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A Fresh Translation of the Nicene Creed

By JMH on July 11, 2018 in Bible and Theology, Worship

The Nicene Creed
(Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan)

We believe in one God the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ,

the only-begotten son of God:
the one begotten from the Father before all the ages,
light of light, true God of true God,
begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father,
through whom all things came into being,
who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven
and became flesh by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,
and became man and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried,
and on the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures
and ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father;
and he shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead,
whose kingdom shall have no end.

And in the Holy Spirit,

the Lord and life-giver,
the one who proceeds from the Father,
who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified,
who spoke through the prophets.

In one holy, catholic, and apostolic church:

we confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins;
we expect the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the age to come. Amen.

—

Some notes:

In the fall of 2017 I decided to make my own translation of the Creed for potential use in worship at Kenwood Baptist Church at Victory Memorial. We discussed it as elders and agreed that for 2018 we would recite the Nicene Creed at the end of the worship service where we had been doing the Apostles’ Creed.

Being more familiar with the phrases of the Greek New Testament than with the Greek text of this Creed, what struck me most was how so many of these Greek phrases match up almost exactly with the wording of the Greek New Testament. We tried to preserve and communicate this in our translation.

I made the initial translation from the text in Schaff’s Creeds of Christendom, which does not include the filioque (“and the son” after “the one who proceeds from the Father” in the statement on the Holy Spirit). I then sent the translation to my fellow elder Denny Burk, who worked over it, caught some errors I had made, and we had a healthy discussion about whether to use “seen and unseen” or “visible and invisible.” You can see from the translation where we came down.

Denny then had the idea to send the translation to Scott Swain, Fred Sanders, and Michael Haykin to get their input. We wanted to make sure we weren’t missing something, and we wanted their opinion on the filioque clause.

At the end of the day, we decided not to include the filioque in our translation. We did not leave it out because we do not believe it. We think the idea is taught in John 14–16. We left it out for reasons like these: first and foremost, it wasn’t in the original text we were translating. Second, whereas the Creed was universally accepted, there wasn’t universal agreement on the inclusion of that clause, and we see leaving it out as a way to avoid unnecessary disagreement.

Matt Damico and I then went over the translation and eliminated many unnecessary commas.

We want to confess the faith that has been handed down to us in unity with believers across space and through time. We want to do this week after week until these words become part of the fabric of who we are. The repetition of the creed weekly in worship will, hopefully, result in many of us memorizing it, so that its phrases flow from our lips and its vocabulary structures our thinking.

May the Lord build up and bless his people on the knowledge of him.

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The Lord’s Supper

By JMH on July 9, 2018 in Biblical Theology, Church

The early Christians met on the first day of the week for the breaking of bread and instruction in the Scriptures (Acts 20:7; cf. Justin Martyr 1 Apol. 67). This breaking of bread was in obedience to the instruction of the Lord Jesus, who told his disciples to do so in remembrance of him.

Celebrating the Passover meal at the Last Supper (Mark 14:14), Jesus had taken the unleavened bread that commemorated Israel’s hasty departure from Egypt and declared that it no longer represented the exodus from Egypt but now symbolized his body. This took place “on the night when he was betrayed” (1 Cor 11:23). He would be crucified the next day, and that reality informed his breaking of the bread and saying the words, “This is my body which is for you” (11:24).

Jeremiah had prophesied that God would save his people in the future in a way that would make them stop identifying Yahweh as the God who brought them out of Egypt. Instead, they would identify Yahweh as the God who had accomplished for them this new, definitive salvation that would bring them into the land of promise (Jer 16:14–15; 23:7–8). The authors of the New Testament present Jesus accomplishing that definitive new-exodus salvation by his death and resurrection, which will return his people from exile that they might inhabit a new heavens and new earth forever. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus transformed the feast that commemorated the exodus from Egypt into a feast that celebrated the exodus he would accomplish in Jerusalem (Luke 9:31).

When Paul wrote the words, “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you” (1 Cor 11:23), he established the point that the celebration of the Supper was given by Jesus to him as an Apostle with the intention that he and the other Apostles would institute this tradition wherever followers of Jesus met to worship him. The bread that Jesus took (11:23) would have been the unleavened bread that symbolized Israel’s hasty departure from Egypt (cf. Exod 12:7–12). The giving of thanks Paul mentions (11:24) was likely one of the traditional prayers that accompanied the Passover meal.

Read from this perspective, when Jesus says, “This is my body which is for you,” he means something like this: eating the unleavened Passover bread helped us remember and celebrate our hasty departure from Egypt when God delivered us from slavery, but I am instituting a new feast that replaces the old one; in this new feast the broken bread is to help you remember and celebrate my broken body by which God delivers you from slavery to sin. Thus when Jesus says, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Cor 11:24), he means for his disciples to remember his death on their behalf. Further supporting this view is Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 11:26, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” The bread is a symbol of the broken body of Jesus. He who eats the bread does so to remember the death of Jesus in his place. He who eats the bread proclaims that death to others.

Paul presents Jesus taking up what commemorated the exodus from Egypt and turning it into a commemoration of his death on behalf of his people: “Do this in remembrance of me” (11:24). No longer would the people of God celebrate the Passover to remember the exodus. They would now celebrate the Lord’s Supper to remember the cross, where the exodus type was fulfilled.

Just as Old Testament Israel was instructed to celebrate the Passover to commemorate the exodus from Egypt, Jesus instructed his followers to “do this in remembrance of me” (1 Cor 11:24). Just as the exodus from Egypt was accompanied by Yahweh’s initiation of the Mosaic covenant with his people at Sinai, the new exodus Jesus accomplished was accompanied by the initiation of the new covenant, as can be seen from what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11:25, “In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’” The cup, of course, is not literally the covenant (nor does the cup somehow become the covenant). Rather, the fruit of the vine in the cup symbolized the blood of Jesus shed on the cross: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (11:25). Just as the old covenant was inaugurated with blood (e.g., Exod 24:8), Jesus announced that the new covenant in his own blood would be inaugurated by his death on the cross (cf. Heb 9:11–28). Those who quaff the cup relish the fellowship of new covenant anticipation of the return of Christ and the consummation of his kingdom (Luke 22:18).

In his comments on the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians, Paul teaches that the Supper reflects the unity of believers with Christ and one another, demanding their separation from idolatry (1 Cor 10:14–22), destroying socio-economic dividers (11:17–22), rehearsing the self-giving redemptive sacrifice of Christ (11:23–26), and thereby urging believers to follow Christ in laying down their lives for others (1 Cor 11:27–34).

Related:

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J. K. Rowling Tells the Truth . . . In Her Fiction

By JMH on July 18, 2017 in Cultural Engagement, Literature

J. K. Rowling tells the truth in her fiction. Her twitter feed is another matter. Perhaps the limitations of the genre don’t allow her to communicate the nuance, sensitivity, and charity that characterize her fiction. Whatever the case, there’s a chasm between what she writes in her novels and what she tweets.

In her fiction, Rowling treats even Voldemort sympathetically. She takes nothing away from the evil he chooses to pursue, nor does she make the reader delight in his wickedness. What she does is put the reader in position to understand how Voldemort got to be so bad. She shows us the way he was wronged, helps us understand how needy he felt, and traces the steps he took—wrong steps, selfish steps, willful steps—that led him down the path of cruelty. Voldemort is evil, but Rowling presents him such that her readers understand the choices he made even as they hope for his demise. We feel sad that Tom Riddle chose so poorly, even as we love the good things he seeks to destroy. He’s the villain pure and simple, but still it can be said: J. K. Rowling loves Voldemort and respects him. She treats him with the honor and dignity due to a human being, even one who has literally dehumanized himself.

Perhaps, in spite of what she tweets, she has a similar understanding and sympathy for those whose politics differ from her own.

It seems to me that the twitter feed has led to some mistaken impressions about the meaning of the literature. Ross Douthat takes the Harry Potter stories as an allegory about the ruling elite’s struggle to deal with flyover country. Hillary Clinton thinks they instill progressive values in the young. Others have referred to the Potter stories as “secular” and suggested that their worldview is thin.

In what follows I want to argue that J. K. Rowling’s Christianity comes through profoundly in her fiction (the Cormoran Strike novels included) in a way that subverts the worldview of the political left and softens callused hearts on the right. The deep meaning of the stories, however, transcends today’s political streetfights, tells the truth about the world, challenges the secular premises of our age, and insures that these novels will stand with the greats of the western literary canon.

A Secular Age?

Charles Taylor has described the “buffered self” and the “expressive individualism” of the “exclusive humanism” of our culture. These terms describe the way many in our culture try to explain the world without any appeal to the divine or the transcendent (exclusive humanism), the way people live for themselves rather than for God, nation, or family (expressive individualism), and the way people think they are not vulnerable to influences beyond what they can see (buffered self).

Who embodies these secular perspectives in the Potter stories? Well, the Dursleys refuse to believe in magic, even after they have the pig’s tail removed from Ickle Diddykins, and Lord Voldemort lives only for himself, to extend his life however many people he must kill, however he must rip his own soul to shreds. J. K. Rowling is not exactly lionizing the progressive ideal.

The Potterverse is not the kind of place where everything that exists can be explained by scientific analysis, naturalistic evolution, and materialistic determinism. The Hogwarts saga is set in a world full of magic, a world not so much different from one in which, to borrow from N. D. Wilson, “Apple trees turn flowers into apples using sunlight and air.” J. K. Rowling’s world is full of magic, just like the one we inhabit. (By the way, the magic in the Potter stories is just like the magic in Narnia and Middle Earth. This is not the kind of magic the Bible condemns, which seeks to manipulate demonic powers. Rather, people who do magic in these stories have gifts, abilities, and they choose to use their gifts for good or bad causes).

Charles Taylor also spoke of the “cross pressure” people feel when the divine and the transcendent foist themselves on those trying to live in a world without anything like God. J. K. Rowling’s stories are saying to all such people, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The Progressive Worldview Subverted?

If there is anything that characterizes the left, it’s the idea that government can and should address the world’s problems. With the right people in power, the correct values imposed on the populace, and the best political system enacted, just outcomes can be insured for all people. Well, at least all the people the government deems worthy of justice.

If there is anything that characterizes the Harry Potter stories (and the Cormoran Strike novels), it’s the idea that no one should look to the government to fix anything. The government in the Harry Potter stories is worse than just neutral, it’s populated by fools and supporters of the Dark Lord, pursues cruel and wicked policies, and eventually becomes Voldemort’s own tool. In the Cormoran Strike novels, the authorities bumble along drawing wrong conclusions, resisting the force of truth, and impeding the course of justice.

Are these kinds of stories we expect from someone who believes the government can fix everything? For the left, the government replaces God, and politics replace religion. Not so in J. K. Rowling’s fiction. In her fiction, the government values itself, not the people. What the government seeks to do is make itself look good and maintain its own power not make life better for the people. And when things finally do get better in a Rowling novel, whether it’s the downfall of Voldemort or the solving of a crime, the achievement belongs not to government but to individuals who love truth, goodness, and beauty and risk their own lives for things that matter more than their own safety.

For progressives, the media—newspapers, journalists, talking heads—are looked to as a source of truth. People look to the news to find out what is happening and for help in processing how to respond. Information, values, opinions, and feelings are all shaped by those who do the reporting.

For J. K. Rowling in her fiction, the media are a pack of self-serving wolves preying on the populace. They live under the thumb of the government and are easily manipulated by anyone with power or money. In both the Potter and Strike novels, the press is mainly interested in clickbait, not truth. The Daily Prophet won’t, or can’t, report what is really happening. It opposes the good guys and shapes the opinions of the public in favor of Lord Voldemort against Harry Potter. The press in the Strike novels are bloodthirsty paparazzi and reporters who delight in ruining people’s lives.

Most people in the Potter stories and the Strike novels are treated sympathetically by J. K. Rowling. Not so with government officials or members of the media.

Whatever might be concluded from her twitter feed or other public statements she makes, in her fiction J. K. Rowling teaches that no one should expect help from the government, and no one should expect truth from the media.

Softening Hard-Hearts on the Right?

Have you read the Potter stories? Have you re-read them? (You can thank me when you’ve done so.) Have you noticed how your sympathy for different characters deepens as you encounter and re-encounter them? You sympathize with a werewolf, you lament that Tom Riddle’s mom didn’t love him the way Harry’s did, you see how Hagrid’s optimistic devotion tames Grawp, you feel the force of what Hermione says about house elves as you come to know Dobby and Creature, and you rejoice at the way Harry Potter honored two of the bravest men he’d ever known, headmasters of Hogwarts, one a vampire, the other outed by his author as gay.

Having said all this, it must be said again: in no way does J. K. Rowling provoke an appetite for evil. She shows what evil does, it gets people killed, people we love, people we know are needed by characters we care about.

In the Potter stories, love is the greatest magic. So Rowling said she always thought of Dumbledore as gay. He’s a celibate, single, wise old man who repeatedly refused the post of Minister of Magic (because he didn’t trust himself with power, and because government never does good). Dumbledore never gives any indication that he wants to redefine morality, and he even takes steps to protect himself from becoming too attached to his students, in the process protecting them from his own weakness. If I may be allowed to put it this way, Albus Dumbledore looks like a man who embraces traditional Christian morality who is struggling well against same sex attraction.

The reader who sees all this will grow in understanding, sympathy, and have his hard heart softened. But nothing in the Harry Potter stories or Cormoran Strike novels redefines morality, promotes a sexual or moral revolution, or advocates government takeover.

Telling the Truth about the World

If this has not been controversial enough, let me suggest that in Career of Evil, under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, J. K. Rowling has subverted the premise that undergirds all things Trans—transgender, transable, transracial, transwhatever. She accomplishes this through the fact that the main character of the stories, Cormoran Strike, lost half a leg in the war in Afghanistan.

In the course of an investigation, Strike comes into contact with people from the “transabled” community dealing with “Body Integrity Disorder.” These people want to have parts of their bodies amputated—working parts of their bodies.

The people Strike encounters have heard lies about Strike. They have been told that Strike was not injured in the war but is like them, someone who “needed” to have a working part of his body removed. As if a human “needs” to be disabled. The audience naturally sympathizes with Strike, and Rowling rehearses how as he recovered in the hospital he saw so many men who had been disabled, men who would have preferred to have been whole.

Strike’s reaction to the transabled is bracingly real. His assessment is that such people do not need help having body parts removed, they need mental and emotional help.

I submit that this fictional account argues that people should not seek to remove body parts or alter their sexual or racial identity but embrace what God has made them to be.

Great Literature

So much more could be said about these novels and topics, but I will conclude by echoing the sentiment of the Dean of Harry Potter Scholars, Hogwarts Professor John Granger: J. K. Rowling is the Charles Dickens of our time, and Harry Potter is the “shared text” of the 21^st century. As of May 2013, the series had sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, making it the best selling series in history, and there is no indication that it’s losing steam. Go to your local bookstore and note the many prominent displays of Harry Potter books.

From open to close, the series is about the greatest kind of love, the kind where people lay down their lives for others. Moreover, there is an alchemical undercurrent of meaning that lies below the surface of the gripping stories. That undercurrent is all about Harry Potter being refined in the fires of testing until he has been transformed from base metal to pure gold. The pure gold is Christlikeness, as Harry Potter’s furious desire to live takes the form of his readiness to die.

I love these stories. I talk about the Harry Potter novels all the time—to my kids, in my teaching and preaching, and with friends, and I’m eagerly anticipating Book 4 in the Cormoran Strike series. If you’ve not yet read Harry Potter, you are in for such a treat. These books will make you better: better at loving, better at living, and better at worshiping God the Father through Christ the Son in the power of the Spirit.

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The Nicene Creed: A Not Too Difficult Greek Challenge

By JMH on November 28, 2016 in Bible and Theology

The Nicene Creed is pretty easy to read for anyone who has had a bit of Greek.

Why not try to read it?

Here you go:

Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα ΘΕΟΝ ΠΑΤΕΡΑ παντοκράτορα, ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς, ὁρατῶν τε πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων.

Καὶ εἰς ἕνα κύριον ἸΗΣΟΥΝ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΝ, τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ θεοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων, φῶς ἐκ φωτός, θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ, γεννηθέντα, οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ πατρί· διʼ οὔ τὰ πάντα ἐγένετο· τὸν διʼ ἡμᾶς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ διὰ τὴν ἡμετέραν σωτηρίαν κατελθόντα ἐκ τῶν οὐρανῶν καὶ σαρκωθέντα ἐκ πνεύματος ἁγίου καὶ Μαρίας τῆς παρθένου καὶ ἐνανθρωπήσαντα, σταυρωθέντα τε ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν ἐπὶ Ποντίου Πιλάτου, καὶ παθόντα καὶ ταφέντα, καὶ ἀναστάντα τῇ τρίτῃ ἡμέρᾳ κατὰ τὰς γραφάς, καὶ ἀνελθόντα εἰς τοὺς οὐρανούς, καὶ καθεζόμενον ἐκ δεξιῶν τοῦ πατρός, καὶ πάλιν ἐρχόμενον μετὰ δόξης κρῖναι ζῶντας καὶ νεκρούς· οὗ τῆς βασιλείας οὐκ ἔσται τέλος.

Καὶ εἰς τὸ ΠΝΕΥΜΑ ΤΟ ἌΓΙΟΝ, τὸ κύριον, (καὶ) τὸ ζωοποιόν, τὸ ἐκ τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον, τὸ σὺν πατρὶ καὶ ὑιῷ συν προσκυνούμενον καὶ συν δοξαζόμενον, τὸ λαλῆσαν διὰ τῶν προφητῶν· εἰς μίαν, ἁγίαν, καθολικὴν καὶ ἀποστολικὴν ἐκκλησίαν· ὁμολογοῦμεν ἓν βάπτισμα εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν· προσδοκῶμεν ἀνάστασιν νεκρῶν, καὶ ζωὴν τοῦ μέλλοντος αἰώνος. Ἀμήν.

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An Open Letter to Airbnb on Their Bias and Discrimination

By JMH on October 31, 2016 in Cultural Engagement, Current Events, Marriage

This morning I received an email from Airbnb on their new Church Covenant, er, “community commitment.” As I have settled convictions against their statement of faith and cannot live by their church covenant, I am happy to resign my membership in their church. I do so with the following open letter:

Dear Airbnb,

Your new community commitment discriminates against any person of the historic faiths of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity who remains committed to the moral teaching of those faiths.

Christianity and Judaism uphold the sanctity of marriage as a union of one man and one woman, and like Christianity and Judaism, Islam holds that God created human beings as male and female.

Your new policy on “discrimination” and “bias” does nothing but embrace the “bias” of those who believe other things—things pertaining to transgenderism and gay marriage.

So you may think that your policy is enlightened and kind, but all you have really done is trade one set of moral standards for a different set.

And in the application of your new moral standards, you are not achieving your “commitment” to “treat everyone . . . with respect, and without judgment or bias.” Instead, you are exercising “bias” and acting on a moral “judgment” that condemns everyone who adheres to the teaching of Christianity and Judaism (and at points Islam, which holds to the gender binary, condemns homosexual activity, but also embraces polygamy).

You are biased. Your policy is judgmental. And your new morality will be far more harmful than the one you have rejected in favor of this new moral code that belongs only to the religious adherents of late-modern secularism.

I refuse to commit myself to your newly invented moral code, which has been dictated by the false gods of secularism. In my view, your gods are no gods, and your worship of them is merely idolatry. You may, of course, cancel my Airbnb account.

Sincerely,

James M. Hamilton Jr.

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It’s Not a J. K. Rowling Novel

By JMH on August 3, 2016 in Art, Books, Literature

The title of this post says what you need to know about this play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, bearing the ascription, “based on an original new story by J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Jack Thorne; a new play by Jack Thorne.”

Here are my complaints, as they come to me:

The characters are flat and boring and say the kinds of dumb things we say in real life with all our cliches and banality. These hacks have the same names, but they are nothing like the surprising, funny, noble, sincere, honest, endearing, real characters in the Rowling novels. One of the bad guys in the novels tells Harry that if he’s going to use an unforgivable curse, he has to mean it. These characters don’t seem to mean it.
The plot fails to grip. The book arrived on my doorstep last night. We got the kids in bed, and I started reading around 10pm. At the end of Act 1, I went to bed. It was about 11:30. And I had done other things than read in that hour and a half. If this were a J. K. Rowling novel, I would not have been able to put it down to do other things, and I would not have gone to bed at 11:30. I likely would have read into the early morning, unable to stop until I simply couldn’t read any more. But this isn’t a Rowling novel.
The plot fails to convince. In a Rowling novel, the spell is cast convincingly and both the story-world and the events that take place in it so fit that we never pull up from the book and say to ourselves: that would never happen. Or: there’s a simpler fix for all this. Or: this is preposterous. Or: I don’t think these characters would act in these ways. Everything in a Rowling novel is right and feels inevitable. She does the necessary work to set us up, and she does it in a beautiful way. But this play by Jack Thorne isn’t a novel by J. K. Rowling, so I repeatedly found myself broken out of the weak spell of its world, unconvinced by the unnecessary events, the dumb solutions, and the trite words and actions of the characters.
Whatever has been said about him since the end of Book 7, Ron Weasley is a great guy in the Rowling novels. He’s a big enough person to be normal around the boy who lived when he first meets him, and then at the end of the first story sacrifices himself for his friends. He is funny, principled, heroic, and true to the right. His barbs toward enemies have teeth, and his dialogue is sharp and witty. In this stupid play Ron is a worthless doof of a loser. That’s not fair to him, and I don’t know why J. K. Rowling signed off on letting this be done to someone she cared so much about as she wrote those magnificent novels. She should have had more dignity. She should have loved Ron now as she loved him then. And she should not have let her name appear on this new play by Jack Thorne. She should not have let Jack Thorne and John Tiffany do this to her creation. And if it’s her fault it’s the way it is, she should have let the creation stand as it was rather than risk ruining it with this failed add-on.
Even worse than Ron is the way Harry is presented in this play. If he’s going to be such an incompetent father in this disappointment, why not just leave the hero alone and the story untold? I simply do not believe that the Harry Potter of those seven great novels would be as bad a father as this play tries to make him. The Harry Potter in this play never could have done what the Harry Potter in the novels did: The play-Harry could not have loved people, understood what was at stake, been taught by Dumbledore, and sacrificed himself the way the novel-Harry did. If he could have done all those things, he wouldn’t be the loser-dad the play-Harry is. So even though the play-Harry has the same name as the novel-Harry, they are not the same character.
Please. The adult novel-Harry would never say to Dumbledore-in-the-portrait: “I have proved as bad a father to him as you were to me.” I’m just not buying it. Adolescent Harry who didn’t know or understand the whole story could have blown up at Dumbledore the way he does when he throws a fit in his office. But then the rest of the story happened, and the characters both matured through their experiences and came to understand the necessity of everything that happened in the novels. In this play, the main characters are childish, even though they’re presented as adults. And these characters went through too much in those seven novels to be childish adults. Adults in our culture are childish, but adults in our culture haven’t been through what Harry, Ron, and Hermione went through, nor have they stood up the way the threesome did.
If J. K. Rowling wrote the lines of these characters in this play, she didn’t begin to approach what she achieved in the dialogue of the novels. So I’m inclined to think that either she didn’t write the lines and someone without her genius is responsible for the tripe, or that she’s too busy now, or that she failed to enter into this new story with all her emotional range and creative power. Because the dialogue stinks.
This play is a sappy, uninteresting attempt at sentimentality that fails to convince and just leaves me disgusted that someone would attempt to manipulate my emotions rather than earning the right to move me with real goodness, deep beauty, and high truth.

To sum up, the difference between reading a J. K. Rowling novel and reading this new play by Jack Thorne is like the difference between watching LeBron James play basketball and watching yours truly attempt the same. The one is dynamic, mesmerizing, awesome in his physical prowess and dominating presence. Thousands gather every time LeBron takes the court, and even more tune in for the spectacle. The other is the attempt of a guy in his 40s to get some exercise, not something even friends and family would have any reason to show up to watch.

Maybe Cursed Child is better on stage than read as a script, but I doubt it. Shakespeare’s plays do just fine when you read the script instead of seeing them enacted. Not this one. This is no J. K. Rowling novel. There’s no magic here.

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Will Following Jesus Make You Liberal?

By JMH on February 24, 2016 in Cultural Engagement, Current Events, Discipleship, Jesus

Susie Meister has explained how studying religion made her a liberal, with the result that she left the right, stopped voting Republican, and started voting Democrat. I want to provide an accurate summary of her concerns and try to provide the kind of things I would say in response if I knew her: if I was a trusted friend, her brother, or her pastor.

Summary

A lot of her post is personal narrative about how she campaigned for Bush, “represented the worldview of conservative evangelicals” on an MTV reality show, and then went off to study religion at the University of Pittsburgh. She talks about how people at her church warned her about liberal university influence, and of her confidence that: “surely a faith as strong as mine could stand up to academic scrutiny.”

She explains that “what happened . . . wasn’t an abandonment of [her] faith, but a shift in [her] understanding of Scripture.” From what she says in her post, she appears to have shifted from believing everything the Bible teaches (the position of her un-schooled Sunday School teachers) to believing the parts of it that would be embraced at the University of Pittsburgh. She describes reading the Bible “through unfiltered eyes” and learning “about scholarly investigation.” In the end: “[the evangelicals’] old Jesus looked nothing like [her] new Jesus.”

How did her new Jesus differ? She could “no longer reconcile

Jesus’s calls for non-judgment
loving your enemies
and taking up your cross

“with many of the Religious Right’s positions on

social services
women’s rights
and the LGBT community

She goes on to relate how “increased reading of the Bible correlated with greater passion for social justice–a trait typically associated with liberalism.” She describes her “worldview fall[ing] apart like a house of cards,” and states, “Now I no longer identify as an evangelical, but I study them for a living.”

She writes,

“Only after my doctrinal evolution did I realize I no longer aligned with the political conservatism for which I once literally campaigned. Jesus was a champion of the poor, the weak, the meek, and downtrodden. He encouraged his followers to ‘sell their possessions’ and give them to the poor. He hung out with hookers and crooks. The lifestyle of Jesus didn’t look anything like the politics of the Right.”

She voices some other concerns about the hypocrisy of evangelicals supporting the likes of Ronald Reagan the divorcee, Mitt Romney the Mormon, and Donald Trump the bragging adulterer. She concludes, “The life of Jesus simply didn’t reflect the agenda of the political right, so now neither could I.”

Response

I suspect that many people resonate with Susie’s concerns, and I don’t want to be antagonistic in the way that I address them. Let’s be friendly, and let’s talk about the ideas and issues, isolating them and understanding the choices that we’re all making.

As I listen to Susie, I hear four concerns that I would like to discuss with her. The first has to do with the way that Jesus lived, with his instruction to “judge not” in Matthew 7:1, and with “the Right” that Susie left behind. The second has to do with the shift she describes in her understanding of Scripture, the third with the relationship between the Bible and worldview, and the fourth with the influence of our families, our communities, and our teachers.

1. Jesus, Hookers and Crooks, Non-Judgment, and the Right

Susie is right that Jesus was a friend of sinners–and praise God for it! We’re all sinners, and what a relief that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim 2:5).

But what Susie doesn’t mention is that while Jesus engaged people where they were, he never left them there. Jesus told that woman he defended (it’s not clear the woman in John 8:1–11 was a prostitute) to go and sin no more (John 8:11).

That very passage also addresses the “non-judgment” issue. The defense Jesus provided for that woman against those who would stone her relied upon him judging that what those accusing her were doing was not right and them being convinced by his righteous appeal to the truth. The words of Jesus in Matthew 7:1 cannot mean: never make any kind of moral judgment. If they did, Jesus could never have told that woman (or anyone else) to stop sinning. But Jesus tells everyone to stop sinning–that’s a lot of judging going on!

Even the context of the statement in Matthew 7 shows that the words of Jesus can’t mean “never make any moral evaluations,” because Jesus immediately speaks of seeing specks (moral imperfections) in other people’s eyes. He doesn’t say “let’s all pretend those specks aren’t there,” but rather “get the log out of your own eye before you address he speck in your neighbor’s” (paraphrase of Matt 7:3–5).

Jesus is telling people not to be overly judgmental and ungenerous and self-righteous. Everyone makes moral assessments and comes to conclusions that can only be regarded as judgments. Susie does so in her post–she concludes that the judgments made by the left, for instance, are superior to those of the right.

I’m not a shill for the Republican Party, and this post is not for defending what they do.

I do have some questions, though, about life, sexual morality and marriage, and the economy that I hope Susie will consider:

Life

Jesus taught us to treat others the way we would want to be treated. Doesn’t this extend to the way we treat unborn children in the wombs of their mothers?
Susie rightly mentions that Jesus was a champion of the weak–is anyone weaker than the defenseless child in its mother’s womb? If Jesus is their champion we should do what we can to protect them too, right?

Sexual Morality

Jesus taught that God the creator made man male and female and said that the two should become one flesh (Matt 19:4–5). If we agree with Jesus, won’t we believe that the only appropriate way for humans to engage in sexual activity is within the context of a covenant of marriage between one man and one woman, right?
Would Susie agree that the Bible treats all sexual activity outside of marriage as sinful? Would she agree that the weak are the ones who are most often exploited and victimized by extra-marital sexual activity?

The Economy

The commands not to steal and not to covet make some assumptions, right? Don’t they assume that people are going to own things? (true socialism abolishes private property and everything is owned by the state). And don’t these commands also assume that other people are going to have some things we would like to have ourselves? (that is, isn’t the Bible forbidding certain responses to income inequality?).
Is it possible for the government to make things better? Are people who want the government to fix the world’s problems putting government in the place of God?

2. Understanding of Scripture

Susie talks about reading Scripture through “unfiltered eyes,” but none of us is really capable of this. We all have some kind of filter. I wonder if perhaps Susie has replaced a Sunday School filter with what she learned at the University of Pittsburgh?

The real question is this: are we going to believe everything the Bible teaches?

If we believe everything the Bible teaches, we won’t be captive to either the right or the left, the Democrat or Republican Party. We will have concerns that overlap with some on both the left and right, and then we will have to rank those concerns in order of importance.

The life of the unborn, the definition of marriage, and the free exercise of religion–the right to live out our faith–are the weightiest concerns facing our civilization. At present those concerns are shared by the Republican Party and not the Democrat Party. I wish the Democrat Party would share those concerns. It would make life better for everyone.

3. The Bible and Worldview

Susie speaks of having her “worldview fall apart like a house of cards,” and I suspect this was a direct result of the “shift in [her] understanding if Scripture.” God gave us the Bible as a worldview building book. If Susie became convinced that the Bible was not totally true and trustworthy, or if the “scholarly investigation” she learned about left the Bible in rubbles, then it would only be natural for her worldview to fall apart.

Every one of those challenges to the unity of the Bible can be answered. And I suspect that if Susie’s confidence in the Bible were to be restored, she would see that the house of cards was not the Biblical worldview she abandoned but the new one she replaced it with.

4. The Influence of Family, Community, and Teachers

There is more to Susie’s story than she related in her short post. But from that post it appears that at one time her church community held primary influence in her life and thinking, and then that primary influence shifted to a new community whose values she now shares.

She wrote, “surely a faith as strong as mine could stand up to academic scrutiny.” The issue is not whether her faith could stand the scrutiny but whether the truth claims she believed would be defended and maintained.

The reason Susie’s church family warned her about the liberal influence of the academy is that the liberals in the academy defend their own conclusions not the ones Susie formerly believed.

The history of ideas demonstrates that people will believe bad things if good things are not explained, defended, illustrated, and applied.

The problem was not a lack of faith on Susie’s part but the lack of diversity in secular universities. I suspect there is not a single evangelical who holds to the inerrancy of the Scriptures at the University of Pittsburgh. No one should be surprised when a school’s graduates believe what its faculty advocates.

So Susie, I hope and pray that you will reconsider the Bible. If those who defend it convince you that it stands, and it does, you might find yourself in a better place than on the left or the right. That is, you might find yourself in the arms of the Jesus of the Bible, at home in the true church.

If you’re ever in Louisville, I hope you’ll come visit us at Kenwood.

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Don’t Play Travel Ball: Stay in the Rec League

By JMH on February 9, 2016 in Discipleship

I have friends I respect whose kids have played (and some who do play) travel ball, and I mean no offense to them by this post. Nor am I categorically condemning their decisions and choices. I am offering these thoughts for parents who are considering whether to put their kids on a “competitive” team, or a “travel-ball” team, or a “tournament” team, or whatever it may be called in your sport and locale.

Don’t get me wrong: I love competition. I love excellence. And I want to provide the best competitive opportunities I can for my own kids.

I played two years of major college baseball at the University of Arkansas, and I’ve been coaching my sons in baseball and basketball for the last 7 years or so. These reflections grow out of my own experience playing and coaching and watching other families. My thoughts will be mainly applied to baseball, but I think they are valid for basketball, volleyball, soccer, lacrosse, swimming, and whatever else.

Here are 10 reasons I think you should keep your kid in the rec league rather than quitting it for travel ball. These are presented in the order in which I suspect most dads think about them, not in the order of importance I would rank them (#6 would be #1, and #4 would be #2).

Kids should play not work.

Growing up I loved baseball. I wanted to play all the time, until I got to college and had to do so. When I walked on and made the Razorbacks, the sport I loved to play became a year-round job. A job is not a game. We practiced a lot, doing as much as the NCAA allowed, all year long, in season and out.

That’s fine for an 18 year old on the cusp of adulthood, but there’s no reason to put a 7–14 year old through that kind of rigor.

After my first year of it in college, I found that what had been so fun because I had the opportunity to look forward to it in the off season, or even on days between practice or games, began to feel like a dreaded obligation that consumed a significant portion of every day.

The daily grind not only sapped the joy of the game, it was physically punishing. My arm hurt all the time, and I wasn’t a pitcher. The journey the Lord had me on led to me being cut from the team after I did not play summer ball following my sophomore year. I had played non-stop from the summer before my freshman year, through fall ball, winter weights, the spring season, then summer ball before it started all over in my sophomore year. I needed a break, and I wanted to be a counselor at a Christian camp that summer (Kanakuk).

The gods of baseball punished me for my lack of devotion. I was sad when the team cut me from the roster, but I was also relieved. I had my schedule back. So much time was freed up by not having to go to practice. I could now study what I wanted to study, and my classes were no longer determined by baseball practice. I could rest.

I’ve heard of travel ball teams that play 60 games in a summer—for kids under 10!—and then they practice at least once a week through the winter.

I’ve also heard more than one parent tell me that after a few years of travel ball, in some cases only one year of it, their son decided he didn’t want to play baseball anymore. I never felt that way until I got to college, but looking at the demands of travel ball, I totally understand how the kid feels.

That’s why I’m writing this post. I want your son to love baseball, to have the opportunity to be a kid, and to play the game as a kid. Baseball should be a fun game for him not a demanding job.

Keep him in rec ball, where he won’t get burnt out because he’s a kid facing the demands of a profession.

Your kid isn’t going pro (and that’s a good thing).

The percentages are outrageous. So many kids grow up dreaming, so few put on a big league uniform. No one should expect to make the show.

I grew up wanting to be a major league baseball player, and I’m so glad I never even got drafted. I spent my 20s laying the foundation for what I’m doing with the rest of my life, not bouncing around in the minor leagues. I got an education, got married, we started having children, and now I get to coach my kids.

If I was in the big leagues, my summers (and falls, and springs) would be dominated by an unrelenting schedule leaving no opportunity to coach my kids’ teams. Travel is not glamorous but grueling. How does a big leaguer have a family? And at best a professional athlete might play into his late 30s or early 40s, then what?

I submit that even with all the excitement of the game, and the money and fame that come with it, the life of a professional athlete is not one to be envied.

Don’t sacrifice your son’s childhood on the altar of the hope that he’s the next Derek Jeter. Have fun with sports, and use it to build character, not dream-castles in the skies.

Give your kid the chance to be a great person and cultivate that through sports.

If your kid does go pro, rec ball is the likelier path.

On the off-chance that your kid is a freak athlete with the arm strength, foot speed, power, stamina, and character, who gets all the right breaks at just the right time, chances are he’ll rise up through the ranks of rec ball rather than being groomed on the travel ball circuit.

Small towns breed professional athletes, and the reason seems to be that kids in small towns aren’t over-coached, over-organized, and over-specialized by the travel ball opportunities found in larger cities. Small town kids grow up playing lots of sports not getting burnt out playing the same one all year round.

Your family doesn’t need travel ball.

This is the one your wife wants you to care about. And you should. Your marriage matters a lot more than some sport your kid plays. What will travel ball mean for your marriage? What will travel ball mean for your other kids? If you’re coaching your 12 year old’s travel ball team, what does that mean for the rec league opportunities your 7 year old has? Do you want to miss the younger kid’s games and practices?

If you are traveling every weekend, or most of them, for a Friday, Saturday, Sunday tournament, what happens to non-sport family time? If you’re exalting baseball over all these other things, are you serving a false god, an idol, that is going to use you and then throw you away?

Is the travel ball opportunity your 7–14 year old kid has more important than Friday nights and Saturday mornings at home with the family? Is it more important than being at church on Sunday morning? (on which more below).

Your wallet will thank you.

I don’t even want to think about how much parents pay for their 7–14 year old kids to travel to tournaments, to stay in hotels, to pay the tournament entry fees, and whatever else all this costs. I am confident that there are better ways to steward those thousands of dollars.

You may be betting on the kid getting a scholarship. I’m betting you would be better off saving your money to help him with college expenses. Consider D1 baseball: each team is allowed a maximum of 11.7 scholarships, and those scholarships can be divided up between players. The roster includes 35 players, 27 of whom can receive scholarship money.

When I was playing at Arkansas, none of my teammates had a full ride from the baseball program. Not one. The only kind of baseball scholarship D1 programs offer is a partial one. That means that even if your kid is the best thing since Babe Ruth, if he goes off to play major college baseball, the baseball team isn’t paying all the expenses. And given the number of kids playing and the number of available spots, even a partial baseball scholarship is terribly unlikely.

You should be in church.

As a follower of Jesus, this consideration is the most important one for me.

I talked to a dad who was committed to having his family in church even when they were on the road—and he said they traveled as a family as often as they could—for tournaments. That’s commendable, but I suspect that those tournaments don’t always start the Sunday games at times that make finding a worship service possible.

More important than that, you and your family don’t need a summer long break from the life and fellowship of your local church. Christians need to be gathering with the same group of people every week to worship the risen Lord Jesus, to hear his word, and to fellowship with each other.

Kids need to see that Jesus and his church are more important to their parents even than baseball. Jesus is God not baseball.

You need the church, and the church needs you.

If you’re a non-Christian reading this post, don’t you want to live for something more than baseball? I would urge you to consider how trustworthy Jesus is, how he can reconcile you to God, how he has paid for your sin, and how his Spirit can enable you to love others and enjoy life with them in a gathering of people joined together at a local church. Baseball can’t raise the dead, but Jesus will do just that when he returns to make this world into the new heavens and new earth.

If you’re in Louisville, come check us out at www.KenwoodBaptistChurch.com.

Better to play more than one sport.

I’ve alluded to this somewhat above. Kids need to play more than one sport so their rotator cuffs can recover, so their elbows can rest, so they don’t have to have Tommy John surgery at 17. They need to run and jump and exercise other muscles than the ones required by baseball. They don’t need to have baseball practice every week all year long, and you don’t need to be their taxi for that every week all year long either.

Don’t dilute the talent pool in the rec league.

Part of the argument for travel ball is the appeal of better competition. As more and more kids get involved in travel ball, the best players are taken out of the rec league. It’s a vicious cycle. The best coaches and the best players stop playing rec ball in favor of travel ball, leading to fewer teams and a lower level of competition in the rec league.

Don’t cause the rec league to dry up.

This is related to the previous: the best players leave the rec league for travel ball, and then the mediocre players get tempted to do so, and then all the kids get burnt out and stop playing baseball. Thus the rec league dries up. Was it really worth it?

Don’t get seduced.

As I’ve talked to people about this dilemma, one friend proposed this to me: he said that I should start my own travel ball team, and I should commit myself to being “low-key” about it. Sound familiar? It did to me. Several dads had told me that they were leaving rec ball for a “low-key” travel ball team, or that they were adding a “low-key” travel ball team on top of the rec ball their son was playing.

But my friend who suggested that I do this also told me what was going to happen: he said I needed to understand that the other travel ball teams weren’t going to be low-key, so we would get pummeled at tournaments and probably lose every game. That would inevitably awaken the competitive impulse, leading to more practices, more effort expended, and the gradual creep to a higher key. He said he had seen it happen. Dads get into it for a little better competition not meaning for it to take over their lives, and the next thing they know their schedule and wallet are dominated by travel ball.

So I’m writing in the hope that you’ll see that rec ball is a better route. It’s better to honor God than to win, and it’s better for your kid to enjoy the game than for him to play at the highest possible level.

Conclusion

Do I think you are sinning if your kid plays travel ball? Not necessarily, but if your kid is in the 7–14 age range, I will suspect that you might not be pursuing the wisest course. I could be wrong. There may be instances in which it’s the right thing, and when a kid gets to be 15 to 16 years old, it’s understandable that commitment levels and demands are going to rise and choices are going to have to be made.

But I say be wise. Be a parent. And for the good of rec ball leagues everywhere, for the good of your family, and for the good of your kids, I would urge you to avoid travel ball until the kid is old enough to commit to a more demanding regimen. It seems to me that time comes in the mid to late teens, but that’s going to be a judgment call . . .

Bottom line: give your kids a childhood they’ll want to replicate with their own children not one they’ll react against.

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Great Books Selections for Fall 2015 and Spring 2016

By JMH on January 18, 2016 in Art, Books

When I was choosing which books to assign for Great Books at Boyce College this year, I googled the topic and surveyed the choices others had made. Teaching Great Books has been a joy to my heart. I was an English major, and I wish I could talk about these books like my teacher, the eloquent Skip Hays.

Here are the books we covered in the Fall of 2015:

Homer, The Illiad.
Pre-Christian violence and nobility in poetry that has been studied for thousands of years now, inspiring offshoots and firing imaginations as it supplied the straw for not a few bricks of literary metaphors, similes, and illustration. The Illiad shows that the adultery of Paris and Helen leads to the smoking ruin of Troy surrounded by its blood-soaked fields, Hector dead and Achilles hopeless.

Shakespeare, Macbeth.
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through fog and filthy air.” Brave Macbeth cannot maintain his resolve to “do all that may become a man” and no more, and his false face hides what his false heart knows. Temptation. Ambition. Marriage. Murder. And in the end we see the triumph of the faithful and the downfall of the traitors.

Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.
Old Fyodor was well acquainted with the dreamers who thought they could bring about a better world if only they could bring themselves to accomplish the worst crimes. All the “progressive” attempts to rationalize evil for the greater good are set forth in this 1866 masterpiece. And the harlot and the murderer find life together as they read the eternal Book. Lazarus, come forth!

Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
I agree with John Granger: the chronicle of the boy who lived is the shared text of this generation. Rich with biblical imagery and themes, laced with imagery and allusion to the western literary canon, the weak who love goodness, truth, and beauty overcome the strong who know only power and love only themselves. Love is the true magic, and the only person who really finds the Philosopher’s Stone is the one who seeks it to serve and benefit others.

Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
A flying Ford Anglia, a book within the book, and a hero who descends to the underworld to stab the snake in the head to save the girl. These stories get better page by page, book by book. As the characters grow the plots deepen in color and texture. Rowling’s seven volume accomplishment is unrivaled.

These are the books we will, Lord willing, consider this spring semester of 2016:

Beowulf.
The noble champion defeats the seed of Cain and then slays the dragon as his disciples, that is, fellow-soldiers, flee the scene. Douglas Wilson has proposed an intriguing chiastic structure as well as a convincing explanation of the author’s apologetic art.

Shakespeare, Hamlet.
Another tale of another murder of another king. The Bard shows that those who kill to get what they want never succeed. Many think Shakespeare was a closet Roman Catholic in officially Anglican England, but Hamlet is a thorough protestant–studies in Wittenberg, even.

Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
This novel gives a better feel for what life was like in Paris during the reign of terror than a history book ever could. The romance of resurrection shows the power and the glory of the love than which there is none greater, when a man lays down his life for his friends.

Tolkien, “Leaf by Niggle.”
Tim Keller discusses this short story in his book Every Good Endeavor. Tolkien depicts the frustration of work in a fallen world followed by the fulfillment of all our efforts in the new heaven and new earth. To be read repeatedly and slowly, pondered and treasured.

O’Connor, “The Displaced Person.”
How will the world treat a helpful Jewish servant? Harrowing, convicting, and thought-provoking. Vintage Flannery.

McCarthy, The Road.
A father and son on the road in a post-apocalyptic world. Headed toward hope, carrying the fire, enjoying the small things, and there is nothing the father won’t do to protect his son from roving bands of cannibals. McCarthy’s prose is a thing unto itself.

Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Had to put volume three of the Potter series at the end of the semester so that students could read books four through seven over the summer. Because they will want to.

Happy reading!

Comments { 5 }

Book Excerpt: The Final Page of With the Clouds of Heaven

By JMH on December 17, 2015 in Biblical Theology, Books

What a book the Bible is! There is nothing else like it. And to think that this unified book from the hands of so many individual literary geniuses transcends itself by imparting the knowledge of the living and true God. What a privilege to have such easy access to the text of Scripture in the original languages. For a taste of the Bible’s beautiful interconnectedness, here’s the final page of With the Clouds of Heaven: The Book of Daniel in Biblical Theology:

“The book of Daniel contributes to the Bible’s unfolding redemptive historical storyline. Like a plug in an outlet, the book joins itself to the Bible’s broader narrative, and as the currents course through the light of revelation shines on the way things will go until God brings about the promised consummation (see chapter 2). The literary structure of the book of Daniel (chapter 3) demonstrates that the biblical authors used wide-angle strategies to communicate (cf. chapter 9). The books of the Bible are like cathedrals, with architectural features that repay close examination. The four kingdoms prophesied by Daniel (chapter 4) are both historical and symbolic: historical in that they match the kingdoms between Daniel and the first coming of Christ; symbolic in that they encapsulate the tendencies and characteristics of the kingdoms of the world, which will continue until the kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. Daniel’s seventy-week prophecy (chapter 5) informs John, who interprets Daniel’s seventieth week as the inter-advent period (chapter 9). The one like a son of man seen by Daniel (chapter 6) is identified with and distinguished from the Ancient of Days in a way that would be mysterious until Jesus came as both son of David and the incarnation of Yahweh. The interpretations of Daniel in early Jewish literature (chapter 7) attest historical, typological, and eschatological interpretive strategies similar to those employed by the authors of the New Testament. The New Testament authors (chapter 8) provide a Spirit-inspired interpretation of Daniel that was learned from Jesus, and in Revelation (chapter 9) John uses Daniel’s language, imitates his structure, points to the fulfillment of his prophecies, and clarifies the meaning of his seventieth week. When we consider broader biblical theological and typological structures (chapter 10), we see that Daniel seems to have seen himself as a new Joseph, forerunner of the new exodus.

God accomplished the anticipated new exodus salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and he will yet once more shake the heavens and the earth as he did at Sinai. Then the kingdom that cannot be shaken (cf. Heb 12:26–28) will fill the earth, and the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the dry lands as the waters cover the sea.”

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Is Biblical Faith a Kierkegaardian Leap?

By JMH on December 14, 2015 in Bible and Theology, Biblical Theology, Discipleship

These reflections were prompted by the first chapter of David Crump’s Encountering Jesus, Encountering Scripture: Reading the Bible Critically in Faith.

In his introduction, Crump is very clear that his understanding of faith has been heavily influenced by Soren Kierkegaard. Crump explains,

“Arriving at faith in the Word incarnate is not the inevitable result of a logical syllogism and doesn’t follow as the obvious sum of a line of convincing evidence. It is always a step, perhaps even a leap, across an otherwise unbridgeable gap.”

To test this, I want to compare it with Adam’s faith-response in the naming of Eve. Arguments similar to the one I’m about to make could be pursued with Abraham’s faith-response to the promise of Isaac and with Abraham’s faith-response when he was commanded to sacrifice Isaac, but to keep this manageable I will limit myself to Genesis 3.

In some ways this is less about Crump and more about Kierkegaard, since these are Kierkegaard’s ideas that Crump has adopted and is heralding. The question comes down to this: does the Bible present faith as a leap or as something else? What that something else might be will become apparent as we continue, but those who would like a hint at where I’m going can take a glance at Romans 10:17 (and to anyone who wants to allege that Paul is controlling how I read narrative, I reply that Paul’s statements are summaries and interpretations of the narratives, meant to teach us how to read narrative–and turn the question back on my accuser: do you follow Paul or some other teacher?).

Adam had been told that he would surely die in the day he ate the fruit (Gen 2:17). He ate the fruit, then he heard the footsteps and hid (3:8).

When the Lord began to speak words of judgment in Genesis 3:15, he told the serpent that there would be enmity between him and the woman. Attentive readers might pause and ponder the fact that enmity seems to involve an ongoing conflict, which already begins to suggest that the death of Adam and Eve might not be immediate. That the author of Genesis intends to present Adam and Eve arriving at this conclusion shortly becomes apparent.

The suspicion that the death of Adam and Eve will not be immediate is confirmed by the next words of Genesis 3:15, where the Lord tells the serpent that along with the enmity between serpent and woman, there will be enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. This means that neither Adam nor Eve face immediate execution, for both are necessary for offspring to be born. In the final statement of Genesis 3:15, the serpent is told that he will receive a head wound from the seed of the woman, only delivering a heel wound himself, suggesting that the seed of the woman will defeat him.

When God speaks to the man and woman, the idea that though they will eventually die, their death is not immediate, becomes a necessary working assumption. The Lord tells the woman she will have pain in childbearing and a difficult relationship with her husband in 3:16, then he tells the man that his toil will be painful and eventually he will return to the dust from which he was taken in 3:17–19.

So Moses has presented these characters as going from the expectation of immediate death on the basis of what God had said in 2:17 and what they did in 3:6, to now having reason to think, to believe, that they would live, have at least one child, and that this seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent, hopefully triumphing over and defeating the one who brought evil into the world.

The next thing Adam does in Genesis 3:20 is give his wife a name that sounds like the Hebrew word for “life,” accompanied by the explanation that “she was the mother of all living.” They expected to die, but now they believe they will live. On what is their faith that they will live and have children, with the hope that the child will triumph, on what is that faith based?

Is that faith a leap?

Rather than being a leap, Adam’s act of faith in the naming of Eve was a response to the word of God.

God made a statement that Adam and Eve had reason to believe. The word of God prompted their faith. Faith came by hearing, and hearing by the word promising a future redeemer.

Kierkegaard was an important philosopher who said challenging things to his generation, but when he talks about faith he does not present it the way the biblical authors do.

Comments { 5 }

Why You Need To Preach the Song of Songs

By JMH on September 21, 2015 in Biblical Theology

The smut is everywhere. On billboards, on TV screens, and eye-level in the checkout line at the grocery store, to say nothing of what is one click away on the device in your pocket or the screen on your desk. Beyond the superficial temptation of all the eye-catchers, the smut comes with a story. These sirens aren’t just singing an isolated hypnotizing song, they are selling a vision of the good life, appealing to your ideas about what pleasure is, about how you can have it now, and trying to convince you there won’t be a reckoning later. As though no one has ever foundered on the rocks trying to get to that shore.

These advertisements—from the billboards to the commercials to the mannequins—are all presenting themselves as icons that symbolize a wider story. They whisper in your ear: this is who you can be. This is how you can live. This is what you can look like. This is who you can have. And this life will satisfy all your longings.

But will it?

And if we’re convinced that there are longings deeper than the ones they’re stroking, how do we counter the intrusive message that saturates our surroundings? How do we convince other people that what they’re seeing is the harlot Babylon posing with that girl next door look? Can we woo them with something better, something that will entice them away from the lust that looses disaster?

Can I suggest to you that this is exactly why the Song of Songs is in the Bible?

What if there was something so beautiful it could break the spell of all that eye-candy? What if there was something so satisfying it would empower us to hear the siren song for what it is—an invitation to ruin and misery with the smoke of your destruction going up forever and ever?

Would God be so good to us that he would give us a book that could describe the lost intimacy of Eden? Not only describing it: holding it out as a possibility, offering it to us, inviting us to partake, inspiring us to imitate.

The Song of Songs, Solomon’s most sublime Song, is no more an isolated statement than those Viagra commercials are. The Song of Songs has to be read in the context of the story of the whole Bible.

That story starts with a couple in a garden, naked and without shame, in perfect harmony and bliss. Sin ruins their safety and shatters their intimacy, and they hide themselves from God and one another. God searches them out, and he promises a redeemer who will defeat the one who tempted them to sin. That redeemer’s line of descent is carefully traced, and eventually God promises that a descendant of David will rise up to redeem. When the prophets speak of what life will be like when he comes, it sounds like things will be better than they were in Eden before sin.

When God put that couple in the Garden in the beginning, he gave them to each other in marriage. Then when God made a covenant with the nation of Israel, he spoke of the relationship as a though it were a marriage. The unfaithfulness of Israel to the Lord was illustrated in the book of Hosea. The Lord commanded Hosea to marry a prostitute, and faithful Hosea stood for the Lord himself, while his wife’s promiscuity and unfaithfulness stood for Israel’s spiritual adultery.

The book of Hosea communicates the failure of the covenant between the Lord and Israel, leading to the “divorce” of the exile of the people from the land. There are plenty of indications in Hosea, however, that the Lord intends to make a new marital covenant with his people, after he has disciplined them for their sin (see esp. Hos 2:16–23).

If the book of Hosea presents a failed marriage, the Song of Songs presents a poetic success. The Song of Solomon depicts an idealized Solomon, scion of David, king in Jerusalem, who overcomes every barrier to intimacy between himself and his bride. This picture provides the wider backdrop that explains the way that carpenter’s kid from Nazareth came hailed as “the bridegroom.”

Once the Galilean had shown himself to be the long awaited Redeemer, the apostle Paul explained in Ephesians 5 that marriage exists so that the world will understand the relationship between him and his people: the new covenant between Christ and his Bride, the church. Then in Revelation 19 we read that the great celebration of his conquering kingdom is going to be a marriage feast.

The good life isn’t the lie of a non-stop, no-consequence orgy with the whore of Babylon. The good life is a permanent, exclusive, comprehensive union of one man and one woman in procreative marriage. In such marriages, husband and wife follow in the footsteps of the one who has made it so that the gates to the Garden of Eden stand open to those who keep his word.

Whatever those billboards say, your life is not about your looks and your identity and your pleasure. Your life is about God, in whose image you were made, and every marriage —including yours—is about Jesus and the church.

The Song of Songs is one movement in the Bible’s grand symphony. Heard in the context of the whole orchestral production, its movements, harmonies, and developments will ravish and purify, enrich and sanctify, deepen and delight. We need to listen closely. You need to preach it. So the Bride will be pure.

—

This article originally appeared at LifeWayPastors.com

On Wednesday, Oct 28, 2015, I’ll be leading a seminar on Preaching the Song of Solomon as Christian Scripture at the Expositors Summit at SBTS.

Comments { 6 }

What Does It Mean That We’re Made in God’s Image?

By JMH on June 9, 2015 in Bible and Theology

Here’s the opening of a piece I wrote for InTouch Magazine:

Sometimes a counterfeit helps us understand the purpose of the genuine object. People produce counterfeit money, for example, not to hoard but to exchange for things of value. And that should remind us money is not to be treasured for its own sake but used. Those coins and pieces of paper have no value in and of themselves. They are merely conveniences that allow us to exchange our labor and expertise for milk, eggs, gasoline, books, and other necessities and pleasures. The same principle holds true for copycats of the imago Dei—a Latin phrase which means “image of God.” To shed light on the original, let me tell you about the knock-offs, the cheap imitations.

The whole thing is here.

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The Song of Songs: A Biblical-Theological, Allegorical, Christological Interpretation

By JMH on March 29, 2015 in Biblical Theology, Books

Christians have long read the Song of Songs as music that sings of the one who so loved his bride that not even death could keep him from her. If Hosea could present his relationship with Gomer as a kind of allegory of the covenant between Yahweh and Israel, why couldn’t Solomon have done the same thing in his very positive depiction of the idealized king’s love for his bride in the Song?

Not only am I convinced that Solomon intended an allegorical layer of meaning for his poetry, I’m also convinced that he understood the importance of his role as Israel’s king, as the scion of David, and as one whose life and writings contributed to significant patterns of events. These patterns of events lay the groundwork for the assertion, “One greater than Solomon is here,” and such historical correspondences and escalations in significance are typological.

If Solomon intended the Song to be both allegorical and typological, we can describe it as Christological. My biblical-theological exposition of the Song, which has just appeared from Christian Focus, attempts to be faithful to the text and apply the truth of Scripture to the heart.

I pray the Lord will use this little book to help people feel his love, stronger than death, a flame no waters can quench, and I pray it will heal and strengthen marriages, guide and bless Bible studies, and bring glory to the Bridegroom whose voice made the Baptist rejoice.

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Can We Arrive at a Young Earth and 24-Hour Period Days in Genesis One from Scripture Alone? A Guest Post by Steve Ham

By JMH on February 23, 2015 in Bible and Theology, Creation

Steve Ham is the Senior Director of International Outreach at Answers in Genesis. It has been a privilege to get to know him and to enjoy his friendship.

—

I do believe the Bible gives ample justification for calculating the age of the earth at around 6,000 years and for seeing six normal 24-hour days in the week of creation. I also believe that this position most appropriately meets the confines of the textual boundaries and best upholds the doctrine of Biblical perspicuity.

How Old Is the Earth?

To suggest that the Bible does not directly teach the age of the earth is to suggest that we need an explicit statement of age. The lack of an explicit statement, however, does not mean that something is an unimportant or undecipherable teaching. Notably, the doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly stated in Scripture, but with careful synthesis it is clearly understood from what the Bible directly states. Using Biblical data—such as the genealogies in the Old Testament—we can, with insignificant variance, approximate the amount of time between Jesus and Adam.[1]

Then there is the discussion of the six days of creation. Those who believe the earth is billions of years old base their understanding on the varied ways the word “day” is used.

We do not need a catalogue of quotations to serve as an appeal to authority for either side in this conversation. As with many other doctrines in Scripture, we could list innumerable respected orthodox Christian scholars of the past and present and note their varying views. In many of these instances we can also identify influences that led them to those views. Significantly, since the early nineteenth century there has been an escalating proportion of Christian scholars holding old-earth positions. No matter how much we try to rise above them, we all have to battle with the outside influences of our day when we come to the text. Regarding the days of Genesis and the age of the earth, the scholarly struggle most visible has been with uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism became prominent in geology in the nineteenth century and holds that present processes dictate the way we understand the past. The quotations that follow (Augustine excepted) are presented to show that uniformitarianism has had an impact on the way many very respected godly Christian scholars and leaders have interpreted the days of Genesis 1. Consider the following:

Augustine did not hold to 24-hour periods in Genesis 1 and he could not have been impacted by uniformitarianism. But he did not hold to an old earth. He noted, “Creation, therefore, did not take place slowly in order that a slow development might be implanted in those things that are slow by nature; nor were the ages established at the plodding pace at which they now pass.”[2] Augustine talks of creation as more of an instantaneous event and held to the genealogies of Scripture to arrive at no more than 6,000 years for the age of the earth.
Edward J. Young, writing after the popularization of uniformitarianism, wrestled with views of the scientific establishment of his day: “For one thing it is difficult to escape the impression that some of those who espouse a non-chronological view of the days of Genesis are moved by a desire to escape the difficulties which exist between Genesis and the so-called ‘findings’ of science. That such difficulties do exist cannot be denied, and their presence is a concern to every devout and thoughtful student of the Bible.”[3]
Gleason Archer’s words reflect a similar struggle (although unlike Young, Archer did advocate a particular old-earth day-age position): From a superficial reading of Genesis 1, the impression would seem to be that the entire creative process took place in six twenty-four-hour days. If this was the true intent of the Hebrew author (a questionable deduction, as will be presently shown), this seems to run counter to modern scientific research, which indicates that the planet Earth was created several billion years ago.”[4]
R. C. Sproul, Sr. summarizes the difficulty that arises from the apparent discrepancy between the scientific consensus that the earth is old and his impression from the Bible that it is young:“When people ask me how old the earth is I tell them ‘I don’t know,’ because I don’t. And I’ll tell you why I don’t. In the first place, the Bible does not give us a date of creation. Now it gives us hints and inclinations that would indicate in many cases a young earth. And at the same time you get all this expanding universe and all this astronomical dating, and triangulation and all that stuff coming from outside the church that makes me wonder.”[5]

We are all situated within a historical-cultural context, and we all come to the Bible with assumptions and ways of thinking that seem obvious because they are taken for granted in our culture. To some degree we all have an “outside influence log” in our own eye. We must be aware of outside influences and test everything by the Scriptures allowing the Bible magisterial authority from start to finish.

The Genesis Week

The week of creation unfolds sequentially, day by day, as God prepares the earth, creates plants, speaks the heavenly bodies into existence, creates animal life, and makes mankind in His image. There is stylistic beauty to Genesis 1, but such does not require that Genesis 1 fall outside the genre of historical narrative where some who also question a normal week of sequential days have placed it. One can see the difference between poetry and narrative simply by reading Judges 4 and 5, which contain a narrative account followed by a poetic song—both speaking of the same event.[6] Genesis is a masterful literary work, structured in such a way to communicate rich theological truth. It is a text that is both historically accurate and theologically profound. Furthermore, Genesis 1 and 2 was a suitable historical reference point for Jesus’ argument about marriage (Matthew 19:4–6, Mark 10:6–9).

Exodus 20:11 and 31:17, which state God’s commandment for the Sabbath, are best understood in light of a literal creation week correlating to the normal week of an Israelite’s experience. McCabe notes, “He created the universe in six, sequentially arranged, normal days. Both passages use an adverbial accusative of time (‘in six days’). This grammatical construction indicates the duration of God’s creative activity by stating how long it occurred, ‘during six days.’ This construction, as Benjamin Shaw has correctly noted, ‘implies both that the days were normal days, and that the days were contiguous. Thus, the “dayness” of the six days, as well as the seventh, is essential to the meaning of the Sabbath commandment.’”[7]

I also believe the seventh day to be a normal 24-hour period. God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy. If we are to see God’s rest on the seventh day as an enduring or unending day of rest, we would have to ask the question, How then on this blessed unending day is the earth cursed with the fall of Genesis 3?

When Does a Day Mean a Day?

– Yôm (day) in the Old Testament generally refers to a normal day.

– When yôm is used with a cardinal or ordinal number, it refers to a normal day.

– When yôm is used with the words morning, evening, or night, it refers to a normal day.

– A possible exception noted recently by Justin Taylor is Hosea 6:2. Yāmîm, the plural of yôm, is used in Hosea 6:2. Some have used these passages as examples for when the plural of yôm does not mean a literal day. Others believe that Hosea 6:1–3 shows that if Israel would repent, God would quickly heal and forgive them—making sense of a normal day. It may be possible that it is used both ways. Others believe it is pointing the restoration of Israel in the eschaton and used by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:4. Either way, this one example is disputed and so it is a very weak justification for not taking the days of Genesis 1 as literal.

Andrew Steinmann notes that Genesis 1:5 employs yôm with an ordinal number as well as with the contextual indicators “evening” and “morning” and says, “Evening is the transition from light/day to darkness/night. Morning is the transition from darkness/night to light/day. Having an evening and a morning amounts to having one full day. Hence the following equation is what Genesis 1:5 expresses: Evening + morning = one day.”[8]

Why Be Concerned?

The question I prefer to ask is, What is wrong with believing the world has been here for millions of years?

We should be able to apply our conclusions about the text to the world we live in and find consistency. This is what it means for the text to inform our view of the world and not the other way around. Genesis 3:18 states that thorns and thistles are a consequence of sin. On the assumption of the Bible’s historical accuracy, I must therefore assume that wherever I see thorns and thistles, they are a product of the fall. We do see fossilized thorns and thistles in the geological record in layers assumed by uniformitarians to be millions of years old. If uniformitarian dating methods are right, this would necessarily place these fossilized thorns and thistles before humans and, given what Scripture plainly states, before the sin of Adam and Eve. Therefore, I reject the uniformitarian assumptions that establish ages for the geological layers.
We also see these thorns and thistles in the same geological layers as animal fossils, and fossils with evidence of disease. Paul tells us that, because of sin, the whole of creation is groaning (Romans 8:22). Old earth views would necessitate placing a groaning creation prior to its cause, sin.
In Genesis 1:29–30 we find that animals and humans were created on the sixth day as vegetarians. If the fossil record is millions of years old and precedes the fall, we should not find evidence of carnivorous activity – yet we do.

Placing the consequences of sin before the intrusion of sin itself creates problems that the young earth position does not have. This raises questions about God’s purpose and character and makes this issue exceptionally important to me.

Because of Jesus’ victory, we can be assured that all things will again be reconciled—and not just the elect but the entire creation. To what state will the creation be reconciled if not to its original state of perfection? We hope not for a future full of disease, suffering, animal death, or thorns and thistles (Isa 27:4; Romans 8:21; Ephesians 1:10; Colossians 1:20).

Psalm 104 has sometimes been used as an objection to this noting that the Psalmist is talking of an original creation that includes lions going after their prey. It also, however, talks of ships on the sea and man going out in his labors. The Psalmist is acknowledging that the wonder of creation—even the corrupted creation he is seeing in his time—was originally by the hand of God.

Conservative evangelicals are also fighting against the naturalistic explanations of evolution and the allowances made by some for an allegorical Adam and Eve. We should take heed that the idea of an allegorical Adam and Eve is only ever raised in a context where the world is thought to be millions of years old.

God called His finished creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31). I cannot read this statement in any other way than as the creation being a reflection of God’s pure and holy character. The idea of millions of years of death and suffering prior to sin allows too many things that conflict with God’s holiness and perfection.

It is always profitable to discuss the Bible with Christian brothers. I read and admire the writings of great Bible scholars of the past and the present, some of whom held or hold views on the days of creation that I cannot agree with. The issue of the earth’s age is a significant one, and serious discussion of these important issues is a sign of spiritual health. This subject, I contend, matters more than most will admit or perhaps have carefully considered.

While Martin Luther could never claim infallibility, I believe he has given us an example of the type of humility we all need. The trick is applying it consistently. Luther asserted with humble boldness: “When Moses writes that God created heaven and earth and whatever is in them in six days, then let this period continue to have been six days, and do not venture to devise any comment according to which six days were one day. But, if you cannot understand how this could have been done in six days, then grant the Holy Spirit the honor of being more learned than you are.”[9]

—

[1] Tim Chaffey, “Are There Gaps in the Genesis Genealogies? Appendix C,” Answers in Genesis, March 22, 2012, https://answersingenesis.org/bible-timeline/genealogy/are-there-gaps-in-the-genesis-genealogies/. Note from JMH: Fred Zaspel raises good questions about the possibility of establishing dates from the genealogies (http://www.credomag.com/2013/03/08/telling-time-in-scripture-part-22/) but I am not convinced that the problems he raises are insurmountable.

[2] Cited in John Hammond Taylor, St. Augustine: The Literal Meaning of Genesis (Newman Press, 1983), 1:141.

[3] Edward J. Young and Robert Young, Studies in Genesis One (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1999), 51–52.

[4] Gleason Archer, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2007), 156.

[5] “The Age of the Universe and Genesis 1 — A Reformed Approach to Science and Scripture,” Ligonier.org, June 22, 2012, http://www.ligonier.org/blog/age-universe-and-genesis-1-reformed-approach-science-and-scripture/.

[6] A helpful work by Steven W. Boyd presents a strong case for reading Genesis 1 as narrative, studying and cataloging 522 historical narrative and poetic texts, and classifying Genesis 1 as historical narrative with a probability of virtually one. See a presentation of Boyd’s material in “A Proper Reading of Genesis 1:1 to 2:3” Donald DeYoung, Thousands Not Billions: Challenging the Icon of Evolution, Questioning the Age of the Earth (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2005), 158–170.

[7] Robert V. McCabe, “A Critique of the Framework Interpretation of the Creation Account (Part 2 of 2),” DBSJ 11 (2006): 112–13.

[8] Andrew E. Steinmann, “One as an Ordinal Number and the Meaning of Genesis 1:5,” JETS 45, no. 4 (2002): 583.

[9] Cited in Ewald M. Plass, What Luther Says: An Anthology (Saint Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1986), 1523.

Comments { 20 }

Don’t Try to Learn History from the Movies

By JMH on February 21, 2015 in Art, Cultural Engagement, Current Events

Edward Rothstein asks, “Whose History Is It, Anyway?” in the Wall Street Journal, and don’t miss this important section on the recent movie “Selma”:

“Selma” is more complicated. You might conclude from the film that President Lyndon Johnson’s staff was untrustworthy on civil rights, while Johnson himself was actually nefarious, regardeding Martin Luther King Jr. with nasty condescension. “You listen to me!” he scolds King. “I am sick and tired of you demanding and telling me what I can and can’t do!” As punishment for King’s uppityness, he sics J. Edgar Hoover on him.

None of this is true. And this is not a negligible distortion. King’s conversations with Johnson are crucial: Legislative success justifies King’s strategy. So why is Johnson turned into a near villain, seeing light only when King forces his hand? “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie,” Ms. DuVernay has said. “Black people,” she has asserted, “should tell their own stories from their own perspectives.” She wanted a history in which African-Americans determined their own fates instead of seeming like passive recipients of Johnson’s good will. So instead we have Johnson’s bad will. Ms. Du Vernay alters history in order to control it; we hear the gears clanking, nearly undermining the powerful history she gets right.

“Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor . . .” (Eph 4:25).

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Chesterton on the Convincing Accumulation of Evidence

By JMH on February 13, 2015 in Books, Evangelism and Apologetics

From Orthodoxy:

If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, “For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.” I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts. The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind.

I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape and one old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion.

Now, the non-Christianity of the average educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it.

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Anachronistic Assumptions and the Documentary Hypothesis

By JMH on February 13, 2015 in Bible and Theology, Scripture

David M. Carr opens his book, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature, as follows:

In her book Oral World and Written Word, Susan Niditch vividly illustrates the problems with contemporary assumptions about ancient textuality, as she outlines the picture many biblical scholars often assume in their discussions of biblical formation. Critiquing the traditional documentary hypothesis (J, E, D, P), she says:

At the heart of the documentary hypothesis [sic] . . . is the cut-and-paste image of an individual pictured like Emperor Claudius of the PBS series, having his various written sources laid out before him as he chooses this verse or that, includes this take not that, edits, elaborates, all in a library setting. . . . If the texts are leather, they may be heavy and need to be unrolled. . . . If texts are papyrus, they are read held in the arm, one hand clasping or “supporting” the “bulk” of the scroll, while the other unrolls. Did the redactor need three colleagues to hold J, E, and P for him? Did each read the text out loud, and did he ask them to pause until he jotted down his selections, working like a secretary with three tapes dictated by the boss?

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The Days of Creation and Exodus 20:11

By JMH on February 9, 2015 in Bible and Theology, Creation

Justin Taylor has caused quite a stir with his post on “Biblical Reasons to Doubt the Creation Days Were 24-Hour Periods.”

The decisive factor for me is how earlier biblical statements are interpreted by later ones, so Exodus 20:11 is BeastMode (a.k.a. Marshawn Lynch) on the goal line in this argument.

Re-reading the Van Pelt quote JT gives on Exodus 20:11, I think it misses the point and fails to do the job old-earthers need it to do.

The point Moses is making in Exodus 20:10–11 is a different point from the one being made in Psalm 95 and Hebrews 3–4.

The author of Hebrews cites David as saying something like this in Psalm 95:

God did the creation for six days, then rested on the seventh day.
God did the redemption at the exodus, then offered Israel rest in the land.
Israel rebelled in the wilderness, so God swore they would not enter into his rest–the rest he offered them in the land.

The author of Hebrew sees David in Psalm 95 drawing an analogy between creation and redemption, and between God’s seventh day rest and the rest Israel was to enjoy in the land of promise.

The rest that remains in Hebrews 4:1 would seem to be a rest analogous to the one offered to Israel, along these lines:

6 days of creation, followed by sabbath day rest;
Exodus from Egypt, followed by an offer of rest in the land;
New Exodus at the Cross, followed by the promise of rest in the fulfillment of the land (new heaven/new earth).

It seems that just as John 17:3 says that eternal life is knowing God and Christ, so also Hebrews 4:2 says that those who believe have an already/not yet experience of the future rest now, even as we pilgrimage through the wilderness toward the city that has foundations (not least because we have rested from our works–which points to salvation by faith not works).

It is not the intention of either David or the author of Hebrews to assert that God’s seventh day rest was something other than a single day that stood at the end of the six days of creation. That David and the author of Hebrews are drawing analogies does not indicate that they are thinking of something other than a normal week.

Then when we go to Exodus 20:10–11, we find Moses drawing an entirely different analogy than the one drawn by David and the author of Hebrews. The analogy Moses draws looks like this:

God created in six days. God rested on the seventh day.
You work for six days. You rest on the seventh day.

The most natural reading of Exodus 20:10–11 seems to be that the six days of creation followed by the sabbath day of rest was a cycle of the same kind of seven day week that was to become the pattern of Israel’s experience.

It’s hard for me to imagine someone coming to some other kind of conclusion unless he seeks to accommodate extra-biblical considerations from philosophy (a la Augustine) or science (a la contemporary old-earthers).

Here are the theses I would offer for discussion:

The most natural reading of the text is that in Genesis 1–2 Moses intends his audience to think of a normal week of seven days, and that reading is confirmed in Exodus 20:11 (cf. also 31:17).
We can hold such a position with epistemological humility and not, as AiG does, suggest that old-earth creationists (such as Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware) are opening the door to abortion on demand and gay marriage.
The real lesson of the Galileo episode is that Christians should not tie their understanding of the Bible to scientific theories.

If God created Adam as an adult male, he has no problem making something that has the appearance of age.

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The Days of Creation and Death Before the Fall

By JMH on February 9, 2015 in Bible and Theology, Creation

What follows is my response to Gavin Ortlund‘s response to Douglas Wilson. Check them out for context on this conversation that plunges right in mid-stream.

Gavin tries to deal with death before the fall, but I don’t think we can retroject onto the pre-fall situation what “must” have been the case given the way things are now.

If I grant that humans would not have died had they not sinned, can I not imagine a situation where low-level organic life might not have died either? Gavin says the world would have become uninhabitable apart from those kinds of death. How does he know? Couldn’t there have been some pre-fall, uncursed, very good way that God had in the offing to deal with those realities? I suspect he could have handled the logistics.

As for the overhaul of creation that is proposed if predatory behavior only begins after the fall, again, we don’t know what those eagles and eels and saber toothed tigers might have used their peculiarities for in a very good world. It sure looks to me like the animals weren’t afraid of people until after the flood (Gen 9:2), which would seem to imply that maybe they weren’t a threat to humans until that point, either.

Could God have designed eagles and eels and tigers with some other purpose than predatory behavior? I suspect the pre-fall world was different in ways we don’t conceptualize, so I’m not prepared to close down that possibility.

Acknowledging what I don’t know and can’t imagine seems a lot safer than elaborate speculations about demons and a fallen creation prior to human sin. (Gavin acknowledges the speculative nature of his proposal that “nature fell when angels fell.”)

I would rather believe what the Bible says and need more information than it gives me than adopt a hypothesis that entails extra-biblical information requiring exegetical gymnastics to pretzel the Bible’s statements around my theories.

I trust the Bible more than I trust that extra-biblical information.

The Bible’s material provides us with a grammar of sorts, and out of that grammatical material we construct our lexicons and syllabaries and mental books on syntax that we use to conceptualize and talk about the world.

It seems to me that the grammatical data on this one is pretty straightforward. Note the avoidance of the word literal, here. What I’m saying is that the grammatical data that the Bible gives us builds up an interpretive world where “in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed'” (Exo 31:17 ESV) means that we are to think of God making the world in what we think of as a normal week. Then a bunch of other statements in the Bible get built out of that same stuff.

There is another set of grammatical pieces of information that drives people to look at a verse like that and say something like: well, actually it wasn’t a normal seven day week at all but was in reality a longer period of time than we can begin to conceptualize. The grammatical data that leads to that kind of interpretation of those words and phrases comes from outside the Bible, not inside it.

As for the three-tiered universe, I want to think further on that. I want to keep reading the Bible and see if what has happened to me in the past doesn’t happen to me on this one – I come to an understanding of the texts that makes total sense and gives the lie to the conclusions that, in my view, folks like Peter Enns have jumped to on these matters. Would love to tell you what I’ve come to conclude about Enns’s vaunted movable well.

On the specifics of the scientific evidence, I remain untroubled by the distance light has traveled from the sun or very distant stars. If God can create Adam as a full grown man, he can create a lot of other things that look like they’ve been growing for a while, too.

The idea that God did such things is easier for me to stomach than the alternatives. In fact, it’s not hard to stomach at all, and it begins to taste like honey from the comb.

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Why You Need To Preach the Song of Songs

What Does It Mean That We’re Made in God’s Image?

The Song of Songs: A Biblical-Theological, Allegorical, Christological Interpretation

Can We Arrive at a Young Earth and 24-Hour Period Days in Genesis One from Scripture Alone? A Guest Post by Steve Ham

Don’t Try to Learn History from the Movies

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