Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

 

Retired Bible Professor,

Bob Jones University

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When the Impossible Becomes Likely: The Resurrection of Christ, Part 2

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Part 1

In my last post I observed that because the claim that Christ rose from the dead is extraordinary, it calls for an extraordinary level of evidence. I noted that the Bible contains both eyewitness and forensic evidence. In this post we begin to work with the eyewitness evidence.

People don’t always tell the truth. Sometimes they lie, and sometimes they’re just mistaken. (Just think of all your Facebook friends who regularly post things you know to be flatly untrue—and they really believe the nonsense. And think of how many of them are professing Christians.) Because the legal system knows of this problem, it has instituted requirements for witnesses, to weed out the crooks and the well-intentioned bozos:

  • Witnesses must be competent.

That is, they must have actually seen something. “My brother told me that he saw … “ will get a witness thrown out on the basis of a sustained objection to hearsay. We have no time for people just passing along stories they’ve heard. What have you seen?

The biblical record includes witnesses like that—people who saw and heard the resurrected Christ. Eyewitnesses like Mary, who initially thought that Jesus was the gardener but realized during the ensuing conversation that he was the one she had known so well (Jn 20.11-18). And his eleven disciples, who had lived with him for three years and knew him intimately, and who actually sat and ate with him at least twice after the resurrection (Lk 24.33-43; Jn 21.1-14), and likely a lot more than that (Ac 1.1-3). And James (1Co 15.7), his next-younger brother (Mt 13.55), who had not believed in him during his earthly ministry (Jn 7.5).

These are competent eyewitnesses. They’ve seen, and they know what they’ve seen.

Are there other explanations for what they’ve seen? Anything other than a resurrection?

Well, it couldn’t be a case of mistaken identity; these witness knew Jesus well and interacted with him extensively during the 40 days after the resurrection.

And despite lots of frantic theories, there’s no evidence that Jesus had a twin brother—especially since his birth is described in great detail (Mt 1-2; Lk 1-2) without any mention of a twin. Now you’re just getting desperate.

Further, these eyewitnesses rule out the most obvious counter-explanation—that the resurrection is just a myth, a natural consequence of stories accreting unlikely details over time, like the fish that gets bigger every time the fisherman describes him.

How do these witnesses rule out the myth theory?

Well, they stood together, made the claim, and identified themselves publically as eyewitnesses less than 2 months after the event (Ac 2.32), in the very city where it allegedly happened, and no one—including a lot of influential and empowered people who wanted desperately to put the kibosh on the whole thing (Ac 4.6-7, 15-18)—was able to refute their story. That’s not how myths develop; they don’t spring up immediately, when opposing eyewitnesses would be available to serve as first-century mythbusters. The silence is deafening.

Now, if you’re thinking objectively, you’ve probably thought of a weakness with what I’ve done here.

How do we know about these eyewitnesses? From the Bible. And how do we know the account is true? How do we really know there were any witnesses at all?

Good question. I’m glad you’re thinking in an engaged way. (Teachers love it when students do that.)

That’s a big-boy question, and it requires a big-boy answer, not one you can present in a blog post or two. In short, I find the Scripture to be reliable on the basis of a great number of evidences and in the absence of any credible exclusionary evidence. I’ve laid out my thinking in that regard in a previous series of posts, but even those posts barely scratch the surface. I can recommend all kinds of books—big, thick, sometimes but not always dry and dusty books. Let me know if you want a list.

Next time, we’ll look at the second qualification for an eyewitness. And maybe a third, depending on how verbose I get.

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When the Impossible Becomes Likely: The Resurrection of Christ, Part 1

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Squarely at the center of Christianity is the resurrection of Christ (1Co 15.3-4). As a rule, Christians have gotten so used to the idea that they no longer realize how crazy that sounds.

So try a little thought experiment.

Suppose you hear that someone you know has died. And then, a few days or weeks later, you see him walking around.

What do you think?

Well, there are several possibilities that will come to mind.

  • If you see him just briefly at a distance, you’ll say to yourself, “Boy, that guy sure looked like Joe!” And you might see if you can get a second look at him. But then you’ll move on, marveling that different people can look so similar.
  • If you see him more thoroughly—say he walks up to you and says, “Hello, old friend!”—you’ll conclude that the report you got was mistaken. The guy who told me he died must have been joking, or honestly misinformed. Or maybe I dreamed it. Or whatever. At any rate, he didn’t die; he’s still alive.
  • There’s a third, less likely, possibility. Once an acquaintance of mine died. Something that a lot of his friends didn’t know was that he happened to be an identical twin. Since I did know that, I didn’t have the reaction many of his friends did on seeing his brother at the funeral.

But I’ll tell you what you won’t think. You won’t think your friend rose from the dead, because that just doesn’t happen, and you know that perfectly well. There has to be another explanation.

Resurrections just don’t happen. Resurrection is impossible.

So then. About this alleged resurrection of Christ. Christians need to fully apprehend what an extraordinary—even preposterous—claim it is. We can’t expect people to just accept the allegation, and in fact we shouldn’t accept the allegation either without extraordinary evidences. Plural.

Resurrections just don’t happen.

After a lifetime of studying the claim and ruminating over the evidence, I’ve come to a conclusion:

The least likely possibility—the impossible one—is in fact the most likely possibility.

Now, that claim is just as preposterous as the first one, isn’t it?

What I’d like to do over the next several posts is examine the evidence and see whether there’s any basis at all for my conclusion.

I should note that in 1998 Lee Strobel edited an anthology called The Case for Christ, containing chapters by our generation’s leading apologists on Jesus’ claims to Messiahship, including the resurrection. I came to confident belief in the resurrection before Strobel’s book arrived on the scene and was delighted to see that his thinking on the evidence paralleled mine. What follows here is a concise summary of my thinking; if you want something quite a bit deeper and a lot more thorough, read Strobel’s excellent book.

We should begin with some observations about the nature of evidence. When detectives investigate a crime today, they generally gather two kinds of evidence: eyewitness testimony, and forensic evidence, such as materials left at the scene: shell casings, blood, fingerprints, and so forth.

The biblical record contains both types of evidence. The subsequent question is two-fold:

  • Is the evidence reliable?
  • Is the evidence exclusionary? That is, does it rule out other explanations?

These are important questions, and given the preposterous of the claim—he rose from the dead!—we ought to evaluate the evidence carefully and answer the questions with reasonable objectivity. That’s what I hope to do in the next few posts.

Something to think about for next time:

Eyewitness evidence is notoriously unreliable. Especially when it sees dead men walking around. Nobody in his right mind believes that Elvis bought a sandwich at a diner in Tulsa in 2006. So does the biblical evidence reach the level of authority needed to support a preposterous claim?

See you next time.

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On Cold-Call Evangelism and Cultural Appreciation

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While I’m at it, let me give another example of how we decide whether to fight over behavioral questions.

One of the things I’ve learned on frequent short-term mission trips around the world is how different cultures are, and how important it is to know and respect those differences if you’re going to minister effectively.

Cultures are different, and that’s something to celebrate. My favorite example of that is eating a meal at someone’s house. Here in the US, we were all trained as children that when someone has you over for a meal, you eat everything on your plate. Why? Because turning away food means you don’t like it, and it’s rude to say that to the person who has prepared that food for you.

In China, though, you must not eat everything on your plate. Why? Because eating it all says that your host didn’t give you enough—and that’s rude too. You should leave a little bit, and if he offers more, say, “I am very satisfied, thank you.”

Isn’t that cool? Two different cultures have attached opposite meanings to the very same action, and both meanings make perfect sense. Cultures, consisting of humans made in the image of God, are reflecting God in their creativity—even when they don’t recognize him as God. Yes, that’s cool.

Something else to notice is that cultures develop their convictions for very surprising and sometimes trivial reasons. Let me give you an example.

Back in the early 20th century, houses had porches. The main reason was that in the summertime, when it got hot, it would often be warmer inside the house in the evening than it was outside. Families would sit on the porch in the cool of the day, enjoying the breeze and escaping the stuffy heat inside.

As a consequence of that, people sitting on the porch saw their neighbors and the people walking by, and since they were just sitting around, it was common for the others to step up onto the porch and engage in conversation.

Then something big happened.

Air conditioning.

Now there was no need to sit out on the porch in the summertime; it was more comfortable indoors. And furthermore, with TV to watch (it had been around since 1939, but it became ubiquitous in American homes in the 60s), there was no time to talk to the neighbors and the passersby, or so we thought.

And so we quit dropping by one another’s homes.

Seriously. When some stranger knocks on your door, what’s driving your thinking? Getting rid of said person as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And as a result of that, what we used to call “door-to-door visitation” is largely ineffective today. I know of churches that still engage in it aggressively, but I know of none that can claim any significant amount of response—I’m thinking particularly of evangelized church members—for all their efforts.

So most American evangelicals don’t spend time with cold-call evangelism. The preferred approach today—for those who evangelize, and shame on those who don’t—is “relational” evangelism, forming relationships with neighbors or co-workers or retail workers with the goal of living and speaking grace and gospel in a way that woos them to Christ.

Are these Christians weak on evangelism? Not if they’re really doing what they say they are. But what about Acts 20.20? Doesn’t that verse say we’re supposed to go door to door? No, it doesn’t. It might say that Paul did, but he was living in a culture different from ours, and those differences matter.

Now, let me moderate that just a bit.

The porch illustration I’ve given here is specific to American culture—and modern, suburban American culture at that. The US has always been a mix of cultures; even in pre-colonial days the Oneida were different from the Cherokee, who were different from the Apache, who were different from the Tlingit. In the Colonies, Massachusetts was very different from Georgia. We even had a civil war as a result of sectionalism and the cultural divide that sectionalism represented. And today, all four corners of the country—I’ve lived in all of them—differ from the middle.

Today door-to-door visitation works in some places in America, and in even more places around the world.

Know your culture. Appreciate its strengths. Address its weaknesses. Represent Christ in it with wisdom and grace—and strategic smarts.

And again, don’t sweat the small stuff.

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 6

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In my last post we worked through the Apostle Peter’s sermon at Pentecost (Acts 2), looking for doctrinal content. Here’s what we came up with, in systematic theological terms:

Bibliology

  • The Hebrew scriptures are God’s Word (Ac 2.17) and therefore reliable (Ac 2.16).

Theology Proper

  • God directs history (Ac 2.23).
  • God does miracles; history includes some number of supernatural events (Ac 2.22).

Christology

  • Jesus did miracles (Ac 2.22).
  • Jesus died by crucifixion and rose again (Ac 2.23-24, 32).
  • Jesus continues his divine work from heaven (Ac 2.33-34).
  • Jesus is God (Ac 2.36).
  • Jesus is Christ, the fulfillment of the Hebrew messianic prophecies (Ac 2.36).

Pneumatology

  • There is a Holy Spirit (Ac 2.17).

Anthropology

  • People are sinful (Ac 2.40).

Soteriology

  • Salvation is available to all peoples (Ac 2.18, 21, 39).
  • Salvation is available freely (Ac 2.21) through repentance (Ac 2.38).

Eschatology

  • There is a coming “Day of Yahweh” (Ac 2.20).

When we put all this into our chart, we end up with something like this. (I’ve truncated our data slightly for simplicity’s sake.)

Where do we go from here? Well, we repeat this same process on the other apostolic sermons in Acts, filling in the other columns on our chart. A quick result might look something like this, though a more careful study—which you’ll do, right?—would yield more doctrines in the first column.

And then you see where the overlaps are—which doctrines are most emphasized in this database of sermons. For illustration purposes I’ve simply counted the number of sermons in which each doctrine appears and then sorted the list on that column, with the most common doctrines at the top. You can see that “quick and dirty” result here.

What are the biggest ideas?

  • The deity of Christ
  • Forgiveness of sins
  • The death and resurrection of Christ / witnesses
  • The reliability of Scripture
  • Repentance

It’s no surprise that our list includes “the gospel” as defined by Paul in 1Co 15.3-4.

Now, we’re not done yet. As I noted in a previous post in this series, we need to evaluate the other datasets that my friend Tom Wheeler identified in his dissertation, and then we need to compare all the lists we end up with to see if there are patterns there—which there are—as justification for producing a “meta-list,” which should serve as a pretty good indicator of What We’re Going to Fight About.

And then we need to decide where to draw the line. How far down the list do we decide this is a doctrine that isn’t “emphasized”? How far down the list do we go before we decide that we’re not going to fight about that one? I’d suggest that that’s a literary-analysis question: where do you draw the line at emphasis?

Tom’s dissertation has done a good job of that already. But you can do that work yourself, you know. You don’t have to be a scholar like Tom; with the Word and the illuminating work of the indwelling Holy Spirit, you have all the tools you need to do this study for yourself. Maybe you’ll notice something he didn’t. And even if you don’t, you’ll benefit immensely from the study, and you’ll approach doctrinal controversies in this polarized and freaked-out world with a calmness and a confidence that will communicate grace, mercy, and peace to all those around you.

That’s worth the effort, right?

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 5

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Last time I explained my thinking on why we should evaluate the doctrines taught in the apostles’ preaching as recorded in the book of Acts, as a step toward identifying the essential doctrines of the Christian faith—the things we ought to fight about. And I pause to remind my reader (all 1 of you) that we’re also determining, by their absence from this list, the doctrines that are not worth fighting about.

If you’ve done your homework from the last post—you don’t expect to really learn anything worthwhile by just reading blog posts, do you?—you downloaded my little chart as a working template and read through at least some of the sermons in Acts to list what doctrines they asserted.

How about if I go through the first one, and we can see how your list compares to mine?

The first sermon is Peter’s famous discourse at Pentecost in Acts 2, where he refutes the observers’ initial observations and explains what’s really going on with the sound and the fire and the inexplicable speech.

Let’s scan the text to see what we find.

  • Ac 2.16—What you’re seeing is a fulfillment of a prophetic scripture from long ago. Peter’s initial statement implies—strongly—that we should expect ancient scriptural prophecies to be fulfilled. And this in turn implies the truthfulness of scripture, even in its predictions. Lest I be accused of bringing my bias to the research, I’ve avoided using the explosive term inerrancy, but I would observe that “truthfulness” means the same thing.
  • Ac 2.17—In citing his source, Peter includes its claim that Joel’s words are what “God says” (NASB), and he says nothing that would soften the blunt statement. Joel’s words are the words of God, accurately recorded.
  • Ac 2.17—God has a Spirit that can be “poured forth.” Maybe not enough here to support a distinct person of the Spirit, but wording that is certainly consistent with that concept.
  • Ac 2.18—God’s empowering work extends to “bondslaves, both men and women.” His work is not limited by our social constructs.
  • Ac 2.20—There is a coming “Day of Yahweh.” We can’t tell this from just Acts 2, but the prophets gave us a lot of information about this coming day, and again, Peter seems to take it at face value.
  • Ac 2.21—Salvation comes to those who “call on the name of Yahweh.” This verse alone doesn’t tell us whether “salvation” here is physical rescue from catastrophe or spiritual salvation in the theological sense, but further study can settle this question pretty conclusively in favor of the latter.
  • Ac 2.22—Jesus did miracles. This has implications about both Jesus and the fact of the supernatural, of miracles.
  • Ac 2.23—God’s doing what happens, even when it seems disastrous—as the recent execution of Jesus certainly had seemed to Peter and the other disciples.
  • Ac 2.23—Jesus died as a direct result of the crucifixion. Yes, he was really dead.
  • Ac 2.24—Jesus rose from the dead. Really.
  • Ac 2.25—Here’s another fulfilled prophecy. We should expect that.
  • Ac 2.27—The resurrection was specifically predicted.
  • Ac 2.30—Like Joel, David was accurately reporting words directly from God himself.
  • Ac 2.31—David was speaking not of himself (Ac 2.29), but of Christ.
  • Ac 2.32—The resurrection again, this time with witnesses.
  • Ac 2.33—The living Jesus is the agent behind what is happening at Pentecost—namely, the coming of the Spirit.
  • Ac 2.34—Jesus is alive and active in heaven, the presence of God.
  • Ac 2.36—Jesus is “Lord.” It’s true that the Greek word here (kurios) can mean simply “sir,” similar to Elizabethan English (“Good day, my lord”). But since it often cannot have that meaning (e.g. Jn 20.28), and since the Jews used it to translate the name Yahweh in their Greek scriptures, this statement is much more likely claiming deity for Jesus.
  • Ac 2.36—Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one—by implication prophet, priest, and king—the fulfillment of the entire Hebrew scriptures.
  • Ac 2.38—Forgiveness of sins comes from repentance and baptism and brings “the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Note that the presence of sin as part of the human condition is assumed. [Sidebar: here I’m simply listing what Peter is saying; this is what theologians call “biblical theology.” No, I don’t believe that baptism is necessary for the forgiveness of sins; that conviction comes from a comparison of this passage with others, which we call “systematic theology”—and which is not my purpose here.]
  • Ac 2.39—Again, God’s plan includes both Jews (“you and your children”) and Gentiles (“all who are far off”); God’s plan overwhelms our cultural and social barriers.
  • Ac 2.40—“This generation” is “perverse.”

How did you do? How did I do? Are there unfounded or biased assumptions in my list? How about yours?

Next time we’ll give some thought to what we’ve found so far and where we go from here.

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 4

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So when believers disagree about doctrine—about their interpretations of what the Scripture says—how do we decide whether these disagreements are worth making an issue about?

A friend of mine, Tom Wheeler, wrote his PhD
dissertation on that very question at the same time I was writing mine. For folks who are near Greenville, it’s available in the BJU library; for folks who aren’t, there’s interlibrary loan. :-) Tom looks at a number of ways we can discern which doctrines are most important, and better yet, he does so without killing you with boring dissertationish prose. It’s a valuable piece of work.

I won’t give away all his ideas, but here are a few—

  • We can look at what the apostles emphasized in
    their sermons in the New Testament.
  • We can look at the context of NT references to
    “the faith” or “doctrine” (e.g. 1Ti 6.3).
  • We can look at NT confessions of faith (e.g. Mt
    16.13-16).

There are other places we can look as well. And then we can compare all the doctrines indicated by those different methods and see where the substantial overlaps are.

I’d like to look more closely at the first suggestion: NT apostolic preaching. This idea isn’t original to Tom; earlier in the 20th century, C. H. Dodd nearly made a whole career out of the study of the NT “kerygma,” or preaching—though I would disagree with a whole bunch of his conclusions. And the concept was studied long before Dodd as well.

Why would the apostolic preaching help us answer the question? Several reasons—

  • Directed by the Spirit himself, the apostles
    were ordained by Jesus himself to relay inerrantly the facts and significance
    of his earthly ministry (Jn 14.25-26; Jn 15.26-27; 16.12-15). They’re going to
    relate the most important stuff, and they’re going to get it right.
  • While several apostles—Matthew, John, Peter,
    Paul—wrote portions of the New Testament, not everything they wrote was of
    primary doctrinal importance, as Paul
    himself said    .
  • But there is a record of several sermons, almost
    all of them preached to unbelievers with the purpose of defining this new
    “religion.” If the sermon is definitional, it’s going to highlight the uniquely
    identifying ideas.
  • All the apostolic sermons are contained in the
    book of Acts.
    • Peter preaches several—
      • The foundational explanation of Christianity at
        Pentecost (Acts 2.14-36)
      • The popular explanation of the healing of the
        lame man in the temple (Acts 3.12-26)
      • The official explanation before the Sanhedrin
        (Acts 4.8-12)
      • The Sanhedrin defense of the apostles’ continued
        preaching (Acts 5.29-32)
      • The introduction of Christianity to Cornelius,
        the first Gentile inquirer (Acts 10.34-43)
    • As does Paul—
      • His first “synagogue homily” in Pisidian Antioch
        (Acts 13.16-41). This is likely very similar to all his later synagogue
        preaching, which is not recorded for us.
      • His sermon to a pagan audience at Mars Hill in
        Athens, which is rhetorically very different from his synagogue sermon but
        evidences similar doctrinal content (Acts 17.22-31).
      • His “farewell address” to the Ephesian elders
        (Acts 20.17-35). This is unique in that the audience consists of believers.
      • His defense of his ministry to the angry Jewish
        mob in Jerusalem (Acts 22.1-21)
      • His defense before Felix, the Judean governor
        (Acts 24.10-21)
      • His report to Festus, the new governor, and
        Agrippa, the figurehead king, after his appeal to Caesar (Acts 26.1-29).

The last two are different in that they are mostly personal reports of his conversion experience, but they do have doctrinal content as well.

There are other sermons in Acts, most notably Stephen’s defense before his execution (ch 7), but since Stephen is not an apostle, we’ll set him aside.

Now. What we can do is list the doctrinal content of each of these sermons and then compare the lists to see whether there’s a pattern. Do the apostles emphasize the same doctrines throughout their recorded preaching? If they do, then we can argue that these are the defining doctrines, without which Christianity is not Christianity at all—and that they are thus worth fighting for.

So here’s your homework. I’ve made a chart for you. Download it and fill it out by reading each of the sermons noted above. Next time we’ll talk about what we’ve found.

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 3

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As I noted in beginning this series, the Bible tells us to fight over doctrinal issues as well as sinful actions. But it also tells us to give other believers some slack as to how they interpret some biblical teachings. A significant issue in the early church was how much of Judaism ought to be retained in the Christian community. That’s at root a theological question. And in both Romans 14 and Colossians 2, Paul tells his readers to lighten up—in the latter passage, in the context of refuting a false teaching.

So when do we fight about doctrine? And when must we not fight?

The Bible itself indicates that there are different levels of doctrine. Some doctrines are more important than others. For example, Paul says, “Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel” (1Co 1.17). The gospel is more central than the doctrine of baptism—or Paul’s words wouldn’t have made any sense. (Side note: that’s something you can mention to your friends who believe that you need to be baptized to be saved. If they’re right, then again Paul’s words make no sense–and may amount to malpractice.)

Further, some doctrines are more foundational than others: because you need to understand them in order to understand other things, you need to start your Christian life by learning first things first (Heb 6.1-2). It’s interesting to me that the doctrine of baptism, while less important to Paul, is still foundational, or elementary, according to Hebrews 6.

Over the centuries the church has recognized this distinction between less important, or central, and more important doctrines. The Reformers used the term adiaphora to refer to less important doctrinal matters, and as you can imagine, the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Anglicans disagreed on specifically which doctrines and religious practices were central and which were not. Sometimes they even disagreed within their own denominations—and it seems that worship practices were the most common area of disagreement.

In the 20th century the early fundamentalists were so named because of their emphasis on the distinction between the Important Stuff—“the fundamentals”—and the Less Important Stuff. In the succeeding years, a lot of fundamentalists lost sight of that, and it seemed that many who called themselves fundamentalists wanted to fight about pretty much everything; but the early emphasis was on bringing together theological conservatives from widely different denominations—Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, even Pentecostals—because they agreed more with one another than with the liberals in their own denominations. They could maintain their distinctives—with conviction—but still cooperate with others who agreed with them on the core doctrines of the Christian faith.

Early on, that group published a series of books called The Fundamentals, which argued for the centrality of certain key doctrines. Though to some extent that series reflected the hot issues of its day, it served as a valuable concrete statement about which doctrines are worth fighting for.

But for most of the century there was little noticeable work done on how you decide which doctrines are fundamental and which ones aren’t. In other words, when we fight, and when we don’t. (Scholars would call that a question of “epistemology.”)

So now some professed evangelicals think that hell is not eternal, or that God doesn’t really know the future, while others think that anybody witnessed to from any version other than the King James isn’t really saved.

Yikes.

We’ve never been more in need of a set of criteria for this issue.

When do we fight about doctrine, and when must we not?

What are the fundamentals, and what are the adiaphora?

I think the Scripture gives us considerable help on that question, of course. And with further help from an old friend of mine, we’ll take a look at some of that next time.

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 2

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Part 1

My previous post noted that sometimes the Bible tells us to fight over things—and sometimes it tells us to keep the peace for the sake of unity. Since both of those responses are directly commanded—and since, obviously, we can’t do both at the same time—we need to know which is which.

When do we fight? When must we not fight?

I mentioned in passing that there are actually two different areas in which we must make that decision: beliefs and behaviors. Sometimes we need to give fellow believers freedom to act in the way they choose, and other times we must seek to change their chosen way of acting. And sometimes we need to give them freedom to believe what they choose, and sometimes we must seek to change their chosen way of believing. And in both of those areas, if they will not change when they need to, then we must go to battle.

So it’s really important that we know when to fight, and when not to.

On the behavioral side, the distinction is pretty clear.

Sin.

If what our brother is doing is sinful, then we are obligated—because the body is one—to intervene and exhort him to stop sinning—to change his behavior. Jesus himself lays out the process for doing that in Matthew 18. It happens in stages, which are probably familiar to most of us. First you go alone and urge the brother to stop the sin. If he won’t listen, you take 2 or 3 witnesses. If he won’t listen to the group, you take it to the whole church.

A few comments about this process are in order.

First, we intervene not out of authoritarianism, but out of love. Whether he realizes it or not, our brother is being harmed by his sin; there’s nothing good down that road, and there’s nothing loving about letting him proceed unimpeded. We put warning signs on highways when there’s danger ahead, and nobody thinks that’s unloving; in fact, it would be unloving not to care enough to put up the signs.

But that’s not the only kind of love involved here. The body of believers can be harmed by his sin as well; sin hurts bystanders, whether by encouraging them to follow him down the road (1Co 5.6) or by damaging their reputation in the community (Rom 2.24). We intervene because we love the rest of the body as well.

Second, the process Jesus lays out is one of grace, not harshness. The steps in the process increase the pressure slowly over time, and each step occurs only if the previous step did not bring repentance. This means that you’re applying the minimum amount of pressure necessary to bring the brother to repentance. You’re not shooting a fly with a cannon; you’re not “lowering the boom” until less forceful measures have been insufficient.

Third, you’re showing grace by keeping the circle of knowledge as narrow as possible. There’s no gossip here. Even bringing in a few witnesses is an act of grace; I know of cases where the witnesses listened to the “defendant’s” story and told the accuser he was out of his mind to initiate the confrontation—that what the brother was doing was something he had a perfect right to do. The witnesses help ensure against overzealous accusers.

So when the issue is behavior, when do we fight? We fight only when the behavior is sinful, and then as graciously and gently as possible to achieve repentance.

We don’t fight when the issue is not sin—for example, when the person is doing something we don’t like but the Word does not condemn. There are all kinds of things that irritate me—clothing styles, hairstyles, popular expressions, lack of situational awareness, slow drivers in the left lane, Yankees fans—but I can’t be in the business of imposing my personal preferences on others. Especially when I know that some things I do irritate them as well. :-) By showing grace in those situations, I’m demonstrating love, grace, and peace that must have been given to me by someone else, because it’s certainly not my nature.

Next time—what about beliefs? Here it gets a little more complicated.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Application 1 Application 2

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Sometimes We Fight, Part 1

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Tucked away in the tiny epistle of 2 John is a remarkable statement.

John is warning his readers (“the elect lady and her children,” 2J 1.1) about some false teachers in the region. He calls them “deceivers … who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh” (2J 1.7). These are harsh words, more reminiscent of the “Son of Thunder” (Mk 3.17) than the “apostle of love” who wrote John 3.16 and 1 John. Hmmm.

And it gets stronger. This is “the antichrist,” he says (2J 1.7), and the lady must “not receive him into your house or give him any greeting, for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works” (2J 1.10-11).

Yikes. Harsh.

There’s an interpretational question over what “receive him into your house” means, but even setting that aside, John’s very dark view of these teachers is clear.

And John is not alone. Paul (Gal 1.6-9), and Peter (2P 3.1-7), and Jude (Jude 1.3-4) all warn against false teachers, and many of those warnings include specific orders to isolate the offenders (e.g. Rom 16.17; Ti 3.9-10). Some evangelicals argue that this kind of isolation is commanded only for immoral lifestyles, and not for doctrinal disagreements; in 1Cor 5, for example, the church member is expelled for “hav[ing] his father’s wife,” and in 2Th 3 another man is expelled for not working to support his family. But I find it interesting that both of those passages include references to doctrinal as well as moral issues; in 1Cor 5 Paul orders the believers “not to associate” with several kinds of people, including not only the sexually immoral, but also the “idolater” (1Co 5.11); and in 2Th 3 Paul broadens the group of offenders to all those who live “not in accord with the tradition that you received from us” (2Th 3.6; cf. 2Th 2.15).

So. Sometimes we fight about doctrinal matters, theological disagreements. Sometimes we gird up our loins and go into battle.

But sometimes we don’t—in fact, we must not. The early churches had all kinds of doctrinal disagreements, many of which led to differing beliefs about practice—in modern language, disagreements over what sorts of things Christians could do and what sorts of things they couldn’t do. And many of those disagreements were heated and severe.

  • Can Christians eat pork, or should we follow the Mosaic dietary restrictions?
  • Should we keep the Sabbath? How about the other Jewish holidays?
  • Can we eat meat that’s been offered in sacrifice to idols?

All of these issues had been addressed directly in the Hebrew Bible. God lays down all kinds of dietary restrictions on his people Israel. He tells them to keep the Sabbath—that’s in the Ten Commandments, for crying out loud—and sometimes he kills them when they don’t (Num 15.32-36). And pagan idolatry was absolutely verboten; the prophets wrote whole books against it.

You can imagine how difficult the early Christians—who thought of themselves as simply Jews, delighting in the arrival of their Messiah—would have found the suggestion that things like this didn’t matter anymore. Sounds like heresy to anyone who’s read his [Hebrew] Bible.

And so we find the apostles stepping in and calling for order. And here, surprisingly, they’re not calling for isolating the “heretics.” This time they say that we need to just get along, to agree to disagree, to treat one another with respect (e.g. Rom 14.1-13; 1Co 10.23-31; Col 2.16-17). Love and church unity trump a good many doctrinal disagreements.

Sometimes we fight. Sometimes we don’t.

Now this raises an obvious question.

Which is which? How do we know which to do? When do we fight, and when must we not fight? God clearly thinks both actions are very important, at the proper times.

What are those times?

Next time, we’ll start down the path toward answering these questions.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Application 1 Application 2

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New Leaves

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New Year’s Eve. Last day of the old year; looking forward to the new.

There is something in us that makes us reflective at this season. We think through the past year and often make resolutions for the new.

This year, things will be better. Life will be better. We will be better.

Humans being complicated, this general optimism—or at least desire for improvement—is countered by cynics (they would call themselves realists) who confidently predict that it won’t last. Some of them seem irritated that anybody’s even trying. The most obvious example of that, I suppose, is at the gym, where the regulars are frustrated that for the first week or two of every January they can’t get to their usual machines because of the crowds—and their irritation is increased by the fact that the interlopers don’t even know how to use said machines.

I feel their pain—though I’ll admit that I haven’t done much at the gym this last semester, mostly due to schedule constraints of my first-semester teaching schedule. If I were going to start an exercise program, I think I’d start in December—or any time other than January. But as it happens, my gym is closed for 2 weeks precisely at the end of December, so that’s out.

Anyway, while recognizing the inconvenience that the optimists are to the cynics, at least at the gym, I’d like to suggest that they lighten up a little. If history is any guide, a lot of people will set out on a course of self-improvement this week, and the great majority of them will apostatize before the month is out. But does that mean that they shouldn’t even try? Or that they shouldn’t at least aspire?

Isn’t aspiration, the desire to get better, the desire to succeed, an essential part of being a healthy human? Isn’t it part of the image of God in us?

And if it is, shouldn’t we start down that path, and encourage others to do the same? Is that hopelessly naïve, or is it just healthy?

God certainly knew that we would fail when he created us, and he went ahead and did it anyway. He knew that Abraham’s descendants would be unfaithful lovers in the extreme, but he chose and blessed them anyway. He knew that Moses would strike the rock in rage, and that the same Israel who stood at Mt. Sinai and cried—with one voice—“All that the Lord has spoken, we will do!” (Ex 19.8), would refuse to take the land when God gave it to them. He knew that David would sin with Bathsheba. Jesus knew that Peter would deny him—and that Judas would betray him. And God chose them all anyway.

The Judas story is particularly intriguing. The Scripture doesn’t tell us Judas’s motive for the betrayal—though earlier it describes his motive at Bethany as greed (Jn 12.6). Some have speculated that like some of the other Jews, he wanted Jesus to overthrow the Romans and establish a political Messiahship. Maybe he did. If so, Jesus’ treatment of him is interesting.

It appears that Jesus set up a “buddy system” among the Twelve; we know that he sent them out in pairs on at least one preaching tour (Mk 6.7), and the accompanying list of the apostles appears to list them in pairs—Peter and Andrew, James and John, and so forth (Mt 10.2). If this is a “buddy list” of long-term “roommate” relationships, with whom does Jesus pair Judas?

Simon the Zealot (Mt 10.4).

And what’s the significance of that?

The designation Zealot is a reference to an activist group of the day who opposed the hated Roman occupiers with what we would call today “asymmetrical warfare.”

Simon was a guerrilla fighter. He was a terrorist.

But a changed one. He followed Jesus, and unlike Judas, he stayed true to that commitment to the very death.

So maybe—maybe—Jesus paired Judas the malcontent with Simon the (converted!) Zealot to let him see up close what a redeemed terrorist and Roman-hater looked like.

Maybe he was giving Judas a chance.

In any case, the God who knows all doesn’t go all cynical on us just because he knows we’ll stumble or even fail spectacularly.

We shouldn’t think like that either.

So make your plans, and your resolutions, for the new year. Set off down that path, with determination.

And if you proceed unevenly—you will, you know—get up and keep going.

For what it’s worth, I’m rooting for you.

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