You Just Think It’s in the Bible

I’ve listened to several fascinating conversations over the past few weeks about how people approach Scripture with biased hearts.  When we sit down with the Bible, we bring to our reading an entire suite of preconceptions – biases we’ve come to believe from sermons we enjoyed, social preferences and mores, even political preferences that have little to do with Scripture itself.

I thought it would be instructive this month to reflect on things we've come to think are discussed in the Bible explicitly, but which aren’t.  Some might be there in concept, but not in direct words.  Some might be historical misunderstandings.  Still others might be complete fabrications imposed by modern spins of Christian sects.

But all of the things I discuss below should center us on one key question: How well do we really know the Scriptures, and to what extent do we force it to say what we’ve already decided to believe?

NOT THERE #1: The Word “Trinity”

This is one you probably already knew: The word Trinity is nowhere to be found in all of Scripture.  Those whose faith biases them to reject the Trinity are quick to point out that the word is not a Biblical one.  Those who see Trinity as a central element of the entire Christian faith just as quickly point out that the absence of the word is not the same thing as the absence of the concept.  And while there is one verse that seems to speak explicitly about the three-fold person of God (1 John 5:7), many respected Biblical scholars point out that the verse can’t be found in early manuscripts of Scripture, and seems to have been added much later.

Personally, I believe in the Trinity as a concept borne out by Scripture.  But I do need to ask myself this question: If the concept of Trinity is so central to the foundations of the Christian faith, why is it not an explicit fact that’s central to the New Testament?  Why isn’t it an unambiguous theme hammered home as directly and specifically as the nature of God being Love?

NOT THERE #2: A Devil Named Lucifer 

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O heylel, son of the morning,” reads Isaiah 14:12, a verse famously misapplied to a character named Lucifer.  If you look in your King James Version, you will even see heylel changed to lucifer – a rendering inspired by the Roman Catholic Vulgate’s Latin translation of Scripture, which is a fairly decent attempt to capture heylel’s sense of a shining daystar, a bright light of dawn.  Interestingly, the Latin Vulgate presents the word lucifer without an initial capital letter, the lower case indicating it wasn’t understood as anyone’s name. 

But here’s the kicker.  Whatever the translation or rendering of that word, the passage has nothing at all to do with Satan, the accuser.  The entire speech is directly and unambiguously addressed to the King of Babylon, not to any spiritual being, god, or angel.  That fact is further driven home by the words immediately following the fall of the heylel: “Is this the man who shook the earth and made kingdoms tremble?”

The words heylel and/or lucifer appear nowhere else in Scripture.

NOT THERE #3: The Devil in the Garden of Eden

I’ve covered this idea in a previous blog post, but it bears repeating here.  Nowhere in the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden and the Fall are we told that the serpent involved in Eve’s deception was anything but a serpent.  Furthermore, there’s no later Scripture that interprets the passage that way.  As far as we can tell from the actual text in all the Bible, not one sacred writer had the idea that the serpent was the devil.

As I detailed in that other post, there is a single line in Revelation comparing the devil to a snake, but that passage says nothing of the Garden of Eden – and other passages compare many other Biblical entities to a serpent, including one that references Christ Himself (John 3:14).

One brother in Christ I shared this with insisted, “Yes, I know it isn’t there, but it simply had to be the devil that entered into the snake to do that!”  And therein lies the message of this entire blog post: What do we know the Scriptures say, vs. what do we insist it must say because we already think so?

NOT THERE #4: The Term “Personal Lord and Savior”

As often as we ask others, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”, you’d think the line appeared at least once in the Scriptures.  Not true.  Jesus as a “personal Lord” or as a “personal Savior” is not a term explicitly stated anywhere in the New Testament, and may be more an expression of American individualism and revivalism than anything else.  To the contrary, there are numerous examples of just the opposite: Jesus not as a personal savior, but as savior of the world, savior of all men, Lord over all – a Corporate Savior and Lord, to put it succinctly.

But here, as with Trinity, we have to hunt for the concept rather than the specific term.  Romans 10:9, for example, says: “…  if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”  For those of you who love ancient languages, you’ll be even more pleased to know that the “thy” and “thine” used in that verse are renderings of the genitive case of the Greek sou, the second person singular pronoun.  It’s clearly a single “you” and not “y’all” doing the confessing and believing.  One person, personally confessing.

But how quickly could I have recalled that verse if I were challenged in a discussion to support the idea of a “personal Lord and personal Savior”?  It’s easy to look as if I knew it right here in this article I took plenty of time to write.  Would I have recalled it while witnessing?  Have I studied enough to show myself approved?

NOT THERE #5: Unconditional Love

Preachers who tell you that the Greek word agape means “God’s unconditional love” are profoundly mistaken.  Since I’ve covered this topic in detail in still another blog post, I won’t devote too much time to it here.  I will, however, point out that the term “unconditional love” is not in the Bible, and that I believe the concept itself is clearly anti-Scriptural.   “IF you confess, you will be saved,” the verse I cited early says.  “You are my friends IF you do as I command you” says the Lord in the Gospel of John.  Computer programmers and scripters know what the word IF indicates … a condition, a possible pathway should a routine follow a potential direction.  Every IF implies an IF NOT ... in programming and in Scripture as well.

No, no, I am not proclaiming a Gospel of works.  We are saved without conditions.  But I am proclaiming that the term “unconditional love” is no older than the 1900s, probably coined by the atheist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in his book The Art of Loving, and certainly pushed heavily by the humanist Carl Rogers via his concept of “unconditional positive regard.”  Scripture, on the other hand, is a history of conditions about how one behaves in the Kingdom.  The word “if” fills over five pages of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, a complete guide to all conditional phrases in Scripture.  A vast number of those are conditions being set down by the Lord and by His apostles and prophets.

NOT THERE #6: A Ban on Abortion

Yes, I know, this will raise hackles.  The simple fact is, Scripture directly discusses abortion only once – an extensive passage in Numbers 5 that gives direction on how to perform one if you think your wife has been cheating on you and is bearing another man’s child.  No other direct reference exists.  The one thing Scripture has to say about abortion is how to give one.

I’ve heard lots of discussions that try to uncover a Scriptural attitude toward abortion.  Pro-choice Christians point out that the law and its punishments never treat a miscarriage caused by a violent act as a murder, but only as a lesser property crime.  Pro-life Christians counter that God clearly thinks a blastula has a human soul because Scripture has the Lord saying, “Before you were in your mother’s womb, I knew you.”  Pro-choice Christians counter that knowing someone “before”  they were in the mother’s womb meant the soul must have existed “before” conception, a belief held only by Mormons if it isn’t poetic.  Pro-life Christians counter that counter by saying …

You get the idea.  Both sides have a view, and both sides dig up Scriptural rationales to imply support of that view.  What is very unlikely is that individuals on either side of the argument began holding that view by reading Scripture.  Like so many other ideas, the view came first, and the Scriptural rationales came later.

NOT THERE #7: A 666 Antichrist

Tim LaHaye, coauthor of the sixteen Left Behind novels, has done a masterful job of popularizing the modern mythology developed around the Second Coming of Christ.  If you arched an eyebrow at my use of “mythology” just then, please consider this short list:

• embedded microchips in your hand
• a one-world government
• planes crashing at the time the rapture happens due to missing pilots
• the Catholic Church as a one-world Satanic Religion
• the need to rebuild a Temple in Jerusalem

All of these non-Biblical ideas are part of the fanciful thinking (and dare I say vain imaginings?) of those with a premillennial catastrophist mindset like LaHaye’s.  The Bible has no microchips, not even implied ones.  It has no prophesied one-world government, since the Beast is battling countries from start to finish.  The Whore of Babylon in Revelation 17 is never identified as a symbol of a world religion.  These are all inventions of those who struggle to interpret one of the most symbolic and arcane books of the Bible.

And as for an Antichrist whose number is 666?  That is an imposed interpretation.  The Antichrist appears nowhere in the Book of Revelation, the place where the number 666 plays a role.  The 666 code refers to one of the symbolic beasts of the apocalyptic calamity.  The term “antichrist,”  on the other hand, is found only in the letters of John (very likely not the same John as the one who wrote Revelation, given the commonness of the name John and the completely different quality of Greek used by the authors).  When antichrist is mentioned in the letters of John, readers are always encouraged to think of the term in the plural … antichrists, not a single man.  John seems to encourage believers to stop thinking in terms of one arch villain.

Is the beast the same as the antichrist?  We have no evidence to suggest it is, and plenty of encouragement from the epistle writer John to stop focusing on a single bad guy.  There are many antichrists.  There is one beast with the code 666.  For my money, that was Nero Caesar, whose name adds up to that number.  But I am open to other ideas.

NOT THERE #8: A Third Temple

Another result of so many people in the United States embracing a premillennial catastrophist mindset is a need for a third temple to be built on the spot in Jerusalem where the two previous temples stood.   However, Scripture say nothing at all about a third temple being built.

Where did the idea come from, then?  It arises from an attempt to see the apocalyptic sections of Scripture – Matthew 24, Daniel, parts of Ezekiel, Revelation, etc. – as depictions of far future events, rather than as encoded messages about the writers’ own times.  To see those texts as secret codes applying to our own day, we would have to have a temple again, because the texts make such a big deal about what happens with temple sacrifices during the time being discussed.  How does one get those sacrifices underway?  By inventing a third and final temple for them to happen in, despite the fact that Scripture has no prophecies about a third being built.  If your mythology of the End Times demands it, you have to have one.

Far easier would be to read the histories of the time and to realize that nearly all of the prophecies in all the apocalyptic parts of the Bible were fulfilled shortly after being made.  Yet even seeing that might not help dissuade us of our modern philosophies about apocalyptic literature.  A recent interpretive trend is introducing “dual fulfillment of prophesies” – an idea that springs directly from those honest enough to see the fulfillment of the prophecies in history, but still unwilling to let go of premillennial dispensationalism.

Our earliest ideas die the hardest, sometimes.

NOT THERE #9: Prayer Warriors

This is a relative newcomer to the list, but I wanted to include it.  More and more, churches are using the extra-Biblical term “prayer warriors” as if they were describing a special caste of Powerful Praying People, those with more muscle behind their requests of God.  Keep an eye on this term.  It may soon be declared an actual ministry with its place in the hierarchy, despite the fact that Scripture’s description of the armor of God is for all believers, not just a praying caste.

Yes, there are levels of prayer.  The parable of the Widow’s Mite shows us exactly what those levels are: good prayers that get heard, and lousy ones that get ignored and are their own reward.  Any other distinction will make us forget that every one of us is to pray at all times, without ceasing.  To deem some believers to be “warriors” with special praying powers is to deny direct, efficacious intercession by every child of God.

NOT THERE #10: Moses’ Authorship of the Pentateuch

I thought I’d end on a lighter note.  Guys … Moses didn’t write the first five books of the Bible.  Honest.  He didn’t.  Even though your KJV uses the title “Books of Moses” to describe them, those titles are nowhere in the early manuscripts.  Even if they were in the early manuscripts, calling them the Books of Moses doesn’t make Moses the author any more than Ruth was the author of the Book of Ruth.

Yes, there’s a line here and there instructing Moses to write down everything he was going through.  But that doesn’t mean we have those writings any longer, and it doesn’t mean our Torah is what Moses wrote down.  The Bible mentions lots of writings that we no longer have.  For example:

• Book of the Wars of the Lord (Numbers 21:14)
• Book of Jasher (Joshua 10:13)
• The Manner of the Kingdom (1 Samuel 10:25)
• Book of Samuel the Seer (1 Chronicles 29:29)
• The Acts of Solomon (1 Kings 11:41)

 There is evidence against Moses’ authorship: (1) The books discuss Moses’ death.  That part would be tough for Moses to have written.  (2) It talks about Moses in the third person, not in the first person as if he had written it.  (3) It calls Moses the most humble man on the face of the earth (Numbers 12:3) … words not likely to be written by the most humble man on the face of the earth.  (4) Genesis 12:6 says of the Promised Land: “At that time the Canaanites lived in the land” … something still true until well after Moses’ death, clearly indicating the words were being written after the Canaanites were gone.  (5) Genesis 36:31 says “before any king ruled over the Israelites …”  which unambiguously shows the writer knew there were kings over the Israelites hundreds of years after Moses’ death.  (6) There are lots of other clues, but I only included this part to poke at a friend who doesn’t agree with me on this.

My prayer is this: That I keep my eyes open to what the Word really says and never get lost in the blindness of my preconceptions, nor too convinced of my own rightness not to accept correction.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez

Dear Faith Healer: Everyone Dies

Once upon a time, a famous faith healer ended a rousing service by bellowing through his microphone, “And Lord, because we get everything we ask for in Jesus’ name, I declare and consider it fulfilled that You will remove every sickness, every weakness, and every pain from every single believer within the sound of my voice!”

And then everyone there dropped dead.

The End

***

Recently, I read a note from a self-proclaimed faith healer sent out over the social network Second Life to various Christian groups.  In the note, the faith healer chided fellow believers for praying that the Lord bring peace and relief to the suffering of a Christian friend of ours who was dying.  That evening, the believer went home to the Lord, and the self-proclaimed healer took it upon himself to rebuke everyone who had prayed for a peaceful passing with little suffering.

The rebuking man strongly implied that our fellow believer would have lived had people prayed in the right way.  In effect, he suggested, those who prayed the wrong words were guilty of pushing one of our own into death.

Apparently, if you get the magic incantation wrong, you’re a killer.

***

Everyone dies.  Everyone.  That is the rule, and any exceptions – Enoch, Elijah, or the ones twinkle-changed at the final coming – are special cases set aside in Scripture as violations of the norm.  The rest of us through all of history, the hundred trillion who have ever been born, we have an appointment set up by the Lord, a specific time at which we will shuffle off this mortal coil.

The days of my life are appointed, all scheduled, Job 7:1-3 teaches me.  The moment of my death is appointed as well, Hebrews 9:27 confirms.  No man, not even a really, really confident faith healer, is going to change by one nanosecond the time God has appointed for my death.  I will de-incarnate, my flesh will be left here and I will be declared Alive On Arrival in His presence, thanks to the saving power of His grace.

***

Everyone dies.  Yes, everyone, even those Jesus Himself healed when He walked upon the Earth.  Those He raised from the dead, they also died again, their first sleep appointed to bring Him glory and their second appointed to fulfill the reality of The Fall.  Can faith change that?  Can it force God to shift the time He appoints?  No.  Even Elisha, who had a double portion of faith, came to the end of his life and passed through “the sickness from which he would die,” according to 2 Kings 13:14.  Read how that is phrased – the sickness from which he would die.  The death was appointed, and the sickness that brought it about was appointed as well.  God was not taken by surprise when Elisha fell ill.

Everyone gets sick, like Paul’s companion Trophemus in 2 Timothy 4 who had to be left behind to recuperate, and the devoted servant Epaphroditus in Philippians 2 who came close to death in his sickness.  These men traveled with a paragon of faith, the Apostle Paul, yet for neither did Paul demand or receive in Jesus’ name instantaneous healing.  Paul knew the will of heaven, and prayed only in that will.  He learned to do that from his own three failed attempts to pray away the thorn in his flesh – and Scripture clearly calls that affliction a matter of the flesh, using the word “buffet,” the pounding of a fist, a physical messenger of Satan to give Paul physical weakness.  I point this out because you can rest assured that a Magic Faith believer will try to soften that Scripture and say it had nothing to do with physical sickness, that maybe it just meant a whole lot of persecution.

Anyone who says that to you is either lying or denying. 

***

“But wait!” I hear a Magic Faith Wielder claim in my imagination. “Christ promised us that anything we ask in His name, He will do for us!  He said it in John 14:14, and then, to show how true it was, He repeated it in John 16:23!”

Yes, He did say that, and yes, He will do anything we ask in His name.

But you, self-proclaimed Magic Man, are focused on the word anything.

I recommend you now focus on the words in my name.

Without making too long a lesson of it, Christ’s name is His essence, His power, and the fullness of His will.  There are things you simply will not get when you pray for them, since those things are outside His name and His will.  I don’t care how much faith you have or how passionately you declare “In Jesus’ name!”  You simply won’t get “anything” you ask for.  For example:

• It won’t work if you pray, “Dear God, please change the appointed time of the Second Coming and send Jesus back riiiiiiight …. NOW!”
• You won’t get what you want when you pray, “Oh Lord who gives me anything I ask for, please turn my grumpy boss into a koala bear.  Literally.”
• You certainly won’t get what you want with the prayer, “Father who promised me I get anything I request, please travel back in time, stop Eve from being tempted, erase all of The Fall from history, and make it so Jesus never had to die for sin.”
• And you don’t get this: “God, make people not die any more.”

***

People get sick and die, according to the will of God and despite the will of self-proclaimed faith healers.  Notice how some faith healers misuse the words “in the name of Jesus.”  They proclaim them at the end of their healing prayer, raising their volumes as if punching home the power words that make the wish come true.  They have declared their “anything” and now BAM, like chef Emeril slamming down a spice, they fiercely spurt, “in JESUS’ name!” as if that were the power flex in their enchantment formula.

Advice to the wise: the words “in Jesus name” are not there to trigger or compel the power of God.  They are there to guide and humble the asker.  You don’t get anything you ask for.  You get anything in His name, in His will, and that is what you should ask for.

Look at it this way – if I freely offer you any red car in my lot, any red car you ask for, you don’t get to leave with the black van.  You get a car, you get a red one, and that’s in my generous will.

Those who focus exclusively on the “anything” word in Christ’s promise are obsessed with getting.  Those who focus on the “in My name” are obsessed with His will, and with getting what is best.

***

And in conclusion …

Dear Faith Healer: Everyone dies.  When our fellow believer passed away and went into the presence of the Lord, it was not because people neglected to pray the right magic words.  The time of that death was appointed, and a miracle happened … a miracle you didn’t notice.

This was the miracle: Throughout Second Life and into the real, non-virtual world, members of the Body of Christ received a Word of Knowledge that you did not.  That Word of Knowledge was an insight into the will and appointments of God, the spiritual understanding that it was the appointed time for our fellow believer.  And acting on that miraculous gift of the Holy Spirit, those who were given that Word of Knowledge prayed for ease of suffering and a gentle passing from the flesh and into the presence of the Lord.

While you prayed to thwart the appointed time of God, others prayed in His name and for His will.  And I firmly believe those prayers were answered.  One more of us is away from the body and at home with the Lord, in accordance with His schedule.

One day I will join the ranks of the dead, dear Faith Healer, and one day so will you.  I serve my Lord happily wherever He wants me and in the state He judges best.  I know that in the Magic Faith world, people see me as cheating myself out of miracle door prizes I’d be getting if I knew some special Faith School rules or if I named it and claimed it just so.  And I know the Namer-Claimer types look at me, the actual me, Yolanda Ramírez, with pity – the inner city girl born deaf and left mute because of that deafness.

And I smile.  If only their eyes could see the blessings brought to me because of the minor inconveniences I endured for a few decades.  And if only they could see that even if my worldly blessings fade, I have Him.  So nothing else matters.  I have anything in His name, even when I have nothing in this world.

Along with my brother Job of Old, I declare: 

“Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

Marana Tha,

YoYo Rez, who is Cosmic Parx, who is God’s Yolanda

Divorced Pastors: The New Norm?

“Divorced men CAN serve as pastors, elders, and deacons!”
 Dave Miller, Pastor, Southern Hills Baptist Church (from his blog post on the topic)

“I hate divorce.”

God, the Good Shepherd of the Universe (from his Scripture on the topic)

***

I’ve recently done a bit of top-line investigation on divorce rates among Evangelical pastors, and the first round of results has me somewhat discouraged.  The lowest figures I found on pastoral divorce come from Barna Research studies in the late 1990s, a finding of a 13% divorce rate among active pastors. 

The closer I got to our own time, the higher the rates climbed … 25% according to a Focus on the Family study from a few years ago, and a staggering 38% reported by www.intothyword.org that distilled recent reports from Barna, F.O.F., and Fuller Seminary data.

These surveys didn’t cover general Protestant ministries in the U.S.  They targeted Evangelical and Reformed ministries, specifically.

One in four of our U.S. pastors has a divorce in his résumé. Maybe one in three.

***

“Because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not so from the beginning.” Matthew 19:8.

***

THE SIN WITHIN

Are we in the midst of an all-out assault on our congregations by those who do not even have the emotional wherewithal to lead a family through spiritual hard times?  Is Satan using the self-serving rationalizations of divorced pastors to invade the Body of Christ and degrade our marriages from within?

In the past several years, I’ve met an alarming number of pastors in New York, Maine, and Connecticut who are on the second round of their once-in-a-lifetime “two shall become one flesh” journey.  Some of them–not all, I confess, not all–are absolutely vitriolic in the pulpit about the moral state of the U.S.  How horrible it is that non-Christian gays are in relationships!  How terrible a thing that non-Christian couples want to use condoms to space out their babies!  How abominable that non-Christian millionaires have to pay high taxes on the small unsheltered, onshore fraction of their visible yearly incomes!

Strangely absent from their rants: lamentations about the moral state of Evangelical Christian leaders, specifically in the area of divorce.  There are far too many splinters in the eyes of non-Christians for pastors to make their own divorces a plank in their in-Church morality platforms.

***

“For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness.” Jude 4

***

“DIVORCE DOESN’T DISQUALIFY ME FROM PASTORING!”

It’s tempting at this point to fall into a tedious, picky argument about whether Scripture forbids a divorced person from serving as a pastor.  If you’re interested in those rationales–and I confess, they are interesting, with their Pharisaic attention to the jots and tittles of words and their clever sidesteps to justify how God didn’t really mean what He’s so clearly saying–you can find them just about anywhere on the Web.  Google away.

Instead, I’d like to focus on a few disturbing observations that I hope will get at least a couple pastors or pastoral selection committees thinking before their next move.

Disturbing observation #1—The divorced pastorate is becoming a norm among Evangelicals.

When God wanted to choose a symbol to represent His connection to His people, He made marriage the first and foremost of His metaphors.  Israel was His wife; the Church is His Bride; the coming of the Kingdom is a marriage feast; Jesus’ first miracles were at a wedding.  In fact, the institution of marriage was likely created by the Lord for one reason alone–to show us that He will never sever the bonds He has with His creation.  He is our Spouse.

When 25% of Evangelical pastors are divorced from their own spouses, what becomes of this holiest, first metaphor?  Answer: It becomes a joke.  It becomes a declaration to the world: “A relationship with God is optional.  If you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay in it, so relax.  Flee when times get tough, the way I did.  Don’t bother sticking in there the way Yahweh did.”

Does your desire to flee your covenant, oh minister, justify a divorced pastorate becoming the Evangelical norm?

Disturbing observation #2—The divorced pastorate is highly skilled at rationalizing its own divorces.

One of the research sites I found while preparing for this blog used this phrase about pastors who divorced after being sexually unfaithful to their own spouses:

 “… they took comfort where it ought not to be taken.”

It nearly made me dizzy.  The cheating pastors took comfort?  Such language softens the impact of sin, and is gut wrenchingly disturbing precisely because the author intended it to soften the condemning blow to pastors for their violations of the lifelong marriage covenant.  When the act of betraying one’s spouse by sneaking away, becoming naked in secret, pressing flesh to flesh illicitly, performing an act of sexual intercourse, and then lying about it afterwards becomes known as “taking comfort where they ought not,” then we might as well start referring to murder as “acting out a little” and rape as “getting a bit carried away.”  It’s offensive language, and such manner of thinking should disgust us.

I’ve asked some divorced pastors directly about their state of broken covenant.  Here’s one of the replies I’ve gotten over the years: “I remarried because God says it is not good for man to be alone.”

This response sidesteps the issue.  A divorced pastor is only alone because of a spiritual failure to make the marriage covenant work.   I’m certain Solomon felt lonely time and time again.  Was he, therefore, justified in his hundreds of wives and their new gods?  After all, he felt so lonely, the poor man.

Does your loneliness, oh minister, outweigh the longsuffering of Job, and does it justify a divorced pastorate becoming the Evangelical norm?

Disturbing observation #3—The divorced pastorate sees itself as entitled to a pass.

Another response I’ve gotten from more than one divorced pastor takes several forms I'll summarize this way: “The blood of Jesus can forgive me of anything, including a bad marriage.”

Really?  I ask you, pastor, do you really think that your past marriage, abandoned by you, is wiped away clean, unremembered, a sin that’s as far from you as the east is from the west?  Then let me run this one by you:

“I don’t have to pay child support for that kid of mine, because I was drunk when I had sex with that lady I’d just met.  I’ve since become a Christian.  God has forgiven me of that drunkenness, of that sexual sin, and of that child.”

If one of your congregants said that to you, you’d burst into laughter, asking how on Earth a man could think he is “forgiven” of his own child.

I laugh as well, asking why on Earth a pastor might think he is now “forgiven” of two humans Scripturally becoming one flesh, a joining that creates the holiest of unions and God's own metaphor for His unceasing love.

Does your station in life and your personal conviction that your divorce “feels right” to you, oh minister, justify a divorced pastorate becoming an Evangelical norm?

Disturbing observation #4—The divorced pastorate loves loopholes.

By far the most common rationale I have heard from divorced pastors I’ve known is this one: “My spouse cheated on me and/or became an unbeliever, and Scripture allows divorce for that!” 

The obvious question here – it’s low-hanging fruit, so I won’t spend a lot of time on it – is, “Wow, how can so many future pastors have such poor judgment when it comes to picking a spouse, and what does that say about their judgment now?”

Of more concern to me is that there are so many pastors who act as if they are supposed to divorce when their spouse cheats on them or when their spouse loses faith.

They are not ordered to.  They are not commanded to.  And they ought not to.

Squirm in your seat and protest that, pastor, but your heart knows I am right, even if your congregants have bought into your excuses and your misuse of Matthew 19 and 1 Corinthians 7.  Divorce may be permissible in certain situations.  That we know.  But you, as a leader of churches, as one held by Scripture to a higher standard, you are called to be the role model of reconciliation.

First Corinthians 7 establishes that model – if one is separated from a covenant spouse, one is to pursue reconciliation.  That becomes the new ministry of the pastor, a calling modeled by the Lord himself through centuries of Israel’s unfaithfulness.  If you do not see yourself as called to that and instead see yourself as entitled to a divorce and a new marriage because you’re feeling so alone and have a Bible verse that gives you an out … then you mock the covenant nature of marriage, you mock the wisdom of Paul who pushed reconciliation to the failing spouse, and you mock your very Lord, Who never gave up on the unfaithful people He called.  You are a role model of nothing but self interest.

Or are you, oh minister, allowed to be just as relativistic and situationally ethical as all those Post-modernists you rail against from your pulpit?

SHEESH, YOYO, KIND OF HARSH, NO?

Yes, my words in this blog are strong … because today I am speaking directly to pastors and elders and deacons, those who lead the churches and who sometimes need the voice of admonition to kick them back into a righteous path that frees itself from the kind of self-justifying rationales that entrapped Peter when he would not eat with Gentiles.

I end with these bits of advice:

Betrayed pastors: When your spouse cheats on you, it is time to focus your efforts on reconciliation, and that means leaving your ministry.  To say “It’s not fair, it wasn’t my fault!” is a child’s response.  The bottom line is, your house is not in order, and your new ministry is clear, whether you think that’s fair or not.  It is time to pursue reconciliation with all your strength.

Divorced pastors: It’s past time for you to leave ministry and dedicate yourself to reconciling with your estranged spouse.  Perhaps that upsets you.  Perhaps you recoil at the idea.  You need to realize how ungodly that reaction is.  Think about it: you can’t imagine leaving ministry, but you were able to imagine–and go through with—breaking a lifelong covenant?  Are your priorities right if you see being a pastor as more central to your faith than being a spouse in a lifelong quest for the reconciliation Paul called for?

Congregations: When you select a new pastor, you need to put that pastor’s marital status at the forefront of your consideration.  A pastor who has left behind a spouse and family will leave you behind as well.  A pastor whose house is not in order will bring chaos to your house.  And a believer who is not passionately dedicated to reconciliation of a covenant relationship has no place in Christian leadership.  Such pastors are far too focused on their own liberties and entitlements in this passing world to help us prepare for the eternal world to come.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx

The Miracle of Human Language

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.  Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:7-9)

     Does a universal grammar, hardwired into the brain, point to a single Designer of that brain?

     Language, argues Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, is an instinct.  At first blush, an assertion like that seems unremarkable.  After all, what could be more human, more a common denominator of the Homo sapiens experience, than our capacity to speak with one another?

     That said, however, we tend to behave as if language is a learned, rather than an instinctual, capacity for humans.  After all, scores upon scores of English teachers have battled the tendency of boorish youth to wantonly split infinitives, even while bemoaning their parents' love of "lite" products and use of quasi-imaginary adverbials like "irregardless."  If language is an untaught instinct, then why must so much energy be put into teaching it?

     Pinker's claim not only flies in the face of well-known pedagogical struggles, it calls to task major trends in sociological and academic philosophies.  Pinker asserts that language, in its essence, is a biological (or, more precisely, neurological) device that has evolved as a selected-for trait of the human race.  No anti-absolutist philosophy -- be it post-modernism, social constructionism, or Margaret Meade's anthropological relativism -- can change that meaty fact.  The brain is hardwired for language, and it is hardwired in an absolute way, universal to all cultures, ethnicities, and races.

     That's a bold claim to make in a society that has trouble believing that the brain and the mind are the same thing, and Pinker invests considerable time explaining and defending his thesis.  Several arguments represent the most convincing elements of his Language Is Hardwired argument (these categories are mine rather than Pinker's):

• Ease of acquisition: Infants absorb and manipulate language with breathtaking speed.  Given very little instruction (what linguists call a "poverty of input"), a child is soon able to manipulate and create an endless number of sentences -- potentially infinite output from finite input, yet another nail in the coffin of classical behaviorism.  After several years of initial mastery, a child does little more than polish the results of language acquisition -- usually a matter of adapting to the irregular forms that violate the base grammar of a tongue (e.g., replacing the logical "Mommy comed home!" with the correct but problematic "Mommy came home.")
• Ease of codification: Children of language-deprived adult communities -- for example, the deaf children of speaking parents who, without additional input, quickly surpass and improve their parents' halting attempts at sign language, as well as the second-generation speakers of a pidgin who immediately transform it into a more complex creole -- demonstrate that the minds of children are not the proverbial "blank slate," but are instead operating with an instinctive grammar "hard-wired" into their brains.
• Universality of complexity: Despite the misconceptions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century academics working for colonial empires, there is no such thing as a "primitive" language, neither in existence now nor found in ancient writings.  Today's most technologically primitive cultures employ grammars that rival the grace, subtlety, and at times gross irregularity of Cicero's Latin and King James's English.  If there ever was a prehistoric "primitive" tongue, its evolution was complete long before ancient man put cuneiform to clay.
• Universal conformity of grammar: Among disparate languages, words vary greatly; grammar does not.  While cultural relativists offer many claims about concepts that "simply can't be thought" by speakers of different languages, close examination reveals that all examples -- from the mythical nine (or twenty [or forty-four]) words Inuit peoples have for snow, to the Whorfian hoax that Hopi Indians have no concept of time -- are little more than the academic equivalents of urban legends.  True, grammars vary language to language, but they vary in macrological and predictable ways.  Subjects, verbs, and objects jockey for position, but always establish a predictable sequence, and are comfortably comprehensible to humans thanks to their relative proximity.

     The last point above is of the utmost importance to Pinker's thesis, so I will discuss it further.  Hang in there with me as I get all thinkish and complexy and stuff:

      To say that all human grammars have proximate subjects, verbals, and, when needed, objects sounds facile and trite.  It is the very triteness of the assertion that supports Pinker's point that a human grammar is universal.  The brain demands the elements mentioned above, and it further demands that the concepts represented by language carry an element of term proximity for complete comprehensibility.  I can't set a subject pronoun eight phrases away from the verb it brings to life.  I can't list all objects at the end of my conversation, relying on earlier word order to clarify which actions occurred with which verbs.  However, I can easily imagine a grammar -- a nonhuman grammar, "tongues of angels," if you will -- that handles our most common elements differently.  Consider the following human passage:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

     Suppose that I need to translate that passage for the alien Living Beings -- a race of principalities with a brain grammar favoring concrete Actors addressing concrete Recipients, followed immediately by Indirect Recipients, clustering peripheral conjunctives and prepositions (let's call them "itty bits") for convenience before climatically resolving a series of four -- and ONLY four, per Ezekiel 1:4-22 -- ideas, serving up four crucial verbs.  In addition, before the verbs, the Living Beings race must insert a vocative or interjection to establish what mood the coming verbs ought to inspire in the listener; if no mood is intended, a simple one-word blessing of their Hive King is inserted as a placeholder.

God earth darkness Spirit (of God)!  Heaven + earth beginning, form/void - face (of the deep) - face (of the waters). And (4x) the (5x) in (1x).  Ominous!  Created & was without & was upon & moved upon!

     Any protest that a language of that sort is incomprehensible is further evidence of Pinker's point -- the structure is nonhuman.  No human language would cluster ideas into groups of four, extract all verbs for a terminal "action quartet cluster," and establish a hierarchy of concrete nouns while treating all lesser connectors as simply inferential to meaning.  But the language is not illogical -- it's simply nonhuman, following a pattern that doesn't feel like language to your brain or mine.  Is it an issue of complexity?  Not likely.  My alien Living Being rendering of Genesis 1:1-2 is no more complex than any other 4+ idea sentence, such as the one I create below:

Upon learning that the Archduke of the southernmost conquered fiefdoms (whose sister had had a scandalous affair with the red-haired scullery maid's addled cousin) had adopted the religion of the Musselmen, Nikolai foreswore his alliance with the Nordic raiders -- oh may they be forever damned! -- and fell to his knees chanting "Allahu akbar!"

     The sentence is cumbersome, but completely intelligible if you read it slowly.  A human brain has no questions about what Nikolai foreswore, who has red hair, whose knees were being used, who was addled, what was southernmost, and what aspect of the Musselmen was being adopted by the Archduke.  The complexity of the sentence would cause little more than an eye roll in humans; an alien Living Being, however, might very well bleed from all four of its ears when attempting to sort this potpourri of promiscuously intermingled Actors, Recipients, Indirect Recipients, Itty Bits, and Actions.  The sentence simply doesn't conform to the evolved brain structures of the Living Being race, and even a Star Trek universal translator would need a new software suite to do its job.

     So where is the "organ" of language in the human brain?  The answer is: we linguists aren't positive.  We have definite indications of where particular language functions reside, thanks to early studies of brain lesions and their impact on language, and thanks to modern fMRI, PET, and CAT scan techniques that can track brain/blood activity tied to specific language actions.  Language is located in the left hemisphere of the brain, even in most left-handed humans.  The area is known as the perisylvian region of the cortex, and it contains the better-known language spots called Broca's and Wernike's areas.  Stroke damage to Broca's area tends to lead to a breakdown in grammatical flow, although isolated vocabulary words can be uttered to convey meaning, painstakingly.  Stroke damage to Wernike's area tends to have the opposite effect, allowing a flow of flawlessly grammatical nonsense words akin to lines from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.  The separate storage of grammatical rules and vocabulary terms is of particular interest when considered in light of Noam Chomsky's hypothesis of a Universal Grammar that is the central processor used to execute language-specific vocabulary terms.

     Also interesting -- and like the above neurolinguistics summary, also in developmental infancy -- are hypotheses tying grammatical performance to genetic triggers.  Ongoing studies of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have revealed evidence of family-based and heritable grammar deficiency -- not the grammar errors haunting the English teachers mentioned above, but core inabilities to grasp language constructs accessible to even the youngest human speakers of language (e.g., the referent of a relative clause).  The hunt is on -- not for any so-called "grammar gene," as simplified mass media reports have put it, but for a sequence of genetic codons that instructs a developing embryo to create specific proteins, which in turn act as building blocks to specific parts of the developing human brain.

     Does the sheer complexity of language and its unlearned neurological basis provide absolute proof for a Designer of brains and tongues?  Obviously not.  What this discussion does provide, however, is one more tool for those arguing against a "complexity arose from chaos" mentality, as well as insights to use in the endless debate against post-modernist relativism.  It's likely we will never find any smoking-gun evidence of a Creator -- for what is faith, except belief despite the absence of absolute evidence?  But consideration of the sheer complexity of all aspects of creation continues to build the confidence of those who have come to accept that there is more to heaven and earth than can be dreamed up in Creator-free philosophies. 

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx

Ignorant Christians & the Texas GOP

In case you missed it, the Texas Republican Party has officially declared their opposition to critical thinking skills.  Their approved 2012 Platform Committee Report, detailing every plank of their political agenda, specifically calls for the prohibition of teaching such skills.

Oh, they later apologized, saying the language got left in the document “by mistake.”  But, hey, let me apply some of my own critical thinking skills to this issue: (a) If it was in the final document, it was in earlier drafts; (b) if it was in earlier drafts, it was written down by an education subcommittee; (c) if it was written down by an education subcommittee, they must have originally considered it a valuable idea, worthy of further discussion; and (d) all 32 platform writers read it through and voted to approve it, signaling that after many, many reviews, the words "[w]e oppose the teaching of ... critical thinking skills" didn't jump out as anything all that objectionable to anyone.

Cosmic, Is This about Christianity?

You wouldn't think so, would you?  I use this blog to record my ramblings about living as a Christian in the modern world, and this month the modern world includes the 2012 Republican Party of Texas Platform Committee Report.  It is, without dispute, a religious document.  The language of its six key planks is liberally seasoned with the terminology of believers: “God” (12 occurrences), “faith” (9), “Judeo-Christian” (5), “church” (4), “religion” (4), “religious” (21), and “biblical promise to bless those who bless Israel” (only 1 use, but it was in a really, really long paragraph).

So I reserve the right to make faith-based observations about government actions, left and right.  If they’re going to try to put my God into their politics, then I’m certainly going to put their politics under my microscope.  Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of Theocracy.  I prefer America.

Okay, Go Back to That Inflammatory Title

Thank you, I’d almost forgotten.  Please notice that I purposely use the word “ignorant” rather than “stupid” in the title of this piece.  That’s because “ignorant” means lacking knowledge or awareness of a subject, while “stupid” means lacking intelligence or common sense.  The first has to do with experience of or access to information.  The second refers to an inability to process that information, accessible or not.  Therefore, if you did not know the difference between “ignorant” and “stupid,” you were simply ignorant of the meaning of ignorance, not stupid about the meaning of ignorance … and now that you know, you are no longer ignorant of “ignorance,” for ignorance is fleeting.  “Stupid” has a longer shelf life.

The desire of the Texas Republicans is to keep American students ignorant of critical thinking skills.  Many party members, it seems, feel that higher level thinking is incompatible with the Christianity they know and love.  And, surprisingly, they are right.  From an education and information standpoint, evangelical Christians are ignorant, uneducated, in many areas.  Those who become less ignorant by means of higher education and critical thinking tend to become less like what Texas Republicans are willing to recognize as Christian.

I’ll let the research assert it for me:

•  From June 2009 research in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion: “[Our] research shows that college students are more religiously engaged than has traditionally been thought, but that this interest appears to be more broad than deep.”  In other words, students who attended institutions of higher education are moved to investigate religions and faiths outside the experience of their upbringing.
• From a 2007 Baylor Religion Survey: “I have no doubt that God exists.”  High school graduates: 71% agree.  College graduates: 58% agree.
• From the 2010 Pew Forum on Religious & Public Life U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey: “Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.”
• From an article analyzing the Baylor survey: “And all respondents with college educations were less likely to view the Bible as the literal word of God, but Catholics, evangelicals and black Protestants with increased education were more likely to view the Bible as being inspired by God.”

Read that last bullet again, because it explains a lot.  Christians, including evangelicals, who experience a college education actually grow in their faith that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.  What diminishes is their acceptance of it as a 100% historical, scientific, literal text.

And in Republican Texas, that don’t fly.

God Hates Uncritical Thinking

What sins of man elicit the most condemnation from the holy Scriptures?  Turn on your cable channel TeleGospel, and you’re likely to learn it’s homosexuality, abortion, and not donating enough to television ministries.  And not necessarily in that order.  But should you turn to the Bible with that same question and read it for yourself, you’ll get a different picture.  Hundreds and hundreds of verses bemoan foolishness, and whole sections of the Bible (especially the “Wisdom Books”) are dedicating to combating it.  Sometimes “foolishness” in the Bible refers to ignorance; sometimes it refers to stupidity; still other times it’s used as a euphemism for other sins.  But clearly, God is down on dumb.  Even Paul’s celebrated opening to 1 Corinthians, railing against the “wisdom of this world,” is not a condemnation of learning.  It is a rebuke against the internal factions of Christians who were behaving in a manner no better than the fractious world.  It was instruction on how to access the right kind of wisdom, revealed through the cross, the foolishness of God.

As a believer, I begin with the premise that all true wisdom is from God, and that I begin to operate in wisdom when I fear Him.  But that is where the Texas Republican Party and I part ways.  I need the critical thinking skills they would withhold.  I need them to choose well, to argue well, to chasten others well, to rebuke well, to reason well, to maintain well, and even to hand out tasks well.

Arguing.  Choosing.  Chastening.  Rebuking.  Reasoning.  Maintaining.  Delegating.  All seven of those concepts are embodied in a single Hebrew word, yakach, a word so diversely translated in English versions of the Bible that it probably has never come up in one of your local word-study sermons.  Yakach-ing is what Abraham did with Abimelech when reproving him and making him less ignorant about the incident with the well water in Genesis 21.  Isaac yakach-ed in prayer with God when convincing him to reveal the perfect wife for him in Genesis 24.  The judges in Judges "judged" (yakach again) over Israel for many years each.  Job desired to yakach with God and got scolded for it; Isaiah, on the other hand, is directly invited to yakach with the Almighty in his first chapter.

That last one, Isaiah 1:18, intrigues me.  Lkuw-na', wniwakchah, yo'mar YHWH, it reads, “ Come on, let’s jointly yakach, says the I Am.”  But what is yakach?  Translations abound:

NIV: “Come now, let us settle the matter,” says the Lord.

KJV: Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord

CJB: “Come now,” says Adonai, “let’s talk this over together.”

CEV: I, the Lord, invite you to come and talk it over.

Douay-Rheims: And then come, and accuse me, saith the Lord.

ESV: “Come now, let us reason [note: or dispute] together, says the Lord.

New Century: The Lord says, "Come, let us talk about these things."

So, what is yakach?  Is it settling matters?  Disputing?  Reasoning?  Talking over things?  Exchanging accusations?  Yes.  It is all those things and more in Scripture.

Dare I, then, with so many translations out there, attempt to offer one that embodies most of their nuances?  Yeah, I dare.  I suggest yakach be translated “apply critical thinking skills.”  In the majority of its appearances in the Hebrew Scriptures, that translation would serve well.  I admit it isn’t pretty.  It’s just a touch more accurate.

A Plea to GOP Texas

Dear Texpublicans,

Come, let us yakach together about this.  I realize you fear the unchecked spread of thinking and the disease of knowledge, and I respect your right as a sovereign state to oppose pondering matters too deeply.  But I insist on using, and on teaching, the tools and wonders of reason.  The Lord has invited me to reason with Him, as long as I stay rooted in fear of the Lord and His ways.  For you to throw out critical thinking skills – to throw out yakach – is to throw out Aquinas, or Augustine, or Luther, Kierkegaard, Athanasius, Barth, and C.S. Lewis, all of whom were brilliant Christian critical thinkers and some of whom you guys may have even heard about.

Think of it the way the NRA thinks about firearms.  It's not critical thinking skills that kill people.  It's people who kill people, when they misuse those critical thinking skills.  The skills themselves are promoted by the Word of God.

Do you fear your children will lose their faith?  Then I say, teach them critical thinking skills.  Show them reason and enlighten them in the ways of debate and logic.  If you don’t, the world surely will … and not in ways you’ll like, I promise you.  Do you remember that verse in Proverbs 22 about training a child in the way he should go, so that when he is old he will never depart from it?  Now is the time to apply that verse, right at home.

So I correct you, Texas GOP.  The Lord rebukes you through His Word.  But be of good cheer.  As it says in Job 5:17: “Happy is he whom the Lord corrects.”

The word for “corrects” in that verse is yakach.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx

The #1 Threat to Marriage Sanctity

It’s that season again: The hard-core social conservative wing of the Republican party needs to incite its base to action, and there’s no better rallying platform than shared enmity. This political season’s threat of choice is Gay Marriage, a phenomenon which will, we are told, cheapen and demean traditional marriage.

It’s a clever straw man, really. Aside from opposition to abortion, the shared resistance to gay marriage might be the only political plank capable of uniting Mormons, Evangelical Christians, and Roman Catholics. In any other context, these groups demonize one another, declaring eternal hellfire for the other two (or lower levels of heaven in the case of Latter Day Saints). Rallied around a common enemy, however, these three antithetical institutions lock arms as brothers and declare themselves joint heirs of a Christian nation, defending their common morals.

After the rallies, they go back to declaring each other damned. There are limits, you know.

***

FLASHBACK: The morning after gay marriage was legalized in New York State. My parents are at breakfast. He reads the paper. They speak in Spanish. I translate below.

     HIM: Hey, gay marriage got passed yesterday!
     HER: Ah. Is there more milk?
     HIM: There’s a letter saying it cheapens our marriage.
     HER: Really?
     HIM: It’s what the letter says. Does ours feel cheaper this morning?
     HER: It must. It’s right there in the paper.
     HIM: Yeah, they wouldn’t just make that up.
     HER: Of course not, never. So, the milk?
     HIM: Hey, the Bills are getting a new helmet design!

***

I hereby declare: Christian marriage is in danger of being cheapened. In fact, it is in the very process of being cheapened. Not, however, by gay marriage, as those caught up in the politics and machinations of this world would have you think.

The primary and only significant threat to Christian marriage today is Christian divorce.

I had thought to make this blog post about addressing the question of Christian remarriage after divorce, itself a rather controversial issue. But as I researched the topic, I felt myself growing more and more heartsick. Site after site and commentary after commentary, it dawned on me that the only reason there is so much Internet discussion about whether or not Christians can remarry after a divorce is because there is so much Christian divorce. The followers of the very Lord who declared “I hate divorce” (Malachi 2:16) seem to spend an inordinate amount of time arguing what situations make it permissible.

Fact: Marriage is so important to the Almighty, He chose it as the principal metaphor for His own relationship with His people.

Fact: Divorce, with or without remarriage, is rampant through the Body of Christ.

***

On the off chance you think I am overstating the case, let me present this scenario: I walk you up to a group of ten adults. You poll them, and you discover three of those ten have been divorced. Using that information alone, you have no sure way of determining whether I have walked you up to a group of ten born again Christians, or a group of ten non-Christians. Divorce is equally embraced by both groups.

This information comes from a 2008 study by The Barna Group, an evangelical research company based in Ventura, CA. Specifically, they found divorce rates to be:

     All born again Christians:          32%
     All non-born again Christians    33%
     Atheists or Agnostics:                30%

Since the margin of error for the study was +/- 3%, any rating within 6 points of an atheist is pretty much indistinguishable from that atheist. So let’s take heart that we aren’t statistically worse than atheists. No, not worse. We’re exactly the same.

Yay for us.

***

Those who argue the jots and tittles of how, when, and why a Christian can be allowed to divorce are missing the point. The real threat to the sanctity of Christian marriage is the Christian couple.

Those who maneuver and dissect scriptures to reveal exactly how a Christian might be able to remarry after a divorce are also missing the point. The real threat to the sanctity of Christian marriage is the Christian couple.

Those who throw themselves into screaming political battles over the legalization of gay marriage are missing the point. The real threat to the sanctity of Christian marriage is the Christian couple.

***

I spend a good amount of time in my Social Network of choice, Second Life. In my years there, I have met dozens of Christians who are divorced and remarried, and when I get to know them well enough, I take the risk of asking how they reconcile their divorce with the sanctity of Christian marriage. To date, their response has been uniform: Their spouses cheated on them, and therefore they were free to divorce based on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:32: “But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.”

I’m going to comment on that. I’ll step past the obvious irony that those quoting the verse to me were using a passage where Jesus was speaking out against excessive divorce and setting it the task of justifying why they did get divorced. Instead, I’ll focus on a subtler assumption that seems to dwell behind their words. That assumption is this: That divorcing due to unfaithfulness is practically required by Jesus in that passage, and if not required, at least shown to be the better path to take.

If that assumption is really there, then I’m compelled to respond to it this way: Stop using a single scripture to justify your flight from marriage, and embrace the whole of Scripture, which has a far different message.

Were you wronged by an adulterous spouse? So was Yahweh, who took Israel as His betrothed, and was cheated on again and again.

Were you furious at that spouse, unable to contain your hurt and your fury over the betrayal? So was Yahweh, Whose bride Israel became like a harlot when seeking other beds, other gods.

Did you cast away that spouse, severing the covenant forever by means of a justifiable divorce? Now you're on your own, for Yahweh did not. Instead, He found a way – built a way at great expense to Himself – to make that covenant eternal.

***

You say your wife has violated the sanctity of the marriage covenant by having an affair? Then instead of using that as your justification for fleeing, man up and show her by your example the path to righteousness again. Says Paul: “How do you know, husband, that you might not save your wife?” (1 Cor. 7:16)

You say your husband has lost his faith and that you shouldn't be unequally yoked? Then instead of using that as your rationale for escape, become a woman whose worth really is beyond rubies and be the presence of Christ in that relationship. Says Peter: “If any husbands do not believe the Word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.” (1 Pet. 3:1-2)

Christian married couples, your decisions to rationalize flight from your marriage commitment might be technically permissible. There may be exceptions in Scripture that allow you to break ranks and run away. But when you do that, you cheapen the sanctity of marriage. You, Christian divorcer, are the real threat to traditional Christian marriage.

Those who are married need to find every blessing and every prayer available to avoid divorce. Those who have already divorced, be it for a month, a week, or decades, need to find every bit of strength the Holy Spirit gives them to bring those marriages back to covenant status and righteousness, rather than hiding behind the Get Out Of Jail Free cards they claim from Scriptural loopholes.

And those Evangelicals waving signs against gay marriage and expending unbelievable amounts of time and energy in worldly politics need to ask themselves why they are so worked up about how marriage looks in the non-Christian world … given how sad it looks in their own congregations. They need to put down the signs, go back to their flocks, and begin reconciliation from within.

Once the plank is out of the eye of the Body of Christ, there will be plenty of time to pick specks out of other eyeballs.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx

Run Schools like Business? Okay. You’re Fired.

I’ve never done this before, but I think I’ll make my first blog post that doesn’t explicitly mention Christianity.

Full disclosure: I’m a public school teacher.  Now, let’s proceed.

* * *

I’ve just read another article on how education systems would operate better if they were run like corporations.  “Run school like a business!” has become a knee-jerk rallying cry for reform, and while I know that everything – schools, government, businesses, and American home life – could use plenty of reform, I tire of those who have no idea what they’re saying when they demand schools run like “businesses.”

Listen up, society: I will not run my classroom like a business.  I will not treat your children like products on an assembly line, because I refuse to reject and scrap the ones who are below my standards.  Nor will I treat your children like customers, because I won’t turn away and refuse to do business with the ones I sense are unprofitable to my enterprise.

So feel free to thank me for not running my classroom like a business.  If I did, you might not like the consequences, depending on which business model I chose to emulate:

• If I ran my classroom like a manufacturing business, I could demand that the more hazardous of your students be delivered to me with detailed Material Safety Data Sheets.
• If I ran my classroom like an assembly plant, my procurement department would have a list of qualified preferred-vendor parents who would send us only the top quality raw materials for the construction of our products.  Your child might not make that list.
• If I ran my classroom like a luxury car dealership, I could watch you pull up in your 1998 clunker and determine from your clothes, style of speech, and demeanor that I shouldn’t waste too much time making you one of my preferred customers.
• If I ran my classroom like an automotive manufacturer, I might issue recalls to have you take your student back to a lower grade for retrofitting.
• If I ran my classroom like General Electric or Exxon, I’d pay absolutely no federal taxes at the end of my very profitable year of teaching.  In fact, I’d get federal subsidies on top of my untaxed profits.
• If I ran my classroom like Microsoft, I would stop supporting your student’s knowledge upgrades once I’d found a younger, more promising student to release to the world.
• If I ran my classroom like a Donald Trump business, I could fail to improve your children, then file for bankruptcy protection against any claims you might have on me, and then start all over again with a clean slate and no penalties.  In fact, as a Trump business, I could do that twice a decade.
• If I ran my school like a recession-proof, lean, efficient business, I would focus on core competencies and cut all frills.  By “frills,” you think I mean music and art.  But I don’t.  I mean football, basketball, cheerleading, and all other non-core sports nonsense.
• If I ran my school like a multinational corporation, I would stop working with American children and instead outsource to Asia, where the children are raised to be more compliant, making fewer demands on my limited resources.
• If I ran my classroom like a customer service call line business, instead of contacting your home with my praise or concerns about your child, I would have you contact my call center in India.  They’d read you pre-prepared trouble shooting scripts on how to ensure your student is operating effectively.
• If I ran my school like an insurance company, I would not accept your students with preexisting conditions.  If you tried to force me to, I'd run to the Supreme Court to see if they'd have my back against you, and whine a lot if they didn't.
• If I ran my classroom as a bank runs its loan business, I would ensure that those students who come to me with a lot of ability receive a lot of my investment.  To those with lower ability ratings to their credit, I would give far less.  Perhaps I would even turn them away.

Those who demand schools run like businesses may know even less about business than they do about schooling.  But many of them don’t care.  What many of them are really saying is, “I want a school that runs without tax dollars, where teachers can be fired without cause, where salaries hover barely above minimum wage, and where only what I think is important is allowed to be taught!”

But what do you do, dear customer, the day those schools look at your student and say, “He does not meet our standards, and we don’t want him here”?  What do you do the day they say, “This just isn’t a good fit for us”?

I’ll tell you what you do.  You come to me.  And I will welcome your student with open arms and find a way to work with rejected raw materials.  I will reach into my pocket and finance the pens and notebooks and folders and texts you and your community can’t afford.  I’ll stay up late at night to think up better ways to get an education into his head.  I’ll differentiate.  I’ll customize.  I’ll find a way not to reject him as scrap.

Because I do not run my classroom like a business.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx