But It Doesn't Say That!

 

But It Doesn’t Say That!

August 29, 2021

 The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Reading the Bible is tricky business. Many people say they want an easy translation and that they just want the Bible straight, without interpretation, without commentary. The problem is that that just isn’t possible. The Bible is an immensely complicated book. Indeed it is hardly a book at all. It is a collection of sixty-six different writings written by different people at different times in different political and cultural contexts. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part the texts were never written to be combined into a book with other texts.[1] The Bible’s range of theological views and perspectives is broader than anyone can easily keep track of. The Bible is full of contradictions, and it says that thing happened that can’t possibly have happened. There simply is no way around those realities. There simply is no legitimate way to make the Bible simple.

Because the Bible is so complex and difficult to understand there are certain traps that people fall into when they read it without proper guidance—and much of the guidance out there is anything but proper.[2] Most people who read the Bible do not come to it with fully open minds. Most people who read the Bible are church people. They have been told, perhaps for their whole lives, what the Bible says and what it means. Sadly, what many pastors tell their people the Bible says and means is just wrong. Yet their people bring what they have been told the bible says to their reading of it. They read it to say what they’ve been told it says even if what they’ve been told just isn’t right. That’s one trap people fall into.

Another is reading the Bible to say only what you want it to say or wish it said. A great many Christians want the Bible to be a how to manual for getting their souls to heaven when they die when in fact the Bible is hardly about getting souls to heaven at all. Others want the Bible to be about nothing but social justice, so they read, or try to read, social justice into everything in the Bible. The Bible says a lot of very good and important things about social justice, but it says a lot about other things too. You can’t legitimately read social justice into everything in it. I have a professional colleague who wants to read the Bible for the fun parts, of which frankly there aren’t very many.[3] We can make big mistakes when we read the Bible only for what we want it to say rather than what it actually says.

There is a significant example of people reading the Bible for what they want it to say rather than to discern what it actually says in the Bible itself. It appears several times in the New Testament. Here’s a prime example of that error from Acts 10:43. In that passage Peter says, “All the prophets testify about [Jesus] that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” Several New Testament authors insist that the ancient Hebrew prophets predicted Jesus. Here’s another example, this one from Matthew’s account of Jesus’ conception and birth:

 

All this took place to fulfill what had spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

 

                ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’

 

which means ‘God is with us.’

 

The Gospel of Matthew says several more times that something has taken place to fulfill some ancient Hebrew prophecy. About that it is simply wrong.

In chapter 8 of Acts Philip talks to an Ethiopian eunuch who is reading the prophet Isaiah. He was reading a passage from Isaiah that says “Like a sheep he was led to slaughter.” The Ethiopian invites Philip to help him understand that text. He asks Philip “about whom…does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Acts 8:34. Acts then says that Philip “began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.” Acts 8:35. The clear implication of this pericope is that the Suffering Servant Songs of Isaiah, about one verse of which the Ethiopian asked Philip are predictions of Jesus.

Here's the thing though. Neither Isaiah’s Suffering Servant Songs nor anything else in Hebrew scripture is about Jesus. Yes, the Suffering Servant Songs are the easiest parts of the Old Testament to read as being a prediction of Jesus.[4] The truth is, however, that those passages simply do not predict Jesus, and it is illegitimate for us to read them as doing so. I say that it doesn’t predict Jesus first of all because the best biblical scholars say it just isn’t clear about whom the Suffering Servant Songs speak. I have two more reasons for saying that those passages don’t predict Jesus and that it is illegitimate for us to read them as doing so as well.[5] The first is that the texts of the Hebrew Bible are ancient writings which many Christians have taken to be talking about things that happened many centuries after those texts were written. The second has more to do with the history of Christian-Jewish relations. Let me explain.

When we have an ancient text that appears to be talking about events that happened much later than the time of the text one of two things is happening. One possibility is that the ancient text really does foretell later events. That is how much of the Christian tradition has understood Isaiah’s Suffering Servant Songs. The other possibility, however (and I think a much better one) is this. At least some of the people who had known Jesus during his lifetime, who had traveled with him, learned from him, and spread his message to others experienced the powerful presence of God in him in a unique way. He had revealed God to them in a new way both in his teachings and in his death. Some of them believed him to be the long-expected Messiah. Yet the Romans had falsely accused, arrested, tortured and crucified him as a political criminal. That simply is not how it was supposed to be with the Messiah. He was supposed to a very earthly king who would restore the kingdom of David, and Jesus didn’t even try to do any such thing. Doing any such thing would have contradicted everything Jesus taught and stood for. Yet his followers could not deny their experience of God in Jesus.

So they did the one thing they could do to make sense out of what had happened to him. They turned to their Bible, the scripture we Christians call the Old Testament. They mined their Bible for passages that might explain who Jesus was and what had happened to him. They found at least some such passages in the prophetic books of Hebrew scripture. Among those passages are Isaiah’s Suffering Servant Songs. There these early Christians found a servant of God whom the world had rejected and who bore the iniquities, the sins, of the world. That’s who Jesus was to them, so they said that those ancient texts predicted Jesus.

I do not believe that anything in Hebrew scripture predicts Jesus because I don’t believe that a writer writing hundreds of years before Jesus could have had any knowledge of a man who wouldn’t come along until many centuries later, not even of Jesus. Perhaps I don’t believe that because I am, among other things, a professionally trained historian. Historically speaking people just don’t accurately predict things that won’t happen until centuries later. Yes, I know. Many people like to say that the New Testament book of Revelation predicts the end times. It doesn’t. People think somebody named Nostradamus from the sixteenth century CE predicted all sorts of things that are happening in our time. He didn’t. It’s easy enough to read an old text as predicting the future. The truth is those texts don’t do that or at least don’t do it accurately. As Kris Kristofferson wrote, “Yesterday is dead and gone, and tomorrow’s out of sight.” It’s out of sight for everyone. It just makes a whole lot more sense to say that the earliest Christians read Jesus back into the Hebrew Bible than to say that those texts actually predict Jesus.

My second reason for rejecting the notion that Hebrew scripture predicts Jesus arises from the horrific, murderous, sinful history of Christian anti-Judaism. What we Christians call the Old Testament is the sacred scripture of Judaism, the great faith from which our great faith arose. The Old Testament is our scripture too, but it is that only because it is first of all Jewish scripture. When we say that it predicts Jesus was are attempting to force Jewish scripture to speak with a Christian voice that it just doesn’t have. That it speaks with a Jewish voice rather than a Christian one doesn’t make it wrong. It just makes it not Christian. In light of the Holocaust and the centuries of Christian violence inflicted on the Jews that led up to it, it is simply inappropriate and impermissible for us to force Jewish scripture into a Christian mold that it just doesn’t fit. So let’s let go of our attempts to make Jewish scripture say something specifically Christian, that is, to say things it just can’t and doesn’t say.

And let’s let go of reading any of the Bible to say what we want it to say rather than what it says. That’s what those earliest Christians were doing when they said Hebrew scripture predicts Jesus. They wanted it to predict him, but it just doesn’t. It is true, as I explain in Volume One of Liberating the Bible, that the meaning of a text is not necessarily limited to the author’s intended meaning. Yet every legitimate interpretation of any text must begin with the text itself, not with what the interpreter wants the text to say. It is inappropriate for any interpreter to stray so far from the text itself as to say that it says something that it just doesn’t say. It is even more inappropriate for any interpreter to make any text say anything that is simply inappropriate for the context of the text or the context of the interpreter.

So as you interpret biblical texts, check yourself. Are you reading a text to say something it just doesn’t say? If so, bring your interpretation back to the text itself. Are you making the text say something that it is inappropriate for you to make it say because of historical events in your own context? If so, please discard that interpretation. Come back to the text. Let it speak in its own voice. Let it mean what it meant when the author wrote it and whatever else the text may legitimately be expanded to mean. It’s the only way to produce an acceptable interpretation of any text. It is the only way to draw legitimate meanings from Bible.

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[1] The exceptions include the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, Acts being essentially the second volume of Luke. The books of the Deuteronomic history—Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings were written as a piece and meant to be read together. The Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—contain material from several earlier sources, but they were compiled and edited to be read together, or at least all of them except Deuteronomy were.

[2] For proper guidance see my three volume work Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, soon to be available at amazon.com.

[3] I find the book of Jonah to be biblical comic relief. The stories of Ruth and Esther are fun in their way. There’s Balaam’s talking donkey (traditionally Balaam’s ass) in Numbers. That’s about it for the fun parts of the Bible.

[4] You’ll find them at Isaiah 42:1-4, 49:1-6, 50:4-8, and 52:13-53:12.

[5] You’ll find this analysis also in Volume Two, The Old Testament, of Liberating the Bible, my books that I mentioned above, in the Stop at Isaiah.

Does God Do That?

 

Does God Do That?

August 25, 2021

 

Psalm 146 raises an issue for me that I also have with many similar passages in the Bible. It is the issue of what God does in the world and what God does not do in the world. In verses 7 to 9 Psalm 146 says that God does all of these things:

 

·         Executes justice for the oppressed.

·         Gives food to the hungry.

·         Opens the eyes of the blind.

·         Lifts up those who are bowed down.

·         Loves the righteous.

·         Watches over the strangers.

·         Upholds the orphan.

·         Upholds the widow.

·         Brings the way of the wicked to ruin.

 

I’ll be honest here. Of all of those justice items in that list it seems to me that God does only one. God loves the righteous. That’s because God loves everyone. God even loves the self-righteous, something I and many other people aren’t quite able to do.

So I have to ask: If God executes justice for the oppressed, why are so many people still oppressed? If God gives food to the hungry, why are so many people still hungry? I ask the same question about all of the things in Psalm 146’s list. If God does all those things, why are there still so many prisoners, blind people, people bowed down? Why do orphans and widows so often have very hard times in their lives? Why do so many wicked people thrive economically and exert so much political power around the world? Really, if God did all the things that Psalm 146 says God does, the world would be a much better place than it is. That the world isn’t a better place than it is pretty much establishes that God doesn’t do the things Psalm 146 says God does.

So does that mean that the parts of Psalm 146 that say that God does all those things that we know God doesn’t do have no meaning for us? If we take Psalm 146 at face value no, I don’t think it has any meaning for us. I mean, what meaning could there be if the words in the psalm are just wrong? Yet I’m not quite ready to write off Psalm 146 altogether; but to get any meaning for us out of these lines  we have to read it essentially as saying something that on its face it doesn’t say. Let me explain.

Psalm 146 gives a list of very desirable things. We would all love to see all of those things become realities in the world, wouldn’t we? Of course we would. I’m quite sure that God would love to see all those things become realities in the world too. The God we know in and through Jesus Christ wants only the best for every person. God is love, and love always wants only the best for the beloved. Yet when we look at the world we see that God doesn’t intervene in the affairs of the world to make good things happen for all people. The book of Deuteronomy may say over and over again that the righteous succeed in this life and the unrighteous are cursed, but we know that that just isn’t true. Evil and suffering are existential realities for a great many people, most of them as innocent of wrongdoing as any of us humans ever are. So how do those lines from Psalm 146 have any meaning for us? How can they have any meaning for us?

Here's how I can understand them as having meaning for us. Those lines express a vision of what the world would be like if the world were ordered according to the will of God rather than the wills of human beings. We humans are so horribly fallible. We all make mistakes, sometimes big mistakes. Our mistakes perpetuate injustice and avoidable suffering on earth. Psalm 146 and a great many other passages in the Bible tell us what the world should be like. If we read it correctly—and sadly most of us don’t—we see God’s vision, God’s dream of a world of justice for the weak and vulnerable and peace for all people. Jesus calls that vision the kingdom of God. Giving us that vision, that dream, was what Jesus was mostly about.

When we read the Bible correctly we see God’s vision, God’s dream, and we see that God calls us to be the instruments of making that dream a reality. I can’t understand much of the Bible in any other way. The Bible brings us God’s vision. Sometimes it says God does the things needed to make the vision a reality, but we know that God doesn’t do that. We can get badly mired in the bog of theodicy if we think too much about why God doesn’t do it. That way lies confusion and despair. We are on much more solid ground when we see the divine vision of a transformed world as a call to us to do the work to make that vision real. To transform the world in the direction of justice and peace, actually of peace through justice. God doesn’t intervene to do that work. God never will. What God will do and does do is be with us, guiding and supporting us, as we do that work. The answer to the question that prompted this piece, the question “Does God Do That?” is no, God doesn’t. Or better, God does it but only through the efforts of human beings. Only through the work of fallible women and men working bas best they can, as best we can, to make the vision a reality on earth. We do the work. God is with us as a source of inspiration, guidance, consolation, and forgiveness of our inevitable mistakes. On our own we couldn’t do it. With God’s sustaining presence maybe we can. So let’s get one with it, shall we?

Would You? Would I?

 

Would You? Would I?

A Meditation on Psalm 15

August 23, 2021

 The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Psalm 15 begins with this question: “O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill?” Psalm 15:1. It then gives a series of answers to that question. The first sort of people it mentions as answers to the question are “Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right….” Psalm 15:2a. The list goes on, and it comes to a group of people deemed to be worthy that raises a significant issue for me. It includes in its list of the worthy those “who stand by their oath even to their hurt.” Psalm 15:4c. The term “their oath” is a bit obscure for me. The study note to that verse in the New Oxford Annotated Bible says the reference is to honesty in business and legal matters. Honesty in business and legal affairs is of course commendable. Yet this phrase raises for me the issue of whether my faith is strong enough to hold when there are negative consequences to my keeping it and living it. Not just my faith though, but the faith of essentially all the Christians I know. Would we really stand by our faith to our own hurt? Not that I have an answer to that question. Still, it is the question I want to consider here.

We mainstream Protestant Christians are most fortunate. We face essentially no negative consequences from our being Christian. It is true that Christianity is no longer the default faith of most Americans. Certainly being a Christian pastor no longer carries with it the respect and influence it once did. But though I once had a stranger tell me that I was taking my life in my hands by wearing a University of Oregon cap in the midst of Washington Husky land, no one has ever told me that I was taking my life in my hands by being a Christian. We take Christianity being legal for granted. We have our right to the free exercise of our faith guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and the Supreme Court cases that interpret and apply that guarantee. Tragically there has been some violence against Christians and their churches in this country, but that violence happens rarely and affects only a very small percentage of all Christians. Some of that violence may come not specifically because the victims are Christians but because churches are easy targets for disturbed individuals hellbent on causing mayhem and death. All things considered though, the US today is quite an advantageous place to be a Christian. We rarely if ever face the question of whether we will stand by our faith even to our own hurt.

It was not always so for Christians. For roughly the first three hundred years of the Christian faith’s existence in the Roman Empire, which is where almost all Christians lived, it was illegal to be Christian. The church has made a lot out of the Roman persecution of Christians in those centuries. It has very probably exaggerated the extent of those persecutions, but that there were such persecutions of Christians is a well-established historical fact. Christians reacted to the illegal status and the sporadic persecution of themselves and their faith in different ways. Some, I suppose, just lay low, kept their faith a secret, and figured that the negative consequences of being a Christian would not touch them. Some became apostates, that is, they renounced their Christian faith in order to avoid those negative consequences.

Others, however, held to their faith even to their own hurt. St. Paul was imprisoned and beaten several times because he proclaimed the Gospel of Jesus Christ. People even plotted to kill him both in Damascus after his conversion and in Jerusalem. There are no historical records to corroborate these things as historical fact, but the Christian church has long said that the Romans executed both St. Paul and St. Peter because of their public proclamation of their Christian faith. There were others who also held to their faith though it cost them their lives. We know them as martyrs. Some early Christians even sought martyrdom as the ultimate expression of their faith.

The Christian churchtoo has inflicted negative consequences on Christians. It has persecuted and killed Christians who espoused a variety of the Christian faith of which the church did not approve. We’ve probably heard of the church burning supposed heretics at the stake, something that could hardly be less Christian. Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, and others were burned at the stake for teaching doctrines the church condemned and for translating the Bible into the languages of their people so that any literate person could read it. All of these women and men who the church killed as heretics held to their faith very much to their harm.

There are more recent examples of Christians holding to their faith very much to their own harm. Oscar Romero, now St. Oscar Romero, was a Roman Catholic priest who became archbishop of San Salvador, the capital of the Central American country of El Salvador, a name that perhaps ironically means The Savior. Though when he was appointed to that post he was quite a social conservative, Romero became a powerful champion of the rights of the poor people of El Salvador and a vocal opponent of the murderous policies of the El Salvadoran government. On March 24, 1980, as he celebrated mass at a hospital chapel in San Salvador, gunmen stormed in and shot him dead. It is said that his blood mixed with the blood of Christ in the Communion cup. Also in El Salvador, on November 16, 1989, gunmen murdered six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and the housekeeper’s sixteen year old daughter. These priests were known for ministering to communities caught in war zones of the El Salvador civil war. Surely they knew how brutal the regime in San Salvador was. They certainly knew what had happened to Oscar Romero. They must have known the risks they were taking, but they held to their faith though it cost them their lives.[1]

Then of course there is the example of Jesus himself. He was a poor man from a tiny town in a backwater area of the Roman Empire. He spent his adult life proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching the people a new way of understanding God and God’s will for God’s people. In everything he said and did he criticized and even condemned the political authorities of the Roman Empire and the religious authorities of his own Jewish faith. He knew what the Romans had done to the leaders of earlier popular messianic movements. He knew what crucifixion was. He could have stayed in Nazareth, kept his mouth shut, worked as a carpenter, and never drawn any attention to himself. He would have died a natural death in his hometown. He didn’t. He knew what God was calling him to do. He may even have believed that God sent him to do it as so many Christians came to believe after his death.

So he held to his faith and preached the good news of justice for the poor and oppressed. He preached the good news of peace through the nonviolent establishment of that justice. He was from Galilee, by the standards of his time a long way from Jerusalem. He didn’t have to go there. But Jerusalem was the big Jewish city. It was the economic center of the region. It was the location of the temple, the sacred center of Jesus’ Jewish faith. So he went. He caused disruption. See Mark 11:15-17. He taught what he knew to be God’s truth in the temple, the house of the religious authorities of his faith against whom he directed much of what he said. He had a large following, and he surely knew that the Romans did not tolerate large popular movements directed against them even if, as it was in Jesus’ case, that opposition was completely nonviolent. He went, and if he didn’t know it when he went there he surely learned in very short order that his life was seriously at risk. He could have stopped teaching. He could have slunk back to Nazareth to lead the quiet life of a small town carpenter. He didn’t. He stayed. He acted. He taught. When he knew that crucifixion was at hand he begged God that it not happen. Mark 14:32-36. Yet he ended his prayer saying to God “yet, not what I want, but what you want.” Mark 14:36. He held to his faith though it led him to an excruciating and unjust death on a cross.

And I wonder: I know that we Christians are called to life as Jesus lived, but would I have the courage to do what he did? Would you? Would my faith be strong enough to sustain me in whatever came my way? Would yours? To be perfectly honest, I don’t have an answer to those questions for myself. I certainly don’t have one for you. I don’t think any of us can have answers to those questions if we’ve never been threatened because of our faith, if we’ve never had to make a choice between our faith and our life. I hope that I could cling to my faith no matter what. I pray that I never find out if I would or not.

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[1] We must not forget these Christian martyrs. The priests’ names were Ignacio Ellacuria, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Segundo Montes, Amando Lopez, Juan Ramon Moreno and Joaquin Lopez y Lopes. The housekeepers name was Elba Ramon. Her sixteen year old daughter’s name was Celina Ramos. May they rest in peace, and may their example be an inspiration for all of us.

Would That All the Lord's People Were Prophets

 

Would That All the Lord’s People Were Prophets

August 22, 2021

 The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

In a sermon I heard recently I heard a suggestion that we liberal, progressive Christians, should not criticize other Christians who see the faith differently than we do. I heard a call for us to avoid “spiritual warfare.” I write here to say I couldn’t disagree more. Remaining silent may be pastoral. There certainly are contexts in which pastoral silence is called for and even necessary for us to serve people we are called to serve. I’m thinking of the situations where I have been called upon to provide pastoral care at the end of life for people whose view of life after death is very different from mine. That is not the time to argue the theology of life after death. Yet pastor is only one of the things God calls us to be. God also calls us to be prophets. In the Torah some people complain to Moses that some other people are prophesying who weren’t authorized to prophesy. Moses responds, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” Numbers 11:29. The great eighth century BCE Hebrew prophets, Jews all, railed against other Jews who were practicing Judaism all wrong. Amos attacked those Jews who thought that all their God required of them was sacrificial worship and the observation of Jewish festival days. Speaking the words of God, he said:

 

I hate, I despise your festivals,

       And I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,

       I will not accept them;

and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals

       I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;

       I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

But let justice roll down like waters,

       And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Amos 5:21-24.

 

In Jesus’ day the Pharisees were a prominent school of Judaism, and Jesus never tired of condemning them. A Jew himself, Jesus went to far as to call the Pharisees a “brood of vipers.” Matthew 12:34. In that verse the Jew Jesus calls the Jewish Pharisees evil. He certainly didn’t feel himself constrained from criticizing other Jews who he though were practicing their faith all wrong. We aren’t Jesus of course, but the Torah calls us all to be prophets. I am sure that Jesus does too. In our world today there simply is no doubt that many Christians, perhaps even most Christians, are practicing our great faith all wrong. Here are just a few examples of how wrong they get the Christian faith.

 

·         Jesus preached the kingdom of God and called us to transform ourselves and the world here and now, in this life not in some imagined future life on some other plane of being. Since at least the fourth century CE however most Christians have understood him, wrongly, to be about getting our souls to heaven after we die.

·         Jesus preached nonviolent social revolution. In virtually everything he did and said he turn the world of his time and place upside down. He proclaimed God’s values of justice and peace against the world’s ways of oppression and violence. Yet most Christians today take him as a bulwark of the world’s status quo and turn ancient cultural values and (mis)understandings into the word of God.

·         The Bible is quite obviously a purely human product that, while it also contains great wisdom, is full of contradictions and assertions that are quite simply wrong. God did not order Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites the way 1 Samuel 15:1-3, says God did. No one who proclaims God as a God of love, 1 John 4:8, can possibly believe that God did any such thing. The Bible contradicts itself on how many animals Noah took into the ark. Compare Genesis 6:19 with Genesis 7:2-3. Either Jesus was on his knees in real human agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Mark 14:21-36, or the armed band that came to arrest him fell to their knees before his divine majesty, John 18:1-6[1]. Yet popular Christianity today has convinced itself that the Bible is the inerrant word, or words, of God that contains no errors and no contradictions.

·         Jesus was a nonviolent revolutionary who demanded the nonviolent overturning of essentially everything in the status quo of his day including all of its political, economic, social, religious, and cultural institutions and ways. Popular evangelical Christianity today, however, has become a bastion of the status quo. Its leaders direct their followers to vote for politicians who will change nothing for the better and to resist transformation of the world into one of justice—except perhaps for themselves.

 

The list of ways in which popular, evangelical Christianity distorts and abuses the faith of Jesus Christ could go on and on, but I trust I have made the point. A great deal of contemporary Christianity is just wrong in its interpretation and practice of the faith.

Does God call us to be silent in the face of the widespread bastardization of our great faith? Of course not. “Would that all of the Lord’s people were prophets.” Are we supposed to be nice and avoid all conflict in the family of faith? No! Was Jesus nice and avoiding conflict when he overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the temple? See Mark 11:15-17.  Of course not. He was committing a prophetic act against the temple itself. We are called not to silence but to speak the truth. Ephesians 4:15. Yes, that verse also tells us to speak the truth in love, but it most certainly does not call us to be silent in the presence of evil. Christ’s directive that we love one another, John 13:34, does not mean love one another by not speaking the truth. Did God send us Jesus Christ as one who would not speak the truth because some people thought it wasn’t nice for him to do so? Of course not. What use would we have of such a Christ? God knows that we don’t need that kind of Christ. We need a Christ who speaks God’s truth and isn’t afraid to do it despite what he knew could happen to him if he did. That’s the Christ God sent us in Jesus.

So with all due respect to pastors and other Christians who believe that God calls us only to be pastoral, only to be nice, I say no. That’s not all God calls us to be. God calls us to be prophets as well. Prophets of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a radical Gospel of nonviolent worldly transformation from the ways of injustice and violence that so characterize today’s world to God’s ways of peace through the nonviolent establishment of justice. Not the due process kind of justice, although that is important too in its own way. Justice as the undoing of social, economic, and political systems that oppress and impoverish some so that others may be immensely wealthy. How can we remain silent in the face of that undeniable reality? We can’t. God calls us to be prophets. Let’s get on with it, shall we?

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[1] In the New Revised Standard Version and other English translations of the Bible Jesus says “I am he” when told that the mob come to arrest him was looking for Jesus of Nazareth. The NRSV, however, has a translators’ note here that says that the Greek original only has him say “I am.” “I am” is the sacred name of God in Judaism. See Exodus 3:14.

Which Gods Will You Serve?

 

Which Gods Will You Serve?

August 13, 2021

 The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Several years ago when I had moved into a house near the church I was serving at the time a member of that church gave me a little plaque that had written on it, “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” I thought it a nice sentiment, but at the time I didn’t know where it came from or its the context, if any. Well, it turns out it comes from chapter 24 of the book of Joshua. In the story in which it appears Joshua, Moses’ successor, had led the Israelites across the Jordan into the land they believed their god Yahweh had promised their ancestors that they would possess. He has fought various battles against the inhabitants of that land, most famously the battle of Jericho. He has distributed the land he has taken from its inhabitants to the twelve tribes of Israel.[1] At the beginning of chapter 24 he has gathered “the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers” of Israel at the city of Shechem. He says to them:

 

Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord. Joshua 24:14-15.[2]

 

We see that Joshua has given the leaders of the people the choice of serving Yahweh or serving the gods of the people of Mesopotamia (“beyond the River”) or of the Egyptians. Make the choice he says, but “as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord,” that is, we will serve our Israelite god Yahweh and not some foreign gods.

We know from parts of Hebrew scripture that come after Joshua that the Hebrew people were constantly being drawn to the worship of the local gods and goddesses of Canaan, especially the god Baal and his consort Ashera. Perhaps they were drawn to Baal because Baal was, among other things, a weather god . In the ancient religion of the Hebrews Yahweh was a war god and nothing else. It’s good to have a war god I guess when you’re fleeing the Egyptian empire and conquering the people of the land you intend to possess. Once you’ve done that and become settled in the land however, most of the time what you need is a rain god to facilitate the growth of your crops. A war god is pretty much useless in that regard. In any event, the choice of which gods to serve was a big question in ancient Israel.[3]

Now, I assume that choosing between the war god of ancient Israel and the gods of other ancient peoples isn’t an issue for you. I know that it isn’t an issue for me. So does that mean that the choice Joshua put before his people so very long ago means nothing to us? No, I don’t think it means nothing to us. I suppose if I did I wouldn’t be writing this blog post. I think that God actually calls all of us continually to choose what god we will serve, but to understand what I and a lot of other people mean by that contention we need first to consider what the word “god,” not God, means in that statement.

We find the answer to that question in the work of the great 20^th century German/American theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich taught that every person has what he called an “ultimate concern.” By that he meant that for every person there is something that is more important to them than anything else. Tillich said that a person’s ultimate concern is that person’s god. It is that to which she looks for fulfillment, care, meaning, and reward. A person’s ultimate concern is that to which he will sacrifice everything else. A person’s ultimate concern can be that which is truly ultimate, i.e., God, or it can be something that isn’t ultimate at all. Tillich thought that most Americans have that second kind of ultimate concern and that the two most common of such ultimate concerns are wealth and the nation.

So many Americans spend their whole lives, their time, their energy, and their resources pursuing material wealth. Material wealth actually is the ultimate concern not only of individuals but of our culture as a whole or at least of white American culture as a whole. We look up to wealthy people and look down on poor people. We equate material wealth with success. We look to money as the ultimate source of our security and wellbeing. When wealth is a person’s ultimate concern he will sacrifice everything in his efforts to obtain it and keep it, often even his family.

Others of us make the nation our ultimate concern. Some whose ultimate concern is wealth may see the nation primarily as a device there to help them get and stay wealthy. For others the nation not wealthy is truly their ultimate concern. These people look to the nation as a source of identity and even pride. They’ll say “I’m proud to be an American” even if they’ve done nothing to make them Americans other than be born here. They’ll say “America first” and “America: Love it or Leave it.” They look to the nation and its various instruments of force (police, the military) as the source and guarantor of their security. Most telling of all, people whose ultimate concern is the nation will do things the nation tells them to do that they would never do on their own. They will join the military and kill other human beings, convincing themselves that they’re just doing their duty and doing it honorably. Never mind that there is nothing honorable about killing. They will put their lives at risk, going “in harm’s way” as they often put it. They will even willingly die if they think their dying will serve the nation.

Those two things, wealth and the nation, are what Tillich thought most Americans’ ultimate concerns are. Based perhaps on my personal experience however, I’d like to suggest a third possible ultimate concern that I believe a great many people have. That other ultimate concern is the family. I’ll use myself as an example. I’m not wealthy, and although I used to be a lawyer I have never considered the pursuit of wealth to be a worthwhile way to live. I oppose a great many things my country does and will not willingly die for it. But I have a family. My parents are gone now, but I still have a twin brother, badly disabled by strokes as he is. More than that I have a wife, two adult children, and five grandchildren. They are the ones for whom I would do very nearly anything. I want to say I wouldn’t kill to protect them, but in dire enough circumstances I might even do that[4]. I would willingly give up my life if I had to in order to keep them safe. Maybe I’m projecting here, but I believe that the family is the ultimate concern not only of many Americans but of many other people around the globe as well.

Here’s what all that has to do with Joshua’s question to his people about which god or gods they would serve. Tillich  taught that a person’s ultimate concern is that person’s god. He taught that an ultimate may be that which is truly ultimate, i.e., God, or it may be something that is not truly ultimate. An ultimate concern that is with something that is not truly ultimate is always idolatrous. Idolatrous ultimate concerns always fail the person who holds them. Wealth does not insure happiness, satisfaction, or security. Pursuing it as an ultimate concern certainly does not bring mental or spiritual health. Our nation fails us in more ways than I can even begin to recite. It fails some of us more than it fails others of us, but in the end, sooner or later, it will do something that seems to us to betray what we thought our nation was. Even the family is an idolatrous ultimate concern. It is idolatrous because like any ultimate concern other than God is it not ultimate. It is not infinite or immortal. Members of our families disappoint and even fail most of us at some time or another. Ask anyone who has raised teenagers, or if you have raised teenagers yourself you won’t have to ask. Only the truly ultimate, that is, only God, will never fail us, although of course to understand that God never fails us we can’t expect God to do things God just doesn’t do.

So we are all faced all the time with the choice of which gods we will serve. Will be serve the small, idolatrous gods that so beguile us and demand our service and loyalty? Or will we serve the one true God, the only reality that is truly ultimate, that is true God and not an idol? Joshua said that as for him and his household they would serve Yahweh, the only god of the Israelites. The text tells us that after he made that commitment all the people joined him in vowing their allegiance to Yahweh.

But what about you? What about me? When I said above that under the most dire circumstances I might even kill to protect my family I actually wrote “I won’t kill” in the first draft of this post. I wanted to say I would not because I am so convinced that that violence is never God’s way and must not be our way either. In writing that part of this post I was experiencing something many people experience. The conflict between different concerns that we might want to be ultimate but only one of which can be can get really messy. That truth does not, however, obviate God’s call to us to make only the truly ultimate, to make only God our ultimate concern.

Making God your ultimate concern doesn’t mean neglect your financial security. It doesn’t mean don’t care about your country and wish the best for her. You can make God your ultimate concern and actually work to make your country the best that it can be, with best meaning what is best in God’s eyes not the world’s eyes. Making God your ultimate concern certainly doesn’t mean neglect or otherwise harm your family. It means always putting God first. It means doing the best you can to see that your non-ultimate concerns are informed by and loyal to the truly ultimate, to God. That’s an easy thing to say and can be a very difficult thing to do. Yet God puts before us all the directive Joshua gave to his people. Choose which god you will serve, the idolatrous god that is not the ultimate or God the only truly Ultimate. May God help us all as we make that decision over and over again throughout our lives.

---

[1] Sort of like the way we have divided the land we’ve taken from its original inhabitants into states, but never mind.

[2] The word Lord here, spelled in small caps, renders the Hebrew name of God, Yahweh, without actually making anyone utter the name of God, something that in the Jewish tradition one is never supposed to do.

[3] Yahweh would eventually evolve in the people’s consciousness into the one true universal God, but he didn’t start out that way. See Exodus 15:21, where the prophet Miriam sings an ode to Yahweh as a war god.

[4] Then I would beg God’s forgiveness, for I know as Dietrich Bonhoeffer did, that necessity does not make killing moral.

Are Christians Cannibals?

 

Are Christians Cannibals?

August 11, 2021

 

My mother, may she rest in peace, grew up in the church, First Congregational Church of Valley City, North Dakota to be more precise about it. She wasn’t a particularly religious or spiritual person, but she belonged to and attended First Congregational Church of Eugene, Oregon, from 1947 when the family moved to Eugene until physical limitations stopped her from attending a few years before her death in 2006. So she had strong ties to the Congregational Christian tradition, but there was one thing about Christian worship that she could never accept. She would not participate in the sacrament of the Eucharist. She wouldn’t because when that sacrament is performed properly it calls the bread and wine used in it the body and blood of Christ.[1] Mom always thought that that language turned the people who ate the bread and drank the wine into cannibals. I’m sure she would have hated Bible verses like John 6:54, where John’s Jesus says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life.” NRSV

We cannot deny that Eucharistic language sounds like it is inviting people into cannibalism. Yet of course countless generations of Christians have partaken of the elements of the Eucharist without ever understanding that what they were doing made them cannibals. How is that possible? Well, different Christian traditions understand the Eucharist differently. Within those differences there are at least two ways that give ways of understanding the sacrament that obviate the possibility of the sacrament being cannibalism. One is Roman Catholic, the other is more contemporary and Protestant. We’ll take a look at both of them, starting with the Roman Catholic one.

The Roman Catholic Church insists that the elements of the sacrament truly are the real body and blood of Christ. The most common way, though not necessarily a required one, that the Church explains the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the elements of the Eucharist is called transubstantiation.[2] That explanation is grounded in Aristotelean philosophy. Aristotle taught that there are at least two aspects of every physical thing. There is the thing’s “substance,” and there are the thing’s “accidents.” The substance of a thing is what it really is in its deepest essence. The thing’s accidents are what we perceive of the thing, what we see of it for example. A thing’s accidents can be quite different from the thing’s substance. The theory of transubstantiation says that in the course of the performance of the sacrament the substance of the elements is changed but their accidents are not. That’s how the wafer and the wine that the Church uses in the sacrament can still appear to be wafer and wine while at a deeper level being in substance the body and blood of Christ. The person partaking of the elements perceives that she is consuming wafer and wine. The substances of those elements have, however, become the body and blood of Christ.

The more modern, more Protestant explanation of the Eucharist is that the elements are symbols. In this understanding the elements remain physically what they are, bread and wine; but they function as symbols. A symbol in this sense is a physical object (or and idea or a word) that mediates transcendent reality to the person observing or manipulating the symbol.[3] Think of a symbol as existing in two different realities at the same time. Or think of a symbol as a bridge connecting two realities that otherwise would remain separated from one another. The bread and wine of the Eucharist are symbols in this sense. Even though we may never think of them as symbols they do their symbolic work in us. That work is to connect us with God and God with us. Thinking of the Eucharistic elements as symbols doesn’t change the physical structure of the bread and wine. They remain bread and wine. Symbol is an identity we lay on the elements. Being symbols deepens the thing’s spiritual reality, but it doesn’t change the thing itself. I have experienced the reality of Gd through understanding the bread and wine of the Eucharist as symbols. You can too. Symbolism works.

Now of course, as is true of many different areas of human endeavor, the benefits of both of these ways of avoiding the charge of cannibalism that people like my mother make against the Eucharist come with shortcomings or failings attached. The potential problem with transubstantiation is that the so-called substance of the elements still becomes the real physical body and blood Christ. That is, it is understood to be the real physical body and blood of Christ. The person consuming the elements does not experience them as human flesh and blood. Yet the teaching of the Church is that beneath their physical presentation to us, that is, beneath their accidents in the Aristotelean sense, they really have become the body and blood of Christ. The Eucharist remains open to the charge of cannibalism. Moreover, the theory of transubstantiation uses language and philosophical concepts that few people know or can comfortably use. After all, who besides philosophers and Catholic theologians thinks of any physical object as consisting as substance and accidents? No one, or very nearly no one. Transubstantiation requires an intellectual agility that the Church really cannot demand of most of the Church’s people (or of any other people for that matter).

The problem with understanding the elements of the Eucharist as symbols is that symbols come across to most of us as impersonal. Abstract. Unable to participate in the deep relationships that often exist between people and between people and God. The elements of the Eucharist as symbols is just an idea. It can seem not to be alive. Moreover, symbol in the sense that I mean here is something very few people actually understand. Symbols can and do work in people who do not think of anything as a symbol. We are, however, far more likely to experience a symbol as a symbol if we understand it as a symbol at the outset.

So neither of these explanations of why consuming the Eucharistic elements amounts to cannibalism is perfect. For me personally understanding the elements of the sacrament as symbols works. Transubstantiation doesn’t. Perhaps for you it’s the other way around. All that really matters is that however you understand it, or even if you don’t understand it at all, you at least at times feel the spiritual presence of Christ as you participate in the Eucharist. And no, Christians are not cannibals.

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[1] Using texts like Matthew 26:28.

[2] The Rev. Dr. Mike Raschko, a Roman Catholic priest and one of my seminary professors, told us that what the believer must accept is the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the elements of the Eucharist. The believer may but need not accept transubstantiation as an explanation of how the real body and blood of Christ are present there.

[3] For more on symbols see my Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, (2008, Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon), pp. 24 to 28.

Zhivago or Zhivavo

 

Zhivago or Zhivavo?

August 10, 2021

 

I’ve been reading a book about the Russian author Boris Pasternak, his novel Doctor Zhivago, and how the CIA used that book in an anti-Soviet propaganda campaign.[1] There is an interesting (interesting to me at least) issue about how to pronounce the name Zhivago. In English and many other languages it is pronounced the way it is spelled, with the next to last letter correctly transliterated from the Cyrillic as a g and pronounced as a hard g. The issue arises from the source of the name. Pasternak took it from a verse in the Russian Orthodox liturgy that includes the phrase properly transliterated as “Syn Boga zhivago.” It means “Son of the living God.” The last word in the phrase, which is an adjective not a noun, means “living.” It is the source of Pasternak’s name for his book and its main character.

The problem is that in Russian the word zhivago is pronounced as if it were spelled zhivavo. The stress is on the first syllable not as it is on the second syllable the way everyone pronounces Zhivago in the name of the book. “Zhivago” is a perfectly ordinary Russian word. It is the singular masculine genitive form of the word zhivyi, which means living. The only thing odd about the way Pasternak used it and the way the Orthodox church spells it is that in ordinary Russian it is zhivogo not zhivago. That spelling difference makes no grammatical difference nor does it change the pronunciation of the word. The adjective zhivyi in all of its grammatical forms is used all the time in spoken and written Russian. There is nothing unusual or extraordinary about it.

Unlike most Russian words, however, that are spelled more or less the way they are pronounced, the adjectival ending ago or ogo is pronounced as if it were spelled ovo or avo. The word that Pasternak adapted for the name of his book is spelled zhivago, but in ordinary usage it is pronounced ovo. Anyone who knows Russian would, upon finding that word in a text, pronounce it avo not ago as it is spelled. If Pasternak’s intent was to use the adjectival ending ago as part of the proper name Zhivago he would presumably have intended that the name be pronounced Zhivavo not Zhivago. That pronunciation retains the actual meaning of the Russian word. Pronouncing the g as a g does not. I was not able to find any source online that pronounces the name Zhivavo. They all pronounce the way it is spelled but put the emphasis on the second syllable not the first one as it is in the ordinary Russian word. Did Pasternak intend to change the pronunciation of the adjective zhivago when he used it as the proper name Zhivago? I haven’t been able to find an answer. I do however find it to be an interesting question. If my finding that question interesting makes me weird, so be it.

 

---

[1] Finn, Peter, and Petra, Couvée, The Zhivago Affair, The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, Pantheon Books, New York, 2014.

On Divine Forgiveness

                                                             On Divine Forgiveness

A Meditation on Forgiveness in the Bible

 The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

From the beginning Christians have experienced divine forgiveness of sin in and through Jesus Christ. We’ve had different ways of thinking about and expressing that forgiveness, but however we’ve understood it we’ve experienced it. We experience forgiveness in Jesus Christ. We find references to that forgiveness and our need for it in the New Testament. We may have thought that the New Testament speaks about forgiveness more than it really does, but never mind. We read texts like Romans 3:23, where St. Paul says, “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” For many New Testament authors we humans are quite thoroughly sinful, but we also read of divine forgiveness in the New Testament. For example, St. Paul also says:

 

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, not things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39.

 

Paul also says that in Christ Jesus God was reconciling the world to Godself not counting our trespasses against us. 2 Corinthians 5:19. Today different Christians react differently to the notion that we’re all sinners in need of forgiveness and salvation. Some very liberal Christians deny that we need forgiveness at all. Most of us know better than that. Either way, there’s no denying that throughout its history Christianity has known forgiveness of sin in Jesus, and we find evidence of that forgiveness in the New Testament.

OK, but what about the Old Testament? A lot of Christians think (wrongly) that the God of the Old Testament is anything but forgiving of human sin. Yes, there are passages in the Old Testament in which God comes across as judgmental and vengeful, although none of them really holds a candle to the New Testament book of Revelation in that regard. There are however other parts of the Old Testament that deal with the question of human sin and God’s forgiveness in far more subtle and sophisticated ways. I want to look at some of those passages in the Psalms to see if we can get a clearer picture of just to the Old Testament deals with human sin.

At least one psalmist seems to think that he has no need for forgiveness whatsoever. Psalm 26 begins:

 

Vindicate me, O Lord,

       for I have walked in my integrity,

       and I have trusted in the Lord

              without wavering. Psalm 26:1.

 

This psalmist also says, “I hate the company of evildoers and will not sit with the wicked.” Psalm 26:5. He distinguishes himself from sinners, the bloodthirsty, and those who have evil devices and bribes in their hands. Psalm 26:9-10. This guy seems to think awfully highly of himself. Seems like he’d agree with our ultra-liberal Christians who think they have nothing to confess and there have no need of God’s forgiveness.

Not so for at least a couple of other psalmists. The psalmist of Psalm 51 sure sees himself differently that the psalmist of Psalm 26 sees himself. His psalm begins,

 

Have mercy on me, O God,

       according to your steadfast love,

according to your abundant mercy

       blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my

              iniquity,

       and cleanse me from my sin.

 

For I know my transgressions,

       and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you alone, have I sinned,

       and done what is evil in your sight,

so that you are justified in your

              sentence

       and blameless when you pass

              judgment. Psalm 51:1-4.

 

This psalm contains what is perhaps the only line in Hebrew scripture that sounds like the very un-Jewish doctrine of original sin:

 

Indeed, I was born guilty,

       a sinner when my mother conceived

              me. Psalm 51:5.

 

I don’t believe in original sin, but I have often used lines from this psalm in prayers of confession in the Christian worship services I have led. This ancient Jewish author knew full well that, as Paul would say centuries later, he has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

So did the psalmist of Psalm 130. He wrote,

 

If you, O Lord, should mark

              iniquities

       Lord, who could stand? Psalm 130:3.

 

This line is less personal than is the prayer of Psalm 51, but it leads to one of the great Old Testament acknowledgments that God is indeed a God of forgiveness. This Psalm says:

 

But there is forgiveness with you,

       so that you may be revered….

 

O Israel, hope in the Lord!

       for with the Lord there is

              steadfast love,

and with him is great power to

              redeem.

It is he who will redeem Israel

       from all its iniquities. Psalm 130:4, 7-8.

 

Here we have an ancient Hebrew confession that we cannot stand on our own before God’s judgment of our sin but that we also know that God is a God of steadfast love and forgiveness. So much for the hoary notion that the God of the Old Testament is only a God of wrath, judgment, and damnation.

We see then that both Testaments of the Christian Bible contain confessions of our need for God’s forgiveness of our sin and assurance that that forgiveness is there for us from a God of steadfast love. When I see these lines from the Old Testament about God’s forgiveness of our sin I sometimes wonder why so many of us think we need Jesus to forgive our sin or why we think God forgives sin only through him, but never mind. Both Testaments tell us that we need God’s forgiveness and that God does indeed forgive our sin.

I don’t mean to suggest that we humans are nothing but sinners. All of us are some kind of mixture of the good and the bad, the sin and the virtue. Former president Jimmy Carter is one of the best people of whom I have ever known. Yet even he admitted that he has looked on women with lust in his heart. All of us straight men have. We are after all sexual beings. All of us men and women have surely been angry with another, and Jesus says that’s a sin. Matthew 5:21-22. Yet we have surely also done good in our lives. We’ve loved and cared for others. We’ve done what we can to make God’s world a better place. I said recently somewhere that even Hitler loved his dog. Only Jesus was perfect. None of us is perfectly evil. Yet all of us need God’s forgiveness. Both Testaments of the Christian Bible confess that truth. People of different faith traditions know of God’s forgiveness in different ways. In Jesus Christ we Christians know that that forgiveness is already there before we even ask for it. Thanks be to God!

 

On Divine Forgiveness

A Meditation on Forgiveness in the Bible

 

From the beginning Christians have experienced divine forgiveness of sin in and through Jesus Christ. We’ve had different ways of thinking about and expressing that forgiveness, but however we’ve understood it we’ve experienced it. We experience forgiveness in Jesus Christ. We find references to that forgiveness and our need for it in the New Testament. We may have thought that the New Testament speaks about forgiveness more than it really does, but never mind. We read texts like Romans 3:23, where St. Paul says, “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” For many New Testament authors we humans are quite thoroughly sinful, but we also read of divine forgiveness in the New Testament. For example, St. Paul also says:

 

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, not things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39.

 

Paul also says that in Christ Jesus God was reconciling the world to Godself not counting our trespasses against us. 2 Corinthians 5:19. Today different Christians react differently to the notion that we’re all sinners in need of forgiveness and salvation. Some very liberal Christians deny that we need forgiveness at all. Most of us know better than that. Either way, there’s no denying that throughout its history Christianity has known forgiveness of sin in Jesus, and we find evidence of that forgiveness in the New Testament.

OK, but what about the Old Testament? A lot of Christians think (wrongly) that the God of the Old Testament is anything but forgiving of human sin. Yes, there are passages in the Old Testament in which God comes across as judgmental and vengeful, although none of them really holds a candle to the New Testament book of Revelation in that regard. There are however other parts of the Old Testament that deal with the question of human sin and God’s forgiveness in far more subtle and sophisticated ways. I want to look at some of those passages in the Psalms to see if we can get a clearer picture of just to the Old Testament deals with human sin.

At least one psalmist seems to think that he has no need for forgiveness whatsoever. Psalm 26 begins:

 

Vindicate me, O Lord,

       for I have walked in my integrity,

       and I have trusted in the Lord

              without wavering. Psalm 26:1.

 

This psalmist also says, “I hate the company of evildoers and will not sit with the wicked.” Psalm 26:5. He distinguishes himself from sinners, the bloodthirsty, and those who have evil devices and bribes in their hands. Psalm 26:9-10. This guy seems to think awfully highly of himself. Seems like he’d agree with our ultra-liberal Christians who think they have nothing to confess and there have no need of God’s forgiveness.

Not so for at least a couple of other psalmists. The psalmist of Psalm 51 sure sees himself differently that the psalmist of Psalm 26 sees himself. His psalm begins,

 

Have mercy on me, O God,

       according to your steadfast love,

according to your abundant mercy

       blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my

              iniquity,

       and cleanse me from my sin.

 

For I know my transgressions,

       and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you alone, have I sinned,

       and done what is evil in your sight,

so that you are justified in your

              sentence

       and blameless when you pass

              judgment. Psalm 51:1-4.

 

This psalm contains what is perhaps the only line in Hebrew scripture that sounds like the very un-Jewish doctrine of original sin:

 

Indeed, I was born guilty,

       a sinner when my mother conceived

              me. Psalm 51:5.

 

I don’t believe in original sin, but I have often used lines from this psalm in prayers of confession in the Christian worship services I have led. This ancient Jewish author knew full well that, as Paul would say centuries later, he has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

So did the psalmist of Psalm 130. He wrote,

 

If you, O Lord, should mark

              iniquities

       Lord, who could stand? Psalm 130:3.

 

This line is less personal than is the prayer of Psalm 51, but it leads to one of the great Old Testament acknowledgments that God is indeed a God of forgiveness. This Psalm says:

 

But there is forgiveness with you,

       so that you may be revered….

 

O Israel, hope in the Lord!

       for with the Lord there is

              steadfast love,

and with him is great power to

              redeem.

It is he who will redeem Israel

       from all its iniquities. Psalm 130:4, 7-8.

 

Here we have an ancient Hebrew confession that we cannot stand on our own before God’s judgment of our sin but that we also know that God is a God of steadfast love and forgiveness. So much for the hoary notion that the God of the Old Testament is only a God of wrath, judgment, and damnation.

We see then that both Testaments of the Christian Bible contain confessions of our need for God’s forgiveness of our sin and assurance that that forgiveness is there for us from a God of steadfast love. When I see these lines from the Old Testament about God’s forgiveness of our sin I sometimes wonder why so many of us think we need Jesus to forgive our sin or why we think God forgives sin only through him, but never mind. Both Testaments tell us that we need God’s forgiveness and that God does indeed forgive our sin.

I don’t mean to suggest that we humans are nothing but sinners. All of us are some kind of mixture of the good and the bad, the sin and the virtue. Former president Jimmy Carter is one of the best people of whom I have ever known. Yet even he admitted that he has looked on women with lust in his heart. All of us straight men have. We are after all sexual beings. All of us men and women have surely been angry with another, and Jesus says that’s a sin. Matthew 5:21-22. Yet we have surely also done good in our lives. We’ve loved and cared for others. We’ve done what we can to make God’s world a better place. I said recently somewhere that even Hitler loved his dog. Only Jesus was perfect. None of us is perfectly evil. Yet all of us need God’s forgiveness. Both Testaments of the Christian Bible confess that truth. People of different faith traditions know of God’s forgiveness in different ways. In Jesus Christ we Christians know that that forgiveness is already there before we even ask for it. Thanks be to God!