Gender and the Bible

 

     The word “wife” appears nowhere in the text of the Bible.  Neither does the word “husband.”

     You may disagree, and that’s understandable.  Our English translations of the scriptures are filled with occurrences of the words “wife” and “husband.”  You can’t get past Genesis chapter 2 without every major English translation referring to Adam and his “wife,” a term applied to her even before she receives the formal name “Eve.”  The English of Genesis chapter 3 follows up by introducing the word “husband.”

     What our translations conceal, however, is that there is no Hebrew word for “wife.”  Neither is there one for “husband.”  Hebrew has a single word, ishshah and its various forms, which simply means “woman” but in English passages is sometimes presented as “wife.”  The same is done with ish, a Hebrew word for “man” that is often rendered “husband” in Bible texts.

     For those who are already a step ahead of me, the same is true for the Greek New Testament.  Gyné is translated sometimes as “woman,” sometimes as “wife,” and andrós pops up as both man and husband, depending on which way the translation team decided to go.

     More news: When you read “the brothers” in Scripture, it may include sisters.

     When you read “the sons,” it may mean sons and daughters.

     And sometimes, when you read the word “man,” there’s actually no word at all, male or female, in the original text.

     What gives?

 

INCLUSIVE BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

     Let me state upfront that I’m not a fan of gender-inclusive versions of the Bible that artificially impose gender-neutral pronouns on my God or my fellow humans.  I see it as destruction of the original text.

     My position on that isn’t theological.  It’s linguistic and literary.  I’m just as put off by modern printings of Huckleberry Finn that omit the N-word from the very name of one of its main characters … an ironic adaptation in what’s arguably the most anti-racist book of its era.  The text of the Bible assigns God a male identity throughout, just as it assigns God female attributes in other places (see Isaiah 49:15 for God breastfeeding; Psalm 22:9-10 for God being a midwife; Deuteronomy 32:11 & 18 for God being a protective mother and giving birth; and Hosea 11:3-4 for God fulfilling a whole host of child-raising Mom roles).

     I’m grown up enough to know that God has no chromosomes, X or Y.  God has no genitalia, male or female.  God is spirit (John 4:24), and I don’t want the original versions of scripture neutered to adapt to anyone’s cultural agenda.  I want to know what it says, literally.  I’ll do my theology on the other side of my text analysis.

     That said … it isn’t just liberal-leaning translators of Scripture I take issue with.

 

EXCLUSIVE BIBLE TRANSLATIONS

     New Testament Greek has two distinct words we translate as “man” – andrós, mentioned above, which specifically means “a male human,” and anthrópos, “a human being.”  There’s a tradition among translators to render both as “man,” but anthrópos has a limited male slant to it.  Indeed, it can be used in the singular to refer to a single male, as it is in Matthew 19:5 & 10 and 1 Cor. 7:1.  However, the Greek writers Isocrates, Aristotle, and Antiphon all occasionally used it in reference to groups of women, as did the Septuagint (the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures used by Jesus and the Apostles) in Numbers 13:35.  So, anthrópos isn’t strictly gender-neutral, but it also doesn’t have a purely masculine meaning.  Anthrópos is flexible, and is usually best translated as “people” or “humans.”

     One interesting note: In Greek Scripture, the term “the Son of Man” is always written with a form of anthrópos.  Jesus is the Son of Humanity, a satisfying moniker for one born of a virgin with minmal male involvement.

     Back to English.  Sometimes when you’re reading “man” or “men” in Scripture, it’s referring to males.  Other times, it’s referring to people in general.  How are you supposed to know the difference if you don’t read ancient Greek?

     [From this point on, I’ll limit myself to commenting on the Greek parts of Scripture.  Kione Greek I can juggle, thanks to formal training; I’ve had no academic education in ancient Hebrew, so I’m no better with that than any other amateur flipping through a Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance.)

     One answer to solving the translation hurdle without taking five years of ancient Greek classes is to read multiple translations of the same passages. 

 

Matthew 6:14

• “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you.” KJV
• “For if you forgive men their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you.” NASB 1977
• “For if you forgive people their wrongdoing, your heavenly Father will forgive you as well.” Holman
• “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you.” New Living Translation
• “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will forgive you.”  English Standard Version.

 

     Comparing these, I not only learn to appreciate the fuller meaning of the word “trespasses,” but I also get a sweeping view of how translators have dealt with the word for “men” in this passage.  Men, people, those who, and others make it clear to me that there’s a troublesome, gender-flexible word in there – and, in fact, it’s one we’ve already seen, anthrópois.  Therefore, I don’t get my heavenly Father’s forgiveness just by pardoning my husband, his brothers, and his male friends.  I have to forgive everybody.

      Reading multiple versions is a lot of work, I’ll admit.  As a people who hold the Scriptures as the very source of our faith, however, it strikes me that checking a few might be a worthy pursuit.  Besides, we live in an age where any number of Web sites do the work for us by assembling the versions.

     Still, I just annoyed some people.  Progressives who insist on inclusion in all cases are irritated at the first two examples I gave, the 1611 King James and the 1977 New American Standard Bible.  Both of those target the gender in the verse as male, a mortal sin in the progressive realm.  On the flipside, there are those of a more conservative bent who are furious that anyone would need to see the word "men" changed in early translations; shouldn’t we stop kowtowing to the feminists out there who are spoiling everything?

     Both sides have a political agenda.  Neither side sways me much.  My bias is a linguist’s bias: I’d like to see translations that are inclusive when the original language is inclusive, gendered when the original language is gendered, and vague when the original is vague about what sex is being addressed.

 

NOT AS EASY AS I THINK, THOUGH

     Let’s start with the easy stuff.

     As I mentioned above, Greek has no terms for the English words “husband” and “wife.” When you see those words in your Bible, you’re definitely seeing translations of the Greek words “male” (andrós) and “female (gyné).”  The way Bible translators know to render those words as the English terms "husband" and "wife" is context.  Most often, that context is what’s called the genitive case of a declined noun – or, for those not schooled in grammar, the “of” form of a word.  Greek has no word for “of,” so it builds that meaning into the end of a noun, adjusting “man” to mean “the man [of her],” which is to say, “her man,” her husband.  “The woman [of him]” becomes “wife.”

     But sometimes a translation runs into issues beyond the simple words.  We have cultural biases built into our way of thinking, and that affects our ways of reading (and our translators’ ways of translating).  Thus, there’s a built-in conservative assumption about verses like 1 Timothy 5:8: That it’s about a father’s requirement to be the breadwinner for his family.  Let’s read it in the English Standard Version, a version whose translators claim is gender-neutral when such language will "render literally what is in the original":

“But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”

     Here’s our issue with the literalism-claiming ESV: Despite there being three decidedly male pronouns in that translation – his, his, and he – the Greek text written by Paul doesn’t have a single gendered pronoun in it.  All the verbs refer back to the Greek tis, the word “anyone,” an indefinite pronoun.    The Timothy sentence refers, literally in the text, to anyone’s household.  We recall that “households” in the New Testament sometimes belonged to women (Acts 16:14; 1 Cor. 1:11).  Frankly, though, I’m not the one willing to tell conservative preachers that the Bible isn’t talking here about dads being breadwinners.  I’ll leave that to braver souls.

 

THE BRETHREN AND, UM, SISTREN?

     The Greek word adelphoí is the plural of the word “brother.”  It seems it would be an easy translation.  One is a brother, more than one are a bunch of male brothers.

     But it’s language, so you know there’s a twist.  Let me tell you about my family.

     When my mother informed me that mis tíos were coming over for dinner, I at no point thought that all my uncles were the ones on their way to my house.  Tíos meant my aunt and uncle.  Yes, it’s a masculine word, and yes, it could have meant only my male uncles, but the context made it pretty clear I was seeing my Aunt Sofia and Tío Berto.  One Spanish word became three English words, tíos turning into "aunt and uncle" when migrated across the language border.

     The same held true for my mother’s hijos. We were her son and daughter, not two sons.

     The count got higher with my abuelos, my two grandmothers and two grandfathers.

     Make a masculine human into a plural form in Spanish, in French, in numerous Romance languages that evolved from Latin, and you often have a mixed group of males and females.  Or maybe all males (remember, context counts).  And it turns out non-Latin languages like ancient Greek have the same bundling property for plural males.

     So, should the word adelphoí be translated as “brothers and sisters” in most New Testament occurrences?  Some argue that doing so is ridiculous, since Greek already has the word adelphé, which means sister.  If sister isn’t in the text, why put it in?

     Remember the bundling, though.  I’d actually be misinforming you if I translated my arriving tíos as “my uncles.”  I have to add words by saying “my aunt and uncle.”  An accurate translation will sometimes have to add words.  For example, the first verse of the Gospel of Matthew has 16 words in the King James Version.  This is translated from 8 original Greek words.  Adding to the word count is not adding to the word of God – here, the KJV translation is 100% accurate.

     So, to my mind, translating adelphoí as “brothers and sisters” isn’t just allowable, it’s often the responsible thing to do … when the context allows.  I repeat: when the context allows.  One example: In Acts 16, when Paul and Silas address the "brothers" in the church meeting at the house of the merchantwoman Lydia, the term probably includes women since, you know, Lydia is standing right there being addressed in her own church.  But is that situation in Scripture common?

     Commentator Michael D. Marlowe sees these occurrences as exceptions to the majority of times the term “brethren” is used in Scripture.  However, the minister Dr. Jerry Jones gives example after example after example of Scriptures that prove Marlowe’s opinion just can’t be correct, providing citations where women are clearly mixed in with groups referred to as adelphoí.  I’ll conclude this name dropping with a reference to the opinions of the co-pastors called the Bayly brothers, who seem to argue that “brothers and sisters” should never be used in Bible translations because we all already know that “brothers” means “brothers and sisters,” just like it did in Greek.  We all just know it.

     That makes as much sense to me as my pointing at Aunt Sofia and Tío Berto while saying, “Have you met my uncles?”

 

THE VISIBLE MAN IN INVISIBLE GREEK

     I thought I’d end these reflections with a tip for those who use Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, a book that’s truly a blessing for those who wish to study scripture.  If you don’t own one, they’re pretty reasonably priced at the link above, although you’ll want to buy a magnifying glass at the same time for its tiny print.  (I don’t get a kickback from that link, FYI.  I include it because my studies as a young Christian were immensely enriched by both Strong’s and the text Gospel Parallels, a book chronologically laying out the synoptic gospels side-by-side on the same pages for instant story comparisons.)

     But book purchases weren’t my tip.  If you have Strong’s, you know that it’s laid out word-by-word, capturing every term in the Authorized and Revised English versions of the Bible.  To the right of the verses that use each word is a number referencing either the Hebrew or the Greek dictionary term the original Bible texts use.

     Should you have one, open it to the entry for MAN.  Scan the numbers to the right.  And now, start noticing the blank spaces, the times “man” is used in English without any word correlating with it in Hebrew or Greek.  Each of those is a judgment call on the part of the translator, a decision to insert the word “man” when it doesn’t appear in the original text.  Sometimes that works well, as when 1 Cor. 7:2 advises each [man] to have his own wife.  The context makes it pretty clear that “man” works better there than other options like “squid” or “microwave oven.”

     But some of those blanks, some of the insertions of “man” into the text where no man had gone before, reveal a clear gender bias in the translators.  And sometimes, that inclusion makes the text pointedly exclusionary:

“Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” ~ Matthew 16:24, KJV

     Any man.  Let him.  Himself.  His cross.  And yet the Greek has no “man” in it, not in the nouns or the pronouns.  It’s another case of the indeterminate pronoun tis, meaning “anyone” or “whoever.”

     As a woman, I can’t help but feel that I’ve been robbed of the true spirit of that verse by some long-dead translator.  I’m not "any man," as the KJV requires, but I am an "anyone," whom the Lord Himself invited.  And I confess it makes me soften to those who would like to have some inclusivity in the translation.  I can handle that, as long as it’s in service to the original text.

     Yes, yes, I can hear the Bayly brothers protesting, “’Man’ means men and women, we all know that!  We don’t have to add a ‘whoever’ to this verse!  Everybody knows it mean everybody.’”

     To which I offer one reply:

     “Have you met my uncles?”

 

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx, aka YoYo Rez.

God, Race, Scripture, and the Churches

 Preamble note: This month I was feeling a bit more topical than expository, so forgive the free-form flow of my chat.  To clarify, an “expository” discussion focuses on a specific Bible text and extracts ideas, principles, and thoughts from that text, as I did with my posts examining the Epistle of Jude and the “cast your bread upon the waters” verse.  A “topical” discussion, on the other hand, adopts a theme up front and hunts down a variety of Bible verses to bolster that theme, an ad hoc approach.

Each is a valid way to address an idea biblically, although I confess a preference for the expository.  I also confess I feel disappointed when a speaker/writer claims to be taking an expository approach but is really only doing topical verse-fetching.  That’s why I’m advising about this month’s approach up front.

***

      Do a Google search for “What the Bible says about race” and you’ll get dozens of links to sites proclaiming that God shows no favor to any particular races or ethnic groups.  You’ll find citations showing we’re all made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), that in Christ there is no difference between Jews, Greeks, or anyone else (Gal. 3:28), that God made from one blueprint of man every nation of the Earth (Acts 17:26), and that God shows zero partiality among humans (Deut. 10:17).

     Therefore, slavery is wrong, interracial relationships are fine, mixed-race children are a blessing, and everyone should have equal civil rights regardless of color or culture.  God is a 21^st-century gentleman.

     This is an example of what I call “revisionist exegesis” – Bible interpretations that have changed so dramatically over time that they’re nearly the opposite of what many of our churches used to believe.

    Don’t get me wrong.  I’m totally down with 21^st-century gentleman God and equal protection under any law for any human.  I’m mixed-ethnicity myself and in a marriage my extended family would consider mixed, so I’m pleased most churches have moved on.  Should we forget our churches’ pasts, though?  Is there something to be gained by remembering that each and every one of the above egalitarian positions were at one time staunchly considered by many Christians to be unbiblical?

 

REMEMBERING THE PAST

     I once upset a local prayer-meeting leader by mentioning over coffee that many U.S. churches previously claimed a Bible-based justification for enslaving Blacks.  She insisted that couldn’t be true since the Bible is very anti-slavery, so I made matters worse by pointing out that, technically, the Bible never specifically condemns slavery as an institution.  The discussion got heated – not loud, since we’re both users of American Sign Language, but I’m sure it caused other diners at the café to wonder what all the soundless, histrionic signing and arm waving was about.

     It was not my finest hour.  I’d yet to learn that I should be explaining my beliefs and reasoning in a less sarcastic, more humble and charitable manner (2 Pet. 3:15-16).  I don’t like recalling how wry and caustic I got in my argument with the woman.  I can be in the wrong, it turns out, even when my facts are right.

     It was one of the sins of my youth, the kind David prays that the Lord not remember (Psalm 25:7).  I could smooth it over for myself by claiming it wasn’t as bad as I thought, or that the woman needed firm correction and guidance, or that she was probably happy to be given better information from a superior intellect.  After all, I had the Bible on my side.

     Handy rationales – and exactly the type that 17^th century Christian slaveholders used in order to justify their treatment of the enslaved:

• Slavery wasn’t so bad; many of the enslaved benefitted from skills they learned.
• As a lesser race, the enslaved needed regular correction and guidance from superiors.
• Many slaves were very happy with their regular work and reliable meals.
• And the Bible says they should obey.  It’s the Curse of Ham.

     I’ll be picking on those preachers of the past.  But I’ll also be remembering the cautionary verse of Rom. 2:1 – “Passing judgement on another, you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”  Et tu, Yoli, I’ll be telling myself.

 

SIDENOTE ON PSALM 25

     One very short language observation before I move on:

     I just cited Psalm 25, in which David asks the Lord to forget his youthful sins.  One feature of the psalm which we as English readers don’t notice is that it’s an alphabetic acrostic.  Each word at the beginning of its twenty-two verses starts with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet – aleph, beth, gimmel, daleth, and so on through the end of the psalm.  Only five other psalms have that playful acrostic pattern (9, 10, 24, 37, and 145).

     Plus, one fascinating point from the Bible’s document history:

     Together, Psalms 9 and 10 make up a single acrostic poem, which led some Bible editors to conclude they were the same psalm.  The Septuagint combines them.  It also combines Psalms 144 and 145, but it still ends up with 150 psalms by splitting both Psalm 116 and Psalm 147.  All this splitting and recombining leads to a psalm citation oddity you may have noticed, the occasional use of multiple numbers (e.g., “Psalm 22 (23).”  That’s the history behind that unexpected notation.

     This is a geek point, not some deep Bible truth.  As my first pastor liked to remind me, Bible verse numbers, chapter breaks, and titles are all later inventions, not part of the original, inspired text.

 

BACK TO CONSIDERATION OF THE RACES

     We’re a tribal species.  If tomorrow we found a way to equalize everyone’s skin tones, eye shapes, hair qualities, and body types, we’d still find ways to throw up tribal boundaries (“Oh, you’re one of those BlueEyesies.  My GreenEyesies parents would never let me date a BlueEyesies boy.”)  Group unity certainly helps humans coordinate our civic structures, our farming, and our towers-of-Babel building, but unity comes at a cost.  To be “Us,” there must be a “not-Us.”   We must identify a “Them.”

     Was I wrong to marry one of the Thems?  My mom had no issue with it, but a 1950s preacher may have taken me to task for violating Deut. 7:3-4, when the Israelites found themselves among the Hittites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Amorites, and a bunch of Other-ites:

“Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons and taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following Me.”

 

     Our modern eyes immediately twitch over to the “turn away from Me” part of that prohibition, deciding that the ban on intermarriage was about escaping the false religion of outsiders, not about Israelites sidestepping the barely distinguishable genetics of fellow Middle Easterners.  A mere sixty years ago, however, any number of U.S. Christians would have insisted that the whole verse applied, every letter, not just the spirit of the edict.

     Sixteen states still had laws against interracial marriages (down from a high of thirty-eight in the late 1800s) before Loving v. Virginia declared bans on such marriages unconstitutional in 1967.  It took until the year 2000 for Alabama to officially rescind its interracial marriage ban from the law books, and until 2009 for at least one Louisiana Justice of the Peace to let it go.  These weren't simply cultural tenets of the time.  They were butressed by Christian doctrines.  Fifteenth Circuit Judge Leon Bazile, who adjudicated the Loving case before it went to the Supreme Court, directly ruled: "Almighty God created the races ... and but for interference with His arrangements there would be no need for such marriages."

     In addition to Deuteronomy 7, other passages of Scripture are similarly re-envisioned by modern eyes, departing from an era of more provocative, racialized interpretations:

• The “Curse of Ham” I referenced above is an Antebellum belief that Blacks were descendants of Noah’s son Ham, whose own son was cursed by granddaddy after Ham saw Noah drunk, passed out, and naked.  Canaan, Ham’s son, was cursed to forever be the servant to the descendants of Shem and Japheth (Gen. 9:20-27).  Canaan’s offspring were imagined to be dark-skinned after that point, a belief never fully explained or even appearing in the Bible text.  The idea did, however, work well within the social conventions of the day.
  
  
• The Tower of Babel story (Gen. 11:1-9) is another favorite of Antebellum exegetes who promoted a proslavery, anti-intermarriage Bible view.  God clearly didn’t want humans unified.  He confused their languages and scattered them.  For us to bring them back together and to intermingle them would be an act of treason against the Almighty (said some of our Christian forebears), which is why interracial and interethnic marriages should be banned.  We, like our languages, are meant to stay separate.
  
  
• Acts 17 records Paul’s speech in the Areopagus of Athens, revealing to listeners the nature of “the unknown god” for whom they'd built an altar: “From one [ancestor] He made all peoples to inhabit the whole Earth, and He allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live” (v. 26).  God made the people; God made the boundaries.  Early American preachers used this verse to oppose immigration by the Chinese, Italians, Irish, and others deemed too unamerican at the time.

      Those are just three examples of passages used in days past to promote race-separation ideologies within parts of U.S. Christianity – one example based on people’s skin color, one based on their languages, and one based on their culture of origin.  As tribal creatures, we’re predisposed to find any way possible to draw and redraw the lines to exclude the Them from the Us.

 

DENOMINATIONAL BREAKDOWN

     Not all our Christian forebears agreed with this particular method of interpreting Scripture.  And where there’s disagreement, there’s opportunity for schism.

     Methodists were founded by profoundly anti-slavery proponents like John Wesley.  In time, however, the denomination split into pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions, north vs. south.

     Also splitting over slavery, Southern Baptists broke from their northern American Baptist brethren in order to maintain the rights of slaveholders to be appointed as missionaries.

     Presbyterians, already dividing over Old School and New School theologies, suffered a final blow on the slavery issue, splitting like the others along north/south boundaries.

     These three (and subsequently six) denominations represented the bulk of Christians in the continental U.S.  All were evangelical.  All were Bible-based denominations.  All embraced the concept of salvation by faith rather than by works.  Yet they were rent asunder over the concept of whether a human can own another human … biblically.

     Their split widened over the concept of whether schools should allow the educational intermingling of children from different races.

     They continued to preach against each other’s stances regarding interracial marriage and dating.  (Yes, I’m looking at you, Bob Jones University.)

     They solidified their divide arguing whether their country should adopt civil rights legislation and voter equality acts in Congress.

     Only one group, the Presbyterians, managed to overcome their rift, reuniting in 1983 at an Atlanta, GA conference to form the current Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  The others remain split – not over doctrine, but over cultural interpretations of Scripture and the inertial drag of history.

     Speaking of Scripture … I haven’t referenced it for a dozen or so paragraphs, so let’s bring it all home there.

 

SCRIPTURE AND THE RACES

     I’ve only danced around the edges of what Scripture has to say about slavery.  I’ll leave it at that, since this is just a blog post and not an academic text.  But I will revisit interethnic and interracial marriage, a theme dear to my heart.

MOSES WAS IN AN INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE.  Ancient Egyptian records detail that Cush was a land south of Egypt, now a part of what's known as Ethiopia.  Moses married a native Cushite woman, much to the consternation of his co-leaders, older brother Aaron and sister Mariam (Num. 12).  God stepped in and put the siblings in their place, affirming that marriage outside the color lines of the Hebrews was absolutely fine with Him.

RUTH WAS IN AN INTERETHNIC MARRIAGE.  The whole gist of the Book of Ruth is the story of her accepting her dead husband’s mother as her own kin, pledging that Naomi’s people would now be her people and Naomi’s God would be her God.  A Moabite outsider, she marries into the Hebrew tribes thanks to her late husband’s distant tribal relation to her new husband, Boaz.  This works out well for Israel, since Ruth is King David’s great-grandmother.

RAHAB OF JERICHO MARRIED A HEBREW: Only four women are mentioned in the genealogies of Jesus.  Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute who helped two Israelite spies escape detection in the enemy city of Jericho (Josh. 2:9-13), is one of those four.  At the conquest of her Canaanite city, Rahab and all her family were spared.  Good thing, too.  Praised for her faith in Hebrews 11 and for her works in James 2, Rahab’s first Hebrew son was named Boaz, that dude up in the last paragraph who married the immigrant Ruth, great-grandmatriarch to King David, all of whom contributed to that mixed-ethnicity ancestor named Jesus.

     There are more examples, but …rule of three, enough said.

     Here are the reflections I take away from this month's reading and writing experience:

Large groups of people can make massive mistakes when interpreting Scripture.  Do I do that?  Are there areas where I let my pre-existing biases color my experience of the Scriptures?  Do I read to validate what I already think, or do I let the words change my thinking?

We’re thoroughly afflicted by our Us v. Them perceptions.  Do I carve out niches in my church, my community, my life, instinctively cutting off those who might benefit most from seeing the light of Christ in me?  Have I “Other-ed” the very ones I’m meant to serve?

I’m wrong about things.  There are firm assurances in my faith – that Jesus is my Lord, come in the flesh to ensure that I was saved (Titus 3:5), that I am being saved (1 Cor. 1:18), and that I will be saved (Rom. 5:9-10).  But I am wrong about some nonessentials I imagine are so important.  Which ones, specifically?  I don’t know.  I just know I’d be a fool to think they’re not there.

I should listen to, not break with, Christians with different ideas.  I shouldn’t live in fear of being sullied by wrong thoughts.  As one of His sheep, I know His voice.  As one of His listeners, I hear His word and read it, studying it to learn what’s true.  But do I listen carefully to what other Christians think, how they interpret?  Will I find flecks of gold in the sands they shift?  Are there pearls where I thought there was only mud?  Most important, am I showing love to build them up instead of being contentious when I decide I disagree?

     Here ends this month’s topical free-walk.  I think I’ll go hug my gringo husband now and let him know that his different ethnicity is all right by me.

 

Marana Tha,

YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx

 

“Ecumenism” and Other Dirty Words

I have given them the glory You gave Me, so that they may be one, as We are one. John 17:22

 

     As I write this, Christian churches around the world have just completed their Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  The event lasts from January 18^th through January 25^th each year, which, if you count on your fingers as I did, is actually eight days, not a week.

     Let me clarify, though.  January 18^th through 25^th is when northern hemisphere churches hold their eight-day week to pray for Christian unity.  Southern hemisphere churches celebrate it from the feast of the Ascension through the feast of Pentecost.  This year (2024), that’s from May 9^th through May 19^th, an eleven-day event held five months later.  Such feast-day markers wouldn’t work for northern hemisphere churches, since the Orthodox feast of Ascension is on June 6^th this year while Orthodox Pentecost is on June 23^rd, a spacing which would turn their week of prayer for Christian unity into an eighteen-day event.

     In summary: Even cross-church efforts to pray for Christian unity are embarrassingly ununified.

 

WHAT IS “ECUMENISM”?

     The spirit of ecumenism is the spirit of Antichrist.  Many people, especially new converts to Christianity, are naive concerning the evils of ecumenism.  This is a dangerous enemy of the New Testament church.  In fact, ecumenism is at the heart of the Devil’s plan for World Government (aka, the New World Order).

     Wait, did I forget to put quotation marks around that paragraph up there?  The above words actually belong to one David J. Stewart, compiler and author of articles at www.jesus-is-savior.com.  I selected his quotation because it captures the spirit of one extreme of reactions to ecumenism: that it’s really, really not good and plays a satanic role in many people’s “eschatology,” their expectations of the end times.

     (I neglected to put quotation marks around Stewart’s words because I wanted you to arch your eyebrows a little.  It’s good for the circulatory system, I promise.)

     Here’s the other extreme (I’ll play nice and use quotation marks this time): “Ecumenism is the name of a movement that promotes the recovery of Christian unity and works towards the vision of one undivided Church….  The vision includes the search for visible unity of the world’s Christian Churches and the move to make this goal the concern of all Christians.”  I pulled this quotation from www.anglicancommunion.org, where that denomination spotlights Christ’s desire for His followers to be one, even as He and His Father are one (John 17:22-23).

     Well, this is a pickle, isn’t it?  Either ecumenism is the very will of Christ or it’s a critical tool of the Antichrist.  How’s a girl to decide between such diametrically opposed opinions?  Could degrees in linguistics and some ancient Greek terms be of any help here?

 

YOU KNEW I’D GO TO THE GREEK

     The word “ecumenism” to indicate church unity has only been around for a century or so.  However, the word’s roots go back to New Testament scripture and earlier Hellenic writings.  The Greek term oikouménē gives us the English “ecumenical,” popping up a little over a dozen times in Matthew, Luke, Acts, Revelation, and other NT areas.  If you do a quick classical-languages dictionary search, you’ll find many translators render it as “the inhabited land.”  That’s not a bad translation … depending.

     When Luke 2 uses the term oikouménē to discuss Augustus Caesar’s taxation efforts, “the inhabited land” would be a decent translation, despite many Bible versions opting for “the whole world” as the translation in that verse.  “The whole world” is certainly a less-than-ideal translation.  Augustus wasn’t taxing the Han Dynasty in China or the Olmec peoples of Mesoamerica – he didn’t know they existed.  He was taxing his own empire, the only land he accepted as valid civilization.

     Two chapters later, though, Luke’s gospel again uses oikouménē when Satan tempts Jesus by showing “all the kingdoms [of the] oikouménēs,” a much, much grander use of the term, covering a lot more territory.  One assumes the Han and the Olmecs popped up for that display.  Here the translation “the whole world” is more fitting.

     A term meaning just Augustus’s territories in one place but the entirety of the world a few chapters later?  Two meanings of the same word?  Perhaps that shouldn’t be shocking to English speakers who park their cars to walk in a park and who left their phone on that car’s left seat so they could be mobile without their mobile… but what does any of this have to do with the unity of the Body of Christ, and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing in modern times?

     Hang with me for one more linguistic juggle.  Our target term, oikouménē, is one of three koine Greek words for “the world.”  The others are kósmos, referring to the ordered, natural world, the entirety of creation itself; and gē, usually meaning the physical land, which we see used in our words geology and geography.  Oikouménē is distinct from those other terms because of its association with households and families.

     Oīkos is the Greek source word of our ecumenism term.  Oīkos is both the physical structure of a house and the household itself, the family that gathers within.  It’s the place; it’s the people.  We see this type of place-means-the-people application in English, both in secular use (“Fall of the House of Usher”) and in Scriptural translation (Paul’s baptizing of the “house” of Stephanus in 1 Cor. 1:13).  It’s a nuance that’s missing when we translate oikouménē as “the whole world” in our English Bibles.  Lost is the sense that it’s a word about people, our people, our homies and in many scriptural contexts our vast, extended human family.  We could translate the term oikouménē as “the realms of the human family” in place of “the world.”  That would certainly bring an original-language depth and beauty to such verses as Hebrews 1:6: 

… [W]hen God brings his first-born into the realms of the human family, He says, “Let all God’s angels worship him.”

 

SO, BACK TO TODAY’S ECUMENISM

     It strikes me that one of the main concerns revolving around accepting or rejecting ecumenism today is which version of oikouménē we are expected to adopt.  On the one hand, we could be like Caesar, reaching out only to the community we already know and inhabit.  On the other, we could be reaching out to the whole of Christendom through all the lands it touches.  Which is more likely?  I confess a bias toward thinking it applies to the whole of Christendom, since someone saying “I am in global unity with every one of my fellow Anabaptist Hutterites” doesn’t sound a lot like unity to me.

     So, let’s ask: Why is there Christian pushback against the idea of uniting the Christian family in its efforts to spread the Gospel and to share the fruits of the Spirit with each other and with the whole of the world?

     I suspect one of the issues is a suspicion about non-Christians the modern application of oikouménē might include.  Is it meant to embrace the beliefs of every religion and non-religion on the Earth, a literal acceptance of the entire human family?  The only sites online I’ve seen suggesting that meaning are those arguing ecumenism is a Satanic plot.  All the pro-ecumenism congregations I’ve read up on in my limited month of research seem only to mention other Christian groups as part of their outreach.

     But maybe it’s more limited than that, even.  Should “ecumenism” reach out only to those who are in our own genres of Christianity – a unity of mainstream Christians if we’re mainstream, of independent Evangelicals if we’re that, of all salvation-by-faith believers, of all who agree with us on the nature of God and Christ?  Paul uses the term oīkos, ecumenism’s Greek root word, in his Galatians 6:10 mention of “the household of faith,” but exactly who does the household of faith interact with as part of the acceptable family?  What are the boundaries?  Where are the property lines?

• Agreement over the nature of God?  A number of Christians wouldn’t consider themselves fellow household dwellers with Latter Day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses, since neither group sees Jesus as part of the Godhead.  How far does that extend?  Do we exclude those of a Oneness tradition, who see God in an indivisible, singular entity with no Trinitarian breakouts into divine Persons?  Do we exclude followers of John Calvin, the Reformer who insisted there was no human element of Christ distinct from the Word nature of Christ, thus making human and divine indistinguishable natures?  Do we exclude higher-criticism theologians who search for the Historical Jesus as distinct from the Scriptural presentation of Christ?  And do we exclude the Health & Wealth-ers who see God’s nature as a cosmic Door Dash delivering goodies to all who ask in faith?  Is that a concept I want in my faith household?
• Agreement over the nature of salvation?  Perhaps our acceptance of ecumenical interaction – and our boundaries -- should be determined by our soteriology (which is a fancy word for our theology of salvation).  After all, salvation’s what it’s all about, right?  Shall we exclude those who insist that a physical act of baptism is necessary for the salvation of our souls?  Contrariwise, shall we exclude those who say it isn’t required by a God who saves through faith alone?  Should we reject those who add on a requirement for ongoing sanctification after rebirth?  Should we boot any congregation not requiring evidence of the fruit of the Spirit in Christian walks?  What about tongues-speaking – are you “in” if you do, “out” if you don’t?  And what if a church baptizes babies?
• Agreement over the nature of assurance?  If there’s a congregation that doesn’t accept that salvation is permanent – “Once Saved, Always Saved” – do we need to make sure we don’t have ecumenical fellowship with such doubters?  If there’s a denomination that insists salvation was determined and foreordained from before the foundations of the Earth were laid, do we count them out?  If they’re softies who think even Catholics can be saved, shall we avoid being unequally yoked with them?  And if they don’t share our futurist, catastrophic end-times eschatology and rapture ideology, do we cut them off?
• Agreement over the nature of worship and church structure?  If I hop on board with this ecumenism thing, what do I do about churches that have those old-fashioned pipe organs and almost no guitars?  Am I expected to tolerate a church that has more video screens than hymnals?  What if their congregation votes, votes mind you, on church direction, rather than submitting to the strong leadership of a singular apostle?  And if they have youth ministers and a separate youth ministry – a church structure found nowhere in the New Testament that has led to horrific outcomes in numerous Southern Baptist churches – must I come into forced ecumenical fellowship with them?

 

HOW TO GET THERE: COUNTING THE WAYS

     A whole section of questions!  I haven’t done that in a while.  I think I decided to write it that way because I have no answers to the real question: Can Christian denominations ever really get along if they have doctrinal differences?  The lines that can never be crossed are different for each group, and overcoming them would require significant revival throughout all corners of the Body of Christ.

     That would include revival for Mr. David J. Stewart, the gentleman I quoted without quotation marks up top.  This is a brother in Christ who looks with far more than suspicion on anyone who would utter the words, “My prayer is that they may be one.”  Such unity, in Stewart’s eyes, is evidence of an end times Whore of Babylon world religion poised to stamp us all with sixes and make us kneel before Illuminati altars.

     But he’s an obvious case.  What about the less blatant barriers to unity?  We’d also have to convince Trinitarians that they can find some footing with Oneness believers.  We’d have to convince Southern Baptists that it’s not the end of the world when Lutherans baptize their infants in family acts of dedication.  Christians who accept evolution would have to embrace die-hard Creationists.  United Methodists would need to tolerate the gambling habits of Bingo-loving Catholics (I mean, seriously, what is it with Bingo and those guys?  Is it their eighth sacrament or something?)  I, myself, would have to embrace the Pentecostals who told me that my failure to get healed of my childhood deafness and muteness means I can never have the Holy Spirit in my non-tongues-speaking Christian life.

     All my misgivings aside, however, here seem to be the only paths I can imagine toward ecumenical unity.

• COMPROMISE: Accept that someone’s view of God’s nature or particulars about salvation vary from yours, and make peace with it.  If you’ve read my last blog post, you’ll probably guess that I see this as the least likely option for Christendom as it’s now constituted.
• DOMINANCE: Having one church exert power and authority over another to change its doctrines.  Lately this has been done in covert ways, groups seeding existing churches with members of their own congregations to take over from within and change policies and doctrines.  This practice of “steeplejacking” eventually leads to the hijackers taking power and severing ties with the congregation’s denomination.  Haven’t heard of it?  It’s a thing.
• COMPARTMENTALIZING: This approach, unlike compromise, has more of a psychological denial element to it.  It’s a type of selective ignoring – you preach that a Catholic will burn in hell on Sunday, then stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him the next Tuesday to protest outside an abortion clinic.  This “don’t think about it too hard” approach has been somewhat successful in limited social efforts, but hasn’t really made inroads into shared worship, fellowship, and mutual acceptance overall.
• CELEBRATING THE SIMILAR: This would be the flipside of compartmentalizing – tallying with other believers all of the faith elements distinct Christian groups have in common.  Where do we overlap?  Let’s rejoice in that.  What’s our shared heritage?  We’ll build bonds from there.  Where will we spend eternity?  We can laugh a thousand years from now about how petty we used to be.  Who is on the throne of our hearts and our lives?  We’ll make that, make God, the first item in our makeshift credos of unity.  In effect: I don’t have to compromise what I believe in order to rejoice in common ground with you.
  
  

     Will it be easy?  I dunno.  But I recently felt a glimmer of hope by the examples of a duo of preachers in the virtual world of Second Life, one a Trinitarian and the other a Oneness pastor.  The first spoke publicly about the second, saying (I have to paraphrase, since I wasn’t taking notes at the time): “I’ll be a Trinitarian my whole life, but that man is a great guy, my brother in Christ, and you just know that the Lord is using him!”  That same week (and for several Sundays after), I heard the Oneness pastor ask all of us in his virtual church building to pray for the churches in Second Life, all of the churches, because they’re all trying to bring Jesus to the visitors on that virtual platform.

     I know I’ve leaned negative during much of this post.  I close it on that positive note, though.  Seeing a couple of guys with completely different takes on the existential nature of the Godhead speaking with generosity and love about those with different doctrines, I retain a small ember of hope for long-term Christian unity that may, in the end, overcome the exploding divisions of the past 300 years.

     “Of the increase of His government and of peace there will be no end,” says Isaiah 9:7 in a passage I sincerely feel maps the non-catastrophist future of His church.  “The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this,” it promises.  His zeal – not my efforts, not an ecumenical movement, not steeplejacking operations or hostile takeovers, but Him and His zeal.  As I learn to celebrate other believers’ similarities without sacrificing my own faith community’s standards, I might be able to join in on that zeal and contribute to the increase of peace.  I long to see the swords beaten into ploughshares, the wolf living with the lamb, the Calvinist leopard lying down with the Armenian kid.  I’m one who sticks her nose into dangerous doctrinal areas of discussion, so I especially hold out for Isaiah 11’s promise that a child can stick her hand into the adder’s den with no harm, no foul.

            That’s my eschatology.  That will truly be a time (to borrow from Acts 17:6) that “turns the oikouménē, the realms of the human family, upside down.”

 

Marana Tha,

Yolanda Ramírez / YoYo Rez

The Death of Christian Nations

 

The demon Screwtape explains how to trick a Christian into entangling faith and politics during wartime:

“Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the 'Cause,' in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war effort or of pacifism.”

   ~C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

***

       I write today as a temporary resident of Switzerland, but one whose roots run to another country far from where my family now live.  Can I claim an insider’s perspective to my country of origin?  Perhaps not, since time and distance have separated me enough to force a more detached perspective.  Indulge me, then, as I look in from the outside:

       My forebears founded a Christian nation.  That nation became a global power, the global power, boasting the most advanced culture in history.  They felt strongly that their nation should be a light in the darkness, a city set on a hill, a land where government was led by faith and where faith enforced support of the right kind of government.  A perfect place?  No, not yet.  The strangers among them, the immigrants, the ones who couldn’t be trusted … those were the problem.  They were unclean, dirty, disgusting even.  Their faith and their patriotism were suspect.  They either had to accept Christianity – and, mind you, Christianity in its right form – or they could just get out.  Love it or leave it.  There’d be no separation of church and state, and there’d be no doubting the path, the righteous destiny, that the Holy Spirit had laid out for this great, patriotic experiment we called the Empire of Spain.

       In time, England kicked Spain’s butt under the banner of yet another Christianity.  The rest is history, apparently doomed to repeat its cycles of one Christian nation causing the deaths of others.  That said, I apologize on behalf of my 1490s Spanish ancestors for all the Jews, Muslims, and fellow Christians we killed to make our nationalist Christian point.

 

GOD AND THE NATIONS

       How do Christians develop the idea that God will select their nation of birth as His preferred venue for the faith?  In my formative years, I regularly came across the idea that my home, the United States, was the “New Israel,” God’s select nation of chosen ones.  Those promoting this idea seemed to be either (A) end-times desperados anxious to find a starring role for the U.S. in their apocalypse scenarios or (B) Christian nationalists, a Dominionistic wave of budding theocrats.  The idea seemed odd to me in my early believing years.  To my mind, these people had flipped Christ’s great commission on its head.  Instead of going forth to make disciples of all nations, they wished to make a nation with all disciples, no exceptions.

       But I can’t indict the U.S. for doing anything unique here.  The love affair between Christendom and state traverses time and geography.  I opened above with Spain’s church-state marriage as one example.  England, too, has a long and bloody history of conflict among Christian factions vying for control of the monarchy, and the King of England remains the titular head of the Church of England to this day.  During the French revolutions, the church was made a department of state and all church lands became government property.  In Iceland, citizenship in the year 1000 required one to become a Christian, and the Evangelical Lutheran sect is its state-funded national church today.  Lutherans also hold a national-church funding lock in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and other Nordic realms.  The Greek state pays the salaries of Orthodox clergy.  Argentina does the same for Roman Catholic bishops and subsidizes their schools, all while making it nearly impossible for smaller religions to acquire government recognition.

 

DON’T I USUALLY WRITE ABOUT SCRIPTURE?

       It’s true, I use this blog space to reflect on Scripture and share a few linguistic insights about the text.  I’m trying to do that today.  I’m having trouble, though, because of one big barrier: Scripture has nothing to say about Christian states.

       Jesus had no sermons or parables about overthrowing non-believing governments.

       Paul didn’t urge the conquest of countries and the imposition of an official religion.

       Most important: the word “nations” never occurs in the New Testament.  At least not the word “nations” as you think of it.  More on the Greek-word stuff near the end.

 

CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION

       When Jerry Falwell, Jr. was fasting for forty days in the Judean desert before beginning his messianic ministry … or maybe it was Franklin Graham, I have trouble keeping track of the sons of godlike figures … Satan came to him to offer three temptations: one of personal comfort (“Have some bread instead of putting up with self-sacrifice!”), one of pride (“You’re at the tippy top of your church, so no fall can hurt you!”), and one of power (“At the summit of this highest mountain, all the world’s kingdoms are within your grasp!”)

       I dunno, maybe that Falwell tale’s apocryphal.  It’s telling, nonetheless.  Personal comfort, pride, and power-grabs are the ingredients for cooking up just enough rebellion to make some Christian groups decide Jesus was mistaken when he claimed His kingdom was not of this world.  Consider the musings of this U.S. citizen below, whom I’ve entirely made up:

       PERSONAL COMFORT: “They’re building a mosque just five miles from my apartment!  How am I supposed live with that, and how can the government allow it?!  It’s even worse than when they went ahead and rented an apartment to that gay couple in the building right up the street from mine.  I can barely tolerate this after going through a whole shopping season of hearing ‘Happy Holidays!’ when all I should be hearing is ‘Merry Christmas’!”  I’m living in persecution all the time!  I got grievances!  Somebody needs to do something.”

       PRIDE: “This is a Christian nation, so I’m gonna get one of those American flags with a cross emblazoned on it.  And then I’ll get a cross with a flag draped on it.  Then I’ll slap identical decals of those on my gas-powered vehicle to let those Socialist God-haters in electric cars know just how much the Bible promotes capitalism.  My first trip will be down to the school board meeting to protest how they don’t preach the Bible in public schools.  Never read the book much myself, but I stand up for it in this Christian nation of mine!”

       POWER: “I’m running for office because our nation was founded on the Bible.  My political party needs to be a party of nationalists, and I’m a Christian, so I say it proudly: We should be Christian nationalists.  Then our persecution will end.”

 

A LITTLE DECONSTRUCTION

       It’s odd to see personal discomfort cast as “persecution” by American Christendom.  There’s more than a slight disconnect between the Jesus who said, “If anyone sues you for your shirt, give him your cloak, too” (Matthew 5:40) and the Jesus follower who complains that being required to mask up at the supermarket during an epidemic is a violation of his religious liberty.  “If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two,” says Jesus in the very next verse.  “Never give an inch!” American Christendom retorts.

       I know, it’s not all of America’s Christians.  But have you scrolled through any social media lately?  It’s certainly the louder ones.

       As for the tired “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” grouse: The English word “holidays” derives etymologically from the words “holy days.”  Store greeters are literally wishing someone joy during the holy days.  Meanwhile, “Merry Christmas” means “I want you to be happy at the Roman Catholic mass being celebrated for the Christ.”  I suppose that works well for the one in five Americans who actually are Roman Catholic.  But even upping it to one in four by tossing in the Episcopalians with their Christmas mass doesn’t change the irony of Protestant anger and their feelings of retail-store persecution.

       As for the likelihood of power garnered by Christian nationalist politicians being able to end all this alleged persecution?  History reports that it’s just the opposite.  When Christians take government power, the real Christian persecution begins.

 

THE BIGGEST PERSECUTORS OF CHRISTIANS

       The Roman Empire persecuted Christians for 300 years.

       Christians with government power persecuted Christians for the next 1,700 years.

       We forget our history.  It’s more convenient to forget.  It pains me to reflect on the endless examples of Christian-on-Christian violence that used state power to flex temporal church muscles.  There are too many examples.  The turbulent Council of Chalcedon led to thousands of deaths over dozens of decades, all thanks to disagreements over the true nature of Christ and the Trinity.  Several of the early Crusades were not fought solely against Muslims, but also against Christians of the Eastern empires.  The gloves came off after the Reformation: the German Peasant’s War, the Thirty Years War, the Hessian War, the Eighty Years War, the Nine Years War, the Savoyard-Waldensian War … there’s far too long a list of Calvinists killing Armenians killing Catholics killing Reformed Church members killing Orthodox and so on.

       Some historical apologists reason that religion was often used as an excuse to go to war, not as the main driver of conflict.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  From my point of view, the argument is moot.  Once religion and secular politics have been so interwoven as to become indistinguishable, it doesn’t matter which one is the engine and which is the gas.  Government is the faith and the faith is the government, and all who disagree with either are committing treason against both.

       Other apologists argue that all those ancient (to us) sects of Christianity were the wrong kinds of Christians – CINOs, Christians in Name Only.  “Their national faith was the wrong faith, fake faith.  Mine is the right Christian faith, and would actually work without persecuting others if we controlled the state.”

       Again, maybe.  Maybe not.  A test of that would be to have U.S. public schools required to begin their days with a Christian prayer in a hypothetical U.S. now declared to be a Christian state.  How long would I last in Alabama if I chose to open with a “Hail Mary” Christian prayer, followed by a round of the Christian rosary with all my Alabama public school kiddies?

       “Aha!” I pretend to hear someone say.  “Those are Catholic prayers.  We’re talking about Christians.  Catholics aren’t really Christians.”

       Ay, there’s the rub, as Hamlet might have soliloquized.  For all the talk we as Christians hear of the U.S. being a Christian nation, the counting of actual Christians gets pretty flexible depending on context.  Pew Research’s 2022 comprehensive surveys on U.S. religion came up with 63% of Americans identifying as Christian.  That was down from 75% ten years earlier.  “See?” it’s tempting to say.  “That’s still practically a super-majority!  We’re a Christian country!”

       Now start asking questions.  Are Mormons considered Christian?  If your faith says no, we’re down to 61%.  How about those salvation-by-works Catholics?  Shall we discount them as American Christians?  That would drop us down to 42%.  And what about those mainstream Christian churches, the ecumenical people who don’t even mind praying with imams and Buddhist monks?  Out they go, and we’re now tickling 30%.  There are also those fringe groups, though, the ones with weird ideas like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists and Christadelphians and Christian Scientists, and … Well, that nudges us down to 23%, mostly evangelicals.  About 16% of the nation is White Evangelicals.  About 7% is Black Evangelicals.  But the Black ones tend to vote differently from the White ones, so …

       As Americans (including me, as a temporarily displaced one), we believe our nation was founded on religious freedom, first populated by those fleeing persecution.  We embrace that as an identifying principle of being American.  However, we need to remember that the persecution being fled was Christian-on-Christian oppression.  It wasn’t oppression by atheists.  It wasn’t attacks by Islam.  It was flight from a Christian sect that didn’t appreciate the Reformed ideologies of our Puritan forebears.

       That was step one in the New World’s taming of the Christian-on-Christian violence that had run rampant for centuries.  After failed attempts by Puritans at some New World oppression of their own, the age of Christian auto-persecution began to wane.  How did it wane?  Not, to our shame, by the force of Christian faith, hope, and love, but by the power of secular democracy.  Our government’s First Amendment, which (when read carefully) stands in stark contrast to our faith’s First Commandment, shut down all possibility of Christian sects using state power to kill each other.  We were the world’s first nation of Christians that didn’t feel the need to launch a Christian state.

 

I SAID NATIONS AREN’T IN THE BIBLE, RIGHT?

       Nope.  I said nations aren’t in the New Testament.  Yes, the word “nation” appears in many of our New Testament translations, and I even quoted one earlier when I referenced Matthew 28:19 and the great commission.  But our modern idea of a nation – a multi-city group of citizens within a protected border with their own army and leadership – has nothing to do with the Greek word ethnos that is so often rendered as “nation” in the New Testament.  There was a word for a bunch of citizens behind a border with leaders and an army: basileia, a kingdom, the sort of thing Satan was offering Jesus in the desert (See?  I really did know it wasn’t Jerry Falwell, Jr.)

       The Greek ethnos and its variants are most often translated as “the Gentiles” in the New Testament, despite popping up as “the nations” in a few dozen spots.  Like our word “ethnic,” is refers to a group with shared customs and cultures, and in its plural form it’s better seen in the New Testament as a reference to all the diverse, widespread, and non-Jewish peoples of the world.  Not the governments; rather, the cultures and the people.  Not the nation states; rather, the humans, the lost and hurting ones.

***

       Our job is not to conquer states to Christianize them.  There will never be a Christian politician who arises to honestly declare in place of Christ, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).  The great commission does not send us to the basileias, the worldly kingdoms, but to the ethnesin, the people and cultures within the kingdoms of this world.  How do we engage that world?  Jesus promoted a holy life by means of persuasion and stories and parables and discourse.  Whenever anyone around Him tried to enforce morality through the wielding of law and punishment, he stepped in to redirect the legalistic minds among his own people.

       And when they demanded He be a worldly king and that he shed the blood of Israel’s enemies, He sidestepped the political role.  Yes, there’d be bloodshed, but it wouldn’t be the blood of His enemies.  It would be blood for His enemies, in service to the only kingdom He’d sponsor, the one that is not of this world.

       So why are we still so tempted to take Satan up on his offer of power over worldly kingdoms?

 

Maran Atha,

 Cosmic Parx, a.k.a. Yo Yo Rez