Category: religion

religion

Our Suffering and the Cross

Over at Jesus Creed, a regular comment box writer who goes by RJS has been doing a series of posts on a book called The Reason for God.  It has been a great series, but for whatever reason, today’s installment particularly struck me.  It discusses Chapter 13 of the book, which is The (True) Story of the Cross.  IMO, there is a tendency on the part of evangelical Christians to view the cross as simply a matter of forgiven sins and little else.  OTOH, there is a tendency in some progressive circles to see the cross as foolishness – almost an embarrassingly outdated myth.  While of course, I agree much more with the evangelical view of the cross, it seems to me that it actually reduces the cross to frame it as simply a quid pro quo for our sins.  In the discussion at Jesus Creed, RJS presents part of what the book has to say in regards to the issue of sacrificial/substitutional nature of Jesus’ death on the cross:

The Gospel of Christ – the good news – is wrapped up in the story of the cross. This story however causes a great deal of consternation in our western world. Why was sacrifice required? Why did Jesus die? Isn’t the appeasement of the wrath of God best classed as divine child abuse — a remnant of an older more primitive society? . . . Forgiveness always requires sacrifice. When we forgive we bear the consequence, the suffering, ourselves rather than demanding retribution. No one “just forgives” any grievous wrong. How much more then for God? God did not, then, inflict pain on someone else, but rather on the Cross absorbed the pain, violence, and evil of the world into himself.”

That last part is probably the best explanation of the sacrificial nature of the cross which I have read.  RJS, goes on to talk about how death on the cross also helped us to understand that God can identify with our pain, injustice and oppression.  In conclusion he asks: Continue reading “Our Suffering and the Cross”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter5 Comments
religion

Book of Job Chapter 3: Ever Wanted to Die?

Chapter 1 here

Chapter 2 here

At the start of Chapter 3 of The Book of Job, we find Job, having sat in silence with his 3 friends for 7 days, ready to talk. (Text of Chapter 3 here.) What comes out of his mouth is one of the more heartbreaking of the laments found in scriptures. Job does not curse God or Satan or even his misfortune. Rather, it is his very existence which is the subject of his lament.

One of the notable things about Chapter 3 is that it is where the Book of Job ceases to be a narrative story and becomes an extended series of poems. We are of course reading a translation which can make it hard for us to appreciate the poetry involved. In addition, Hebrew poetry uses something called parallelism where an idea is stated and then restated. This can happen between lines, within lines, between stanzas or withing stanzas. For example, verse 17: “There the wicked cease from troubling, there the weary are at rest” is an example of parallelism within a line. We can see it in the repetition of the sentence structure and the repetition of the first word of each phrase. There is also a pairing relationship between the wicked and the weary and ceasing from trouble and being at rest (ceasing to be troubled).

People with more patience and attention to detail than I have/can spend oodles of time teasing out these structures and themes. For the rest of us, however, the result is often that the text becomes repetative and we can get so caught up in the flow that we lose track of what is going on. Like I said, I am not a good detail person, so having to wade through a bunch of lines which repeat themselves with variations over and over again is not my cup of tea. I have found it helpful to look at these sections as what they are: poems. I try to break the poem into thematic sections which are usually composed of the same or similar number of lines. For this chapter, it looks like this: Continue reading “Book of Job Chapter 3: Ever Wanted to Die?”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter5 Comments
religion

Book of Job Chapter 2: Lowering the Boom

Well, I figured I would pick up my slow-mo study of the Book of Job again tonight. (Here’s my take on Chapter 1.) Tonight we’ll look at Chapter 2. (Text of Chapter 2 here.)

Chapter 2 starts with a repeat of the scene from Chapter 1 with a gathering before God at which Satan appears. Once again, God points out Job’s integrity – this time in the face of enormous suffering.

One of the challenges of the Book of Job is God’s complicity in Job’s suffering. As I said in my comments on Chapter 1, God not only allows Satan to visit tragedy on Job, but He actually offers Job up as a target for this treatment. This doesn’t sit well at all with our understanding of God as a protective force for His people. This difficult state of affairs continues in Chapter 2. Here we find an oddly worded sentence which points both to the fact that God is manipulating Satan and that He is willing to take responsibility for causing Job’s suffering. Verse 3 says, “you incited me against him to ruin him without cause”. The Netbible translates “incite me” as “stirred me up”. This is a rather odd thing to say as it was God who actually provoked Satan’s desire to ruin (lit “swallow up”) Job. But, like a manager who allows an employee to think their new assignment was their own idea, God allows Satan to think that he rather than God is in control of this situation. The other odd thing about the sentence is the imprecise pronouns which obscure who is bringing about ruin. God does not say, “you incited me against him so that you could ruin him without cause.” Rather, by simply saying “to ruin him”, God leaves open the possibility that it is not Satan, but God who has brought Job to ruin. In which case, Satan is merely the tool by which God has done this work. Satan, of course misses this distinction (as do most of us, come to think of it).

Now, I do know that I am treading in some ugly territory here. Continue reading “Book of Job Chapter 2: Lowering the Boom”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter4 Comments
religion

Italians ask, “who was this Jesus fellow?”

Apparently Americans are far from alone in being an overwhelmingly Christian country where most people know shockingly little about what scriptures actually say. A recent survey of Italians found that although 88% of them claim to be Roman Catholic, most of them are unable to answer basic questions about the bible correctly. Questions included whether Paul was in the OT or NT, if Jesus penned … Continue reading Italians ask, “who was this Jesus fellow?”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter3 Comments
religion

A Christian Feminism

When I first started looking at the issue of women in the bible, I wasn’t attached to any particular set of ideas about women and men. As a child of our times a more egalitarian ideal made a lot of sense to me. But I also knew that we get a lot further by conforming ourselves to God’s ways than to our own ideas. I wasn’t closed off to the idea that a subordinate role for women was something I would need to make peace with.

In fact, it was trying to make peace with a subordinate role was what motivated me to study women in scriptures. I figured that if I could learn more about what God had to say and why, the idea of being under men would not be a source of pain, but would be a source of life, as all things which come from God are. Like many, many women I’ve heard from over the years, I wanted to have peace about this subject, but something deep in me kept rebelling at the idea that God had given me the role of less-than all my life.

If you read what I have written previously, you’ll see that the more I studied the matter, the more it became clear to me that using scriptures to demand that women take their place under men was an abuse of God’s word. At a bare minimum, it was blazingly clear that there is nothing in scriptures which would bar full equality between men and women. So, you can make an argument for a subordinate position for women from scripture. And you can make many, many arguments for the equality of men and women which rely not just on a few verses, but stories and themes found all through scripture. Both arguments can be made, so the real issue isn’t which on is biblical – they both are, if you just look at it a certain way. Either way is faithful to scriptures. As always, all that is left now is our own choices.

All of which still begs an important question. Why did God allow scriptures to be written in such a way that they were so easily manipulated to put women at a disadvantage? Surely God knew that this would happen and could have made things clearer – not left half His creation so vulnerable to abuse by those claiming to act in His name. Over the years I have heard from more than one young woman – usually a teen – who has just read some verse about how a woman was ritually unclean for longer with a girl child than if she had a boy child or some such. “Why does God hate me?” was the theme of those girl’s questions. Why would God allow verses that made young women think that God hates them? Continue reading “A Christian Feminism”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter11 Comments
religion

Chapter 1: Job gets screwed

I am studying the book of Job for a bit, so I figured I would share what I am seeing as I go through it here. Please know that this is not going to be a comprehensive study of Job, and that my ideas are just my ideas. I do have some odd ideas about things but they work for me. Perhaps there will be something of use which you can take away as well.

We start with what I think is one of the most confounding parts of this book. In Chapter 1 we have Job who is an upstanding man, successful, and God fearing. And God hands him over to Satan for no discernible reason. I believe that we have so sanitized our reading of scriptures that we frequently pass over the most awful, problematic things with nary a glance. It’s like acknowledging how bad and just WRONG some parts of the stories in scriptures are poses a threat to our faith. However, if part of our faith includes a trust in a good and loving God, than part of our faith must include taking what is plainly wrong to God for an explanation. And I’m so sorry, but on its face, God handing Job over to Satan to be crushed and ruined for no reason other than to prove his faithfulness is just wrong. WRONG.

So, we dig a bit deeper and take it to God and a slightly different picture emerges. Continue reading “Chapter 1: Job gets screwed”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter6 Comments
being mom, religion

Happy Birthday, Noah!

In a few minutes my oldest son Noah turns 13. Right now, he and his brother are in our basement with a half-dozen other boys watching a movie and playing gameboy. They were playing sword tag down there earlier and now it smells like a high school boy’s locker room. They’re at that age where they still care about Pokemon more than girls or clothes, but they’re starting to smell like men. A couple of his friend’s voices have changed and I’ve been startled more than once tonight by the sound of men talking coming up from the basement.

Tonight as I thought about my son’s entry into the teenage years, I realized that more than anything I feel amazed at where we are. At how well things have turned out. You see, 13 years ago, I was unmarried, essentially homeless, directionless and poor as all get out. I had really planned on placing him for adoption. After all, I knew the statistics. I knew that the odds of us living comfortably were lousy, of me ever getting married were worse, that the odds of him growing to manhood without falling into the traps which catch so many boys raised by single mother were not good. Everyone I knew told me this was the right thing to do. I thought it was the right thing to do.

Except one thing; I asked God and He said no. Specifically, He said, “I am giving this child to you to care for.” I remember exactly where I was: in my junk-packed little red Ford Escort on Roosevelt Road, turning left onto Lorraine on my way to meet with people who might give me a place to live. It was about 7 o’clock at night in November, dark and rainy. I had just said, “God, just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” And He did. Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Noah!”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter7 Comments
religion

Is it time to reclaim liturgy?

Over at Christianity Today, there is an article by Mark Galli, the author of Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of the Christian Liturgy about the appeal of liturgy to evangelical Christians. The article is called “A Deeper Relevance”. I found his words on the church’s attempts to be “relevant” to be particularly interesting:

something more profound and paradoxical is going on in liturgy than the search for contemporary relevance. “The liturgy begins … as a real separation from the world,” writes Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann. . . It is precisely the point of the liturgy to take people out of their worlds and usher them into a strange, new world—to show them that, despite appearances, the last thing in the world they need is more of the world out of which they’ve come. The world the liturgy reveals does not seem relevant at first glance, but it turns out that the world it reveals is more real than the one we inhabit day by day.”

One of my frustrations with the church is that while there seems to be a never ending quest for relevance, we are not called to be relevant. We are called to be set apart, to live in ways which are wholly different from the world around us, to care about things which the world cares nothing for and to care very little for that which the world sees as important. Much of our quest to be relevant seems to me to be in stark contrast with the biblical instruction: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Romans 12:2

In practice, it can be hard to figure out what this means. Does Christian music which sounds like it could be playing on the adult contemporary station count as being conformed to this world? Continue reading “Is it time to reclaim liturgy?”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter5 Comments
religion

Is Reading Scriptures Literally, Literally Wrong?

I came across a blog post today by Father Stephen, an Orthodox priest about the problems with taking scriptures literally. On this blog, I have tended to focus on how insisting on taking scriptures literally leaves us vulnerable to being unable or unwilling to deal with reality or to losing our faith altogether when our literal understanding comes into conflict with reality. Father Stephen points out another, probably more important problem with a literal approach to scriptures: it engenders a shallow reading of scripture. From his post:

The Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament, are frequently misread (from a classical Christian point of view) in a literal manner, on the simple evidence that the New Testament does not read the Old Testament in such a manner. Rather, as is clearly taught by Christ Himself, the Old Testament is “re-read” from a Christological point-of-view. Thus Jonah-in-the-belly-of-the-whale is read by the Church as Christ in Hades. The first Adam in the Garden is but a shadow and antitype of the Second Adam – the One who truly fulfills existence in the “image and likeness” of God. The Passover and the deliverance from Egypt are read as icons of the true Passover, Christ’s Pascha and the deliverance of all creation from its bondage to death and decay. Such a list could be lengthened until the whole of the Old Testament is retold in meanings that reveal Christ, or rather are revealed by Christ in His coming. . .

A “literal” reading of the Old Testament would never yield such a treasure. Instead, it becomes flattened, and rewoven into an historical rendering of Christ’s story in which creative inventions such as “Dispensationalism” are required in order to make all the pieces fit into a single, literal narrative. Such a rendering has created as well a cardboard target for modern historical-critical studies, which delights itself only in poking holes in absurdities created by such a flattened reading.”

Now, I do know that it is possible to see the deeper Christological meaning of the scripture stories while also maintaining a belief that these things are literally historical events, recorded in scriptures. And certainly there are certain things which we need to be literally true. For example, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:17 “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” Continue reading “Is Reading Scriptures Literally, Literally Wrong?”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter15 Comments