Welcome to 4S
4s: The summer of morality
Week 1: Morality defined
Note, these are my definitions unless I specifically mention a source. Defining terms is not the job of the dictionary. A dictionary is just a compendium of common usage as determined by those who write dictionaries. A dictionary is not an objective source of meaning. It is a reference of common usage.
It is the job of every individual to define their own terms. If there is a disagreement on a definition, the true definition is the one you carry in your head because that is the representation of what you mean by the term. Your meaning could be wrong in an academic sense, but never in a conversational sense because it represents what is in your mind when you use the word. I am offering you an expansive set of meanings for the term as I see it and use it.
We need to learn to negotiate definitions. I tell you what I mean by certain words so that you can unpack them properly when we communicate. But you also need to tell me what you mean so that we can spot the differences and negotiate a common usage between the two of us. Only then can we have a productive dialog. Here is my attempt to provide clarity with regard to what I mean by morality, and other important ideas:
No such thing as morality
There is no such thing as morality as I understand and define the word. Morality is not a thing anymore than numbers are things. Numbers are useful fictions. They are ideas we hold in our minds as a way of describing particular aspects of reality. Numbers are the most objective and accepted ideas held by humans. Numbers can be taught and learned. Numbers gives us a sense of grounding because, when used the same way to describe certain aspects of reality, numbers are universal and objective. When you understand what I mean by 1, it becomes a universal and objective fact that 2 is the sum of adding another 1 to the existing 1.
Note that we begin with a definition and teach it the same way to everyone. Only then can you get universal agreement about numbers. Also note that you might get a different result if you use base 8 as opposed to base 10. (I’m not a mathmagician.)
The important takeaway is that numbers are not things. They are descriptions of things. Further, they are abstractions that describe the relation of things in a single aspect of reality. The correct use of numbers provides objective facts about reality. There are no exceptions. That is why we love numbers, and why there is nothing quite like numbers in the entire universe. We wish there were other descriptions of reality that are as useful. But there simply aren’t any.
Morality is the same kind of thing as a number, but it never produces an objective fact about the universe. It can only be a marker for how you feel about social events. A social event is anything one person does that affects another person or persons. Morality cannot tell you whether or not a social event was a good thing or a bad thing. It can only be a marker for how you feel about that social event. Again, morality does not describe social events. It only describes your feelings about social events. Because of that, morality can never be a definitive description of the event itself. It can never be objective. It can never be as useful as numbers. That is why we accept numbers but debate morality. By their very nature, numbers describe reality. Morality does not and cannot describe reality, only how we feel about social events.
Objective, subjective, and universality
Numbers are descriptions of certain kinds of relationships between two or more entities. If one inputs the right kind of query, the product of correctly manipulated numbers is the objective truth. To the extent that descriptions of things can be reduced to numbers, they can be objective. All of the properties of colors and brightness can be reduced to numbers. Knowing whether or not the light and color in one place is exactly the same as another, is a contention that can be expressed entirely in numbers. We can be mathematically certain about things like color and brightness. We don’t rely on our senses for that information because at their best, our senses are not calibrated for the problem.
Sound is another aspect of reality that can be objectively known and described. Sound that we can hear is a matter of Newtonian physics. I can precisely reproduce a certain set of sounds given the right instruments of measurement and sound production. What I reproduce would not be similar or close to the original. It would be precise. We can know that I did an exact reproduction, not because of your senses, but because of numbers. Sound is reproducible to a degree of mathematical certainty. It is a fact that resides in the world of the objective.
Feelings are always subjective. Morality is feelings. Therefore, morality is always subjective. Social events are objective Morality is not the language of social events. It is the language of how we feel about social events. Descriptions of social events are always incomplete. How we feel about any given social event is largely mediated by how thorough the description is of that event.
That man shot and killed that other man is a set of facts without context. By themselves, those facts are insufficient to trigger a grounded opinion about how we feel about that event. Context is the details that allow us to personally adjudicate the moral content of our feelings about that event.
No event is moral or immoral. To believe so is to make a category error. Let’s add some context: *That man killed a baby just for the personal entertainment value of the action.” Now, is it immoral? That’s a trick question. The answer is always no. There is no moral content in the action. The action is just a thing that happened in reality. It cannot be moral or immoral. That said, we can feel a certain way about it. We can even universally agree that the action was harmful, and therefore, immoral. We are agreeing about our feelings of the actions. We use the same word to describe our feelings about the action. In that way, it is immoral since morality describes how we feel about a social event.
It feels like an objective fact that it is wrong to torture and kill babies for fun. But that feeling is always subjective and never an objective fact about the social event. If everyone we encounter feels the same way about that event, then the feeling is mutual and even universal. But universality does not equal, or ever point to objectivity. The fact that we all agree that the sky is blue has nothing to do with whether or not the sky is actually blue. We might all be correct. But the fact that we are all correct still doesn’t make it objective. What makes it an objective fact is that it is true regardless of what we think about it. The color of the sky is exactly what it is even when there is no one to describe or observe it.
A social event is exactly what it is even when there is no one to describe or observe it. It has no inherent moral context. We add the moral context as a way to explain our feelings about that event. The moral content is not in the event, but in the eye of the observer.
A thing is not beautiful because of mathematical parsimony. Things have no aesthetic context. Beauty is a description of how we feel about that thing. A person can never be wrong about their emotional description of a thing. That is why there will always be disagreement about whether or not something is beautiful. Nothing can be beautiful or ugly because things don’t possess those traits. We assign those values based on our subjective aesthetic values.
Morality is the same as beauty. We all agree that killing babies for fun is horrible. That doesn’t make the event horrible. The event is just the event. And for the record, I believe that a social creature is fundamentally broken if they don’t find such an event repulsive every time.
Universality can be gained via negotiation if we do not already have it by some other means. Negotiation is the attempt to agree on a mutually good outcome. I might have one idea about how to achieve a goal. Another person sharing the same goal might prefer a different course of action. Where only one action can be done, negotiation is required.
We also negotiate feelings. There was a time when not everyone believed in the humane treatment of noncombatants in war. At some point, we realized that good outcomes were not being achieved by letting everyone do whatever they felt like at the time. As a group, we decided to codify feelings of disgust over the inhumane treatment of noncombatants. Not everyone agreed at first. Such things take time and negotiation. But now, most civilized people around the world believe we should codify war crimes as a category. Enough negotiation has been achieved such that in large enough numbers, we can agree.
Inhumane treatment of noncombatants is not immoral or moral. It is merely a social event that happens in reality. We don’t tend to like the outcome of such treatment. Enough of us now feel the same way about it such that we agree on the label of immoral, and now, illegal. That is the product of subjectivity and negotiation. It is not a fact about any event. It is a fact about what we think of such events.
Good, bad, righteousness, and sin/evil
Secularly, we can describe events as good or bad. These words describe how we feel about the events and their outcomes. In subjectivity, outcomes are always a consideration. Was giving out $600 stimulus checks good or bad? Without context, we can only speak philosophically. Even with a lot of context, the event can never be good or bad. It is only a matter of how we feel about it.
On a personal and selfish level, it was very good. However, I am not an economist. It could be that the event will prove to be the downfall of western civilization. In that case, it would be bad, very bad. Right now, none of us can say for sure. We need the perspective of history.
Definitionally, good and bad are descriptions of how we feel about social events. We are either describing the outcome of an event or predicting the outcome of an event. Should we do another round of stimulus checks? We can describe the outcome of the last one and try to predict the outcome of the next one. Even if we predict that it would bring about the downfall of western civilization, some might believe that to be a good thing. Therefore, it would be a good thing from their perspective. If the feelings on the subject are sufficiently unclear, we come together to make our case and negotiate. That is how society works. Social creatures cannot remain social creatures without negotiation.
Righteousness and evil are not the same as good and bad. They have a metaphysical connotation. It is the language of someone who believes that events have some inherent moral content the way electro-magnetism contain the nature of color. There is no “moralion" that infuses a thing with morality. But if you think that there is in some metaphysical way, you are likely a religionist or spiritualist who believes that events, in and of themselves, are morally one way or the other.
I don’t believe in good/righteousness and evil. I believe that things can have good and bad outcomes. When Christians and atheists talk about such things, this is one place where imprecision in language creates confusion. Atheists generally mean only one thing when assessing an outcome as good or bad. Christians have a dual meaning. They are sometimes using righteousness and evil the same way we mean good and bad. And other times, they have a second meaning of metaphysical, inherent goodness and badness.
They and I might describe a social event as good or evil. But when I say it, I am speaking of my feelings about the event with a full view of outcomes. I never mean that it is some inherent nature of goodness or badness. Almost always, the Christian means that a thing is inherently good or bad. We both might decide that a thing is bad/evil. We both might use those words. But there is always a difference in meaning because the Christian has metaphysical baggage attached to the words that can never be ignored.
Moral goals
My moral goal is the outcome I wish to achieve by social events. It is aspirational more than predictive. It is a statement of what we want to happen rather than what we think will happen. Sometimes, there is no way to know for sure what will happen. In the case of stimulus checks, some of the goals might have been short-term predictions. But since we need the perspective of history to really know the outcome, the goals were mostly aspirational. Morality generally lives in the aspirational zone.
Based on our goals and the nature of humans, some moral decisions are trivially easy. We want all people in a society to be as free as possible to pursue their own happiness when that happiness does not conflict with the common good. That is always aspirational because we can never be too sure of an outcome. Slavery around the world lasted for a very long time because enough people benefited from it that we could not clearly see the advantage of abolishing it. From the slaves perspective, it is better to be regarded as a good mule than to be regarded as nothing at all.
However, as a society, we eventually determined that the usefulness of slavery was outweighed by the benefit of a society where everyone is free. The maximum possible freedom produces better outcomes. Also, if some could be slaves, then anyone (including you) could be a slave. Since powerful people don’t want to be slaves, it is better to kill the system than to risk ending up on the wrong side of it. Even if your nation is overthrown, your risk of becoming a slave is much lower since everyone has abolished it.
Distress signals at sea are interesting to me because there is no direct benefit of one crew risking their lives to save another crew who fell upon bad circumstances. But mirror neurons are a bitch. The sea is a rough place that can overturn any set of fortunes. We would cry out for help, even to the enemy, because on the high seas, there is no one to see you pee your pants with terror. So when we encounter a distress signal, we stop what we are doing and help the helpless.
This all has to do with moral goals. What are we aspirationally trying to achieve? Social creatures are also practical creatures. The greater good might be expressed in metaphysical terms, but is usually practical. We want a system of safety nets sufficient to get us out of a jam if we find ourselves on the wrong side of a distress call. We have to be a part of that safety system if we want it to be in place when we need it. See how this is not so much noble as it is a practical goal that we can dress up as metaphysical? We don’t save sailers because of the universal dignity of mankind. We save them because all sailors are equally vulnerable, including us. Wrap whatever metaphysical BS around that fact as you like. You are not being moral as much as you are achieving a practical goal.
I suspect war crimes are the same way. Get rid of the spiritual bullshit and recognize that you, who are safe right now, could fall to a savvy enemy before this paragraph is completed. You don’t want your family to be treated the way your soldiers sometimes treat other families. We have all lost enough war to recognize the universal appeal of better treatment of people in war. It is not righteous. It is the meeting of a practical goal.
We hire referees to adjudicate the moment by moment happenings of a game. This is not for the morality of fairness. It is to make sure that the other team can’t get away with stuff that our team can’t get away with. The reason playgrounds are full of team play without referees is that both sides want to play the game with a sense of fairness. They self-regulate and call their own fouls. They are not being moral; they are meeting a goal to ensure gameplay is fun and repeatable. People who routinely violate the rules are not invited back to play. Even assholes will follow some rules because they are also social creatures who want to play the game.
There can be no morality without an underlying set of goals as a way of adjudicating whether or not the aspirational outcomes are being met. Any morality not based on a set of clearly-defined, human-centric goals will be a liability rather than a benefit. When morality comes up, always determine the goals. When moral goals are aligned, it is possible for people to agree on the means to reach those goals, and a way to self-regulate and recalibrate the methods.
Moral values
A value is the description of a moral aspiration. We want to be good employees. There are many things necessary for being a good employee. Being on time is one of those necessary things. We notice that few people who are routinely late for work get to remain as an employee. So we decide that punctuality is a value worth having. We value punctuality.
Note that there is nothing inherently good about punctuality because nothing contains inherent goodness or badness. There are practical reasons why we deem some things values and others not. When arriving at a certain kind of party, there is an even greater value of being unpunctual. Concerts never start on time on purpose. Punctuality is not inherently good. We can value somethings in some situations and discard those values in other situations. That is how it should work.
Religion tries to shortcut the work of moral calculus by simply declaring that some things are good and other things are bad — that some values are good and others are bad. But trying to apply values in this universal manner creates more problems than it could ever solve.
Lying is bad and honesty is good, except when it isn’t. It is good to lie to save a life if your goal, at any given moment, is to save lives. Honest game play is good so that the game can be enjoyed by all, unless you are playing poker or liar’s dice where dishonesty, deception, and deceit is the order of the day. In many cases, telling the truth leads to horrible outcomes. It can never be universally good. It is merely an option that can result in positive or negative results. Things do not have inherent moral values. A moral value is just the way we describe our moral aspirations and nothing more.
Moral oughts
If a value is an expression of aspiration, then an ought is the necessary procedure for achieving that aspiration. If we want to be a punctual employee, then getting out of bed on time becomes a moral ought. If we want a system of rescue by strangers on the high seas, then answering a distress call is a moral ought. All moral oughts are tied to moral goals and moral values. A moral value is simply the codification of a moral goal.
There is no ought without a goal. We cannot be good for goodness sake. We are good for the sake of achieving a moral goal. The goal might be to make sure we are seen as being a good person by others. To achieve that, we must do good things in the most visible way possible. If the goal is to be seen as good by ourselves, then it is not necessary to do good that others can see. But it is still necessary to do acts we deem as good.
No one has a moral ought to save a drowning kid in a pool apart from a moral goal. We might have a legal ought. But there is nothing metaphysical about it. Most of us will save a drowning kid, especially if we have kids. We want the distress calls of our kids to be answered, even by opposing tribes. So we all engage in rescuing drowning kids. That is why we pay for lifeguards at public pools. Even without kids, rescuing a drowning kid makes us a hero in the public eye and also in our own eye. No one ought to save a drowning kid. But there are plenty of moral goals aligned with doing so.
Conclusion: Because of the kind of creature we are
At bottom, our expressions of morality, values, and oughts come down to the kind of creature we are. A lion does not hold all values common with humans because of the kind of creature it is. Our values differ due to the kinds of creatures we are. Monkeys are social creatures that were here before us. We are closely related to them. We share many moral instincts. But where different, it is due to the kind of creatures we are. There is nothing metaphysical about it.
If kissing was necessary for a particular lifeform, you can be assured that there would be many moral values and oughts about kissing. They would do it all the time. Kissing a stranger would not be illegal. You might even be rewarded for kissing people against their will because you were helping them live. Those rules would not be wrong. They would be right because of the kind of creature such people would be.
What if humans had developed differently? Then we would most certainly have different moral insights. We know that because as we have matured via social evolution, we have become different kinds of people, so much so that our ancestors would probably not recognize us as being the same as them. Our morals change even as individuals. Moral values as a child are different than the ones we have as young adults, middle-aged, established adults, and mature adults nearer to the end of our lives. Our morals shift as a result of the kind of creatures we are at any given stage of our development.
Constitutions are largely based on negotiated moral instincts. Constitutions change. They must change to reflect the kind of creature we are right now, and aspirationally, what kind of creature we wish to become. Are there creatures who view rape as okay? Absolutely! That could have been us. So what? Those creatures are acting out what they are. We have what seems like the unique ability to desire to be different from what we are. That is a powerful evolutionary achievement that is not always an advantage.
We can imagine being better than we are — a different kind of creature. Religionists live in this space. They want to be other than what they perceive themselves to be. In some ways, that cannot be achieved without reshaping everyone into that better kind of person. They are always correcting for what they want to be and failing to recognize what they really are. Their mores are largely based on their aspirational fantasies.
It is hard for two people to agree on anything concerning morals when one acts on the basis of the kind of creature we are while the other acts on the basis of the kind of creature they fantasize we can be. In one reality, homosexuality is just human nature with no particular harm to what we are as human societies. The other sees it as a manifestation of what is wrong and an impediment to achieving the aspirational goal of what we want to be. This bifurcation is how we get wars.
There is much more to be defined. This will have to do for now. Coming up in week 2, the moral argument unpacked. See you then.
David Johnson
4S and friends: Evidential
Dale and I kick it old-school and do a marathon show. the usual suspects were in the peanut gallery causing their usual chaos in the comments. It was a great show. Expect more like this in the future. What follows is Dale’s writeup and then mine. Enjoy:
Dale's case: Christianity & Evidentialism and the Making of Apparent Strange Bedfellows
Dale’s Claims (I have the Burden of Proof): (1) Evidentialism is the proper Epistemological standard for belief & (2) Christianity (as per Jesus and the “12”) endorsed Evidentialism (esp. specifically with respect to Jesus’ Resurrection).
The Atheist host of the Skeptics and Seekers Podcast, David Johnson, has recently responded to my show on the Ultimate Resurrection Panel, celebrating the legacy and research of my friend Dr. Gary Habermas (see his comment here = http://disq.us/p/32xctfs).
Gary Habermas is famous for arguing his “Minimal Facts” case for Jesus’ Resurrection as a provable fact of history using secular history’s own standards. In his online book, The Uniqueness of Jesus Christ among the Major World Religions (free here = https://garyhabermas.com/Evidence2/Habermas-Uniqueness-of-Jesus-Christ-2016.pdf ), Gary goes into exquisite detail showing that of all of the other major world religions, only Christianity provides the Evidentialist with what they want most, evidence proving that the essential claims of the religion are in fact true!
But David Johnson sees this whole enterprise as a fools errand, he says, “Evidentialists like Gary have walked away from the [Biblically prescribed] path [to faith] and chosen a more secular approach”. Worse yet, David accuses Christian Evidentialists of degrading the Gospel message itself, he says; “They [Christian Evidentialists] want to seal the deal with evidence. And in trying to do so, they unknowingly mock the simple presentation of the word of god to the receptive heart”.
Is this true? I, myself, am a Christian Evidentialist and I came to faith in Christ solely on the basis of the evidence. If Christianity and Evidentialism are truly the strange bedfellows that David makes them out to be, then I want to know about it! Seems to me the first step toward figuring this out is to understand what exactly an “Evidentialist” is before then querying what Scripture has to say about it.
What is Evidentialism?
In the words of famous Evidentialist philosopher, Dr. Kevin McCain;
“Evidentialism is the view that facts about what a person is justified (or rational, or reasonable) in believing supervene upon facts about the evidence he/she has. More specifically, Evidentialism says that the evidence that a person possesses at a given time determines the doxastic attitude(s) that are justit person has. More specifically, Evidentialism says that the evidence that a person possesses at a given time determines the doxastic attitude(s) that are justified for her to adopt toward any proposition at that time” (p.1-2 of his paper on my Blog).
A simpler way to put it, is how I teach my own first year University students in their Logic and Critical Thinking class, namely that one’s individual credence level is in accordance with the principle of proportional belief. This principle states, as David Hume once put it, that one ought to apportion their level of belief/credence to fit the degree of evidence one is privy to at the time for the truth of that belief (Play Klaas Kraay clip in show).
But what qualifies as evidence? World-renown philosopher and logician, Dr. Robert Audi, defines evidence as “a sign or indication of something that helps us determine what is true” (See his The Architecture of Reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality paper on my Blog). He goes on to list the 4 main sources of evidence: i) Perceptions, ii) Memory, iii) Introspection and iv) Reason and although there is some debate among philosophers, I would also include testimony itself as a 5th main source of evidence which actually generates rather merely transmits knowledge (see the debate between Testimonial Reductionism and Testimonial Anti-Reductionism positions in the Epistemology of Testimony papers on my Blog and/or later in this write up).
In general, Atheists and religious skeptics, love to pay lip service to Evidentialism but they want to deny the Christian/religious adherent of the right to appeal to such. I remember many comments from skeptics online (including from David J. himself) when Dr. William Lane Craig seemingly stuck his foot in his mouth by he seemingly put the evidence aside and claimed;
“When I first heard the message of the gospel as a non-Christian high school student that my sins could be forgiven by God and that God loved me and that I could come to know him and experience eternal life with God, I thought to myself and I'm not kidding, I thought if there is just one chance in a million that this is true, then it's worth believing and so my attitude toward this is… far from raising the bar or the epistemic standard that Christianity must meet to be believed I lower it”. See YouTube video = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4wb3KoBc8A
Fundy lay skeptical sneering aside, Dr. Craig is hardly the silly roob that online Atheists and skeptics made him out to be when he said this, no Dr. Craig, like many brilliant philosophers and experts, simply holds to a Pragmatic Encroachment rather than Evidentialist theory in Epistemology. In his own words, he explains;
“In order to understand my answer one needs to distinguish between pragmatic justification and epistemic justification. Epistemic justification seeks truth-directed reasons for some belief. That is to say, it seeks reasons to think that the belief is true. By contrast pragmatic justification seeks for non-truth-directed reasons for some belief. This is usually done in terms of a pragmatic/practical cost/benefit analysis… Sometimes one can be pragmatically justified in holding a belief even though one is not epistemically justified in holding that belief.” = https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/raising-and-lowering-the-epistemic-bar
This is the same epistemic theory that stands behind the notion of Pascal’s Wager for Christianity. And there are other theories that claim that evidence is an insufficient factor when considering what one ought to believe vs. not (for example, see Moral Encroachment theory in the papers on my Blog). Funnily enough, it is more often than not, fundy lay Atheists and skeptics, who like to dabble in Pragmatic and/or Moral Encroachment theories much more so than Christians when confronted with the evidence for Christianity! David Johnson, in particular, has advocated for raising the epistemic bar at times based on the moral implications of God’s Judgement and Hell and/or based on various pragmatic considerations as a way to argue that almost no amount of evidence would be sufficient prove to him that the Christian God is real, it would have be proven beyond all reasonable doubt before he’d even consider considering whether it might be true or not based on the evidence!
So, ought we employ Evidentialism or is another epistemic theory, like Pragmatic and/or Moral Encroachment theory, to be preferred?
Just the Evidence Ma’am
Evidentialism, everyone admits, is the common sense position that has been held to since the dawn of civilization, by Christians and non-Christians, even the goddless David Hume advocated for it! Evidence is inherently truth-indicative and since belief entails that one thinks a given proposition is in fact true, one will want to base their belief only on things which indicate such are true instead of other factors which are aimed at truth or producing true beliefs.
Neither pragmatic nor moral considerations are inherently truth-indicators and in many cases there are counter-examples to such considerations which contradict the truth such as telling your wife she looks beautiful instead of horrid in their new dress for survival purposes or hiring an underqualified person as the “best candidate” for the job because of their race to morally virtue signal (affirmative action).
Great, now that that is cleared up, what is the Bible’s take on Evidentialism, does it support such a view? You bet ya it does!
Christian Evidentialism & the Biblical Resurrection of Jesus
Having read David Johnson’s comments, I think he would actually agree with me that the Bible does indeed support an Evidentialist perspective as there are countless verses in the NT saying that Jesus’ Resurrection served as evidential proof of Jesus and the Gospel Message. Paul himself, says that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, then the Christian faith as a whole is worth nothing more than the manure that Biff Tannen drove into (actually that manure had some worth, it was worth about $300 damage to Biff’s car, so Christian faith would be worth less than that as it would be literally worthless in such circumstances). Thus, according to Paul, the Resurrection of Jesus served as evidence that their beliefs were true and if the Resurrection didn’t happen, then that would falsify their beliefs as being untrue.
But David, knows this full well and so he quickly dismisses most of the NT as being relevant by saying, “Paul is the one who repurposed the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus. But the Jewish followers of Jesus remained Jews”. OK, for the skeptic’s sake, let’s just focus in on Jesus and “the 12” specifically, can we demonstrate that they were Evidentialists with respect to Jesus’ Resurrection? Did they think that treating the Resurrection of Jesus as evidence for the Gospel was wrong in some way?
No, in fact, looking at the Bible, we can see there is an explicit concern for belief in the one true God and for Jews LIKE Jesus and His “12 disciples” to follow truth and to be truthful, so they care that what they believe is true; they are truth-oriented in principle so to speak. On what basis do Jesus and the 12 disciples believe the truth, well in terms of the 5 sources of evidence, it appears that they utilize all of them in one way or another to help them adjudicate what is true vs. what is false.
i) Perceptions- Jesus appeared to various people after His death and Resurrection in multi-modal sensory ways- visual, audible, tactile, to prove His claims were true. John 20:30-31 says; And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.
ii) Memory- There are ample proof of memorization of oral Jesus’ teachings and events surrounding His death and Resurrection preserved in the New Testament. All scholars agree that memory was used by the earliest followers of Jesus and used as evidence for the truth about Jesus and His Resurrection. The 1 Corinthians 15 creed is proof enough of this much!
iii) Introspection- The earliest Christians knew that the God of Israel, Yahweh, existed and that Jesus’ Gospel message was true through direct introspection of the inner witness of the Holy Spirit which dwelt in every single one of them and testified to the truth and guided them into all essential Spiritual truths about Jesus. See John 15:26 saying “But when the Helper/Holy Spirit comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.”
iv) Reason- The Bereans reasoned from the Scriptures logically to assess if what Paul taught about Jesus’ Gospel was true or not. Acts 17:11 says “Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” Jesus likewise reasoned from the OT Scriptures to make points during His ministry and teach people the truth about Him and the good news of the Kingdom of God.
v) Testimony- Once again, the Holy Spirit testified to early Christian’s Spirits, but also ordinary testimony was also used by the early followers of Christ. John 21:24 saying “This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true.”.
Looks to me to be conclusive, both Jesus and the “12 disciples” utilized various sources of evidence to establish and then demonstrate publicly that their beliefs were true. Sounds to me like Jesus and His disciples were definitely Evidentialists!!!
BUT, David Johnson objects to this line of reasoning and cites the Doubting Thomas incident to prove his point;
“Wearing my theology hat, I still believe that is correct and that the evidential enterprise is fundamentally flawed. I believe that the search for hard evidence stands in defiance of the kind of faith Jesus wanted, if John is to be believed. He rebuked Thomas for wanting that kind of faith and then turned to the camera with a wink, saying blessed are those who believe without seeing (evidence) as opposed to you who required it… Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God”?
It’s true, Jesus did indeed say “blessed are those who don't see and yet believe" following the Doubting Thomas episode in the Gospel of John 20:29, but where is the rebuke? I don’t see Jesus’ shaming or scolding Thomas and telling him that he and his eyeballs are of the devil in the same way He did to Peter during His ministry that one time! There is no condemnation or admonishment given to Thomas saying that employing empirical visual evidence itself is somehow contrary to the Gospel message and/or against proper faith in anyway. After all, Jesus fulfilled Thomas’ evidential demands and appeared before him, I don’t think a sinless Jesus would have done that if providing such evidence was a sin or hindered Thomas being born again or left him spiritually deficient in someway.
But what is Jesus saying here, in what way are those who haven’t seen and yet believe “blessed”? What does Paul mean that faith comes from hearing the Word of God?
Well, firstly, we know that Jesus and the Apostles constantly provided empirical proofs via miracles for during Jesus’ ministry and then again after Jesus’ Resurrection. Jesus appeared to all the other Apostles, to the women, to the 500, to Paul- he gave empirical evidence to all these people so that they would believe in the Gospel message. Do you honestly think that Jesus means to say that I am spiritually superior to Peter, Paul and John or the others simply because I didn’t see Jesus’ risen body physically, does that lack of visual confirmation with my own eyeballs really have any bearing on my spiritual status? Is this meant to imply that any and all demands for sufficient evidence of any kind is antithetical to proper faith via hearing the Word of God?
No, of course not. The point Jesus is making is perfectly clear here. The early disciples had already received and heard the Word of God, literally in the flesh for 3 years and they were privy to the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost which testified to their spirits about the truth of the Gospel message. It is the Holy Spirit’s testimonial evidence authenticating the Word of God/Gospel message when heard (or today read), known to all true Christians via direct introspection (both sources of evidence), which serves as the required sufficient evidence for the proper faith in Jesus. Sometimes, we are so sinful and hard of heart, that our lack of receptiveness to the Spirit’s testimony means we need some more objective forms of evidence to help open our spirits to the Holy Spirit and push us over the edge toward faith.
So, Jesus is merely saying blessed are those who don’t need that extra objective help, blessed are those whose hearts are already sufficiently soft and receptive to the Holy Spirit that upon hearing the Word of God and the Gospel, they believe in the evidence of the Holy Spirit’s testimony alone and get to work to serve the Kingdom right away.
David's case: Evidential
Positive claim:
Evidentialism is not a biblical prescription for making converts.
Evidentialism denies the power of the simple presentation of the gospel to save.
Evidentialism is ultimately self-defeating and is most effective for bolstering the faith of believers who need something more than faith.
Gary Habermas has completed his life’s work in book form. Despite his long and influential career as a Christian apologist, he will be known for his four-volume work on the resurrection. I am proud of him for his hard labor of love and also a little sad because I truly feel it is completely misguided.
You see, Gary is an evidential apologist. He specializes in providing hard evidence for the truth claims of Christianity: the resurrection in particular. That is all the more unfortunate since there simply is no such hard evidence, nor can there be. If the gospels are to be believed, the evidential door was bolted shut the moment Jesus left the scene.
Jesus rebuked Thomas for needing to see hard evidence. But because it was needed, he gave Thomas the hard evidence he required. John has him say that blessed are those who believe without seeing. That is because he knew there would be no more seeing. In this context, to see is to view hard evidence of his resurrection. John knew that faith would be the only looking glass available to future believers.
But along comes the evidentialist who insists that John spoke too soon and we do have evidence. One wonders what could spark this sudden interest in apologists to pedal evidence over faith? Also, is that really what is going on? I will leave it to the reader to decide. I will try to lay out my case for why evidentialism is misguided, but also explain what I think is at the heart of the movement. Here we go:
When faith is not enough
The biggest problem with the evidential movement (besides the fact that there is no evidence) is that faith is not enough. They have been lured away from their profession of faith by the siren song of evidence. It is not just their atheist interlocutors demanding evidence. It is other Christians.
I believe the problem runs much deeper than that and Gary is a prime example. By his own testimony, he had reached a crisis of faith that left him cold. He focused on the problem of resurrection and determined, like Paul, that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then the faith was untrue and Christians were to be most pitied.
Understand that at this point, Habermas was not only a Christian, but a graduate student. At that point, he already knew more about Christianity than the vast majority of people who would ever live. It simply wasn’t enough. His ability to take it on faith was insufficient to propel him further in his religious vocation. Without convincing evidence that the resurrection was true, he was done as a Christian.
I think a lot of believers reach the end of their race prematurely because their are thirsty after running for so long and so hard. They don’t need platitudes and well-meaning encouragement. They need water. In this metaphor, water is evidence. And they are bone dry. I believe that Gary was at that point. And just before expiring from dehydration, he saw a mirage in the distance and went for it with all he had.
Unfortunately, Jesus wasn’t a big fan of evidence, at least not when it mattered the most. When one group demanded evidence, he called them a wicked and adulterous generation for their troubles. On another occasion, he wasn’t able to do many miracles due to their lack of faith. This is one of the most damning passages in the gospels. Since when does god need you to believe he can do miracles before he can actually do miracles? It suggests that the magic of Jesus was mostly based on the power of persuasion rather than actual demonstrations of power.
Gary, like a lot of Christians, came to the end of what faith could do for them. So before completely jumping ship, they decided to try and find something that could pass for evidence, exactly the thing Jesus warned against.
Demand and supply
Apologists were also facing another front in the war against faith. They had to deal with a new kind of atheist who wasn’t afraid to call out the naked emperor in the room. The internet served to amplify those calls and also amplify the fact that there were not any answers for those calls.
Christian apologists had gotten away with bad arguments featuring question-begging, philosophy gamesmanship, sophistry, and presuppositionalism for ages. Atheists were more polite and fewer in number. The naked emperor could prance around freely and seldom be called out. Today, none of those rhetorical tricks are allowed to stand and the call to prove it has never been louder. Apologetics had to adopt or die.
Apologists started fighting back with something they called evidence, not just faith. The problem is that the new evidence was just a redress of the same old tricks with extra glitter. The “evidence” was as easily dismissed as everything that came before it. Here is a look at some of what people like Gary have presented as evidence to meet the growing demand:
Empty tomb
There is no empty tomb. Just ask any believer where this tomb is located and they will give you a blank stare. It is a thing taken on faith and not based on anything concrete. There is not, nor has there ever been an empty tomb to examine except in bible stories. But the situation is more damning than that.
No biblical narrative ever provides an account of anyone using an empty tomb as a way of proving that Jesus rose. Remember, the gospels were much later than the writings of Paul. Not once does Paul try to convince anyone that Jesus rose because of the empty tomb. He used made up eyewitnesses as evidence, but never an empty tomb.
Jesus never took his followers on a tour of the empty tomb. That might have been a powerful tool. But Jesus never mentions the tomb (or a shroud). When Peter preached the first sermon of the Christian age, he never tried to persuade on the basis of an empty tomb. It just wasn’t a thing.
Perhaps they knew that just pointing out an empty tomb would have proved nothing. There are plenty of empty tombs. What one has to prove is that there was a dead person in the tomb who became not so dead and left it empty after being occupied. This simply cannot be proven.
The first person who supposedly saw the empty tomb was a woman (not mentioned by Paul) who demanded to know where they had moved the body. Even seeing the empty tomb did not convince her that Jesus had risen. I can’t imagine why it should convince anyone today.
Witnesses
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul gives a list of witnesses of the resurrected Jesus. However, the writers of the gospels sharply disagreed with the list. It is important to note that Paul gave the list as an ordered and exhaustive list. He starts with the first, then the next, and the next, etc. Then, he gets to a “finally”.
There are many places to question the list. But we could stop at the first witness. It is wrong if the gospels are to be believed. The women were all over the gospels and nowhere to be found on Paul’s list. One cannot excuse this major oversight.
But the most fantastical of the witnesses were a mysterious group of 500 who saw Jesus at once. This development was completely missed by the gospel writers. No such appearance is even hinted at. I stand firmly on the ground that Paul made it up just as preachers do today. There was no 500. We simply have no reason to trust any account of witnesses.
We don’t have any account from Peter. We have a writing from Luke the fabulist. Paul and the gospel writers disagree. The witnesses are nothing more than plot devices and con artist rhetoric. Inventing witnesses is easy. I did many miraculous deeds and saved many during the event of 9/11. 5,000 people witnessed it. Many of them are alive today. Now, do you believe? You would immediately start asking questions like, who were these people? What were the names? Name even one of them? Did anyone write about it? You know, all the questions that no Christian asks of Paul’s 500. We have no witnesses, only stories of witnesses.
Martyrdom
You have heard it said that no one dies for something they know to be a lie. But this is not evidence of anything. We have no real evidence that any of the disciples were killed for what they claimed to be true, and only church tradition for a couple of them. There is no tradition that any had a chance to recant. There is reasonable criteria for what counts as martyrdom that Christians don’t tend to demand.
The bigger issue with the martyrdom argument (besides the lack of evidence for it) is the argument depends on an accurate reading of human nature and what people wouldn’t do. What we know about people is that they can convince themselves of the truth of anything if properly motivated. So it could be that some were convinced of their own story.
In sales, you must first sell yourself on the product. If you tell the story enough times, you start to actually believe your own BS. Once you have sold yourself on it, you can make bank selling it to others. At that point, the pitch is truly authentic. And authenticity sells. When you believe it, you can make others believe it. That doesn’t make any of it true.
Moreover, the argument from human nature works against the Christian. The apostles had not only watched Jesus do the impossible, they were also routinely doing the impossible. So human nature suggests that they wouldn’t abandon Jesus like they did. Not one of them remembered they could raise the dead. Not one of them tried. Not one of them decided to hang around the burial site just to see if anything would happen. That defies human nature. For the Christian, the argument from human nature is a total bust.
Minimal and maximal facts
It doesn’t matter if you are a fan of the minimal facts approach or the maximal facts approach. Neither proves the resurrection actually took place. Gary tries to collate and used agreed upon facts as taken from scholars in relevant fields. This is problematic for too many reasons to go into in this writeup.
The biggest problem is the cherry-picking. What Gary forgets to mention is that these facts do not convince these scholars to convert to Christianity. The minimal facts are too minimal to have any persuasive effect. Gary picks the facts that agree with his thesis. But then throws the same scholars under the bus when they do not validate his conclusions. No agnostic or atheist scholar believes that Jesus rose from the dead. And dead is where the minimal facts approach remains.
The wrong proof for the wrong thing
If a Christian could obtain real evidence for just one biblical claim, what should it be? I argue that your one wish for proof is wasted on resurrection. That is because resurrection was a lot less important than you might think. Bible times were dark times of superstition and misinformation about how the world really works. That might explain why the Bible is lousy with stories of resurrections.
Doing a bit of Googling, the blind were healed three times in the Bible. Leprosy was healed but I found no count. It wasn’t many. Though there was one time when ten were healed all at once. But there were 9 or 10 (depending on how you count them) resurrections in the Bible. It was the most common of the miracles and it was done by far more people than any other miracle. On one occasion, resurrection happened quite by accident. It was never played up as the big miracle that proved anything, let alone, everything.
Yet today, Christians like Gary believe that resurrection is the one thing that has to be proven. They don’t even care about all resurrections. All other biblical resurrections can be myth and fantasy. They only care about the one resurrection that proves Christianity, as if Christianity comes down to the good fortune of one man rather than the teachings that came directly from that man. They believe that if they can prove the resurrection of Jesus, they can validate the teachings of Paul. It simply doesn’t work that way.
Jesus never presented the message that his resurrection would prove that he was the son of god. Supposedly, that was known even before Peter’s confession. All of that was before the resurrection. Jesus didn’t need the resurrection to prove that he had authority. He was already considered an authoritative teacher.
Consider the fact that even in the stories, he died before a multitude but post-resurrection, showed himself to a relative few. And most of those few were already believers. He didn’t use his resurrection to prove to the world that he was legit. Were that his goal, he would have shown up at the Sanhedrin. He would have been the one to give the sermon on Pentecost instead of just the sermon on the mount. Jesus wasn’t trying to prove anything with his resurrection. And indeed, nothing was proven by it.
Conclusion: The failure of evidence
I contend that the more Christians attempt to present evidence that isn’t there, the worse things get for them. When the emperor tries to prove the magnificence of his non-existent attire, the more blinding is his full, frontal insanity.
But let’s imagine that all this evidence was present in the first century. What was the result of it in the lives of the people with the most access to it? The disciples lived the dream. Yet they didn’t believe. Jesus returned to them and they still didn’t believe, until they did. Paul was a murderous prosecutor who specialized in Christianity. He would have had access to all the evidence. Not a single bit of it was convincing to him. This all happened in the land of the Jews. The vast majority of them were unconvinced. The historians of the day such as Josephus were not convinced. They did not become Christians after their exhaustive research.
If the freshest evidence that could ever exist failed to convince the people of the day who had the greatest access to it, why on earth should it convince anyone today?
If Jesus wanted his resurrection to convince people to follow him, there are endless possibilities with regard to actual evidence he could have left, including the evidence of him sticking around to this day. But that is the point when these same Christians say that Jesus didn’t want to leave evidence lest we somehow lose our free will to choose. They can hang on to one of those arguments, but not both. Either he left convincing evidence or he refused to leave convincing evidence. Choose one.
I, for one, remain in the category of the unconvinced after carefully researching and reviewing the “evidence”. It has been weighed in the balance of my rational mind and found wanting. If I could have evidence for only one thing, it would not be evidence for the one resurrection. It would be evidence that god exists and that sins can and have been forgiven. Alas, for such things, we are left with the same inadequate faith that led Gary and the rest on an even more futile search for evidence in the first place.
And that’s the view from the skeptic.
David Johnson
4S: In transition
We speak to Lauren Blighton about the realities of being trans, trans activism, sports, and more.
In part 2, we talk about life, reduction to a one-dimensional existence, politics, and more. Enjoy.
4S: The Cross
The Cross
This is the beginning of a series focused on the cross. The series might be a single writeup and a single podcast discussed over time. In the comments, I will drop in a number of shows and lectures done by other people for discussion. Going forward, I will view my role in a series as a conversation starter, not the sole provider of content.
Beyond that, I have mentioned before that I want to place more of a focus on deconstruction. It is no longer just about my deconstruction. I am feeling more missional and want to be a resource for other people on the verge of their own deconstruction journey. I am no longer just deconstructing out loud; I am actively calling on others to do the same. In Christianity, the exit door is already wider than the entrance. Let’s bust it open completely.
This slightly new flavor of the cite begins with the cross. This is the focal point of modern Christianity. So it is a good place to start for anyone at the beginning of their exodus. It starts with death and dying. It cannot be avoided. With that in mind, here we go:
Born dead
Original sin means we are all born dead. Note that there are many variations of Christian belief. So if something I say doesn’t fit with your idea of Christianity, it does not mean I am misrepresenting Christianity. With that said, one of the most dominant interpretations of the doctrine of original sin is that we are all spiritually and otherwise metaphysically stillborn.
Sin is the matrix of our reality. The first humans had a neutral nature with regard to good and evil, and chose evil. That resulted in all humans having a sin nature rather than a neutral one. So for a certain kind of Christian, the real beginning of the human story is that we are dead. How we became dead takes up very little space in their imagination. The only thing that really matters is that humans are evil by choice and are without excuse. As for the rest, shut up!
So it is that their story starts with the death of Jesus. I really don’t believe Christians care much about the birth and life of Jesus. Sure, there are some fun bits in there such as the virgin birth they feel obligated to believe. But it is not really central to anything important. Sure, they care about the teachings of Jesus. But even that doesn’t really gain any meaning prior to the death. For anything that Jesus said to matter, he first had to die. But why did he have to say anything? Why did he have to die at all?
Necessity of the cross
I believe the vast majority of Christians believe that there can be no Christianity without the cross. The whole point of the cross is resurrection, which you can’t have without a death. The teachings of Jesus would be the mere ramblings of a mad man had he lived out a normal life. The Christian story only works in light of the cross.
Partially, it is due to the stillborn nature of all humans. We are spiritually dead. As with a physically dead person, we cannot do anything about our situation. Someone has to come along and breathe new life into us. The fact that we’re dead, and that we cannot do anything to save ourselves is the bad news. We have to start with the bad news. If people think they can come to Jesus without a sober understanding of their own sinfulness and helplessness in the sight of god, I’m told that they can never actually experience regeneration. Only the knowingly broken are fit for repair.
Once we are sufficiently convinced of the bad news, we move on to the good news. And the good news is that Jesus died for your sins. See how the good news starts with a death? Few really put much energy behind the question of why death was a necessary component of the good news. The answer starts with this:
Now when a will is involved, it is obligatory to prove the death of the one who made it. For a will takes effect only at death, since it has no force while the one who made it is still alive. He. 9:16-17
It seems salvation is a part of a last will and testament. The thing that activates a will is the death of the person who made it. You literally can’t inherit the promises unless god dies. What a terrible framing. None of this was necessary. And this explanation gets more convoluted as it develops:
Hence, not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. For when all the commandments of the Law had been proclaimed by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, together with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God has commanded you to observe.”
All of this is leading to the death of Jesus. He is saying that blood sacrifice has always been a part of the equation. This was wrapped up in a ritual where the leader sprinkled the book of the law and all the people with this blood. They were literally splashed with it. That’s not cult behavior at all, right? Not even the old covenant could work without something bleeding and dying. At risk of repeating myself, the old covenant didn’t work without blood.
And in the same way, he sprinkled with blood both the tabernacle and all the liturgical vessels. Indeed, under the Law almost everything is purified by blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.
Here, we get the second reason for the blood fest. without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. God literally cannot forgive you of any infraction, even the most minor, without something or someone dying. Did you disobey your parents that time when you were 12? Someone’s got to die. That is who this god is, and who he has always been.
Therefore, it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves required still greater sacrifices.
We could get lost in this very weird theology about copies of heavenly things and the real things. For now, we can summarize it this way: If it took blood to purify and forgive those copies, the real thing is going to take something even more.
For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, so that he now appears in the presence of God on our behalf.Nor was it his purpose to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters into the sanctuary year after year with the blood that is not his own. For then he would have had to suffer over and over again since the creation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once and for all at the end of the ages to abolish sin by sacrificing himself.
Make no mistake about it: This is substitutionary atonement writ large. The only two differences are as follows:
Jesus only had to die once instead of once every year.
This is a human sacrifice instead of an animal sacrifice.
As a sidenote, if eternal conscious torment is true, he expects us to suffer continuously forever for our sins. But to pay for our sins as a substitute, he gets a single bad weekend. To an eternal being, that has to be less than a millisecond of inconvenience. He had no intention of doing the kind of sacrifice where he had to die continuously and suffer like we will have to. Justice, am I right?
And just as human beings are destined to die but once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to take away the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to bring salvation to those who are eagerly waiting for him.
Here again, Jesus was human sacrificed for the purpose of taking away sins. In this theology stretching back to ancient Judaism, you cannot be forgiven without the death of something. In our case, it is the death of an innocent person on a cross. That is why the cross is central to Christianity.
Resurrection?
This long passage only vaguely hints at resurrection. He will appear a second time to bring salvation. One wonders what Christians are really about. Is it that they are so grateful to have their sins forgiven? Or is it that they are so eager to get the prize of living forever? These are very different things.
How many Christians would still be Christians if all they got out of the deal was the satisfaction that they were able to have their sins wiped away and that’s all? In this scenario, there would be no promise of a better life here, no special favors, no heaven, no eternal life, no cosmic rescue of any kind, just death. Would that be enough for Christians. Is that what they celebrate?
Resurrection is the promise of something other than forgiveness. Christians aren’t looking forward to forgiveness of sins: Supposedly, they got that when Jesus died. What they are looking forward to are all the eternal prizes they stand to get. That is the promise of resurrection. If Jesus was raised to eternal life, then we will also be raised to eternal life. He is merely the first fruits of the resurrection. But keep this point in view: resurrection does not secure forgiveness. It is the promise of future reward. Jesus’ death is the only thing that secures forgiveness, not his resurrection.
Jesus didn’t have to be raised at all even if he did have to die. God didn’t need Jesus to rule over the kingdom. God could handle it. Or he could hand it over to Bob. Jesus is not required for god to continue his kingdom. God could have even given all the faithful the gift of resurrection without Jesus. After all, Jesus is the substitute. No one expects the substitute to rise from the dead. If they took your place, they have to take all of it, including dying and staying dead. So god could have forgiven you and raised you on just the death of Jesus and the faith of the believer. Resurrection is an unnecessary third wheel. Again, this is why the symbol is the death. The story can’t be told without it.
Too holy for sin
There is one other reason the cross is necessary. Nothing about the cross is intuitive. Why does god require blood to forgive? If blood, why the torment of the cross? There was no option for death in a quick and painless way. Jesus could have simply died of old age and that could have been the perfect death that follows the perfect life. But that wasn’t an option on the table.
The reason it had to be the cross is that god is too holy for sin. If you only knew how holy god really was, you would understand what an unthinkable offense sin is to god. Heavens forfend! God practically gets the vapors at the very thought of sin. He cannot stand to be in its presence. The punishment has to fit the crime.
All crimes agains god (which is all sin) are capital offenses. Heck, even death isn’t enough. Remember that piece of candy you stole when you were six? Of course you deserve to die. God showed immeasurable love and restraint when allowing you to live to six and a half. From the time you were born, you disgust god. He owes you nothing but the hottest hell.
The only death that can cover it is the death of a perfect man who was also god. And the death had to be really bad. When you understand how bad sin is to god, you will no longer ask why god requires something as terrible as the cross. You will, instead, ask how something as terrible as the cross could possibly be enough to forgive a wretch like you. That’s real Christianity. And that’s why it all hinges on the cross.
Conclusion: Put down your cross
Consider this the alter call.
There is an old hymn that asks:
Must Jesus bear the cross alone and all the world go free? No, there’s a cross for everyone and there’s a cross for me.
As a condition of discipleship, Jesus said the following:
Then he said to all who were with him, “Anyone who wishes to follow me must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.
Paul added this idea:
Therefore, brethren, I implore you by the mercies of God to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice that is holy and acceptable to God—a spiritual act of worship.
I’m sad to inform you that the human sacrificing is not over. Jesus might have died only once. But you have to die daily. Jesus carried his cross part of the way. You have to carry yours all the way, faithful to death. Jesus does not carry the cross alone. He is not the only one with a cross to bear. To follow him, you need to take up your own cross. You have to be a living sacrifice, a human sacrifice.
If Jesus conquered sin, why are his people here and still sinning? Why didn’t all the faithful dead rise at that moment? Why didn’t all of the past and future elite get swept up into heaven at that very moment that sin and death were conquered? Because it wasn’t! Nothing happened in this realm or any other besides one more insurrectionist getting the nail.
That doesn’t have to be you. Put down the goddamned cross for jug sake! Instead of being a living sacrifice to a god who doesn’t need it, why not live to be an incomparable resource to your fellow human beings who do absolutely need it. You don’t need a savior. But you can be a savior to someone in your life. There have been enough meaningless crosses over the centuries. Put down your cross and help someone else do the same. Then, you can both rise to the newness of a better life.
See you in the comments…
David Johnson
Kingdom (multiple parts)
Kingdom
Possibly the most important and least understood concept in the New Testament, and perhaps all of scripture is the kingdom. There is no way for me to break it down or simplify it, or clarify it, or even to say anything definitive about it. Yet I feel compelled to try, as I have since I was a kid. What is the kingdom is the single biggest unanswerable question of my time in the church.
I have done bits and pieces of this work together over countless years and articles and sermons. This is the first time I am attempting to put it all together in one, neat package. It will be the most challenging project I have done since Red Letters and should go for a handful of weeks before I wrap it up. There will be write-ups and podcasts. This is the first installment:
What is the kingdom?
The kingdom is a big, hairy, unexplained, and unexplainable mess. It is difficult to know where to begin. Let’s try something easy:
What should we call it?
In those days, John the Baptist appeared in the desert of Judea, preaching: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.” Matt. 3:1 - 2a
There we have it. We should call it the kingdom of heaven. But hold your taters! This is from Bible Odyssey:
Did you know…?
The Gospel of Matthew is the only biblical book that talks about the “kingdom of heaven” (thirty-two times) while the rest of the Bible refers to “the kingdom of God.”
Ah, shucks.. And I thought this would be the easy part. Hint: There is no easy part when it comes to the kingdom.
After John had been arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time of fulfillment has arrived, and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” Mark 1:14 - 15
John says kingdom of heaven while Jesus says kingdom of god. Matthew says kingdom of heaven while everyone else says kingdom of god. Adding to the confusion is the fact that it is also simply called the kingdom.
From my perspective, you can call it anything you want. There is no official name. That said, I discount kingdom of heaven most of all because Matthew had theological reasons for just about everything. Did a historical Jesus use any of these designations? There is no way to know.
The reason I devote some time to this question is because there are many Christians who believe that the kingdom of heaven and kingdom of god are different in some subtle way. They are convinced that there is some theological significance in the designation. This is likely a result of holding to verbal plenary inspiration. They put a lot of emphasis on the exact words used because god inspired and cares about the exact words.
That is enough time spent on the name of the kingdom. It doesn’t help us at all with the next aspect of this exploration. But don’t be surprised if naming doesn’t pop up again in another part of this study.
What kind of thing is the kingdom?
Is it a spiritual kingdom, physical kingdom, or both? The biggest difference between the two is probably land. A spiritual kingdom doesn’t require a patch of earth and a physical kingdom does. But don’t celebrate too soon. That does almost nothing to answer the question. So let’s start with the very first mention of the concept:
“Yet the Lord, the God of Israel, chose me from my whole family to be king over Israel forever. He chose Judah as leader, and from the tribe of Judah he chose my family, and from my father’s sons he was pleased to make me king over all Israel. Of all my sons—and the Lord has given me many—he has chosen my son Solomon to sit on the throne of the kingdom of the Lord over Israel. He said to me: ‘Solomon your son is the one who will build my house and my courts, for I have chosen him to be my son, and I will be his father. I will establish his kingdom forever if he is unswerving in carrying out my commands and laws, as is being done at this time.’ 1Ch. 28:4-7
Here, we find the kingdom of the lord. Interesting, that is yet another name to add to the list. That is interesting. But more so is the fact that David said he would be king over Israel forever. Then we have god saying that he has chosen Solomon to be his son (son of god) and god would establish Solomon’s kingdom forever. The plot thickens…
Is David going to be king forever? Or is it Solomon? We might be tempted to say that it is essentially the same thing. It is the reign of the house of David. But is this designation of forever king given to everyone who takes the throne? It kind of loses its meaning after a few declarations that a new person will be king forever.
There is also the question of what it means to be a king forever. I’m guessing it means that the king will always come from the line of David, and Solomon. It could also mean that the kingdom of the lord of Israel would last forever. Whatever the full meaning was, it would appear as though this kingdom was very much a physical kingdom.
At what point would anyone start to think of it as a spiritual kingdom? My guess is that it was when there was no longer much of a physical kingdom about which one could boast. You can’t really say that your sovereign kingdom has a leader from the line of David if you no longer have a sovereign state. In the time of Jesus, there was no sovereign state. That was kind of a big problem.
The announcement of the kingdom
First John, then Jesus announced that the kingdom of heaven/god was at hand. But if something is at hand, it is not yet actuated. What exactly was being announced. What did people hear? There was no physical kingdom at the time. But many were looking forward to one coming in the future. The job of the messiah was to finally reestablish and rule in the new, physical kingdom. That was the dominant expectation.
Do we have any reason to believe that the people hearing these announcements of the coming kingdom were thinking of anything other than a physical kingdom? With the memory of the Maccabees fresh in their minds, many would have very much understood this to mean that someone was going to make another play for Jewish independence.
Many Christians today believe that the heralded kingdom was a physical kingdom. For them, it is just a matter of timing. That physical kingdom has not yet come to fruition. But like the end of the world, it is coming soon and very soon.
When they talk about the kingdom, they are being quite physical and literal. They are envisioning a city (Jerusalem) and a king (Jesus) and a ruling class at his side (them) and robes, and crowns, and territories, and legislation, and power, and, and, and… all that and more. It is the kingdom of David renewed, with the whole world as the territory and Jerusalem as the capital city. It is the game of Thrones, but with them as the winners. They couldn’t be more literal. And they couldn’t be more serious.
Further, they believe that all, or at least many of the world governments will still be in place alongside the kingdom of the lord. There will also be people who are not onboard with the king of kings and who will want to dissuade the righteous and even overthrow the holy city. This kingdom of peace will also have other business which to attend.
If this all sounds a little funny to your ear, think millennial and it will all fall into place. Whether pre or post, there will be a 1,000 year reign of king Jesus the divine. This is no hippy-dippy spiritual kingdom proposed by the eschatological losers hoping for a manufactured victory of the rhetorical kind. This is for the real believers. And yes, they have a mace.
When John and Jesus were traveling the countryside proclaiming that the kingdom of god was near, they were talking to people who believed in a real kingdom with a real king. Arguably, one of the reasons Jesus was rejected by the Jewish leaders was that some of his teachings seemed a bit off for people who were expecting a real king and kingdom. They wanted a devouring lion but Jesus was a sacrificial lamb. Yet even today, one of the big Christian applause lines is that the first time, Jesus came as a lamb. The next time, he will come as a lion. They want exactly what the Jews wanted and expected. The desires and expectations for a physical kingdom have not really changed over the centuries, just the timing.
Spiritual kingdom
All that said, it is important to realize that not all Jews were alike anymore than all Christians are alike. I suspect that many Jews were sick and tired of wars and failed messiahs. They appreciated the old stories but were not in the market for yet another movement that would bring down the wrath of their current overlords.
It was time for a religion of peace and righteousness: Justice for the innocent, comfort for the poor, joy for the brokenhearted, rest for the weary, and acceptance of the disenfranchised. What they didn’t really want was more conflict. Maybe a spiritual kingdom could provide most of what they wanted without bloodshed. That’s a pretty nice idea.
Unfortunately, ideas are not governments. To change society on a grand scale, you need a government. The transformation of Rome into a Christian state was kind of like establishing a government. But we might be getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Without a government, what you could establish is a small society, a congregation, a church, the assembly of the saints.
Inside this kind of organization, you can have any kind of government you want as long as it doesn’t run afoul of the actual and ruling government. A religion can establish a physical presence with spiritual implications.
- Spiritual kingdoms can have a physically dead king
- Spiritual kingdoms can go without physical territory
- Spiritual kingdoms can have impractical but aspirational rules
- Spiritual kingdoms can have spiritual, without need for physical law enforcement
- Spiritual kingdoms can appeal to everyone who buys into the ideology
- Spiritual kingdoms can scale almost infinitely
- Spiritual kingdoms can span longer periods of time than physical kingdoms
- Spiritual kingdoms can be more easily revised to fit current needs than physical kingdoms
We could go on this way for a long time. But I think you get the point. There are lots of advantages to having a spiritual kingdom. As an idea with no walls that can be battered under siege, it can be highly resilient. I believe that Christianity eventually transformed into a spiritual kingdom because it failed as a physical one. Jesus and all of his apostles are dead. Jerusalem, as it once was, is dead. The temple is dead. The sacrifices are dead. The law is dead.
It is clear that the end would culminate in some kind of physical kingdom. But it never came to pass. So that idea had to be either put off so far into the future that people no longer saw it as imminent, or by transforming the whole thing into something that was meant to be spiritual all along. But why do I believe that Jesus envisioned an eventual physical kingdom?
First, scholars such as Ehrman believe that is what he was teaching. I happen to think he is right. But there was also the refusal to clearly and emphatically correct his disciples when it was clear they believed it would be a physical kingdom with an actual government. In fact, he seemed to encourage it at times. Remember when they were bickering about who would have the highest honors in the new kingdom? Jesus told them that in the new kingdom, there would be 12 thrones and that they would be ruling the 12 tribes from that throne. (We might come back to this one in another installment.) Never mind the actual heads of the 12 tribes. The disciples were told they would have that position. That is a position of leadership in an actual kingdom.
There was another place where his disciples were telling Jesus how much they had sacrificed to follow him. He told them that all who had given up such physical trappings such as houses and spouses would get it all back 100-fold in the new kingdom. That is the kind of thing that makes the most sense of a physical kingdom that has physical things. And again, it was the expectation of the disciples that Jesus kept feeding.
What happens when it becomes clear that there would be no magical reunification with the lost sheep of Israel? What happens when decades later, Christian’s are asking where this kingdom is that they were promised? There are only two things that can happen:
- Punt the actuation of this kingdom down the road long after any of the people are still alive.
- Make it a spiritual kingdom with some other, even better form than what you can imagine now.
For the kingdom of god, both methods have been conflated and deployed. Welcome to the kingdom, or at least the discussion about the kingdom.
See you in the comments…
David Johnson
Kingdom part 2: Who is the kingdom?
We might never fully know what the kingdom is. If we don’t agree on the matter after 2,000 years of debate, I don’t expect anything to com along that will clear it up. Perhaps we can find agreement to a different question: Who is the kingdom?
Some say it is the church, or Christendom at large. There are certainly good reasons to believe that. For instance, this verse:
But you are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people claimed by God as his own possession,” so that you may proclaim the praise of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 1 Peter 2:9-10
This can be found under a heading, “The Mystery of the Church”. While this passage never uses the word kingdom, it is dripping with kingdom language, especially the part that says, “Once you were not a people…” If anything in this passage sounds familiar, perhaps it is because you have read your Bible.
Moses climbed up to meet God, and the Lord called out to him from the mountain, saying, “You will say this to the house of Jacob and announce it to the children of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I lifted you up on eagles’ wings and brought you here to me. Now, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you will be my own possession from among all the peoples, for the entire earth is mine. You will be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation for me.’ These are the words you will speak to Israel.” Ex. 19: 3—6
The passage in 1 Peter is clearly an echo of the one in Exodus. Notice the words royal priesthood. Royalty is something we associate with a kingdom. The Exodus passage makes it clearer by saying kingdom of priests. These are the same things in the eyes of the New Testament writer. Also, notice the words holy nation. They were to be a nation, as in a political system with king and territory. These exact words were repeated in the New Testament passage.
The only thing that seems different is the people for whom this message was intended. In the Old Testament, it was intended for the “house of Jacob… children of Israel” these designations were specifically called out and emphasized. These designations are two ways of identifying a single group. Notice the absence of those designations in Peter. But read a little further and you will find a clue:
Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles not to succumb to the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul. Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles so that, although they now malign you as evildoers, they may observe your good works and glorify God on the day of visitation.
Who was he talking to that would be considered aliens and exiles? Exiles from where? Aliens from where? This doesn’t sound like some generic reference to all believers. They were to conduct themselves honorably among the Gentiles. Hang on! Were not Gentiles also Christians? If he is distinguishing them from Gentiles, he has to be talking to Jews. Then again, that greatly depends on what he meant by Gentiles. That is not a settled issue. We will return to this point shortly. First, there is another clue in the introduction of the book:
Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to all the exiles of the Dispersion who are now living in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia…
Quick question: Who were the exiles of the Dispersion? We find this in the footnotes of the NCB:
1 Peter 1:1 Christians regarded themselves as the true Israel and made use of the term Dispersion, which designated the Jews who had been dispersed and awaited the reunion of their people (see Jas 1:1). By divine choice, they are the New Covenant, evoked by the mention of the Blood of Christ (see Ex 24:3-8; Heb 9:12-14). Related to the three divine Persons, the Church is born of the Trinity. This is an extremely dense salutation.
A dense salutation indeed. This commentator has to do a lot of fancy footwork to make sure their zionistic interpretation is the only one you accept. In this commentary, the Jews aren’t the Jews; the Christians are the Jews. They’re the new Jews - the new covenant. I see three possibilities:
- The passage is referring to all non-Jewish Christian’s.
- This passage is referring to Jewish Christians.
- It’s more complicated than either choice leads you to believe.
Spoiler alert: It’s 3.
Old Testament Gentiles
If you think you know what a gentile is, I beg your indulgence as I believe it is one of the most misunderstood terms used in the bible. Growing up, I was taught that a gentile was any non-Jewish person as in Jews versus gentiles. But that isn’t quite right. It is also not entirely wrong. A better term than non-Jew would be outsider.
Rather than a mere distinction of non-Jew, gentiles was more of a racial epithet. It was a nasty, hateful term that described a group of people for whom Jews had nothing but contempt. To further clarify this idea, it helps to recognize that there were three kinds of Jews as I see it:
- There was the full Jew born within the tribes of the southern kingdom.
- There was the naturalized, or converted Jew from non—Jewish stock. Via conversion, they became Jews.
- There were the Jews who were the scattered, the dispersed, the diaspora.
While the real Jews accepted the converted Jews, they did not accept the diaspora Jews because they had assimilated into the cultures of the many nations and had lost their cultural Jewishness. They intermarried with the nations which was strictly forbidden. They were unclean in every way imaginable. They had lost the right to be called Jews. They were the goy. From Strong’s lexicon:
Definition: Nation, people, Gentile Meaning: a foreign nation, a Gentile, a troop of animals, a flight of locusts
It could be something as simple as nations, or something nastier like the herd. What it always means is them and not us. It was a way of saying that those people over there are not any part of us.
The meaning of a word is only part of the story. The other part is how the word is used and what other terms and idioms are commonly associated with that word. To say that a person was gay in the 1800s meant nothing more than they were happy. Today, it means something quite different. Word usage can be quite different, even opposite of its official definition. When Michael Jackson declared that he was bad, he wasn’t confessing to being of low character. That was for a court to decide.
When the ancient Hebrews used the word goy, they were saying quite a bit more than nations. To get a taste of that, you have to know at least a tiny bit about the Hebrew kingdoms:
- There were two kingdoms because it was divided. There was the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom.
- The southern kingdom was called Judah and were considered the “real” Jews. At least, that is how they regarded themselves. The northern kingdom: Israel, were the rebels who were punished by being scattered to the nations.
- The northern kingdom was often referred to simply as Ephraim.
Once you see how Ephraim is used in the Old Testament, you will have a better foundation for understanding the way gentile is used in the New Testament.
Although you, O Israel, commit adultery, do not let Judah become guilty! Do not journey to Gilgal. Do not go up to Beth Aven.[a] Do not swear, “As surely as the Lord lives!” Israel has rebelled[b] like a stubborn heifer! Soon[c] the Lord will put them out to pasture like a lamb in a broad field.[d] Ephraim has attached himself to idols; Do not go near him! Hosea 4:15-17
Notice how Israel and Ephraim are used interchangeably? Ephraim is synonymous with the 10 tribes: with Israel, as opposed to Judah. Notice right up front how Israel is distinguished from Judah? Do not let Judah become guilty of Israel’s wickedness.
Also take note of how this prophet talks about Ephraim/Israel. It is with scathing rebuke and harsh condemnation. This is typical of how the prophets referred to Israel. They spewed venom of the most poisonous variety at the northern kingdom. They condemned the tribes for attempting to make pacts with Assyria and Egypt rather than relying on god. They were said to have voluntarily left god and his laws. They became the untouchables. Leave them alone. Don’t go near them. That was the message of the prophets and the order of the day.
While both the northern and southern kingdoms suffered conquest and diaspora, the southern kingdom survived and rebuilt. The 10 tribes, Ephraim, Israel, suffered the fate they were promised throughout the writings of the prophets. They were scattered to the winds and lost to history. God pounded them to sand. Judah remained stable enough so that Jesus could be a product of the line of Judah. Here are some excerpts from Bible Study Tools:
An Encyclopedia Britannica article traces the history of the 10, lost tribes of Israel. The original 12 Hebrew tribes took possession of Canaan, the Promised Land, after the death of Moses. Under the leadership of Joshua, the tribes named Asher, Dan, Ephraim, Gad, Issachar, Manasseh, Naphtali, Reuben, Simeon, and Zebulun—names of Jacob’s sons and grandsons—formed the Kingdom of Israel in the north in the year 930 B.C.E. Soldiers of the Assyrian empire conquered the northern 10 tribes of Israel in 721 B.C.E. The Israeli people of this region were then assimilated by other ethnic, tribal groups and “disappeared from history.”
Goy is another way of saying nations. It can also mean outsider. But in ancient times, it didn’t necessarily mean non-Jew. Some experts believe that idea was a Pauline adaptation. Here is an excellent article on the word that I recommend, but will not cover in this section. Consider it homework. Here is a snippet showing that it was, and still is, often used as a pejorative:
But the word "goy" has too much historical and linguistic baggage to be used as casually as "non-Jew" or "gentile." It starts with the obvious slurs – like "goyishe kopf," or gentile brains, which suggests (generously) a dullard, or "shikker iz a goy," a gentile is a drunkard. "Goyishe naches" describes the kinds of things that a Jew mockingly presumes only a gentile would enjoy, like hunting, sailing and eating white bread.
Nahma Nadich, deputy director of the Jewish Community Relations of Greater Boston writes:
I definitely see goy as a slur — seldom used as a compliment, and never used in the presence of a non-Jew.
With that background, we can begin making the connection between the goyim of the Old Testament and the gentiles of the New Testament:
New Testament gentiles
Here is an excerpt from another bible study guide:
In the Bible, the term "nations" often refers to distinct groups of people, tribes, or ethnicities that are separate from the people of Israel. The Hebrew word "goyim" and the Greek word "ethnos" are commonly translated as "nations" in the Old and New Testaments, respectively…
And here:
Corresponding Greek / Hebrew Entries: - H1471 גּוֹי (goy): Often translated as "nation" or "Gentile," used in the Old Testament to refer to non-Israelite nations.
As I already mentioned, the Old Testament usage of goy did not necessarily mean non-Jew. It had a variety of meanings. As the prophets used it, the word took on a distinctly nasty tone. Rather than non-Jew, it became something more akin to renegade Jew, or assimilated Jew. Or defector, traitorous Jew. Those Jews were so bent on wickedness and so embedded with those other nations that they became the nations. Israel became goyim to the southern kingdom, Judah.
That brings us to the New Testament goy. Who were they? Like everything else to do with the kingdom, the answer is not straightforward and leads us down a rather convoluted path. To get started unraveling this tangled skein, we need to revisited an article cited earlier:
Goy acquired the meaning of someone who is not Jewish in the first and second century CE. Before that time, academics Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi have argued, no crystallized dichotomy between Jew and non-Jew existed in Judaism.[23] Ophir and Rosen-Zvi state that the early Jewish convert to Christianity, Paul, was key in developing the concept of "goy" to mean non-Jew:
"This brilliant Hellenist Jew [Paul] considered himself the apostle of the Christian gospel "to the gentiles," and precisely because of this he needed to define that category more thoroughly and carefully than his predecessors. Paul made the conception that "goyim" are not "peoples," but rather a general category of human beings, into a central element of his thought... ...In the centuries that followed, both the Church and the Jewish sages evoked Paul's binary dichotomy."
— Haaretz journalist Tomer Persico discussing views of Ophir and Rosen-Zvi[14]
Before goy came to exclusively mean non-Jew and before it took on a heavily theological flavor, it meant all kinds of things and referred to all kinds of people, including Israelites.
From the same article:
The Biblical Hebrew word goy has been commonly translated into English as nation,[7][8] meaning a group of persons of the same ethnic family who speak the same language (rather than the more common modern meaning of a political unit).[9] In the Bible, goy is used to describe both the Nation of Israel and other nations.[10][7][8] As a word principally used by Jews to describe non-Jews,[5] it is a term for the ethnic out-group.[11]
It was not just the ethnic out-group. It could also be the political or religious out-group. The Mormons sound silly, but are technically correct when they describe non-Mormons as gentiles. That even includes other people you would regard as Christians. Apostates of any religion could be considered goy to those who remain orthodox. And so it was with the lost tribes (sheep) of Israel.
All that said, I believe that, at least initially, the goy of the New Testament were the same as the goy of the prophets. It was the scattered tribes of Ephraim who were lost to history. The way they were lost is they became indistinguishable from the non-Jewish nations. So while they were genetically Jews, they were separated from that which made them Jews. They didn’t even know they were Jews. That is definitely lost in my book.
Eventually, the goy became all people who were not orthodox Jews. It became a broad term that caught up just about everyone on the planet. This is where some of the complexity comes in. I pointed out speculation that this definition of goy was popularized by Paul for theological reasons. But I have no way of proving that. Every use of the term in the uncontested Pauline letters could also mean the lost tribes of the northern kingdom. And there is at least one clue that has me leaning toward that conclusion. (Maybe in a supplemental.) But first, what about Jesus?
To seek and save the lost
When Jesus spoke of the lost, what did he mean? Modern believers tend to think he was referring to all people who were not professing Christians. That came to be the people who confessed Jesus as lord and placed their faith for salvation solely in his sacrifice on the cross. It would have been a little different for those who were his followers before he died. What if they accepted him as their savior before he did and then doubted after he was killed? Yes, even salvation is tricky.
But I contend that Jesus had something different in mind when he spoke of the lost. According to a well-known passage, Jesus came to seek and save the lost. That should ring a little funny to the ear of the contemporary believer. Why should Jesus, or anyone else need to seek out lost people? If everyone but your small band of travelers is lost, no seeking should be required. They’re all lost.
If you think that passage is confusing, check out the one that comes right before it:
Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham
Salvation is another one of those concepts that requires more time and space I can spare here. But whatever is meant by salvation, the declaration is that it came to that house because that man was also a son of Abraham. That is directly followed by the great mission statement that Jesus came to seek and save the lost.
I have lost count of the number of commentaries I have read on these passages. Every one of them goes through gymnast-level contortions to make the passage say the opposite of what it says. The problem is the mission statement. Who does Jesus believe the lost is? It can’t have anything to do with Jewish ancestry or the whole enterprise of modern Christianity is done and dusted. So perhaps we can find clarity some place else:
And responding, he said, “I was not sent except to the sheep who have fallen away from the house of Israel.” Matt: 15:24 Catholic Public Domain Version
Here is a translation that is more familiar:
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
The flavor of the translation doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, it is all the same. Let’s break it down:
I was sent: Jesus is responding to a woman begging for a miracle. He starts by declaring that he was sent. That is an interesting idea. He didn’t just decide that coming to earth would be a good idea. He was a good foot soldier who went where he was sent and did what he was commanded. But who sent him? Only the father god could send him. So there was a clear mission with boundaries.
Only to: This one is even more intriguing, especially since it didn’t have to be there at all. But it was important that this qualifier be present, at least to the writer, and to god if you believe he is somehow the writer. This places a huge restriction on the mission. It is not to everyone in some universal sense. Rather, it is only, or exclusively to…
The lost sheep: This is yet another qualifier. We are now stacking qualifier on top of qualifier on top of qualifier. It is a veritable qualifier sandwich. Is this the same lost that Jesus said he came to seek and save? It sure sounds like it. But this time, it is with even more force and specificity. He was sent, exclusively to, the lost sheep. If he wanted to make a universal statement, he would have stopped there. But he didn’t.
Of the house of Israel: I included the Catholic version so that you could see a slightly different wording. the sheep who have fallen away from the house of Israel.
This is one of the most awkward passages in all of the bible and might explain why commentators are practically soiling themselves to try and get these passages to say something that Jesus didn’t. Earlier, Jesus goes to the house of a goy Jew who is a tax collector: one of the worst of the outcast Jews. Jesus declares that he is just as much a Jew as the rest of them. It looks like he recovered one of those lost sheep he was sent to find.
Many of the commentators downplay the fact that this man was an ancestral son of Abraham. At least one I saw flatly denied it. They all made it clear that it made no difference that this man was a Jew of any kind. Rather, salvation came to that house because he repented and accepted Jesus by faith. They have made being a son of Abraham entirely metaphorical. You, too, can be a son of Abraham by repentance, faith, and obedience. That is how they repackage seeking and saving the lost.
It is a little different with the lost sheep of Israel. Jesus went and made it quite a bit harder to spiritualize. Jesus says he was sent exclusively to a particular group. The commentators change it to say that he was sent first to a particular group. Some change it to say that the particular group was his priority. But all reject the notion of exclusivity.
The last thing they can try is that the lost sheep of the house of Israel is just another way of saying everybody. We are all the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But to say that, you would first need to make the case that we are all Israel in some metaphorical way. We are the new Israel? We are the replacement Israel? We are the additions to Israel? We are spiritual Israel? What the heck is spiritual Israel?
Really, what the heck is spiritual Israel? We are Israel in that god forgives us and makes us his children when we accept Jesus as a sacrifice for sin? Like the actual Israel? That can’t be it. Every one on whom god shows mercy is spiritual Israel? Every one who wears spiritual clothes made of only one spiritual fabric? Really, how does any of that make any sense at all?
What the commentators are trying very hard not to do is take Jesus at his word. He didn’t save the one man, at least in part, because he was also a son of Abraham. He wasn’t sent exclusively to one group of people. And that group of people was definitely not Israel. These machinations to get Jesus to say something he wasn’t saying is why this topic is so hard. Look at how much more sense it makes if we just take the text at face value.
God created a special race of people for himself. That race of people demanded a king and became a theocratic kingdom. That kingdom quickly became hopelessly divided into two kingdoms: the southern kingdom and the northern kingdom. The northern kingdom was called Israel, and was often referred to as Ephraim, to mean the ones who rebelled and walked away from god. Almost synonymous were the words,
- Ephraim *10 tribes
- Northern kingdom
- Israel
- The nations
- goy
The goy/nations/Israelites were outcasts, despised, condemned, untouchable. These same ideas carried over into Jesus day. But even in prophetic times, there were some who had a vision of reunification.
Jesus said he came to seek and save the lost. This makes sense if the lost were truly difficult to find and would require someone to seek them out. But who were these lost ones? Jesus said he was sent for them, he was sent exclusively for them, and he identified them as the lost sheep of the house of Israel. That sounds a lot like the goyim we have been studying. To find these lost sheep of the lost tribes would require a divine intervention. And that is exactly what Jesus and his disciples brought to the table.
Divine intervention
When Jesus sent his disciples out on a missionary journey, he gave them specific instructions. He told them where to go and who to see, and where not to go and who not to see:
These twelve Jesus sent out after instructing them: “Do not go in the way of the Gentiles, and do not enter any city of the Samaritans; but rather go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.“ And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Matt. 10:5-7
Here, I want to introduce another possibility that also makes sense of the text. The house of Israel could refer to the tribe of Judah and the lost sheep could refer to those exiles from that southern kingdom who had not quite found their way back to Jerusalem and back to repentance due to poor leadership. This is an interesting take from a commentary:
But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. By Israel he here meaneth the two tribes that clave to the house of David, for the ten tribes ever since their captivity {2 Kings 17:6} had lost their share in that name. He calls them lost sheep in the sense that Jeremiah speaks, Jeremiah 1:6, My people hath been lost sheep: their shepherds have caused them to go astray. So that lost sheep here signifies wandering sheep, for want of proper guides. The Jews at this time had miserable teachers, so as they wandered as lost sheep. And this comporteth with what we had in the last verses of the former chapter. There was a great harvest and but few labourers; he is therefore providing them labourers, shepherds that should gather those scattered sheep into one fold. > Matthew Poole’s Commentary
Even if this mission was restricted to the diaspora Jews from the southern kingdom, I do believe the ultimate mission would have included all Jews, even those from the lost 10 tribes. Either way, we are left with a question that has to be addressed before we can close this part of the study: How were they to discover these lost sheep?
There had to be some brand of divine intervention at play because you couldn’t just tell by appearance who was and wasn’t a lost member of the house of Judah, or if more expansive, a member of the tribes of Ephraim. There would have been no visual indicators because they had been assimilated by marriage and culture for many generations. There was no distinction between one who was of the seed of Abraham and one that wasn’t.
Can you look at me and tell which tribe of Africa I am from? Is there any way to identify such a thing? None that I would submit to. Let’s make it even harder. It could be that we are all from some part of Africa. Is there any way for you to tell what part of Africa you are from? You might not even have skin color as a guide. What was your ancestral religion? You have no idea and no way of knowing it.
This is the situation describing the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Ask any Persian in the time of Jesus what Israeli tribe they were from and they wouldn’t be able to tell you with any credibility. They couldn’t even tell you if they were from any of the 12 tribes, or if the 12 tribes were even a real thing apart from stories. So how do you seek them out and identify them? With man, it is impossible.
However, we get this nugget of insight from another missionary journey involving a lot more of Jesus’ disciples:
“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. Luke 10:5-7
What is that if not spirit magic of some kind? What does it mean that your peace will rest on them or return to you? What I get from this is that the disciples were not to try, on their own wisdom, to detect who was and who wasn’t the right kind of person. They were to offer a simple greeting and the spirit would do the rest.
When Jesus was arguing with the Jewish leaders in the book of John, he said that his sheep hear his voice and that the reason they couldn’t believe was that they were not his sheep. How did these “sheep” get their special hearing? We don’t know. But again, it could be a hint that there was divine intervention.
I am told by Christians that the very act of faith is a gift from god that one cannot do unless god has proactively given it to you. Again, we are left to believe there is some kind of divine intervention at work. Those that hear him were his sheep in the first place. Those who have faith in the message are those who are given the faith. So all that need be done is for preachers to preach and the lost sheep of Israel will identify themselves by responding with faith and repentance.
Conclusion: Preaching the kingdom
Let’s briefly revisit that passage from Matt. 10:7:
And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
After 5,000 words, we have finally come full-circle and find ourselves where we began: the preaching of the kingdom. It was the first thing from John the Baptist and from Jesus. Now, it is the first message from his disciples.
With the added information that these disciples were to stay within the Jewish districts, it bears even more definitional weight that the message they were instructed to preach was the message of the kingdom. These disciples had a particular idea about the kingdom and they were to go and speak of the kingdom to people who would have had the same idea about it as they did.
They were not on a mission to redefine the kingdom. They were just to tell the people that the expected kingdom was near at hand. Who was the kingdom? From the teachings of Jesus (and others we might address in a supplemental) the citizens of the kingdom were the same as they were for the prophets of old.
And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD to minister to Him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be His servants— all who keep the Sabbath without profaning it and who hold fast to My covenant— I will bring them to My holy mountain and make them joyful in My house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on My altar, for My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations Isa. 56:6-7
This prophet thought that the house of prayer for all nations would be populated by those who knew and kept the covenants and laws and sacrifices and sabbaths. By some description, these were Jews. They may have been Jews in exile and who had compromised in order to assimilate. But the prophet is proclaiming that as long as they return to the Jewish religion, they would be welcome in god’s kingdom. So it is that we return to Jesus:
He said to them, “It is written: ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a den of thieves.” Matt. 21:13
Jesus reuses the same language as the prophet to describe the temple. He is happy to associate his understanding of the kingdom with that of Isaiah. In this final example, he is even more explicit:
The Rich Young Man.[d]A certain ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Honor your father and your mother.’ ” Luke 18:18-20
The answer Jesus gave can be summarized in the following way: Keep the law. Jesus loved the law and taught the law with his own special twist. But that is what all teachers did. Jesus thought he was taking people back to the original meaning of the law. He was not trying to abolish the law. If you want to be in the kingdom of eternal life, keep the law as it was originally intended. That is exactly and only who the kingdom was. And no, I haven’t forgotten about Paul.
More to come. See you in the comments…
David Johnson
Kingdom part 3: The kingdom according to Paul
Paul’s kingdom begins with the fraudulent section of Mark. Throughout his ministry, he was focusing on the law and the Hebrew people. But suddenly, there is a shift. Here it is:
And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.
And these signs will accompany those who believe: In My name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not harm them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will be made well.” Mark 16:15-18
Note that these verses are outside of the original work and stand as fraudulent additions to the text. They are later additions. So I find it suspicious that the place where we find the great commission is in a part of the text that shouldn’t be there. We have no reason to believe this was something Jesus said, especially because it contradicts what he previously said. The commission in other passages was possibly cribbed from this text. I can’t prove that though.
Why would Jesus be so emphatic about where and to whom his disciples should teach and suddenly change his tune at the end? When he gave them their mission, he emphasized that he was sent ONLY for Israel. That slams a lot of doors such as the one where Christians say he meant first and not only. That would be like telling your partner they are the only one for you, then later saying that you clearly meant she was the first of many. We have to pay attention to the words and phrases that stand as qualifiers.
By the time this was written, Paul was likely already in prison. By the time we get this fraudulent addition, the church had likely already taken the turn to appealing openly to people who were never Jews of any description. We went from the narrow audience Jesus described to all creatures and every nation with a few strokes of the quill. This fraudulent text might be an indication that the Pauline doctrine had already taken hold in some communities. In fact, it would be kind of surprising if it hadn’t.
Even so, this passage is not necessarily at odds with what I believe Jesus taught. It could be that instead of Jesus flipping on the recipients of the message, he was only expanding the territory for seeking the lost sheep. At first, they were given restrictions on where they could go. Later, Jesus could have lifted that restriction since the scattered could literally be anywhere. That doesn’t mean that they were to shift exclusive focus from the lost sheep of the house of Israel. For the record, I don’t buy this idea. But it could be the case without doing damage to my theory. And it is just a theory.
From Jesus to Paul
The first third of Acts is all about the disciples preaching a Jewish message about the Jewish Messiah for and to Jewish people. That is weird given the Great Commission, if it really happened. They went on teaching this way years after Jesus told them to preach to every creature and in every nation. Yet it took about eight years and an act of god to get the lead apostle to do it. That makes no sense at all. He clearly didn’t believe he was supposed to be preaching to goy. This is yet another reason I don’t believe the Great Commission ever happened. This is the end of the first sermon after the resurrection:
Therefore let all Israel know with certainty that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ!” Acts 2:36
Peter was making his address at a Jewish holy day event to a crowd of Jewish celebrants. And he told them to spread the word to all the Jews, not to all the people. This is how the Christian era begins. Later in Acts…
Meanwhile, those scattered by the persecution that began with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, speaking the message only to Jews. Acts 11:29
This is after the conversion of Cornelius. The gospel was still only being preached to the Jews. Why, do you suppose, is that? We are nearing the halfway point of Acts, and preaching to anyone other than the Jews was still a novel and tentative thing. There’s more:
From the descendants of this man, God has brought to Israel the Savior Jesus, as He promised. Acts 13:23
This was from Paul. Even Paul was preaching to Jews and proselytes. (I believe the god-fearers were proselyte Jews.) He was addressing either natural-born or naturalized Jews. In this speech, he brings up the promised savior of the Jews. The messiah was a savior of the Jews, a Jewish messiah. That is how they understood it. He also brought up John the Baptist, who preached repentance to all of Israel.
We might consider this next bit a good candidate for when the turn took place:
The turn
Then Paul and Barnabas answered them boldly: “It was necessary to speak the word of God to you first. But since you reject it and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles. For this is what the Lord has commanded us:
‘I have made you a light for the Gentiles, to bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’”
When the Gentiles heard this, they rejoiced and glorified the word of the Lord, and all who were appointed for eternal life believed. And the word of the Lord spread throughout that region. Acts 13:46-49
Paul is not at all gracious about the rejection of his message by the Jews. So he makes the unverifiable claim that he had to preach to the Jews first. But now, god has given him a new mission. Since the Jews were no longer qualified for eternal life, he would take the message to the Gentiles. So there!
This little scene is getting pretty late in the game. It seems the Jesus who gave the great commission failed to let Paul in on it, leaving Paul to labor among the Jews. It was only after Paul lost his temper that he gained insight that he was to be teaching the Gentiles.
Here’s my question: Is this the turn? Is this when the kingdom went from being strictly Jewish to universal? That depends on something that I have already acknowledged I can’t fully assess. It depends on what this writer meant by Gentiles. It depends on who the goy were to them.
In these highly Jewish audiences, it is reasonable to assume that these were real Jews who were descendants of southern kingdom Jews. That means that goy could have been diaspora, southern kingdom Jews, the 10-tribes Jews, or just people belonging to other nations who were never descendants of Jews. They were all goy. I’m afraid the context doesn’t help.
A question keeps coming up about how any diaspora Jews could have been distinguishable from non-diaspora Jews. I quipped that with man, it is impossible. But the follow-on is that god is doing something that makes it possible. I hope you noticed this line from the last reading:
… all who were appointed for eternal life believed.
This wording suggests more magic is at play. But it is not on the preachers to figure it out. It is on god to spark the belief. Those who believed were those who, beforehand, were already appointed to believe. None of this works without something like that. I called it spirit magic. That still feels right to me.
At the beginning of this section, I asked if this was the turn? Again, I can’t know for sure. But I do believe it was one aspect of the turn. This is Paul giving up on Jewish (non-diaspora) priority and turning to something else. But to what did he turn? It could be that he believed that things had opened up to the lost 10, or just the lost southerns. That would also be a turn, just not the one most Christians are thinking about.
This is where I have to admit that while some of what Paul says on the matter seems pretty clearly Jewish-focused, some of it could be interpreted as universal. As we have seen in this section, Paul has definitely taken some kind of turn. The rest is speculation on how radical a turn it was. It is not just that I don’t know. It is that I don’t think we can know. Let the speculation begin…
Paul and the Gentiles
I ask then, did God reject His people? Certainly not! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. Romans 11:1
By Israelite, Paul means the 12 tribes. By tribe of Benjamin, he means Judah. He means real Jew. By this time, the 10 tribes had been completely written out of the story. This is according to some. The only Jews were southern kingdom, Judah Jews. Paul is saying that he is one of those, as if to add credibility to the idea that god had not given up on his people. Who Paul thought was god’s people is, for me, an open question.
God did not reject His people, whom He foreknew.
In this context, god’s people is some flavor of Israelite. Those he foreknew are Israelites.
Do you not know what the Scripture says about Elijah, how he appealed to God against Israel: “Lord, they have killed Your prophets and torn down Your altars. I am the only one left, and they are seeking my life as well”?
Who is the Israel Elijah prayed against? The better question is who did Paul think they were. Was it 12 tribes or 10 tribes? I don’t know.
So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace.
As god reserved 7,000 who had not bowed the knee to Baal, Paul claims that in his day, there was still a remnant. But a remnant of what? Whatever flavor of Jew he was referring to, it couldn’t be native non-Jews. Remnant would be a nonsensical description of them.
What then? What the people of Israel sought so earnestly they did not obtain. The elect among them did, but the others were hardened,
He was not saying that none of Israel obtained because he called out the elect among them. In Israel, there were still the elect: the elect of Israel.
Again I ask: Did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all! Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious.
Here, again, we don’t know exactly what Paul meant by Gentiles. I suspect these were the Hellenized and, worse, Samaritans. And worse, those of the nations so lost to Judaism that they didn’t even know they were Jews. These were the Jews that the Jews had written off as untouchables. Or, it could be never-Jews. It would read the same either way.
But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their full inclusion bring!
I am talking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch as I am the apostle to the Gentiles, I take pride in my ministry in the hope that I may somehow arouse my own people to envy and save some of them.
That feels like enough. We can see that something changed in Paul’s messaging from mid-Acts to Romans. Whatever gentile meant to him, I suspect it changed over time. He became more progressive and more radical in his teaching to the point that he started identifying with Gentiles. He admits to being proud of his ministry to the Gentiles. Perhaps he saw it as the only growth opportunity for this fledgling religion. His gentile progressivism did bring growth. But it also brought division.
A brief review
Not everyone agreed with Paul. There was a lot of tension in the church over this point. Before going further, I want to recap the transition from the Hebrew Scriptures to Paul.
Genesis through part of Kings was all about the house of Israel, as in the 12 tribes. Then, there was the divided kingdom, the nations, goy. We jump to the prophets speaking during and after the various diaspora. Some of them seem to have been believers in some sort of reunification. But they were clear that the people coming into the fold had to be Jewish with its various traditions.
Skip forward to Jesus, who would have been right at home with the Old Testament prophets. As an apocalyptic prophet, his message was very much about the end of the world and what it meant to get right before it was too late. He defined the kingdom in terms of who it entailed and what they needed to be like. He was on a mission to find the lost sheep of Israel. And like the prophets of old, he taught observance of the law.
Fast-forward again, this time, to Peter. He spends the first part of his ministry preaching only to the Jews because Jesus commanded them to confine the message to the Jews. They did that well into the Christian age and it took an act of god to change it.
Skip to Paul who was visited by Jesus after the resurrection and ascension. Jesus apparently forgot to tell Paul about the commission to preach to everyone because he didn’t. But for some reason, Paul had trouble connecting with the Jewish audience. So he wrote them off and dramatically announced that god told him to take the message to the gentiles.
However, with Paul the progressive, there was a twist. He started teaching his converts that they didn’t have to become proselyte Jews or follow Jewish rituals. This is a big departure from the prophets, Jesus, and Peter. There was a good chance that this transition was not going to go smoothly. In a surprise to no one, it didn’t.
Division over gentiles and circumcision
One of the things that created such tension between Jews and Israelites is the fact that the Israelites abandoned the Jewish laws and traditions. The Israelites were called Ephraim and were hated by the Jews. So it is no surprise that when prophets started talking about unification, it was with the caveat that the laws be kept.
This notion was maintained through Jesus and his chief apostle. When Paul lifted the burden of the law from incoming believers, this caused quite the stir, especially considering the historical enmity between the law-keepers and the non-law-keepers. He spoke about the keepers of the law with contempt. While not expressly mentioned in the Bible , we get the word Judaisers from the conflict. They were the ones insisting that non-Jewish converts have to get circumcised and keep the law:
Certain people came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.” This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. Acts 15
Here is where I will interject and say that I have no reason to believe anything that Luke the fabulist had to say on just about anything. I am not alone in believing he was concerned with whitewashing the division between the church leaders on this matter. It was a big one. But all the key players are all on the same side and get along quite nicely. Most importantly, they all agreed on the matter according to Luke. I don’t believe that is an accurate picture.
The Judaisers are never named, but the good guys are. I find that suspicious. But that’s just me. I will note the way this is presented. Those bad guys were saying that converts had to be circumcised according to the custom of Moses. Circumcision was not a custom but an absolute command from god. It applied to natives and converts alike. There were no exceptions. As an aside, the reason this issue didn’t come up at the inception of the church is because up until Cornelius, they were preaching to people who had already been circumcised.
I hypothesize that circumcision was a shorthand for all the Jewish laws, including things like Sabbaths and feast days. This was an issue that warranted a council with all the heavy hitters in the area.
The apostles and elders met to consider this question. After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them:
I believe the phrase After much discussion is doing a lot of work in this story. If the matter were so clear-cut, why would it warrant so much discussion? Why didn’t the Judaisers know about the rules for gentile converts? These Judaisers were also Christians. This rule change came suddenly and unexpectedly. I’m not so sure the Judaisers were the bad guys in this story.
“Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe.
This doesn’t sound like Peter to me. But let’s run with it as Peter. I would have expected a recap of the rooftop experience. I admit to finding the wording of this passage a bit confusing.
God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith.
Here is more of the spirit magic I spoke of earlier. God knows the heart…. He purified their hearts… This is god proactively doing something to some specific group of people. Perhaps he is giving the magical ears to hear him to his mysterious lost sheep.
Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”
How would keeping the only known law of god be testing god? How did the law that Jesus kept and loved become a yoke on the neck? In what way could the ancestors not bear it? After all, there were provisions in the law to atone for sin.
This speech plays well to never-Jews of today. It is the thing that allows us to read ourselves into someone else’s story. But none of this was obvious to the people of that day. They received the law from god through Moses, the prophets, and Jesus. All of them validated the keeping of the law and the divine beauty of the law. Suddenly, without as much as a “thus sayeth the Lord”, the law is an ugly burden and should never be taught to new citizens of the kingdom.
When they finished, James spoke up. “Brothers,” he said, “listen to me. Simon has described to us how God first intervened to choose a people for his name from the Gentiles. The words of the prophets are in agreement with this, as it is written:
“ ‘After this I will return and rebuild David’s fallen tent. Its ruins I will rebuild, and I will restore it, that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, even all the Gentiles who bear my name, says the Lord, who does these things’ — things known from long ago.
It is always interesting when a New Testament apostle cites an Old Testament prophet or precedent. You can see the eisegesis in real time. I recommend Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament for an interesting read on Amos 9:11-12: the text cited by James. There are differences in what the text says and how James uses it. First, the text from Amos:
“In that day
I will restore David’s fallen shelter— I will repair its broken walls and restore its ruins— I will rebuild it as it used to be, so that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations that bear my name, ” declares the Lord, who will do these things.
Now, a snippet from the commentary:
The explanation given above is also in harmony with the use made by James of our prophecy in Acts 15:16-17, where he derives from Amos 9:11 and Amos 9:12 a prophetic testimony to the fact that Gentiles who became believers were to be received into the kingdom of God without circumcision. It is true that at first sight James appears to quote the words of the prophet simply as a prophetic declaration in support of the fact related by Peter, namely, that by giving His Holy Spirit to believers from among the Gentiles as well as to believers from among the Jews, without making any distinction between Jews and Gentiles, God had taken out of the Gentiles a people ἐπὶ τῶ ὀνόματι αὐτοῦ, "upon His name" (compare Acts 15:14 with Acts 15:8-9). But as both James and Peter recognise in this fact a practical declaration on the part of God that circumcision was not a necessary prerequisite to the reception of the Gentiles into the kingdom of Christ, while James follows up the allusion to this fact with the prophecy of Amos, introducing it with the words, "and to this agree the words of the prophets," there can be no doubt that James also quotes the words of the prophet with the intention of adducing evidence out of the Old Testament in support of the reception of the Gentiles into the kingdom of God without circumcision. But this proof is not furnished by the statement of the prophet, "through its silence as to the condition required by those who were pharisaically disposed" (Hengstenberg); and still less by the fact that it declares in the most striking way "what significance there was in the typical kingdom of David, as a prophecy of the relation in which the human race, outside the limits of Israel, would stand to the kingdom of Christ" (Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, ii. 2, pp. 84, 85). For the passage would contain nothing extraordinary concerning the typical significance possessed by the kingdom of David in relation to the kingdom of Christ, if, as Hofmann says (p. 84), the prophet, instead of enumerating all the nations which once belonged to the kingdom of David, simply mentions Edom by name, and describes all the others as the nations which have been subject like Edom to the name of Jehovah. The demonstrative force of the prophet's statement is to be found, no doubt, as Hofmann admits, in the words כּל־הגּוים אשׁר נקרא שׁמי עליהם. But if these words affirmed nothing more than what Hofmann finds in them - namely, that all the nations subdued by David were subjected to the name of Jehovah; or, as he says at p. 83, "made up, in connection with Israel, the kingdom of Jehovah and His anointed, without being circumcised, or being obliged to obey the law of Israel" - their demonstrative force would simply lie in what they do not affirm, - namely, in the fact that they say nothing whatever about circumcision being a condition of the reception of the Gentiles. The circumstance that the heathen nations which David brought into subjection to his kingdom were made tributary to himself and subject to the name of Jehovah, might indeed be typical of the fact that the kingdom of the second David would also spread over the Gentiles; but, according to this explanation, it would affirm nothing at all as to the internal relation of the Gentiles to Israel in the new kingdom of God. The Apostle James, however, quotes the words of Amos as decisive on the point in dispute, which the apostles were considering, because in the words, "all the nations upon whom my name is called," he finds a prediction of what Peter has just related, - namely, that the Lord has taken out of the heathen a people "upon His name," that is to say, because he understands by the calling of the name of the Lord upon the Gentiles the communication of the Holy Ghost to the Gentiles.
Notice that when Luke quotes James quoting Amos, he uses the word gentiles. But the text from Amos uses nations. It is the same word that has been plaguing this entire exploration: goyim. Who did Amos think the goy were? I believe it was the same as almost all other uses of the word by the prophets, namely, Israel, Ephraim, the ten tribes, also, heathens.
An interesting note is that every commentary I could find linked this passage back to Acts 15 and used Acts to read a Christian interpretation into Amos. They have to do this because this is one of those existential passages. If it does not do what the writer of Acts wants it to do, the entire Christian enterprise is in danger of crumbling from the most ironic fate of death by text.
This was the only commentator I found who actually said the quiet part out loud: The text from Amos simply does not do the work intended by James and Peter. It does not say that new converts from the goy did not have to be circumcised or follow the law. I will remind you again of the house of prayer for all nations text: That came with the requirement of keeping the law. So whoever the goyim were in these passages, that requirement would not have been retracted.
James and Peter are hijacking a saying from an ancient prophet and trying to twist the words and meaning to their purposes. But an honest reading of the original text and a basic understanding of the prophets shows that Peter and James via Luke are hoisted by their own petard.
Conclusion: Easy believism
Growing up, there was a term we used to describe people who said that salvation by faith meant that you didn’t have to obey any laws. We called it easy believism. You can just be saved by granting space in your head for certain propositions without doing works of any kind, such as baptism. We believed in baptism the way Jews believed in circumcision. It was an absolute requirement. With that context, hear these words from James again:
It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.
I said earlier that Peter didn’t sound much like Peter in this passage. Well, James doesn’t sound much like James either. But I will leave that for another exploration that might never happen.
These words are the motto of easy believism writ large. Don’t make it difficult! Almost every utterance of Jesus made it difficult for people to follow him. He kept the law perfectly and demanded his followers to be perfect. Paul claimed perfection in keeping the law. But here in this pivotal moment of goyim inclusion, they all want to make it easy by removing the difficulty of keeping the law? Really? I just don’t buy it.
Instead, we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood.
Wait, why? Why ought they abstain from food polluted by idols? Didn’t the real Paul say that there was nothing wrong with eating food sacrificed to idols? Why abstain from meat of strangled animals and from blood? Who said those things were wrong? Could it be that it is because those things were a part of the law of Moses? Do those things, but not the circumcism thing. A finer example of cherry-picking I have never seen.
For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”
Just when you thought you understood what was going on, we have to end on this bombshell. These commands for the goyim were based on the law of Moses. It seems that maybe the goyim were those that would have been familiar with it. Otherwise, why bring up the fact that it has been preached in every city from the earliest times and read in the synagogues on every Sabbath? I have no idea. I eagerly await your clarification for this.
See you in the comments…
David Johnson
Kingdom part 4: Citizenship
We have devoted two parts to the who of the kingdom. But that was not quite enough to cover this complex issue. Rather than focus on what was meant by goyim (because no one can know), we will consider other, more pressing questions about the kingdom and the people who occupy it. No discussion of the kingdom can advance without some exploration of citizenship. Here we go:
Gaining citizenship
Every kingdom has rules for citizenship. There are very few successful nations with completely open borders and no rules for becoming a citizen. The kingdom of god is no exception. Here is a look at how it was done in the original kingdom of god:
Birth
This is an element of citizenship for all nations of which I am aware. If you are born there, you get to live there, particularly if you were born to citizens of that particular nation. This was true for the kingdom of god.
He made certain promises about the kingdom to Abraham. He didn’t make the promises to everyone in the world, or every tribe, or every patriarch. He singled out Abraham to be the father of his nation. So first and foremost, you had to be of the seed of Abraham.
But that wasn’t enough because the promise was very specific. It only applied to the child of the promise, which was Isaac. The other son Abraham sired had no part of the promise. Beyond that, the promise was even more specific. It had to go through only one of Isaac’s children.
So the other child of Isaac, though born of the child of the promise, had no part in the promise. These tribes of people who were Abraham’s seed but not of the right lineage were the first gentiles. These were Semitic people who were nevertheless outsiders because they were born outside of the promised line. Note that they were still closely related to the people of promise.
Paul notes that it is not enough to be able to say that you were from the seed of Abraham. There were a lot of people who were born of Abraham who were never a part of the promise. But to be clear, even if you were from the right lineage to be qualified for the promise, that still wasn’t enough.
Snip snip
It was never enough that one was born of the seed of Abraham via the right lineage. God made a contract with Abraham. Like every contract, god made, it was signed with blood. Instead of his blood, it was the blood of the children of promise.
Circumcism is a barbaric act of genitive mutilation. It was required of every male child of 8 days old. When the contract was first made, it was required of every male regardless of whether they were 8 days or 80 years. They all had to get the snip. Here is a scene from the Moses story with which you might not be familiar:
Now at a lodging place along the way, the LORD met Moses and was about to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched it to Moses’ feet. “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me,” she said.
So the LORD let him alone. (When she said, “bridegroom of blood,” she was referring to the circumcision.) Ex. 4:24-26
God was about to murder Moses because his son wasn’t circumcised. If you were wondering how important circumcision was, it was that important. There were no compromises and no exceptions. Do it or you’re out.
Last time, we talked about the division in the church over Paul’s insistence that circumcision was no longer necessary. There were those who were demanding that the new converts be circumcised. Where did they get that idea from? They got it from knowing their Bible. God was willing to kill Moses for his son’s lack of circumcision. His life was only spared when his kid got the snip.
When did this change? The answer is that it never officially changed. Jesus didn’t change it. But out of nowhere, these new leaders were saying that circumcision, along with the bulk of the law, was an unnecessary and cruel burden on people seeking to enter the kingdom. Again, I ask, when did god deliver such a law? Never!
Naturalization
You needed to be born of the right lineage and you also had to be subjected to the snip. But that was not the only way in and birth was not the only path. There was also the process of naturalization. Those entering the kingdom from the outside were proselytes.
To be clear, all proselytes had to keep all of the law just as any natural-born Jew. That also includes the snip. There was no shortage of people wanting to be Jews. This is true of any successful religion. If you have a good story that appeals to people, you are going to need a way to bring them into the fold. That is how religions grow. Judaism was no exception.
So as important as birthright was, it could be bypassed by someone committed enough to take the next step: genital mutilation. But let us be very clear about this: there was no way to sidestep the snip. If you were committed enough to have a piece of your penis chopped off, you were clearly committed to the cause. Proselytes had to be just that committed.
This did not change in Jesus’ day. He was all in on the law. Peter and the other apostles were also all in. There was no disparagement about circumcision until the Jerusalem council. Suddenly, it was no longer a requirement to enter the kingdom. Just don’t forget that before that time, it wasn’t even questioned. Birthright was far less important than circumcision. But that leads me to another question:
Why was there ever any notion that the goyim couldn’t be a part of the Jewish kingdom? After all, they could always come in as proselytes since bloodline wasn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things. The only answer I can come up with is that there were limits on proselytizing with which I am not familiar.
For instance, maybe only certain kinds of people could be proselytes. Perhaps the Samaritans were always off-limits. Jesus strictly forbade his disciples to enter the land of the Samaritans. They might interact with one here and there who happened to be outside of their territory. But there was no intentional proselytizing allowed in those territories.
For all I know, this restriction might have applied to the heathen goyim from the diasporas. Because of their willful rejection of god and his ways, they were out of the picture and could not use the method of becoming a proselyte as some kind of back door. There is more that I don’t know than I know about proselytization. It was a thing that happened with very little exposition in the text. The part about which I am confident is that whoever they were, they all had to be circumcised and keep the law like any other Jew.
Jesus and citizenship
This one is tougher than it seems because Jesus never mentions circumcision. He does mention the law quite a bit. But he was already talking to law keepers for the most part. So he didn’t have to get into the specifics. For instance, when he told the rich young ruler to keep the law, he didn’t get into all of the commandments. And I find it unlikely that he intended his truncated list to be exclusive. Here it is:
You know the commandments, ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not give false testimony, Honor your father and mother.’” Luke 18:20
That’s 5. Were the others meaningless? Recall the question that led to this answer:
“Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”
Is this an exhaustive answer? If so, I’m in. After all, there is nothing in there about keeping the Sabbath. There is nothing about worshipping the Lord your god. Either Jesus didn’t think those things were important or this list is just shorthand for the first thing he said about knowing the law. Jesus’ answer was to keep the law.
There is a good chance that even the command to keep the law isn’t quite right. After all, there was nothing in there about believing certain propositions. There was no word about faith. Jesus focused on the works of the law. That’s interesting. The man called him teacher. Why didn’t Jesus correct him and proclaim that he was god? Why didn’t he make that belief a condition of eternal life? Maybe different people had different requirements.
It would have been much easier if Jesus had compiled a list of requirements for gaining citizenship into the Kingdom. I suppose we could start with one of the first things he said:
From that time Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Mt. 4:17
One might gather that the first requirement for citizenship was to repent. Now when the prophets called for repentance, they were already talking to Jews and Israelites. That was no different for Jesus. So all of the other things such as birth and the snip were already done. These messages were to wayward Jews who had left the ways of the law. The call to repentance was a call to return to the law, not mearly to be sorry about their sins.
From that perspective, those of us who were never Jews could never repent insofar as we were never under the law. We can feel sorry about our moral shortcomings and vow to change our ways. But again, in the context of the Kingdom, repentance always includes returning to a state of obedience to the law.
Take away the law and one has to wonder of what they were meant to repent. Let’s say that some cultures ate the meat of animals that had been strangled, and drank their blood. That would simply be a part of their culture, as it is today. What would make that wrong? if they were not familiar with Jewish law, what would provide any hint that it was wrong? What about wearing clothes made from two kinds of fabric? There is nothing obviously sinful about that. So how could they possibly repent of any but the most commonly agreed upon evils?
Here is John the Baptist with a similar message but with a bit more detail?
So he was saying to the crowds who were going out to be baptized by him, “You offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore produce fruits that are consistent with repentance… Luke 3
This is quite the message for someone trying to win over hearts and minds. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who had any respect for Jews or their traditions, and certainly not their standing as god’s chosen people. He uses a broad brush to paint the Jewish forefathers as a bunch of snakes. It is a wonder he wasn’t beheaded right then and there. He goes on:
… and do not start saying to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children for Abraham. But indeed the axe is already being laid at the root of the trees; so every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
At a glance, it seems like John is declaring that the old covenant was almost over and that there was no such thing as a chosen people anymore. God no longer needed them, if he ever did. God could turn stones into Abraham’s seed. That part never made any sense to me because why bother? If you are out of the covenant, then you don’t need to raise up stones to fulfill it. The line about the axe being already at the root is the most ominous of pronouncements because this is more than a few branches being pruned. The whole tree is about the be chopped down and discarded. Have fun working through that. Then, things get interesting:
And the crowds were questioning him, saying, “Then what are we to do?” And he would answer and say to them, “The one who has two tunics is to share with the one who has none; and the one who has food is to do likewise.” Now even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they said to him, “Teacher, what are we to do?” And he said to them, “Collect no more than what you have been ordered to.” And soldiers also were questioning him, saying, “What are we to do, we as well?” And he said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone, nor harass anyone, and be content with your wages.”
I love this passage because it is one of the few that attempts to put meat on the bones of repentance. Who is in the kingdom? Those who repent. What does it mean to repent? It seems to mean that you live a good life characterized by loving one’s neighbor. The problem with that simplistic synopsis is that it is not anything that the vast majority of Christian leaders would endorse.
Notice what’s missing? There was nothing in there about faith, or theological propositions, or heaven and hell, or homosexuality, or church, or anything of the kind. There was no doctrine, no catechism, no nothing. What are we supposed to do with that?
So far, the kingdom requirements according to Jesus and his herald were all works. One might even describe repentance as the ultimate work since it has no duration. It is an ongoing thing that you never stop. It is all about changing your heart and actions from whatever it is to something befitting the kingdom. Jesus has more to say about citizenship. This is from Luke 21 starting with verse 20:
Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
Time for a quick round of translation roulette. Many translations have Jesus saying that the kingdom of god is in your midst, or among you. But two versions of the KJV have him saying that the kingdom is within you. These are not remotely the same things. This little translation nugget is part of what has fueled the debate for centuries. Back to our regularly scheduled program:
If the kingdom is within you, as I was taught, then it is strictly a spiritual kingdom that could be attained even before Jesus was crucified. If it is among you, then he might have been talking about himself as the kingdom. But that is even more confusing because he started out preaching that the kingdom was near, not that he was the kingdom. Neither of these interpretations are any good. It also doesn’t help that he was addressing the Pharisees, a group he was happy to confound with mysticism and confusion. The rest is what he directed at his disciples:
Then he said to his disciples, “The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. People will tell you, ‘There he is!’ or ‘Here he is!’ Do not go running off after them. For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.
This seems to be saying that the coming of the kingdom will not be subtle. You will know it when it happens. So if it is not as obvious as lightning in the sky, it isn’t the real thing. But if the kingdom is spiritual, then it can never be that obvious. I find nothing obvious about the church being the kingdom. If anything, the modern church is obviously not the kingdom.
Has Jesus changed the Subject? We started with him talking about the kingdom. Now he is talking about the son of man. Is he conflating the two? It seems so. But it is really hard to tell. Maybe things get clearer if we just keep reading:
Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.
“It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.
“It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. On that day no one who is on the housetop, with possessions inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. Remember Lot’s wife! Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it. I tell you, on that night two people will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding grain together; one will be taken and the other left.”
Now, the kingdom is the plot of the Left Behind series. Things got real dark real fast. It is compared to god’s destructive rage fits of the past. He could be making a reference to the sacking of Jerusalem. But that tells us very little about the kingdom. Honestly, I question whether this speech is real. It feels like a compilation of greatest hits that were haphazardly jumbled together rather than a singular, cohesive thought about the kingdom. Let’s try one more verse:
“Where, Lord?” they asked. He replied, “Where there is a dead body, there the vultures will gather.”
That’s interesting. In the other gospels, the disciples ask when rather than where. Luke has them asking about where. That implies that this apocalyptic vision is a local affair. Here is a passage of commentary from * Barnes' Notes on the Bible*:
Where, Lord? - Where, or in what direction, shall these calamities come? The answer implies that it would be where there is the most "guilt and wickedness." Eagles flock where there is prey. So, said he, these armies will flock to the place where there is the most wickedness; and by this their thoughts were directed at once to Jerusalem, the place of eminent wickedness, and the place, therefore, where these calamities might be expected to begin.
Well that doesn’t clear up anything. If this commentator is right, this was all about the destruction of Jerusalem. That places the coming kingdom spacially and temporally. Technically, it places the signs of the coming kingdom spacially and temporally. But that is also a problem because Jesus had already died and rose long before these events. That most important Pentecost had already occurred. Was the kingdom not in full swing already? What did the sacking of Jerusalem add to the reality of the kingdom?
We can also observe that the Left Behind scenario didn’t happen with the raising of Jerusalem to the ground. As for who, Jesus seems to be referring to some kind of final judgement of the Jews. The good ones are taken and the bad ones remain. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Who knows? Thing is, he is talking about Jews and what is coming for them. If there is anything that can be learned from this passage about the kingdom, it is that it was made up of repentant Jews. Jesus did not seem to have anyone or anywhere else in mind. There is one more passage I found illuminating when considering who Jesus thought could enter the kingdom. Here it is:
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples:“The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. Matt 23…
Here, Jesus is not being cynical or mysterious. He seems to really mean that the teachers of the law really did know what they were talking about, and that the people should do everything they taught. Who is Jesus talking to? These are Jews. And the thing that Jesus told them was to obey the law as taught by the rightful teachers of the law. His instruction only warns them not to do as the teachers did because those teachers didn’t practice what they preached. Jesus never condemned anyone for keeping the law. He commanded it. He spent his ministry focusing on what he considered the weightier matters.
At risk of repeating myself, Jesus thought the kingdom was populated by law-keepers who also majored in the weightier matters such as love, good works, justice, and total reliance on god for everything. Just as following the law was insufficient without those things, those weightier matters were insufficient without keeping the law. Those weightier matters were not separate from the law. They were the essence of the law. Jesus wasn’t teaching that you shouldn’t keep the law, rather that you should keep it properly.
The reason the message was to repent is that Jesus was already talking to the citizens of the kingdom in all other ways. He was talking to Jews and directing his disciples to do the same. The Jews who lived out the Jewish law properly were the citizens of the kingdom. Those who didn’t would get a rude awakening as the axe was already laid at the root.
Paul’s innovation (whether he intended it or not) was to remove the law-keeping component altogether to make it easier for more people to join. But even so, there is one final wrinkle to explore:
When we arrived at Jerusalem, the brothers and sisters received us warmly. The next day Paul and the rest of us went to see James, and all the elders were present. Paul greeted them and reported in detail what God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. Acts 21: 17…
Paul goes to Jerusalem and talks about his success with the gentiles. But this isn’t going to go the way you think it will. After all, Paul had a reputation for telling Jews that they were not worthy of eternal life. Awkward!
When they heard this, they praised God. Then they said to Paul: “You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law. They have been informed that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs.
James is being diplomatic as he is likely the one who spread this rumor about Paul. After all, he was the head of the Jerusalem church and was at the council meeting. Moreover, this wasn’t a rumor. It is a reasonable extrapolation from what Paul taught. Remember that James has emphasized that thousands of Jewish believers were among them and that they were zealous for the law. These were law-keepers. These were kingdom people as James understood it. This is not going to end well.
What shall we do? They will certainly hear that you have come, so do what we tell you. There are four men with us who have made a vow. Take these men, join in their purification rites and pay their expenses, so that they can have their heads shaved. Then everyone will know there is no truth in these reports about you, but that you yourself are living in obedience to the law.
This looks like a very deceptive coverup. James is saying that we can’t have all these Jews thinking that the reports about Pauls teachings were true (which they were). James orders Paul to join four other men who were taking a very specific Jewish vow that was heavy on appearances. It seems strange that Paul had to pay the expenses of the other men. But this, too, was a part of the performance. Paul was to look like he cared so much about these traditions that he was willing to pay for others to fulfill them.
The payoff is that it would gaslight the people and make them think that all the reports about Paul and his teaching concerning the law was false. It was also to show that Paul was living in obedience to the law. This is the kicker. Paul did not live in obedience to the law when he thought it would help him win Gentile converts. He boasted as much.
So this whole thing was to whitewash Paul and make him appear to be a law-keeping Jew. Notice also the phrasing: It was not that he was living according to the traditions, but rather that he was living in obedience to the law, as if to say that the law was something to be obeyed, not something to be optionally observed when it was convenient.
As for the Gentile believers, we have written to them our decision that they should abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality.”
Just when we thought things were simple, it gets weird again. What we can gather is that natural Jews had to keep the law. Naturalized Jews also had to keep the law. But gentile converts who were never Jews only had to keep a subset of the law. Even the bit about abstaining from sexual immorality was based on how the Mosaic law defined it. So in that sense, none were completely free from keeping the law.
Do you believe you can be a kingdom citizen without keeping the Mosaic law? What about the part about the meat of strangled animals? Did you say something about the big 10? Funny, because that wasn’t mentioned here. Christians tend to read that back into the text. Do you teach that Jews who convert to Christianity should keep the Mosaic law? Funny, because that is what they demanded here. How does one enter the kingdom? Maybe by keeping the law, maybe by keeping some part of the law? Or maybe it was something else entirely.
Conclusion: The mark of citizenship
He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.” Mark 16:15-19
Initially, I was going to make this section about baptism being the new circumcision. But we can do baptism in a supplemental. The more interesting part of this passage is the way you can tell who is a citizen. Jesus said of those who believe, accompanying signs include driving out demons, speaking in new tongues, picking up snakes with their hands, drinking deadly poison without being harmed, oh, and healing sick people just by placing hands on them.
This has to be one of my favorite passages from the gospels because it makes one of the more falsifiable claims in the Bible. If these signs mark the true citizens of the kingdom, then there is no kingdom. Even the bit about speaking in tongues is intriguing. It is not just speaking in a language, but in new languages. Healing would be accomplished by simply placing hands on a sick person. Can you point me to the person who can do that? I didn’t think so. Care to drink some poison? No? Maybe we can find someone who can verifiably cast out demons? I might have something for that coming soon.
Outside of charismatics, it is hard to find Christians who claim to be able to do any of this. They have all kinds of excuses for why they don’t have these powers. That is the case for the VAST majority of Christians today. Maybe it is that there was some kind of kingdom that has long vanished. Or maybe we are still waiting on the kingdom to come and for kingdom people to finally get their super powers. But that idea makes hash of the teachings of Jesus. If everyone who believes gets the powers, I should have gotten them. No believer should ever die without having those powers. No powers, no believers. No believers, no kingdom.
And with that, I’ll see you in the comments.
In the meantime, I’m out.
David Johnson