Today, when you ask people who God is, you can get every answer from orthodox to weird. Most people in our culture seem to believe in a god of some sort. Most people, however, seem to make their own definition. There are some definite traits that the majority of people seem to agree upon. God is “good”—but what is good seems to change from person to person. God is love—but love is also open to interpretation. God is fair—but we don’t understand why the innocent perish or the wicked prosper. God is great and completely other—but we seem to grasp who he is and are pretty comfortable with putting him in our box. These are just the answers off the street—great men from history and philosophy have pondered this question too. According to Plato, God is the eternal mind, the cause of good in nature. Aristotle considered him to be “the first ground of all being.” Leibniz says that the final reason of things is called God. Kant defined God as a being who, by his understanding and will, is the cause of all nature; a being who has all rights and no duties; the moral author of the world. Hegel considered God the absolute spirit (giest), yet without consciousness until it becomes conscious in the reason of man. These answers, whether we agree with them or not, show that there is something unanswered about the nature of God. And it also shows that we want the answer.
Nevertheless, the only tool we have in-and-of ourselves to define God is our insight (a philosophical word meaning “best guess”). What we find is that because God is transcendent (bigger than we can understand), and because we are a fallen and frustrated people, our best guesses are just as fallen and frustrating as we are. Yet, we keep searching for a greater understanding of God and who he is. The Teacher, in the book of Ecclesiastes, tells us that God has set eternity in our hearts, yet we still cannot fathom him (3.11). What he means is this—we know that God exists, and we know that we are meant to know that he exists, but we are so small that anything we come up with sounds like a three-year-old explaining how a carburetor works. But God is good enough to reveal himself to us in such a way that we can apprehend this revelation and understand it. This is done through General Revelation (nature, conscience, providence) and Special Revelation (miracles, the Incarnation, Scripture). With these, God trumps our insight and tells us who he is; he tells us about his beauty, his love, his glory, and sometimes we recognize these things and respond as we ought to—worship and awe. But sometimes we confuse the issue like the Athenians in Acts 17.16-34. Here, Paul sees how the Athenians recognized God’s providence during a plague several years back by building alters. However, they didn’t know who they were worshiping, so they wrote, “TO AN UNKNOWN GOD”, on the formless statues. It was here that Paul uses their insight to point out the revelation of God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He uses a tool that most of us Christians have forgotten all about. He uses the tool of context. The Athenians had a concept of God and Paul used this concept within the context of Greek culture to show them how God was revealing himself and how this revelation should be understood. He didn’t use a tract or a pizza feed. He didn’t use an outreach strategy or attractive church bulletins. He used the context of the people and spoke to them using ideas from their own culture and world-view. God has done the same for us. Jesus came down and became a man so that we could understand who God is. Paul writes about Jesus in his letter to the Colossians 1.15 that he is the image of the invisible God. A theologian by the name of John Calvin, writing about the incarnation (God becoming a man) called it “the Great Condescension”. It was where God revealed his love by lowering himself to our level and showing us who he is so that we might once again know the unknown God.
Showing posts with label Interpretation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interpretation. Show all posts
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Friday, February 6, 2009
Truth
One of the more important things under attack in our culture today is the concept of Truth. Most of us live as functioning relativists. We exist in a bubble of reality in which we can hold to anything that permits our behavior and world-view. What we believe is “true for us,” because it confirms our perceptions and our interpretation of reality. When we are confronted by a contradictory truth it is validated as true for that other individual, but is still not incorporated into our own reality. The problem with this is that, by default, having individually validated truth invalidates all truth. By saying that everybody is right, you essentially prove everyone wrong. This is called the law of the excluded middle (something is either true or it is false—there is no middle ground). It is one or the other. The fact of the matter is that not all “truths” are true and not all opinions are equal and to assert otherwise is itself a contradiction.
This foolishness, however, stems from a very true assessment of the human condition, but it comes to a very false conclusion. It is true that man’s ability to fully comprehend reality and to universally recognize truth is flawed. We have different perspectives and we have different opinions because sin has permeated and fractured man’s connection to the world around him and has severed his connection to God who, by definition, is Truth. However, to fix this uncertainty we came up with the idea that we can define our own truth and everything will turn out fine. Essentially, we admitted to ourselves that we are blind and convinced ourselves the cure to our blindness is to close our eyes, jump in the driver’s seat and go on a joy ride. This kind of public-school logic is the best we could come up with. However, despite our backwards attempts to find Truth, God, who us above creation, saw fit to step in and show us truth, instead of letting us fumble around like a drunken prom date. This was done through relationship and revelation and providence. It was done by what is called inspiration. As God revealed truth, we began to recognize it a like lost sheep hearing the voice of its shepherd, and we wrote it down and kept it. As these things were passed from one person to another, they became volumes of historical accounts and letters and prophetic declarations, until finally they became one volume of complementary texts. These texts were transcribed and translated, and guys with too much time on their hands came up with lists adding in and subtracting books in the Bible. They did this to propagate their theological and political agendas thinking that they were more important than they were. Things became messed up, the original manuscripts were lost, and new ones were made. There were errors here and there—words misspelled, phrases adjusted, punctuation changed—but God preserved the truth of his word.
The original texts were written by men who were guided by the Holy Spirit making use of their personalities to superintend every word that was written. But over time as the originals were lost, errors occurred in transcription but not in such a way as to influence any significant doctrine. That is to say, as the different existing manuscripts are compared, although they vary in details, the overarching teachings and doctrines are not changed. The Holy Spirit preserved the truth as God laid it out for man to know and as hard as we tried, we did not destroy its message. This is a miraculous testament to the eternal nature of God’s truth and gives some credence and reason for the belief in the Word of God—it gives credence and validity to what we call the Bible. The words and teachings that come from its pages do not come from man who is crooked and deceived; they came from God who is the ultimate authority. It isn’t a book of good ideas or morals, but it is the standard by which we are to look at the world and verify whether we see the world for what it truly is or we are looking at it upside down because we are an upside down and perverted people.
This foolishness, however, stems from a very true assessment of the human condition, but it comes to a very false conclusion. It is true that man’s ability to fully comprehend reality and to universally recognize truth is flawed. We have different perspectives and we have different opinions because sin has permeated and fractured man’s connection to the world around him and has severed his connection to God who, by definition, is Truth. However, to fix this uncertainty we came up with the idea that we can define our own truth and everything will turn out fine. Essentially, we admitted to ourselves that we are blind and convinced ourselves the cure to our blindness is to close our eyes, jump in the driver’s seat and go on a joy ride. This kind of public-school logic is the best we could come up with. However, despite our backwards attempts to find Truth, God, who us above creation, saw fit to step in and show us truth, instead of letting us fumble around like a drunken prom date. This was done through relationship and revelation and providence. It was done by what is called inspiration. As God revealed truth, we began to recognize it a like lost sheep hearing the voice of its shepherd, and we wrote it down and kept it. As these things were passed from one person to another, they became volumes of historical accounts and letters and prophetic declarations, until finally they became one volume of complementary texts. These texts were transcribed and translated, and guys with too much time on their hands came up with lists adding in and subtracting books in the Bible. They did this to propagate their theological and political agendas thinking that they were more important than they were. Things became messed up, the original manuscripts were lost, and new ones were made. There were errors here and there—words misspelled, phrases adjusted, punctuation changed—but God preserved the truth of his word.
The original texts were written by men who were guided by the Holy Spirit making use of their personalities to superintend every word that was written. But over time as the originals were lost, errors occurred in transcription but not in such a way as to influence any significant doctrine. That is to say, as the different existing manuscripts are compared, although they vary in details, the overarching teachings and doctrines are not changed. The Holy Spirit preserved the truth as God laid it out for man to know and as hard as we tried, we did not destroy its message. This is a miraculous testament to the eternal nature of God’s truth and gives some credence and reason for the belief in the Word of God—it gives credence and validity to what we call the Bible. The words and teachings that come from its pages do not come from man who is crooked and deceived; they came from God who is the ultimate authority. It isn’t a book of good ideas or morals, but it is the standard by which we are to look at the world and verify whether we see the world for what it truly is or we are looking at it upside down because we are an upside down and perverted people.
Monday, January 19, 2009
The Gospel
Literally Gospel means "good news", but within the context of Scripture, the depth of the good news is life changing. But what is it really? The technical definition is the message of God's redemption in Jesus Christ. In the New Testament it is, first, the proclamation by Jesus that the
This doesn't mean that the Gospel isn't simple, just that it gets bigger and deeper everyday we are changed by its message of grace. If we were to stop and meditate upon the implications and consequences of the Gospel in history, in theology, in our very own personal lives, I think we would be awestruck by its impact on every aspect of creation. Simply the fact that the Gospel has been at the forefront of God's mind since before creation and has been woven into the threads of history and creation—even unto the end of this age when God will create a new heaven and a new earth. It is staggering, and yet, despite its philosophical and theological girth, it is presented to us as a free gift, given by a loving Father.
However, it is not a gift meant to keep for ourselves, nor is it a chunk of information we know in our minds. It is the life we live and the hope we share. It is praying for a stranger and being a good friend. It is caring for the fatherless and single mothers. It is living with the understanding that no person deserves the grace of God and then giving it indiscriminately and without consideration of personal cost. And most importantly it is living with the understanding that you don't deserve the grace of God, but receiving it with humility and faith in Jesus Christ. It is the life lived apart from Sunday mornings worship with all of its ritual and high-minded charades, where blood and tears are shed everyday because it is a real world bound by addiction and abuse, hate and fear, pain and suffering; where real people fail at life. The Gospel is that Eternal Life that we live out today in the midst of everything else because there is more than this. The good news is the hope greater than all of us and greater than our despair and struggles. That hope is simply Jesus and his Kingdom. The Gospel is the promise to us that we can live in spiritual abundance in a world of poverty.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Now What?
There is an interesting myth that has penetrated the worldview of Christians. This myth is like most lies in that it is a half truth. For some reason we have gotten it into our minds that salvation is defined by "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ". But this is only half of what it means to be a Christian. It is true that regeneration, or being "born again" as the Bible calls it, is a deeply personal and unique experience, and, as a result, intimacy with the Creator comes naturally. However, according to Scripture, this is not the goal.
Time and time again, the Bible reminds us that our belief in Jesus was not for our self-absorbed, naval gazing selves. There are two sides to this coin we call salvation. John teaches us this reality in a subtle way with the last chapter of the gospel he wrote. He ends the previous chapter by writing, "But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ...and that by believing you may have life in his name." But the story doesn't end there. The next chapter has a vivid and memorable discussion between Peter and Jesus.
The story is set up in this way: Peter, the leader among the disciples (and consequently the one who denied ever knowing Jesus when confronted by a little girl barely old enough to see the "High School Musical" trilogy) wanted to go fishing. He takes six of his buddies and fishes all night and catches nothing. That morning, Jesus appears to his disciples for a third time in John's gospel and makes them breakfast after he bails them out of a fishless fishing trip. He then turns to Peter and deals with him in front of everyone. Jesus asks him three times if he loves him. Each time Jesus does this, Peter tells him that he does, and Jesus tells him each time how to love him: "Feed my lambs", "Take care of my sheep", and "Feed my sheep".
On a side note, it is widely taught that Jesus uses a special word for "love", agape, and Peter uses a lesser synonym phileo. Then on the third time Jesus uses phileo, illustrating Peter's lack of commitment or faith. Among several problems I have with the exegetical steps taken to come to this interpretation (including a poor understanding of the Greek language, the disregard for John's writing style, and sloppy word studies done only using a concordance), does Jesus really seem like the kind of guy who lowers his standards to accommodate some body's lack of faith?
What if Jesus is making the point that if Peter loves him, he needs to do something about it. And that something is to think about and live for others. Jesus wants Peter to love him by serving the needs of others. John is showing us that our "personal relationship with Jesus" is actually inter-personal. If we think about it, the person in the Bible who had the deepest relationship with God was Jesus and he did nothing but serve and think of others. When we look at his life, we should feel ashamed about how we have misrepresented the nature of this sacred relationship. His life contradicts just about all of our popular beliefs. He was not healthy and wealthy, Jesus was hated and homeless. He didn't spend hours in the Christian book store trying to find that book that would help him overcome his "bitterness" or actualize his self-worth. He was betrayed by his friends and the Bible calls him a "man of sorrows". Furthermore, what he tells Peter next is that he too will be murdered by crucifixion. This is not the self-affirming, hugabbly soft life Peter was hoping for. This is not the "victorious Christian living" we've read so much about. Instead, this is hard and selfless. It is putting God and others above your own well being.
This notion is entirely antithetical to everything we would expect out of salvation. But it does answer the question of "Now what?" It's that question you confront yourself with sobering realization and say, "My Christianity is all about myself." Do you love him? Then do something about it! And if you don't know where to begin or what to do, start where Jesus left off, breakfast. Invite someone over and be hospitable. Give someone something you know they need. Think less about your budget or your schedule and do something for someone else. Start little and go big.
Time and time again, the Bible reminds us that our belief in Jesus was not for our self-absorbed, naval gazing selves. There are two sides to this coin we call salvation. John teaches us this reality in a subtle way with the last chapter of the gospel he wrote. He ends the previous chapter by writing, "But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ...and that by believing you may have life in his name." But the story doesn't end there. The next chapter has a vivid and memorable discussion between Peter and Jesus.
The story is set up in this way: Peter, the leader among the disciples (and consequently the one who denied ever knowing Jesus when confronted by a little girl barely old enough to see the "High School Musical" trilogy) wanted to go fishing. He takes six of his buddies and fishes all night and catches nothing. That morning, Jesus appears to his disciples for a third time in John's gospel and makes them breakfast after he bails them out of a fishless fishing trip. He then turns to Peter and deals with him in front of everyone. Jesus asks him three times if he loves him. Each time Jesus does this, Peter tells him that he does, and Jesus tells him each time how to love him: "Feed my lambs", "Take care of my sheep", and "Feed my sheep".
On a side note, it is widely taught that Jesus uses a special word for "love", agape, and Peter uses a lesser synonym phileo. Then on the third time Jesus uses phileo, illustrating Peter's lack of commitment or faith. Among several problems I have with the exegetical steps taken to come to this interpretation (including a poor understanding of the Greek language, the disregard for John's writing style, and sloppy word studies done only using a concordance), does Jesus really seem like the kind of guy who lowers his standards to accommodate some body's lack of faith?
What if Jesus is making the point that if Peter loves him, he needs to do something about it. And that something is to think about and live for others. Jesus wants Peter to love him by serving the needs of others. John is showing us that our "personal relationship with Jesus" is actually inter-personal. If we think about it, the person in the Bible who had the deepest relationship with God was Jesus and he did nothing but serve and think of others. When we look at his life, we should feel ashamed about how we have misrepresented the nature of this sacred relationship. His life contradicts just about all of our popular beliefs. He was not healthy and wealthy, Jesus was hated and homeless. He didn't spend hours in the Christian book store trying to find that book that would help him overcome his "bitterness" or actualize his self-worth. He was betrayed by his friends and the Bible calls him a "man of sorrows". Furthermore, what he tells Peter next is that he too will be murdered by crucifixion. This is not the self-affirming, hugabbly soft life Peter was hoping for. This is not the "victorious Christian living" we've read so much about. Instead, this is hard and selfless. It is putting God and others above your own well being.
This notion is entirely antithetical to everything we would expect out of salvation. But it does answer the question of "Now what?" It's that question you confront yourself with sobering realization and say, "My Christianity is all about myself." Do you love him? Then do something about it! And if you don't know where to begin or what to do, start where Jesus left off, breakfast. Invite someone over and be hospitable. Give someone something you know they need. Think less about your budget or your schedule and do something for someone else. Start little and go big.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
All That Remains
In chapters 13-16 of John's Gospel, Jesus, just hours before his betrayal and murder, turns to his disciples and breaks the horrible news that he will not be with them for much longer. It is a heartbreaking and confusing revelation for these eleven men who have spent the last three years of their lives under the impression that, with their teacher leading the way, they would turn their world upside down and inside out. We can imagine the confusion and even disappointment these men might feel at that very moment. But he does not leave them room for despair. In addition to this bombshell, Jesus gives his disciples a message and a mission of hope.
Drawing upon a metaphor that is well known to the Jewish people, he calls himself the "True Vine" and his Father "the Gardener" in chapter 15. It is a metaphor that has deep rooted significance to the Israelite identity. Isaiah calls the house of Israel the vineyard of the Lord of Hosts (5:7). Jeremiah teaches that God planted Israel as a "choice vine" (2:21). Similarly, Hosea titles Israel as a "luxuriant vine" (10:1). Over history, the vine became a symbol for the nation as a whole. It was the emblem on the coins of the Maccabees. One of the glories of the Temple was a great golden vine that decorated the entrance to the Holy Place. When the Temple was built by Herod the Great, people would line up for the honor of giving up their gold to be forged into this great national symbol. And with this sentimentality in mind, Jesus tells his disciples that it is he who is the "True Vine" and God the Father is the "Gardener". He then explains our role as the branches is to bear fruit, and if we do not, the Gardener will cut us off from the Vine (v. 2). And for those who do bear fruit, they will be pruned so that we can bear more fruit. But it is the first part that, upon first glance, causes me confusion.
It was just five chapters ago in John 10, that Jesus gives us that picture of us resting secure in the hand of God unable to be snatched away from his grasp. Is Jesus now contradicting himself? If so, then our understanding of this passage runs antithetical to Scripture as a whole. We learn in Romans 8 that nothing can separate us from the love of God. In Philippians 1 we are promised that God is faithful to complete the good work of salvation he began in us. It would seem that apart from our understanding of John 15, the Bible teaches that Jesus cannot and will not lose one of his Christians. But still we read this passage and interpret it in such a way that God has demanded some unknown quota of work from us and if we do not fulfill it, we are cut off from Jesus and burned as firewood in hell according to 15:6. With this mindset, it's easy to nurture our legalism and boast about our works. We teach new Christians that they must read their Bibles and pray so many hours during the day and that we can measure our fruitfulness by how many people we "lead to the Lord". We show our faithfulness by how many times we attend church during the week or how many ministries we serve in. We define our Christianity by how many hours we subject ourselves to horrible Christian pop music written by musicians that only produce three cord, happy-clappy songs that have poor theology and even worse sentimentalism.
So what do we say? Should we ignore this passage? Should we interpret it in such a way that promotes a Gospel of Works instead of the Gospel of grace taught by the rest of Scripture? Or could it be that it is actually saying something else? What happens if we read the rest of the passage? Well, Jesus teaches that we have already been pruned by Jesus' teaching and his word. And that if we remain in him we will bear "much fruit". He makes it clear that he is the one who gives us the ability to bear fruit and apart from him it is impossible to be fruitful. He also states that he has chosen us and appointed us to bear fruit that will last.
The raw truth of this passage is that Jesus is asking the impossible of us. We cannot bear good fruit. History teaches us that when faced with the choice between good and evil, we will always choose evil. We bear poor fruit, that is, unless we are empowered to do good by something outside of our own compulsions. That something is Jesus. With this in mind the passage falls in place with the entirety of Scripture. The fruit we are expected to bear is provided by the True Vine, who is Jesus. Now our ability and skill at being a Christian is inconsequential. This is not because we don't have to produce good fruit, but because the source of our good works (our desire to pray and read our Bibles, our love for one another and our neighbor) is Jesus. If it is not, then our work is pointless at best and selfish at worst. That is why Jesus stresses so adamantly that we must remain in him. Without him there is no grace to do the good works he has prepared for us to do. The fruit that we bear gives glory to him because he is the author and perfecter of our faith and our actions. When we remain in him and bear the fruit that he has empowered us to bear, then the glory of our actions belongs to him, not us. John the Baptist had an amazing goal in life: it wasn't to build the most successful ministry or have the most followers. It was not even to send out the most missionaries/church planters. His goal was to decrease so that Jesus would increase. That should be the goal of every Christian. For as we decrease and remain in Jesus, in the end, Jesus will be all that remains.
The raw truth of this passage is that Jesus is asking the impossible of us. We cannot bear good fruit. History teaches us that when faced with the choice between good and evil, we will always choose evil. We bear poor fruit, that is, unless we are empowered to do good by something outside of our own compulsions. That something is Jesus. With this in mind the passage falls in place with the entirety of Scripture. The fruit we are expected to bear is provided by the True Vine, who is Jesus. Now our ability and skill at being a Christian is inconsequential. This is not because we don't have to produce good fruit, but because the source of our good works (our desire to pray and read our Bibles, our love for one another and our neighbor) is Jesus. If it is not, then our work is pointless at best and selfish at worst. That is why Jesus stresses so adamantly that we must remain in him. Without him there is no grace to do the good works he has prepared for us to do. The fruit that we bear gives glory to him because he is the author and perfecter of our faith and our actions. When we remain in him and bear the fruit that he has empowered us to bear, then the glory of our actions belongs to him, not us. John the Baptist had an amazing goal in life: it wasn't to build the most successful ministry or have the most followers. It was not even to send out the most missionaries/church planters. His goal was to decrease so that Jesus would increase. That should be the goal of every Christian. For as we decrease and remain in Jesus, in the end, Jesus will be all that remains.
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