The "Christ" is Jesus' Last Name Problem

What if we took a break from saying "Jesus Christ" and instead went with "Jesus the Messiah" or "Jesus the Anointed"? Here's my rationale: Technically, when we say "Christ" we are merely transliterating the Greek noun "christos" rather than really translating the word into English. That is, "Christ" doesn't have any meaning in the English language outside of a moniker for Jesus, which is why some people, understandably, think it must be just part of Jesus' given name. "Christos" translates the Hebrew word "messiah," and comes into English as "anointed-one." All to say, when the Bible calls Jesus the "Christ," it is actually communicating something about Jesus' mission, the purpose that the Father had appointed for him. To start calling him "Jesus the Anointed" would remind us that Jesus was called and equipped by God for a specific kingly, priestly task (kings and priests were both anointed in the Old Testament). Many people these days are rightly acknowledging that the most recurrent theme in Jesus' own teaching about himself is that he had arrived to inaugurate his Father's kingdom, to put-the-world-to-rights (as N.T. Wright likes to say). Whenever the New Testament writers call Jesus the "Christ," they are reminding us that Jesus is God's chosen-one, Israel's messiah who was sent to be the world's rightful Lord, that this Jesus has personally brought the beginning of the end of history, as all the old prophets had anticipated. To many people, the untranslated word "Christ" does not communicate any of this rich meaning (though certainly, we can train ourselves make such an association in our heads whenever we hear "Christ"). To start calling Jesus "the Anointed" would immediately raise the question "anointed to do what?" - and of course, the answer to that question is what matters most about Jesus. Any thoughts, readers?

N.T. Wright at City Church of San Francisco

As promised, here's a short review of the event last Monday night. I drove up to the city in time to catch dinner with Rev. Mike Hayes of City Church, then over to the Russian Center. N.T. Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham, spoke to a packed house of mostly twenty and thirty somethings. To see some five hundred young people cram-in to hear a lecture about theology from a former Oxbridge don, in San Francisco no less, is surely good news for the future of the world. The lecture was mostly Wright summarizing his new book, Simply Chrisitian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, which has a chance at being the next Mere Christianity in terms of its hyper-accessible, smart, appealing introduction to the Christian faith. The hook of the talk (and the book) is Wright's observation that all human beings hear four "echoes of a voice": a desire that the world be more just and fair, a drive for some spiritual connection, a yearning for relationships, and an awe before real beauty. While these voices are universal, they are mere whispers, since none these yearnings are ever quite satisfied or explainable on their own terms. From here, Wright shows how the story of God's creation of the world, its fall, and its recreation through Christ and his kingdom makes the most sense of these vague yet persistent voices. Because God's new creation has been inaugurated in the arrival Jesus Christ in Palestine, God's justice is on its way, a path to spiritual union with God has been opened, the possibility of a renewed human commmunity has begun, and a glimpse of the truest beauty has appeared. These are different ways to introduce the old Christian doctrines, but (especially in the book) Wright gets around to the Trinity, person and work of Christ, etc. Of course, new creation themes make up the dominant doctrinal framework for Wright, which sometimes to me seems reductionistic when it comes to the atonement. The book is worth the read though, and especially good for post-modern types who might be specifically suspicious of traditional Christianity. Is it the Mere Christianity of the 21st century? Time will tell.

Gettin' on the Bus for N.T. Wright

If there was such a thing as a rock star of theology living today, it would be N.T. Wright. The slightly plump, bearded, vestment-wearing, sixty-something Anglican bishop might not say so himself, but the fact is that he inspires groupies as well as super-fans, those who swear he's reinventing the study of the New Testament. I, for one, am not quite a super-fan, but I am about to inconvenience myself and my family tomorrow in order to drive four hours to hear him speak in San Francisco (heck, even moderate fans of U2 would drive that far to hear them play). Beyond the rock-and-roll analogy, N.T. Wright is a serious scholar at the fore-front of what has been called the "Third Quest for the Historical Jesus." In case you missed the first two quests, they began in the 1700's and are just recently winding up. These quests, as they are known, tended to conclude that the Jesus of history was either a "pale Galilean" who was very sweet and mostly talked like Robert Schuller, or, a New Age guru who tried to get everyone to wake up to their inner deity. He certainly did not do miracles or rise from the dead. The interesting (and amazing) news is that many of these conclusions about Jesus are no longer in theological vogue, giving way to a Jesus that looks a lot like a first century Jew who might have actually known something about the Torah (how uncouth!) and, the biggest surprise, may well have been painted fairly accurately by the Gospel writers (at least Matthew, Mark, and Luke). What's more amazing is that this family of scholars is simultaneously academically respectable even to those who disagree with their conclusions, and, their conclusions about Jesus are relatively orthodox. I've tangled a little with N.T. on this blog, but I'd still agree with the super-fans that he's the most widely influential scholar in theology today. I'm heading up to hear him speak to a fairly small group of folks at City Church of San Francisco surrounding the release of his new book Simply Christian. I'll make a report here later in the week.

Da Vinci Code Absurdity of the Week

This week's selection comes from page 240 of the illustrated edition: Dr. Teabing says, "Don't get a symbologist started on Christian icons. Nothing in Christianity is original. The pre-Christian God Mithras-- called the Son of God and the Light of the World-- was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days...the newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Even Christianity's weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans."

Well. Scholars distinguish between two periods of Mithraism, the early Persian original, and a much later Roman version that appeared in the West at the end of the first century, at the earliest. So, the only version that early Christianity could have conceiveably borrowed from was the Persian variety. The Persian Mithras was a cattle herder who was born of a woman who got pregnant by swimming in a lake that happened to have the 400 year-old sperm of a god in it. This Mithras was not resurrected from the dead. The Roman post-Christian Mithras may have had more similarities with Jesus, but the charge of copying is as easily reversed in that case, since the canonical Gospels were in circulation far earlier than Mirthraism. Teabing's reference to Mithras' burial and resurrection on the third day (and Krishna's birthday gifts) seems to be lifted in toto from Kersey Graves' discredited The World's Sixteen Saviors, an outlandish book of undocumented claims published in 1875 (for example, no Hindu texts before 300 AD even discuss Krishna's birth, and the later Harivasma Purana, which does, makes no reference to "gold, frankincense, and myhrr.") Is the Christian Lord's Supper a rip-off of a Mithraic "god-eating" ritual, as Teabing also suggets? While Mithraism features a ritual consumption of bread and water (possibly wine), there is no evidence that it was interpreted as an act "god-eating." Even if it was, the Christian Lord's Supper is obviously rooted in the much more ancient Jewish Passover meal which predates any form of Mithraism, Persian or not. As for Sunday worship being "stolen from the pagans," Jesus resurrection on Sunday, as reported in the Gospels, is the real source for that day being hallowed. Again, remember the timeline: the honoring of Sunday as "the Lord's day" (cf. Rev.1:10 and 1 Cor.16:2, for example) arose within the first century, centuries before the pagan Emperor Constantine created a "hybrid-religion" (Teabing's words) bewtween Christianity and paganism. One wonders if Dr. Teabing's doctorate was really issued by a diploma-mill!

Newsweek, Judas, and Me

I was surprised to find a letter I wrote to Newsweek appearing in their May 1st issue. You faithful readers at enormoushippo were the first read my praise for Newsweek's Gospel of Judas coverage in my April 16th posting. After I blogged about the Newsweek article, I sent a letter to the editor, which then appeared two weeks later in print. Since Newsweek has a circulation of 3.2 million, I have likely now experienced the peak audience that anything I write will ever reach. That fact is simultaneouly exhiliarating and deflating. For the remaining 277 million Americans who don't get Newsweek (as well as you international readers), here's the letter they printed:

"Your good coverage of the Gospel of Judas puts the brakes on our readiness to grasp at any newly discovered ancient text that happens to mention Jesus as a reason to rewrite his whole history ("Sealed with a Kiss," April 17). As David Gates reminds us, the Gospel of Judas was written awfully late to play any such revisionist role. Don't get me wrong -- I'll be interested to eventually read the Gospel of Judas -- but as a study of a later variant on the earlier form of Christianity which was based on the much older canonical Gospels, not as a new source for what really happened during the days leading to Jesus' crucifixion."

Da Vinci Code Absurdity of the Week

A few weeks ago I made a tentative decision to stop writing about the Da Vinci Code because thought I'd run the risk of making this blog too repetititive, and perhaps because I'd come off as too much of a crank. I've changed my mind. Since the movie is still on the way, we have at least another couple of months where the ideas of the book will be as hot as ever (as depressing the thought of that is to me!). I also just started teaching a class on it at our church, so everything is fresh in my mind again. Here's the format I'll try in this and future posts: I'll quote a sentence or two from the book, and then make a few comments on why this quote qualifies as "A Da Vinci Absurdity."

This week's selection comes from one of the many historically revisionist speeches of the character Leigh Teabing. He says,"Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike." The hint of truth: Constantine did commision the copying of a few dozen Bibles after the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. The absurdity: the list of Gospels included were only what anyone would have expected -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These Gospels were not in dispute as the historically reputable ones by anyone at the Council of Nicea. So, Constantine was not pulling a fast one, nor did he even personally act as the Bible's editor. Also, no evidence whatsoever exists to suggest that these Gospels were "embellished." On top of this, the four canonical Gospels, far from supressing ideas of Christ's humanity, are replete with his humanity. The critique of the Gnostic Gospels was, in fact, that they are the ones that diminish Christ's true human nature by turning him into some kind of phantasm that only appears to have had human flesh. Orthodox Christianity, from the earliest of times, claimed that Christ was fully God and fully human -- and this conclusion came because the four canonical Gospels emphasize both of those things. That Christ was fully human was not something that the early church denied or tried to supress as Dr. Teabing suggests -- in fact, Christ's full humanity is one of the most fundamental articles of faith as even the Nicene Creed itself alludes to.

Is Christian Salvation Other-Worldly or This-Worldly?

(My apologies to anyone who just read a shorter version of this entry that I just posted on JollyBlogger.)
A hot-topic in theology circles these days, especially in light of the rise of the "Emergent Church" movement, is whether or not the kingdom that Jesus Christ came to announce is more about a life-after-death place we go, or an entire overhaul of the present created world. My contribution to the debate: salvation is both of these things.
Despite what we might think about his whole theological project, N.T. Wright nails the biblical theme of salvation as "new creation," proving that the scripture really does underwrite some of the renewed interest in going beyond the language of mere life-after-death. The "heaven" of the book of Revelation is really more like a fabulously renewed earth than a wispy, cloudy, world of disembodied, blissful souls. Yet, (and this is a big "yet"), the fulness of the renewed future creation is only experienced by those who pass into it through a physical death (and dying in Christ no less), and then, a future bodily resurrection and vindication at the judgment seat of Christ (cf. 2 Cor.5). This "new heavens and new earth" is not an inevitable inheritance of anyone who lives on earth today, nor a reality that we can realize through any degree of sanctified efforts at cultural reform. The present world, and all of its history, must draw to a close at the moment of a future cataclysmic judgment, before that new creation will be brought to fruition. Most of us will experience this as a life-after-death reality. Until then, of course, we should get busy making the world more kingdom-like in ways that we can -- to do so proves that we have a theology of creation/re-creation, and not just a theology of the redemption of souls. There is, in fact, no room for the view that we shouldn't bother improving this world since it's all "going to burn."
But there is no ultimate conflict between a life-after-death understanding of salvation and that of a renewed creation. The mistake would be to pick either emphasis and make it its own "camp" from which to judge the other perspective as entirely wrong-headed. No surprise, the biblical view of reality, even heavenly reality, is not so easily summarised by just one metaphor, one image.

Newsweek on Judas

Continuing the theme of giving credit where credit is due in media coverage of the Gospel of Judas, let's pause to considerer these wise (even punchy) words from Newsweek's David Gates:

"Don't be expecting this fragmented manuscript to read like the King James. Small sample: " '[Truly] I say to you, [ ... ] angel [ ... ] power will be able to see that [ ... ] these to whom [ ... ] holy generations [ ... ]' After Jesus said this, he departed." And not a minute too soon. The secret wisdom Jesus confides—when he's not laying out a hierarchy of angels, gods and more gods that makes Hinduism sound minimalist—is a lot like that of the Gnostic Gospels, which posit a strict enmity between flesh and spirit..."

"Robinson, who tried to acquire the manuscript again in 1993, says the Gospel is a sensation—but only to scholars, not the public. His own book, "The Secrets of Judas," hardly oversells the translation. "It tells us nothing about the historical Jesus, nothing about the historical Judas," he told NEWSWEEK. "It only tells what, 100 years later, Gnostics were doing with the story they found in the canonical Gospels. I think purchasers are going to throw the book down in disgust." But right now, people are loving the idea that Jesus and Judas were dear friends who were in it together—it's such a downer to think the guy sinned and felt bad—and the hoopla machine is grinding away. The book. The book about the book. The National Geographic TV show about the book and the book about the book. The audiobook. (Can't wait to hear the passage above.) Last week, the public unveiling of the manuscript. Next year, the illustrated critical edition. Can the lipstick tie-in be far behind?"

The New York Times and Judas

Accolades to John Wiford and Laurie Goodstein for their balanced treatment in the New York Times of the Gospel of Judas on April 7th. They mention that the real debate is not whether the document is ancient, but over it's relevance (presumably, they mean, to the question of Jesus studies). Those experts who they go on to quote as representatives of the pro-gnostic side of this new debate show how limited the scope of this whole conversation will really be. In other words, the relevance of the discovery is not so much to a possible redrawing of old lines about the historical Jesus, about which all late-dated gnostic Gospels are dubious source texts, but relevance merely to the nature of second and third century beliefs about Jesus in certain sub-sects. One of the champions of gnostic Christianity, Elaine Pagels, is quoted as saying that discoveries of this and other gnostic texts "are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion and demonstrating how diverse — and fascinating — the early Christian movement really was." She's right, though one wonders if anyone ever believed such a myth (though again, the truly "early Christian movement" of pre 70 A.D. shows very little of the diversity that Pagels revels in). The Gospel of Judas will be a fascinating read, but only as it gives insight into a highly marginal (even among Gnostics?) religious community and their imaginings about Jesus and Judas.

Betraying The Gospel of Judas

Today's big story in religion is the unveiling of The Gospel of Judas, a 1,700 year-old Coptic document that purports to record a secret conversation between Jesus and Judas, where Jesus asks Judas to betray him. The text was actually dug up in Egypt in the 1970's, but, somehow, ended up in a New York City bank safe-deposit box until it was recently restored and translated (National Geographic will soon print and sell copies). Is this copy of The Gospel of Judas really as old as 300 A.D.? Yes, probably. Does this mean we have to seriously re-evaluate what really happened on the night that Jesus was betrayed? Well, not exactly. First, it must be conceded that this Gospel was probably written well before 300 A.D. If the idea that Jesus asked Judas to stage a betrayal sounds familiar, it might be because you saw Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ in the late 1980's, which portrays such a scene. We've actually known about this claim for a long time- since 180 A.D., in fact, since that's the rough publication date of a rebuttal of The Gospel of Judas written by a church leader named Irenaeus. So, through Irenaeus, we've actually had second-hand quotes of The Gospel of Judas for a long time. Today's announcement really only qualifies as news because now we have the full text of the work, and not just quotations. So, despite the tone of some of today's headlines, nothing earth-shattering has come to light. Orthdox Christianity dealt with this book and moved on quite a while ago -- just over 1,800 years ago, to be exact.
But the real reason why we don't need to seriously reconsider what the New Testament says about Jesus having been genuinely betrayed by Judas is that The Gospel of Judas is still a very late occuring document compared to especially the synoptic Gospels (Mathhew, Mark, and Luke), which were written about 100 years earlier. Unfortunatley, today's coverage of the story suggests that we should equally weight the Gospel of Judas alongside the New Testament sources, if not give it even greater weight. But on what grounds? That 100 year gap just yawns too wide. More importantly, The Gospel of Judas bears all the marks of full-blown Gnostic Chrisitanity, a melding of various Greek and Near-Eastern religious elements with the Christianity of the New Testament -- and no one has shown evidence that this advanced form of Gnosticism existed until well into the the second century. The fact that Jesus asks to be killed in order to be freed from the prison of bodily existence is classic Gnostic anti-materialism, but this was not a religious perspective that existed in first-century Palestine. The Gospel of Judas presents us with an alternative Jesus alright, but not a Jesus that likely has much to do with the Jesus of Nazareth.

Please Accept This Emotional Appeal

With the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard film on its way in May, we're headed into another season of media attention for the Da Vinci Code and its claims about Jesus and early Christianity. It will be hard to miss interviews with scholars, pseudo-scholars, the man-in-the-street, and maybe even a rare interview with Dan Brown himself. Our course, I'd like to weigh-in on these heady issues myself, using this forum. But tonight I won't. I have a number of (I'd like to think) well-argued, thoughtful responses to Browns' claims that (1) no one believed Jesus was God until after 325 A.D., 2) Constantine commissioned the writing of the New Testament, 3) Jesus was once widely known to have had children with Mary Magdalene; 4) the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls threaten Christian orthodoxy, and 5) the Gnostic Gospels are better sources of historical information about Jesus than the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John). Yes, I've got a few things to say about all these things -- but so do, and so have, many other scholars. And, frankly, it doesn't take particularly savvy scholarship to answer many of Brown's claims -- rather, it takes an hour-and-a-half at your nearest public library.
So, instead of a scholarly response, I'd like to draw on all of the trust capital I may have earned with you, gentle reader. I'd like to make a direct appeal to any amount of credibility my education warrants, a plea for consideration based on the simple assurance that I am a generally reasonable person. All of these appeals in order to say: please, please, please believe that what the Da Vinci Code says about Jesus Christ and ancient Christianity is just sheer poppycock. Really, just an incredible pile of unwarranted silliness. I'm not making an argument here, I'm making an emotional appeal. Even anti-Christian scholars wouldn't think of trying to publish most of Brown's stuff in a respected journal. The problem with a lot of the media coverage is that, in the name of objectivity, I suppose, Brown's ideas are introduced as some kind of "fresh perspectives" that are "at least worth considering." Even non-committal talk show hosts want to allow that Brown is at least "thoughtfully examining long-held beliefs." But I'm here tonight, writing way past my bedtime, to say, 'No, no, no,' Dan Brown is not "onto something" here, or even "at least asking hard questions." He's not really asking questions at all, he's making deeply, deeply ridiculous claims through the extended monologues of his characters.
People speak of the sin of "heretical" claims, or the mistake of "ahistorical" claims, but what's at issue here is first, simply, "ridiculous" claims. No one believed in Jesus' divinity until after the Council of Nicea in 325? How does one even begin to answer such an outlandish assertion? The first challenge, certainly, would be to even keep a straight face while trying to make reference to the thousands of parchments that pre-date Nicea that would prove such a belief was widespread -- but now I'm actually making an argument. Brown's ideas in The DaVinci Code are not just wrong -- for you can be earnest, well-researched, and still make wrong conclusions. They are not even exactly devious, for that would suggest some kind of clever manipulation of the data. To date, the best word I've come up with is "ridiculous." Please, please, trust me on this one unless you are planning to pick up one of the many published rebuttals. If you are, my favorite is Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel's The DaVinci Hoax. Until then, I hope that while you may never think of me as the single most discerning, brillliant, penetrating thinker you've ever encountered, you'll at least trust me in this: I know cookoo-rookoo when I read it.

How the New Testament Authors Read the Old

Depending on who you are, the following statement might seem either utterly obvious or pure wishful thinking: The writers of the New Testament actually believed that the Old Testament was all about Jesus Christ. Let me explain why this is a post worth writing. For a long time I've been basically convinced that the Old Testament contained several prophecies of the coming Messiah, and that the New Testament writers thought that Jesus fulfilled those prophecies. Most Christians would admit as much. But it was only recently that I starting "collecting" New Testament references which show the specific ways that they thought Jesus was revealed in the Old Testament. The fairly startling result when these texts are compared is that, according to New Testament, (1) several Old Testament characters had specific knowledge of Jesus, (2) Jesus was an active agent in Old Testament events, and (3) the whole substance of the Old Testament reveals Jesus (not just a few scattered prophecies).

Here are the details: Abraham "rejoiced that he would see my [Jesus'] day" (Jn.8:56); Moses was emboldened to give up the easy life in in Pharoah's court to serve God because he "considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt" (Heb. 11:26); the exodus itself, as well as supernatural intervention of God in the Sinai desert was actually the work of Jesus: "Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe" (Jude 5); the "spiritual rock" from which the Israelites drank in the desert was none other than "Christ" (1 Cor. 10:4); the message of "eternal life" to which the Old Testament bears witness is a message centered on Christ (John 5:39). The Old Testament prophets specifically wrestled with the details of Christ's sufferings and future glories (1 Pet.1:11). In fact, the sin-atoning death, burial, and third-day resurrection of Christ are foretold in the Old Testament (1 Cor. 15:3-4). Isaiah understood his call as a prophet to be about Christ, since "Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him" (Jn.12:41). And, at the broadest level, the Law, Prophets, and the Psalms reveal the entire gospel, including the church's mission to preach Christ to the nations (Luke 24:25-27;44-47).

The upshot: if we agree that the New Testament (and Jesus) got all of this right, we should always read the Old Testament looking for hints and whispers of Christ. Christ's person and work are not incidental or occasional themes, but make up the very warp-and-woof of those old books. If, as the New Testament suggests, the pre-incarnate Christ haunts even the details of the narratives in the Pentateuch, let's keep our eyes open for other ways that Christ may be revealed there. Want a guide-book for this kind of Christ-centered Old Testament study? A great primer is Edmund Clowny's The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament.

Note on One Kind of Good Ecumenism

Let's face it, some Christian traditions have been better at living out certain aspects of the Biblical vision of the Christian life than others. Would anyone doubt, for example, that the charismatic movement -- all theological criticisms aside -- has done a pretty good job modeling fervency in prayer? So here's the point about ecumenism: sometimes we'll find that people in another tradition are living out an aspect of our own doctrine in a better way than we are -- and they may not even officially confess that doctrine themselves. I have plenty of friends, for example, who pray with a fervency and confidence that assumes God is sovereign over all events in the world, though if you asked them they'd articulate a strong free-will theology. Yet, to watch them pray reminds me that my own beliefs about God's sovereignty should make me more like them when I pray, and less like my often tentative, low-horizon self. In such places we can learn from sometimes very different traditions without becoming relativistic about doctrine itself.

March Book Recommendation

D.A. Carson's great little book, Exegetical Fallacies, is an extended list of mistakes that people often make when they think they are proving something "from the Bible." Sadly, many people have become skeptical about any arguments based on "what the Bible says" because they have observed how others have made the Bible say anything and everything. However, the modern adage, "you can prove anything with the Bible," is not true according to Carson. Most erroneous and subjective interpretations of Scripture are also guilty of breaking some classical rules of argumentation. These common fallacies, if they were understood by those seeking to interpret the Bible, would prevent a lot of hanky-panky as well as many honest mistakes. Some of Carson's list of exegetical offenders are partiuclar to the world of biblical interpretation, but many are straight out of a logic textbook. Christians, especially, need to be clear about how to move from text to interpretation, and how not to. To the extent that we are sloppy about this, we can destroy confidence that the Bible is anything other than a spiritual springboard, a wordy Rorshach that carries no particular meaning apart from what our own minds bring to it. Pick up Exegetical Fallacies if you've never seen it, and be prepared for an interpretive tune-up.

Disney and the Other Kingdom

I just got back from Disney World yesterday, a family trip sponsored by my very generous father-in-law. Wow. Would you believe that the Orlando Disney employs fifty-seven thousand people on a forty-seven square mile piece of land? No kidding. After four days, we only scratched the surface of what's there. Even the details impressed me: all the grounds were spotless, the "cast members" cheerful, even the landscaping was show-stopping. For all of my high-brow critiques of Disney and its believe-in-your-dreams humanism, its portrayal of increasingly sexed-up princesses, etc., Disney World was a load of fun, especially with our two year-old, Willa. I'm trying to sort through the fact that I was, myself, a little starstruck when we met Minnie-Mouse at the "character dinner". Willa too was starstruck - shaking, actually. Beyond just Minnie, she was, in a sense, catechized into a mastery of the whole pantheon of Disney characters that prowl around the park. A week ago she only knew how to say "Minnie-Mouse" and "Cinderella", but now she can verbally identify Mickey, Goofy, Pluto, Snow White, the Little Mermaid, and Chip and Dale. Some of this makes me nervous. While we bought very little merchandise, she has no-doubt formed a myriad of positive associations with Disney images that will influence her buying choices for years to come. She, and we, had such an ongoing feast of dazzling entertainment that my wife and I wonder if life after Orlando will seem drab. I.e., it's nine o'clock, where are the fireworks? I vaguely feel the scrutiny of Neil Postman from beyond the grave, for at the end of the four long days we had, it seemed, nearly entertained ourselves to death.

Some of this makes me think that the best Christian response to the arresting power of Disney World is to be sure that our preaching and liturgy tells as compelling a story as Walt's. In a way, Disney lays down the gauntlet when it comes to enthralling an audience. And while the business of the church is not to entertain people, certainly our story - the creation, fall, and redemption of the world through the Passion of Christ, and the future culmination of his kingdom at his final return - surely this is, as Dorothy Sayers said, "the most exciting drama ever staged." Why shouldn't we also seek to capture the imagination of our young people, but about a greater Prince Charming, a more enduring Kingdom, and a real Lion King? After a week at Disney World, to bore people with the gospel seems more sinful than it did before. If the kiss of the bridegroom in the Song of Solomon is, as Bernard of Clairvaux said it is, the kiss of Christ on the lips of his people, and if that kiss raises us from the sleep of spiritual death -- well then, the otherwise enchanting tale of Sleeping Beauty starts to look a little derivative. One of the reasons the church can confidently take up Disney's implicit challenge is that we have the better story -- the True Myth, as J.R.R. Tolkien would have said.

None of this is to say that Disney's kingdom is in direct competition with the kingdom of God. If Tolkien had seen the nightly parade through the streets of the Magic Kingdom, wouldn't he tell us it is a true, however dim, reflection of the future procession of the saints through the gold streets in the kingdom of God? If so, he would have been right. This is why the Christian response to Disney World can not be a one-sided critique. It is somehow right to be swept up by the kernel of truth and beauty that is here. There is such a thing as scrooginess, afterall, and to be unmoved by something like the (four times a day) coronation of pauper-turned-princess Cinderella, complete with royal anthem playing from a thousand speakers, all against the backdrop of the fabulously illuminated palace (fiberglass construction not withstanding) is to be guilty of a wonder deficit. When the myths that are played out on the various park rides and animatronic stage shows are really good, as they often are, glimmers of the gospel are usually just under the surface (as anecdotal evidence, I cite the number of Lion King sermon illustrations preached from American pulpits a few years ago). And, now that Disney owns the Narnia film franchise and has opened a proto Narnia-experience at their Disney-MGM Studios park, the gospel/fairy tale gap has become even narrower when walking the golden streets of Disney World.

But, on the other hand, to try to presently create an explicitly Christian version of Disney's spectacle is to fail to realize that such a final version of the kingdom is a future reality, not a present one (take note, founders of the new Ave Maria town in Florida). Maybe that's why after four days in the park, for all of the fun we were having, it was beginning to feel a tinge like escapism. While the forty-seven square-mile Disney World is a near utopia, once in a while you are reminded that outside the walls of this kingdom there exists a world that is still fallen. A USA Today headline I saw while waiting for the shuttle to EPCOT broke the spell for a moment: "Alabama churches burned 'as a joke,' suspects say." EPCOT means Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. In its best aspects, that's what Disney really is -- a prototype of a future City, but one that we'll have to wait for. So, taken in measured doses, the Disney experience is fun in some of the highest senses of the word. But, as a family, we'll need to remind ourselves this week that God has called us, for the present time, to be pilgrims on the way to the Celestial City -- and not to hole-up for too long in imitations of that place, however legitimately enchanting. And on those warm winter nights in Orlando, schmoozing with the princesses, Disney World was certainly that.

Scientific Knowledge vs. Religious Knowledge

This post is inspired by the problem that fans of science often have with the reasonableness of holding Chrisitan religious beliefs, and the twin problem that makes Chrisitans often nervous about applauding the sciences. My case is that both problems often result in failing to distinguish the properly separate spheres of scientific knowledge and religious knowledge.

Science, everyone agrees, arrives at truth-claims by using the apparatus of the natural world, in order to make conclusions about the things in the natural world. That is, science as a human endeavor is concerned about testable physical causes and reactions in the world of matter, both living and non-living. Even when its hypotheses are not actually testable, science thinks that it's conclusions are at least testable in principle, given enough time, money, improved technology, etc. Christians, of all people, should be glad and optimistic about the possibility and value of scientific conclusions because they believe (on scriptural grounds, no less) that God has made and approves of the physical world, and that he has made it in in an orderly way that generally conforms to basic physical laws. To put this another way, Christians have deep theological reasons (deeper than some other religious traditions) to be champions of the knowledge that science provides.

But science is not in the business of commenting on the role of non-physical realities, like God. It simply has no tools to weigh in on questions like "Does God exist?" "What is the meaning of life?" and, "What's the difference between right and wrong?" If such questions are meaningful at all, they are not meaningful because of any objects or events in the physical world. This in no sense makes science an enemy of such religious questions, but serves to remind us that such questions cannot be settled with the physical tools of the laboratory. Problems result when fans of science (against the advice of most scientists) make this kind of a move: "Unless science can show me evidence for why a certain religious belief is true, it is unreasonable for me to believe it." Philosophers would call this a "category mistake." Religious knowledge, whatever it is, is not derived by the rules that properly govern the formation of scientific knowlege.

In everyday life we understand that there are different types of knowledge, some of which allow us to reasonably hold beliefs that we have no scientific ground for. My favorite example of this is the inutitive knowledge of the "hunch". When we say that we have a hunch about something, we specifically mean that we can't cite any particular evidence (and certainly not scientific evidence) for some belief that we find ourselves in possession of. It is often reasonable to act on hunches even though it is not "scientifically reasonable" to do so. While "hunch knowledge" is not as objectively testable or even as regularly reliable as "scientific knowledge", it is the fool that completely ignores her hunches for those reasons!

Is "religious knowlege" like "hunch knowlege"? In many ways "no", but in one important way "yes": both show an alternate and reasonable means of gaining certain beliefs that are not the result of scientific inquiry. If an invisible and non-material God exists, science (by definition) will have no evidence to offer one way or another. If God does exist, and I come to believe that he does, the reasonableness of my belief will be grounded on different criteria than the canons of the scientific method. Again, saying this does not slight science in any way.

Oftentimes the secular critique of religious belief is on the grounds that we are irrationally dismissing the gains of scientific knowledge if we come to hold any untestable religious beliefs. But this is to wrongly think that all knowledge must be scientifically derived. Science itself would place no such limits on us and how we form proper beliefs. The opposite mistake is the sometimes Christian hostility toward the sciences that results from forgetting that God made a physical world that has observable, testable processes that can be discovered without reference to the supernatural. It is not unspiritual to pursue the sciences -- if anything, it honors the God who set the world up in such a way that invites us to examine its mechanisms and complexity. While some religious beliefs refer to physical things and historical events (especially in Christianity), including the miraculous suspension of normal physical laws, the basic beliefs of Christanity are not unreasonable by any judgment from science.

The last sentence will raise in some minds a good question about the rules for another category of belief, "historical knowledge". On what grounds to can we claim that a certain event happened in a certain way and for certain reasons? History deals with events in the physical world that are, therefore, somewhat open to scienfic conjecture -- but not fully, given the amazing number of unknown variables and unobservabe causes that go into any one event. Events of ancient history are even harder to study, given the often paucity of sources. It's not hard to see why history, as an academic discipline, has sometimes been considered a science, and at other times an art. Since Chrisitanity rises or falls based on whether or not certain events took place in first-century Palestine, several important Christian beliefs should be considered claims to "historical knowlege". Here, things get more interesting, because both Christians and non-believers are properly operating on the same turf, dealing with the same category of knowlege. The reasonableness of the Christian beliefs about the life, death, and resurrection Jesus Christ is based, in part, on whether or not Christians are using the canons of historical knowledge propery or improperly, and, whether they have the right canons at all. This is a much more slippery debate, given the slippery nature of historiography in general. Yet (I think) the Christians make a strong case, though the reasons for saying so will require another post.

Why Did Jesus Die? or, Avoiding a Reduced Gospel

The previous post which argued that we ought to be able to affirm BOTH the new-creation-inaugurating aspect of Jesus' death AND the sin-atoning accomplishment of it leads me to a broader observation: sometimes those of us who speak about the value of Jesus' death on the cross tend to reduce the benefits of it to one or two areas while the Bible itself seems happily to move between many. While some of these benefits are overlapping, none of the following five are easily reduced to a single achievement: Because of the cross 1) the sinner's impurity is cleansed through a sacrifice (Heb.9:13-14), 2) Jesus pays a ransom for the debt that sin has created (Matt.6:12; Mark 10:45; 1 Tim.2:6), 3) Jesus conquers the power of sin, death, and the devil (Col.1:12-14, 2:14-15), 4) the personal hostility between God and the sinner is removed (Rom.5:10), 5) the legal judgment of sin was transferred from the human law-breaker to Jesus (Gal.3:13). While it may be true that the church sometimes makes the mistake of emphasizing some of these benefits while neglecting others, we should resist the temptation to respond to one kind of reductionism with another. Not just biblically, but even intuitively, would we not expect that the multiple manifestations of falleness from which creation suffers would all be reversed by the work of Christ (even if only in an inaugurated extent)? This is the long-awaited Savior of the whole sinful creation, afterall, and his arrival brings a restoration "far as the curse is found", not just to the curse as summarized by one family of biblical images of falleness. Broken bodies will one day be given resurrected bodies like his in which to experience a restored world, but also they will enjoy the forgiveness of a God they have offended, the cleansing from their shame, a victory over spiritual and temporal powers that used to enslave them, etc. To put this another way, when we spot the limitations of some theory of the cross, we should remember that a limitation is not necessarily an un-truth. Did the old "ransom theory" of the atonement have its problems? Yes, but this doesn't free us from somehow including the clear ransom metaphors used in the New Testament to complete our view of the atonement. Is N.T. Wright mistaken if he does not believe that the imputation of our sin for Christ's righteousness is a New Testament teaching? Yes, but that doesn't detract from the value of his work on the new creation themes surrounding Jesus' work which is manifestly biblical if we open our eyes to it. Christ announces a big gospel, good news all around, and not easily reduced. Our preaching, to stay scripturally balanced, should probably dance between all the New Testament portraits of what Jesus accomplished. A good example of the both/and approach to the cross (and the resurrection) can be seen in Michael Horton's responses to Frederica Mathewes-Green in The Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives, pp.143-190).

My One Tiny Problem with N.T. Wright

I just listened to three fantastic N.T. Wright lectures from a weekend seminar he gave recently in Oxford. His central claim was that the New Testament theme of God enacting a "new creation" is the most central biblical theme to explain what God is up to in redemptive history. Contrast this with the assumption of much of platonized Evangelicalism which says that God is primarily in the business of transporting individuals from this world to the ethereal heavenly realm, from the body to the realm of the spirit, etc. Jesus' resurrection is the inauguration of the new creation, God will one day renew the whole present cosmos from its groaning and fallenness in a like manner, that is, a manner that allows for great continuity between present world and the future new heavens and new earth. To speak this way is a cure for the dualism that makes the Bible into an instruction manual to get us out of this world and into a different realm of being, which is heaven.

As much as I love what Wright brings to the table, my lingering concern is what I seem to never hear him saying: the Bible, even given all of its new creation themes, also tells us that what allows anyone to experience the new creation is that Jesus has first atoned for his sins. I've always thought that the links between Jesus death and the Passover provide a strong reason to see atonement near the heart of Jesus' mission. Granted, the atonement for our sins is more of a means to an end (a restored friendhship with God) than a final redemptive benefit in itself. Wright mentions the Passover context of Jesus' death, but relies instead the allusions that the original Exodus Passover would have made to an act of divine re-creation, specifically, that the typical image of God conquering a watery chaos to bring forth a new creation is what the Red Sea crossing and birth of his covenant people is all about. Wright's evidence is strong that the Red Sea crossing of the Exodus is thick with new creation motifs (which I never saw before, apart from Israel in the desert as a new Adam), but why not affirm this AS WELL AS the atonement motif? After all, the only people who experienced the "new creation" of the Red Sea crossing were those whose lives were saved by the lamb's blood on the doorpost the night before. Can't we admit to both the substituionary atonement and new creation as important motifs? The first describes the entrance mechanism and the second, the nature of the kingdom itself, but both are important. To emphasize God's new creation without dealing with the atonement seems to underappreciate Chist's office as priest (even while doing a good job with his kingly office). In fairness, Wright may not really deny any of this. He is, after all, trying to draw our attention to certain biblical themes that we have often missed (new creation) rather than to articulate an exhaustive system. But still, something in me wishes that I'd hear a few more bones occassionaly tossed to the substitutionary atonement motif that seems so central to the Old and New Testament way of describing how it is possible for a sinner to get right with God. To be sure, thanks to Wright, we will not forget that a forgiven sinner will experience God's full redemption in a renewed body, in a renewed cosmos, not somewhere up in the ether.

Molinism and Acts 13:48

Molinism (after the Jesuit Louis de Molina, 1535-1600) suggests that God only contingently knows the future free choices of human beings, such as a person's decision to put his faith in Christ. The contingency is whether or not the person does, actually, come to such a belief, for before such a decision is made, it does not exist in a way that can be known. This means that God does not logically know the outcome of free choices until they are actually made (though temporally, he would know the decision before it takes place). So while temporally God may know what a person's future free choice will be, he knows it only on the basis of what he forsees their future decision to be.

A prima facie read of certain Bible verses seem to challenge such a view, however. For examle, Acts 13:48, "When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honored the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed." A natural interpretation of this verse suggests that God had first appointed these Gentiles to become believers, only after which (and because of which) they did come to believe upon hearing Paul's message. They were first appointed to believe (by God, presumably -- who else?) and only later did actually believe. "Appoint" is quite an active verb, so it appears that God has done something more with regard to these Gentiles than merely know of their future freely chosen faith.

A Molinist must, it seems to me, disagree with something in such an interpretation of Acts 13:48. And, of course, often we must correct our prima facie readings of a particular text. Other scriptures themselves may sway us, or, perhaps we realize our first view has internal inconsistencies, etc. So here's my concern about Molinism: what would possibly lead me to abandon my prima facie reading of Acts 13:48 in favor of a Molinistic solution that would, somehow, deny that God actively appointed these Gentiles to believe? It seems that Molinists are generally motivated by a philosophical contradiction they perceive between saying a given event is both determined by God and also determined by a human being. Is that concern legitimate enough to pry us loose from the natural reading here?

I don't think so. A simple affirmation that God pre-appoints certain uncoerced human choices is not necessarily a philosophical contradiction. The Bible's mention in Acts 13:48 that God appointed Gentiles to believe is "simple" in that it doesn't tell us anything about the mechanisms of agency in either the divine or human will. Admittedly, we would be guilty of a philosophical contradiction if we said that God freely determined the outcome of that event in a simultaneous and exactly similar way that free Gentile wills determined it. But no one is making that claim (that I know of). The Bible does not say how God can determine an event that is also freely chosen by a human, it just says he does, without indulging us in the details. But someone might respond, "Knowing the details wouldn't change anything, since even what it said is a contradiction." But this is only the case if God's agency operates enough like human agency that there isn't room for both to act freely to produce the same event. Granted this would be impossible if talking about two humans (I can't predetermine that my wife will eat pizza with me tonight and then claim she has an equally free choice whether to eat it or not). Isn't it quite possible, then, that God knows something we don't about divine agency that makes it different than ours? Why opt for a philophical solution like Molinism that forces us to nearly deny the face value of a text like Acts 13:48, not to mention that necessarily rests on determinations about the mechanics of divine causality that do not seem to be revealed to us? The alternative is to give the Bible the benefit of the doubt about what is possible within God's mysterious ways.


These are just some opening thoughts, mostly to myself.

Christian Philosophers and Divine Agency

My philospher friend Mark Case (Ph.D. Cornell) and I had a short discusssion the other day about the nature of free-will. Apparently, the majority of Christian philosophers, following Alvin Plantinga, tend to think that human free-will is not compatible with the kind of determinism that states that if one could know everything about the universe, then one could predict any future event. But where would this leave the likes of Jonathan Edwards and his position on free will? Edwards seemed to say that God does have such perfect knowledge, but that humans still do, in fact, have a kind of free-will in the sense that they can always choose in favor of their preferences. Is this just too shallow a sense of free-will to deserve the name, according to Plantinga, et. al.? In a somewhat related observation, my nagging sense has been than we don't know enough about the nature of divine agency to state, philosophically, that God can't determine a human decision without violating all senses of free-agency in the human chooser. Isn't it conceivable that God could act on an object (like a human will) in a way unlike ways that we would (such as coercion, brainwashing, etc.) and thereby allow that God can foreordain (in God's way) a human choice that nonetheless allows that choice to still be called "free"? Isn't it a potential err to make quick analogies between zero-sum events of agency in the world of our normal experience with what need not be zero-sum events when we're dealing with an agent like God who gets his work done God-knows-how? I need to think more about this (and my later post on Molinism goes deeper into this issue).