Would bringing back the vengeful help us to love our neighbors better?

Posted on June 15, 2009 by PaulVK

“Vengeance is mine, I will repay” Romans 12:9

The Bible talks a lot about God taking vengeance. This kind of speech bothers a lot of people. They imagine that their preferred god would simply and immediately look past all offenses and immediately wipe the slate clean. Likewise they imagine that if everyone in the world simply did this the world would be a better place. I don’t think so and I don’t think many of those who hold this position really do either.

Let’s imagine the guilt of every incident of theft, assault, abuse, neglect, were simply, permanently wiped clean away. Would anyone seriously advocate for such a situation? Instead we tend to postulate hypothetical offense that we imagine should be immediately forgotten but real offenses, the consequences of which we are in touch with emotionally or experientially, these we instinctively and immediately respond to with a call for redress.

If you do a concordance search of the Bible for the word “vengeance” you’ll find it comes up a lot (I searched the NRSV). The first occurrence comes up with the story of Cain. Cain is terrified, afraid that someone will take vengeance upon him for being an outcast and the murderer of his brother. God promises that He himself will take a seven-fold vengeance on anyone who kills Cain. The story that follows is that of Lamech who boasts to his wives that if God’s vengeance for Cain is sevenfold then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold. He killed a man for wounding him. Very early on the pattern is set. We are flush with ourselves, we step into God’s shoes and attempt to multiply his place by eleven.

I love the way the movie “The Godfather” begins. The undertaker pleads with Don Corleone for “justice” for the assault on his daughter. Even the Godfather recognizes that the undertaker’s request that the perpetrators be killed is not “justice”, because his daughter is not dead. Don Corleone, however, understands Lamech’s economy all too well. “If you would become my friend then your enemies would become my enemies and then they would fear you!” Is Yhwh Cain’s Don Corleone? Is this why talk of God’s vengeance disturbs us?

So what can we make of wrongdoing and retribution? On one hand we can’t just blithely imagine that nothing bad ever happened. On the other hand we see that Lamech’s approach instinctively leads to all the cycles of retribution we witness today. We also see that those charged with bringing justice to our world do so poorly. Only a fraction of wrongdoers are actually brought to justice and only held accountable for a fraction of all the wrongs they do. (Notice how easily it is to exclude myself from the class of “wrongdoers”!) Hollywood regularly releases violent movies about strong men and women “settling the score” outside of the law. It’s a fantasy we all indulge in and Hollywood knows there is money to be made by inviting us to indulge in these fantasies. We also know, however, that the real life stories of people who pursue this indulgence are far more ugly than the Hollywood versions.

The Apostle Paul quotes the Old Testament when he says “Vengeance is mine, says the LORD, I will repay.” One place in the 5 books of the Law where this sentiment is approximated is Leviticus 19:18. Leviticus is an Old Testament book with a severe image problem in today’s society, but this verse says something that even the most “enlightened” folks can celebrate: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.” If you look at this and Deuteronomy 32 it seems that God’s vengeance is tied to our capacity to love our neighbors.

On the basis of God’s promise that he will repay, we can legitimately withhold judgment and retribution from wrongdoers (now I want to include myself) because we now have no need to take “justices into our own hands”, also knowing full well that justice is never done by our own hands. In Romans 12 Paul drops this Torah quote in the midst of all sorts of very Jesus-like commands: “bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse”, “live in harmony with one another”, “do not repay evil for evil but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all”. It is God’s promise to take up the need for retribution that allows us to love and forgive those who don’t deserve love because of what they’ve done.

I hope that you see in this piece that I am not challenging the state’s role in bringing justice. They should and must pursue justice. I am speaking about our impulse to take vengeance ourselves against the wrong done to us. I am also not limiting my observation to those things that are egregious or illegal, but in fact including the much more common variety of relational offenses we live in the midst of every day. In those cases our acts or words of vengeance are seldom violent but generally verbal or relational. Our impulse for vengeance leads us to gossip, verbally malign, passive aggressively retaliate, withdraw, withhold, etc.

What happens, however, if you take God out of the equation? Who then is left to bring retribution?

If God is mentally taken out of the process by us we are left only with ourselves. For the big things this means violence, chaos, and cycles of bloody retribution and retaliation. For the small things, this means nursing resentments, mentally rehearsing past wrongs, and setting ourselves on a path to bitterness and hatred. We will feel that we simply MUST establish justice by our own hand, or our own tongues. We MUST vindicate ourselves, protect our own reputations, usually at the expense of the reputations of others. Human conflict then just continues on, relationships are broken, tempers flair, churches are torn apart, bonds are broken.

Without God and a vivid knowledge of his justice, we are locked into perpetual warfare with each other. With a God of vengeance, we have a hope to be freed from cycles of retribution and a need to defend self and reputation thus pursuing love of neighbors and enemies alike.

Perhaps the liturgical repetition of God’s faithfulness in vengeance in the Old Testament is designed to free us from hostilities ourselves. The irony of course is that these are the bits we often leave out when privately or publically reading the Bible. We emphasize the mercy bits but subtlety sidestep the bits about God’s judgment in hopes to not offend people with this part that God plays and that the Bible regularly emphasizes. If we want to lead people in the kind of uncommon love, generosity and forgiveness that we say we are about perhaps we should include these passages about God’s passion for retributive justice thus de-emphasizing our felt need to take matters into our own hands.

What do you think? Conventional wisdom seems to assert that portrayal of the Old Testament God of wrath and vengeance elicits violence and retribution in those who confess to follow Him. Could the opposite in fact be true?

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Diff btwn Solid and Incredible

Posted on June 15, 2009 by PaulVK

Great Tim Keller quote from the CT article:

It should give some comfort to church planters plagued by church-growth-ecclesiastical-porn:

“The difference between a solid church and a terrible church is pretty much up to you,” he tells one group. “The difference between a solid church and incredible success has almost nothing to do with you at all. It’s like you are out there paddling on your surfboard, and suddenly the wave comes and you ride in, standing up like you’re a Greek god. That has everything to do with the wave.”

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Twitter Updates for 2009-06-15

Posted on June 15, 2009 by PaulVK

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Outline of Tim Keller's Gospel Realizing

Posted on June 14, 2009 by PaulVK

This MP3 is part of a three part series. It is part 1 called Gospel Realizing. Here is an outline of sorts I made from the MP3 lecture.

1. Sin:
a. In the mid-late 20th century, D James Kennedy’s “Evangelism Explosion” talked about sin we’d say “you have to be perfect to please God” but people would look at him “like a cow stares at a new gate”. When he began to talk about sin in terms of idolatry he began to get traction.
b. Before we use idolatry with others we first have to use it on ourselves. We have to be something before we can do something.
2. Jonah
a. Always looked at the book of Jonah as a book about evangelism
b. The next time he saw how the book was about idolatry
i. Jonah has been sent to preach to people about pagan idolatry
ii. Before he can preach to them about their idolatry he has to be confronted about his own.
iii. Though he’s a Bible believing prophet his problem with idolatry is as bad as the Ninevites problems with idolatry. See Romans 1, 2, 3

3. Jonah as a book is similar to the movie the Sixth Sense. You don’t understand the book until the end.
a. Jonah is told to go to Nineveh but he goes the other way and immediately we all assume he’s afraid of persecution, death or failure. So we read the whole book that way.
b. He repents, goes to Nineveh, preaches and people respond and repent and then God had compassion on them. If our assumptions are right then the book would end differently.
c. Chapter 4 reveals the truth about why Jonah went the other way. He wasn’t afraid of failure, his motive was hate.
d. The commentators all attribute Jonah’s hatred to patriotism which would be natural. But what lies below it is deeper
i. He would rather see all these people die rather than saved because it will be better for Israel. It is an inordinate national and racial pride that leads to cruelty and an embrace of genocide.
ii. Jonah cannot evangelize properly because of the idols of his own heart.

4. How to find your idols and deal with your own idols
a. Jonah says “if these people are alive, I don’t want to live.” this is a sign of idolatry in your life.
b. It’s hard to find out about what you are really living for. The way to find out is nightmares, your biggest fears. What if you lost it would make you lose the desire to live.
c. Anything that if you lose it causes you to not go on with your life, has made you lose meaning in your life is your real justification for living. It justifies your day to day life.
i. Romantic relationship. If it’s a good thing and you lose it, you will be devastated. If you’ve turned it into an ultimate thing and you lose it then you want to kill yourself.
ii. Illustration of the 2 women who were angry with their husbands. The second woman, functionally it was being a mother that was her justification for living. The happiness of her son and her love for him was her reality. “If my son loves me then my life is worthwhile.” She couldn’t overcome the sin of bitterness because there was a sin underneath the sin.
iii. You can’t break any other commandment unless you break the first commandment “you shall have no other gods before me”. Underneath there is something more important to you than Jesus Christ at that time.
iv. All idolatry is a disbelief of the gospel. Idols are always self-salvation projects, ways of justifying myself. But basically THIS is what makes me feel like a worthwhile person.
v. We are trying to preach grace to people yet in our own lives we’re angry, bitter, scared, addictions, problems because we don’t understand grace ourselves. We’re still believing in justification by works (whatever stuff we’ve set our hearts on.)

5. Salvation is of the LORD
a. We do know it but we don’t know it.
i. The money in the coke machine. You pound the machine until you hear the pennies drop. Almost all Christians are like that. The pennies haven’t really dropped. We’re still anxious, driven, as a none Christian. Your job as a preacher is to pound them on the side of the head until it gets into the heart and then comes out graciousness.
ii. Then you don’t look at people like you did before. You see that there is no difference between us.
iii. Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit their own grace.
iv. Knowing that deep down I’m not different from the pagan idolaters helps me love them and want the best for them. You’re humbler, kinder, less judgmental and that helps make you an evangelist.

6. How do you pound your own head so the gospel coins get into your heart?
a. The expulsive replacement rejoicing in Jesus in the face of your own idols
b. Expulsive rejoicing: Thomas Chalmers “The expulsive power of a new affection”
 i. You need an over-mastering positive passion to throw out fear and addiction
(1) Jacob’s labor for Rachel
(2) Two guys in a room doing a tedious job with two different promises of reward, one great, one small. They will work in two completely different ways.
ii. It is seldom that any of our tastes are made to disappear by a mere process of natural extinction. What cannot be thus destroy may be dispossessed. One passion displaces another as we grow older. There is not one of these transformations in which the heart is left without an object. The heart’s desire for one particular object may be conquered, but as to its desire for some supreme object that is unconquerable.
c. Replacement rejoicing: When you see yourself moving into fear or moving into anger because some idol has gotten ascendancy you have to look at Jesus on the spot and think of what he’s done for you.
i. Why did Jesus come and suffer? The only thing he didn’t have in the whole universe was us. The overmastering passion that enabled Jesus to actually face hell was us. There is a sense in which we were his Rachel. When you see him making us his Rachel, that makes him our Rachel. His loss of everything for us makes him so beautiful that you can turn away from these other things.
ii. You have to do it as you see your heart moving towards the wrong thing.
iii. Illustration of the woman with serial criminal boyfriends but she had to have a man. “If a man doesn’t love me I’m worthless.” The counselor wanted her to substitute a career for men. “Get rid of a typical female idol and go get a male idol.” Colossians 3: Your life is hid with Christ in God. Under my breath I say “you are not my life.” She’s doing replacement rejoicing in the face of her idols.

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Idolatry and Emotional Worlds

Posted on June 14, 2009 by PaulVK

This is a repost from July 7, 2008

Again this was from a CRC Voices discussion continuing the discussion of emotional worlds. Tim Keller has obviously influenced a lot of my thinking along these lines. Idolatry is a large element of Tim Keller’s theological and pastoral framework and one that I have found to be immensely helpful. He appears to have gotten these notions mostly from Martin Luther with some help from Kierkegaard.

An idol for Keller is something that we attempt to build our lives on apart from God. One of the best articulations of this from the story of the fall actually comes from Greg Boyd in a sermon on Jesus’ log and speck.  The illustration is in the first half of the sermon. I didn’t find the second half of the sermon to be very remarkable. He’s a long preacher too.

A third source for my thoughts on idolatry come from our own Rod Hugen in one of our late night GR talks sessions that I value so much. He was teaching me about spiritual warfare with the demonic and he mentioned that we make oaths about ourselves and these are what demons use as entry ways into our hearts. An oath might be “I’ll never be an alcoholic like my father”. Keller’s illustrations about idols work similarly: “If I can get that job then my life will matter” or “If I can lose 30 pounds and look like her then my life will be worth living…” Things like that. These self-oaths become defining, foundations for our lives, they then become organizing frameworks for our perception of the world as in your piece on glasses/contact lenses. They also begin to determine what we see as “good” and what we see as “bad”. Larry Crabb notes that we then take God’s role in defining the world rather than live within the definitions given by God.

These idols deep in our psyches then become formative for our emotional worlds as well. If I base my perceptions of self-worth on my physical appearance words that affirm my appearance please me greatly and critical words or even greater beauty possessed by another cripple me. Now of course all of us care about a good many of these goods like security, approval, being seen as smart, moral, wise, correct, etc., the difference is that if we make an idol out of these things they become masters of our emotional worlds. If you tell me I’m overweight, my hair is falling out and I wouldn’t win any beauty contests I wouldn’t feel great about it but it wouldn’t bother me. If you start poking around negatively around an idol I possess you’ll probably get a much more vehement response from me. I’ll be angry or depressed about your comments. By following the trail of our strongest emotions we begin to discover the idols below the surface.

Keller deals with these things in terms of the language of the heart and the affections of the heart. These idols hold our affections and we need a stronger affection to displace them. He follows Thomas Chalmer’s sermon: The expulsive power of a new affection:

If you find you have overwhelming emotions in this framework, the way to deal with the is by exploring your idols and through worship and spiritual disciplines invite Jesus to displace your idols and become the center of your heart. The problem could also be an absence of emotions that should be there. The devil is smart and know how to hook us.

After reading my post I thought of something  to add that might clear up confusions. Previously I said that emotions come from pre-conscious experiences, genetics and absorption of cultures. In this post I said they come from idols and oath taking. Both are true. Think about Forrest Gump. Forrest learns early on that he is stupid. This gets reinforced by many others. He internalizes this: “I am stupid”, he gets defensive about it: “Stupid is as stupid does” and he forms an idol about it: about his son “Is he smart?”. A little girl might get the message she is ugly. She takes on self-loathing “I am ugly” AND she develops an idol “I’ll be worth something if I am seen as pretty or desired by men.” Over time these things grow like vines around our hearts and our “selves” (Identity) and get twisted up in our relationships, our religions and our behaviors. Given a couple of decades and they become very deep parts of our selves and our habits and difficult to address directly. It’s like trying to remove a brain tumor by surgery, you can get big parts of it but it has metastasized and infiltrated our system. This is sin. It infects our conscious minds and our non-conscious selves. It takes even God time and history to undo what time and history have created.

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Twitter Updates for 2009-06-14

Posted on June 14, 2009 by PaulVK

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Twitter Updates for 2009-06-13

Posted on June 13, 2009 by PaulVK
  • GK Beale’s new book on idolatry, introduction posted in pdf, exciting work http://bit.ly/nFaUS #
  • Last installment of Zondervan’s LDS book promo, LDS being the religion evangelicals dream of http://bit.ly/DvzhQ #
  • favorite line of the day so far: “and they eventually hit the road looking for greener pastors. ” 🙂 #
  • men get married thinking she’ll never change, women get married thinking he will. #
  • RT @cicw: Blog: Video: Walter Brueggemann on preaching http://bit.ly/7i1Qe #
  • RT @clfwvs: Tim Keller has a new book coming: Counterfeit Gods:The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters. #
  • Reformed? Pentecostal? A Short Satire About Some of the Strange People Who Are Drawn to Different Types of Churches http://bit.ly/FOUzw #
  • retitled previous posting: Evangelicals as Mormons-lite http://bit.ly/DvzhQ #

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Evangelicals as Mormons-lite

Posted on June 12, 2009 by PaulVK

Zondervan Academic posted the last installment of their teasers on a new book out on the LDS use of the book of Mormon. The experience I had reading it was similar to what I had reading the previous installments. The sociological tracking and piety habits between the LDS and American evangelicalism which was foundationally shaped in the 19th century track so closely. In this installment he notes how stories from the book of Mormon and characters within it become identity shaping and guiding for Mormon youth. He also notes the merchandising of book of Mormon characters on t-shirts and bracelets. This tracks with American evangelical so tightly it’s freeky. American evangelicals have long “dared to be a Daniel” or imagined themselves to be like David. I remember first picking up a copy of the book of Mormon in a hotel room in Idaho and thinking “this reads like someone trying to speak KJV as a second language” but the beauty of a rewrite is that you can endow the work with our cultural habits keeping your heroes pure. David can withstand the temptation of Bathsheba and Solomon doesn’t have to be brought under by all those foriegn wives. I sometimes think that Mormonism is the religion that many evangelicals wish they could be if they didn’t have that pesky Bible with all of its awkward oddities and lapses getting in the way. You’ve got a dictation theory of inspiration for your holy text so you can claim it be bullet proof in a way that the organic theory never measures up to. You’ve got a more pure 19th century style penetrating your iconic imagery and cult practices. You’ve got a top-down moralistic control structure that Pentecostals would die for. You’ve got an evangelistic army and regime that covers the world. Could some of the antagonism between the two groups be born out of envy? 🙂

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Twitter Updates for 2009-06-12

Posted on June 12, 2009 by PaulVK
  • RT @cicw: RT @AndyRowell I revised my blog post: Two new reports: Thumma / Travis on Megachurches and Chaves on.. http://bit.ly/wd3wo #
  • RT @CRCNA: Calvin College now has a “Congregational and Ministry Studies” program? http://ping.fm/cvD14 #
  • If any self-help book really worked, there would only be one. #
  • RT @CrossCultural Asian pastors were asked why house churches don’t flourish in the U.S. In Asia the home is a market; here its a fortress. #
  • similarities in religious epistemology btwn Mormons, evangelicals w/ 19th century roots & emerging world Christianity http://bit.ly/tsqx2 #
  • Quote: “Most of the things that count about Christianity cannot be counted…” http://bit.ly/2mlsFg #
  • Quote on American Xianity: “To win the greatest number of converts with the least expense is their constant endeavor.” http://bit.ly/xyIki #
  • RT @annascott: mental illness, the church, privacy, disclosure, the gospel. http://www.notadinnerparty.wordpress.com. powerful & vulnerable #
  • Ignored yet obvious new finding of the day, early to bed, get better grades. http://bit.ly/11iNmS #
  • Bible cosmology, symbolism of Noah’s rainbow http://bit.ly/19xSaf #
  • RT @chuckdegroat: Restoring the Divided Heart – My Newest Blog on Peace for the Soul at War – http://bit.ly/DjWmb #
  • Food fight, would you pay double for healthier food? Could you? “behind the food industry’s iron curtain” http://bit.ly/tqLK3 #

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Posted on June 11, 2009 by PaulVK

From Mark Noll’s book The New Shape of World Christianity pg. 88. The book explores the relationship between the development of American Christianity in the 19th century and the current development of World Christianity.

Even more germane to the concerns of this book, it is important to remember how the American concern for enumerating Christian work can look to non-Americans. Kanzo Uchimura (1861-1930) was a Japanese Christian evangelist and Bible teacher who as a young man studied in the United States and thereafter made many visits to North America. Toward the end of his life in 1926 he wrote at some length about his impressions of Christianity in the United States:

“Americans are great people; there is no doubt about that. They are great in building cities and railroads. . . . Americans have a wonderful genius for improving breeds of horses, cattle, sheep and swine. . . . Americans too are great inventors.. . . Needless to say, they are great in money. . . . Americans are great in all these things and much else; but not in Religion. . . . Americans must count religion in order to see or show its value.. .. To them big churches are successful churches. . . . To win the greatest number of converts with the least expense is their constant endeavour. Statistics is their way of showing success or failure in their religion as in their commerce and politics. Numbers, numbers, oh, how they value numbers!”

To Uchimura, the American churches did their work under the guidance of American cultural imperatives. Uchimura elsewhere had many positive things to say about American religious life, but he was struck by how much the norms of an acquisitive, market-driven and aggressively statistical culture had shaped the perspective of the churches.

Kanzo Uchimura, “Can Americans Teach Japanese Religion?” Japan Christian Intelligencer 1 (1926): 357-61, as quoted here from The Complete Works of Kanzo Uchimura, 7 vols. (Tokyo: Kyobunkwan, 1972), 4:63-65. I was introduced to Uchimura and his opinions on American religion by Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1996), 221-22.

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