Revelation: The Challenge of the Gospel to the Apostosies of the Present Time

When speed reading through the NT last fall I discovered The Book of Revelation for the first time as a letter written in encouragement by the Apostle John to the early churches he had founded. That they might greatly persevere in their Christian faith against growing Roman-Greek-Jewish oppression and persecution which was leading to the loss, displacement, even death, of early Christians for testifying to their faith founded in their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

A faith that challenged the early belief systems and paganisms of their day even as it does now in today's post-truth world devoted to patriotic nationalism to the exclusion of the civil and human rights of a society's populations. A nationalism that has slipped into today's undiscerning religious churches and is confusing the gospel of Christ with the gospel of an ungodly Empire regressive in its religious Dominionism; repressive in its anti-intellectual reconstructions of the bible; and holding so many more ungodly teachings and behaviors as to create an ungodly heathen altar upon which another sacrifice is being made to the exclusion of Christ, the Lamb of God, slain before the foundations of the world.

Not unlike today's outbreak of post-truth Nationalism which is contending for the soul of the church, so too The Book of Revelation is a letter displaying John's great heartbreak for his churches as they slipped away into the pernicious teachings of Gnostic mysticism; worldly racisms and discriminations; and a plethora of unchristian ideas and teachings challenging the early Christians founded in Christ and His gospel through faithful Apostolic teaching.

The Apostle's churches were being continually challenged by the incursion of untruthful false teachings and by disingenuous false teachers working hard against the gospel of Christ causing the churches of Asia Minor to slip away all too quickly from the ministries of John and his disciples. These false teachers were more than oppositional to the gospel of Christ. They were highly motivated, caustic, argumentative, duplicitous, conniving, and purposeful in destroying the hard-won ministries of John across Asia Minor.

A ministry which John's churches had testified to by word and by deed, had learned, had even discussed and witnessed, in the Apostle's very presence. At the time of writing Revelation John was discovering through the many emissaries he was sending out of the grave challenges coming against the gospel of Christ he and his disciples had labored so hard to preach and teach. Deeply oppositional challenges growing across Asia Minor's enculturated societies in anger and resoluteness to deny, resist, and remove from their older Hellenistic traditions and customs the Christian gospel that was replacing those beliefs and practices.

So then, the Book of Revelation was yet another letter by the Apostle John to the Asia Minor churches to hold fast to Jesus, to endure persecution, to forsake false gospels, and to grow in the faith and hope they had first learned in Christ. The apocalyptic imagery he used drew from popular "end-time" literature and spoke to their "present time" of hardship-and-trial - that it would continue to increase proportionate to the gospel's outreach into the tribes and nations of the ancient world.

John's final letter to his churches would culminate in what he had sown, taught, and exampled through his earlier visits, letters, and gospel, as the first century quickly drew to a close and a new era commenced far removed from the Jewish-Messianic Christianity John once had transitioned under in his Lord's day in the lands of Israel, his holy ancestry.

Now, into the pagan cultures of the ancient world had come yet another challenge from a foreign religion, Christianity, dismissed and despised as unworthy and unwanted. A religion founded in a Judeo-Christian ethic with the understanding of Christ's culmination of the Old Testament, it's laws, and salvation history to the nation Israel through its cycles of faithfulness and faithlessness. This Judeo-Christian faith was unknown in Asia Minor's Greek-Persian-Roman culture; spoken by a foreign tongue and descended from a foreign culture (Jewish); and didn't make sense to the Gentile populations becoming convicted by its strange teachings of love and sacrifice. And yet, under the hand of God, it was growing in its missional outreach to fast become a fundamental religious belief - if not religious philosophy - that all the Gentile nations across the ancient world were beginning to wrestle with as to its truths, cultural demands, and personal commitments.

So that in the midst of all this the dear Apostle John was sorrowfully witnessing a fundamental falling away of the church under renewed raw persecutions aggressively challenging everything he and his apostolic disciples had learned and taught. It held a renewed energy unlike what he had ever expected and would require a new generation of Christians to uphold-and-contest in vigor, and personal commitment, against the evils of their generations.

This was the energy of the gospel of God into the dark world of mankind lost in its blindness and sins. And it was the power of God through Christ by His Spirit to release men and women from their torments and chains to find a spiritual freedom unlike what they had ever known. It was the beginning of the era of the church of God speaking truth in love, duty, honor, and commitment that would be led by men and women of God trained to go forth to plant, defend, and wisely shepherd the flocks of God.

"Even so Lord, Come in Power, in Majesty, in Reign, into our hearts!"

R.E. Slater

March 3, 2017

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Things You (Might) Mistakenly Believe About The Book of Revelation

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/formerlyfundie/things-might-mistakenly-believe-book-revelation/

by Dr. Benjamin L. Corey

March 2, 2017

If you grew up in Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism, you probably grew up with a doom-and-gloom view of the future and “end times.”

Me? I grew up with the whole deal: raptures, tribulations, the Antichrist, and even warnings that those things we first called “barcodes” might actually be the mark of the beast.

End times belief is so much more than an area of theology. It is a complex world-view that shapes every single aspect of our faith and the way we see the world, whether we’re able to recognize it or not.

The book of Revelation– the last book in the Bible– is perhaps the most complex book in Scripture. It is also in this obscure and highly symbolic book that much of the doom-and-gloom end times world-view is planted and watered.

There’s just one problem with building an entire world-view off the book of Revelation: it is a book that is notoriously difficult to understand or interpret. While it would be impossible for anyone to truly understand the book without sitting down for an interview with the author, John, there are some things we do know about it. In light of the few things we know for certain, here are a few corrections to things we were mistakenly taught to believe about the book of Revelation:

The Book of Revelation is not about the “end times.”

John’s Revelation was not something intended to be put in a time capsule and opened 2000 years later. Instead, it was a letter written to very specific churches and was addressing imminent events that directly impacted the people it was written to. John repeatedly uses terms like “soon”, “quickly” and “shortly” in reference to his prophesy– he goes out of his way to make it clear that he is writing about soon-to-happen-events, not ones distant in the future.

Simplified version: It was a letter written by one man to a handful of churches about imminent matters that were relevant to them. For us [today], this means that Revelation is mostly a book about past events.

Revelation is not a fear-based book of doom-and-gloom.

The book of Revelation isn’t a doom-and-gloom book at all, but rather is a very specific genre of Jewish literature where the main goal is to encourage the readers. Any interpretation that falls outside of encouraging the specific recipients of the letter, is an interpretation that is inconsistent with this literary genre.

It is a letter from one person to a handful of churches, addressing imminent events, and the entire purpose is to encourage them in the midst of these events.

The book of Revelation does not teach a secret “rapture” of the Church.

If I could count the times someone has told me to go back to Revelation to read about the rapture, the number would be considerable. The reality is however, that Revelation doesn’t teach a rapture at all. It’s simply not in the book. (It’s not even in the Bible.)

Those who believe in the rapture will argue that it’s “implied”, since the Church is only discussed in the first part of the book, but that’s silly. We can’t just make stuff up, but when we say that Revelation teaches the rapture we actually *are* just making stuff up. Rapture theology wasn’t developed for another 1500 years after John wrote this letter.

(Same is true for the Anti-Christ, which is a figure from the earlier letters from John and is not in Revelation.)

No one knows exactly what all if it means, and if they claim to, they’re lying.

Since Revelation is apocalyptic literature, it is by nature massively symbolic. Throughout the book we find symbols, numbers, and all sorts of other interesting stuff. While some of it can have an obvious meaning because of themes in the rest of Scripture (such as a symbolic lamb, which is obviously Jesus), much of what is found in this book has been endlessly debated with no clear way to determine a “correct” interpretation.

The reality is that without the ability to travel back in time and talk to the author who wrote it, and the recipients of this letter, we’ll never know the full and correct meaning of everything. While this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, it does mean you should be ultra skeptical of end-times preachers who claim to have it down to a science.

…

The book of Revelation is certainly interesting and filled with wonderful lessons to be gleaned, but it is notoriously misunderstood. It is not a book about the “end times.” It does not hold more news than your local newspaper, and it has very little to do with the future.

Instead, it’s a letter John wrote to several churches when he was exiled on Patmos. It was a letter he wrote in the Jewish apocalyptic genre, which was intended to foretell events to immediately occur, and which was designed to encourage those churches as they experienced the turbulent times of the mid first century.

The book of Revelation is a lot of things– but it’s not what your childhood pastor told you it was.

Social Evolution & The Role of Religion in Humanity

Having written over the years of the evolutionary progress of life, humanity differs little from the animal world it resembles when viewed through scientific critique. However, it is unique from the animal world in its adaptation to survive its own species by locking onto that eusocial preservative trait known as religion. As a result, mankind was better able to survive as a species through the evolution of a conscience devoted in part to a developing societal religious consciousness seen both scientifically and theologically as hard wired into humanity's makeup (neurologically, if not genetically). But if God is Creator this would be a very natural consequence as God cannot divorce His presence from His creative work (which then would include quite naturally all of His creative work that has been divinely enacted into creation).

As a Christian this divine process is what one would expect when looking at divinely decreed creational evolution begun from a biologically chaotic state preordained, or "shaded towards", the scientifically discovered Darwinian model of life somehow managing to survive naturally hostile environments. The church might call this a "divine spark", or a "miracle", but when presented as a fully mature evolutionary system divinely decreed and sovereignly ruled God does not "interfere" with His design (by spark or miracle) but "partner with it" a la a free will creation imbued with indeterminative choices and results.

It also would be in keeping with a future always open and moving forward towards reconciliation with its Creator. It is the opposite of what is taught in many evangelical churches portraying God as the ultimate "choice maker" as versus a God giving that divine function over to His creation by wont and by will. Where, in place of predetermination, there lies an open, unknown future rebuilding towards a divinity locked away in itself. Drawn as it were by a Sovereign God through love and wisdom rather than by judgmental decree, otherworldly control, or divine retribution. The former is known as an Open and Relational (Process) theology of God-and-creation whereas the later avoids any process to its theology and falls back on Greek Hellenistic ideas of "gods and goddesses controlling everyone and everything according to their rights of divinity." This latter is thus a closed and definitive system disallowing any loving, free-willed partnerships.

R.E. Slater

March 1, 2017

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An adult male marmoset carries the offspring he fathered on his back at the Bronx Zoo in New York. Marmosets are among the world’s smallest primates, with their heads slightly larger than the size of a quarter. | The Wildlife Conservation Society via AP

“A lot of people assume, falsely, that science and religion are zero-sum games:

that if science explains something, then religion must not be true. … If you were

God and wanted to set up the world in a certain way, wouldn’t you create

humans with bigger brains and the ability to imagine?” - Robin Dunbar

A scientist’s new theory: Religion was key to humans’ social evolution

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/02/27/a-scientists-new-theory-religion-was-key-to-humans-social-evolution/?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.f2ed0f684ce8

by Julie Zauzmer

February 27, 2017

BOSTON — In humans’ mysterious journey to become intelligent, socializing creatures like no other in the animal world, one innovation played an essential role: religion.

That’s the theory that a preeminent evolutionary scientist is setting out to prove.

“You need something quite literally to stop everybody from killing everybody else out of just crossness,” said Robin Dunbar. “Somehow it’s clear that religions, all these doctrinal religions, create the sense that we’re all one family.”

Dunbar, an evolutionary psychology professor at Oxford University, gained some measure of fame more than 20 years ago for his research on the size of animals’ social networks. Each species of primate, he found, can manage to keep up a social bond with a certain number of other members of its own species. That number goes up as primates’ brain size increases, from monkeys to apes.

Humans, Dunbar found, are capable of maintaining significantly more social ties than the size of our brains alone could explain. He proved that each human is surprisingly consistent in the number of social ties we can maintain: About five with intimate friends, 50 with good friends, 150 with friends and 1,500 with people we could recognize by name. That discovery came to be known as “Dunbar’s number.”

And then Dunbar turned to figuring out why Dunbar’s number is so high. Did humor help us manage it? Exercise? Storytelling? That riddle has been Dunbar’s quest for years — and religion is the latest hypothesis he’s testing in his ongoing attempt to find the answer.

“Most of these things we’re looking at, you get in religion in one form or another,” he said.

Dunbar is just one of a recent wave of scientists who are interested in how religion came to be and how people have benefited from it.

“For most of Western intellectual history since the Enlightenment, religion has been thought of as ignorant and strange and an aberration and something that gets in the way of reason,” said Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame who studies religion. “In the last 10 or 20 years on many fronts, there’s been a change in thinking about religion, where a lot of neuroscientists have been saying religion is totally natural. It totally makes sense that we’re religious. Religion has served a lot of important functions in developing societies.”

In the case of Dunbar and his colleagues, they already published research demonstrating that two other particularly human behaviors increased people’s capacity for social bonding. In the lab, they showed that first, laughter, and second, singing, left research subjects more capable of forming connections with other people than they were before.

Religion is the remaining key to explaining humans’ remarkable social networks, Dunbar thinks. “These three things are very good at triggering endorphins, making us feel bonded,” he said last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting, where he presented his team’s research on laughter and singing and introduced the forthcoming research on religion.

Religion includes numerous elements of Dunbar’s earlier studies on endorphin-producing activities. Lots of singing, to start. Repetitive motion triggers endorphins, he said, noting that traditions from Catholicism to Islam to Buddhism to Hinduism make use of prayer beads.

Plus, researchers have shown that doing these activities in synchronized fashion with other people drastically magnifies the endorphin-producing effect: Picture the coordinated bowing that is central to Muslim, Jewish and Catholic worship.

And Dunbar’s most recent published research demonstrated the effectiveness of emotional storytelling in bonding groups of strangers who hear the story together — again, a fixture of religious worship.

“What you get from dance and singing on its own is a sense of belonging. It happens very quickly. What happens, I suspect, is that it can trigger very easily trance states,” Dunbar said. He theorizes that these spiritual experiences matter much more than dance and song alone. “Once you’ve triggered that, you’re in, I think, a different ballgame. It ramps up massively. That’s what’s triggered. There’s something there.”

Dunbar’s team will start research on religion in April, and he expects it will take three years. To begin, he wants to map a sort of evolutionary tree of religion, using statistical modeling to try to show when religious traditions evolved and how they morphed into each other.

Of course, religious people themselves might find Dunbar’s theory odd — most don’t think of religion existing to serve an evolutionary purpose, but of their faiths simply being true.

But Smith thinks one can easily have faith in both God’s truth and religion’s role in human development.

“From the religious point of view, you can say this … . God created humans as a very particular type of creature, with very particular brains and biology, just so that they would develop into the type of humans who would know God and believe in God,” Smith said. “They’re not in conflict at all.”

He added: “A lot of people assume, falsely, that science and religion are zero-sum games: that if science explains something, then religion must not be true. … If you were God and wanted to set up the world in a certain way, wouldn’t you create humans with bigger brains and the ability to imagine?”

One more research finding on the place of God in our brains — remember Dunbar’s number, the five intimate friends and 50 good friends and 150 friends each person can hold onto? Dunbar says that if a person feels he or she has a close relationship with a spiritual figure, like God or the Virgin Mary, then that spiritual personage actually fills up one of those numbered spots, just like a human relationship would. One of your closest friends, scientifically speaking, might be God.

WHAT IS THE BIBLE? A Good Question that Biblical Inerrancy Can't Answer

WHAT IS THE BIBLE? A Good Question that Biblical Inerrancy Can't Answer

http://www.peteenns.com/what-is-the-bible-a-good-question-that-biblical-inerrancy-cant-answer/

by PeteEnns

February 22, 2017

I deeply respect Scripture, but I am not an inerrantist. I have several reasons for this, but it comes down to two things:

• The Bible as a whole (rather than a prooftext or two) doesn’t support inerrancy.
• The history of Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Bible doesn’t support inerrancy.

I write quite a bit about the first point (see some blog posts here). Some might say “too much” but you’re not the boss of me. Jesus is and just this morning he told me personally that I need to keep writing about it.

The bottom line here is that the Bible is too diverse and contradictory for “inerrancy” to hold any explanatory power. To “hold on” to the term would mean either (1) ignoring the the biblical data, or (2) qualifying the term “inerrancy” beyond recognition.

Neither posture contributes to spiritual growth, but stifles it.

Some choose to take one or both of these approaches, thinking that too much is at stake if we “let go” of inerrancy. My response is that wishing it to be a central doctrine doesn’t make it so, if in fact the Bible you are protecting doesn’t support the theory.

On the second point, the history of Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Bible is so diverse, that to expect to mine through all that and find beneath all the chaos an inerrant Bible seems rather nonsensical to me—unless one’s version of Christianity entails the belief that your tradition has gotten the Bible entirely right and others that disagree are wrong and need to be corrected. This leads to religious wars or at least rumbles at church softball games.

Jewish and Christian interpretation of the Bible evinces diachronic and synchronic diversity, meaning diversity through time and diversity at any one time.

The presence of these diversities is simply a fact. You can look it up.

A deep problem with inerrancy is that it presumes (or works best with) the notion that the Bible “properly” understood will yield one and only one authoritative meaning.

But the Bible is famously fraught with ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that are part of the character of Scripture, and the result of either intentional internal debates by the authors or the natural by-product of diverse authors writing at diverse times under diverse circumstances and for diverse reasons. Add to that the great distance between a book whose beginnings go back about 3000 years—as far removed back in time for us as the year 5000 is from us ahead.

Simply put, the phenomenon of a Scripture that is diverse and the inevitably diverse history of interpretation of such a diverse text do not sit well with the insistence that God would only produce an inerrant text.

What Is the Bible?

The question remains, then, “What is the Bible?”

Good question, but I don’t always like the way it’s posed: “Well, Enns, now that you’ve taken inerrancy away form us, what are we supposed to think of the Bible now, huh? HUH?!”

That way of phrasing things assumes the normalcy of an inerrantist paradigm.

Another bad way of asking the question is, “So, I suppose that makes you an ‘errantist.’”

No, no, and no. That too presumes the normalcy of inerrancy—that discussions of the nature of the Bible center on whether or not there are errors, and everyone falls on one side of the divide or the other.

There are many other ways of thinking about the Bible. What is needed here is to broaden one’s field of vision.

My own answer to “What is the Bible?,” at least at this moment in my life, includes but is not limited to the following:

In the Bible, we read of encounters with God by ancient peoples, in their times and places, asking their questions, and expressed in language and ideas familiar to them. Those encounters with God were, I believe, genuine, authentic, and real. . . . All of us on a journey of faith encounter God from our point of view. . . we meet God as people defined by our moment in the human drama, products of who, where, and when we are. We ask our questions of God and encounter God in our time and place in language and ideas familiar to us, just like the ancient pilgrims of faith who gave us the Bible. . . . This Bible, which preserves ancient journeys of faith, models for us our own journeys. We recognize something of ourselves in the struggles, joys, triumphs, confusions, and despairs expressed by the biblical writers. ~ The Bible Tells Me So, pp. 23-24

No answer will be perfect, and I think it is wise to be willing to hold our definitions loosely (as I try to). But my point here is simple that an “inerrantist model” of the Bible creates unnecessary conflict with with how the Bible behaves and how it has been read for a very, very long time.

And there are other, faithful, ways of answering the question, “What is the Bible?”

Biblical Salvation: How It’s Possible To Be A Christian And Still Not Be “Saved”

Biblical salvation seems to be heavily focused on being saved from an old way of living, and saved into a new way of living– a way of life that Jesus described as “eternal.” - BLC

Biblical Salvation: How It’s Possible To Be A Christian And Still Not Be “Saved”

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/formerlyfundie/biblical-salvation-possible-christian-still-not-saved/

by Dr. Benjamin L. Corey [edited by r.e. slater]

February 17, 2107

Growing up evangelical, one of the primary questions we were taught to ask strangers was: “Are you saved?” Or, better yet: “If you died tonight do you know where you’d go?”

The concept of being saved was pretty simple, really: You’re a sinner headed for hell, Jesus died to take your punishment, and if you “ask him into your heart” you’ll go to heaven instead of hell.

Salvation as understood this way has taken root in much of Americanized Christianity, and even global Christianity thanks in part to the American way of packaging and exporting an Americanized version of the faith.

It is a simple, non-costly understanding of salvation that has little biblical precedence even though it is so commonplace.

This truncated version of salvation turns it into something elusive, something secret. Like a membership card tucked into the deepest corner of your wallet, you have no way of knowing who has one, and who does not. This is precisely why-and-how so many Christians came to see Donald Trump as “saved” and one of us: leaders like James Dobson reported rumors that he “accepted Christ” (as if it’s like accepting an offer for a low interest credit card) and from that moment on, Trump is seen by many to be “saved” and thus one of us.

But that’s not biblical salvation– biblical salvation has little to do with a secret transaction that points you toward heaven or sends you to hell, in the commonly understood sense.

Biblical Salvation - What It Is Not

While the NT term salvation can hold a variety of nuances, the ultimate contextual meaning of salvation in the NT is in reference for one who joined God’s Kingdom as proclaimed by Jesus. Joining God’s Kingdom is much like joining any other Kingdom that has one who rules from a throne: you join by pledging your allegiance and obedience to the King– and then living that out.

In Americanized Christianity, salvation often only includes half that equation, or at least offers a footnote to the idea of living out Kingdom principles. They’ll often say things like,

“Well, we don’t have to emulate Jesus in this particular area of life because he was unique”

or,

“Well, the Kingdom of God isn’t fully here yet, so Jesus was just describing how we’ll live one day in a perfect world.”

Readers Digest version: As long as you have the card in your pocket, you’re saved. The second half is nice, but not totally necessary, because there’s a lot of “reasons” why we don’t always do what Jesus did. In this case, the faux version of salvation we grew up with was an easy, individualized transaction that was focused on where you’ll go when you die, not on how you live in the here and now.

Biblical Salvation - What It Is and Means

However, biblical salvation is directly linked to net-result of actually doing what Jesus said (aka, living the principles of his Kingdom). This is precisely because biblical salvation has little to do with life after death (though it does some), but has a lot to do with life right now. In fact, when Jesus uses the term “eternal life” in the NT, he often uses this term in the present tense.

Since the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed is founded upon very specific principles, a specific culture that must be lived out (see the Sermon on the Mount for his full manifesto), biblical salvation seems to be heavily focused on being saved from an old way of living, and saved into a new way of living– a way of life that Jesus described as “eternal.”

For those who reject Kingdom principles,

for those who oppress the poor,

for those who reject the immigrant,

[for] those who refuse the way of nonviolent enemy love,

[for] those who refuse to live out the culture of the Kingdom right now,

it would be a stretch to say they are “saved” in the biblical sense,

because until they put down their guns,

feed the hungry, and

welcome the immigrant,

they have not yet entered God’s Kingdom

[nor have they] and begun living in it.

They may have “asked Jesus into their heart”

but they have not yet joined

the Kingdom -

and that’s what salvation is about.

- BLC

Thus, salvation is not a transaction that is open and shut, taking place in totality within the recesses of one’s heart. It surely begins in the heart, but salvation doesn’t end there– it is not possible to be “saved” in the biblical sense if one is not actively striving to be obedient to the King and the culture of the Kingdom– and Scripture speaks quite forcefully on this point.

This is precisely why Jesus said it is possible to be deeply religious, to be a lover of the Bible, and to still not be saved (Matthew 21:31, John 5:39-40).

It is also why he said that many who are thrown into the lake of fire on judgement day will be Christians who did not care for the poor and needy, and thus never actually entered the Kingdom (Matthew 5:31-46).

Certainly, other NT writers back up this concept of salvation, such as the author of James who wrote that faith which is not followed up by caring for the poor and hungry cannot save you (James 2:14-17).

Does biblical salvation have anything to do with the afterlife? To a degree, yes. God’s Kingdom will be eternal. However, the bigger issue is this: If one is not willing to live in the Kingdom now, no matter who they ask into their heart, the chances that they’d even want to live in the Kingdom then seem slim. God, of course, sees that– and the Bible warns us in that regard to not think that simply raising our hand at the end of a sermon means we’re headed to paradise when we die.

There’s little point in talking about being saved then, if we aren’t first saved right now– because salvation isn’t as much a distant event, but a present reality.

The Importance of Being Jesus Acting Christians (vs. Americanized Evangelical Christianity)

Franklin Grahm, Evangelical Politico | Matt Johnson, Flickr Creative Commons

There’s Only Two Types Of “Christian”

(And You Should Be Able To Tell The Difference)

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/formerlyfundie/theres-two-types-christian-able-tell-difference/

by Dr. Benjamin L. Corey

February 14, 2017

As one who studies culture for a living– most specifically, religious culture, I will tell you that technically there are over 40,000 Christian sects in the world.

But realistically? There’s only two kinds of Christian– and honestly, I’m tired of pretending there’s not.

It doesn’t matter what kind (denomination) of Christian you are; there are still only two types: one is the member of a Christian religion, and the other is someone who is actively living like Jesus.

I don’t believe the word “Christian” was ever intended to be used the way we use it in America. When it was first used, the term wasn’t in reference to a well-crafted religion with a long list of tenets, but instead was simply used to describe people who actively did what Jesus said to do. Essentially, the word meant “little Christs.”

Christian, as the word was intended, was measurable– or at least observable. You could tell who was and who wasn’t, and that wasn’t a “judgement” about the state of their heart, either. Being able to tell who was Christian, and who wasn’t, was something one could do by simply observing their outward behavior.

Do they follow the teachings of Jesus, or not?

But that’s not what the term has come to mean in Americanized Christianity. For many of us growing up, if you said a simple prayer at the end of a sermon and “asked Jesus into your heart” you were automatically a Christian. Becoming a Christian was something done in secret, in the most quiet place in your heart. You repeat the words given to you and signify your transition into the group by quietly lifting your hand with “every head bowed, every eye closed,” and at the end you’re part of the group. Since becoming a Christian was internal and not external, there was really no way to know who was a Christian and who wasn’t.

(Well, except if they were gay. If they were gay they *definitely* couldn’t be Christian [wink, wink], but that’s beside the point.)

It strikes me that American Evangelicalism invented an entirely new version of the Christian religion with its own concept of “salvation,” and the consequences of this religion are dire. It has taken the message of Jesus and the biblical mandate to pattern our lives after Jesus, and in so many was reduced it to the near-effortless act of “accepting Christ into your heart.” In fact, it’s become a bizarre religion where one can actually refer to themselves as a Christian while simultaneously disagreeing with what Jesus taught.

That’s not how this thing was originally supposed to work, folks. If one disagrees with Jesus, the word Christian ought not apply.

"In Americanized Christianity we use Christian as a noun when originally, Christian was more of an adjective. It wasn’t so much about something you were, but was more about something you were doing. You were actively living out the teachings of Jesus, and this was easily observable– either you agreed with Jesus and did what he taught, or you didn’t."

The confusion of having two types of Christian and a totally different use of the word, creates all sorts of problems. Mainly, it has the ability to lull people into the idea that they’re Christian when often they’re not– at least, not in the original sense. It also complicates things for those of us who want to teach others to be Christian, because we’re no longer able to easily do what was done 2,000 years ago– we’re not able to walk with new disciples and show them, “Here is an example of Christian. Here is an example of not Christian.“

Case in point: Franklin Graham

The other day I stated that he was not Christian (in response to his anti-immigrant/anti-refugee beliefs), and of course, I immediately got the expected push-back to such a statement.

“How do you really know?” (Implication: how do you know his heart? How do you know he hasn’t “accepted Christ into his heart?”)

Or, of course, some will ask rightly, “is it your job to decide who is or is not a Christian?”

Since Christian has come to mean something different in Americanized Christianity, these objections are totally valid. Since we are operating in a culture where Christian is a noun, and where anyone can secretly be one regardless of what they think about what Jesus said, I don’t know who is that type of Christian and who isn’t. Certainly I don’t know if Franklin Graham has ever asked Jesus into his heart, though I would bank on the fact that he has. Neither is it my place to declare who is part of the Christian religion or not– there’s ultimately 40,000 versions of that and I am not the gate keeper for any of them, let alone all 40,000.

But to me, there are only two types of Christian, and the second one– an adjective instead of a noun, is observable. It doesn’t require the ability to judge the individual heart. It is not something that can only be done by a gate-keeper as if they have any power anyway. It is simply the act of returning Christian to an adjective, and being honest in that it does not apply to people don’t want to do what Jesus said to do.

For all the damage that Americanized Christianity has done, the foundational damage is that it has distorted the word that was first used to describe the disciples of Jesus: Christian.

Instead of describing members of a religion, the word used to mean something so much more. It used to describe what people were doing, and who they were following. It used to be so loaded with meaning that the act of being Christian was totally observable and obvious to anyone around you.

The reality in Americanized Christianity is that you can be “a Christian” without actually being “Christian.” They are two, totally distinct identities.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

Christian used to actually mean something, and I don’t think we should be afraid to say it.

The Valley of Hinnom & Burning Fires of Gehenna

What Jesus Talked About When He Talked About Hell

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/formerlyfundie/what-jesus-talked-about-when-he-talked-about-hell/

by Dr. Benjamin L. Corey

June 25, 2014

What was Jesus talking about when he talked about hell? Well, that’s actually a great question.

Growing up I was often told that “Jesus talked more about hell than he did heaven”, but I don’t once remember being encouraged to actually research from a historical and grammatical perspective what Jesus was actually talking about when he used the word “hell”. (In their defense, I don’t think I ever had a religious leader with advanced theological training, so they probably didn’t realize that someone might want to “look this up” either).

The first discovery one will make on such an investigation, is the inconvenient truth that the word “hell” didn’t exist in first century Israel. This brings up one crucial problem when translating/interpreting the Bible apart from any scholastic work: we see English words that have specific linguistic and cultural connotations and meanings, and read those meanings into an ancient text which may, or may not, have intended to send the same meaning.

The word “hell” becomes a prime example: the word we use today, doesn’t actually appear in language until approximately AD 725– long after the first century. In addition, the word doesn’t come from Hebrew at all, but rather is ultimately rooted in Proto-Germanic. According to the The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology, the word “hell” was adopted into our vocabulary as a way to introduce the pagan concept of hell into Christian theology– which it did quite successfully.

Therefore, we know right off the bat that when we read scripture in English, we’re not actually reading what was originally said and risk reading into the text instead of getting back to the original historical and grammatical meaning of the text. We do this in many areas, which is why competency in Biblical languages or at least Koine Greek, is a mandatory requirement at legitimate institutions of higher theological learning– and why one would do well to hold theology in humility until they are well versed in the grammatical and historical realities of any given ancient text.

It is true however, that we do see– and not infrequently– Jesus refer to “hell”. So what was he talking about?

It’s easy to dismiss something in scripture as just being “metaphorical” without having an intelligent reason to back that up, so we’ve got to go deeper. In this case, we find that Jesus was actually referring to a literal place– and not a literal place of the future, but a literal place of first century Israel. “Hell” was a place that the people of Jesus’ time could actually go and see (image below). So, what was it? Here you go:

The word Jesus uses in Greek is γέεννα (Gehenna), which actually means “The Valley of the Son of Hinnom”. An over simplified description of Gehenna would be that it was the garbage dump outside of Jerusalem; this was the place where both garbage and dead bodies would be discarded and consumed by a fire that was likely always burning. The location goes all the way back to the book of Joshua, and was a place where bad things happened– child sacrifice, bodies were cremated, etc. Basically, imagine a dump where garbage is burned– add into that the vision of burning bodies and a historical connotation of child sacrifice, and you’ll see that it wasn’t a very desirable place. However, it was a very literal place and the original audience of Jesus would have understood it as such. They would not have heard the word “Gahenna” and thought of our concept of hell– they would have realized Jesus was talking about an actual place outside the city.

Jesus did talk of Gehenna as a warning to his audience, but not in the same contextual framework you and I see it from a modern perspective. As my friend and co-Kingdom Conspirator Kurt Willems previously wrote on this same topic:

“When Jesus appeals to Gehenna, he evokes a literal place, not in the underworld, but outside of Jerusalem. Most of the time Jesus uses “hell” in the context of parabolic imagery. To say “hell” is to use imagery that helps listeners understand the danger in this life and the next of not joining up with God’s kingdom purposes.”

As Kurt said, I think the warning of Gehenna is two-fold, one with a very practical application for his audience and one that is symbolic of consequences in the afterlife. For example, it Matthew 23:33 we see Jesus issue the religious leaders a stern warning:

“You are nothing but snakes and the children of snakes! How can you escape going to Gehenna?”

Now, going back to our historical context, we know that the original audience who heard this warning would not have thought Jesus was talking about the “hell” that you or I think of. Instead, he is warning them about their pending risk to literally be burned in the Valley of Hinnom.

Here’s what they would have heard: “You are nothing but snakes and the children of snakes! How will you escape going to the Valley of Hinnom?”

When we look at historical context, we remember that Jesus clearly warned people about the coming judgement against Israel. At the beginning of Matthew 24 Jesus explicitly sets the stage for the coming destruction, warning them that even the temple will be destroyed (“not one stone will remain on another, it will all be thrown down.” V. 2) Jesus goes so far as to even tell them what the signs of the coming judgment (the end of the “age”) would look like: wars, rumors of wars, famine, earthquakes, etc. As Jesus describes this “great tribulation” with horrible persecution, he advises them that if they want to escape death at the hands of the Romans, they would need to flee to the hillsides when they see the “signs of the times” (verse 16).

This actual event and the fulfillment of Jesus’ warning came in AD70 when Roman armies destroyed Jerusalem along with her temple. Presumably, those who heeded Jesus’ warning in Matthew 24 of fleeing to the hillside would have survived the advancing destruction of the Roman army… but those who didn’t?

Well, those folks were killed. And guess what we know actually happened to their bodies? They were burned in… “hell”, just outside of Jerusalem– exactly as Jesus had warned. This makes the teachings of Jesus very practical when considering the historical and grammatical context: those who listened to him would live, and those who didn’t would end up burned in the Valley of Hinnom. While we don’t know for sure, it is highly likely that some/many of the people in the audience when Jesus warned “how will you escape going to the Valley of Hinnom?” actually ended up dead and burned in Gehenna by the Romans.

You probably didn’t hear any of this in Sunday School, but that’s what Jesus was talking about when he talked about hell, at least on a historical level (not accounting for symbolism or dual fulfillment). However, I still affirm that his warnings of hell also have implications for the afterlife– which is why I remain an annihilationist with the hope there will be opportunities for the unjust to come to postmortem repentance, and be reconciled to God through Christ.

All things considered, I believe it important to realize that when Jesus discusses hell, a primary purpose (not negating secondary) was a warning of the coming destruction of Jerusalem and that refusal to heed his advice would result in one being killed and burned in Gehenna.

Living in the Days of Our Ancestors: Doing the Unpopular Thing

Burning the Witches of Salem

Truly we are living in the days of our ancestors where choosing what is good and right is seldom done. We join with our ancestors when we show indifference, or stand to the side, allowing deceiving popularism to determine self rights over human rights.

So then, the question of all questions we must ask ourselves as bible believing Christians is this - "Why is it we always pretend we're Able, and not Cain? The Prophet, and not the one stoning them? Jesus, rather than the Pharisee?"

Very seldom are we the former and usually we are the latter. The scoundrel, the rogue, the charlatan, the thief, the wicked, and false follower of the way, the truth, and the light.

In point of fact, we would have killed the witches of Salem, drowned the baptizing Baptists with their families, stood actively against Black Civil Rights, and participated in the genocide of America's aboriginal tribes.

So why is it when we look at our narrative we always tell ourselves we are the good guys in the story of God's renewal rather than the bad guys which is more likely the case?

Simply, because we always think of ourselves as heroic when the opposite is true.

It is hard to stand up against popularism and speak out. Because it is hard to be courageous though the way of God's love demands it. To embrace the undesirable, be the voice of the oppressed, the giver to the unwanted, the compassionate to the despised.

It takes a rare courage to do what's right and act out love - but no courage at all to stand indifferently to the sidelines actively spectating against the right and the good, the wise and the beautiful.

The bible tells us we are always the Abel, the stoners, the Pharisee, and never the good guy unless we show ourselves to be courageously willing to stand up against fickled popular opinion.

Thus is the way of life to which the bible speaks, Jesus preached, and God's heroes lived and died.

R.E. Slater

February 9, 2017

"What Jesus seems to be suggesting here is that we find ourselves repeating the sins of our ancestors because we have deluded ourselves into imagining that we’re better than them and that “we would not have taken part with them.” Once we convince ourselves that “if we had lived in the days of our ancestors” we would have done better, we make ourselves extremely susceptible to doing exactly as they had done, behaving exactly as they behaved, choosing exactly as they chose." - Fred Clark, The Slacktivist

Matthew 23:29-36

New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

29 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, 30 and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Fill up, then, the measure of your ancestors. 33 You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?[a] 34 Therefore I send you prophets, sages, and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, 35 so that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. 36 Truly I tell you, all this will come upon this generation.

Two Great World Forces Breaking Both Nations and Churches Apart - Law v. Grace

I would have thought the difference to be obvious enough. Especially after speaking to the difference between theologies of Law versus theologies of Grace within Christian communities for so many years. And yet the Western church (and society) are split into two fundamental yearnings. Those who must have authority in their lives at all times and those who must have grace in their lives at all times. Consequentially each group has modified its position by the other. The Law people have added grace but always place it second behind Law; and the Grace people have added law but always place it second behind Grace.

As a psych guy what we believe usually is informed by our personal constitution or make up. "If a belief isn't fundamental to our core than it doesn't become a belief." As a Grace-guy I will always interpret everything in my life through God's grace. Its what drives everything else and cannot come after Law. But other people are Law-and-Order types. Law brings grace and is the reason grace is here. To me, its arcane thinking. But I get it when seeing people thumbing through Romans trying to figure out Paul's logic.

For Grace people, God's very nature/Being is first Love from which all His acts proceed. Not truth or justice, but LOVE. Love is what gives truth and justice meaning. Without LOVE we would have a miserable world indeed. But then again, I'm a Grace-person. Most likely I grew up with this idea through my parental upbringing and personal interactions with the world. It gave me the opportunities I needed to grasp God in the way that I do. When I tried the Law-path to life and theology it never made sense. It created more problems than it solved. Hence my rejection of Calvinism which leads out with a God of Law premeditating wrath and judgment on creation. Instead, I must ride on the "freedom train," the one where God declares "I Love you" and in my love have given you freedom to love me back. Thus the Wesleyan doctrine of Arminiamism (no, not Armenianism! haha. That's a country!).

At Relevancy22 there are a hundred articles and more on why Grace is superior to Law. I make no apologies for wishing to see life through the eyes of Love rather than through the eyes of Law. The very Jewish, and very Law-abiding Apostle Paul, had great difficult getting his head-and-heart around God's Grace which he observed through Messiah Jesus' "tour de force" and the Church of Christ he was persecuting. He describes a period of blindness in his life that so conflicted him that he couldn't make sense of life anymore. But when Grace won the battle over Law the scales on his eyes fell immediately off his soul when the Spirit of God touched his spiritual malady and raised him up unto the great gift of God's Love through Jesus. It righted all his curmudgeonly beliefs and theologies to a true north. Love made sense of the Law he believed in, was taught from a young child, and followed as a spiritual practice devoutly. Love destroyed it all and brought a peace beyond his years of understanding.

And so, as much as I detest binary thinking, in Western culture it is what makes our societies what it is. And if we must use binary thinking to discuss great ideas than this idea between 1) authoritarianism-and-fear and 2) love-and-freedom is significant. Between their interplay comes all of Western civilization's will to create, to be, to discover, to hope. It is what drives Western Society. These two powerful forces can divide us as much as they can heal us. And it can become a very present and real force as demonstrated by America's politics and national policies in these recent years of deep societal and theological conflict.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

February 6, 2017

* * * * * * * * *

President Donald Trump at the Bully Pulpit

The mystery of Christians’ support

for Donald Trump is solved

http://www.kentucky.com/living/religion/paul-prather/article57553638.html

by Paul Prather

January 30, 2017

"IN A WORLD OVERRUN BY BRIGANDS AND TERRORISTS, AUTHORITARIAN CHRISTIANS PREFER A BAN-BAR-AND-BOMB PRESIDENT, EVEN IF HE’S A SELF-PROMOTING HEATHEN."

I’ve expressed before my puzzlement that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump could win so many disciples among the Christians who make up a hefty portion of the Republican base.

Trump is an insulting, profane, thrice-married, megalomaniacal billionaire from New York City who can’t even pronounce 2 Corinthians correctly. Indeed, he seems to proudly stand for everything the Christian faith supposedly opposes.

And yet a great throng of Christians love the guy.

If you, too, have been scratching your head in wonder at this conundrum, allow me to say this mystery has been solved.

The answer made great sense, too. It even led me to contemplate an ancient divide within Christianity itself.

It came from a poll by Matthew MacWilliams, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

He wrote a brief essay for Politico.com about his research.

MacWilliams sampled 1,800 registered U.S. voters from across the political spectrum in an attempt to understand Trump’s popularity.

“I found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate,” he said. “Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter.”

Authoritarians, a group studied by social scientists for decades, inclined sharply toward Trump.

MacWilliams summarized what it means to be authoritarian:

"Authoritarians obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened.”

Statistically, MacWilliams found, among those likely to vote in the Republican primary, 49 percent ranked high on the authoritarian scale. That’s more than twice as many as among Democratic voters.

And Trump sings these folks’ love song:

“From pledging to ‘make America great again’ by building a wall on the border to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United States,” MacWilliams wrote, “Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations.”

Reading this, I experienced an “aha!” moment.

Not all of Trump’s Republican supporters are Christians, I know, but many are. And while religiosity was not the key factor in predicting support for Trump, many self-described Christians, be they devout disciples or only sporadic churchgoers, definitely incline toward authoritarianism.

---

You see, there’s historically been an emotionally charged split within our faith between disciples who focus on authority and those who focus on freedom, between those driven and riven by fear, and those propelled by hope and joy.

In the Christian vernacular, it’s a spiritual contest between “the Law” (capital L) and “Grace” (capital G).

Christians who lean toward the Law are all about God’s authority, the Bible’s authority, church leaders’ authority, men’s authority, civil authority. They’re the church’s cops and prosecuting attorneys.

They serve a stern God who lectures dryly from above, brooks no dissent and expects them to flog the daylights out of the dense and disobedient.

They thrive on order. They insist on doing things, whatever those things might be, the way they’ve always been done, whether or not that happens to make sense anymore, just because that’s the way they’ve always done them.

They operate largely from their own fear: fear of God’s wrath, fear of being wrong, fear of outsiders, fear of the public’s jeers.

Compared with them, Grace people, of whom I am happily one, are practically God’s do-gooder public defenders — or God’s loosey-goosey flower-children. (Although I tend toward khakis and a button-down myself.)

Grace people serve a God who is unimaginably merciful, infinitely liberating and surprisingly understanding of every kind of birdbrain.

They believe their job, being his children, is to love all colors and nationalities and faiths and political views and theological quirks. They’re about forgiving their enemies and making peace and and welcoming strangers and helping the poor, no questions asked.

Grace folks drive the authoritarians mad.

And vice versa. We Gracies giggle when we picture them showing up in heaven, only to discover, to their purple-faced dismay, that the Lord let us in as well.

Probably neither side has a lock on the whole truth.

Grace people need a little authoritarianism to keep us from levitating away on shimmering clouds, and Law people need a big dose of Grace to keep them from getting swallowed whole into their profoundly constricted sphincters.

Everything in the Christian faith, as in life generally, works best when held in balance.

---

Ah, but I digress.

The point is, when I read MacWilliams’ piece, I finally knew how so many Christians could support The Donald, even though he probably wouldn’t recognize Jesus if he saw him walking across the thawed Hudson River on snowshoes.

In a world overrun by brigands and terrorists, authoritarian Christians prefer a ban-bar-and-bomb president, even if he’s a self-promoting heathen, over some milquetoast pseudo-Christian who embraces strangers and prefers negotiation to warfare.

Trump will wall out border-jumpers and slap down smart-aleck reporters and keep things the way they used to be back in the good old — well, the way they used to be sometime, somewhere, in somebody’s version of the good old — days.

To these Law folks, he stands for authority. He’s large and in charge and vindictive and brazenly unapologetic. He’s as good an approximation of their God as they’re likely to find in such a gone-to-blazes world.