Seems Good to Me

Elders haven’t got the easiest job in the world.

The average local church requires answers to a hundred different questions in the course of a year. Some are of an obvious and urgent spiritual nature. Others appear innocuous and procedural, though even these may be chock-a-block with hidden spiritual landmines.

Sure, deacons handle many of the day-to-day administrative details in gatherings where New Testament principles of operation are given priority, but that still leaves an awful lot of territory to be talked over, prayed through and hashed out between busy men just trying to do the best possible job of shepherding the people of God, often while caring for their own families and leading busy lives.

The most careful, prayerful, diligent and confident leader must still occasionally ask himself “Are we getting this right?” Or if he doesn’t, he should.

Remember to Quote the Whole Thing

Christians in the habit of proof-texting should consider examining the context of their favorite “gotcha” verses once in a while. It’s a healthy exercise, useful in maintaining doctrinal balance.

Determinists, for instance, would benefit immensely from making context-scrutiny a daily practice. Most of the great passages they like to cite on the subject of God’s sovereignty have overtures to human responsibility at their core.

Let me grab a couple of favorites from The Calvinist Corner, because nobody can make the point better.

On the Mount (16)

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord,” says the book of Leviticus. Those last four words are not unrelated, as we will shortly see.

In Leviticus, the neighbor in question is indisputably a fellow Israelite, a blood relative: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” With the parable of the Good Samaritan, the definition of “neighbor” would shortly extend itself to moral geography a Jewish legalist might not strictly consider his own stomping grounds, but that’s another story. It isn’t part of the Sermon on the Mount.

We could import it, of course, but Jesus didn’t.

The Good Samaritan is Luke’s tale to tell. Matthew, who is all about the Lord’s Jewish audience, doesn’t touch it.

Forests and Trees

When I pick up a Bible and try to understand a particular verse or passage, I am at a slight disadvantage compared to the writer’s original audience.

“Slight?” you might well ask, taking out your logical 2x4 and preparing to give me a smart tap on the frontal lobe, hopefully in the interest of bringing me to my senses.

“How can you possibly call the disadvantage of living thousands of years after the original writer slight? Sure, you can read the words that the author penned, assuming there has been no significant textual corruption along the way, but you have no idea what was in the author’s mind. You’re not a Hebrew, and you didn’t live in his day. You don’t know the cultural baggage with which his language was freighted. You didn’t have his experiences. You don’t know Greek idioms or how they came about.

“Chances are quite high that you are coming to the text with all kinds of modern assumptions that influence how you read things.”

Too Hot to Handle: #MeNOT

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Have you heard of the “Pence Rule”? The term comes from a 2002 interview of current American Vice-President Mike Pence in which he confirmed that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife.

Tom: This idea didn’t originate with VP Pence. It has Christian roots. Way back in 1948, Billy Graham and team members George Beverly Shea, Cliff Barrows and Grady Wilson agreed to something called the “Modesto Manifesto”, which obligated each man on the Graham team to never be alone with a woman other than his wife.

Naturally, today’s media find the Pence Rule scandalous.

I am the One

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Truth Out of Balance

When I’m working, I leave my car in a seven-storey public parkade across the street from a hospital. Recently it was thought prudent to increase the number of available parking spaces for disabled drivers, so the necessary repainting was done and the usual signs posted.

That would have been fine, except that the increase in disabled spaces was an order of magnitude greater than the need it was intended to address; ten times the number required even in the busiest hours of the average day. Virtually the entire second floor of the parkade is now empty morning, noon and night. Thirty drivers who would otherwise have paid for space in this busy downtown parking lot are stuck looking for accommodation elsewhere, and the City loses the revenue from their daily custom. On the bright side, the strategy virtue-signals magnificently, so the town hall clerks and administrators are likely unperturbed.

Christian instruction can be a bit like that parkade. We only have so much space in our craniums. A truth stressed out of proportion pushes other truths out of place.

Right Place, Wrong Way

Christendom is full of people getting to the right place the wrong way.

“Well, that’s a good thing,” we might say. “The important thing is that we get there, right?”

That’s certainly true. Correct conclusions matter. They affect what we do and how we live. But how we arrive at them is often just as important.

In his new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Dr. Jordan Peterson gets to a pretty good place by examining dominance hierarchies in lobsters. No, I’m not kidding.

A Bright Thought for a Brisk Winter Morning

Life is affliction.

Too dark an opener? Maybe. But it’s true.

It’s too short for one thing, gone before we fully appreciate it. “Dust”, says Moses. Like a dream. We wither like grass. We are swept away like a flood. Seventy years on average. Eighty maybe, if we’re unusually robust. Almost nothing. At some point after we enter this world, we discover that death is a universal reality. From that moment on, the spectre of our own imminent demise and that of all those we love hovers over, informs, taints and affects every moment of our lives. Affliction.

On the Mount (15)

There’s a useful little spiritual truth called the Corban Principle. That’s just my name for it; I’m sure I owe somebody older and godlier for introducing me to it, but I can’t for the life of me remember who ought to get the credit.

Anyway, it comes from that passage in Mark where the Lord Jesus calls out the Pharisees for allowing religious Jews to reduce their financial obligations under the Law by giving sums of money intended for the upkeep of aging parents to the synagogue instead, which effectively put the money in the hands of the Pharisees.

The practice was called Corban. It was an end-around the spirit of the Law of Moses, and the Lord called it “making void the word of God”.

The Corban Principle simply stated: God doesn’t want anything from you or me at someone else’s expense.

Wintry Landscapes

“A wintry landscape of unrelieved bleakness.” That’s Lutheran scholar Martin Marty’s take on Psalm 88.

One of the difficulties encountered by those of us who like to go scratching around the Bible to background its characters is that, just like in the phone directory, lots of different people have the same name. That makes certainty an issue. Names like Mary, John and James appear all over the place. Disambiguators help, of course, and the Holy Spirit provides them here and there: Mary Magdalene, James the son of Alphaeus, and so on.

This morning I’m more than a little curious about Heman the Ezrahite, the poet credited with the aforementioned “wintry landscape”.

Too Hot to Handle: This Little Christian Went to Market

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Ya Really Oughta Know …

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Two Kindreds

“All the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name.”

The Psalms declare that God made the nations.

By “nations”, the Psalmist means the natural ethnic divisions of our world; the families, clans and specific language groups that exist almost from pole to pole. The Hebrew term for these divisions is gowy; the word goyim is thought to be related.

David’s not speaking here of states or republics or empires or flags or unions — those grand expressions of the will of exceptional and powerful men, held together by law and force of arms, that spread across whole continents only to disappear into the history books when an even greater will or a bigger army rises up against them.

No, he’s talking about something smaller, more fundamental, more instinctual and longer-lasting.

A Godly War Cry

Kathy Kelly argues that there is “no such thing as a just war”. Jim Foxvog argues that trust in God demands national pacifism. One comes at it from a secular perspective, the other from a Christian perspective, and both wind up in the same place: War is wrong, period.

You know, it seems to me that the writers of the Psalms might just disagree.

Psalm 83 is a godly war cry.

Truth Recycled

Novelty can be overrated.

Oh, people like to hear new things. An original twist on even the most well-worn religious theme is bound to perk up an ear or two.

One of the more remarked-on features of Jesus’ earliest ministry was that it was accompanied by demonstrations of spiritual authority. Unclean spirits fled at his rebuke. But Mark records that at least part of the excitement in Capernaum was that the Lord’s teaching was thought to be new.

And new ideas get people talking.

On the Mount (14)

Words are usually coined when we need to make useful distinctions not obvious in the current vernacular. If we have at our disposal a nice, precise bit of language to describe a particular concept, we generally use it. If we don’t, we have to either cobble ourselves together a new one from other familiar words (I’m currently fond of “crybully” and “humblebrag”), or borrow one from another language (schadenfreude is getting a little long in the tooth, but it’s still a beaut).

This is an ongoing process, for obvious reasons. Through repeated misuse, the semantic range of our existing vocabulary expands relentlessly until we get to the point that we can no longer make those useful distinctions that are such a critical component of communication.

All to say that if you can distinguish between the current, debased usage of “profanity” (offensive language), “obscenity” (morally offensive language) and “swearing” (profanity), good luck to you.

I can’t. Or really, this generation can’t.

A Better Idea

My head is a tangle of ideas this morning, so let me set about trying to untangle them for you.

Thread One: Dr. Emidio Campi is convinced that “the Christian message of salvation becomes futile unless its implications are extended throughout the whole of human life, into political, social and international structures.”

Thread Two: John Calvin’s view of the Church, which provoked the aforementioned rather ecumenical outburst.

Thread Three: Psalm 80, an Asaphian meditation on the restoration of Israel.

Whew! How would you like a bowl of that for breakfast?

Too Hot to Handle: Culture and the Gospel

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Leadership: It’s a Dog’s Life

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