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Wednesday, February 28, 2024

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 21st-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 21st-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 17th 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

 

Monday, January 29, 2024

“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 18th through January 25th each year, which, if you count on your fingers as I did, is actually eight days, not a week.

     Let me clarify, though.  January 18th through 25th 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 9th through May 19th, 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 6th this year while Orthodox Pentecost is on June 23rd, 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 , 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

Monday, January 1, 2024

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

Friday, December 1, 2023

HOW TO BE A HERETIC


       What if you were to discover that there was a secret group of heretics in your church?

       Worse still, what if they weren’t even secret?  What if they lived right out in the open with their heresies, tempting your Christian brothers and sisters to join them in their profane heterodoxy?

       Worst of all: What if you discovered that you were the heretic?

 

THE BLOG POST THAT NEVER WAS

       I’ve always had sympathy for the author of the Bible’s epistle of Jude.  This past month, though, that sympathy has evolved into downright empathy.   He’d planned, he says early in his letter, to write about the glorious salvation he shares with the members of his audience.  Instead, he was forced to address the threats faced by that audience.  He had to change his writing plans.  His group, his audience, probably covered a number of churches under the author’s influence – churches he knew well, people he knew personally given the outpouring of wrath Jude directs at those threatening the faith of the believers.

       Invaders.  Heretics who’d snuck into the church to take it over from the inside out.

       Like Jude, I sat down with a firm idea of what I’d write about this month.  I was going to compose “Jude’s Got ‘Tude,” an in-depth examination of the nature of heretics.  I mean, Jude gave me so much material to work with there!  He goes off on heretics, literally spews forth condemnation after condemnation, accusation after accusation.  In a couple dozen scant verses, he showed me that heretics:

  • Respond to challenges with violent uprising, falling into the error of Cain
  • Pursue profit over piety, falling into the error of Baalam
  • Tolerate immorality in their own leadership structure, mimicking the error of Gomorrah
  • Pollute their bodies, forgetting they're the temples of the Spirit
  • Reject any authority God has placed over them
  • Say rude, nasty, disparaging things about their betters
  • Cause their own destruction, like those fleeing Egypt with no true belief
  • See themselves as subject to no laws, like angels fleeing their places in heaven
  • Whip up insurrections like the rebels of Korah
  • Cause divisions, splintering churches and even nations

 

  Oh, yeah, that blog post I imagined I would write was going to be a doozy, an exemplar of exegesis!  Half of you would say, “Wait, is she really writing about Donald Trump?” and the other half would say “She must be writing about Joe Biden!” and the third half would say “No, this is definitely just about church heretics” and the fourth half would ask “How many halves are packed in here anyway?”  Go me! 

        Spoiler alert: That isn’t happening.

 

HERESY, AND A LITTLE HISTORY

        I am the heretic.  I chose a different path for the blog.

        Let me clarify.  The word “heretic” came to us through Middle English, bouncing in from French, where it had wriggled in from Latin as a conduit from the ancient Greek hairetikos.  Heretic, hairetikos.  Not so different, right?  Except that hairetikos did not originally mean “person believing ideas contrary to orthodox Christian doctrine.”

        It meant “able to choose.”  No more, no less.

        In the early years of the church, there was a lot to choose from.  Valentinianism, Marcionism, Montanism, Adoptionism, Docetism, and every mystical-woo variation of Gnosticism that you can imagine.  Christianity spent several centuries fine-tuning what would one day be called “orthodoxy.”  It was by means of defining orthodoxy that Christianity invented heresy.

        Don’t be thrown by those last three words.  By the new definition it was being given, heresy no longer meant choosing anything   In his 1934 book Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, Walter Bauer makes a persuasive argument that many regions’ first establishments of Christianity were founded on ideas that would now be viewed as heretical, "heterodoxy."  Those churches came around in time, although we shouldn’t forget the vast differences between western and eastern Christian faiths that remain to this day.  Most western hemisphere believers, in fact, remain mostly unaware of the variety of Christian doctrines found east of Moldova and north of the Caucasus (and unaware of the locations of Moldova and the Caucasus, for that matter.  ‘Murica.)

        Heresy didn't exist in paganism.  Prior to the spread of Christianity’s monotheism, having different doctrines within the vast expanse of polytheism didn’t mean you were wrong.  It meant you decided to follow a different god.  All gods were legit, even if they didn’t always get along with one another.  If you followed the mystery cults of Isis over the emperor’s preferred, traditional Jupiter following, you were simply picking differently.  Hairetikos.  You were able to choose.

        Not so in Rome’s new Christianity.  If you chose a different path, a different god, you were completely off track.  That wasn’t a choice you could make any longer.  The church father Irenaeus took that distinction a step further in the century after Jesus’ death, writing that even differences of opinion in ideas about Jesus should no longer be a matter of choice.  There were four gospels, no more, and no other trustworthy sayings of the apostles.  The apostles crafted successors by the laying on of hands, and no earthly authority could claim supremacy over them or claim alternate facts.  As time rolled on, the lists of doctrines firmed up more, and in 325 C.E. the council of Nicaea—a tool of the Roman Empire which during the 300s was being taken over from inside by Christendom—firmed up the basics of orthodoxy in what is still called the Nicaean (or sometimes the Apostles’) Creed.

         There was no longer a need to choose.  Being hairetikos was off the table.  In fact, it became dangerous to choose a variant Christian belief.  Downright deadly, praise the Lord.

 

THE HISTORY OF HERESY UPENDED YOUR BLOG?

        But it wasn’t that history that made me veer off course from the blog I intended to write.  It was Jude himself who thwarted me.  I read his epistle.  I read it again.  I played with a number of the (very accomplished) Greek phrases he uses.  I read a few commentaries and listened to a couple audio commentaries.  I read Jude again.

        Then I read a commentary that used a single word that jammed my gears.  The word was “triplet.”  It didn’t mean “a child with two siblings of the same birthing.” It meant “the literary device of tripling a word or concept to drive the idea home.”

        My next read through Jude made my jaw drop.

        Triplets. 

        When I teach students how to write argument essays, I impress upon them the idea of a Rule of Three.  Arguments are either true or false, one thing or another thing – a “couplet” of contention, if you will, a dichotomy.  Are you trying to convince me of your side of the couplet?  Then go beyond single arguments, beyond couplets, and into triplets.  One example alone won’t sway me; for all I know, the one lonely fact you provide as your proof could be a fluke, a quirk, an outlier.  You need a second example of the argument or point you’re making … but even then, a second piece of verification could just be a coincidence.  When you layer on a third supporting claim, you’re closing the sale.  Now you’ve established a trend, and you’re making good use of the Rule of Three.  I might buy your argument.  In threes, it sounds like evidence.

        When I read through the epistle of Jude with the word triplet bouncing in my brain, I begin to see things I haven’t seen before.

        Were my assumptions about the text right?  I thought his arguments against “heretics” in the congregation were a vitriolic volleying of vindictives against the enemies within, like an unhinged jeremiad.  I perceived them as disconnected, the way individual mashal sayings in the book of Proverbs are singular and stand-alone.  I assumed his attacks were a stream of consciousness akin to Qoheleth’s wandering waves of whimsy in Ecclesiastes.

         Look how I wrote the above paragraph.  I gave you a couplet situation (am I right about Jude or am I wrong?)  Then I gave you a triplet of verbs (I thought, I perceived, I assumed) with a triplet of Biblical allusions (Jeremiah, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes) to make it look like I was working hard, thinking really hard, studying insanely, inordinately hard to get things right about Jude.

        (Geek side note: And I just used a tripled anaphora with climactic parallelism borrowed from Hebraic style in that last sentence explaining the previous paragraph.  I also did an apophasis at the start of the post, raising an issue by claiming not to be mentioning it.  I’ll stop now.  But if you’re a blog writer, an argument maker, or a sermon deliverer (Rule of Three there!), it never hurts to review rhetorical techniques.  As you’ll see below, Jude certainly used them.)

 

THE BRILLIANCE OF JUDE


            One-two-three, one-two-three,

            Read the Book of Jude with me!

            Then we’ll see (thee and me!)

            Everything turns triple-y!

 

       There.  I dropped my academic pretense by remembering I’m a mom with a tyke who reads Dr. Seuss to me.  Let’s take a simple look at Jude.  I was wrong.  He’s not spewing.  He’s not frothing at the mouth.  I should have suspected it from the quality of Jude’s Greek, but I missed something in my first few dozen reads: Jude’s letter is a carefully crafted essay whose power comes from its form as much as its content.

       I’ll clip back my prose here and let Jude’s format do the talking.  Follow his flow, even if the outline form throws you a bit.

       Jude opens with a triplet of triplets – three lines of three –

  1.   FROM: Jude’s name, his role in Christ, his tie to James
  2.   TO: those called, those loved, those kept
  3.   HIS PRAYER FOR READERS: mercy, peace, and love

       Then a dastardly couplet: The enemy within (1) perverts grace [by wrong behaviors] and (2) denies Christ [by wrong belief].  Double trouble.

Next comes a major triplet of triples:

A: THE ANCIENTS ARE A WARNING SIMILAR TO THESE ENEMIES:

  1.   Those destroyed who’d been freed from Egypt (disbelief)
  2.   The now-punished angels who left their place (disobedience)
  3.   Sodom and Gomorrah who lost their cities due to immorality (carnality)

B: LIKEWISE, these enemies within:

  1.   Pollute their bodies
  2.   Reject authority
  3.   Heap abuse on their betters

C: THEY’RE LIKE OTHER BAD EXAMPLES

  1.   Cain’s murderous ways (violence)
  2.   Baalam’s error of pursuing profit (greed)
  3.   Korah's rebels who fell to destruction (anti-authority)

       This movement of the letter closes with another couplet: These enemies (1) mock what they don’t understand and (2) are destroyed by the impulsive passions they do understand.  To this point, we’ve seen a couplet of couplets encasing a triplet of triplets.

        Now there’s a breather with a barrage of metaphors, each making the same point about the evil of the enemy within.  In rhetoric, this is called an exergasia, a “work out” of the full idea.  Think of it as the drum solo in the middle of an old 1980s song, a rapid ticking off of points.  These enemies are blemishes, they’re self-feeding shepherds, they’re fruitless and rootless trees, they’re wild waves, they’re wandering stars.  It’s intermission in the epistle of Jude until the triplet assault begins anew.

 A: They’re scoffers of these end-times

  1.   They divide you
  2.   They follow their own natural desires
  3.   They do not have the Spirit

B: In contrast, you, believer, have this trinity in your favor:

  1.  You pray in the Holy Spirit
  2.  You have the love of God
  3.  You await the mercy of Jesus

C: As for how to treat this enemy:

  1.  Show mercy to the doubters
  2.  Snatch some from the fire
  3.  Snatch even the worst, but fear them

         The letter closes with a second barrage, a final exergasia drum solo of sentiments.  It’s Jude’s doxology, without doubt the most famous element of the letter.  It’s a graceful step away from the wrathful tone, reminding us point by point by point of how the Lord has saved us and of all the homage God deserves.

         I’ll indulge myself with one final observation.  There are three nonbiblical citations in the Letter of Jude:

  1. A story of Michael and Satan arguing over Moses’ body (from The Assumption of Moses)
  2. A prophecy of Enoch, seventh from Adam (from The Book of Enoch)
  3. A prophecy from the apostles that occurs nowhere else in Scripture (perhaps from a text lost to us)

Obviously, this last triplet is just an amusing (to me) epilogue to the patterns that so awed me in the text.  Jude had no way of knowing whether the Assumption of Moses or the Book of Enoch would wind up in a canon that would be hundreds more years in the making, and he couldn't know that his would be the only letter extant today recording the apostles’ words of prophecy.  But it made me smile, nonetheless, to see that the extra-biblical citations turned out this way, a final, parting triplet of pure chance.

 

SO … HERESY?

       It turns out the word “heretic” doesn’t appear anywhere in Jude.  In fact, it shows up only once … maybe … in the New Testament.  Titus 3:10 gives counsel on how to deal with a “factious” man, our hairetikos, one who causes splits among the brethren.  The word is an offshoot of hairesis, usually translated as a sect (or denomination, if you will), and only considered “heresy” fleetingly in scattered Bible translations.  The word was still growing its negative connotation in the era of New Testament writing.  It wouldn’t get full muscles for at least a couple more centuries.

       But it’s obvious Jude opposes those “blemishes on your love feasts” against whom he rails.  He just didn’t have the right word yet to call them heretics.

       I have to thank you for sticking with me this long and wading through my sheer joy at finding complexity in a work I always falsely assumed was crafted as angry chaos.  I’ll leave you with a final consideration about Jude’s fury at those who had secretly slipped into churches, bringing their ungodly ways.

       He attacked them for behaviors.  He attacked the lusts they brought into the fellowship.  He attacked the money grabbing and greed they embodied.  He attacked their violent tendencies.  He attacked their rejection of God-placed authority.  He attacked their arrogance and their false sense of superiority.  He attacked them for all these immoralities – and it’s probably rather telling that in our era of the church, the word “immoralities” usually refers to sexual behaviors, never immediately conjuring church greed, arrogance, rebelliousness, or even violence.

       Jude attacked them for behaviors, and not for a suite of doctrines they held.  For Jude, heresy—admittedly a word still in formation in his day—was not about wrong dogmas and wrong beliefs, the key meaning of the term in our era.  It was about wrong behaviors within the church, committed by those who needed to be snatched back and kept in the fold, if possible.  We’re to have mercy and grab them back from their bad behaviors.

       There was only one doctrinal error for which Jude despised these enemies: “denying the only master and Lord of us, Jesus Christ” (v. 4).  Denial of His mastery over us is what leads us to presume on his grace and follow the baser instincts of humanity.

       After codifying orthodoxy for post-biblical times, many early Christians turned to the practice of executing heretics, inflicting their own form of persecution on those who chose differently.

       Perhaps we need to consider Jude’s recommendation.  Angry as he was, he still wanted to snatch them away from their bad behaviors and back into fellowship.

       I’ll think of that the next time I consider someone a heretic.  I'll even pause and think of it three times over.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez