Common Denominator

Our small group continues to read Jesus Wars by Philip Jenkins. See my post on the introduction and first chapter here.
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1. After reading about the crazy battles that resulted in what we now call orthodoxy, there seem two possible conclusions: 1) God was behind the scenes making sure the right answers won out or 2) it's all a crap shoot and orthodox Christianity is a sham.

I have argued for #1 for the last 25 years. If we don't have some faith that God was directing the final outcomes, Christian orthodoxy falls apart. We like to think that the Bible is obvious on all these things, but history tells a different story.

Every party in the debates over the Trinity and the nature of Christ was arguing from Scripture. Arius argued from Scripture. Athanasius argued from Scripture. Paul of Samosata argued from Scripture. Cyril argued from Scripture. Apollinarius argued from Scripture. Nestorius argued from Scripture. 

The politics -- indeed the violence -- that forged what we now believe as Christians is depressing. I think I had some sense of holy men gathering to discern what God wanted the church to affirm. Not so. In fact, the winners were more often the least holy and the most politically crafty. It reminds me of something Victor Frankl said about the concentration camps of the Holocaust. The more virtuous you were, the less likely you were to survive. "The best of us did not return." [1]

The century between Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) primarily argued over the two natures of Christ. I have always felt like the final conclusion made perfect sense -- one person, two natures, fully God, fully human. Yet the players in this debate seem far from holy intellectuals. They seem more like the Gangs of New York.

2. Jenkins reviews the lead up. 

The earliest centuries saw options -- arguing from the books we now call the New Testament, no less -- that were early considered wrong. These were not evil people with twisted mustaches. They were the losers, and history is told by the winners. Again, by faith, we believe that God picked the winners whether they were good people or not.

Some early losers:

• The Ebionites -- Jews who believed Jesus was the Messiah but not that he was divine. It is debated whether they represent a form of Jewish Christianity going back to the earliest church.
• Adoptionists -- This one lasted a while. They believed that Jesus became the Son of God at some point (for example, at his baptism). Mark does not give any explicit teaching on Jesus before his baptism.
• Perhaps Matthew and Luke could be used to argue that he was Son of God through the virgin birth, but they say nothing explicit about what he might have been before that. Some early Christians might not have believed in Jesus' pre-existence.
• Some Gnostics had a form of adoptionism. Cerinthus (time of John) thought Jesus was possessed by a divine force at his baptism.
• Paul of Samosata (bishop of Antioch in the 260s) believed the human Jesus was born of Mary and then that the Logos descended on him at his baptism.
• Some might have believed Jesus became Son of God at his resurrection.
• By contrast, Docetists (around at the time of 1 John) believed that Jesus only seemed to be human.
• Sabellius (around 220) believed that God was only one person who kept changing hats. The Father became Jesus became the Spirit. One person.

3. Then we have the 300s. Constantine makes Christianity legal, which means the door is now open for Christians to develop power and use it to stomp on others. I will say, reading this book has made me much more open to those who think Constantine inadvertantly opened the door to the wholesale corruption of Christianity. We seem to do better when people -- by which I mean non-Christians -- are trying to kill us.

Some losers:

• Arius -- "There was a point when the Son did not exist." Arius believed Jesus was pre-existent and that he was like God. It's hard for us to fathom how popular this version of faith was in the 300s -- more popular than the orthodox. And Arius may very well have been more godly than Athanasius. Christianity among the Germanic tribes in the 400s was more Arian than orthodox.
• Apollinarius -- To be frank, most popular Christians today might just as well be Apollinarians or Eutychians. They more or less saw Jesus as having one nature -- a divine one. Apollinarius thought Jesus had a human body and divine soul. Eutychus thought that Jesus' humanity was like a drop in the ocean compared to his divinity.
• If the Council of Ephesus in 449 had stood (the Robber Council), we would all believe that Jesus did not have a human nature -- or at least not enough of one to count.

4. In 380, the emperor Theodosius II picks a winner for Christianity in the Empire. He picks Nicene Christianity. Thus, we are all Nicenes.

The two centers of the conflict for the next 70 years or so are Antioch and Alexandria. Antioch is always defending the humanity of Jesus. Alexandria is always pushing a single nature that is divine. Antioch is the place of biblical scholarship. Alexandria is the place with a history of Platonism.

Alexandria seems to wield the power of sabotage and the power of the mob. Frankly, I kept thinking of MAGA Christians as I read about them. 

Constantinople had become the center of Roman power, so it was a key power with regard to its bishop. These bishops often were chosen from Antioch. Then Alexandria would use its power to trash them. Most of the time, they did this by finding something about the Antiochenes or patriarch of Constantinople that they could call heretical and stir up a mob over. Again, MAGA Christians.

Meanwhile, Rome was trying to consolidate its power but was really like an old man whose hearing aid isn't working. They don't speak Greek so they don't really know entirely what's going on. They're invited to the council but can't really hear very well.

All sorts of forgeries are being created in this era. And of course, on a popular level, people believe whatever they want to believe, which is what their tribe believes.

"People knew the slogans, but did they really understand them? Actually an excellent case can be made that such distinctions were beyond the reach not just of ordinary believers but of many church leaders" (62).

"Cities fell apart in violent conflicts over a single letter: was Christ of the same being with the Father or of like being, homoousios or homoisousios? Was he from two natures or in two?" (63).

5. Nestorius was another target of the Alexandrians. It's not at all clear that he was the heretic he is made out to be.

Christians "did not fully understand the theology they believed" (67). But they knew the groups they were against. "Once something was an ism," it was a target. Once a stereotype was established, it could be used to destroy someone. All you had to do is attach the label to them.

Sound familiar? This is quintissential MAGA Christianity. "Socialist" "Leftist liberal" "woke." No need to have any.thought whatsoever. Once the label is attached, they're toast.

"Whatever he actually preached, Nestorius became the central figure of Nestorianism" (67). "Theological debate became a game of guilt by association."

"Understanding a war of isms helps us trace the course of theological development thorugh these centuries... In each case, advocates were reacting as much to the stereotype of the enemy movement prevailing at the time rather than to any rational analysis of its teachings" (67-68).

[1] Man's Search for Meaning.

New Tuesday series... Confessions of a Bible Know-It-All: 25 Ways I Changed My Mind. Way #1
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Confession #1: I am not the "you" of the Bible
I'm not sure I ever gave it much thought, but for the first 18 years or so of my life, I assumed that when the Bible said "you," it was talking to me.

Take Jeremiah 29:11 -- "I know the plans I have for you." Wow, I thought. God is talking about me!

"Be strong and courageous. I am with you wherever you go" (Josh. 1:9). Wow, I thought! God is with me wherever I go.

I went through a time of struggle when I was ten. My mother gave me these verses to hold on to, promises to remember while I was at school. She wanted me to remember God was with me while I was at school.

Now, don't get me wrong. I do believe God is with me and you wherever we go. I do believe God is love and has good plans for those who trust in him. What I didn't realize until much later, though, is that those verses weren't actually written to me at all. I am not the "you" of those verses.

When I realized what was going on here, it completely changed how I read the Bible. And once you see it too, you'll start to notice it everywhere.

2. I always say that the Bible is for us but it was not written to us. Once you see it, you see it. "Hear, O Israel" (Deut. 6:4). I'm not Israel. The Israel of Deuteronomy lived about 3000 years ago. The Israel Isaiah addressed lived 2700 years ago.

Paul says he's writing to Romans, Corinthians, Thessalonians, and other churches in his day. Am I a Roman? A Corinthian? A Thessalonian?

Nope. None of those letters were written to me.

Why did I think those books were written to me? Why did I think that the Y-O-Us of Scripture are for me? That's not actually what the Bible says.

So, does that mean the Bible has nothing to say to me?

3. Of course it does. That's how the idea of a "Scripture" works. The idea of a Scripture is that it speaks beyond its own time to the people of the religion whose Scripture it is.

But, mind you, Paul didn't know his letters were going to end up in a Bible. "Scripture" for him was what we call the Old Testament. He was just writing letters. Important letters, to be sure. Letters that he believed carried authority for the churches to which he was writing. 

But did he think he was writing part of a future Bible? Almost certainly not.

4. Yes, I was once an unreflective reader of the Bible. Still am, of course, to some extent. We can never become fully self-aware.

But I narcissistically read the Bible as if it was just about me, which meant that I was mostly misreading it. And I didn't even know it. A little self-centered, really. To ignore the message it actually had. To ignore the people it was actually written to.

It's like picking up a love letter to someone else and applying it to yourself. "Wow, whoever's writing this really loves me." That's how we often read the Bible. Kind of funny, really, how clueless we can be when reading the Bible.

"I know the plans I have for you"? God said this through Jeremiah to the Israelites who had been captured and taken to Babylon. It wasn't written about anyone alive today. God was telling them to buy property but that in 70 years he would bring them back. They're all dead now, of course.

"The Lord is with you wherever you go"? God said this to Joshua before he started a military campaign. It's over. You can go visit the ruins of Jericho if you want today. The verse wasn't a promise to anyone alive now, let alone to anyone today who is about to start a military campaign. To read it that way is to rip it out of its context.

I know, it's hard for a lot of people to see it. "No, no, no! It's for me." Yes, I was a narcissist once too.

But it wasn't written to you. Those words weren't originally to you. Just read what the words actually say. 

5. We're talking about learning to read the Bible "in context." That is, reading the words for what they actually meant. Realizing that the love letter was first to someone else before we immediately clutch it longingly to our chests with stars in our eyes. 

Yes, I believe by faith God preserved the Bible for us as Scripture, even though the Bible mostly doesn't say that. It's an idea I learned in church, a tradition about the Bible that the Bible mostly doesn't say. It's a true tradition, but it mostly goes beyond what the Bible itself says.

Bottom line. If I really love this text -- if I really respect the Bible -- shouldn't I first stop and listen to what it actually says? That is, before I rip the words out of context and smack them on myself? 

Before I ask what it means for me, shouldn't I first ask what it meant to them?

... continuing my years as a Teaching Fellow at Asbury and student in classics at the University of Kentucky. Last post here.
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1. In the years when I was a Teaching Fellow, I was learning more and more about literary criticism and, of course, postmodernism was in the mix. My original source of exposure here was Dr. Bauer at Asbury.

Dr. Bauer was a leader in narrative criticism, especially in the Gospel of Matthew, which I've mentioned before. As it was practiced in the United States, narrative criticism examined the stories of the Bible as stories. His Dokter Vater Jack Kingsbury and others like Mark Allen Powell bracketed the historical questions. You didn't ask whether or not these events happened. You assumed each Gospel was a self-contained story world. It was a very convenient hermeneutic for evangelicals to work on their PhDs because they didn't have to address those critical issues.

Alan Culpepper has a complex but helpful diagram in his book, The Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel which captures the main dynamics. And of course, Mark Allen Powell wrote a helpful little book called What Is Narrative Criticism? The three main elements of a story are the events, characters, and settings. There is the narrator, the implied author, and the implied reader. There is narrative time and story time. I would use some of these categories in my PhD dissertation, as I've said.

When I got to Durham, I felt like they weren't quite as sophisticated at these hermeneutical approaches as Bauer and others were. They were still quite historically oriented, and those who were dabbling with narrative criticism had not fully disconnected their study of narratives from the study of history. 

Of course, as Joe Dongell once mentioned to me, the very use of language assumes a historical baseline. I would understand this better my first year at Durham when I was exposed to Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, the idea of narrative criticism was to examine the text in isolation from historical questions and historical background.

2. As I've said before, in those days I felt like I was slowly moving through the historical progression of biblical criticisms. In the early 90s, I would catch up. Textual criticism asked whether the King James tradition was more or less original. Historical criticism searched for the history. Source criticism looked for written sources. Form criticism looked at oral traditions. Redaction criticism asked how the authors edited their sources. Composition criticism asked how the writings were composed. Narrative criticism analyzed the stories as stories.

Now, in the early 90s, I had caught up with reader-response criticism, the next step after narrative criticism. The first two thirds of the twentieth century had focused on the world behind the text, the historical. The 80s had tried to focus on the world within the text. Now, with the 90s, there was a turn to the reader, the world in front of the text.

Reader-response criticism had at least three varieties. First, there were those who viewed it with a historical lens -- what was the impact of the text on the original audience. David Smith, doing his dissertation at Durham in the late 90s, hypothesized how the passion narrative of Mark was written in a way to have an impact on the original audience. If the author ended the book at Mark 16:8, what kind of an effect would this have on the audience?

A second variety relates to the impact of the biblical texts on various groups of modern readers. How do women experience the letters of Paul (feminist readings)? How might an African-American woman experience the text (womanist readings). There were black readings and Latinx readings. There is ideological criticism, such as liberation theology readings.

I would read Stephen Moore's Literary Criticism of the Gospels my first semester of my doctoral program. I found it very helpful to sort out these different approaches hermeneutically. I think I mentioned before the SBL presentation I managed to hear from him in 1991. You can find it in the helpful hermeneutical volume, Mark and Method.

Perhaps the most extreme form of reader-response criticism is the one that basically says you can read any meanng you want into the text (see Stanley Fish). As I began to embark on my doctoral studies, I would become acquainted with Paul Ricoeur and the notion of the autonomous text and the polyvalance of texts. Although I don't think the number is infinite, the same text can be interpreted in vastly different ways. Once a text is uttered, Ricoeur observed, it becomes autonomous. The author can no longer control what it comes to mean.

If you've had me for certain classes or read much of my hermeutical stuff, you will begin to hear where my understanding began to sharpen. There are virtually as many potential meanings to a text as there are readers. The text is often a mirror in which we see ourselves. 

3. In those days, I was gaining a good perspective on the way I grew up reading the Bible. We wanted God to "quicken" the text and speak directly to us. God might tell you to move to Florida or go to a specific mission field when a few words in a verse jumped out at you. I grew up with almost no sense of how to read the Bible in context. The meaning of the Bible was to some extent untethered from its historical moorings. We read the text in reader-response mode, shaped by the tradition we came from. 

In terms of ideological criticism, we made "holiness readings" of the text.

Those of a more charismatic nature regularly read the text this way. I've come to believe that if God didn't speak to people in this way, we would all be lost. Although pastors and people in the pew think they know what the Bible means, the fail rate is actually quite immense in terms of the details. I suspect that Sunday morning sermons across the globe are filled with some spectacularly creative interpretive moments.

Perhaps most scholars who come out of these backgrounds, like Gordon Fee, end up rejecting these sorts of reader-response readings. "The text can't come to mean something that it never meant," he wrote. He's right of course in terms of the original meaning, but can't God speak to people through the text however he wants to?

I'm not sure who first came up with the idea of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern interpretation. I can overlay the people I was reading in the early 90s with it. Hans Frei's Eclipse of Biblical Narrative was quite challenging but the first few pages gave me a powerful sense of what I later called "unreflective" readings of texts. Two decades later, when our IWU Religion Monday reading group read Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, an even deeper sense of the shift from pre- to modern was to be found.

Putting it all together, we start off as unreflective, "pre-modern" readers. We don't see ourselves as readers of the text. The meaning of the text seems obvious to us without us realizing that we are bringing our own "dictionaries" to it. 

Pre-modern or precritical interpreters don't read the text in context, but they don't know they aren't. They have a "what you see is what you get" approach. They think they are seeing meaning in the world that they are actually reading into it. Paul Ricoeur called these kinds of readings a "first naivete."

I recently encountered some Bible readers of this sort in discussions of biblical prophecy. It's quite clear that they have no idea how to read verses in context. They see the meanings someone has told them. 

When I taught inductive Bible study, it was very hard to get students to read certain Old Testament texts in context. It was quite discouraging actually. You might give them a text that the New Testament reads in relation to Jesus. But they couldn't detach themselves from that meaning to hear the verses in the flow of whatever Old Testament book it was in.

Meanwhile, my holiness forebears and modern charismatics are very open to these on-the-spot "zappings" of the Spirit too.

All of these readings are exercises in reader response, and there are potentially as many meanings as there are interpreters.

4. This, of course, is why the notion of sola scriptura itself was pre-modern because it assumed the meaning of the text is intrinsic and self-evident in the text. The Reformers were more or less premodern and non-contextual. They increasingly knew literary context. Melancthon understood literary context, but he didn't understand the depth of historical context. Wesley largely did not know how to read the Bible in context. And so when he said he was a man of one book, the book he had in mind was the Bible filtered through his reader-responses.

Now to be sure, his reader-response interpretations had a massive archaeology. As an Anglican, he had massive amounts of church tradition rattling around in that head of his. Somewhere in the back of his head were vast numbers of historical texts and of course the biblical text. He knew those texts as Tradition had brought them to him.

And here, let me tip my hat to Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer suggested that we do not actually read the text as it was originally, but we read it as it comes to us through layers and layers of tradition. I would say this is absolutely true for the pre-modern, unreflective reader. They have no idea of the glasses they are wearing when they read the text. So it was with Wesley.

5. Postmodernism is then a step beyond reader-response criticism. Jacques Derrida did not believe the text had any stable meaning. Of course, this seems to deconstruct in that he wrote books. [1] In my opinion, he deliberately wrote ambiguously to try to make his point. But the fact that we all know his point suggests that words can indeed have meaning.

Postmodernism is thus a warning sign rather than a philosophy in itself. It tells us that our confidence in the meaning of our words is almost certainly overconfidence. Some like Stephen Fowl have pointed out that the meaning of many texts, including biblical texts, is frequently underdetermined. That is to say, we may lack sufficient evidence to know for certain what their original meaning actually was.

But in my mind, he has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. He effectively says, because we cannot know for certain the meaning of certain texts, why don't we just assume that they're orthodox. This is a certain brand of what has been called "theological interpretation." 

In the end, interpretation is a never ending struggle. But at any point in time, it does seem likely that we can identify a host of things that the text didn't likely mean -- including a lot of the meanings that people from various church traditions give it today.

6. The hermenutical struggles of those years left me concluding that there is more than one legitimate path to biblical interpretation. First, there is the original meaning, about which we can have varying degrees of certainty. If you want to be an expert on this original meaning, you must know biblical languages. You must know biblical history. You should know the history of interpretation. 

This is something beyond the level of most pastors. They're simply not trained on this level. And many don't have the aptitude.

Then, there is the reader-response understanding of broad orthodoxy. It does not tell you how to interpret every verse, but it gives boundaries to your appropriation of Scripture. The more we dig into the history of orthodoxy, the more nervous we might get about this reading. We almost have to have some sense that God was behind the scenes, directing this process. Even within the Bible itself, an honest contextual understanding inevitably has to believe that God directed the flow of revelation within the pages of Scripture.

I wrote up how this might work in a book I first published in 2006. I had first submitted the text to Westminster John Knox in a competition. Then, I gave it to Abingdon for year, at the end of which they published a curiously similar book with someone else. 

7. In addition to the orginal meaning, there are the many different reader responses to the biblical texts. There are denominational readings. There are our "tribal" readings of various kinds. Finally, there are individual readings when God speaks directly to you.

These years were the crucible in which I was catching up with the postmodern discussions of that moment. I was learning to distinguish between what I thought was valuable and what I thought wasn't. It would eventually allow me to have a second naivete (another Ricoeur phrase). My childhood church involved readings of a first naivete. 

With a second naivete, we can read the texts in the same way we did in our first naivete. The difference is that, now, we are consciously reading the texts out of context. First, we read it out of context without knowing it. But now, we can read it that way quite conscious of what we are doing.

[1] Deconstruction is the term used to refer to his philosophy. It's the idea that meaning unravels in the very act of trying to construct it. He did not claim to try to construct a philosophy--his was an anti-philosophy. But, ironically, his own attempt to deconstruct meaning was a veiled attempt to construct it.

Continuing from last post
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1. On January 17, 1991, the US launched an attack against Iraq from Kuwait, the beginnings of the first Iraq War. I was standing in the University of Kentucky student center when it launched, suddenly realizing that, at 25, I was still an age that had once been drafted.

I remember some trepidation about a war with Iraq. I don't know how widespread my feelings were, but I felt like we had been under a hangover from the Vietnam War up to that point. Could we win a war? It sure hadn't seemed that we had won Vietnam. It had seemed that, in the end, we had cut our losses and hightailed it out of there. 

In that sense, the first Iraq War restored our confidence. At least it restored my confidence. We got our mojo back. 

Bush senior wisely didn't go into Baghdad, unlike his son. In hindsight, that seemed prescient, although he was sharply criticized for it. The next time, when Dick Cheney had the chance, he and the neo-cons talked Bush junior into it, resulting in the second longest American conflict. P. S. He started the longest one so far too, in Afghanistan.

2. I was at the University of Kentucky (UK) because I was starting an MA in Classical Languages and Literature, that is, classical Greek and Latin. I was following in the footsteps of Joe Dongell, who had done the same thing when he was a Greek Teaching Fellow. They foolishly gave me the same scholarship they had given him, not knowing how much smarter he is than me.

It was my second semester teaching beginning Greek, and the courses I was teaching that spring were the same ones I taught in the fall. In short, I was already getting bored.

I only took one class, Greek Poetry. It certainly wasn't the ideal class to begin with. Poetry in any language tends to break the most rules and be the least explicit. It doesn't use the full grammar of prose.

And it was painful. This was a master's degree. We had a lot of lines to do for each class. I was just solidifying my Koine Greek. I had no idea that ινα could be used with the indicative. I had no idea that ου could be used with a participle. There was no Google yet, and there certainly wasn't any AI yet.

I would teach Greek in the morning at Asbury, then drive 30 minutes to Lexington to an Arby's not far from the UK campus. I would spend the next two or three hours trying to create an interlinear from a blown up version of whatever text from Sophocles, Aeschylus, or Euripides. I had an English translation to try to retrofit the Greek text if I was totally lost.

And there were cherry turnovers involved.

I almost never had the translations entirely done, which was embarrassing. I would try to predict where we would be in the text by the time they got to me and, if I hadn't gotten that far, I scrambled to have something to say.

3. However, Dr. Hubert Martin was the best professor to have for such an incompetent fool as me. Soft spoken, infinitely merciful. He must surely have known how much I was struggling.

The other students had done classics in their undergraduate work. I had not looked at Latin since high school. I had taken 2.5 years of it with Mrs. Mrozek -- and high school Latin is a lot different from master's degree Latin. In the summer of 1991, I crammed Wheelock's 40 chapters down my throat. Thankfully, I had started Latin when my brain was like a sponge, so it came pretty easily.

One of the students had done his undergraduate work at Berea College. I don't remember his name but, man, he was sharp. There was another woman fresh out of undergraduate classics too. I felt SO stupid around them.

4. I believe we read Oedipus at Colonus for this stint. I had known the Oedipus trilogy since high school. But it has been interesting to think about it from a theological angle. The ancient world was fatalistic, as the story of the Three Fates shows. But they didn't see "free will" and fate as contradictory. Rather, as we humans went about making free choices, we ultimately end up where it was said we would end up. (reminds me a little of Molinism)

You probably know the story. Oedipus' father gets a prophecy that his son will kill him. He has Oedipus exposed -- put outside for animals and the elements to kill him. But, of course, a shepherd rescues him. He ends up raised thinking his father is the king of Corinth.

He then gets the same prophecy. He doesn't want to kill his father, so he heads north. And who should he meet on the way but, unbeknownst to him, his father. In the first recorded incident of road rage, he kills him. He goes north to Thebes where he brings about the Sphinx's end and, as a reward, gets to marry the queen of the city -- who interestingly is his mother.

Everyone in this story thinks they are acting freely. Yet when the story is done, they have all fulfilled their fates.

I've wondered if something along these lines is a better explanation of the tensions in the New Testament rather than Augustine or Wesley's more philosophical approaches. In any case, it speaks to the cultural framework in which Paul and others lived.

I would end up taking Greek Poetry again in year 3 because there wasn't another option. It was at least a little better the second time -- with different readings of course. I always felt like, when I got to the end of these degrees, I was about where I would liked to have been when I started.

We read Prometheus Bound. I wasn't very acquainted with the story before. Prometheus is punished for helping humanity by giving them fire. It's a reminder that the biblical creation story is unusual when God actually likes us. We are much more of a thorn in the side of other creation stories.

Martin had us read J.B. by Archibald MacLeish alongside PB. It is a play on Job. It has Job say that famous line, "If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God." I would wrestle quite a bit with the problem of evil over the next couple years. It wasn't Dr. Martin's fault.

5. The second Greek class I took was Thucydides (with Robert Rabel). That was an eye-opener with regard to the standards of ancient history writing. He apologizes for not being more entertaining. Many historians of the day were more prone to make things up for the delight of their readers, apparently.

But the most striking passage is where he indicates he made up some of the speeches in his history. If he didn't have access to witnesses or wasn't present himself, he invented what he thought they probably said. This potentially has implications for the speeches of Acts and the Gospels. Thucydides was not being pernicious at all. He was genuinely trying to present the flavor of the events. 

To me, it showed that the parameters of ancient history writing were just different than they are for us.

I would take Plutarch with Dr. Martin in the program too. Plutarch was a moralist. He is potential background for what biography was like at the time of Christ. My main take away was that he was far more interested in what lessons or morals we might take from the figures he told about than portraying them with great historical accuracy.

What was important was that the story about the person present a truth rather than you track down and be absolutely sure it happened.

I always laugh when I think that, while Herodotus is often called the "father of history," Plutarch called him the "father of lies." This was actually because Plutarch could not be objective about history. The Greeks always had to be superior to any other people. Meanwhile, part of what earned Herodotus that title was the fact that he could critique his own people. 

In the end, Plutarch was a tribal thinker and nowhere close to an objective one.

Fatalism, Herodotus, and Thucydides would show up in my philosophy classes at IWU, because the first two are mentioned in Sophie's World.`

To be continued...

Last night the next group of philosophers in training started social and political philosophy. We primarily went through Niebuhr's five ways Christians have engaged culture. But since I am going beyond my classes in this blog series, I thought I would start with some fundamentals.
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1. One of the basic principles of theology--the study of God--is that any earthly, visible church is not the same as the invisible, spiritual church. Your local church may be great. The denomination to which you belong may be great. But it is not the same as the one, true, invisible church. This is one of the most basic things you learn in Christian theology.

Protestants especially believe this. But it is true even for Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholic Church openly admits that not all of its popes have been godly. The church has had periods of great corruption. No earthly church is ever the same as the true church. 

Even when you dig into the earliest councils of the church, you will find huge instances of all-too-human politics and ungodliness. The church erased a council in 449 that would have likely changed what we believe about Christ for all time. At that council, a bishop was beaten to death and those present were forced to sign a blank document that was filled in later. 

Afterwards, the emperor's horse tripped and killed him. Because that emperor died, there came a different emperor who backed a different position--the one we believe today about Christ being one person with two natures. They had another council two years later (Chalcedon) and erased the first one. Chalcedon established what almost all Christians believe today about Christ being fully human and fully divine.

The one, true church is invisible. No earthly, visible church is equivalent to it.

2. If this is true of the church, it is absolutely true of any earthly, visible state or country. Think about it, is the state more likely to be holy than the church? It's really an absurd thought. If the visible church is never the same as the true church then the state absolutely is never the same as the kingdom of God.

It's important to point out that this is a major blind spot for some Christians at times. We have recognized the dangers of civil religion for as long as people have confused patriotism for worship. Various forms of religious nationalism can't tell the difference between fervor for a particular vision of a country and the worship of God. 

And those infected can't see it. In fact, they are more zealous for the state than they ever were for God. At its worse, they are ready to kill those who do not bend to their vision of the state. They become hard hearted, and anyone whose loyalty to their vision is in question becomes the worst of evil.

In our times, Nazi Germany is of course the classic example, where loyalty to Hitler's Germany became indistinguishable from state Christianity. When German Christians in the 1930s tried to merge Christianity with nationalism, the true church responded with something called the Barmen Declaration. 

This statement pointed out that "Jesus Christ [that is, not Hitler or Germany] is the one Word of God whom we must hear and obey in life and in death." When the state insisted that it was God's kingdom on earth, they rejected "the false doctrine that the church could recognize other powers as God’s revelation."

Whenever our love of nation takes on a fervor that should only be reserved for God, we have begun to lose sight of the real God and our vision for the state has become an idol. The state has become a god for us.

The kingdom of this world is never the same as the kingdom of our God.

3. There may be times when an earthly state aligns more or less with the kingdom than at other times, but we should always be clear. No earthly kingdom is ever identical to the kingdom of God.

It is essential that we never confuse or blur the two.

A theocracy is allegedly a state ruled by God. But apart from the days of Moses, there has never been one and will never be one till Christ actually returns. The book of the Judges, when Israel was allegedly a theocracy, was one of the most godless periods of Israel's history, when everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

In so-called theocracies, there is always a group of priests or a Pope or an Ayatollah interpreting what God says. Theocracies are thus really monarchies (rule by one) or something called an oligarchy (rule by a few) in disguise. 

Sure, someone might say they are only letting the Bible rule--but it is always their interpretation of the Bible. In Calvin's Geneva, the rule of the Bible was the rule of John Calvin's interpretation of the Bible. And in Puritan England and Puritan New England when they were in charge, it was their interpretation of the Bible that ruled. If you were a Mary Dyer or Roger Williams, you were either ousted or put to death.

No earthly state--even if it claims to be a theocracy--can be equivalent to the kingdom of God because humans are involved. A human has to tell the people what God says. A human has to implement what they think God says. A human has to interpret the Bible. 

And people are sinful. "There is none righteous, no not one" (Rom. 3:10). The Founding Fathers of the United States thoroughly took that into account. They put extensive "checks and balances" into the Constitution so that the evil, sinful nature of one person or group was counteracted by other individuals and groups in the government.

This is part of why Jesus, Paul, and the rest of the New Testament strongly distinguished between the church and the state. Jesus told his questioners to "Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" (Mark 12:17). And Paul told the Philippians--living in a Roman colony--that they were citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20). 

The implication was that their political identity did not lie with Rome but with God in heaven. Hebrews and 1 Peter imply the same when they call citizens exiles and aliens (Heb. 11:13; 1 Pet. 1:17).

The Founding Fathers were thus wise to dictate that "Congress shall establish no religion." Thomas Jefferson called this a "wall of separation" between the state and religion. It was all too clear to the Founding Fathers that, if there were a state religion, it would end up oppressing the people like the Puritans had in New England or like the kings, queens, and Puritans of England had in the 1500s and 1600s.

3. Lord Acton put the principle wisely: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." [1] For this reason, it is best for the church to always be distinct from the state and for there to be more than one church at that. There is surely a correlation between the amount of power someone has and the danger of corruption and corrupt impact. 

It is not an absolute correlation, but it is a general one.

And since wealth brings power, the same correlation is in play there. The more wealthy a person is, the more powerful a person is. And the more powerful a person is, the greater the potential for corruption and corrupt impact. 1 Timothy 6:10 was not lying when it said that "the love of money is a root of all evils."

At times, Western culture has at least given some appearances of resisting these trends. But the more you dig into history, the more you realize that corruption has never been far away from any period of rulers. We celebrate the apparent exceptions. Yet even here the public doesn't always know what has happened behind the scenes.

These are not absolutes. They are tendencies and warnings with serious implications about how society would ideally be structured. The main take aways are 1) keep power from being concentrated in the hands of the few and 2) keep religion separate from the state with the state as a neutral zone. 

Of course, at any given time, most of us don't have a choice about these things. We are born in a particular place and time, and the state is a given.

[1] In an 1887 letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.5 The Natural Philosophers 

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 
2.7 Hellenistic Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause 
3.4 God as Intelligent Designer
3.5 God as Necessary Being (including ontological argument)
3.6 God and Morality
3.7 God and Miracles
3.8 The Problem of Evil
3.9 Augustine and Aquinas

Philosophy of the Person
4.1 What is a human being?
4.2 A Body and a Soul?
4.3 What is the meaning of life? (including existentialism)
4.4 Are we free or fated? 

Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy
6.1 The State is Never the Kingdom (this post)
6.2 How to Structure Government 
6.3 Kingdom Values for Society
6.4 Christ and Culture
6.5 The Social Contract (equal rights and utilitarianism)
6.6 Adam Smith vs Karl Marx

Epistemology
7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

Metaphysics
8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics

8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism  

Thinking about a strange novel idea. Went to Fazolis. Here's what came out...
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We met in the summer, three unlikely friends brought together by a common enemy—Greek.

Julie was a Methodist, sort of. Two weeks before starting seminary she wasn’t even a believer. She had gone a few times to a United Methodist church when she was a kid. But it all seemed so boring to her, even useless.

She had gone into social work because she wanted to help people. About three years in, she was pretty discouraged. She wanted to help people so badly. But it was such an uphill battle.

The last straw was when one of her clients took her own life. She had worked so hard with her—well beyond the norm. But you can’t watch everyone 24/7. A person’s going to do what a person’s going to do.

It was then she saw a billboard. Sometimes you wonder if those signs do any good. I think, as often as not, they tick people off. But that day Julie heard a message: "Have you tried God?"

She went to that Methodist church for the first time in twenty years. She wasn’t even able to talk to the pastor, but an older lady in the back struck up a random conversation with her.

“You seem like you’re looking for something,” she said.

“God, I guess,” Julie said with a chuckle.

“Well, you’d think you’d come to the right place.”

Before she knew what was happening, Julie was having a home cooked meal with an 87 year old widow. She shared her story. The woman listened.

“I think God might be calling you into ministry,” the older woman finally said.

“What?” Julie blurted out. She later expressed to me repeatedly her shock at such a question.

Our friend Bobby not only thought such things were ridiculous but exclaimed at one point, “Were you even baptized at the time?” he asked.

“No,” she said with a grin. “I’m still not.”

Being friends with Julie would be hard for Bobby even beyond the challenges of seminary itself.

By the end of that lunch, Julie took comfort in the thought of starting seminary to find out what God had to say—if he even existed.

The timing was right. Intensive Greek was just about to begin in July. Bobby and I were headed in the same direction, although by different paths.

Bobby was a Southern Baptist. He hated the thought of going to a “liberal Methodist seminary,” but he had a good job working third shift at a mail facility and he didn't want to move. He thought he could work all night, take classes in the morning, and sleep a little in the afternoon and early evening. 

He had looked at other choices, including online. None of them clicked with him. He felt like his foundation was strong enough to survive liberal Methodist professors. Maybe he could even convert a few.

Ultimately, he wanted to preach, but he wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. Baptist churches don’t always have a good structure for a person to get a church. He had tried to connect with various small churches in rural North Carolina, but he hadn’t been successful. He thought maybe if he had a degree in Bible it might help.

To be frank, his presence at Coke Seminary was an oddity. I’m sure he wouldn’t have come if some bizarre donor hadn’t set up a special scholarship just for Baptists. They hardly ever had anyone to give it to. 

One day, he finally walked into the admissions office and jokingly asked, "You don't happen to have any scholarships for Baptists."

The lady looked at him funny and said, "Funny you should ask..."

Me? I was a charismatic. Assemblies of God. It was a strange place for me too because I had a sneaking suspicion that nobody there exercised any spiritual gifts. (I was wrong, by the way.)

I was between things. My girlfriend had dumped me for a random woman we met at Myrtle Beach—that was tough. I decided I should get my life in order. One thing led to another and, before you know it, I found myself learning the Greek alphabet in a two-month summer intensive.

It wasn't how I had seen my summer going.

For years, some of us at IWU met -- especially from the Department of Religion -- to discuss various books at Monday lunch. Keith Drury, Steve Horst, Dave Vardaman, Steve Lennox, and others. Some will remember the annotated Catholic catechism we produced.

The Horsts, Vardamans, and soon Gunsaluses still meet to read through books together. I am particularly interested in the current one, Jesus Wars, by Philip Jenkins. It is about the time around the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

You may know Jenkins from The Next Christendom, which we required in the original curriculum at Wesley Seminary for the Cultural Contexts of Ministry class. He also wrote a book called Lost History of Christianity. 

All these books play on a common sense that, while we like to think of "Western," Protestant-Catholic orthodoxy as providential and inevitable by God's will, there have always been other forms of Christianity. In the year 1000, the center of Christianity might have more been in the area of Iraq than Rome.

Next Christendom pointed out that Christianity in the Global South is overtaking us. There will likely be moments in the future where our sense of orthodoxy feels threatened as a result. The Lost History reminded us of the once vibrant forms of Christian faith that faded over time with movements like the rise of Islam and the Mongols.

2. Jesus Wars looks at a crucial moment in the history of Christianity, one that most of us don't know too much about -- the Chalcedonian moment in 451. This is the council that said Jesus was one person with two natures -- fully human and fully God.

We like to think of Nicaea in 325 as the pivot. Some popular belief here is just wrong. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the empire. He did not eliminate Roman religion. He did not set the canon or persecute the Gnostics.

For some Christians, Constantine is the boogie man who messed everything up. True, he did get the Roman state involved in Christianity, but it was far less intrusive at that time than it would become.

This is all more than 100 years before Jenkins book, but Nicene Christianity was not the clear winner after Nicaea. In the mid-300s, there may have been more Arians in the church than Trinitarians. Arius taught that Jesus was the firstborn of all creation -- meaning that God created Christ first as the most exalted being of the universe. He just wasn't "of one substance" with God for Arius.

3. Tonight we discussed the Introduction and first chapter, "The Heart of the Matter." It's a potentially sobering read for the "orthodox," those of us in the West who are in the Western-Catholic-Protestant tradition. However, fear not. There are options. :-)

Did God cause (or allow) the horse of Theodosius II to trip in 450? If he hadn't, the center of Christianity might be in the Middle East and Islam a marginal religion. Meanwhile, Europe might be Arian, Celtic, or some Game of Thrones like religion. (I'm throwing that in there, not Jenkins.)

In 449, there was a council that we don't talk about. It was in Ephesus. History calls it the "Gangster Synod." Monk militias forced the representatives there to sign a blank piece of paper and filled it out with "monophysite" doctrine. They actually beat the opposing patriarch of Constantinople (Flavian) so badly that he died a few days later.

The emperor Theodosius II was also Monophysite. If he hadn't died in a freak horse accident, Monophysitism would likely have become the official doctrine of the empire.

4. Who were the Monophysites? They believed that Christ only had one nature. Typically, they erred more on the side of Christ's divinity and minimized his humanity (For example, Apollinaris believed Jesus had a human body but a divine soul). As usual, there was more nuance than each side wanted to admit. In fact, there are some parables here of the way we stereotype "the other side" today. Are all liberals communists? No. Are all conservatives fascists? No.

Some Monophysites might be better characterized as "Miaphysites." They saw Christ's one nature as a mixture of human and divine, a fusion of the two. Meanwhile, historians and theologians still debate whether Nestorius was really a heretic. He is usually taken to have virtually seen Christ as being two people and going too far in dividing Christ's two natures.

Probably, Nestorius was. He did not seem to be comfortable calling Jesus God when he was an infant. He did not want to say that Mary was the mother of God, theotokos.

As an aside, a Facebook friend of mine, Gregory Blevins, who is Syrian Orthodox, has sometimes described my view of Jesus' knowledge while on earth as semi-Nestorian. But I have never claimed that Jesus had two minds. I have only suggested that Jesus' human mind on earth did not fully access his full divine capacities. Like the Antiochenes of the past, I lean this way because of my historical reading of the Gospels.

5. Perhaps the most striking claim of this first chapter is how violent these disagreements were. These were far from mere ideological debates. Jenkins himself likens it much more to the Gangs of New York. People were murdered and persecuted for being on the wrong side of this debate. The common person basically went along with whatever their ruler at that time demanded that they believe.

The Athanasian Creed, which actually dates to a century or more later, says that anyone who does not believe what it says can't go to heaven. It ends with a series of anathemas against those who disagree. I'm thankful that John Wesley removed the anathemas when he included this creed in his Articles of Religion.

Jenkins notes that these violent gang wars are a good argument for the separation of church and state. It is really in this phase that the Roman Empire got involved. Indeed, empresses played a major role. For example, Justinian's wife Theodora pushed the monophysite position.

Jenkins sees such tribal behavior as typical of these honor-shame cultures. It reminds me of some of the extremely hardened attitudes of Christians today who virtually excommunicate each other over matters of doctrine. What is sometimes called "Christian nationalism" is basically a contemporary form of these attitudes.

This brings me to a second observation. God is far more interested in the state of our hearts than our creedal confession. We are saved by faith, not by creedal affirmation. How many of these partisans were truly Christian at all? Were the real Christians the unnamed "little people" tossed about by those with power? How hard it is for the powerful to be true Christ-followers! Is it like a camel going through a needle's eye?

I suspect Arius will be in heaven. But there are probably many on all sides who won't be.

6. Jenkins believes that these bloody conflicts severely weakened the church around the Mediterranean. Along with Edward Gibbon, Jenkins sees this as a factor in the fall of the Roman Empire to the barbarians. Even more, he sees this as a reason why the church of the East fell to the Muslims. He also notes that the monophysites fared much better under the Muslims than they did under the empire, as did the Coptics in Egypt.

What might have happened if the monophysites had won? Perhaps, Jenkins muses, Christianity would have been strongest in Syria, Egypt, and the Middle East.

Continued from last week
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1. I was very excited to start teaching Greek. I felt a little guilty to be teaching, because I felt like I still had a lot to learn. I sometimes say things like, "Do I know Greek? Well, I haven't even taught it yet."

There were two of us. The senior Teaching Fellow was Bill Patrick. He was quite intelligent, far more intelligent than I am. He was the only Teaching Fellow I know who taught for four years. Cheated me out of ever being the senior Teaching Fellow. :-)

Bill always seemed to know what the latest scholarship was. I envy people like that. How do they always seem to know the latest book or article? Certainly Google and social media have helped tremendously. Now we have bloggers like Nijay Gupta or Mike Bird who let us know the latest and greatest.

Back then, Bill always knew. That was also a great thing about the annual Society of Biblical Literature convention. Milling about the book hall quickly let you know what the latest "it" books were. My book purchase each conference was proportional to the amount of money in my account.

Bill went on to teach for a while at the Asbury Orlando Campus, which unfortunately was sold recently. Bill never wanted to do a PhD even though he could have done it in his sleep. I even offered to take dictation. At some point, he came to see academia as a game. He enjoyed pouring into students lives. He didn't want to play the game.

There is of course a certain reality to power. I always enjoyed a line in Bobby Clinton's The Making of a Leader. Somewhere in there he mentions an aha moment he had when he realized that the one with the most power typically wins against you whether you're right or wrong. Few of us can get through life without playing the games thrust upon us.

Duh!

2. Bill was probably my closest friend during those years. We had a lot of fun going to Ramses in Lexington. Joseph-Beth Booksellers was a never-ending favorite. I don't know if he introduced me to Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy, but they certainly featured heavily in all conversation. He still jokes about one time I remarked in inferiority after reading one of them, "He's a master."

I would say Bill was a better teacher than I was. I was a more entertaining teacher. Probably, students enjoyed my Greek classes more than his--especially the average students. But I venture to say that more of his students actually passed the compentency exam than mine did.

I was full of silly gimmics. On "subjunctive day," I would put a note on the board that said we might be in a different room down the hall. I used the songs that Rory Skelly had developed before us. I use them to this day and have developed a few of my own to memorize paradigms. I've heard that some of my students (and their children) have remembered those songs years later, long after they remember what they meant.

The Teaching Fellow I replaced left a note on his desk: "Just remember. People are stupid." I didn't think that was very nice at the time. But you have to remember how smart some of these teachers were. And the average intelligence of most people out there is, well, average. I always felt like I wasn't a bad teacher because I was somewhere between the brilliant and the academic struggler. I thought maybe a biography of me might be titled, "Not Quite a Genius."

I was so excited to teach. The night before I started I had these ideas like drawing a huge paradigm box on the lawn and having students hold signs with the endings on them. Never did that one.

3. Bob Lyon oversaw the Teaching Fellow program. I had never been invited into his Lo Society. I suspect I was too conservative at the time. Then when it started becoming popular, he ended it. That wasn't what it was supposed to be.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed getting to know him some. That was around the time that Fazolis came into the world. He always thought he was funny when he would order a "Freddie" (fettucine alfredo). Bill and I used to beat him to say, "Humor isn't what it used to be." He didn't find our mocking very amusing. 

That was also about the time that Walmart started being open 24/7. That was really weird back then.

I also enjoyed the occasional Chinese with Dr. Bauer. I sometimes joked that I wouldn't have been surprised if he had ordered by saying, "There are three reasons why I would like Cashew Chicken. First..."

Joe Dongell came the year after I graduated, so I never had him. Unintentionally, I had somewhat been following his path. He went to Central; I went to Central. He went to Asbury; I went to Asbury. He became a Teaching Fellow; I became a Teaching Fellow. He did a master's degree at the University of Kentucky... well, I decided to start that degree in the spring of 1991, my second semester as a Teaching Fellow. 

I wouldn't follow him to Union. Who knows, though? If Paul Achtemeier hadn't retired, maybe I would have.

4. One of the books that Bill Patrick used in his Intermediate Greek class was G. B. Caird's The Language and Imagery of the Bible. I didn't use it when I came to teach that class, but I did read it. I found it a breath of fresh air.

It's hard to describe the thrill of reading something that just makes so much sense. It's like finding words to describe reality. Those experiences would slow down over time, but they often happened when I was in my 20s and 30s. I hope to share some of those moments.

The book is about the meaning of words. The later parts of the book were most striking to me. For example, he notes that language like the sun darkening and the moon turning to blood probably wasn't meant to be taken literally. Steve Lennox once told me that he found some of those last chapters a little difficult to swallow, although perhaps not that point. N. T. Wright has hammered this general dynamic home in his writings as well with his sense that "Jesus coming on the clouds" isn't about the second coming. 

I suppose my main take away from those last chapters is that end of history and the world language didn't always mean a literal end of the world. Ezekiel 37 wasn't about a literal resurrection of the dead originally. It was about the revival of Israel collectively as a people. Similarly, I'm not sure that Isaiah 66 was originally about a literal new heaven and earth.

G. B. Caird died in 1984, way before his time. But most of his work that I read made a lot of sense to me (not that I agreed with everything). His method of starting with the clear and moving to the unclear really resonated with me.

Caird had been working on the ICC (International Critical Commentary) on Hebrews when he died. Congratulations to David Moffitt for taking up the torch, although I would have liked to do it. :-) To be frank, I think my approach to Hebrews is more in keeping with the historical flavor of the series than the theological interpreters who reign at present.

Both Tom Wright and Lincoln Hurst studied under Caird at Oxford. Hurst was an early influencer on me with regard to Hebrews as well, particularly his work on Hebrews 1 and his analysis of "copy and shadow" in chapters 8-10. 

I was very interested in Wright's work in those early days as well. I finally plowed through The New Testament and the People of God while I was in Sierra Leone in the winter of 1997. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I waited anxiously for the second volume but probably had moved beyond him by the time it finally came out.

These were high days for me. I was so happy. And despite what Jim McNeely might say, I had become funny.

This is a continuation of last week's beginning.
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5. Then came that final week of Jesus on earth. That was the week that I met Jesus, from his glorious procession into Jerusalem to his crucifixion. I will need more papyrus for that. 

We had heard stories of healings and exorcisms in the north, in Galilee. My family too had gone out to see the Baptizer. We had also been baptized. Could Jesus be the one that John had foretold?

So, we were there when he came into Jerusalem, on a donkey. We knew this was a prophetic act. We shouted, "Hoshi'ah na" from the psalm, "Save us, O Lord." We expected the heavens to open and for angels to descend, decimating the Romans and the leaders of Jerusalem.

That was not the plan. I heard Peter say it repeatedly in his sermons. He was constantly beating himself up for not getting it, for not understanding. He especially was hard on himself for his denials of Jesus.

But it did not happen the way we all expected. We expected vindication when we arrived at the temple. We were confused that nothing happened.

It was then that I met Jesus. In all the confusion, Jesus saw me. "Thank you for marching with us today," he said. The crowd was preoccupied with its questions, but Jesus saw me. What was I? Fifteen?

6. I was not there the next day for the big event. On Sunday, Jesus seemed to just evaporate. Only later did I hear that he had gone back to Bethany. He was staying there with a friend of the movement, Simon the leper. I would get to know all these people later on.

But when Jesus returned on Monday, something about the scene really angered him. I could sense the frustration in my house as well. The leaders of the city were so corrupt. Pilate was so ungodly and yet they collaborated with him without a second thought. My family had money, but they all used their money on themselves. They couldn't care less about the people.

As I look back, I suspect it was just too much, seeing those greedy moneychangers cheating people for an extra shekel--and in the place set aside to worship Adonai. It did not last long, but for a good minute he wreaked havoc there, overturning tables, driving sheep away. The Romans didn't seem to pay much attention, but I'm sure the temple leaders were ticked.

When he came back, he started preaching judgment. He spoke boldly from Isaiah that God's house was supposed to be a house of prayer. Then he shifted to Jeremiah--they had made the temple into a den of thieves. His words from Jeremiah were particularly bold. Like Jeremiah, he warned the Jerusalemites that they should not think that God would spare the city just because it was the place of God's house. 

Peter wondered if God did not come then because Israel was not repentant. After all, wasn't that the message of the Baptist, that Israel needed to repent in preparation for the Lord? We would eventually come to see Jesus death as a kind of ransom for the sins of Israel, like the Maccabees before us but so much more powerful.

7. Jesus would preach the message of Jeremiah more and more as the week went on. He ruffled a lot of feathers. And he did it right there in the temple, not like the Baptizer, who was outside the city by the river Jordan. It made us all nervous. How long would the Jerusalem leaders let such prophecy continue before they did something really bad?

"There was a fig tree that didn't bear fruit," Jesus preached. "Because it had withered, the farmer eventually cut it down and planted a different tree. Let the one with ears to hear, hear."

I heard a prophecy from the Lord a decade later. It circulated widely in the church in the days of Emperor Caligula, not long after he tried to set up an image of himself in the temple precincts. It was a prophecy based in Daniel about a sacrilege that would defile the temple. 

The prophecy spoke of intense persecution for the church, the true Israel. It foretold that we would be beaten in synagogues. We would be betrayed by our families. There would be apocalyptic signs as the creation groaned in longing for its redemption.

Then the temple would be defiled. The prophecy ended with the prediction that this would happen within our generation. And then Jesus would return...

My spring philosophy class has been going now for almost eight weeks, so my live sessions have resumed. The idea of this series was to slowly fill in a rough sense of the journey through philosophy that I take semester after of semester. These posts of course go well beyond what we have time to talk about in our live sessions. For example, I am being more forthright here in what I actually think.

This post is in the section on what a human being is. My last post in this stretch was here. See the bottom for the overall shape.
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1. I think it's clear that we human types have a body. I've never met a person yet who didn't. (At least not that I know of.)

I seem to remember my mother resisting the notion that we are animals. I wasn't saying that we are only animals. But this seems difficult to deny short of some grunt of irrationality. I am much more than a mammal, but by every defining characteristic of a mammal, I am one.

My observation of human behavior is that we behave far more like animals than we would like to admit. I have noted that the roosters in my yard seem preoccupied with fighting each other and mounting hens. So it would seem with a quite large portion of the human men in the world. Very little going on upstairs. A lot of fighting and mounting.

When I'm having this train of thought, I sometimes think of the 1968 movie, The Planet of the Apes. Interestingly, that was a time of American history not unlike our own. The movie is of course a parable of humanity. The sentient apes of the movie mirror human society. There are virtuous apes. There are intelligent apes. But they had better watch out because there are militant, violent apes too.

2. As I observe humanity, the difficulty is not seeing that we are animal as well as human. Strictly from observation, the difficulty is in seeing how we are more than animal. So few humans seem self-reflective. Rather, we seem driven and tossed by our urges.

B. F. Skinner long ago demonstrated that we can be manipulated using behavior modification, just like animals. In one episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon humorously trains Penny to stop talking when he offers her a chocolate. Most of us are just as easily manipulated.

What might be defining characteristics of humans that rise above other animals? Is it our self-consciousness? The majority of humans are barely self-aware, it seems to me. We are elephants that go where we want, with our riders rationalizing our actions after the fact. [1]

We are herd animals. We do whatever our tribe does, and say what our tribe says. Nowhere is this clearer at the moment than in politics, where the official line of the government is so obviously false it is excruciatingly painful. And yet a third of the population mindlessly parrots insanities. Ironically (or perhaps revealingly), a predominant part of that third are evangelicals.

Is it our ability to tell the difference between right and wrong? I have long been disabused of any sense that humans come with a universal conscience. I have never found C. S. Lewis' moral argument persuasive. Our consciences seem in large part culturally conditioned and psychologically formed, apart from some basic instincts.

Theologians call what I am describing "Sin." If you were beginning to get nervous, I am simply describing what we Christians call "fallennesss." Our failure was to think that we were somehow immune. Yes, the other side is fallen, but we have our act together. No, we are all human, all too human.

2. Do we have a soul? Is there a spiritual dimension to us as well? From a Christian perspective, we are image-bearers regardless. We are intrinsically valuable one way or another because God says so. [2]

There is a stream of Christian thought that might be described as "non-reductive physicalist." It does not believe in a detachable soul or a true spiritual ontology, but does not believe that humans can merely be described in terms of our bodies. Our minds may be based in our brains, but it would not be adequate merely to equate them with our brains. The mind is "more than" our brains in some sense.

I would put Joel Green in this category. [3] I'm not sure that N. T. Wright exactly fits this category but his work on the resurrection has emphasized that resurrection in Scripture is an embodied existence. [4] These books, which came out around the same time, were pushing back on the popular Christian narrative that "you die and go to heaven or hell" and that's it.

Rather, resurrection in the New Testament is overwhelmingly physical. It involves a body. The tomb is empty because Jesus' resurrection self is in continuity with his body. It was not a merely spiritual resurrection, as so many in the church seem to imagine the afterlife. 1 Corinthians 15 is emphatic about the corporeal nature of resurrection, as we would expect from an ex-Pharisee.

This is not a new observation although popular Christianity is often disconnected from common scholarly knowledge. Oscar Cullmann, while no doubt oversimplifying the categories, pointed out in 1955 that the notion of the immortality of the soul was far more Greek than biblical. [5]

Nevertheless, I believe these scholars have created too sharp a distinction. There are places in the New Testament that use imagery of the soul or spirit as a detachable part of our identity, not least the pre-resurrected souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9. Paul speaks of the "unclothed" dead (2 Cor. 5:3) and to be absent from the body (2 Cor. 5:8). In what way might the thief be with Jesus in Paradise before the resurrection (Luke 23:43)?

It would thus seem easily that many biblical authors had some notion of a disembodied intermediate state between death and resurrection. Despite what we are often told, embodied resurrection was not the only Jewish tradition around the time of Christ. I and others have argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls, which reflect one stream of Jewish thought in the century before Christ, would far more accurately be characterized as looking to a disembodied future existence in the afterlife even if you can find a few fragments that assume a different position. [6]

3. I should emphasize that these are pictures. The Bible gives us incarnated revelation, revelation that comes to us in the clothing of ancient paradigms. It is the reality to which these images point that we are to look. The clothing is ancient, reflective of the categories of the day. The clothing can change even withinn the pages of the Bible itself. 

So, the point is that we survive death. We survive death not only when God resurrects us in the future. We survive death immediately. In my opinion, the form of that survival is above our paygrade. The Bible uses ancient images drawn from its world to picture that survival. But those images are not the point. Paul can express these uncertainties: "Whether in the body or out of the body, God knows" (2 Cor. 12:2).

4. Even from an empirical perspective, I do believe it is plausible that humans have a spiritual dimension to their identity that "goes beyond" what we can see. Let me use a modern image that is also an attempt to give clothing to a timeless truth.

Science fiction has given us a sense that there may be other "dimensions" to existence beyond the three (or four) that are most obvious to us. In 1884, Edwin Abbott published his novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. In it, a three dimensional creature terrifies a two dimensional one. He seems to be able to walk through walls by simply stepping in and out of the third dimension.

It seems to me that there have been countless instances of events that seem to go beyond what can be observed physically. Someone wakes up in the night with an urge to pray for someone who, at exactly that moment, is undergoing some kind of a crisis. [7] A person seems to effect spiritual power both good and evil.

As a Christian, we nest these sorts of events within a larger spiritual framework--a personal one at that. God and the Devil are personal agents, as are angels and demons.

5. The ontological existence of the soul would be incredibly convenient philosophically. Here are just a few examples:

• It would account for continuity of identity between this life and the next. If God merely recreates us in the resurrection, how is that anything more than cloning some version of our bodies and giving that new person our memories?
• It could anchor human identity at the moment of conception.
• It could ground a notion of human free will outside the cause-effect flow of the material world.
• It might account for human identity beyond the memory and personality functions of the brain.

This last possibility is fascinating. What if, for example, Alzheimer's was an interface problem? What if, the person is in there but unable to connect with us through the brain, like a defunct computer screen on a computer that still works? You can't see what the computer is doing because the screen isn't working, but all the functions are still being performed.

Of course, the advantages of a concept are not in themselves an argument for the truth of the concept. That would be the fallacy of subjectivism--wanting something to be true doesn't make it true. Nevertheless, faith in the existence of a detachable soul would seem to cohere well with Christian faith and biblical faith.

6. The brain does correlate well to many functions we like to attribute to our identity. When a rod blew through Phineas Gage's frontal lobe, his personality changed. The same is of course true for those in the past who were forced to undergo a frontal lobotomy. Alzheimer's involves the tangling of physical neurons in our brains, leading to a loss of memory and self. Biochemistry clearly affects our moods and behavior.

Years ago, a colleague at Indiana Wesleyan University (Michael Boivin) presented a paper showing that certain parts of our brains "light up" when we are undergoing a spiritual experience. That is to say, it is at least theoretically possible that someone could counterfeit religious experiences by targeting those parts of our cerebral cortex.

However, these data points are not proofs that the brain is all there is to human identity. They merely indicate that the brain is significantly involved in human identity. They do not disprove the existence of a soul. 

[1] An image from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012).

[2] I realize my statement borders on incoherence. I am using "intrinsically" in a questionable way. What I am trying to say is that our value cannot be detached or dislodged from us. Yet all created value is derivative. It derives from God. I do not see it as "ontological" in the sense that it inheres in us in some metaphysical way. It is ascribed value--undetachable, inalienable--but solely based on God's assignment. "Good is good because God says so." It is permanent and thus "essential," but it is not truly intrinsic.

[3] Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker, 2008).

[4] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).

[5] Oscar Cullmann, The Immortality of the Soul or the Resurrection of the Dead (Epworth, 1958).

[6] See John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: Death and Afterlife in the Second Temple Period and in several other works.

[7] It is tempting to invoke some sense of quantum entanglement here, although any literal reference would no doubt expose a quantum incompetence on my part. I am simply wondering if there is such a thing as a "spiritual" quantum entanglement.

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.5 The Natural Philosophers 

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 
2.7 Hellenistic Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause 
3.4 God as Intelligent Designer
3.5 God as Necessary Being (including ontological argument)
3.6 God and Morality
3.7 God and Miracles
3.8 The Problem of Evil
3.9 Augustine and Aquinas

Philosophy of the Person
4.1 What is a human being?
4.2 A Body and a Soul?
4.3 What is the meaning of life? (including existentialism)
4.4 Are we free or fated?

Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy
6.1 How to Structure Government
6.2 Christ and Culture

Epistemology
7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

Metaphysics
8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics 

8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism 

Last week I finished my reminiscences on my student years at Asbury Seminary.
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1. Asbury had a sweet set up where each year they would choose a graduating senior to be a Teaching Fellow for two years. The task was primarily to teach Greek, but I was privileged to get to teach Hebrew as well.

I applied that final year and waited to see what door might or might not open. I put out a sort of fleece. If I was chosen as the Teaching Fellow for that year, I would teach my two years and go on to do PhD work in New Testament. I would minister primarily as a teacher of ministers. If I was not chosen, I would take a church in Florida and perhaps go on to do graduate study at some point in the future.

Perhaps this is a good place to say that, when I first felt a call to ministry at Central, my first thought was to focus on theology. This reflected my philosophical bent. Besides, I thought, the meaning of the Bible is pretty obvious. But I thought there would be all sorts of puzzles to solve in theology.

This was the naivete of my unreflective youth and pre-modern background. As it turned out, there were countless puzzles to solve in biblical studies. Meanwhile, the basic beliefs of Christendom had been established for over 1500 years. When Thomas Oden set out to write his three volume systematic theology, his goal was to have no new idea.

Of course, I would eventually become sympathetic to constructive theology, a theology that engages with the contexts of those who reflect on it. There's a lot of synthesis to do there. But that's not important right now. 

The bottom line is that my attention shifted to biblical studies when I realized how many challenges there were there. And, I think somewhere deep down, I realized the power and authority that an expert on the Bible had in my circles. Subconscious, not noble, but alas.

Of Old and New Testament, as I've said, I was far more attracted to the New Testament. The New Testament is more directly theological; the Old more poetic and ancient. Mind you, I love the Old Testament world.

There seemed far more landmines in Old Testament studies than in New Testament studies. I taught Old Testament Survey my first semester at IWU. What should I mention? What not? I also remember a girl coming up after I made a joke about the King James being good enough for Peter and Paul. She sincerely asked after class, "Peter and Paul didn't use the King James?"

Finally, the New Testament is determinative of Christian faith. The Old Testament certainly provides critical background. But, in some ways, even then it was the Old Testament as interpreted in the Intertestamental Period that provided the framework from which first century Judaism emerged.

I realize there is much to debate in that paragraph, but I'll let it fly. Perhaps to be continued.

So, I put out the fleece. A fork in the road. Biblical studies or the pastorate.

2. I had done supply pastoring for a few months over two summers at Zephyrhills Wesleyan. I believe the summer after graduating from Asbury was when I was the youth pastor for my home church in Fort Lauderdale -- now New River Church. My sister Sharon was pastor at that time.

I should point out that my sister is ultraconservative by any reckoning. She hasn't cut her hair since she was a teenager, only wears skirts or dresses, has no jewelry, doesn't buy on Sunday. AND, she is an ordained minister.

It is a reminder that women in ministry is not a liberal or secular feminist thing for the Wesleyan tradition. We were ordaining women in the 1800s before it was cool. The United Methodists didn't start ordaining women till the 1950s. It goes back to the fact that we were a "Pentecostal" tradition before tongues got involved.

3. My sister had been Assistant Pastor for a while under Dr. Everett Putney. He had been so kind and gracious. He's the one I had asked about Hosea 11:1 after my first year at seminary. He was also a middle school principal, I believe in one of the public school systems in the western part of Broward County. At that time, it was up against the Everglades, but I imagine "civilization" has pushed much farther inland since then.

An interesting window into my holiness background was the question of whether we should eat in the fellowship hall where we had children's church. By the time my family arrived in Fort Lauderdale in 1970, they had expanded the original building so that, across a cemented hallway outside the original back of the church, there was a series of Sunday School classrooms, a pastor's study, and a larger room for children's church. That room was used as a fellowship hall when we would have a church pitch in dinner.

However, at some point, because it was now under the same roof as the sanctuary, there was a question whether it was appropriate to eat there. I can't remember the reason. As far as I know, no one had ever asked that question in the early days of the church. It was an extension of not eating in the sanctuary. I'm sure there was a prooftext. Maybe it was 1 Corinthians 11:22, where Paul asks if the Corinthians don't have homes to eat and drink in? 

But there was also a tendency to see the church as a kind of version of the temple. It was holy ground and so you shouldn't run or eat in it. You should dress up in honor of God. My father always wore a suit and tie to church--to the day before he died. Maybe it was something like the moneychangers violating sacred space?

4. I haven't fully studied this tendency, but I think it finds its origins in Scotland. Remember Chariots of Fire when he won't run on Sunday, which he understands to be the Sabbath (which it never was). The holiness movement was "sabbatarian," if that is an appropriate word for it. We ate pork chops, but there was a strong tendency to consider Old Testament law as still binding on Christians.

We find this tendency in many circles today despite what seems to me to be the clear teaching of Paul in relation to Gentile believers. Paul does not bind the Sabbath on Gentiles. Mark 7 does not bind the food laws on Gentile believers (perhaps any believers, despite a valiant attempt at reinterpretation by Logan Williams). Hebrews does not bind the sacrificial system on anyone anymore. The New Testament does not really talk about a tithe as the basis for giving in the church.

It is a misinterpretation of Matthew 5:17-19 to say that all the OT laws are still binding, despite the interpretation of my mother and many others. The rest of chapter 5 makes it clear what fulfilled law looks like and it changes some things (e.g., an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth). The final paragraph of 5:43-48 makes it clear that the fulfillment of the Law is love, which 7:12 and 22:40 confirm.

All of that is to say that, by the summer I was youth pastor, all fellowshiping was done in a duplex behind the church that they had bought for such purposes--ultimately so we didn't eat under the same roof as the sanctuary.

5. This seems as good a place as any to note that I was ordained the following summer of 1991 in the Florida District. With an MDIV, you only needed one year of further ministry service. Without, you needed two. Between my summers of supply and youth pastoring and my year under appointment as an educator at Asbury, they considered me cooked enough to ordain.

I had gone back to Central for two weeks to do my remaining ministerial courses. I believe it was my first summer after graduation from Central. I believe it was Wesleyan Church History and Discipline that I needed. Perhaps I also took the Theology of Holiness at that time with Herb Dongell. Those are the two that usually slip through the cracks.

Those were the days when the process wasn't nearly as rigorous as it can be sometimes today. I met one time with the whole District Board of Ministerial Standing (as it was called back then). My father was on it, and my brother-in-law Dennis Waymire head it up as Assistant District Superintendent.

I had all sorts of things bouncing around in my head. I was frankly worried where my head would end up going, but I felt like I was able to affirm all the requirements. Rev. Noel Taylor asked the most discerning question. "Kenny, we've known you since you were a boy. But sometimes people change their minds as they grow up. Have you changed your mind on any of your beliefs?"

It was a great question. I said that, while I had made many of the beliefs my own, I still affirmed the teachings of the Wesleyan Discipline.

6. I never expected to end up teaching at Indiana Wesleyan University. Young and immature, we had laughed when it changed its name from Marion College. "You can't make yourself sophisticated just by calling yourself a university," we said. I don't remember who the "we" were. I would later admire President Barnes for his business savvy.

Tom Sloan had tried to recruit me to Marion out of high school, I think I said. The Bostics were good friends of Marion College and they spent the winters in Fort Lauderdale. Big donors to IWU--Terry Munday mentioned them to me just last week. As a reflection of his virtue, he took care of them till Mrs. Bostic eventually passed at Colonial Oaks. They were close friends of my parents, and they often had breakfast together at their favorite diner. They would have been delighted for me to go to Marion.

To go even further down the rabbit hole, I don't think I've mentioned what Wesleyan/Methodist "royalty" my home church had attracted in my childhood. Clayton Luce, an old time Methodist and beneficiary of the Blue Bird Bus company attended our church with his wife and her nurse. I was able to take a ride on his yacht once.

Rev. and Mrs. C. Wesley Bradley also attended. He had been a Wesleyan Methodist District Superintendent in Jersey. My father was executor of his will and we ended up with much of his Wesleyana collection.

There was another Pilgrim General Superintendent of old, William Neff, who attended our church when I was a boy. (These were the days when my brother-in-law Dennis was pastor.) I remember he would pray up a storm when called on. 

7. So many diversions. Making Wesleyan theology my own.

I bring up teaching at Indiana Wesleyan because returning to a Wesleyan context after my doctoral work pushed me to refine my Schenckification of Wesleyan doctrines. But I had worked out the seeds in time to be able to make the appropriate affirmations for ordination.

I think I have already mentioned my journey with entire sanctification. Having detached the doctrine from Acts, I reformulated it in a more "Wesley"-an way. At some point I had read Wesley's sermon on the new birth, where he talks about not always being able to discern the moment of death, but you know that there is a point when you know someone is alive and you know when someone is dead.

Wesley was not specifically talking about entire sanctification there, but I thought it might apply as well to sanctification. I reimagined entire sanctification logically, the transition from not surrendering everything to God and surrendering everything to God. Bounds of course helped perfect my understanding later. Sanctification is God's work, not a work of our will, although full surrender is a prerequisite. 

In any case, you can read how it all ended up here.

On inerrancy, I found Asbury's statement, "without error in all it affirms" to be helpful. That raises the question, "What does the Bible affirm?" In other words, it allows not only for interpretation but for theological integration. It thus can be taken in terms of the whole counsel of God as the final answer more than atomized pieces. Indeed, we can even go further to think about a Christian reading of Scripture. 

Here is an early attempt to capture some of these thoughts in 2005.

I was asked what version of the Bible I would like to be given at the ordination service. I chose the NASB because I thought it would be more intelligible to the Florida District than the RSV they used at Asbury, which might be thought liberal. I had moved beyond the KJV of course. I didn't respect the NIV at that time and wouldn't be very comfortable with it until the revision in 2011. I used to make fun of its random insertions of words that weren't there so it could smooth out evangelical theology (like "now" in 1 Peter 4:6).

I used the NIV at IWU because Lennox had used the NIV Study Bible as his textbook for Old Testament and New Testament Survey. With each passing year, I was becoming more and more of a pragmatist, having started out as an idealist.

But I didn't really like the NASB, to be honest. I found it's translation too stilted. But it was considered respectable and conservative enough in my circles. Also, to be honest, I didn't like the formatting of the RSV. Too much block text. It worked for inductive Bible study. Not so much for good reading, IMO.

8. I was grateful to be chosen as a Teaching Fellow in 1990. That was a fork in the road. The rest of my life followed.