Tag: god

What Do We Mean By ”Apocrypha?”

~ Vincent

It’s so important to know what a word means before you start disagreeing with someone about it.  I remember a whole debate that I had with an old roommate about the ethics of punching someone that was “imminently” about to attack one of your friends or you.  I insisted that you should always try to de-escalate things first while he insisted that it was unethical to let someone get punched because you weren’t willing to step in.  We went back and forth and back and forth for about an hour, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend.  It wasn’t until we started roleplaying different scenarios (yes, it went that far) that we realized that the way that we were defining “imminent” was very different.  I assumed that the hostile party had just started to become erratic and hostile, showing their fast escalation towards an attack, while he assumed that they were already deeply hostile and were literally about to throw a punch.  When we recognized the difference, we realized we didn’t disagree at all on any point, much to the continued annoyance of his girlfriend, who took the opportunity to say, “You two are so stupid.  I’ve been saying this all along.”  We weren’t arguing about ethics; we were arguing about a definition.  Unclear terms are the real culprit behind a lot of disagreements.

One theological term that is infamously unclear is “apocrypha.”  The word is varyingly defined as…

•Those extra books the Catholics have (Tobit, Judith, Maccabees 1 and 2, etc.)

•Any ancient Christian-y book that didn’t make it into the Bible (Book of Jasher, Book of Adam and Eve, Book of Enoch, etc.)

•Helpful ancient books that wise Christians know about (The Epistles of Clement, Shepherd of Hermas, etc.)

•Harmful ancient books that are mostly heretical (Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas, Acts of Paul and Thecla, etc.)

That boils down to two key factors that our word is trying to get at: canonicity and doctrine.  First, it might be an attempt to discuss the canonical status of a book.  Maybe someone is trying to say it’s only canonical for Roman Catholics (or “deuterocanonical” to Protestants).  That’s one option.  But it might also be saying that a book is flat out non-canonical.  Or maybe the key concern isn’t about canonicity, but about the doctrine presented in a particular book.  That doctrine could be sound without being a piece of Scripture, or it might be horrendously heretical.  Again, the term can mean either of these things.  It’s saying something about canonicity and/or doctrine… but what exactly?  The vagueness in the term isn’t a modern invention;  it’s baked into the term from the earliest days of the Church.

Factor One: Deuterocanonical vs. Purely Non-Canonical

A fair understanding of the first factor (canonicity) can be uncovered by just looking at the meaning of the word “apocrypha”.  It comes from the Greek word ἀπόκρυφα (apokryphos), which means “hidden” or “secret.”  The word was originally used by ancient Christians (or heretics) to refer to books that were wise, but had somehow been obscured because they represented a threat to authority.  It should be obvious how often this term was used by heretics to introduce “sacred” literature that violated church doctrine.  It’s not hard to find early Church Fathers railing against apocryphal books, meaning those things that were obviously non-canonical and harmful.  A good example can be found in that famous hunter of heresy , Irenaeus, when he’s against the Gnostics:

“[T]hey adduce an unspeakable number of apocryphal and spurious writings, which they themselves have forged, to bewilder the minds of foolish men, and of such as are ignorant of the Scriptures of truth.”

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, (1, 20, 1)

Cleary, he uses the word to warn Christians about harmful, non-Canonical books.  Another good example comes from that rhetorician of Carthage, Tertullian, in his Treatise on the Soul.  He notes that some philosophers arrived at partial truths about the world by using non-Christian sources such as Greek myths, but it doesn’t concern him because they don’t actually seem to hold those myths in particularly high esteem:

“[T]hese philosophers have also made their attacks upon those writings which are condemned by us under the title of apocryphal, certain as we are that nothing ought to be received which does not agree with the true system of prophecy, which has arisen in this present age; because we do not forget that there have been false prophets, and long previous to them fallen spirits, which have instructed the entire tone and aspect of the world with cunning knowledge”

Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul, 2

Again, apocryphal here means any book that’s not a canonical part of Christian scripture.  Clearly that is indeed a valid, historic, Christian use of the term. 

At the same time, we can find Church Fathers that use the term to refer to just the opposite on this particular axis!  Some use it to refer to consent that would go on to be accepted in the Catholic canon and not the Jewish or Protestant canon.  For those that might be unfamiliar with this kind of so-called “apocryphal” content, the Catholic Bible contains a number of additions in the Old Testament that don’t appear in the Jewish or Protestant Bibles.  Why?  Early Christians often spoke Greek and consequently read Scripture from a Greek copy of the Old Testament called the Septuagint.  The Septuagint contained seven extra books (Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, and Baruch) and a few additional chapters in the books of Daniel and Esther.  Even though a broad segment of Greek speaking Jews that used the Septuagint for Scripture readings also considered this content legitimate, ultimately the authorities in Israel neither used it nor considered it canonical.  As time went on, Jews used the content less and less, returning to the Hebrew Scriptures, and Christians used it more and more.  Eventually, there was debate in the Church about it.  Why were Christians using versions of the Jewish Scriptures that the Jews didn’t actually think was canonical?  Why use the septuagint at all instead of something that would have circulated in the region that Jesus actually lived?  Should the church remove that extra content that had been used for generations?  Or did it still count as sacred Scripture?   In his Letter to Africanus, the ever-abstract and theological genius, Origen, argued for the legitimacy of the story of Susanna (a story from the additional chapters in Daniel):

But probably to this you will say, Why then is the History not in their Daniel, if, as you say, their wise men hand down by tradition such stories? The answer is, that they hid from the knowledge of the people as many of the passages which contained any scandal against the elders, rulers, and judges, as they could, some of which have been preserved in uncanonical writings (Apocrypha).

Origen, Letter to Africanus, 9

A word that was elsewhere used to condemn non-canonical writing is now used to point at the additional Septuagint literature as actually purer, uncorrupted, Scripture, hidden away from the tyranny of Israelite authorities.  You can see that from the earliest days of the faith and in the highest circles of authority, the word is used in multiple senses to talk about the canonicity of sacred writings.

Factor Two: Safe or Dangerous Doctrine

We’ve seen how the term historically was used in different circumstances to refer to different aspects of a document’s canonicity, but that’s not all it could do!  Apocryphal could also be a way to discuss expectations for the reliability of a document’s doctrine.  Obviously, Irenaeus and Tertullian used the term to refer to books that were actively heretical and not worth reading, and Origen used it to refer to books that should be considered canonical and are doctrinally pure, but we can also find people that use the term to refer to things that aren’t dangerous, per se, but don’t have any claim towards anything resembling canon.

The compiler of the Vulgate, Jerome, is a perfect illustration of this still further way of using the word “apocryphal.” In the fourth century, Jerome was debating the details of the emerging Christian canon, and he objected to the inclusion of both deuterocanonical content and certain other books that had arisen popularly in key Christian communities.  He listed the Old Testament books he thought ought to be canonical (identical to the modern Protestant and historic Jewish canon), and then makes this note:

Whatever falls outside these must be set apart among the Apocrypha.  Therefore, wisdom, which is commonly entitled Solomon’s, with the book of Jesus the son of Sirach, Judith, Tobias, and the Shepherd are not in the canon.

Jerome, Preface to the Books of Samuel and Kings

At first glance, this appears to be little more than a further exploration of canon.  Jerome is condemning the Catholic epistles to a non-canon status, just like Irenaeus and Tertullian did with dangerous books.  But Jerome doesn’t have that same attitude of suspicion and frustration when regarding these books.  To the contrary, he seems to like them.  He occasionally quotes them in his other writings.  Jerome has the utmost respect for some of these documents that he’s calling apocryphal; he just doesn’t think they’re canonical.  That’s a far cry from Tertullian and Irenaeus’s use of the term, which was essentially “horrible heresy carriers.”  He uses the term “apocryphal” to refer to books that have positive, doctrinally-sound additions to the Christian life.

To recap, we’ve established that even from the beginning of the church, the word “apocryphal” could refer to a writing that is either canonical or deuterocanonical/Catholic, or it could be a reference to the reliability of the doctrine within a non-canonical book. It’s a broad, flexible term! And it get’s thrown around pretty readily among church people that are exploring non-canonical writings enough that it causes issues from time to time.  When you’re talking with fellow Christians about apocrypha, just remember how much history this particular term has and be careful to define what you mean when you use it. It might just save you an argument.

The Lord’s Prayer: Debts or Trespasses

~ Vincent

I’m sure many of you have had this experience: you’re visiting a church that’s a little different than what you’re used to and the time for the Lord’s Prayer comes. Things are going pretty well until… boom! They ask God to forgive them their “debts” instead of “trespasses (or “trespasses” instead of “debts”—you get the idea). What gives? Why are there two different words that churches might use in that part of the Lord’s Prayer?

The most common answer I’ve heard was that it’s because the Lord’s Prayer appears in the Bible twice: once in Matthew 6:9-13 and once in Luke 11:2-4. What a delightful, satisfying little answer… until I actually looked those scriptures up and realized that NEITHER of them says “trespasses” anywhere. Matthew’s version says “debts” both times, even if you take it back to the original Greek! The root word for debt and debtors, opheilō, is what you’ll see in both instances. Forgive us our debts (opheilēmata) as we forgive our debtors (opheiletais). Luke’s version is definitely a little different, but not because it says trespasses. Jesus asks God to forgive us our sins (hamartias in Greek) as we forgive those who are indebted to us (opheilonti). So what gives? If the Bible uses “debts” three of the four instances, how on Earth did we end up with trespasses?

I tried to look for the oldest version of the Bible I could find that used some form of “trespasses” instead of “debts,” and I’m pretty confident that the furthest back you can get is the 1526 Tyndale Bible, one of the earliest and most influential Bibles in the English language. He was translating from Erasmus’s 1522 edition of the New Testament, which had both Greek and Latin text to work from. The Greek (which he was primarily working with) has the same words that we already looked at (debt, debtors, people indebted to us), and even if we glance at the Latin, the words are pretty debt-centric (“remittimus omni debenti“— release us from our debts, in Matthew 6:12, for instance). But when we look at Tyndale’s translation, you can see trespasses and trespassers for the first time! Why did he do that? Who knows? Nobody else was doing it. Maybe he was inspired by what Jesus said just after the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:14-15, in which Jesus warns people that God will forgive their trespasses (paraptōmata) as they forgive the trespasses of others, but we can’t know for certain.

But how did Tyndale’s translation get so popular? Because it was used in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, which is the official book of liturgy for the Church of England. At the time, his translation was one of the most readily available editions that came from the Greek. Over time, other English translations didn’t follow Tyndale’s direction on those verses, but the Book of Common Prayer kept it that way. In every service across the Church of England, that’s what people said, and as with all repeated pieces of liturgy, that’s how it stuck. As time went on, the influence of the Book of Common Prayer was felt in other denominations. Churches that make use of formal liturgy are more likely to say “trespasses” (Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox), while churches that don’t use that same kind of formal liturgy are more likely to say “debts” (Presbyterian, Reformed, Baptist).

Which is probably the better translation? Debts. Obviously debts. It’s not even a question. That said, I doubt it would be a major grievance in Jesus’s eyes if you said trespasses instead. That’s how he described sins and forgiveness immediately after saying the Lord’s Prayer, so I can’t imagine him disapproving too much.

For those that want to go further, if you want to look at the Greek for yourself, the interlinear translation on Bible Hub is a great tool. They’ve also got Tyndale’s translation available. If you’re really wild, Erasmus’s 1522 Bible translation is over at archive.org.

Conveniently Untranslatable: Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna

~ Vincent

One of my personal pet peeves is when pastors bust out the weird words for Hell. “You can see here that they’re talking about Gehenna, which is different than Hades and certainly much different than Hell.” Huh? Hades and Gehenna aren’t English words. You’re just leaving words in their original language and insisting that it’s somehow different and deeper for not having been translated. Can you imagine if any other theological subject took the same approach? Imagine talking about the Gospel and someone said, “well, let’s be sure to speak about the evangelion, which is different from the gospel or the devar YHWH.” Or imagine if we were talking about prophets and someone insisted that we needed to start talking about prophētēs and navi’im if we REALLY want to be serious about all of this. Not all of these conversations are wrong-headed. There absolutely is a place for learning more about cultural attachments to different words and the art of translation, but when a single theological subject (Hell) is the only one that people ever want to debate, I start to wonder if it’s out of a misled curiosity or a deep-seated need for the text to say something other than it does. Ironically, when I looked at the players involved in those translation decisions, both intellectual wanderlust and deep discomfort with Hell seem to be present in the Hades/Sheol/Gehenna conversation.

On one side, you have evangelical pastors that seem to see conversations about Hades and Sheol as the work of serious scholarship unburdened by the assumptions of previous tradition. The logic goes something like this: do you really want to know what the biblical author was trying to tell you? Then you need to get back to the source of the book itself! What did these words mean in the original Jewish setting? The authors didn’t even know the word “Hell,” and if you read passages about Sheol while thinking about a burning pit full of devils, you’re going to totally misunderstand what they were getting at. If you want to be accurate, you have to accept that there are no clean, accurate translations of these concepts into English. We need to leave these words in their original language and let people learn what Jews thought about the afterlife in those timeframes if we want people to understand what those passages mean.

To some extent, I respect the thought process. It’s sincere and genuinely focused on the Bible. It is, however, a little misled. It tosses out the contributions of historic Christians in the effort of uncovering something “more accurate,” but what’s uncovered is almost always much, much less so. After all, it implies that there is a reasonably simple, non-scholarly way for people to comprehend what Jewish religious thought was about the afterlife over thousands of years, and that’s totally unreasonable. Just look at the three-year stretch that Jesus spent in public ministry! Throughout the New Testament, we see the Saducees and the Pharisees. Were they on the same page about the afterlife? No! For a Sadducee, any talk about the afterlife would have been absurd. They believed there was no afterlife at all. The Pharisees, on the other hand, there was a bodily resurrection at the end of time after which some would go on to everlasting life and others would go on to eternal torment. That’s a pretty big difference in the way they thought about the afterlife! Do you think they agreed on the meaning of the word Sheol? And remember, we’re only looking at two groups that were active in the three years that Jesus was involved in public ministry. The Old Testament covers THOUSANDS of years of history. If we’re convinced that words like Sheol and Gehenna are so wildly unlike our modern words that we need to leave them untranslated, we also need to accept that we can’t offer up one explanation about what the afterlife REALLY was to Jews for thousands of years and claim that this is a penetrating work of scholarship that finally explains the concept. If Jewish religious scholars couldn’t agree during the life of Jesus, they certainly weren’t all miraculously on the same page before that. No, we would need a study that’s far deeper and wider than we’re really interested in to seriously embark down this road. In describing what Jews “really thought” about Sheol, you’re inevitably picking one interpretation and blanket applying it for a broad swath of history.

Beyond introducing a level of complexity that is both not scholarly enough to be taken seriously and too scholarly for the most people to understand, there’s a bigger, simpler concern that ought to disqualify the use of these terms in an evangelical setting: is Sheol a real place? It’s usually described as a a spooky, neutral realm of the dead, so is that an actual possible landing place for people that die? What about Hades? And is Hades a different place than Sheol? After all, it is similar, although the Greeks had some moral distinctions to their Hades. You could make it to Elysium or sink to the depths of Tartarus. Oh, but those aren’t explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, so do they count? Or was the New Testament Hades different from the Greek Hades? And how does Gehenna fit into all of this? And how does ANY of it fit in with Christian orthodoxy? The simple truth is that it doesn’t fit into Christian orthodoxy. These places, if imagined as anything other than Hell or Heaven, don’t fit within a cohesive Christian framework. Our Christian forebears recognized this. Bibles didn’t leave those words in their Greek and Hebrew forms until the 19th and 20th centuries and none of those words appears in any historic doctrinal standards (unlike Heaven and Hell, which are pretty standard fare). Leaving the words untranslated doesn’t just risk confusing people! It also risks adding non-existent places to Christian’s understanding of the cosmos. The hundreds of years of resources where our ancestors in the faith translated those words as “Hell” actually help us to understand how they contribute to a consistent worldview. In ditching them for a “more accurate understanding,” we’ve ditched a tremendous aid.

But let’s jump to the other side of the theological spectrum. What about more liberal theologians? Why are they in favor of Hades and Gehenna instead of Hell? This one doesn’t take a lot of explaining. Universalism in both it’s soft and hard forms, are much more common in mainline churches and expectations for doctrine tends to be more pluralistic. In the tradition of Schliermacher, the Bible is often seen as a compilation of ideas about God that are bound by a very different time and culture, rather than a singular authoritative voice illuminating any objective truth. Removing instances of the word Hell from the Bible is generally seen as a good thing, since eternal suffering is supposedly incompatible with the idea of a good God. To use terms about Hades and Gehenna instead helps establish the foreignness and pluralistic nature of the Bible. It becomes more of a cultural curiosity, rather than something serious that needs to be addressed.

My belief is simple enough: people deserve to have Bibles where EVERY word is translated into their language, not just the convenient ones. For over well over a thousand years, Hades, Gehenna, and Sheol were normatively translated to “Hell.” The Vulgate used the Latin word for Hell. The Wycliffe Bible used Hell. The King James used Hell. Hell is the best English rendering of those Greek and Hebrew words, and using them creates a theological consistency that’s necessary to have any honest understanding of the faith. At times, I see people blame the shortcomings of Latin and English for a translation as “shallow” as Hell. The Latin word for Hell, Infernum, is pretty close culturally to our understanding of Hell, so maybe that’s where things fell apart! They claim, “we just don’t have the same vocabulary available to us as the Greeks and the Hebrews did! The Latins mistranslated those word, and English kept those wrong connotations, but now we’re getting back to a purer understanding.” The argument sounds good on paper, until you realize that Latin and Greek were both spoken in the New Testament era and there were no ancient Greeks disgusted by the Latins use of their filthy word Infernum for being too far from their pure Hades. If similar translations were good enough for the Greeks, how they it be too poor for us? A mountain has been made out of a molehill. These words can be reasonably translated! We just don’t like the translation, either because it bores us or because it scares us.

By no means do I say any of this to imply that serious cultural and word studies ought to be off limits. Of course Christians should learn more and continually try to understand what the Scriptures say. But we ought to ask ourselves, why is Hell the single word subject to this intense modern scrutiny? Nobody is scrambling to know the cultural nuances behind ancient and modern understandings of Heaven or implying that a purer understanding of purgatory is just beyond our grasp if we stopped using English. Why are the words for Hell mysteriously the exact words we can’t translate? Why are some of the explanations for those words popularly offered up by detractors actively incorrect (no, Gehenna was not a garbage dump outside of town and not a shred of archaeological or historical evidence has ever implied that it was)? Why has an uptick in interest in universalism coincided with our unwillingness to use “Hell”? Why are the untranslated words mysteriously absent from all historical doctrinal standards? We could go on and on with pointed questions, but the point is that we’re being horribly inconsistent when we use Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna, and our inconsistency isn’t random. It’s the product of very particular thought processes, all of which are skeptical of historic Christian tradition. The evangelicals want to abandon tradition to get back to a “true sense” of the text, and the liberals want to abandon it because they just don’t like it, but they’re both missing out. The things we were handed down from our Christian forebears may not always be perfect, but in this particular instance, they’ve given us clear direction on how to reasonably translate words into our language, and their translations offer doctrinal clarity that you simply can’t find without it. Next time you come across a Sheol, Gehenna, or Hades, be a little spicy and just say “Hell.” The choice isn’t just defensible; it’s better.

Reading the Bible in Latin is Cool

~ Vincent

I’m back! I took some time away after the birth of my second son, and it was incredibly rewarding. I’m blessed not only to have him in my life, but to have had some time to spend with him and his brother and my wife in that transitional period as our family grew. I learned something unexpected during my leave, and I wanted to share it: studying the Bible in a different language is really rewarding.

I wouldn’t have expected this revelation for myself. I don’t know Greek at all and I only have the smallest shreds of Hebrew under my belt. At one point, the prospect of learning Hebrew was really exciting to me. I worked my way through about half of a Hebrew textbook and went to seminary with a real fire for biblical languages, but once I got there, I thought about my high school experience with Spanish. How much Spanish do I remember today? A pitiful amount. And frankly, I never really invested the time to get good at it. Who could have imagined that a high school boy might not be deeply passionate about learning a second language for the sole purpose of polishing his university applications, right? Looking back on my failings with Spanish, I told myself that I must be bad at languages and that I should use the time I would have learned Hebrew in seminary on classes that would better benefit the congregations I would someday serve. After all, I could use an interlinear copy of the Bible and a Hebrew dictionary and get by just fine for the purpose of preaching, and most interesting translational choices are hammered in commentaries anyway. Thus my dream of being a master Hebrew speaker died a quiet death.

But while I was feeding a screaming baby at 2:00 am, I got bored. I wanted to be productive and I realized that the environment wasn’t particularly conducive to reading anything that required an unbroken train of thought. And what’s easy to do in small, flashcard-sized chunks? Memorize vocabulary words. And so I decided to pick up some Latin. I don’t know a lot of Protestants that know Latin, so it would definitely help me bring something unique to the table, and I read enough Augustine that I figured it’d be neat to read his stuff firsthand, instead of through translators. I made it about halfway through a beginner’s Latin textbook before my leave was up, so I can now talk about advanced theological topics like who is in the bedroom and if the dog is barking.

While working through that textbook, I also started studying my weekly Scriptures using the Vulgate (old Latin Bible), and I was shocked to see how deeply it affected my studying. When you don’t really know what any of the words in a given passage mean, you have to scrutinize each word. That level of study changes your relationship with the passage. For example, at one point, I was reading through James 1, and I reached verse 16: “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers,” (ESV). If I was reading in English, I don’t think I would have spent much time not his passage. It’s a warning to pay attention to what James is about to write. Cool. Got it. But when you’re going word to word, dictionary open in another tab, and you see that James just called his readers “mei dilectissimi” or “my dearest ones” (something that, strangely enough, was in the first half of the latin textbook), there’s an impact and a warmth to it that I wouldn’t have felt otherwise. When you’re reading in English it’s easy to end up scanning through a passage for big ideas, controversial pieces, or emotional turning points and end up spending my energy on those. When you’re working in an unfamiliar language, you can’t take any word for granted. Each one is a battle, and each one carries a weight that it wouldn’t otherwise.

There’s also something supremely humbling about tuning in to youtube videos to help you learn the week’s lessons and hearing some teacher that recorded their lectures say, “Salvete, eighth graders!” Yes, my learning partners are mostly thirteen years old. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for.

No idea if my iter longum ad discit Latinum (“long journey to learn latin” probably misconjugated idk I’m new) will go anywhere. Time will tell. But in the meantime, it’s a fun little exercise to make me pay attention to things I wouldn’t otherwise.

God in the Mountains: Moving from Bulgakov to Machen

~ Vincent

I’ve been doing this little series about thinkers and doctrine from the Eastern Orthodox world that I’m slowly moving away from since uncovering classical Protestantism, and today, I’m looking at Sergei Bulgakov.  Bulgakov is a towering figure in Eastern Orthodoxy, though not without controversy.  He was accused of heresy for his teachings on Sophiology (more on this to come).  Even still, he’s influential enough that his name is pervasive. As someone who spent a fair amount of time with his works, I wanted to appreciate the best of what he brought to the table while holding the more theoretical parts very loosely, but the further I’ve moved away from Eastern Orthodoxy, the more I can see that Bulgakov’s work just isn’t worth holding on to at all. Not only are his ideas overly-complicated and bizarre, but they really influence every other part of his work.

But what is this potentially-heretical Sophiology?  It’s an uncommon enough field that a lot of people have probably never heard of it.  I’m going to try to keep it simple (which is more than can be said about Bulgakov, whose books are both annoyingly long and unimaginably unintuitive).  The core of it can be found in Proverbs.  You know that female figure that’s supposed to be the embodiment wisdom?  In Greek, the word wisdom is “sophia,” so this female incarnation of wisdom is occasionally referred to as “Sophia,” (which is strange, given that Proverbs is written in Hebrew; her name should really be Chokhmah instead of anything in Greek, but what are you going to do?).  Sophiology starts here.  Rather than taking the traditional view that lady wisdom a metaphorical character intended to represent wisdom, she is fleshed out into a whole other divine being that is literally the wisdom of God.  And that comes with tremendous implications.  Is Sophia God?  Is she a fourth member of the Trinity?  Theologians know they can’t have a second god or a fourth trinity member and still consider themselves legitimately Christian, so they have to come up with elaborate explanations to avoid these problems. In Bulgakov’s case, he said that the trinity was three beings (hypostases) with one essence (ousia), but Sophia was one essence with no being. She was fully hypostasized by the Trinity (and I hate to use an abundance of Greek words, since it obscures more than it enlightens, but if I didn’t drop the Greek words, I don’t think I’d be properly representing his thoughts).  Despite Sophia being made of the essence of God, she was set apart by him in creation so that she could continually creatively grow to be more like Him and His holiness. In other words, she is creation, constantly growing and becoming more like God, which is what she’s really made of.

If the bar for good theology was creative thought, Bulgakov would be crushing it.  If the bar is accurately expressing the apostolic faith found in the Scriptures, we’re in trouble. Almost none of this stuff is clearly present in the Bible.  We’re taking some “made in the image of God” stuff from Genesis, a little of John 1, and some select chapters of Proverbs and running wild with it.  The divide between creator and creation is practically non-existent in this model.  Yes, humans are made to be like God, but nowhere in Scripture is creation said to be from the essence of God, eternally returning to Him.  That’s fanciful and completely made up.

To be fair to the Eastern Orthodox world, Bulgakov’s Sophiology was mostly rejected.  Probably the best quote about him comes from an untranslated Russian work of little snippets from Archbishop Nathaniel of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He recalls sitting with a group of people that were all hating on Bulgakov and Metropolitan Anthony said:

Unfortunate Father Sergius, unfortunate Father Sergius. After all, this is a very smart person, one of the smartest in the world. He understands many things that only very few understand. And this makes him terribly proud. It’s hard not to be proud if you know that something is clear and completely understandable to you, but no one around you can understand it.  
(Archbishop Nathaniel L’vov, https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Nafanail_Lvov/krupitsy-pospominanij-o-vstrechah-s-velikim-avvoj-mitropolitom-antoniem/, trans. Google)

He isn’t wrong.  Bulgakov’s work and feels very much like the creation of someone who got bored and felt a need to invent a whole philosophical system to delight themselves. The fact that it’s almost impossible to explain his ideas to anyone without them making a confused face and saying, ‘Huh?” is a really, really bad sign. Ideas are generally supposed to solve problems. Here, Bulgakov has created a problem where there was none to introduce a solution that is nothing but a problem.  I have no doubt that he was smart.  I don’t know that he was interested in receiving the faith so much as he was creating one.

Despite his Sophiology never catching fire, Bulgakov still has a lot of clout in Eastern Orthodoxy.  He’s one of the big names.  His works have weight.  A lot of people are willing to ignore the worst to enjoy the best. As was I!  Until I started noticing just how much everything depends on his worst.  For example, Bugakov was an atheist and a communist before he converted.  One of his big conversion moments was a beautiful meditation on the mountains and God’s presence in them:

Evening was falling. We were travel-ling along the southern steppe, covered with the fragrance of honey-coloured and hay, gilded with the crimson of a sublime sunset. In the distance the fast-approaching Caucasus Mountains appeared blue. I was seeing them for the first time . . . My soul had become accustomed long ago to see with a dull silent pain only a dead wasteland in nature beneath the veil of beauty, as under a deceptive mask; without being aware of it, my soul was not reconciled with a nature without God. And suddenly in that hour my soul became agitated, started to rejoice and began to shiver: but what if . . . if it is not wasteland, not a lie, not a mask, not death but him, the blessed and loving Father, his raiment, his love? . . .God was knocking quietly in my heart and it heard that knocking, it wavered but did not open . . . And God departed. (Unfading Light, trans. Thomas Allen Smith, 8.)

Breathtaking!  But the more I looked, the more I saw trouble.  Notice that God isn’t just visible because of his work in nature.  No, God is in nature.  There’s an intimate unity between the two.   If it were anyone else, I would say I was reading into it, but isn’t it interesting that a man that insisted that creation was actually Sophia, the essence of God, becoming like Him and striving to return to Him, is the one that said that the oneness of God and nature were critically important to his conversion?  Uh oh.  That’s right.  The example in question is, at its core, an affirmation of his Sophiology.  The creation/creator divide is intentionally wibbly-wobbly.  And while it might be Eastern Orthodox, it’s certainly not orthodox in the traditional sense.  

I realized I had to move on from Bulgy, and luckily for me, there are plenty of examples of people seeing God’s hand in nature that are a lot more theologically-sound than Bulgakov’s.  For example, I stumbled across John Machen’s account of seeing God’s hand at work in creation when he looked out at the Alps.  Both men were looking at mountains, but you can see how Machen does a better job respecting that creature/creator line:

To me, nature speaks clearest in the majesty and beauty of the hills. One day in the summer of 1932, I stood on the summit of the Matterhorn in the Alps. Some people can stand there and see very little. Depreciating the Matterhorn is a recognized part of modern books on mountain-climbing. The great mountain, it is said, has been sadly spoiled. Why, you can even see sardine cans on those rocks that so tempted the ambition of climbers in Whymper’s day. Well, I can only say that when I stood on the Matterhorn, I do not remember seeing a single can. Perhaps that was partly because of the unusual masses of fresh snow which were then on the mountain, but I think it was also due to the fact that, unlike some people, I had eyes for something else. I saw the vastness of the Italian plain, which was like a symbol of infinity. I saw the snows of distant mountains. I saw the sweet green valleys far, far below at my feet. And as I see that whole glorious vision again before me now, I am thankful from the bottom of my heart that from my mother’s knee I have known to whom all that glory is due. (Machen, Things Unseen, 16)

Is the land God?  No.  It’s a symbol of infinity.  A symbol that has been ignored by so many that only see the dead stuff of humanity, but an effective one to those who are really looking.  The same core elements are all there, but the little details check out. I can share that account without having to wonder, “What weird stuff could that lead to if they ever google the guy I talked about?”  

As much time as I spent with Bulgakov, I don’t think there’s much (if anything) worth the effort in his work.  Even the little moments are too caught up in his bizarre theories.  I don’t care if he has clout.  I’m starting to take these tools out of my toolbox to replace them with more reliable ones.





The Desert Fathers and Works Righteousness? Say it ain’t so!

~ Vincent

In my last post, I mentioned that there were some theological tools I picked up from my mentor that I’m not sure I want to keep. For the most part, they’re Eastern Orthodox. Since I didn’t have classical Protestant thinkers at my fingertips when I connected with so many of these resources, they were great for that period of my life, but now that I’ve had some time to get a little more classical Protestant thinkers under my belt, I think it’s time to say goodbye to some of the things from my past that I have more disagreements with than I fully understood at the time.

And this first one is a hard one: the Desert Fathers. SAY IT AIN’T SO! If you haven’t read The Sayings of the Desert Fathers before, let me just affirm that it is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. Selections from this book were a part of my morning devotions for a long time. Here’s one of my favorites:

A brother came to see Abba Macarius the Egyptian, and said to him, ‘Abba, give me a word, that I may be saved.’ So the old man said, ‘Go to the cemetery and abuse the dead.’ The brother went there, abused them and threw stones at them; then he returned and told the old man about it. The latter said to him, ‘Didn’t they say anything to you?’ He replied, ‘No.’ The old man said, ‘Go back tomorrow and praise them.’ So the brother went away and praised them, calling them, ‘Apostles, saints and righteous men.’ He re- turned to the old man and said to him, ‘I have complimented them.’ And the old man said to him, ‘Did they not answer you?’ The brother said no. The old man said to him, ‘You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not speak; so you too if you wish to be saved must do the same and become a dead man. Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises, and you can be saved.’ (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedict Ward, 132)

Isn’t that wonderful? Each of these sayings balance wittiness and wisdom, and they’re always focused on living Christianity, not just theorizing about it. I ran across this book for the first time while I was in seminary, studying abstract (and unorthodox) theories about how the Bible was written in my Bible class. I randomly plucked it off a shelf in the library, and when I opened it up? Boom. It felt like the Holy Spirit was right there next to me, encouraging me to live a Christian life, not just theorize about things that will never be edifying for real Christians.

As much as I love this collection of sayings, I’ve come to see its limitations. You can even see one of them in this piece. Did you catch what the man said when he asked for help? “Give me a word that I may be saved.” There’s only one word that can save you, dude, and that’s Jesus himself (Jn 1). And I know some would argue that I’m nitpicking here, since that little saying is just a standard part of the Desert Father’s story formula and there’s ways you can try to justify it, but on the whole, I think it’s pretty honest. A massive portion of the Desert Father’s stories are about how to develop a virtuous character, and they usually open with someone asking, “Father, give me a word that I might be saved.” A virtuous character is key to their understanding of salvation. And my logic here isn’t random or unfounded. The deadly edge of monasticism, as expressed by Luther so often and so clearly, is works righteousness. That’s incompatible with the Christian faith that you see in John 3:16 or Ephesians 2:8-9. There’s a big, glaring disagreement with most monastic literature and the Protestant battlecry of Sola Fide (by faith alone).

I may not have fully understood this when I picked up The Sayings, but it did rub off on me. I started reading more and more monastic literature, which pointed me towards Aristotle and his virtue-based ethics. His work is the philosophical underpinning of monastic thought. He argues that practicing good character traits consistently slowly molds you into a just person. I read up on that and thought it was pretty good! Just like the monks, really. So I decided to share my new leanings with my wife. I told her that Protestantism was probably a little wrong in parts. After all, it’s not just faith that makes you what you are! It’s what you do that molds you. It’s faith AND works that save you, when you think about it. Aristotle told me so.

While the monks would have approved of my thoughts, my wife certainly didn’t. She doesn’t often go all-out in arguments against me, but saying, “We might not be saved by faith alone,” was something she absolutely went all-out to defend. And I’m thankful that she did, because when your husband says, “I think Aristotle might be more right than the Bible,” you probably need to set him straight.

I’ve bounced back a lot since then. I’ve come to see that as much as I love the monks, they didn’t always focus on things in a way that reflects what the Bible clearly teaches. To use another Protestant phrase, I genuinely believe that Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone) is true. Everything we need for salvation is in the Bible. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything that looks like what the Desert Fathers were doing. I think they have a logic to their actions that doesn’t reflect the heart of Scripture. Does that mean I think they’re all garbage? Absolutely not. But it does mean I think some of their emphases are a little off. If I want to read them, I have to be aware of the points where we diverge so I can get the best and leave out the worst.

So what to do with the Desert Fathers. Are they perfect? No, but here’s still a lot that I appreciate about them. I’ve just shifted my level of enthusiasm. Whereas historically, I would unapologetically have loved to do whole a sermon series that focuses on the Desert Fathers and their stories, now I’d rather keep Scripture at the center and maybe occasionally use them for a fun devotional or illustrative story. Am I throwing out these tools? Absolutely not. But they’ve gone from a core part of my toolbox that I used every day to some tools that stay up on their hooks until a special occasion comes out.

Six Major Theories About Why Jesus Healed with Mud made of Spit (John 9)

~ Vincent

Why did Jesus heal the man in John 9 by making mud out of spit?!? I preached on John 9 recently and to make sure I had a good take, I looked up explanations from as many wise Christians as I could. People are all over the map on this one! There are so many explanations! I’ve sorted the theories into six major camps and added a quote from someone that I think is a great source for that explanation. Are there more theories out there? Absolutely, Feel free to do even more searching. I do, however, hope that this captures most of the breadth of the conversation. These ideas definitely aren’t mutually exclusive, so there are a lot of people that pick out several different reasons and agree with all of them.

(A lot of these quotes come from Christians throughout history, which means the primary sources can be tough to read. These are my paraphrases for ease of reading. Feel free to look up the original if something particularly. interests you.)

A Series of Symbols

The Lord came and what did He do? He unveiled a great mystery. He spat on the ground and He made clay out of His spit. Why? Because the Word was made flesh. Then, He anointed the eyes of the blind man. The man was anointed, but he still couldn’t see! Jesus sent him to the pool of Siloam. But notice that the evangelist pointed out the name of the pool: “sent.” And you know who was sent for us! If he hadn’t been sent, none of us would be free from sin! So he washed his eyes in that pool called sent — he was baptized in Christ!

-Augustine of Hippo, Tractate 44 on the Gospel of John

A Test of Faith

“The intention of Christ was, to restore sight to the blind man, but the way he went about it seemed absurd at first. By covering his eyes with mud, Jesus doubled his blindness! Who wouldn’t have thought that he was mocking that poor man or just doing some pointless nonsense? But Jesus intended to test the faith and obedience of the blind man so that he could be an example to everyone else. It wasn’t any ordinary test of faith! But the blind man relied on Jesus’s words alone. He was fully convinced that his sight would be restored to him. With that conviction, he hurried to follow Christ’s command. It speaks to his wonderful obedience that he simply obeyed Christ, even though there were so many excuses to do otherwise. When a devout mind, satisfied with the simple word of God, believes entirely in what seems incredible, that’s the true test of faith. Faith is followed by a readiness to obey, so that anyone who is convinced that God will be their faithful guide will naturally give their life over to God. Who could doubt that fear and suspicion crept into the man’s mind? He knew he might get mocked for what he was doing! But with hardly any effort, he broke through every barrier to faith and realized that it was safe to follow Christ.”

-John Calvin, Commentary on John

The Evangelistic Theory

“Maybe our Lord intended to draw even more attention to the miracle. A crowd of people would naturally gather to see something so odd, and the guide that helped the man get around the city would end up sharing the story as they went to the pool of Siloam.”

-John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament

The Gospel Comparison

“The man’s eyes were opened after a little clay was put in them and he washed them out in the pool of Siloam. God really does bless humble things during our process of conversion. It is incredibly humbling for a preacher who thinks, ‘I preached an amazing sermon on Sunday,’ to find God didn’t use that sermon to convert anyone! It was the random remark he made in town the other day that God worked with. He didn’t think it was worth anything! He didn’t plan it out or perfect it! But God did. What he thought was his best didn’t mean all that much to God, but when he wasn’t even trying, God blessed him. A lot of people had their eyes opened by little moments that had an incredible impact. The whole process of salvation is accomplished in simple, humble, everyday things. It’s so easy to compare it to the clay and spit that Jesus used. I don’t know many people that had their souls saved by formal, lofty processes. A lot of people join the church, but I haven’t met any that were converted because of a profound theological debate. It’s not common to hear that someone was saved because the pastor was so eloquent. Don’t get me wrong! We all appreciate eloquence. There’s nothing wrong with it! But eloquence has no spiritual power. It can’t transform our minds, and God prefers to use humbler things in His conversion. When Paul set aside human wisdom and decided not to use eloquent speech, he let go of things that weren’t going to be useful for him anyway. When David took of Saul’s elaborate armor and took up a sling and stone, he killed a giant! And the giants of today aren’t going to be conquered any better by people trying to put on the armor of Saul. We need to stick to simple things. We need to stick to the plain gospel and preach it plainly. The clay and the spit weren’t an artistic combination. It didn’t’ suit anyone’s taste! Nobody felt culturally gratified by that mud! But by that and a wash in Siloam, eyes were opened. It pleases God to use the foolish things to save those who believe in Him.”

-Charles Spurgeon, The Healing of One Born Blind

The Healing Spit Theory

The spittle of a human being is the best antidote for the poison of serpents, though, our daily lives attest to its efficacy and utility, in many other areas. We spit to keep ourselves safe from epilepsy and to avoid bad luck after meeting someone with a bad right leg. We apologize to the gods for having ridiculous expectations by spitting into our laps. In the same way, whenever medicine is employed, it’s good to spit three times on the ground to help it to take hold.

-Pliny the Elder, Natural History Book XXVIII, vii

A Meditation on Means

The Lord revealed his power more effectively by choosing this method of healing than if he had opened the blind man’s eyes with just a word. He used things that seem more likely to blind a man than to let him see! Who would believe that someone was about to heal the ears of a deaf man if they started filling his ears with mud? Clearing his ears might make sense, but putting mud in them? No. If Jesus wanted to use rational means to open this mans’ eyes, a surgical knife would have made more sense than mud. But Jesus chose to use this means for his power… it is supremely easy for him to heal by any means he wants. He can use laying on of hands or touching or a word or even spit and clay. If the word of Christ is added, any means he chooses will be effective, even if it seems more harmful than helpful to us.

-Wolfgang Musculus, Commentarii in Ioannem as found in Reformation Commentary on Scripture.

The Prosperity Gospel

~ Vincent

In worship, I’ve been preaching through John 6. In overview, Jesus makes bread for hungry people, the people get excited, the people chase Jesus down for more miracle bread, Jesus says he’s the bread of life and all they really need, and finally people get disappointed and leave. Here’s a crowd of people that legitimately witness a miracle, but instead of bowing down before Jesus, they want to put him to work. They don’t really want the bread of life; they want a life of bread.

Naturally, I started thinking about people that have that sense of religiosity today. There are plenty of popular speakers who claim that God wants to lead you to a life of bread. The prosperity gospel preachers are the most obvious example. I didn’t want to misrepresent them when talking about them, so I started digging through some of the their writings to get a sense for the kinds of things they say and believe. Let me tell you, it was a wild ride. Not only was it broadly ickier than I expected (you’ll see), but there were a lot of little dots I got the chance to connect.

Prosperity gospel preachers are overwhelmingly nondenominational. They’re also well represented by people of every race. Neither of these first two items surprised me. I can’t imagine most of these pastors being open to denominational oversight, and no race is immune from the temptation of money. What did catch me off guard was the religious background that most of these preachers had. There’s a surprisingly strong tie between prosperity gospel preaching and the Charismatic/Pentecostal tradition. Not every prosperity gospel preacher has a Pentecostal background, but the modern American prosperity gospel did get its start there (Oral Roberts tends to be the usual starting place for religious historians), and it still has really, really strong ties to it today. As a non-Pentecostal/Charismatic looking at their tradition from the outside, the connection seems pretty logical when I think about it. Charismatics often put a really high premium on miracles in a Christian’s life today. It’s not wild to assume that you can get to, “God wants to give me money if I have enough faith,” pretty quickly from there if you go off the rails. Pentecostalism also lacks the clear denominational structures that can prevent obvious false teachings from reaching the pulpit, and it tends to have a really low emphasis on (and even active skepticism about) education. I didn’t expect the connection between those two entities, but it makes good sense.

History aside, I was shocked at how shameless prosperity gospel preachers can be. Legitimately, wholeheartedly, shameless. Here are some quotes that just broke my heart:

  • “Sow a seed on your MasterCard, your Visa or your American Express, and then when you do, expect God to open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing.” -Oral Roberts (“Success in Life” broadcast on the Trinity Broadcasting Network September 21, 1990)
  • “The best thing you can do for the poor is not become one of them.” -Rev. Ike (“The Gospel According to Rev. Ike,” Ebony Magazine, Dec. 1976)
  • “Don’t wait for the pie in the sky by-and-by when you die. Get yours now with ice cream and a cherry on top!” -Rev. Ike (“The Gospel According to Rev. Ike,” Ebony Magazine, Dec. 1976)
  • “If you’ve got one-dollar faith and you ask for a ten-thousand dollar item, it ain’t going to work.  It won’t work!  Jesus said, ‘according to your [faith,]’ not according to God’s will for you, in His own good time, if it’s according to His will, if He can work it into his busy schedule.  He said, ‘According to your faith, be it unto you.’  Now, I may want a Rolls Royce, and don’t have but bicycle faith.  Guess what I’m going to get?  A bicycle.” -Rev. Frederick Price (Fredrick K. C. Price. “Praise The Lord” broadcast on TBN. 21 Sept. 1990)
  • “God works by faith. You must believe first, and then you’ll receive” -Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now, p. 33)
  • “You will often receive preferential treatment simply because your Father is the King of kings, and His glory and honor spill over onto you” -Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now, p.40)
  • “Remember, only what you give can God multiply back. If you give nothing, and even if God were to multiply it, it would still be nothing!” -Oral Roberts (The Miracle of Seed-Faith, p.27)

And my personal favorite, when Oral Roberts told all of his followers that he was going to die unless they sent him eight million dollars. There are a million newspaper articles about it, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted something more incriminating. I wanted to read about the incident in his own words. I didn’t have to look far. He literally wrote about it in his own autobiography:

  • “The Lord spoke to me near the end of 1986 and said, ‘I told you to raise $8 million to carry on My medical work. You have from January 1 to March 31 to get it done. If you don’t then your work is finished, and I am going to call you home.'” -Oral Roberts (Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry, p.289)

Yikes.

You read quotes like this and can’t help but feel angry. When the anger subsides, you worry about the people that they’re taking advantage of. Sure, some of them might be able to afford a donation here and there to support a charismatic speaker, but what about the people who are desperate? What about the woman who has cancer, trying to juggle her medical bills, sending “Rolls Royce faith” checks in the hope that thing will turn around? What about the poor man with brain damage who sends in any little bit of cash that he can in the hopes that God will miraculously restore him? I believe in miracles and tithing as much as the next pastor, but I’ve known people in these circumstances, and I’ve seen the damage that prosperity gospel preachers can cause. Here is a pack of wolves on the prowl for desperate, down-on-their-luck people. Not everyone has the gift of discernment, and they’re counting on that. It reminded me of another certain historical preacher that assured people that God would give them blessings if they forked over some cash:

You should know that all who confess and in penance put alms into the coffer according to the counsel of the confessor, will obtain complete remission of all their sins…. Why are you then standing there? Run for the salvation of your souls! Be as careful and concerned for the salvation of your souls as you are for your temporal goods, which you seek both day and night…

Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, ‘Have mercy upon me, have mercy upon me, because we are in severe punishment and pain. From this you could redeem us with a small alms and yet you do not want to do so.’ Open your ears as the father says to the son and the mother to the daughter, ‘We have created you, fed you, cared for you, and left you our temporal goods. Why then are you so cruel and harsh that you do not want to save us, though it only takes a little?

-Johann Tetzel , Sermon on Indulgences

Where’s a Martin Luther when you need him?

Insights from Old Sermons

~ Vincent

Deciding to post the entirety of a sermon series (The Gospel in a Postmodern World) was a task that took a lot more work than I expected. When I set out to do it, I thought, “All the work is already done! Since I’m moving to a new church, this will be an easy way to post stuff while I get accommodated to my new job.” WRONG! It took me AGES to get all of these sermons edited, transcribed, and posted. There was a lot of unexpected work that went into it, but I’m glad I did it. It was great to go back and look at some old sermons to let them sink in. Not only was it great to look at the material again (which I learned a lot from the second time through), but it was uniquely helpful to wrestle with them for such an extended period of time. Here were some insights I gained throughout the process that I thought were worth sharing.

1. Sermons are a lot of work.

Seriously, pastors are basically up there writing a book chapter by chapter each week. We might have different styles; some of us are writing a verse-by-verse commentary while others are working on a devotional and still others are doing totally different things, but regardless of which style someone uses, it’s a ton of work. We should remember that! As a pastor, I can verify that I feel guilty when I spend too much time on a sermon. Writing good sermons feels like the baseline for the job. The more you do on top of that, the successful you feel.

These seven sermons alone (35,000 words) measured up to a little under half the length of an average novel (75,000ish words) and was on-target for the length of a self-help book (30,000-60,000) or a shorter non-fiction book (40,000-70,000 words). That’s a lot of words! And this only represents seven sermons! Now, I preach for about 30 minutes each Sunday, which puts my sermon length above the average mainline protestant pastor (25 minutes) and below the average evangelical preacher (39 minutes), so my results are a little different than some others might be. Regardless of length or style, sermons are a ton of work, and it’s worth remembering that.

2. Sermons are their own medium

I know I just finished saying how sermons are like books, but they’re also not like books at all. Editing these suckers down to get them posted took a surprising amount of effort. A couple of them were already written, so I just had to do some light editing before I posted them, but the ones that weren’t written were put together using a transcription of the worship service from YouTube, and those ones were brutal to edit. Spoken words tend to be pretty informal. “Hey, how’s it goin’? You feeling tired today?” That sort of thing. There are also a lot of rules you can break while you’re speaking that are much harder to break when you’re writing. For example, writing in incomplete sentences are a no-no. They’re hard to read and look sloppy. On the other hand, when you’re speaking, you can throw around incomplete sentences all you want. If you’re taking a spoken piece and trying to transcribe it, you can try to really mash those incomplete sentences together with enough semicolons and colons, but it’s going to really hinder its readability. The spoken word just isn’t the same as the written word, and it takes some energy and creativity to translate one to the other.

3. Old Sermons Deserve More Attention

Sermons are one of the most disposable forms of media that I can think of. Books get read time and time again. Plays get performed over the course of a few weekends before the actors call it quits. Lectures from teachers and professors get used annually as long as they continue teaching the class. Even YouTube videos get watched multiple times if they’re good! But most sermons get exactly one day in the sun before they vanish forever. Sure, they’re often recorded somewhere, but very rarely does anyone go back and watch old sermons. Which is a shame! I found some really good stuff in here! And I’m sure there is a lot of really good stuff in all the old sermons out there that goes unnoticed just because their day in the sun has ended.

By no means am I saying that every sermon deserves to be played on repeat, but I am saying that I took a preaching class where I never read, listened to, or watched a single sermon that wasn’t given by myself or a classmate. I have a Master of Divinity degree and my coursework rarely had me looking at old sermons (with the singular exception of the required class on John Wesley to fulfill Methodist ordination requirements). By no means am I blaming any professors or the program I participated in. They had so much to teach already. I don’t blame them for not adding one more thing to the pile. There are a million things that deserve our attention in a given lifetime. We grab what we can and the rest slips by. I’m just saying that I hope to pay more attention to old sermons. There’s more there than most of us recognize.

Questioning Authority

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 13, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 119:161-168, Judges 17:1-13

Comedy of Errors at an Elegant Downtown Restaurant
The chair is really a table making fun of itself. 
The coat tree has just learned to tip waiters.
A shoe is served a plate of black caviar.
“My dear and most esteemed sir,” says a potted palm to a mirror, “it is absolutely useless to excite yourself.”

I remember my English teacher reading this poem by Charles Simic to the class back when I was a junior in highschool.  When he was done, he asked us what it meant.  One student said that maybe Simic was trying to talk about how objects take on their own personalities over time.  Not a bad guess, but the teacher just nodded his head and kept waiting for more answers, so we kept going.  Another raised their hand and suggested that the author was talking about how we treat objects better than we treat people.  Again, solid guess.  But still, the teacher just kept waiting with that stoic look on his face.  A few other people took a stab, but nothing seemed to satisfy him.  Finally, an uncomfortable silence settled over the room.  He said, “I noticed all of you were trying to tell me what the author meant.  What if he didn’t have anything in mind when he wrote this?  What if this is just a random thing he wrote down?  What if YOU’RE the one who has to decide for yourself what it means?”

He was introducing us to that classic dilemma within literature: where does the authority to declare the meaning of a piece lie?  Is it with the author, is it in the work, or is it with the audience?  If the author is the person who has the right to tell us what their piece really means, the best way to learn more about it is to read a biography about them.  The more we can learn about them, the more we can figure out what it was they were trying to get at.  But if you think the work itself has authority, you may not want to waste your time with a biography.  The author might have created something that they didn’t even fully understand!  Spending more time with the work itself will reveal things that they might not have dreamed of.  Pablo Picasso was famously in favor of this way of looking at things.  He would paint something and then critics would say, “Ah were you trying to get at this?” and he’d respond, “You know, when I painted it I didn’t think I was, but now that you pointed out it’s very clearly there.  You’re right.”   And then, of course, the meaning might rest with the audience.  Who cares what the creator wanted to say?  What do you experience when you’re engaging with the work?  How does it make you feel?  How does it help you to see things in a new way?  That’s what it’s all about.

Where does meaning lie?  Where is the authority: the author, the work, or the audience?  This question broadly correlates to three different eras that we’ve been talking about (premodern, modern, and post-modern).  In real life, we have those same three possible sources of authority available to us today.  We’ve got an author (God), we’ve got a work (creation), and we’ve got an audience (ourselves).  Where does authority lie?  Each era answered the question differently.

In the pre-modern world, especially from the Middle Ages until around 1700, it was broadly assumed not only that there was definitely an author of all of creation, but that author had the authority over everything.  If you look at the way their society was structured, it was deeply, deeply religious.  Political theory was steeped in faith.  The economy was highly religious.  Even their everyday language was constantly pointing to God.  Something as tiny as a basic greeting had a religious dimension to it.  Instead of “hello,” you might get something like, “God be with ye,” or “God save you.”  And why?  Because they assumed if you really want to understand things, you look to God.  God knows the meaning of everything.  Look to Him and you’ll know what’s going on.  You can see that attitude reflected so clearly in their writings.  I’m going to stick with poetry to explore the thought processes in each era because, you know, pick a motif and go with it.  John Dunn’s poem, Death, Be Not Proud, is a great example of thought in the Middle Ages:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me…

It goes on from there in that same general spirit.  What’s he drawing trying to draw attention to?  God.  We see this thing called death, and it might look scary, but it isn’t as bad as we think.  If you have faith in the author of creation, in God, you have to recognize that death isn’t anything to fear.  Look up to God and you’ll know how everything works out in the end. God makes sense of the world, even in the face of death.

Now let’s move forward to the Modern Era.  In the 17th through the 20th centuries, people started to think differently.  They said, if there is an author out there (and who can say whether there is or not), he doesn’t seem to do much.  Let’s not worry about authors.  Let’s worry about the work: creation.  Clearly creation has certain laws, regardless of where they come from.  If we understand those laws, we will understand existence.  So people set about uncovering those natural processes that governed creation.  

Some people think of this as a great scientific revolution.  A time of light, as opposed to the darkness that came before it.  I mean, the movement was called, “the Enlightenment,” so that’s certainly what they were trying to invoke, but I would push back on that.  Yes, there were some great advances in technology during this timeframe, that much is undeniable, but was it really as totally unprecedented as some make it out to be?  I don’t think so.  Science was advanced in startling ways in a lot of timeframes.  If it weren’t for the accomplishments of Medieval scientists that came before them, people like Alcuin of York, Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and others, much less the thinkers of antiquity and before them.  No, the heart of the movement wasn’t nearly as scientific as it sometimes presented itself to be.  No, the biggest difference was that philosophical change in perspective: the world is its own authority.  We just have to understand it’s laws if we want to live well. To see that in action in a very unscientific way, let’s take a look at Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

What’s Whitman excited about?  Nature!  This air!  This soil!  This blood!  Natural things are good.  There’s an earthiness that makes all of creation worth paying attention to.  It has value in and of itself.  Don’t look up!  Look out.  Look to creation.  It will tell you all of the meaning that needs to be known.

And then, of course, we have the Postmodern Era which we have discussed at length throughout this series.  That’s where you end up with poetry about shoes getting fed caviar.  What’s the point?  It’s up to you.  What does the work bring up in you?  What journey do you undertake internally when you encounter creation?  That’s what matters.

As you go through each era, you can see how people think about meaning and order.  The pre-modern mind saw a sacred order.  God at the top, everything goes around him.  The modern mind saw a natural order.  Keep the order in mind and you’ll figure things out as you go.  In the postmodern world, you make your own order, because there’s no natural logic to the things out here.  The world is what you make of it.

I know some of you may not be big fans of poetry, so thank you for suffering through those examples with me.  You can see these philosophical elements in any artistic medium, though.  I just chose poetry because I liked it and it’s short enough to get to quickly, but you can choose anything you like.  Think about literature.  Dante’s Divine Comedy is a perfect example of a pre-modern story.  A man goes through Hell, Purgatory, and then Heaven, detailing things along the way.  We’re literally observing the divine order at work.  You move into the Modern Era and you have Walden.  It’s just a guy living in the natural world.  The whole point is showing the beauty of living well within that natural order.  And then take something from today, for example, A Song of Ice and Fire a.k.a. Game of Thrones.  It may not be exactly a literary classic but it’s a story that got a lot of people’s attention.  Who’s the good guy in Game of Thrones?  No one.  There’s no divine order.  There’s barely any order at all.  Everyone is trying to seize power for themselves because where does power lie here? You.  You decide what the world is and you try to make what you can of it. 

You start in the medieval section and you will see art everywhere depicting divine beauty: Jesus, saints, and angels.  Then you move forward a little and what do you see?  Landscapes.  People want to capture the beauty of the natural world.  And the further on you move, the more you see the landscapes start to vary.  Artists like Monet and Van Gogh start to paint landscapes from perspectives that earlier artists would never have imagined.  And then, of course, you get to contemporary art and things just fall apart.  I saw one exhibit that was just a fence leaning against the wall.  If they didn’t have a plaque with the artist’s name next to it, I’d have assumed they were just doing construction!  I even googled it and found that exact fence on sale at Home Depot for $219.  You too can have an art installation in your home for the low, low cost of $219.

As we move through these different philosophies in each era, from seeing the authority in an author, to seeing authority in the work, to seeing it in ourselves, you would think it would be like a process of taking off shackles.  Theoretically, we should be the freest people of all time.  We should feel lighter than air!  We should be freer than ever since we’re only answerable to ourselves!  But if that’s the case, why is our Postmodern Era so typified by existential dread?  Why do so many people wake up in the morning and ask themselves, “What’s the point?  What am I even doing here?  What’s the point of any of this?”  It turns out, when we’re the only ones with authority and we invent our own meaning, it’s really easy to remember that it’s all nonsense.  We made it all up!  It’s pointless.  If we get frustrated or bored by what’s going on, the sheer arbitrariness of it all is right there, staring us in the face.  Is it any wonder that people can’t be bothered to enjoy a meaning that they know they’ve made up?  Why bother reading a book or a speech or short story when all of it is nothing more than an opportunity for me to expound upon myself.  Things feel pointless because in many ways, they are.  When the world is bound by the smallness of our own horizon, it seems so tiny.  We have nothing to live for!  We have nothing to die for!  It’s all tremendously shallow.  

This is not the first time that these sorts of ideas have taken hold.  There’s this temptation to assume that whenever something happens, it’s happening for the first time ever.  That’s rarely the case.  Here, we can see in the Scriptures a period not so very different from the one we inhabit; a period where people see no legitimate authority outside of themselves.  Let’s read through Judges chapter 17 carefully.

Now a man named Micah from the hill country of Ephraim said to his mother, “The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from you and about which I heard you utter a curse—I have that silver with me; I took it.”

Then his mother said, “The Lord bless you, my son!”

Right from the beginning, this story should strike you as odd.  What a strange opening!  A man steals his mother’s fortune.  It’s 1,100 shekels of silver.  We don’t need to do any kind of ancient conversion rate to figure out that this is a lot.  Near the end of this story, someone is promised ten silver shekels of silver annually for a job and he takes it without complaint.  If ten shekels a year is a decent wage for one year, this is massive!  He’s set for life!  But he stole it from his mother, who curses whoever took the silver, so he brings it back.  And what’s her reaction?  To bless him.

Why?  Returning the money you stole because you’re worried about a curse is better than keeping it, of course, but it’s not exactly an example of sterling behavior.  Maybe it’s worth lifting the theoretical curse over, sure, but giving a blessing?  Why?  He hasn’t done anything good!  He barely managed to avoid the obvious evil that he was headed towards!  He hasn’t earned anything!  Even though he’s a sketchy guy, he gets a blessing.  I’m sure only good will come of this.

When he returned the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, she said, “I solemnly consecrate my silver to the Lord for my son to make an image overlaid with silver. I will give it back to you.”

So after he returned the silver to his mother, she took two hundred shekels of silver and gave them to a silversmith, who used them to make the idol. And it was put in Micah’s house.

There has been some debate among commentators about what exactly was intended by the word “idol” in this particular story.  Is this idol intended to represent a being other than God, or is this idol a visual representation of the god of Israel?  I tend to assume the latter.  She essentially says, “Thank the Lord! I’ll have this idol made,” so to me that tips the scales towards an idol designed in service of God, rather than Baal or someone like that.  But here’s the thing, it doesn’t actually matter in the end. Either you’re making an idol for some other God, in which case you are guilty of breaking God’s law because you made you’re worshiping some other God, which is wrong, or you’re breaking the law by making an idol, which is against God’s law regardless of the intent you had when you made it.  

God explicitly forbids idols multiple times throughout the Scriptures.  It’s in the Ten Commandments!  Don’t make idols!  Why?  Because even if the idol is intended to serve God, idolatry fundamentally reverses the divine order.  God created us.  We are in his image.  When we turn around and create idols, in some sense we’re turning around and creating God.  We’re designing him in our image.  God is not subject to the smallness of our understanding.

The pattern of disordered behavior continues.  At first, a blessing went to a thief.  Now an idol goes to God because someone wants to thank him.

Now this man Micah had a shrine, and he made an ephod and some household gods and installed one of his sons as his priest. 

Even if I was right earlier and that first idol was intended to serve God, Micah has decided that one god wasn’t enough.  He’s filling out a little pantheon for himself, giving his main god some little friends.  Then he designs his own priestly garb and finds a priest to hire.  He’s got his own little religion going on!  And then we see the through line for the whole book of Judges:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.

This line appears throughout Judges, and it’s one of the last lines of the entire book: in those days, Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.  It’s not necessarily a reference to a physical King.  Not long after Judges ends, Israel does get someone to be king and God warns them that they don’t need a king over Israel.  He warns them that he should be their king and that any king other than him is going to make all kinds of mistakes.  But they tell God, “That’s a little abstract for us.  We’re not really into the whole ‘king we can’t see’ thing. We’d rather just get a physical king just like every other nation.  Thanks!”  So they get a king, and he’s pretty rotten.  The point here is not just that there’s no physical king; it’s that there’s no authority.  There’s no god that anyone really acknowledges.  They are their own authority.  They do what they want.

A young Levite from Bethlehem in Judah, who had been living within the clan of Judah, left that town in search of some other place to stay. On his way he came to Micah’s house in the hill country of Ephraim.

We’re introduced to this Levite, a priestly figure, out traveling around.  He’s looking for somewhere to stay.  We don’t know why, but we know he has responsibilities back home.  For whatever reason, he’s out and about and he meets Micah…

Micah asked him, “Where are you from?”

“I’m a Levite from Bethlehem in Judah,” he said, “and I’m looking for a place to stay.”

Then Micah said to him, “Live with me and be my father and priest, and I’ll give you ten shekels of silver a year, your clothes and your food.” So the Levite agreed to live with him, and the young man became like one of his sons to him.

Micah hires this Levite away from his responsibilities in Bethlehem. And notice that at the end, it says that this Levite became like a son to him. In Roman Catholic churches today, people refer to priests as “Father,” partially to show reverence to a religious authority, but here this Levite is just the opposite! He’s “like a son.”  This priest isn’t someone he’s going to submit to.  He’s hired a false authority for show, but he retains authority over this Levite. 

Then Micah installed the Levite, and the young man became his priest and lived in his house. And Micah said, “Now I know that the Lord will be good to me, since this Levite has become my priest.”

What an absurd statement we get to end this story.  This man has done nothing but break the God’s law since the story began.  He stole money from his own mother, he made an idol, he invented new gods, he started his own religion, and then he hired a corrupt priest to serve as the head of this new religion.  And he sits back and thinks, “Yeah, God must be pretty happy right now.”  Why?  He’s never done anything that God wanted.  He’s only done what he wanted.  He imagined what he thought a good divine order might look like, he usurped traditional elements and ritual to make it look like it had some dignity to it, and now he’s bought in to what he himself invented.  He’s not interested in worshiping God!  He’s only interested in legitimizing his own self-worship.

All too often, that is the way Christians approach church today.  Is there an interest in God?  In church?  In his divine order?  No.  But there is an interest in legitimizing self-worship with traditional elements and ritual.  We come to church with our lives just the way we like them and tell God, “I’m happy with the way I’ve arranged things.  I just need you to sign off on it.  Please tell me it’s ok to break your law.  You want me to be happy, right?  So approve of what I’ve done!  Tell me you’re happy.  Tell me you’re happy!  Tell me you’re happy!”

The whole thing reminds me of a theory by the famous mystic Evelyn Underhill.  She once explained the goal of life by telling people to map their lives out on paper.  Write the central element of your life in the middle, and then everything that serves that center all around the page.  For most people, their name goes in the middle of the page, and most events in their lives are intended to serve them.  God ends up in a corner of the page, propping up their ego.  In this model, the assumption people carry is that God exists to serve them.  People assume that if everything serves them, they will be happy.  Ironically, it makes them miserable.  We long for something greater than ourselves to serve.  As long as we’re using all of the elements in our lives to serve ourselves, we’re eternally frustrated by just how shallow everything seems.  If we want to make a better map, we start with God in the center and design everything in our lives around him. How are we serving him?  How is our life a part of something greater than ourselves?  Serving God brings joy!

I think she’s right. I think she’s absolutely right.  In a world where there’s a sense that we ourselves are the ultimate authority and there’s no meaning outside of ourselves, we Christians have the meaning of life at our fingertips!  But there’s a temptation to slink back and say, “Maybe they’re right.  Maybe I am the authority.  Maybe all of these religious trappings are intended to serve me.  God is here to endorse my order.  He’ll like what I do.  He’ll sign off on it.”

But if we do that, we are denying the world something it desperately needs.  People are waking up every morning asking, “What’s the point?”  People desperately crave to know that there’s a point to all of existence.  For crying out loud, they’re reading poetry about feeding caviar to shoes and they’re staring at gates!  We can do better than that!  People are seeking legitimate beauty!  Legitimate truth!  Legitimate authority!

We have to accept God’s authority to understand any of that.  We have to seek to serve Him, rather than ourselves.  There is an authority outside ourselves.  There is an author, and he carries incredible authority over creation, revealed to us most completely in his word.  The great missionary, Leslie Newbiggin once said, “If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure.” In other words, we can’t present a genuine Gospel to the world if we can’t trust that God’s authority, as put forth in his word, is actually legitimate.  No, we need to look to Scripture and see how the God that we claim to serve is communicating with us!  Talking to us!  Telling us what the point is!

Of course, sometimes, it’s hard.  Sometimes, the things God asks of us in Scripture are incredibly difficult.  Some of his ways don’t seem to serve our wants at all.  The world might look on and say, “What are you doing?  Why don’t you just live an easy life?”  Nobody remembers people who live easy lives.  Nobody writes stories about people that did nice, easy, normal things.  Nobody writes a book about someone who went and got coffee one day.  People read stories about heroes that slay dragons and save kingdoms.  People crave stories about people who overcome the odds for something greater than themselves.  That’s something we have the opportunity to do: to serve something greater than ourselves. 

For the past three sessions (not counting our Reformation Day detour), we’ve talked about Postmodernism.  We’ve talked about the ways that the church is, in many aspects, on the back foot.  We’ve talked about truth; in the postmodern world claiming to know objective truth is seen as arrogant.  How do we communicate in a way that seems humble without giving up on truth?  We’ve talked about sin; in a world where the assumption is society is the sole corrupting force, how do we acknowledge the sin that rests in the human heart?  Both truth and sin are complicated to discuss honestly with people outside the Church.  It violates popular thought in ways that are often seen as offensive.  But when it comes to authority, I think we may have something intriguing on our hands.  It’s something that doesn’t violate the orthodoxy of secularism in a way that’s obviously offensive, but is still outside of the norm enough to make people hesitate and ask, “What?”

If we started to live into God’s authority, REALLY started to live into it, we would probably be perceived as pretty weird people.  We’d be those Christians; the ones who take it a little too seriously.  Too often, we try to distance themselves from those Christians.  We try to seem religious, but not too religious.  We try to be approachable and cool.  That’s proven pretty ineffective.  Looking at attendance rates in larger denominations, the more a church ignores the uncomfortable bits in Scripture to seem cool, the more their attendance rates plummet.  The more a church presents a Biblical counterculture to the world, the more likely they are to grow.  I don’t mean to oversimplify things by suggesting that attendance proves that something is right.  Obviously popularity is a poor substitute for truth.  But I do mean to suggest that people outside the church are seeking more than just an institution willing to rubber stamp the dominant cultural order.  They’re actually more interested in a weird place that they don’t fully understand than they are a safe place where that affirms their own authority.  Weird isn’t all bad.

When you’re weird, you show that you’re willing to break from a status quo that’s proving itself ineffective.  You also become the kind of group that earns a second glance from people.  Have you ever stopped to look twice at something normal?  No!  Of course not!  You see a million normal things every day.  Why on Earth would you stop to look at one more normal thing any longer than you have to?  But something weird?  You may well stop and look for a minute!  This thing, foreign though it may seem, is different.  It’s got something to say.  That’s a huge advantage to the Church, if we’re willing to take it.

Some churches do, and it proves surprisingly effective.  I remember one Pentecostal girl in seminary that spoke very well on this.  When I met her, I asked her about tongues because that’s what you do when you’re talking to someone who’s Pentecostal!  You talk about tongues!  It’s a rule somewhere I think.  We chatted about it a bit before I said, “You know, it must be really hard to evangelize because that’s really out of the norm.  I mean I think it’s weird and I’m a Christian!  I already agree with you on like a huge chunk of things that non-Christian people don’t, and I think your understanding is, forgive my saying it, strange.  It must be infinitely more challenging to talk to non-Christians about your faith, since this is a significant part of it.”

She responded, “Are you kidding me?  It’s so much easier for me to evangelize.  People want to talk to me.  They come up and say, ‘You’re Pentecostal, right?’ and I say, ‘Yeah.’  And they say, ‘But you obviously don’t believe in that tongues stuff, right?’ and I say, ‘I don’t just believe in it; I’ve seen it.  Come and see!’”

I may not agree with the way Pentecostals understand tongues, but wow, that’s a good sell.  I almost went to church with her there and then.  “Come and see!” 

In a world that isn’t used to accepting authority outside of themselves, there’s a shallowness that many feel.  Increasingly, people crave something bigger than their own thoughts and whims, and we have something they’re looking for.  Something weird.  Something that should be forcing us to live in a way that’s totally different from the people around us.  If we’re honestly accepting the authority of God as presented in the Scriptures, people should have to look twice!  If we’re living the way that we’re supposed to, there should be conversations a lot like the ones she experienced.

“You’re a Christian, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But you don’t believe in any of that weird stuff do you?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait, so you actually think there’s a God that you can talk to and outdated laws he wants you to keep and an objective point to all of this?”

“I don’t just believe it; I know it.  Come and see.”