Tag Archives: jesus

Taking Easter Apart and Putting It Back Together Again

I’m easing my way back into blogging with some quick thoughts about Good Friday and Easter.

Growing up Evangelical, I learned to think about Holy Week within a certain framework (for one thing, we never called it “Holy Week,” we called it “the week before Easter”). Here’s what I used to believe about Easter. Not that I could necessarily have articulated all or any of this, but these were the assumptions and implications of our beliefs:

Jesus died as part of God’s Master Plan to assuage His wrath via human sacrifice, a plan that came together with precision in fulfillment of very specific ancient prophecies. None of the players in the story was acting outside of God’s Plan.
God needed Jesus to die so He could legally forgive our sins, so we can also say that we helped to kill him by committing the sins that necessitated the sacrifice. If we had not sinned, Jesus would not have had to die.
The shedding of Jesus’ blood propitiates (satisfies) God completely, but not universally and not automatically. For the sacrifice to be effective, one must convert to Christianity and believe in the sacrifice. Anyone who does not do this cannot enter Heaven when they die, since they have not taken advantage of the legal mechanism provided by the sacrifice.
Jesus’ resurrection was miraculous and triumphant without diminishing the effectiveness of his sacrificial death. God raised Jesus once the sacrifice was complete as a proof of his divinity and of afterlife. God brought Jesus back to heaven to prepare an eternal home for true believers.

Here are just some of the problems that swarmed my mind and heart as I grew up and learned to think through these beliefs:

Why does the God who (according to the Old Testament) ABHORS human sacrifice and who ultimately (according to the prophets and Jesus himself) REJECTS all sacrifice hatch a Master Plan that involves manipulating humans to carry out the horrific execution of a truly innocent person? Do we really believe that shedding the right blood was the key to pleasing God all along? What does this say about the character of God and the nature of the universe He created?
How can anyone (even God) conceivably satisfy their own anger, legally or otherwise? How does orchestrating a sacrifice for Himself “deal with sin” and make God happy enough to absolve a few humans of their guilt?
What is the level of accountability for the human pawns in God’s Master Plan? The priests and crowds demanded Jesus’ death, Pilate ordered it, and the Roman soldiers carried it out, but weren’t they carrying out the holy will of God? In this way, weren’t their actions strangely sacred? Is it wrong for God to hold them responsible for fulfilling the ancient prophecies He arranged “from the foundations of the world”?
If the death of Jesus has the power to heal and save, how is that power limited to only those who “believe in it” in a certain way? Doesn’t this put the onus of salvation onto humans and their decision to think or not think certain thoughts? And how does the salvation of a small remnant of humanity fit in with the Bible’s vision of renewal and rescue for all of creation?
If Jesus’ death was legally satisfying to God, does the resurrection in any way dilute or complicate its effectiveness? If the death of an innocent is required to “pay for sin,” how could God be pleased and placated by a death that is not “final”?

Here are some fresh thoughts about Good Friday and Easter. These are not the “correct” beliefs, they are my current best attempts at interpreting and appreciating this story I’ve inherited:

God did not kill Jesus. We did. And we did it not by committing isolated and disparate personal sins but by ACTUALLY KILLING HIM. The violence of human religion and empire conspired to murder Jesus. And if a prophet appeared among us today preaching empathy and a forgiving God, we’d murder him or her too. That is the scandal of Good Friday.
Resurrection is not the triumphant epilogue that gives the story a happy ending, assures us of heaven, and helps us win the culture war by following the correct religion. Resurrection is both a vindication of Jesus’ legacy and God’s non-violent rejection of our attempt to scapegoat and sacrifice His Son. It’s God’s “no thank you!” to our disgusting rituals and violence which were exposed on the cross.
Jesus does not come back to seek revenge or “settle the score” (as his followers clearly expected), he comes with “peace” on his lips, announcing a new world. His followers still didn’t get it, so he promised that his spirit would always be with them to guide them, if only they’d listen. If only we’ll listen.
Salvation is not achieved by rolling around in the magic blood of an innocent scapegoat. It is found in the light of Easter morning, in the hope of New Creation, and a willingness to follow in the Way of selflessness and vulnerable love. Jesus saved us from our sins by exposing their true nature, absorbing our hate and offering us the opportunity to repent of our violence and self-destruction.
We seek the presence of the Risen Jesus, not as our Holy Emperor leading us to conquest, but as the One who announces shalom and the end of violence and sacrificial thinking. Each Easter, like every new day, is another chance to open our eyes to this astonishing reality.

3 Defining Aspects of My Evolving Faith

Four Ways Jesus Loved His Enemies

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Everyone knows that Jesus said something somewhere about loving our enemies, but to look at his followers you’d think it was just a passing suggestion or a euphemism for something much more complicated. Many modern factions of Christianity are not unlike other insular groups, very sure of who our enemies are and what God has in store for them. Even the prophets and apostles of scripture can’t seem to resist defaulting to an “us versus them” mentality, which only fuels today’s followers by providing them with “biblical” rhetoric about God’s impending vengeance on the bad guys. (Watch Paul wrestle with enemy love in Romans 12:14-21, and see him get downright scary in 2 Thessalonians 1:5-12.) We give those ancient authors a pass because of the times and culture in which they lived and for the persecution they faced, but the fundamental problem persists. The results today range from easily ignored pop-culture revenge fantasies to deeply disturbing calls to arms against specific groups of perceived enemies.

Was Jesus simply being unrealistic when he commanded his followers to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:44)? Some have taken an approach similar to Paul’s in Romans 12; we should outwardly tolerate our enemies right now like Messiah said, but only in anticipation of judgment day when he’s coming back to settle the score. We win, they lose, we just have to bide our time. But that’s not so much “love” as it is “sanctimonious condemnation and self-delusion.” The Romans 12 approach is really just the 2 Thessalonians 1 approach with a smiley face painted on it.

What about Jesus? Did he practice what he preached vis-à-vis enemy love? The biblical evidence indicates that radical empathy and subversive affirmation of the “other” are central to both Jesus’ message and his legacy. Here are just four ways that Jesus modeled love of enemy, according to the gospel accounts.

1. Jesus refrained from cursing Israel’s enemies

Jesus stood in the tradition of Israel’s prophets. The earliest prophets saw their task as twofold: 1) admonish Israel’s kings and priests on behalf of YHWH, and 2) comfort the nation by pronouncing divine wrath upon her enemies. Later prophets (like Isaiah and Jeremiah who were a major influence on Jesus) intensified their challenge to Israel, especially in light of the “curse” of exile, but still maintained that God would ultimately and eternally punish the pagan powers who carried the curse out. Jesus picked up the prophets’ call for reformation (he called it “repentance”), but he dropped the oracles of fire and brimstone against Israel’s enemies. He spoke some harsh and difficult words, but the worst of them were reserved for the religious authorities in his own land. This is not to say that that he condoned or ignored the brutality of Rome (for example), it simply demonstrates that he made a conscious decision not to frame his prophetic message in terms of “us versus them.”

2. Jesus told stories that inspired empathy for enemies

Along the same lines, Jesus told parables to ignite his followers’ imaginations and to challenge their presuppositions. A major theme of his storytelling is a radical rethinking of both “us” and “them.” One of the best known stories concerns a detested political and ethnic enemy who turns out to be an Israelite’s true “neighbor” (Luke 10:25-37). To love this neighbor as much as oneself, says Jesus, is to know God. In one sense Jesus’ parables are subversive and shocking, and yet they are not without precedent in his own tradition. Hebrew texts like Ruth and Jonah (both invoked by gospel authors) offered stunning and countercultural portrayals of hated enemies as sympathetic and beloved of God. Jesus claimed and amplified this vision.

3. Jesus interpreted scripture by filtering out violence and retribution

It is fascinating when studying the gospel texts to consider when and how Jesus invokes the Hebrew Scriptures in his teaching. Which books does he quote? Which books does he not quote? Which passages does he quote, and when? What does he leave in, what does he leave out? There is a growing scholarly interest in “how Jesus read his Bible.” One of the patterns that emerge from such a study is Jesus’ apparent intentional hermeneutical move away from violence and vengeance. This finds broad expression in the way Jesus reframed the Torah law to focus on relationships and empathy rather than technical compliance (see Matthew 5:21ff.). But consider also Luke 4:16-30, wherein Jesus quotes Isaiah (61)’s announcement of “the year of YHWH’s favor” (when God rescues “us”) but omits the very next line about “the day of God’s vengeance” (when God punishes “them”). By the end of the passage, Jesus’ disappointed neighbors are trying to throw him off a cliff. This dimension of Jesus’ bible teaching is challenging on a number of levels, in its original context and our own. (This topic is addressed in a fascinating book called Healing the Gospel by Derek Flood, who is currently writing another book specifically about violence in scripture.)

4. Jesus blessed his enemies as they murdered him

It’s one thing to avoid hateful rhetoric and to reconfigure an abstract religious/political framework around love and empathy. It is quite another to stare an enemy in the face as he brutalizes you and to declare him “forgiven.” This is exactly what Luke portrays (in chapter 23) when Jesus is crucified and prays, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.” The ramifications of this moment in the gospel narrative cannot be overstated. On the one hand, our notions of right, wrong, and forgiveness are turned inside out, as a divine agent pronounces forgiveness over unrepentant murderers. At the same time, Jesus is living out his own teaching to the utmost extreme, practicing his preaching to a confounding end. It is one of the great climactic moments in our Bible, second only to what comes a chapter later. (And there’s more that could be said about the non-vengeful nature of the resurrection tradition in contrast with popular messianic expectations.)

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Of all the moral imperatives in scripture, none remains more elusive and challenging than Jesus’ call to empathy and selfless love. This is the theme not just of his teaching, but of his life, his death, and his glorious legacy.

Repent of Bad Religion! Part 3: Rescuing Salvation

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The premise behind this series of posts is that true “repentance” is not about feeling sorry for your misdeeds and trying to do better. (You should do that, but it’s not repentance.) Nor is it a display of shame and contrition that wins you favor with God or your religious overlords. Real repentance is both a forceful rejection of bad ideas and an embracing of better ones. I’m applying this definition to some of the central tenets of Christian religion and suggesting that some radical repentance is in order.

Please note that I’m not simply exploring arbitrary new ways of conceptualizing Christianity as some kind of thought experiment or act of contrarianism. I honestly believe that we can and should get closer to the true biblical and historical essence of these ideas and farther away from the often poisonous mutations of them to which the modern church clings. We started the series with a clarifying look at repentance itself, and then we tackled the all-too-often bad news of “the gospel.” Today I hope we can rescue the idea of salvation.

What is “Salvation”?

Traditional American Christianity really wants everyone to get saved. After all, the bible itself enthusiastically announces that “salvation” comes through the name of Jesus Christ alone, and so job one for believing Christians has been to pound the pavement and make with the savin’. Problem is, it’s not always clear what exactly this “salvation” is, on a technical or practical level. Questions abound: Is it literal? Is it a metaphor? What are we saved from? What are we saved for? Who decides who’s saved and who’s “lost”? How do I know when I’m saved enough? Can salvation be lost once it’s unlocked? Do we have to dress and think and act and vote alike once we’re all saved? And, while we’re at it, will you save me some pie?

Traditional answer to these questions are problematic to say the least, and betray a host of muddled assumptions. Let’s briefly examine two bad models from the Greatest Hits collection. (They’re ultimately two versions of the same bad model, but please indulge me…)

Bad Model #1: “Saving Souls”

The classical European and American model is all about “saving souls.” Even though the bible only uses the words “save” and “soul” once in the same sentence (James 5:20), this has been the official way of talking about salvation for centuries. It goes something like this: Your body is mortal, but inside of it resides an immortal spiritual object or essence called a “soul.” When your body expires, your soul will live on for eternity. Because of original sin, all souls are doomed by default, and getting saved is the only way to guarantee a pleasant journey on the other side. This model boils down to a toggle switch inside of you that must be switched from the factory setting “lost” to “saved” before it’s too late. This is typically achieved by praying a prayer, professing to believe certain things about Jesus, getting baptized, and/or joining the right kind of church.

In addition to a less-than-compelling view of humanity and spirituality, this model has a much bigger problem for Christians: it’s not at all biblical. The notion of an immortal, immaterial “soul” that will exist forever in a state of either compromise or perfection is Greek philosophy, not bible theology. It’s Plato, not Jesus. To be fair, it’s easy to see how these Greek ideas might have been imported into early Christianity, as the word “soul” is indeed pervasive in both testaments. But in the (very diverse) world of biblical thought – that is, in the worlds of Ancient Israel, Second Temple Judaism, and First Century Christianity – “soul” meant something very different. In both Hebrew and Greek, with a great deal of range and nuance, “soul” means something like “life” or “breath,” and is a poetic way of referring to an individual mortal person, a “self.” I had a seminary professor who summarized the biblical soul as “the whole you as only God knows you, body, heart and mind.”

When we strip away foreign and anachronistic ideas from our understanding of biblical salvation, we move away from the first “bad model” but perhaps closer still to the second:

Bad Model #2: “Saved From Hell”

OK, so the “immortal soul with a toggle switch” model isn’t plausible nor is it biblical. But the bible does say that unsaved sinners are going to burn in hell (right? probably?), and so for many Christians this is the primary motivation for “sealing the deal” of salvation. Despite its popularity, however, this model has numerous serious problems. For a start, the word “unsaved,” ubiquitous in conservative Christianity, is completely unknown in the bible. It’s a silly non-word that betrays a wrongheaded adherence to the “salvation as status” model. (Not to mention how arrogantly dismissive it is of billions of human beings.) Meanwhile, setting aside the huge question of how the hell language in the bible actually works (something I had a lot to say about elsewhere), it turns out that the link between “salvation” and a “ticket out of hell” is not as clear as we assume it to be. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the bible never explicitly links salvation to the avoision of eternal punishment.

In the gospel texts, salvation is always a positive promise of rescue for Israel and the world through Jesus, never a threat. Jesus came to “save his people [Israel] from sin” (Matthew 1:21), to “save the world” (John 12:47), and to “save” countless individuals by healing and liberating them (eg. Luke 7:50). Nothing is ever said about salvation from hell or punishment. The Book of Acts is an account of the earliest Christian evangelists and their mission to bring the gospel of Jesus to all corners of the Roman Empire. The salvation they preach is the same positive, rescuing, life-renewing salvation that Jesus preached. It’s never “become a Christian or you’re going to hell!” Not once. Elsewhere, the Apostle Paul in his letters does use language of life and death when arguing about the power of salvation, but he never once invokes the threat of hell. If the bible never makes this connection, we should probably stop making it ourselves.

There’s a lot more to be said about this model and its problems, but I’m eager to move on and very briefly unpack just what I believe the bible is really getting at when it talks about “salvation.”

Salvation In The (Whole) Bible

First, a surprising fact: forms of the words “save” and “salvation” appear exponentially more often in the Hebrew Bible than in the New Testament. To be sure, the HB is a much much bigger collection than the NT, but the point is still important. “Salvation” isn’t a Christian innovation, it’s an ancient, biblical, Jewish idea. And like so many ancient biblical Jewish ideas, it is rooted in a specific historical reality, the event we know as the Exodus. Salvation was what happened when Israel’s God showed up and rescued his people from slavery in Egypt. This salvation became a metaphor for the rescue of individuals from dangers both temporal and spiritual (Psalm 35:3; Psalm 42:5), and the template for anticipated national rescue during times of exile, invasion, and occupation (Psalm 14:7; Isaiah 62). And by the time of Jesus, Roman oppression and internal division were so devastating that hopes were high for a “New Exodus,” for a new act of salvation from above. Jesus’ message was that the long-awaited salvation had finally come in the form of the kingdom of God.

Meanwhile, the Roman Imperial cult had its own ideas about salvation. The package of benefits promised to compliant subjects of the empire was rhetorically said to bring “peace” and “salvation,” available exclusively through submission to Caesar. This brings many New Testament statements about Jesus and salvation into sharper focus (eg. Acts 4:12, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.”). Rome promised to “rescue” you even as their noose tightened around your neck. Jesus and his followers proclaimed a salvation of true peace, of real rescue from the violence and sin embodied by Rome.

In light of these examples, a few observations about biblical salvation: 1) it is something everybody was already waiting and hoping for, 2) it affects individuals, nations, and the entire world, and 3) it involves physical and temporal rescue as well as spiritual liberation. In the bible, salvation is the too-good-to-be-true news in answer to the hopes and dreams of people who desperately needed to be rescued. It was never a mechanism for soul preservation or belonging to the correct religious group, it was always rescue and renewal and new creation and happy feelings and kittens and powerful God stuff, and it was all unleashed in the words, deeds, life, martyrdom, and resurrection of Jesus.

And there’s nothing we can do about it. The dam has broken and the unstoppable force of God Rescue™ is oozing through the cracks in our world. The bible invites us to embrace this new reality. The first step to embracing salvation is to accept the impossibly ridiculous notion that a kingdom of peace and love and joy could actually be a real thing, and that it could actually take over this world. That’s the Jesus way, the way of salvation. Only religious people could turn this amazing proclamation of unbridled hope into a burden, or worse, a weapon. God save us.

Repent of Bad Religion! Part 2: Dismantling the Bad News Gospel

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This is the second in a series of posts about repentance. In the first post we clarified the notion of “repentance” itself, using Jesus’ message as recorded in the bible to demonstrate that true repentance means embracing good ideas and killing off bad ones, even (or especially) bad ideas about God and religion. Today I want to focus on a central but often poorly-defined element of Christian religion: “the gospel.” [NOTE: I teased last time that we would be talking about “salvation” in part 2, but I changed my mind (repented?) and chose a different topic. “Salvation” and “the gospel” are not the same thing, which is one of the points I will be pushing here!]

“The Gospel” in Contemporary Christian Parlance

In Christian nomenclature, “the gospel” is a phrase that carries a lot of weight but is often very flexible in its meaning. Most people in the church and outside know that “gospel” means something like “good news,” but what precisely that good news is changes radically depending on whom you ask. For most evangelical Christians (my people, that’s why I pick on them so much), the gospel is something like this: “You are a depraved sinner with a grim future but God loves you so much he provided the possibility of salvation!” Not only is this a specious representation of some important biblical ideas, the biggest problem is that this news isn’t very “good” at all!

Many factors (biblical misunderstanding? individualistic Western worldview? obsession with legal sin guilt and personal morality?) seem to have conspired to weaponize our gospel. The “good news” is actually the worst news you’ve ever heard: the universe itself is against you and we’ve got a bunch of hoops you’ll have to jump through if you want a shot at the “free gift of salvation.” In practice this gospel is little more than a burden we place on our neighbors, or worse a club with which we pummel them in the name of God.

Meanwhile, in the church, the meaning of “gospel” is stretched even thinner and it becomes a tool of destruction among those who consider themselves its ambassadors. Inside Christian culture “the gospel” has become a codeword for everything that will be lost or compromised if your terrible ideas and preferences win out over my terrible ideas and preferences. Don’t agree about which people should be excluded from our church? You’re compromising the gospel! Disagree with my stance on a social issue? There’s a hole in your gospel! Think the napkins should be blue? That’s an affront to the gospel!

When it comes to “the gospel,” some clarification is in order. If only there were some ancient documents we could consult…

The Gospel of Jesus

According to the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke), Jesus’ “gospel” was a single simple (but huge) idea:

15 “You’ve waited long enough!” he said, “God’s kingdom is here! Turn back and believe the good news!” (Mark 1)

17 From that time on Jesus began to make his proclamation. “Repent!” he would say. “The kingdom of heaven is here!” (Matthew 4)

43 “I must tell the good news of God’s kingdom to the other towns,” he said. “That’s what I was sent for.” (Luke 8)

The gospel according to Jesus of Nazareth was the “kingdom of heaven” or “God’s kingdom.” As we’ve noted elsewhere, this is not a reference to a far off supernatural location but a present reality. God is becoming king of the earth. A million and one things pour out from this declaration, but if we want an authentic and pure definition of “the gospel” as Jesus understood it, here it is.

Of course, Jesus’ proclamation is only good news if the God it envisions is good. An angry and retributive God taking over the world is not terribly good news, and many before and since Jesus have imagined just that type of hostile takeover. But in his “kingdom manifesto” (in Matthew 5-7), in his “kingdom parables,” and in his boldly selfless life and death, Jesus insists that the God of this kingdom is a God of peace, love, forgiveness, and inclusion. In direct contradiction of the modern Christian sensibility, Jesus says that his gospel is good news for sinners and screw-ups and normal people – their rescue is here! – but bad news for the religious gatekeepers who would force others to jump through hoops to obtain God’s grace. Check this out:

13 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” Jesus continued. “You lock up the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces! You don’t go in yourselves, and when other people try to enter you stop them!” (Matthew 23)

So Jesus’ gospel isn’t good news for a small number of devout VIPs and horrible news for everyone else. It’s excellent news for all of creation, and bad news for anyone who doesn’t want to live in a world where peace and forgiveness flow like a waterfall. Most of all, it’s bad news for religious spoilsports who would wield “the gospel” as a weapon against their fellow humans.

But what about the apostle Paul? Most contemporary Christian defense of “the gospel” appeals to the thoughts and writings of Paul. Notwithstanding our tendency to overemphasize and even absolutize Paul’s message to the point where it threatens to eclipse even that of Jesus, the question is pertinent: what is “the gospel” according to Paul? Is it different from the one proclaimed by Jesus?

Paul’s Gospel

The temptation with Paul is to allow Reformation theology (and its many modern mutations) to put words into the apostle’s mouth or to perform origami on his epistles until they say what we’re expecting them to say. Most of us who grew up in the American evangelical church have been trained to think that Paul’s message is about “justification by faith, not works” according to a multi-step “plan of salvation” that moves the individual from the “damned” column into the “saved” column. As a result, it has been difficult for some of us to reconcile the radically simple and joyous gospel of Jesus with the seemingly technical and burdensome “gospel” of Paul. Are the two really so different?

We don’t have room in this short essay for a full exploration of Paul’s thinking and writing (though something like that will happen soon on the podcast). For now, however, it’s quite possible to get a handle on Paul’s understanding of “the gospel,” as he was kind enough to spell it out for us in the opening verses of his letter to the Roman church:

1 Paul, a slave of King Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for God’s good news, 2 which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the sacred writings; 3 the good news about his son, who was descended from David’s seed in terms of flesh, 4 and who was marked out powerfully as God’s son in terms of the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead: Jesus, the king, our Lord! (Romans 1)

Paul’s gospel is Jesus himself, the embodiment of the good God he proclaimed, and the king of the good kingdom he announced. The message is the same, though the focus is different. In historical context, it’s as if Jesus said “God’s kingdom is here, you don’t have to live in the Roman empire anymore!,” and Paul said, “Jesus is king, you don’t have to serve Caesar anymore!”

Paul does go on to craft many complicated arguments about life in the early church, mostly about how Jews and Gentiles could possibly live together and get along as followers of Jesus. But these arguments and their details should not be mistaken for “the gospel.” Paul’s gospel boils down to the same news as Jesus’ gospel: the peace, love and forgiveness of God himself have been unleashed into creation and it’s time to celebrate!

Conclusion: What Do We Do With This Gospel Today?

The way many Christians “preach the gospel” is actually antithetical to the good news found in the pages of scripture. Having clarified the fundamental goodness of the news proclaimed by Jesus and echoed by Paul, we might ask: how do we embrace, proclaim, and live this gospel today, here and now? Jesus himself gave us a beautiful glimpse at what life in God’s kingdom looks like. There is no anxiety (Matthew 6:25-34). Neighbors choose to love rather than condemn one another (Matthew 7:1-6). Evil is non-violently resisted and enemies are loved (Matthew 5:38-48). These things don’t come easily or naturally, and so this “gospel” manifests as a life-long journey rather than a forced, one-time decision.

The gospel of the Good Kingdom of the Good God calls everybody to repentance. But this is not the shallow, burdensome contrition imposed by religious hypocrites. It’s a rejection of that poisonous gospel, that bad news, and all “gospels” of shame and domination. If it’s not good news that sets captives free – here, right now, today – then it’s not the gospel.

NEXT TIME: Rescuing ‘Salvation.’

Repent of Bad Religion! Part 1

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Welcome to a new series of posts about repentance. My purpose in writing these four or five articles will be to demonstrate that true “repentance” is not about shame and regret over personal misdeeds, but about exchanging faulty and fruitless ways of thinking and living for new ones that work. This can and often does involve clarifying or even jettisoning bad religious ideas, or at least badly conceived versions of them. To help illustrate how this kind of repentance works, the first Christian idea I want to reexamine is the very notion of “repentance” itself.

Repentance in Popular Christian Thought

Echoing many voices in the bible (most notably Jesus himself), Christians consistently call on their fellow humans to “repent!” And what they typically mean by “repent!” is something like “demonstrate sorrow and regret for your personal sins and turn to religion!” This version of repentance (which has even made it into our dictionary) carries many assumptions about the legal nature of sin guilt and an obligation to contrition and right behavior as a mechanism for belonging. Especially in evangelical and other conservative streams of Christianity, “repentance” is chiefly about casting off personal sins as a necessary prelude to spiritual advancement. It’s a religious/legal transaction that (at least temporarily) puts one in a right standing before God.

Problems With Repentance-As-Contrition

While most people would agree in a broad sense that those committing bad or harmful deeds should discontinue them, the popular Christian understanding of “repentance-as-contrition” has some real problems. On a technical level, it has a lot more to do with confession and guilt than it does with actual repentance (which we’ll define in a moment). And in practice, this “repentance” often has the effect of shaming and belittling people instead of liberating them, of driving them through hoops instead of setting them free. Why does this happen? Because, as we’ll see, our misguided and incomplete view of repentance is too narrowly focused on the abstract status of individual persons and not enough on their place within world and society.

Perspective: What Did Jesus Mean By ‘Repent’?

From that time on Jesus began to make his proclamation. “Repent!” he would say, “The kingdom of heaven is here!” (Matthew 4:17)

Because Jesus used the word “repent” in his mission statement, Christians feel justified and even obligated in carrying the torch and echoing his words. But what did “repent!” mean to Jesus? Did he go up on mountaintops to tell people to stop all that sinning so they could go to heaven when they die? Was Jesus in the business of shaming people into behaving properly so God might love them?

Of course, Jesus wasn’t a magic Christian who floated down to earth to give us the correct religion. He was a Jewish prophet who claimed to herald the “kingdom of heaven” or “kingdom of God.” This “kingdom” was not a place but a reality, the “kingSHIP” or “reign” of Israel’s God on earth, as envisioned by the prophets of Israel whose legacy Jesus assumed. (See this podcast for more.) When Jesus called on his fellow Jews to “repent,” he was inviting them to “rethink” (the literal meaning of the word), to exchange one way of thinking and living for another.

A little non-biblical history might be helpful at this point. Titus Flavius Josephus was a Jewish scholar, born shortly after the death of Jesus, who worked as an historian and advisor for the Roman Empire. In his autobiography The Life of Flavius Josephus, he describes his work on behalf of the empire attempting to persuade would-be Jewish revolutionaries to suspend their anti-Roman inclinations and submit to the powers-that-be. In one instance, he pleads with an insurgent (named Jesus) to “repent and believe!,” the same Greek phrase attributed to Jesus of Nazareth in texts like Mark 1:15. Josephus isn’t inviting the brigand to get religion, but to give up his dead-end political agenda and trust Rome for a new one.

Of course, the Roman agenda was all about collusion, oppression, and domination, but Jesus’ “kingdom of God” agenda was something altogether different. In his “sermon on the mount” in Matthew 5-7 (sometimes called the “kingdom manifesto”), Jesus describes in detail what earth looks like when God is king. While typical kingdoms are dominated by the wealthy, violent and shrewd, God’s kingdom is a haven for the poor, the peaceful, and the meek. Those who “hunger and thirst for justice” are happy in this kingdom, and the sad and persecuted find a safe home there. Implicit in these details is a harsh critique of Jesus’ contemporaries. He accuses them of seeking the wrong kind of kingdom, a kingdom where the privileged dominate, the meek are put in their place, and justice is thwarted.

And it’s no small point of clarification that Jesus is not addressing irreligious or non-believing people. He’s not telling godless sinners to get religion, he’s telling believers to repent of their bad religion. Within the kingdom framework, this means not only abandoning personal and corporate sins, but adopting new ideas, agendas and beliefs that promote justice, peace, and humility. These are the attributes of kingdom people, of repentant people. Furthermore, we note that these are not attributes which can play out in doctrine or theory, or within the “soul” of an individual. The kingdom attributes can only manifest themselves in human relationships, and they can only find expression among communities. This kind of repentance doesn’t get people into heaven, it brings heaven to people.

Conclusion: Repentance As a Way of Life

Repentance might well involve a sense of shame or grief as we untangle ourselves from the bad ideas and agendas that pit us against our fellow humans and stunt our character. But no one should ever impose that shame on someone else as a fee for grace or a requirement for belonging. And far more important than guilt or contrition is the joy and freedom of adopting a new agenda that puts us in tune with God and in touch with our fellow persons.

True repentance will require us to surrender far more than our sinful personal habits, it might even cost us our religion.

NEXT TIME: ~~Rethinking ‘Salvation.’~~ What is ‘the Gospel’?

More On Inerrancy, Because Monday

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My original post on Rescuing the Bible From Inerrancy has been read about a thousand times, and while it generated only a single comment here on the blog, there were Facebook comments and shares with more comments, a few emails, and (best of all) several real-life conversations. The feedback was mixed; some Christian friends were uncomfortable with what felt like an attack on the bible, and some non-Christian friends wondered what the big deal was anyway.

The feedback from Christians was the most interesting, and it came in two distinct flavors. Retorts from conservatives/evangelicals basically said, “No, you don’t understand – the bible IS inerrant because it HAS to be!” which only illustrates my point, I think. Agree to disagree. But the most helpful pushback was actually from like-minded Christian friends who said, “We basically agree, but why stress errancy? Why undermine people’s faith in the bible based on a technicality?” While I think my post did touch on this, it’s a valid question and worth revisiting.

My point was never about the technical errancy of the bible. In rejecting the modernist category of “inerrancy,” I’m also implicitly rejecting its counterpart “errancy.” I’m suggesting that these are not the most helpful terms when it comes to describing what the bible actually is, a collection of ancient documents. If I wave my hand and declare them to be “inerrant,” I’m fooling myself and stacking the deck against intellectual honesty. If I quarantine them as “errant,” I’m still playing into the notion of factual veracity as the primary gauge of a document’s value. What does it mean for a poem to be “inerrant”? For the self-defining stories of a community to be labeled “errant”? How do those labels help us engage with the actual content of the bible?

And this is the crux of the issue for me: it’s all about our POSTURE as we engage with the text. Are we open to an encounter with the weird and the unexpected? The disturbing? The divine? Or have we made up our mind ahead of time that it’s all somehow magically perfect, a database of categorized truths ready to be observed, memorized and enforced? Inerrancy is like an immunization against the crags and surprises in the text. It puts the text on a shelf so high we can’t see the fingerprints all over it. It turns the volume of our own doctrines and interpretations up so high that neither the text’s authors nor God Himself can cut through the noise and say anything new.

Here’s an obvious and practical example of the problem as I see it:

The bible says (or rather, the authors of Exodus 21 write, citing the law) “If there is harm, you shall repay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”
But Jesus of Nazareth (in Matthew Chapter 5) says, “You have heard it was said, ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist one who is evil. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn him the other also.”

Two “biblical” principles: violent retaliation and nonviolent confrontation. They are, on the surface, at odds with one another. So which of the two is “inerrant”? Which one is an “infallible doctrinal truth” and the “foundation of our faith”?

Now, you can point out that talion (“eye for eye”) was actually a progressive (read “less violent”) ethic in its ancient context, and that seems to be the case. So when Jesus proclaims the godly ideal of nonviolence, we might receive it as a more pure and evolved but consistent version of the old principle. Maybe. Maybe not. We’d need to wrestle with it for a while. Meanwhile, it took our subjective evaluation and historically-informed interpretation to get us even this far. And once we’ve acknowledged the possibility of an evolution of ideas among the various conversant perspectives in the bible, inerrancy as a presupposition becomes at best unhelpful and at worst a hindrance.

We may insist that the principles and ideas we extract from this subjective process are “trustworthy” and even “infallible,” but the only way to prove them out as such is the same way we encountered them in the first place: open and honest encounters with other humans. You can’t just declare it to be true and go back to bed, you have to live it out for the rest of your life. “Truth” apart from relational experience is just an abstraction. Many “bible believers” throughout history have lived “eye for eye” as “inerrant truth” and spilled a great deal of blood. Jesus himself lived “turn the other cheek” to its perilous extremity.

I believe that God can and does speak through scripture. I believe we can encounter Him in its pages in authentic and spectacular ways. I believe that the bible is precious and crazy and human and divine and ancient and alive. I trust in it, even as I often toil to make sense of it, and I think you should too. But it does no good to engage it with our brains tied behind our backs.

Attack of the False Prophets!

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One of Christian culture’s favorite things to do is reappropriate the ancient language of the Bible for whatever it is we’re trying to accomplish at the moment. We’re not just constructing a new building, we’re “taking possession of the land of promise.” I’m not hogging the copier, I’m “doing kingdom work under the anointing of the Spirit.”

And if what you’re trying to accomplish at the moment is warning your own tribe about a bad seed from another, you’ll find plenty of ammunition in the text. The language of “false prophets” and “false teachers” gives our criticism an air of authority and an edge of supernatural danger. These people aren’t just misguided or unhelpful, they represent an evil force of opposition which is as wrongheaded and wicked as we are correct and righteous. The Christian Internet is standing-room-only when it comes to this sort of name calling. A Google search for “false teachers” unearths countless warnings and accusations, but very little about the context and meaning of these phrases in the Bible.

In the interest of constructive discussion, I offer brief glimpses at these two labels in specific scriptural settings.

False Prophets! Run!

“15 Watch out for false prophets. They will come to you dressed like sheep, but inside they are hungry wolves. 16 You’ll be able to tell them by the fruit they bear. You don’t find grapes growing on thornbushes, or figs on thistles, do you?” (Matthew 7)

This is a big one because it comes from Jesus, and if Jesus said it then I can throw it as hard as I like in your face and you just have to take it, right? One of the unfortunate ways we’ve abused the legacy of Jesus is to assume that everything he did and said was for and about the church, that is, us. Jesus’ primary vocation was not to be the founder of the church and a new religion called Christianity, it was to be a Jewish prophet in the tradition of the great prophets of Israel and Judah. (For more on this see my recent podcasts on Matthew’s Gospel.) Getting Jesus’ context and self-identity wrong has led to widespread misunderstanding regarding his words and deeds. Some examples:

Matthew 18:15-20 is read as a primer on church discipline rather than a plea for peacemaking among neighbors (modern translations complicate this by using the word “church” instead of “assembly”).
Jesus’ parables are read as pep talks about evangelism and the “second coming” instead of announcements of YHWH’s return to Israel in Jesus’ own time (see Matthew 13 and parts of 21-22).
And his prophecies of imminent judgment and destruction on Jerusalem are read as descriptions of the “end of the world” (see Matthew 24-25 and the related discussion in this podcast).

In the same spirit, we’ve heard Jesus’ warning about “false prophets” as a divisive and ominous declaration that there are bad guys among us who must be exposed and expelled. Was Jesus really trying to fill us with anxiety and suspicion, or is there something else at the heart of his message? It just so happens that the immediate literary context of Jesus’ “false prophets” teaching is the “Sermon on the Mount,” wherein he admonishes his listeners not to worry and not to judge others. So what is his point about these “wolves in sheeps’ clothing”?

The collection of teachings we call the “Sermon on the Mount” was Jesus’ way of fleshing out his core message, the coming of the “Kingdom of God” to earth and what life, religion and (what we call) politics would look like within that new reality. It was an overwhelmingly positive – even joyous – message, but it carried with it a harsh critique of the status quo in Jerusalem. In Messiah, God was returning to his children Israel, and he found them mired in anxiety and greed, prone to violence, suspicious and judgmental. Jesus was calling his fellow countrymen to repent of those old ways and to join him in a new way, a “narrow way” chosen by few.

It’s at the end of this “Kingdom Discourse” that Jesus issues his warning about “false prophets” and their failure to produce “fruit.” On the one hand, he is calling out his nation’s leadership for failing to produce the fruit of the Kingdom of God (peace and justice), but he’s also doing something remarkable that gets to the heart of this whole matter: he is offering himself up for scrutiny. Jesus invites his listeners to follow him and trust him that, in the end, his way is truly God’s way and will produce real fruit.

Jesus isn’t just calling names or drawing a line in the sand, he’s calling all eyes and all judgment onto himself and his message, onto his every word and deed. Are we prepared to put ourselves in the same position when we point the finger at others?

Behind You! It’s a False Teacher!

“1 Now the spirit declares that in the later times some people will abandon the faith and cling to deceitful spirits and demonic teachings 2 perpetrated by hypocritical false teachers whose consciences are branded with a hot iron.” (1 Timothy 4)

So maybe Jesus wasn’t talking about the church, but these dudes certainly are. The epistles are a collection of letters written by the apostles and leaders of the early church movement to various colleagues and congregations. They give us glimpses into the lives and challenges of the first Christians, where the chaos of Jewish/Gentile relations and the specter of persecution often led to strong rhetoric and fierce division. And so today, when many in the church are eager to set boundaries around acceptable beliefs and practices, passages like the one above provide a convenient template for condemning and dismissing an offending party. Hey, the Bible warned us there would be “false teachers” with “demonic teachings!” But if we do our homework and learn to appreciate these incendiary passages in context, well, we learn some stuff. You know the drill.

First, it’s very important to remember what these epistles represent. These are not catalogues of universal teachings to be memorized and obeyed for all time. This is ancient correspondence, letters between apostles and elders and congregations. When we read 1 Timothy or Ephesians or 2 Peter or Judah, we’re literally reading someone else’s mail. They reveal much and may even teach much, but they are not designed to function outside of their natural habitat.

Some of Paul’s letters (like Romans and 1-2 Corinthians) were intended to be read aloud to a specific congregation, and they address crises and challenges faced by that group. In the case of 1 Timothy and the passage quoted above, we’re reading a private letter from Paul to one of his younger colleagues, one that may have never been intended to be read by anyone else. Try reading the letter with this in mind, and you might be surprised how candid and even how negative Paul comes across. He insults members of Timothy’s congregation by name and condemns various groups inside and outside the church using the harshest of terms. This is not a criticism of Paul, but simply an attempt to be as honest as possible about the text as it really is, not necessarily how tradition has handled it.

So, in a brutally honest and private communication, Paul warns Timothy about “hypocritical false teachers.” And what “demonic” things were these false teachers teaching?

“3 They forbid marriage and teach people to abstain from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by people who believe and know the truth.”

The “false teachers” in Paul’s world are the ones who are placing boundaries around “acceptable” beliefs and practices! Specifically, these were Christians who insisted that Gentile believers had to adopt certain Jewish observances or be excluded from the “family of God,” which Paul insisted was open to everyone. It’s very ironic, then, that Paul’s warnings would be co-opted today by those seeking to impose boundaries of their own.

The language of “false” or “heretical” belief is more often than not employed today to stifle or condemn differences of opinion that fall well within the spectrum of historical “orthodoxy.” But it’s much easier to (literally) demonize a different point of view than to engage with and be stretched or challenged by it. Instead of imposing boundaries and stifling faith, Paul fiercely defended the simplicity and openness of his gospel message. In the opening of this same letter he described it like this:

“5 The goal of such teaching is love – the love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith.” (1 Timothy 1)

False teachers, then, like false prophets, are the ones who fail to produce real fruit like love and sincerity. And, like Jesus’ warning, Paul’s carries a positive inference: if false teachers impose boundaries and divide God’s people, then follow me for the way of true love and unity and freedom. We are probably never justified in using the “false” labels on our ideological enemies. If we dare, we’d better be ready to back it up with some fruit of our own.

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