George Orwell was not a Christian.
His biographers describe him
as agnostic or even an atheist. His dystopian classic 1984 contains the occasional anti-Catholic comment and a plethora
of
Bizarrely, 1984 is also (in some mysterious way I was unable to ascertain) “unacceptable by today’s standards”.
“Should we not consider that an eschatology that teaches ‘we lose down here’ is an eschatology that may have had something to do with why we are, you know, losing down here?”
The quote comes from Doug Wilson’s introductory comments to a recent round table discussion about Christian nationalism. In case it’s insufficiently clear outside of its original context, the point he’s making is that our expectations often determine how much we are able to accomplish.
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“How should Christians think about making reparations for slavery?”
Scripture appears to give a qualified nod of approval to efforts to compensate one generation for the losses of another, but I’m not sure it’s the type of compensation any modern, Western government should feel terribly comfortable emulating. I’m thinking of the time the Gibeonite survivors in Israel raised a legitimate claim against Saul’s family for unsuccessfully attempting to exterminate them.
The “reparations” requested and received by the Gibeonites involved hanging seven relatives of Saul for the sins of their family.
I’ve been thinking a little about why we do the things we do: low motives, high motives and every type in between. Sometimes we act for a multiplicity of reasons and with several different objectives in view.
For Christians, the goal is always to operate from the highest motives rather than the lower impulses, though even these may inadvertently produce what God is looking for. I think of Samson as an example of that. The Lord used his lust for a Philistine woman, a wholly inappropriate matchup, as an opportunity to judge Israel’s oppressors not once but twice.
At the top end of the motive spectrum, of course, sits love. When we do all things from a heart full of love, we have really come to know God.
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The sovereign God delights in delegating his own infinite power. We find the earliest scriptural instance of such delegation in Genesis 1:16-18 when the Lord makes the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night, then casually throws in the stars as a bonus. The Hebrew word translated “rule” in that passage is elsewhere translated “dominion”, “power” and “government”. The OT writers use it to describe God’s own sovereign power and authority.
Delegated authority is the principle on which God’s creation operates.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
We had a good time with this last week, so Immanuel Can and I have agreed to revisit our growing list of commonly misinterpreted Bible verses and discuss three more examples.
Tom: How about this one?
“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
How do you read that, IC?
Immanuel Can: I think the first question has to be “two or three whats”, or “two or three of whom”?
Her voice on the end of the phone was shaky. Clearly she was very, very upset about something. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell me what. Her words came out in a kind of extended groan that seemed to swell up from inside the depths of her heart, but could only leak past her lips. Something very bad had happened.
As our conversation continued, I gently drew more details out of her broken responses, and it became clearer. Not only she, but all her friends and her church, had been betrayed. A leader in their circle, much loved and widely admired, had turned the corner of a disastrous course. The first of the news had just broken; and she had called me less to tell me than to seek some kind of soothing for her aching soul.
C.S. Lewis called pride “the essential vice, the utmost evil … the complete anti-God state of mind”. Solomon wrote, “Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the Lord; be assured, he will not go unpunished.”
Obadiah is the shortest book in the Hebrew Bible, so it doesn’t take the prophet more than two verses to get to Edom’s problem. Yes, it’s pride. Pride that metastasized into hatred of their brothers. Pride that pulled the wool over their own eyes and made the Edomites believe they were untouchable. Pride that convinced them they could put one over on the God who had decreed “the older will serve the younger”. “Not so,” said Edom.
It was the word of God. Of course they were wrong.
“I am the Lord; in its time I will hasten it.”
A friend and I were talking recently about societal decline and the speed with which it occurs. One writer at least has used the phrase “gradually, then suddenly” to describe it. It’s rather like years of erosion followed by an earthquake. First comes a long period in which the foundations are quietly destroyed one after another, then, with alarming speed, the entire house collapses at the tiniest temblor.
God sometimes accomplishes his purposes similarly: gradually, then suddenly.
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“Is it wrong for a Christian to be an introvert?”
Introversion is one of those terms whose popular usage has become so inconsistent that you really need to agree on a definition before discussing it. I am an introvert by almost any definition, and in my case, it goes well beyond being reserved, quiet and comfortable alone, as some dictionaries have it. I’m also quickly worn down by too much conversation. I have my limits in social situations. I don’t imagine all introverts are socially awkward, but I am often that as well.
Some dictionaries link introversion with being inwardly focused or self-occupied. To me, that’s more a feature of narcissism or solipsism than of introversion.
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Does God’s will ever change in response to the actions of man? Mull that one over for a moment. I can give you at least one incontrovertible example to consider.
Ready? Okay, here we go. A young man wants to know the Lord’s will about the woman he has been dating. He belongs to Christ, while she is unsaved. I can tell him easily what the Lord wants from him, and so can you: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.” It is never the Lord’s will that a young Christian man violate that command. We can be sure of that 100% of the time.
So then, he goes ahead and marries her anyway. What’s the Lord’s will for him now?
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Long before the Lord Jesus ever used the title “Son of Man” to describe himself, the concept had a history with which devout Jews looking for their Messiah were well acquainted. Ezekiel not only had the title before the Lord Jesus, he had it used to describe him many more times than the Lord Jesus, 93 in total. In fact, God himself chose to address his servant that way, as he did Daniel.
What can we learn from that? Not much, probably, except that the hermeneutical “Law of First Mention” is nowhere near as reliable as the law of gravity.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
We’ve done maybe seventy of these exchanges now on various subjects, Immanuel Can. But what we’ve never done is a post on commonly misunderstood scriptures. Everybody does those. I’m feeling left out.
So why don’t we just do it like the Lord Jesus did with the lawyer and ask the questions, “What is written? How do you read it?” That’s a pretty solid precedent to work from.
Tom: I’ll start. Let me lob you a softball here, IC.
Andrew sat back and stirred his tea. “What kind of church are you in?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “I was in a conservative evangelical group, but it seems perhaps I’ve been kind of bumped out.”
“What do you mean?”
“We were in one kind of church, but we had to leave; now we’re sort of in-between, looking for what the Lord would have us do.”
“I will tell you why you left.” His voice was even and certain. He leaned forward. “It was because of … that man.”
The Greek language has a word we translate into English as “necessary”. It is anagkē, and Strong’s dictionary says it refers to some obligation “imposed either by the external condition of things, or by the law of duty”. It refers to a thing that had to happen. One example of its scriptural use is in Hebrews, where the writer says, “It was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.”
It was required. It had to happen that way. There was no other.
From the Department of Very-Much-Intended Consequences, you may have recently read that AI companies are purchasing massive quantities of rare books, scanning the pages to “train” their algorithms, then shredding the original books. If not, you probably will soon.
If that sounds improbable considering the almost inestimable quantities of training data available to them free via public domain access on the Web, there is indeed a sort of twisted logic behind the ‘scan-and-destroy’ strategy.
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“Should Christians take on mortgages?”
I’ve written on the subject of Christians and debt before in a number of different contexts (bankruptcy, school debt, credit cards, etc.) but to the best of my recollection, never at any great length about mortgages.
Okay, then. It’s well established in scripture that carrying debt is less than ideal.
The vast majority of chapter breaks in scripture are well considered. Still, once in a long while, you may find one that is less than perfectly helpful. Because tens of thousands of Christians daily read the Bible by chapter, the worst chapter divisions are the ones that break up content that really belongs together, interrupting the writer’s thought flow and making it difficult to follow.
What does that have to do with financial printing? So glad you asked.
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In his book The God-Shaped Heart, Timothy Jennings makes what I believe is a helpful distinction between two manifestations of divine rule in the world: design law and imposed law.
Design law includes things as disparate as gravity, love, motion, health, mathematics, friction, thermodynamics, authority structures, liberty, exertion, and so on — principles intrinsic to the proper functioning of our world and human society as designed by God. Do X, and Y will be the natural result, either for good or ill. Design law is just the way the world works.
Imposed law refers to both God’s commands and all other codes, rules, regulations and ordinances enforced with penalties, whether imposed by God or by men under his authority.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Christianity Today notes a new trend in “worship”: electronic dance music. As writer Jeff Neely puts it, “layers of computer-programmed electronic backing tracks, quarter-note bass thumps, and cycles of musical ‘builds’ and ‘drops’, much of it set to a tempo around 130 beats per minute.”
*headdesk*
Tom: That’s my sister’s response, Immanuel Can, and I think it’s entirely apropos. Some things are beyond the pale. But perhaps we can use it as a jumping-on point to discuss the role of enthusiasm in worship, what sort of place the arts might have or not have in the context of local church gatherings, and so on.
That work for you?
Immanuel Can: Certainly.
A man and a woman are going to bed. It’s been a long day — work has been vexing, the children have been demanding, calls and emails have piled up, and best efforts at getting it all done have failed. Irritations have built up; and at times, the couple has actually been a bit snappish.
The husband is middle-aged, and somewhat dumpy and slightly graying. His earlier grumpy mood has subsided only into a plodding weariness as he gets ready to turn in. He’s left his slippers askew in the corner again, and hung his trousers over the chair instead of putting them in the closet.
The wife turns to her husband and says, “I love you.”
How important is transparency in church finances?
The question often arises in connection with shocking allegations of recently-discovered financial shenanigans in this denomination or that. These tend to proliferate wherever funds ripe for misappropriation are significant. For example, police in Kingston, Ontario recently investigated a local Catholic church for “financial irregularities” in the neighborhood of $600,000.
If you’re currently stumped trying to recall the last time your own local church had more than half a million dollars lying around for embezzlers to target, join the club.
The most effective lies are 90% truth. Satan proved that in the Garden of Eden, and he’s been exploiting the technique ever since.
Likewise, the most persuasive rhetoric ignores all inconvenient exceptions to its proclamations. Discussing the outliers takes time a rhetorician does not have. After all, rhetoric is about making a pithy point with emotionally compelling force, so shorter is better. In deliberately generalizing rather than carefully debating all possible pros and cons, a sophist makes an argument that hits his target audience right where they live, even if he leaves some significant percentage of the population stone cold.
Not his market. Too bad for them.
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“What’s the difference between faith and belief?”
As far as the Bible is concerned, there is absolutely no difference between these two concepts. The same Greek word (pistis and members of its family) is translated both “faith” and “believe”. You may be surprised to find that the word “faith” does not appear in most English translations of John’s gospel. Yet he writes, “To all who did receive [the Word], who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”
That is unquestionably saving faith John is talking about, and he’s using the word “believed”. As far as salvation is concerned in scripture, the two words mean the same thing.
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
The Father is speaking to his Son. When that happens, we all need to prick up our ears. It’s bound to be important.
There are some stunning examples of this in scripture, all regularly quoted in worship services around the world.
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Sometimes God gets angry. When his servants sin egregiously, even they may become the objects of his righteous and thoroughly justifiable anger:
“The Lord was angry with me because of you.”
“The Lord was so angry with Aaron that he was ready to destroy him.”
“The Lord was angry with Solomon, because his heart had turned away from the Lord.”
“He has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel; he has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob, consuming all around.”
But the consequences of God’s anger (not to mention its duration) are not always precisely the same.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
English philosophy professor James Tartaglia has
Somehow we are supposed to find this encouraging.
Tom: Canada’s CBC Radio recently gave Tartaglia and his Australian co-author Tracy Llanera the opportunity to air their views on its Ideas program. You can find a summary of that here.
IC, how on earth does one come to the conclusion that widespread belief in a meaningless existence “poses no significant problems or threats”?
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I’m seeing more and more of those “self-checkout” units at the local stores. They always creep me out a bit. There just seems to be something really weird about the idea of walking up to a mechanical box, shuffling around my own transaction, and then leaving, going out of a store without passing by a person.
I feel as if I owe somebody some kind of explanation, like “Here’s my purchase, and here’s my money, and they match up; so don’t call the cops.” And then this person is supposed to give me the nod, like, “Okay, you’re alright this time; but when you come back, we’ll need to see each other again.”
“We desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.”
I was reminded this week that languages evolve. A fellow believer embarrassed himself online with a rant that included a line to the effect that a Jew is a person from the tribe of Judah. To be fair, I hear this all the time. He just picked up a talking point from somebody and ran with it. But it’s not so, and it hasn’t been so for at least a couple of millennia. If you doubt that, compare the first four words of Acts 22:3 with Philippians 3:5.
“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Ba-dum-bum!
I don’t recall hearing that line of argument against same-sex marriage from evangelicals much prior to the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015. However, Google’s Ngram viewer shows the phrase “Adam and Steve” appeared in popular culture for the first time around 1978 and peaked in 2011, with a strong tail into 2020.
So then, the line has been around nearly fifty years. It’s an old argument. It’s definitely a true argument. But whenever I hear it I ask myself, “Is it a useful argument?”
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“What does it mean that Christ died for our sins ‘in accordance with the scriptures’?”
The phrase “in accordance with the scriptures” comes from two verses in 1 Corinthians, a letter Paul wrote to a church he established during his second missionary journey. The year was probably AD55, making it likely the fifth book of our New Testament chronologically. When he wrote it, the word “scriptures” meant what we now call the Old Testament, no more. None of the gospels existed, so Paul certainly didn’t mean them.
Later, “the scriptures” would come to include the four gospels, many of Paul’s letters and a number from other pillars of the early church, as it does today.
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife.”
“Honor your father and your mother.”
God never contradicts himself, and any two of his commands, rightly understood, are never opposed to one another. If it looks to us like they are, it’s because we are not interpreting one or both correctly.
Still, many young couples have difficulty reconciling the command to “leave and cleave” to one another in marriage with their ongoing biblical obligations to parents that continue until they die. For no small number of Christian newlyweds, especially those with demanding parents, it’s a tough balancing act.
Let’s try to balance it by looking at the whole counsel of God on the subject.
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The apostle Paul once wrote about his desire to know Christ and share in his sufferings, becoming like him. In doing so, he was responding to God’s own desire that those closest to him understand his heart. In both Old and New Testaments, we find the Lord putting his most faithful servants through hard experiences to teach them how God thought and felt.
Accordingly, we find the Lord testing Abraham in order than he might understand what it is like to give up a beloved son, testing Ezekiel in order that he might know what it’s like to lose one’s beloved, or testing Jeremiah so he would know the cost of telling the truth. I believe such trials were never arbitrary, and never inflicted on anyone who couldn’t handle them. They were expressions of trust and intimacy from friend to friend. Perhaps you have been through similar trials and come out with a better understanding of our heavenly Father and his beloved Son.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: I have a confession for you, IC. I was a terrible kid in Sunday School. I made everybody’s lives miserable, from the guy tasked with leading the singing to my individual Sunday School teachers. I really didn’t like it much.
The odd thing is that I had nothing against church particularly, or the Bible. I even
believed it was true. But I was a total
How about you?
Immanuel Can: Yep. Dead with boredom, and ready to make trouble.
“I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”
— English Common Law
Oath of Testimony
The fight outside a club was broken up by police; but a man was stabbed. Inspector Thomas has been assigned to find the assailant.
When the perp fled, the crowd scattered, but four witnesses remain: a bouncer, the girlfriend, the bar manager and a local cabbie. Inspector Thomas knows procedure; that each must be interviewed separately in order to get a complete picture.
Hagar. Leah. Peninnah. Michal. What do these four Bible women have in common?
If your answer is something like “They came out on the losing end of a bigamous or polygamous relationship”, congratulations. I don’t have any great reward for you, but if you’ve learned the practical lesson these women’s stories teach us, you will be disinclined to pit family members against one another with your attention and love as the prize. Being flattered and chased is fun, but it’s neither kind nor fair to those forced to compete.
Even the “winners” in these oddball relationships lost something in the bargain.
Schindler’s List was a very successful 1990s movie about a German businessman and member of the Nazi party who saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish refugees during WWII. While the screenplay certainly received the Hollywood treatment and has been criticized for a taking a variety of storytelling liberties, one of which was being overly sentimental, the story upon which it is based is said to be substantially true.
So there is a real-world precedent for the scenario I am about to lay out for you.
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“Should Christians be tolerant of other people’s beliefs?”
Some questions have no easy answers, not because the Bible is unclear, but because we cannot be sure what is really at issue. Provided we are paying attention, answering today’s question requires asking several more:
If we cannot first answer these secondary questions, we will not be in any position to answer the primary question.
The following list is the merest starting point. The moment you begin reading it, you will notice all the verses I’ve missed, which is inevitable. Lord willing, I will keep adding to it as I come across more. I’ve barely touched the Old Testament and the Gospels.
The idea started with two friends of mine who grew up among Christians with a bent for legalism. Their upbringing fixed in their minds an image of God their Father as wrathful, implacable, enthroned and distant, while Jesus in his role as advocate and intercessor constantly appealed to him to restrain his abiding anger from breaking out against his children. That image has been difficult to shake off, even with repeated readings through the scriptures.
That’s not the picture I grew up with. Not one bit. How do we get that from a God who so loved the world and a Son he gave, in what may be the single most well-known verse in all the Bible?
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Not all long-term friendships get off on the right foot.
The relationship between the tribes of Judah and Benjamin is a fascinating historical study. Israel’s second king, our beloved psalmist, was from the more dominant, numerous and historically significant tribe of Judah, while its first king, Saul, hailed from the comparatively tiny tribe of Benjamin.
What Benjamin lacked in size it made up in pugnacity. “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf”, prophesied the original Benjamin’s dad, and so it came to be.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Jonathan Merritt contributes to The Atlantic and has been named one of “30 young influencers reshaping Christian leadership” by Outreach Magazine. All good so far, provided you don’t mind your “Christian leadership” flavored with a big honkin’ tablespoon of social justice.
Tom: He also just called Doug Wilson an “unhinged racist”, and Doug has sensibly called foul right here in one of the funniest posts I’ve read in a long time.
IC, these accusations of “racism” are getting so common today as to be almost meaningless.
Immanuel Can: Yes, along with the words, “sexist”, “homophobic” and “Islamophobic”, they comprise today’s “Four Horsemen of the Horse Manure”.
“In a post-Christian society, all faithful people begin to look a little Amish.”
— Ken Myers, host of Mars Hill Audio
Nice quote, Ken. Love the way you put that.
He’s got a point, though. In the ongoing moral and cultural decline of modern society, there must surely come a point at which the difference between how Christians live and how their neighbors live becomes too great to escape notice any longer.
And then, in a sense, we will all be “Amish”. I mean those who actually care to be Christians will be.
“A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.”
A couple of months ago I discovered a new word. Don’t laugh. It was “autodidact”.
It’s not a difficult concept. An autodidact is simply a person who is self-taught rather than formally schooled. Despite being a voracious reader for six decades, to the best of my recollection I had never come across “autodidact” before a friend used it in conversation, prompting me to inquire, “Er, what is that?” I was embarrassed, but only slightly. English has an awful lot of words. I have a decent vocabulary, but some of the words I know are only useful in limited, very specific contexts. Autodidact is certainly one of those.
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Partial Preterists argue that Futurists misinterpret the symbolic language of scripture. Where a Futurist understands imagery like that of Matthew 24:29 (the darkening of sun and moon, stars falling from heaven, etc.) to refer to the apocalyptic finale of our present age, Preterists exhaust the meaning of the Lord’s words in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD70. For Preterists, most or all of the events prophesied in that chapter have already taken place.
The issue, Preterists say, is that Futurists fail to understand “Old Testament prophetic
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“How should Christians react to doomsday predictions?”
You know what’s worse than nuclear Armageddon, for me at
least? The prospect of ending life in an old folks’ home while succumbing to Alzheimer’s just
slowly enough that I occasionally notice my mind’s merciless and
inexorable deterioration. Of the various fates that might turn me
into a quivering bag of
Yeah, as I have said about a few of the questions we’ve handled here over the years, I might be the wrong guy to ask. I’m not exactly the median respondent in any survey you might conduct.
Once upon a time, I had a conversation with a former co-worker about a friend who had just passed away. The Lord gave me the opportunity to share with her how he came to faith.
For years, his family prayed for his salvation, but he was a decent fellow with morals and principles and couldn’t see what all their concern for his soul was about. Looking at the way other people lived, he estimated that if God existed and he found himself standing before him one day, he would probably make out okay. Despite attending church regularly with his family and despite seeing the changes in their lives, he felt no particular personal need of Christ or his salvation.
Then one day on his way to work, he was involved in a catastrophic car accident.
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Because so many psalms are prophetic, we are wise when we come to them to ask the question posed to Philip by the Ethiopian eunuch concerning the prophecy of Isaiah that he was reading at the time. He inquired, “About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”
It was an excellent question. We must ask it of ourselves (and of the scriptures) today.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Canada’s former Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland once noted that Russia had a chance to get on the “right side of history” and help negotiate a political end to the reign of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad. Former president Obama loved the expression, and Bill Clinton used it more than 20 times in his speeches. Writer Ben Yagoda says the phrase — whether it’s “right side” or “wrong side” — has been in use for over a century.
Tom: I can vaguely understand what a Christian might intend by the use of the expression, Immanuel Can. But what on earth does “the right side of history” mean in a post-religious, thoroughly secular context?
On September 9, 1939, The Telegraph reported that a woman from London, England named Frances Fripps was accidentally struck by a local bus. Taken to Middlesex hospital, Miss Fripps awoke to find someone bending over her bed. To her utter astonishment, she recognized her visitor as none other than the Queen of England, there for a surprise tour of the hospital.
“They told me I had been trying to knock down a bus,” gasped Miss Fripps, “and now I find you here, your Majesty. What a day!”
What a day indeed.
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I don’t love boring post titles like this one. However, in this case the alternative was my working title, Babylon 5. You can thank me later.
Yes, this series has run longer than expected. We are done today. In yesterday’s post, we briefly examined the current frontrunners for the real-world, present-day religious and political entity toward which scripture’s “mystery Babylon” symbolism is pointing us. Eschatologists in the Reformed tradition put forward apostate Judaism as its prime candidate, while the more popular names in the Dispensationalist school have historically envisioned Roman Catholicism in the role of the great prostitute seated on many waters or, as John refers to her, “Babylon the great”.
Hey, we’re Protestants. We have to protest something. Or someone. And yes, I know more than a few saved Catholics. Let’s not go there.