A Word With One Meaning or 30?
Let’s pretend that you are a bible translator and you are working on creating an English translation of the bible from ancient (kione/biblical) Greek texts. And let’s say that there is one word – a noun – with a clear, agreed upon meaning. Every time you come across this word, all you have to do is substitute the English version of the word into the text and it works just fine. There’s just one hitch: if you do this your translation will be accurate and faithful to the ancient manuscripts but it will practically erase a long-held church teaching. Do you go with what the text says and use that one word in your translation? Or do you come up with a dozen or more other ways to translate that word in ways that leave the church teaching undisturbed?
Aion*
This isn’t a hypothetical issue here. There really is a koine Greek noun which has one agreed upon meaning, yet has been translated dozens of different ways – presumably because translating it directly would almost totally remove the teaching of eternal hell from the bible. The word is aoin. It is the root word for the English word eon. The one word that can be used to translate it is “age”. It simply implies an undefined period of time. It has been used variously to describe everything from a few days to the span of a life to time longer than we can imagine. But like eon, it always indicates a period of time with a beginning and end. (Here’s a list of quotes from various biblical scholars saying the same thing. Here’s the wikipedia entry on the word aion. For an examination of how the word was used in ancient times by extra-biblical authors, go here. Or go here and scroll down to the section titled “The Greek Classics” about a quarter of the way down the page.) Continue reading “A Word With One Meaning or 30?”
Hell Week – Back to the Beginning
Allow me to take you back to the halcyon days of the early aughts. Wikipedia was new. Destiny’s Child was still together. The first Lord of the Rings movie was coming out. And I was re-reading the Old Testament. I think a lot of people have had the experience of re-reading something like the bible and realizing that you didn’t absorb any of it the first time through. This was exactly what was happening to me. As I read the bible again, I was a bit overwhelmed by a lot of the mucky stuff in it. The guy who sacrificed his daughter to fulfill a pledge. Lot offering his virgin daughters to a mob. Samson killing everyone and cutting off their foreskins. The cannibalism. The commands to kill men, women, children, babes-in-arms.
I think it was after reading the story of Jael who put a spike through the head of a man in her tent that I put the book down and asked God that timeless question: “WTF?” And I actually got an answer: “I work it all out.” I remember praying about it and when I was told that God works it all out, it carried with it a sense of totality. Everything gets worked out. Everything. And I was still thinking, “WTFudge?” I felt like a shark with a beach ball – I just couldn’t grab hold of the idea. It was too much.
Part of the problem was that at the time I was a pretty standard Evangelical. Which means that I was inordinately concerned with who is saved and who is going to hell. Continue reading “Hell Week – Back to the Beginning”
Bloggy Linky Goodness
Well, it’s been a slow week around here as you might have noticed. Next week will be different, but you’ll have to head down to the bottom of this week’s Bloggy Linky Goodness to find out more about that. In other news, I shaved my legs and pits for the first time in months. Most exciting thing to happen around here in a while, I tell ya!
But I do have some good writing/reading for this week’s Bloggy Linky Goodness to share with y’all:
Radical Practice Needs Deep Roots in Doctrine I love synchronicity – great minds think alike and all that. This beautiful post by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove at The Everyday Awakening explaining the gospel, suffering, atonement theology and more reads like if you took my own posts on suffering, the church and the sacrificial death of Jesus and put them into one post with much more skill and clarity than I have. Really great stuff. Continue reading “Bloggy Linky Goodness”
Bloggy Linky Goodness
OK, OK, you got me – I skipped Bloggy Linky Goodness last week. I’m sure there was a perfectly good reason. Which I’d tell you if it was actually important. Or if I had enough brain power left to try to remember what it was. But it’s back! Hooray!
Before I get started, allow me to share one of the weird things I’ve been thinking about. First, the number 40. Remember how it rained for 40 days and 40 nights for Noah? And how the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years. And Jesus retreated to the desert for 40 days before starting his ministry. And it takes 40 days to gestate a human baby. Coincidence? I think not.
Now on to Bloggy Linky Goodness: Continue reading “Bloggy Linky Goodness”
Holy Spirit Raining Down and Welling Up
Have I ever told you about the time that I stopped listening to Christian music, threw away my Christian t-shirts (“Color Outside the Lines – Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind – Romans 12:2” was my fave) and took down anything from my living space with a bible verse on it? Believe it or not, I did it so I encounter God again. For years after my first encounter with God, I would have experiences in prayer or worship or even just through some unexpected event that I experienced as the Holy Spirit raining down on me. Like heaven was washing over me. It’s not an uncommon experience – in fact there’s a well known worship song called just that: Holy Spirit Rain Down. It’s a wonderful experience but one day it started going away. First God’s voice – that still, small voice that will sometimes come to us – just went silent. I would still have that experience of the Spirit through worship and sometimes through prayer, but in time that became more and more muted. Finally, it just seemed to be gone. I remember at one point telling my husband that I felt like I was wandering through a dark forest and God was there – somewhere above me – watching. He knew the way out but I was lost and he wasn’t helping me find my way. This was the first dark night. As John of the Christ explains it is the dark night of the senses. But I didn’t know much of anything about that then.
As the voice and presence of God became fainter and farther from me, I think that without even realizing it, I started adding things into my world that would remind me of God. Maybe make me feel some sort of connection or even just warm-fuzzies. I never went overboard, but as time passed I listened to more and more Christian music, read more Christian books, bought a few of the aforementioned T-Shirts, put bible verses on the bathroom mirror and on my screen saver. I became more stereotypically and outwardly Christian as if by surrounding myself by reminders would trigger that connection with God again. It may have even looked from the outside like I was growing in my faith – and I was, in a way. But from my vantage point, I was just grasping at straws and trying to will God to show himself to me again. Continue reading “Holy Spirit Raining Down and Welling Up”
“High Priests of Caesar’s Court”
I came across a post by Greg Boyd today which I think makes a great follow-up to my post earlier this week – Our Faithless Culture Wars – that I hope you will go read. The choice excerpts for me:
We sadly assume our highest calling is to be the high priests of Caesar’s court, telling it how God allegedly wants it to spend its money.
Of course, being the high priests of Caesar’s court means you’ve got to get into the messy complexity of this court. How do we know that fighting for money to go to recreational facilities is the right thing to do? Maybe fighting for more funding for schools, or housing for the poor, or for more and better public transportation is a better fight. And what about the unlivable low minimum wage, or the lack of adequate shelters for the homeless, or the increasing number of people who lack basic health coverage, or the inadequate presence of police in dangerous neighborhoods? As the high priests of Caesar’s court, we have to make these tough decisions — and there’s only so much money to go around.
Not only this, but every action creates a reaction, and as Caesar’s wiser and more caring counselors we have to be experts about all of these things. For example, it certainly feels wise and righteous to insist on higher wages for workers. But are we sure this won’t force many small business owners to fire workers, thereby harming the poor more than helping them? And it certainly feels wise and righteous to insist U.S. troops pull out of Iraq right now. But are we sure this won’t result in a greater bloodbath than there already is over there? And it certainly feels wise and righteous to insist on preserving a pool for inner city kids, but what if the money for this has to be taken from classrooms, requiring that some teachers be let go, resulting in a poorer education for these kids? Is a pool more important than education?
It’s all very complex and ambiguous, but once we position ourselves as Caesar’s high priests, we have no choice but to wade through it all. Continue reading ““High Priests of Caesar’s Court””
It’s the Prime Directive
Yesterday, I saw a blog post by an atheist asking, “If I had the power to save everyone at the theater that was just shot up because I was all-powerful and all-knowing, and I didn’t do it, wouldn’t I be evil?” The old theodicy question – how do we explain a world of evil if God is all loving? It’s a legitimate question. And one that we have a hard time answering well. So, I was thinking about that atheists’ question last night while laying in bed. And then because I was drifting off to sleep and thoughts become more slippery and less reality tethered as you drift off, my mind wandered to ants. You see, my daughter Sophia had spent some time last night watching an ant colony in the rocks in front of the house. She tried to convince me to let her bring out some sugar for them – probably so she could watch ants carrying sugar crystals. I told her the ants didn’t need any help from us – they do just fine on our own. Partway to sleep, I thought about ants preparing to go off to war against another ant colony while Sophia was watching. What if she could step in to stop it? Would she? Should she? And my mind slipped back to that question – “If I had the power to save everyone at the theater because I was all-powerful and all-knowing, and I didn’t do it, wouldn’t I be evil?” Would Sophia be evil if she didn’t step in to stop an ant war? And just then the words “it’s the prime directive” popped into my head. Which woke me right up.
“Honey, what exactly is the prime directive again?” I asked my husband whose dream is to have us wear our federation uniforms on a replica of the deck of the USS Enterprise cum entertainment room.
“You can’t interfere with the internal affairs of any civilization in any way, for any reason.”
“And if they are getting ready to destroy themselves or do something really awful?”
“They have a right to their own stupidity,” he answered, “grmpzzzzzzz . . . ” (I think he’s kind of used to me asking strange, random questions when he’s half asleep by now.)
I lay back down thinking that I should go to that post and leave the comment, “it’s the prime directive, dear.”
Now, to be clear, I’m no deist. I don’t think that God created us and is just sitting back watching from a nice, heavenly vantage point. The bible and the existence of Jesus and many of our own lives all point to the reality that God is intensely interested in and invested in us. Like Captain Kirk, God has violated the prime directive many times. However, I have been thinking for a while that our understanding of God’s relationship with us is almost certainly skewed and needs adjusting. Continue reading “It’s the Prime Directive”
Mary the Grocery Store Lady and Me, Me, Me!
Last night I went to the local grocery store and saw that Mary had dyed her hair. I was a bit surprised. Mary never struck me as the hair dying sort. The cigarette smoking, beer drinking with her family sort, yes. Mary works overnights at the local grocery store and she kind of intimidates me. She’s not like the nice, cheery ladies who work during the day. Mary doesn’t look at you and she doesn’t care if you found everything you were looking for. She wears prescription sunglasses inside, is thin as a rail and moves like a man. I always think she hates me but I’ve watched her with other people and either she hates them too or that’s just the way she is.
I always try to talk to Mary. I hate how unfriendly people are around where I live, so I make a point of talking to people when I’m out. It’s my little protest. And I just think it’s right to be friendly. However, I’m actually pretty shy and easily intimidated. So when I run into someone like Mary I have to work up the nerve just to say “hi” and ask how it’s going. I don’t always make it. I feel like she’s so fiercely determined not to look at you and keep her mouth set in a straight line because she doesn’t want anyone to talk to her. But if I don’t even try to talk to her, I’m convinced that she thinks it’s because I’m a stupid, fat cow who thinks she’s to good to talk to a person like her. Which right there is a good demonstration of why it’s not healthy to try to put yourself into the head of a stranger. You’re just making crap up. Continue reading “Mary the Grocery Store Lady and Me, Me, Me!”
The Feel Good Church vs The Church of Blessed Suffering
Do you realize that we are supposed to feel good about ourselves? God declared creation good and upped it to “very good” once man and woman were in place. After all that got messed up at the fall, he then sent his Son to live, die and rise again so that we could be redeemed – be very good – again. Our desire to feel good about ourselves comes from a deep, God-created place and should not be mocked or belittled.
The problem is that it’s not easy to get to a place of feeling good about ourselves. There are all sorts of counterfeits available out in the world. There always are. But like all counterfeits, they wear out, break, chafe, leave a nasty rash behind. For example, it’s pretty well known that many criminals have much higher self-esteem than the rest of us. And we all know someone who loves themselves to pieces even though their own mother doesn’t want to be around them. It’s just not as simple as telling yourself how wonderful you are over and over until you believe it. Any decent person doesn’t just want to think that they are wonderful – they want to BE wonderful. What the world does get right and the church too often gets wrong is that it’s hard to get to that place while thinking of yourself as a worthless piece of filth.
Continue reading “The Feel Good Church vs The Church of Blessed Suffering”
Our Faithless Culture Wars
A while ago, I finally realized that I needed to take Jesus’ teachings much more literally. He said, “don’t judge” and I said, “I’m not judging, but clearly some things are wrong. It’s not judging to say that.” He said, “love, pray for and serve your enemies” and I heard, “love the sinner, hate the sin.” He said, “do not resist the evil man” and I signed petitions against groups and politicians in order to protect Jesus’ values. Jesus said, “so do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?'” and I wonder if we should make plans to attend the financial planning series the church is holding on Thursday nights. Jesus said, “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” and I work really hard to be at least in the top quintile in everything I do. See the problem here?
So, haltingly and stumblingly and often failingly, I have tried to unlearn the ways we do things here in the world and adopt the Kingdom way of doing things. What I have learned in the process is that what we see as “standing up for Jesus” or “hate the sin, love the sinner” is really a form of faithlessness. We don’t trust God enough to be able to work things out according to the ways that Jesus told us to do them. We fight and opine and advocate because we are convinced that without our help, God won’t get his way. We think that all that talk about not judging and not resisting and not worrying are good – so far as they go. But there are important issues at play here. If we don’t stand up and fight, we could lose! We could be eating cat food in retirement. “God doesn’t get what it’s like down here” is what I’ve sometimes told myself. Only that’s ridiculous – God made “down here.” He came down here and suffered the worst we could throw at him. And God wins. Always, everywhere. Period. Amen. The reality is that every time I judge or fight or worry or try to keep my position, I’m throwing my lot in with the losing side. Really. Think about that and then think about our culture wars and you can start to see why “the church” has failed so miserably in fighting them. And even more alarmingly, how breathtakingly faithless we are. Continue reading “Our Faithless Culture Wars”
The Upside Down World 