-to-zest, which all epochal occasions have to some degree or another. Reality itself, then, is an act of worship.
One of the most important things to remember about Alfred N Whitehead's philosophy of religion is that he does not think that religion itself is an unambiguous good. Religion is good or bad depending on how a particular religion conceptualizes God and His relationship with the world. For Whitehead religion itself is power, it is a particular example of the most important value in his system: zest. Zest, simply stated, is the joy of becoming, the joy of trying to be 'the most me' I can be. It is self-fulfillment, depth of experience. It is a matter of 'impressing' oneself into the world, of making my existence more real. This is done by acting upon others in significant ways, and by opening myself up to the present moment, making this moment more real and more substantive for me as an individual.
Such an act of impression, taken by itself, is not necessarily good. Without the additional awareness of oneness, that I am a part of a greater whole, this value of zest can easily be corrupted, becoming a kind of cancer on the rest of the universe. A serial killer who tortures his victims is actualizing this value, but he has no awareness of the interconnection between him and his victim. The two truths that Whitehead thinks are essential to life is the truths of zest or 'depth of experience' and the truth of oneness, or the idea that the greatest zest is found in my fulfillment of my 'true self' which is inclusive of the whole of reality.
Religion is one particular form of zest in the human condition. Other forms include play and art. In RELIGION IN THE MAKING, Whitehead lays out what I think is the best account of the development of religion in history both natural and cultural that can be found anywhere. I will comment on it in great detail at some later date, in another contribution to this series. Consider this extended passage:
"Flocks of birds perform their ritual evolutions in the sky. In Europe rooks and starlings are notable examples of this fact. Ritual is the primitive outcome of superfluous energy and leisure. It exemplifies the tendency of living bodies to repeat their own actions. Thus the actions necessary in hunting for food, or in other useful pursuits, are repeated for their own sakes; and their repetition also repeats the joy of exercise and the emotion of success.
In this way emotion waits upon ritual; and then ritual is repeated and elaborated for the sake of its attendant emotions. Mankind became artists in ritual. It was a tremendous discovery-how to excite emotions for their own sake, apart from some imperious biological necessity. But emotions sensitize the organism. Thus the unintended effect was produced of sensitizing the human organism in a variety of ways diverse from what would have been produced by the necessary work of life."
A hunter creates a game to re-experience the joy of the hunt. Having played the game his whole life, the joy of the hunt is increased when actually engaged in. Religion is power, it is a way to deepen our experience of the world. By attenuating that power a certain direction, by living out the zest that a particular religion represents, one creates a particular way of life. God's power is the seeding of the world with ideas, but ideas are more or less conducive to zest. Worship is our way of attenuating our lives to God, of seeking the very source of what makes life deep and meaningful. God's ability to inspire men to such a depth of experience as worship is the very power of God. The inspiration is the power, the worship is the expression of that power. But this power exists whether or not it is properly attenuated.
Whitehead, in that same book says, "Accordingly, what should emerge from religion is individual worth of character. But worth is positive or negative, good or bad. Religion is by no means necessarily good. It may be very evil. The fact of evil, interwoven with the texture of the world, shows that in the nature of things there remains effectiveness for degradation. In your religious experience the God with whom you have made terms may be the God of destruction, the God who leaves in his wake the loss of the greater reality.
In considering religion, we should not be obsesses by the idea of its necessary goodness. This is a dangerous delusion. The point to notice is its transcendent importance; and the fact of this importance is abundantly made evident by the appeal to history."
The action of worship is an action of supreme depth. But it is good or bad to the degree it reflects the character of the one one brought about the inspiration. Simply put, the emotional depth religion is capable of engendering is the real power of God in our lives. To the degree one's entire life becomes an act of worship, to that degree one's entire life will embody the quality of zest. But worship need not be attenuated to the source of the inspiration.
There is another level here that must be mentioned. Remember Whitehead's panpsychism. We are not the special recipients of freedom. Freedom is inherent in the things of the world: to be is to become, to become is to self-create. Thus the inspiration to worship in mankind manifests itself in other ways at other levels of organization. The birds mentioned earlier play in the air. Atoms dance in a display of beauty. Galaxies similarly express aesthetic value. All value-creation is, in part, the result of a will-to-zest, which all epochal occasions have to some degree or another. Reality itself, then, is an act of worship.
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Doctor Who, Death, Life
Last night's DOCTOR WHO episode, part of our ongoing Bible study using the television show, focused on a kind of contrast between The Doctor and Captain Jack Harkness on the one hand and the universe on the other. The Doctor's team found themselves at the very end of the universe, with a group of people struggling to find a way to survive that end. The irony is that for two of the Doctor's team: the Doctor himself and Captain Jack, time doesn't mean the same thing it does for everyone else. For those who are in some sense trapped in linear time, time means the end of all things. Time is the vehicle of death, for most of us. But The Doctor, who has a very non-linear experience of time, and Captain Jack, who is nearly immortal, do not experience time as leading to any kind of end. In a very real sense, the Doctor is Eternal, where as the universe is not.
Time and eternity, death and life...these are the real issue of religion, of Christianity especially, which has at it's center a temporal being, a man in time who is yet the very ground of time itself. Jesus Christ is eternity become a time-dependent being. Too much of Christianity has thrown away all the great questions that make it vital and important. Doctor Who, that silly and yet wonderful television show, often ends up being closer to the true spirit of the original Christian quest than most modern-day ethical, 'religious' Christianity.
Either life is God, either Being and Consciousness, and Love are the final and eternal truth, and thus the Ultimate Reality, and thus death but an illusion pretending to be God, or death and nothingness are god, and our experience of life as of ultimate value is illusory. This cosmic choice is the one that stands before humanity. Only a few are brave enough to face it, fewer still are those brave enough to live as they believe. But I have more respect for the avowed atheist who lives a life determined by the conviction of the finality and ultimacy of death than I do for the person who sleep walks through life, with no sense of the weight of depth of how they have chosen to believe. Better still, though, is the one brave enough to embrace and take a risk on the message of the Cross: for life is harder than death. Letting my life be a testament to the Ultimacy of Life and Love is the greater challenge.
All of this I have explored in the last 24 hours thanks to that one episode of that one television show. Being able to read the Bible and find an even more relevant conversation about the same issues is proof to me that the Bible truly is more than just another book. It is the record of a direct encounter with that Living God who is the ground of all things. Jesus was eternity in time, the Ultimate as a particular human being. Living that, and loving it, is what Christianity is all about. Bonhoeffer was right, the Will of God is not a set of rules created from the outset. The ethical life, for the Christian can be summed up in a quote from another DOCTOR WHO episode, 'The Family of Blood': "“He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun… He's ancient and forever. He burns at the centre of time and can see the turn of the universe… and... he's wonderful.”
Time and eternity, death and life...these are the real issue of religion, of Christianity especially, which has at it's center a temporal being, a man in time who is yet the very ground of time itself. Jesus Christ is eternity become a time-dependent being. Too much of Christianity has thrown away all the great questions that make it vital and important. Doctor Who, that silly and yet wonderful television show, often ends up being closer to the true spirit of the original Christian quest than most modern-day ethical, 'religious' Christianity.
Either life is God, either Being and Consciousness, and Love are the final and eternal truth, and thus the Ultimate Reality, and thus death but an illusion pretending to be God, or death and nothingness are god, and our experience of life as of ultimate value is illusory. This cosmic choice is the one that stands before humanity. Only a few are brave enough to face it, fewer still are those brave enough to live as they believe. But I have more respect for the avowed atheist who lives a life determined by the conviction of the finality and ultimacy of death than I do for the person who sleep walks through life, with no sense of the weight of depth of how they have chosen to believe. Better still, though, is the one brave enough to embrace and take a risk on the message of the Cross: for life is harder than death. Letting my life be a testament to the Ultimacy of Life and Love is the greater challenge.
All of this I have explored in the last 24 hours thanks to that one episode of that one television show. Being able to read the Bible and find an even more relevant conversation about the same issues is proof to me that the Bible truly is more than just another book. It is the record of a direct encounter with that Living God who is the ground of all things. Jesus was eternity in time, the Ultimate as a particular human being. Living that, and loving it, is what Christianity is all about. Bonhoeffer was right, the Will of God is not a set of rules created from the outset. The ethical life, for the Christian can be summed up in a quote from another DOCTOR WHO episode, 'The Family of Blood': "“He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun… He's ancient and forever. He burns at the centre of time and can see the turn of the universe… and... he's wonderful.”
This is roughly equivalent to what is said of Jesus in Revelation 19:11-21. This is what God, what Jesus Christ really is. The Christian is called to have a relationship with Jesus Christ, and thereby with God. What does it mean to have a relationship with THAT? What kind of life and community is formed around THAT? Does your life look that way? These are the ethical questions of the Christian. This is the life we are called to.
A New Kind of Worship Service
I have written before of my sense that I am somehow called to be an 'Apostle to the Nerds'. I believe Geek Culture and Christian Culture have a lot in common, and bridges can be built that are only tangentially realized. Most of my ministry is using films to illustrate certain Biblical passages. For instance, last night we watched the episode of DOCTOR WHO entitled "Utopia". There is this moment where an old man opens a watch and realizes that he is actually a transfigured Time Lord. The opening of the watch wakes him up to a terrible (for us) and wonderful (for him) truth: he is the Time Lord known as "The Master". We read this in conjunction with Genesis 3, and the eating of the apple. Many of the youth saw a clear connection (which I originally missed, to be honest) between the moment when the watch is opened and the Master remembers his true nature, and the moment when Eve eats the apple and has her 'eyes opened'.
If this moment from Doctor Who popped into these young people's minds whenever they read that passage from now on, I'd consider it a victory. For the moments are clearly parallel. The episode 'reveals' or 'illuminates' the fully weight of the moment in the Bible. The awareness gained is both awesome and terrible. Films and television are a 'language', and just as the Bible must be translated into any language, it behooves us to translate it into these languages as well.
I imagine many ways in which my life may proceed. Perhaps I'll start a more conventional church that has plenty of opportunities to engage in this kind of discussion throughout the week, with people of all ages. Or maybe I'll open a comic book store or comic book art store with worship services for a small group on Sunday morning. I've envisioned entire theaters reserved for a few hundred 'parishoners' who then break into small groups at a local coffee shop, where a discussion and then worship takes place. Movie and communion? It makes sense to me. Christianity can survive in the world, though it may take forms we are not used to. I feel more and more that God is calling me to this kind of life, and this kind of project. My only quandary is maintaining at least the level of income I make now while doing all of this. That is not a selfish goal, it is a practical goal: I have a family, after all.
It is time for something new.
If this moment from Doctor Who popped into these young people's minds whenever they read that passage from now on, I'd consider it a victory. For the moments are clearly parallel. The episode 'reveals' or 'illuminates' the fully weight of the moment in the Bible. The awareness gained is both awesome and terrible. Films and television are a 'language', and just as the Bible must be translated into any language, it behooves us to translate it into these languages as well.
I imagine many ways in which my life may proceed. Perhaps I'll start a more conventional church that has plenty of opportunities to engage in this kind of discussion throughout the week, with people of all ages. Or maybe I'll open a comic book store or comic book art store with worship services for a small group on Sunday morning. I've envisioned entire theaters reserved for a few hundred 'parishoners' who then break into small groups at a local coffee shop, where a discussion and then worship takes place. Movie and communion? It makes sense to me. Christianity can survive in the world, though it may take forms we are not used to. I feel more and more that God is calling me to this kind of life, and this kind of project. My only quandary is maintaining at least the level of income I make now while doing all of this. That is not a selfish goal, it is a practical goal: I have a family, after all.
It is time for something new.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
One-Post Wednesday: JUDE STUDY Introduction
I am unable to upload my homily today, so here is a VERY extended meditation on Jude:
The Book of Jude, like the Pauline and Deutero-Pauline Books, is an epistle, a letter written by an early leader in the church. But unlike the rest of the New Testament letters we have read, this letter has no connection to the Apostle Paul, written neither by him nor by one of his followers. There are several such books in the Bible, among them the Letters of John and Peter, but since these letters must be read as a unit, none of them will be included in our study of the “littlest books” of the Bible. Jude, being one single chapter (like Philemon), is the final step on our journey.
The Book of Jude, short as it is, brings up a great many questions. It is in many ways a mystery, and stands out as unique among the scriptures. Thus this little book will require a relatively long introduction. I apologize for the length, but Jude brings up many unique and interesting issues that require extensive background knowledge.
The first question we must deal with is the authorship of the Book. The name Jude is short for Judas, which was a common name in 1st century Judaism, and could refer to any number of Jesus early followers. Tradition has it that this is the Judas who is listed as ‘not Iscariot’ in John or as ‘the son of James’ in Luke. The letter itself indicates that the writer may have been one of Jesus’ own brothers. But in truth, there were probably a great many early Jesus-followers who had this name. The name “Jude” is used by the author, probably to avoid confusion with Judas Iscariot. It must have been hard to share the name of the betrayer in the early Church.
Alongside the mysterious authorship of the book is the setting. Some books in our series have been relatively easy to date. Others, like Obadiah, were more difficult. The difficulty comes when the Book refers to no specific historical event, or refers to an event that could correspond to any number of dates. Obadiah spoke of conflict with Edom, but there were many times when Israel and Edom were in conflict, and that book could’ve reflected any of those times. Further, Obadiah doesn’t use any words that weren't commonly used throughout a vast period of history. Remember we dated Titus in part because of certain words Titus uses that didn’t come into common use until a certain date. Jude, unlike Titus, and like Obadiah, has no particular word usage that helps us indicate a particular date. Nor are there specific events mentioned that give us a clue. Scholars are all over the place as to when the book was written.
Some argue for a later dating, as late as 160 AD, due to the concern with a particular heresy known as Gnosticism (more on this later). But scholars argue about when Gnosticism begins as a movement. This writer, for one, argues for a much earlier beginning to Gnosticism than some scholars, and sides with those scholars that argue for an earlier date for the writing, as early as 80 or late as 100 AD. But it must be remembered that the possible date for the writing could be anywhere within an 80 year period, between 80-160 AD.
Additional to the mysterious authorship and date, there are many things that set Jude apart from other writings. For one, Jude appeals to books that are not included in the Biblical Canons, either Catholic or Protestant. Originally, the Jews did not have official canon. Their were certain books that no Jew would reject as having spiritual authority, namely the Five Books of Moses, called the Pentateuch. But besides these books, the rest of the scriptural corpus was amorphous, with different communities accepting or rejecting certain books, and different books having different ‘weight’ for different communities. For instance, in the Essene Community, which preserved the books now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, had multiple copies of Isaiah, and it seems that the Isaiah books held greater weight than other books of scripture. This ‘weighing’ of scripture is problematic for most Christians today, who want to see all of the Bible as equally the Word of God. But this is a relatively recent attitude. In ancient times, not all books of what we call ‘The Bible’ were considered equal.
And indeed there were books some communities used that others did not. In the Greek Translation of what we call the Old Testament, for instance, there were several books included that are not found in any Hebrew Translations. It is unclear whether these additional books come from Hebrew sources that are now lost to us, or whether they were originally written in Greek. But what is clear is that among Greek-speaking Jews, they were well known and often accepted as inspired scripture.
When the Jews officially split from Christians around 90 AD, they did so by canonizing certain scriptures as official for Judaism, thereby leaving out scriptures that Christians often used to support their claim that Jesus was the Messiah. Only the Hebrew version of the pre-Christian scriptures was considered official, and any scriptures that did not have proven Hebrew foundations were considered false.
But among Christians, the nature of scripture remained amorphous until the Church started to seek it’s own official Canon in the Fourth Century. Surprisingly, many of the books that the Jews had rejected to try to undercut Christians, were given at best a questionable status among Christians. After the reformation, Protestants defined themselves in part by official and final rejection of the authority of these books, which they now called the Apocrypha (which literally means ‘of questionable authenticity). Their rejection of the books had to do with the fact that many of the Catholic doctrines they found distasteful (like the idea of Purgatory) was found within them. Catholics responded in the Council of Trent in 1546 by officially canonizing the books, labeling them ‘Deutero-Canonical’ or ‘A Second Canon’. Eastern Orthodox also consider them authoritative. Their place in the Anglican Communion, is ill-defined, and they remain for Anglicans in much the same place they were before the actions of the Protestants and Catholics. It is left up to each believing Episcopalian how much weight they give these books, though most Anglican Bibles include them.
The process of deciding which books were officially ‘scripture’ and which were not was, for Christians, partly a political process. But generally, Christians chose to make official books that were widely used by the semi-autonomous Christian communities and collectives that had grown up around the world. The questionable place of some books was probably due in part to their use among a significant number of churches, but their lack of use in most churches.
This issue of Canonization and of the status of individual books is important here because Jude quotes from and relies heavily upon books that are rejected by almost all Christians as being canonical, historically speaking. The scriptures quoted include the Book of Enoch and the Book of the Assumption of Moses, both books that were very important to a very small number of Jewish communities in the first century, and less important to an even smaller number of Christian communities after that. Only Ethiopian Christians today include 1 & 2 Enoch in their Bibles. It is interesting then that these Old Testament Scriptures, rejected by Christian and Jewish community alike today, are actually quoted in this Canonical New Testament letter.
So should the Book of Enoch be included in the Old Testament? There can be no doubt that the Book had a big influence on the 1st Century Jewish worldview that informed Jesus and His followers, but it had relatively little impact on the early Church itself. How one approaches scriptures like Enoch and The Assumption of Moses is a very personal matter, involving a great detail of reflection not possible here. But it is important to know something about the process of Canonization and about books of questionable authority when reading the Book of Jude, since they play a central role for the author.
Because of the connection with the Book of Enoch (considered one of the most important Apocalyptic Texts of ancient times), Jude is heavily influenced by what is known as an Apocalyptic Worldview. As we saw in the prophetic books almost ad nauseum, in the most ancient times most Jews believed that all circumstances were tied to behavior: do good and good things happen, do bad and bad things happen. The various exiles of the Jews were interpreted as God’s punishment upon and undeserving people.
Over time, writings grew up like Job and Ecclesiastes that questioned this neat little picture. And when the Greeks took over Judea and started their terrible progroms against the Jews, different views on how God interacted with the world started to develop. What became dominant in the Jewish mind is what is known as “The Apocalyptic Worldview”. Whereas before the prophets had envisioned a world almost completely dominated by the Will of God, Apocalyptic thinkers focused on a supernatural war going on between God and forces aligned against Him. This view predominates in those additions to Daniel made during the Maccabean revolt, and in the Books of Enoch and The Ascension of Moses.
The Apocalyptic thinkers envisioned a world in which there were some kinds of dark powers...ancient beasts, fallen angels, or some other agents...that stood between Heaven and Earth, and kept God’s will from being completely made manifest in His Creation. These forces would become incarnated from time to time in Earthy rulers...for instance in the Book of Daniel, the King of Greece Antiochus Epiphanes was thought to be a monstrous beast made incarnate. These rulers would oppress God’s people, and this was in part the cause of the great evils of the world. This made simple sense of the situation in which the Jews found themselves. They were being oppressed by the Greeks not because they were idolaters or because they had followed other gods, but rather because they refused to follow other gods and stayed loyal to Yahweh alone. Since it was this loyalty that was the explicit reason for their oppression, the old prophetic answer of ‘you get what you deserve’ didn’t work any more. The Apocalyptic writers claimed a revelation from God that made more sense of the facts on the ground.
It was believed that God could, from time to time, send agents to help work ‘behind enemy lines’ to fight against the dark powers and their human followers. The Apocalyptic writers themselves often clamed to have been brought up to Heaven to see ‘behind the veil of the sense’ (‘apocalypse’ literally means ‘to see behind the veil’) and given a message to help people understand the evils of the world, and to fight against them. It was also believed that God would send angels to occasionally fight off the powers when they directly threatened mankind. The Book of Tobit, as well as Daniel 10, are full of this kind of imagery.
The point is that God was thought to no longer work directly with the people of the world. Rather, God had to work through agents, who could circumvent the dark powers and do the work God used to do Himself. But all Apocalyptic writers looked forward to a glorious day when God would finally overthrow the powers (usually via a particular and final messianic agent), and usher in God’s Kingdom on Earth, when Heaven and Earth would be finally one.
This worldview was the one Jesus was born into and it dominated the thoughts, hopes, understanding, and expectations of First Century Jews. The world was thought to be a physical manifestation of a spiritual struggle, a struggle both cosmic and terrible, which caused great collateral damage here on Earth. Both Jesus and Paul were Apocalyptic thinkers. After Jesus died, the general sense was that the final battle with the dark powers (now usually thought of as simply satan), had been won, and that the world would be progressively moving to a final shift, when God’s Kingdom would be instituted. The expectation was that a steady and progressive move towards that Kingdom would be the directional roadmap for the rest of history. But then the Temple was destroyed, an event most Christians thought was a sign of the final coming of God and Christ, yet nothing else really happened. And then again, Rome started to persecute the Christians, and Jews began to split from Jesus followers. All of this threw the dominant, optimistic Christian view into doubt.
So some Christians started to re-emphasize the Apocalyptic Nature of the world. They spoke more and more about angels and demons and about the spiritual warfare that Christians would be involved in until Christ’s second coming. Jude is firmly in this category. It is fitting that Jude immediately precedes Revelation, as both are born of roughly the same historical impulse: to make sense of a world that is increasingly dangerous for Christians using the imagery of spiritual warfare.
In that sense Jude is an important preamble to The Book of Revelation, setting up a vision of the way Jude thinkers like him believe the world to work, a vision that will play a central role in John’s Revelation.
But for all the things that set Jude apart from the Pauline letters, the one thing that ties them together is the focus on detractors. All of the letters we’ve read so far, with the exception of Philemon, have had a special concern with those people who stand against the important leaders who authored the epistles. Jude, too, is centrally concerned with this issue. However, whereas the main enemies of Paul and his followers were the Judaizers, who sought a stricter implementation of Jewish law among believers, Jude is struggling against a group that would be, by the second century, the greatest threat to Christian unity and survival: the Gnostics.
Gnostics were heavily influenced by Greek Philosophy, more so even than mainstream Christianity. They adopted the view of Plato that there was a strict separation and difference between the material and the spiritual, between body and soul. For them, the physical was an evil or corrupt form of existence, and spirit was a pure and good form. The goal of life, then, was to escape the physical and enter the spiritual through ascetic practices and intellectual development. Gnostics generally rejected the Old Testament altogether, believing that the physical world had been created by this part of God that had gone haywire, this kind of Cosmic Cancerous Demon named Demiurge. This being had stolen from God parts of himself, and these trapped pieces of the divine were the human souls, now trapped in this prison called the physical, or Creation. This demon had tricked the world into believe it to be god, and so the entire Old Testament is actually written, from the Gnostic point of view, by the devil.
Salvation came through the teachings of Jesus. Jesus, from the Gnostic point of view, was not really Yahweh incarnated in physical flesh, rather Jesus was the One True God who APPEARED as a physical human being. Jesus came to teach people how to live in such a way that they could escape their physical prison and return to the One True God from whom they had been stolen. All of life was about transcending the evil physical and reaching the transcendent spiritual. It was, then, not Jesus death and resurrection (which were mere illusion), but his teachings, imparted to only a select few disciples, that made salvation possible. People actualized that possible salvation by living out those teachings. This roughly speaking was Gnosticism.
Gnosticism was attractive, especially to those Christians who came from the Greek population, for a number of reasons. First of all, it was based on Greek Platonic Philosophy, and was compatible with Greek religion. Gnostics didn’t think physical behavior mattered much, and so they were not forced to choose between worship of Caesar and worship of Jesus. Most Gnostics thought it completely fine to give lip service to Roman Worship services, while following the way of Jesus. Second of all, Gnosticism didn’t look for a second coming that never materialized. The belief was that Jesus’ first life was the bringing together of God and man, and all that was left was for people to institute His teachings. There was no resurrection of the dead, for material existence was thought to be evil and only the spiritual Heaven was the goal. As people came to know the secret knowledge or gnosis that Jesus had taught some of His followers, the trapped divine spirits would return to their source, until the devil was robbed of his private play prison. Thus there was no challenge to the Gnostic view when the End did not take place in a timely manner.
But as attractive as Gnosticism was (and indeed still is today to many), it was completely incompatible with the original teachings of Jesus or Paul. For the central Jewish conviction, alive throughout the scriptures, is that life in this world is essentially good. The First Chapter of Genesis establishes for all time that God saw all He created and judged it, ‘good’. The idea of resurrection of the dead is an outgrowth of this conviction. The Gnostic desire to escape from life itself as a prison is not in line with the Jewish heritage of the Christian faith.
Further, the Gnostics ultimately put salvation in the hands of the individual, and only a select few individuals at that. Only those who had access to the line of thinkers that went back to the ‘specially chosen’ of Jesus were said to have access to the freedom and salvation that Jesus brought. And that salvation takes place through our own power, for it is the individual person who CHOOSES whether they will accept and live out the gnosis of Jesus. This is an aristocratic and self-important view of salvation completely at odds with the spirit of repentance that lies at the heart of Jesus message. The Pauline emphasis on Grace alone is the only way to preserve that Spirit and to ensure that salvation is truly available to all.
We must pause here a moment for there is a vitally important point that must be made. Gnosticism and Judaic Christianity are two extreme ends of a spectrum. The picture of Gnosticism laid out above is a picture of one extreme on that spectrum. Almost all Christianity exemplified some Gnostic and some Jewish influences. Any given Christian community or individual might fall somewhere on that spectrum. On the one side you had Jewish Christians who thought of Jesus as messiah but not God, and basically thought that all the Jewish law should remain intact. On the other side you had Gnostics who thought of Jesus as God but not man, and sought a purely spiritual release from an evil physical universe. Almost all Christian writings fit somewhere near or on the middle of that spectrum, with each emphasizing one side or the other to some degree. It is interesting that most of Paul’s writings defend the middle against the extreme of Judaizing, whereas Jude defends the same middle against extreme Gnosticism. But understanding the Gnostics as a part of a very subtle spectrum, rather than as some absolute separate group, is important. The same is true in terms of our understanding of Judaizers.
The Book of Jude, then, is the tirade of an early Christian leader against Gnosticism. It paints Gnostics as incarnations of the Dark Powers, in much the same way that Daniel pictured King Antiochus the same way. Jude’s argument has two prongs to it: on the one it is a polemic against those who are challenging the Jewish heritage of Christianity, but embedded in that polemic is an argument meant to weaken the position of the Gnostics themselves. For Jude offers an alternative explanation for why life continues to be difficult: it is not because creation is inherently evil, nor because the resurrection is false, but because the very dark powers that are incarnated in the Gnostics are holding the world hostage, and we must suffer a little longer until the victory of Christ is made complete over His enemies.
And in the end, that is what Jude is all about: the spiritual forces in the world that threaten us and lead us astray, and our need to stay hopeful that those forces will be overcome by even greater forces of good, of which Jesus Christ is the supreme Incarnation.
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