A. Why Isn’t the Bible or the Church So Obviously Better?!
This question in my experience is the seedbed of skepticism and doubt for Christians and non-Christians alike especially when it comes to specific practicalities of life.
B. 20th Century Suburban Evangelicalism
In the seeker movement the most important missiological verse was “I come that they may have life and have it abundantly.” John 10:10. I’d say the embrace of this idea went far beyond that movement however.
The idea was to demonstrate that Christianity’s way of life, as spelled out by the Bible, often in the form of wisdom, yielded more joy, order, happiness, and security than non-Christian wisdom. What followed in American Christianity, especially in the suburbs was an entire movement of the Christian way of raising kids, being married, managing money, etc. It was terrifically successful in terms of church growth, evangelism, and creating a Christian culture that was adapted to late 20th century American suburbia.
People and communities have the liability of knowing best what they know most. This is especially true when that group and community reaches a status of national and even world hegemony. If it seems like my life is “working” now, usually an evaluation based on a sense of emotional well-being, financial security, etc. surely my way must be best. The loving and generous thing to do is to share it with others.
What develops is of course a communal construct of “the good life”.
What happens when both one’s formula for the “abundant life” and specific incarnation of it are not shared by others?
C. American Christianity vs. the Life of Paul
Most of what I do in my little church is old school Bible study. We read though books of the Bible and talk about it together. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of Epistles and Paul. I’ve been trying to give my people a sense, as best I can, of what Christian conversion in the Roman Empire meant for people in the New Testament church. It wasn’t easy. One of the best cases of “not easy” was of course Paul himself.
Paul goes from being a well respected Pharisee with high status within his sub-culture to being a troublemaker and the subject of assault, violence, torture and imprisonment from both his former religious allies and the empire of which he was a citizen.
If you were to ask Paul “In what way has believing and professing Jesus made your life better?” I think his answer would confuse us, especially as American Christians.
We might make a case for Paul that reverting to Pharisaical Judaism might relieve a large degree of his sufferings. What if he went, cap in hand back to Jerusalem and said to the religious officials “I’m sorry, I was deluded, I’ll denounce Jesus and use my Christian network to root out the seditious heresy” he might have been welcomed and become their new hero. Perhaps before his arrest in Jerusalem he could have just stopped doing what he had been doing, settle down in some out of the way place and shut up. Maybe take a wife or, if he was gay as some imagine, take a lover or a series of lovers and enjoy life as a quiet tentmaker. Wouldn’t this have been better?
We might ask Gentile converts to Christianity similar questions. Surely the arrangements of civic life in the Roman world were filled with pleasures and opportunities. The vast majority of people saw it as such. Many Christian converts of course under threat of persecution renounced their faith to save their lives and their property. Some did not of course. For some, most notably slaves, Christianity offered a way to at least in their minds embrace a new status in a small sub-culture that their pagan life did not. These fortunes could change, however. With changed fortunes some would revert, but others would not.
C’ 2 Timothy
In leading my men’s group in 2 Timothy I wanted to try to give them a sense of the cultural context in which Paul felt himself as he was nearing the end of his days in captivity. Here is the ancient Roman historian Tacitus describing the consequence of the Roman public suspecting Nero for setting fire to his own city.
Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor; and the pernicious superstition was checked for a short time, only to break out afresh, not only in Judaea, the home of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrible and shameful things in the world collect and find a home.
First of all, those who confessed were arrested; then, on their information, a huge multitude was convicted, not so much on the ground of incendiarism as for hatred of the human race. Their execution was made a matter of sport: some were sewn up in the skins of wild beasts and savaged to death by dogs; others were fastened to crosses as living torches, to serve as lights when daylight failed. Nero made his gardens available for the show and held games in the Circus, mingling with the crowd or standing in his chariot in charioteer’s uniform. Hence, although the victims were criminals deserving the severest punishment, pity began to be felt for them because it seemed that they were being sacrificed to gratify one man’s lust for cruelty rather than for the public weal.
Bruce, F. F. (1977). Paul: apostle of the free spirit (p. 442). Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster.
Paul in 2 Timothy talks about everyone abandoning him in Asia, of friends who have walked away from the faith and turned against him. He’s trying to encourage Timothy to leave (presumably Ephesus) to be with Paul in Rome. What might it mean for someone to associate publicly with Paul and Christians at this time? Paul, who never seemed to be a paragon of emotional stability seems to be in this place where he’s both rather depressed by how things have gone for him and his ministry, but still buoyant about Jesus and the resurrection. What he’s praying for is endurance. It reminds me of a story told by Daniel Kirk who teaches New Testament at a Fuller extension. He told this story on his blog (no longer up)
Story time: almost two weeks ago I taught a class that ran through the Catholic Epistles in one day. After getting through Hebrews, James, and 1 Peter one of my students raised his hand to speak. I typically allow this in my classes, so I called on him. His observation was this: “It seems that all of these letters are telling Christians that our calling is to pray for faithfulness and perseverance in suffering, whereas we always pray for God to change our situation.”
B’ Back to American Evangelicalism
(I’m working a Chiastic structure for you Bible students who are paying attention.)
A few things reached their peak at the same time here.
The seeker movement reached its apex as showing itself to be the guiding light for retaking America for Jesus. It became a full package of religion, lifestyle, and even politics. Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority were one iteration but it came full flower when Karl Rove realized that the evangelical vote could put George W. Bush in the White House. From Reagan to Bush II was in a sense the victory lap of post-war evangelicalism. There was a new consensus, religious and political in some ways affirmed by the moral failure of Bill Clinton. This was the way life was supposed to be done and “life abundant” could be found at the peak of suburban, conservative evangelicalism.
On the political front things moved quickly with 9/11 and war in Iraq. The Cold War was over and our new great threat was no longer godless Communism but rather fanatical Islam. Islamic literalism begins to cast a shadow in Biblical literalism.
On the social front questions seeded in the 50s and 60s come to full flourishing in the American culture war. I’m moving fast (and probably loose here but I recommend George Marsden’s The Twilight of the American Enlightenment) come to full flower. The earlier mainline consensus of the 50s found its evangelical echo in the end of the 20th century. Serious concerns about “the life abundant” were raised in terms of how abundant it was towards minorities, sexual, religious and cultural.
When it comes to the conversation on same-sex marriage the trend lines follow quite nicely. Gays and lesbians go from a moral problem to a medical problem with the hope of a technical solution to a societal/minority struggle. The dominant conversation goes from “is this right or wrong” to “can’t this be fixed (Exodus ministries, counseling)” to “won’t full inclusion resolve this?”
Red State Blue State
What develops is evident to us all. There are two “abundant life” incarnations and narratives vying for supremacy here and the boundary markers are the flashpoints around which they are coalescing.
Like all civil wars this is a messy war where battlefields go through families and communities and people are all over the place. While religions and ideologies are a big part of this they don’t match up perfectly. You find Christians, Mormons, Muslims, Agnostics, New Agers, Spiritual but not Religious-ers scattered about. It’s a very live battlefield.
A’ Plausibility Structures
Why isn’t the Bible or the church so obviously better?
This is a question I deal with every day. In my series on Leviticus I had to deal with it regularly. Why didn’t God just give Israel tampons and toilets? If Jesus really wanted to make a dent in the “abundant life” of the Galilee if he had done some basic instruction about water sanitation and taught them about germs and penicillin he could have changed human history. Why didn’t God outlaw slavery? Why would God suggest that marrying your daughter to her rapist was a good idea?
Are Christians who are trying to handle the “seven texts of terror” (Brownson, Vines, Pauw and many others) really just trying to save some connection to the Bible for communal or historical reasons when it would simply just be easier to say “How can that ancient book really compare to what we know by science about the world today?”
I think A LOT of people feel that pull deep in their hearts. One of the reasons I respect John Suk is because he’s got the courage to be honest about his thoughts and follow them. I have similar respect for many of my non-Christian or post-Christian friends who decided it wasn’t worth it to play games with trying to find a Biblical justification for same sex marriage. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it seems a tremendously greater challenge than upsetting the traditional taboo of women serving in ministry. Why not just cut the Gordian knot? Embrace the new “abundant life” in its present cultural iteration. Everyone from the president on down feels it to be the winners in history. Isn’t it 2015?
The experiential evidence for gays and lesbians seems clear in listening to the dominant voices in our culture today and many friends around me. You will have to find some other reasons to dismiss the likes of Rosaria Butterfield, but there are always outliars and kooks. Our elephants below are always at work checking the herd.
I know this series is frustrating my friends in both camps (and the myriad of sub camps). Why can’t I just join the Red state, pure underground resistance against the new way? Why can’t I just give up already, embrace the Brownson fig leaf and adaptations by affirming at least same sex monogamous life long (kinda) marriages and doing (for a while) don’t ask, don’t tell with sexual minorities of less respectable and middle class varieties? Why put myself through all of this grief until my blog becomes a too easy to ignore stench? Am I simply indecisive? Do I lack faith? Do I lack love for humanity?
C” Paul and the Age of Decay
I was skeptical about the old “abundant life” formula and I’m skeptical about the new.
I spent some of my morning today helping a mentally ill homeless man try to figure out how to get next month’s Social Security money after he lost his wallet with his debit cards. He’s been trying to get into the county mental hospital, where he used to work, for a month now and sleeps outside my office door. He’s a deeply committed Mormon who will be arrested if he sets foot in a Mormon church. As I sit in my office doing my work I hear him cuss life, his fortune, the cold hard slab he spent the night on. He’ll be moaning and crying and cursing until he can get some alcohol in him to settle him down. Sometimes I’ll buy it for him.
I’m pretty skeptical about a lot of fixes and solutions. His Mormon faith didn’t help him stay sober. Even as a former mental health worker all our drugs and counseling can’t keep his mania and depression from destroying all his relationships, sometimes bringing him to the point of threatening my life. Social security money which gives him at least a little something is more like methadone than a fix for all that ails him. I’ve known way too many like him to imagine that we have any “fix” for him partly because I know even more people without his challenges that will face loss, addiction, betrayal, divorce, and eventually humiliation, abandonment and death. This is the age we live in and I call it the age of decay.
There are many questions I can’t answer and many doubts I possess but solutions offered to me often by wonderful religious people or wonderful skeptics usually fall short. I see the Gordian knots we all possess. I have Gordian knots of my own.
Hooked on Jesus
From what I know about the life of Paul of Tarsus it seems to me that he would have had a more “abundant life” if Jesus had never met him on the road to Damascus. But meet him he did, says this Paul. Despite the litany of sufferings that Paul endured it seems Paul never was willing to unmeet Jesus. Jesus seemed to make a mess out of Paul’s life but Paul wouldn’t have it any other way. I can identify with this.
If we died with him, we will also live with him.
If we endure, we will also reign with him.
If we deny him, he will also deny us.
If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, since he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2)
Leadingchurch.com 
A Little Culture War Chiasmus
A. Why Isn’t the Bible or the Church So Obviously Better?!
This question in my experience is the seedbed of skepticism and doubt for Christians and non-Christians alike especially when it comes to specific practicalities of life.
B. 20th Century Suburban Evangelicalism
In the seeker movement the most important missiological verse was “I come that they may have life and have it abundantly.” John 10:10. I’d say the embrace of this idea went far beyond that movement however.
The idea was to demonstrate that Christianity’s way of life, as spelled out by the Bible, often in the form of wisdom, yielded more joy, order, happiness, and security than non-Christian wisdom. What followed in American Christianity, especially in the suburbs was an entire movement of the Christian way of raising kids, being married, managing money, etc. It was terrifically successful in terms of church growth, evangelism, and creating a Christian culture that was adapted to late 20th century American suburbia.
People and communities have the liability of knowing best what they know most. This is especially true when that group and community reaches a status of national and even world hegemony. If it seems like my life is “working” now, usually an evaluation based on a sense of emotional well-being, financial security, etc. surely my way must be best. The loving and generous thing to do is to share it with others.
What develops is of course a communal construct of “the good life”.
What happens when both one’s formula for the “abundant life” and specific incarnation of it are not shared by others?
C. American Christianity vs. the Life of Paul
Most of what I do in my little church is old school Bible study. We read though books of the Bible and talk about it together. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of Epistles and Paul. I’ve been trying to give my people a sense, as best I can, of what Christian conversion in the Roman Empire meant for people in the New Testament church. It wasn’t easy. One of the best cases of “not easy” was of course Paul himself.
Paul goes from being a well respected Pharisee with high status within his sub-culture to being a troublemaker and the subject of assault, violence, torture and imprisonment from both his former religious allies and the empire of which he was a citizen.
If you were to ask Paul “In what way has believing and professing Jesus made your life better?” I think his answer would confuse us, especially as American Christians.
We might make a case for Paul that reverting to Pharisaical Judaism might relieve a large degree of his sufferings. What if he went, cap in hand back to Jerusalem and said to the religious officials “I’m sorry, I was deluded, I’ll denounce Jesus and use my Christian network to root out the seditious heresy” he might have been welcomed and become their new hero. Perhaps before his arrest in Jerusalem he could have just stopped doing what he had been doing, settle down in some out of the way place and shut up. Maybe take a wife or, if he was gay as some imagine, take a lover or a series of lovers and enjoy life as a quiet tentmaker. Wouldn’t this have been better?
We might ask Gentile converts to Christianity similar questions. Surely the arrangements of civic life in the Roman world were filled with pleasures and opportunities. The vast majority of people saw it as such. Many Christian converts of course under threat of persecution renounced their faith to save their lives and their property. Some did not of course. For some, most notably slaves, Christianity offered a way to at least in their minds embrace a new status in a small sub-culture that their pagan life did not. These fortunes could change, however. With changed fortunes some would revert, but others would not.
C’ 2 Timothy
In leading my men’s group in 2 Timothy I wanted to try to give them a sense of the cultural context in which Paul felt himself as he was nearing the end of his days in captivity. Here is the ancient Roman historian Tacitus describing the consequence of the Roman public suspecting Nero for setting fire to his own city.
Paul in 2 Timothy talks about everyone abandoning him in Asia, of friends who have walked away from the faith and turned against him. He’s trying to encourage Timothy to leave (presumably Ephesus) to be with Paul in Rome. What might it mean for someone to associate publicly with Paul and Christians at this time? Paul, who never seemed to be a paragon of emotional stability seems to be in this place where he’s both rather depressed by how things have gone for him and his ministry, but still buoyant about Jesus and the resurrection. What he’s praying for is endurance. It reminds me of a story told by Daniel Kirk who teaches New Testament at a Fuller extension. He told this story on his blog (no longer up)
B’ Back to American Evangelicalism
(I’m working a Chiastic structure for you Bible students who are paying attention.)
A few things reached their peak at the same time here.
The seeker movement reached its apex as showing itself to be the guiding light for retaking America for Jesus. It became a full package of religion, lifestyle, and even politics. Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority were one iteration but it came full flower when Karl Rove realized that the evangelical vote could put George W. Bush in the White House. From Reagan to Bush II was in a sense the victory lap of post-war evangelicalism. There was a new consensus, religious and political in some ways affirmed by the moral failure of Bill Clinton. This was the way life was supposed to be done and “life abundant” could be found at the peak of suburban, conservative evangelicalism.
On the political front things moved quickly with 9/11 and war in Iraq. The Cold War was over and our new great threat was no longer godless Communism but rather fanatical Islam. Islamic literalism begins to cast a shadow in Biblical literalism.
On the social front questions seeded in the 50s and 60s come to full flourishing in the American culture war. I’m moving fast (and probably loose here but I recommend George Marsden’s The Twilight of the American Enlightenment) come to full flower. The earlier mainline consensus of the 50s found its evangelical echo in the end of the 20th century. Serious concerns about “the life abundant” were raised in terms of how abundant it was towards minorities, sexual, religious and cultural.
When it comes to the conversation on same-sex marriage the trend lines follow quite nicely. Gays and lesbians go from a moral problem to a medical problem with the hope of a technical solution to a societal/minority struggle. The dominant conversation goes from “is this right or wrong” to “can’t this be fixed (Exodus ministries, counseling)” to “won’t full inclusion resolve this?”
Red State Blue State
What develops is evident to us all. There are two “abundant life” incarnations and narratives vying for supremacy here and the boundary markers are the flashpoints around which they are coalescing.
Like all civil wars this is a messy war where battlefields go through families and communities and people are all over the place. While religions and ideologies are a big part of this they don’t match up perfectly. You find Christians, Mormons, Muslims, Agnostics, New Agers, Spiritual but not Religious-ers scattered about. It’s a very live battlefield.
A’ Plausibility Structures
Why isn’t the Bible or the church so obviously better?
This is a question I deal with every day. In my series on Leviticus I had to deal with it regularly. Why didn’t God just give Israel tampons and toilets? If Jesus really wanted to make a dent in the “abundant life” of the Galilee if he had done some basic instruction about water sanitation and taught them about germs and penicillin he could have changed human history. Why didn’t God outlaw slavery? Why would God suggest that marrying your daughter to her rapist was a good idea?
Are Christians who are trying to handle the “seven texts of terror” (Brownson, Vines, Pauw and many others) really just trying to save some connection to the Bible for communal or historical reasons when it would simply just be easier to say “How can that ancient book really compare to what we know by science about the world today?”
I think A LOT of people feel that pull deep in their hearts. One of the reasons I respect John Suk is because he’s got the courage to be honest about his thoughts and follow them. I have similar respect for many of my non-Christian or post-Christian friends who decided it wasn’t worth it to play games with trying to find a Biblical justification for same sex marriage. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it seems a tremendously greater challenge than upsetting the traditional taboo of women serving in ministry. Why not just cut the Gordian knot? Embrace the new “abundant life” in its present cultural iteration. Everyone from the president on down feels it to be the winners in history. Isn’t it 2015?
The experiential evidence for gays and lesbians seems clear in listening to the dominant voices in our culture today and many friends around me. You will have to find some other reasons to dismiss the likes of Rosaria Butterfield, but there are always outliars and kooks. Our elephants below are always at work checking the herd.
I know this series is frustrating my friends in both camps (and the myriad of sub camps). Why can’t I just join the Red state, pure underground resistance against the new way? Why can’t I just give up already, embrace the Brownson fig leaf and adaptations by affirming at least same sex monogamous life long (kinda) marriages and doing (for a while) don’t ask, don’t tell with sexual minorities of less respectable and middle class varieties? Why put myself through all of this grief until my blog becomes a too easy to ignore stench? Am I simply indecisive? Do I lack faith? Do I lack love for humanity?
C” Paul and the Age of Decay
I was skeptical about the old “abundant life” formula and I’m skeptical about the new.
I spent some of my morning today helping a mentally ill homeless man try to figure out how to get next month’s Social Security money after he lost his wallet with his debit cards. He’s been trying to get into the county mental hospital, where he used to work, for a month now and sleeps outside my office door. He’s a deeply committed Mormon who will be arrested if he sets foot in a Mormon church. As I sit in my office doing my work I hear him cuss life, his fortune, the cold hard slab he spent the night on. He’ll be moaning and crying and cursing until he can get some alcohol in him to settle him down. Sometimes I’ll buy it for him.
I’m pretty skeptical about a lot of fixes and solutions. His Mormon faith didn’t help him stay sober. Even as a former mental health worker all our drugs and counseling can’t keep his mania and depression from destroying all his relationships, sometimes bringing him to the point of threatening my life. Social security money which gives him at least a little something is more like methadone than a fix for all that ails him. I’ve known way too many like him to imagine that we have any “fix” for him partly because I know even more people without his challenges that will face loss, addiction, betrayal, divorce, and eventually humiliation, abandonment and death. This is the age we live in and I call it the age of decay.
There are many questions I can’t answer and many doubts I possess but solutions offered to me often by wonderful religious people or wonderful skeptics usually fall short. I see the Gordian knots we all possess. I have Gordian knots of my own.
Hooked on Jesus
From what I know about the life of Paul of Tarsus it seems to me that he would have had a more “abundant life” if Jesus had never met him on the road to Damascus. But meet him he did, says this Paul. Despite the litany of sufferings that Paul endured it seems Paul never was willing to unmeet Jesus. Jesus seemed to make a mess out of Paul’s life but Paul wouldn’t have it any other way. I can identify with this.
If we died with him, we will also live with him.
If we endure, we will also reign with him.
If we deny him, he will also deny us.
If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, since he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2)
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Husband, Father of 5, Pastor