missionality

This is a question I’ve been trying to answer for a long time. There is so much within the Old Testament “code” that I just don’t understand, so much that seems to be completely archaic and at many points strange. I really started thinking about this around the time I started getting tattoos. One of the laws in Leviticus says we are not to tattoo our bodies. The way I used to get around this was to say, “I don’t tattoo myself, I pay other people to do it.” But, that didn’t last very long. If we truly believe that all of Scripture is profitable, then we need to understand how the laws in the Old Testament apply to us today.

There are multiple different angles to go at this question. But, I think the more popular answers are simply missing the point. So, hopefully through this post I can help at least a few people consider a more realistic way to read, understand, and apply the OT laws today…

I think the first important thing to consider is that the Law was given in the midst of Israel’s story. The majority of the Old Testament is narrative, and the long lists of laws are given as a gift from God to Israel as part of the overarching story.

“The Law, therefore, is clearly part of the Pentateuchal narrative and is firmly embedded into the story of Israel’s exodus, wandering, and conquest. One’s interpretive approach to the Law should take this into account. Connecting texts to their contexts is a basic tenet of proper interpretive method. The Law is part of a story, and this story thus provides a critical context for interpreting the Law. The method for interpreting Old Testament Law should be similar to the method used in interpreting Old Testament narrative, for the Law is contextually part of the narrative.” (http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_law_hays.html)

The next important point to remember is that the Law and the land are intimately related. So, we need to understand how the land functioned for Israel. Then, It’s also relevant to consider that the New Testament speaks in many ways of the Mosaic covenant being fulfilled/obsolete, because of Jesus. Simply pulling out verses here and there can only be done arbitrarily, so it’s not helpful.

What I propose is that the laws given are “paradigmatic” for all future generations/cultures of followers of Jesus. This framework is outlined here:

1. We need to understand what a particular law meant to the original audience (context).

2. We need to attempt to discern what the specific essence or purpose was of the specific law. A great example are the specific, seemingly strange, “holiness” codes. What was the purpose? Was it simply that God is holy (different) and He wants us to be holy? Or, was the original thrust missionary in nature - that the other nations would look to God’s people to see what God Himself is like, and would thereby be compelled to worship Yahweh?

3. We need to contrast the difference between that law’s context and our own.

4. We then need to correlate the New Testament teaching with the Old Testament purpose.

5. And, finally, we need to apply the underlying intent to our own context.

In his book Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, Chris Wright adds one important caveat to this approach: that we can easily fall into extracting principles while ignoring or downplaying the role of Israel in the story. I think this is a trap we often fall into when pulling things from the Old Testament out of context in order to support something we believe (while rarely telling the stories of Israel as unique and important on their own). He says, “To regard Israel and the Old Testament as an ethical paradigm forces us to constantly go back to the hard given reality of the text of the Bible itself and imaginatively to live with Israel in their world (inhabiting the text), before returning to the equally hard given reality of our own world, to discover imaginatively how that paradigm challenges our ethical response there.” So, extracting universal principles is in the first place about understanding the whole worldview of Israel, and then it is about how that applies to our own worldview.

I think this approach takes into account the original context of the passage itself, remembers that we also have the revelation of Jesus and the New Testament, and attempts to bring God’s purpose to bear on our contemporary context. The danger in a lot of approaches toward the specific laws of the OT is that they tend to focus on only one part of this whole interaction. With the desire to simplify things, we can end up ignoring what’s really there. But, since the Law takes up a large chunk of our Bibles, then it is important and we shouldn’t ignore it.

Here is a great example of how important and relevant the Law is to our lives:

The law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure,
making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is clean,
enduring forever;
the rules of the Lord are true,
and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
in keeping them there is great reward. (Psalm 19:7-11)

May God bless you with discomfort…
at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships,
so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger…
at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless you with tears…
to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war,
so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness…
to believe that you can make a difference in the world,
so that you can do what others claim cannot be done,
to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

Amen.

There’s recently been a lot of blogononsense about this article recently published by Christianity Today:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2008/002/9.74.html

Simply put, Keller is advocating that “the gospel” presented in Scripture is multi-faceted, and that trying to narrow it down to one simple statement is antithetical to the way Scripture itself speaks of “the gospel.” He is not by any means advocating more than one gospel, but rather that the way we present the ONE gospel must be contextualized to any given audience for it to make sense. This, to me, is Communication 101, but a lot of the heresy hunters out there want it to be much more complicated and “dangerous” than that.

What made Keller’s article so timely for me was thinking through why the Kingdom of God seems to be the predominant theme of Jesus’ teaching in the synoptic gospels, but then Paul doesn’t speak of the Kingdom of God, specifically using that language, much at all. So, did something change between Jesus and Paul? Many would want to say yes, which thereby gives them the permission to rip apart the entire Bible. But, what if they were saying the same essential things, but rather using different language to communicate it?

I don’t think this is simply “defending Tim Keller” but rather I think he’s spot on in how the Bible itself speaks about the ONE gospel - in many different ways. Our shallow, pragmatic culture wreaks of reductionism, and this topic is no different. If something can’t be stated in a soundbite, it must be false, right? Wrong!

What I think Tim Keller has done is take two opposing sides of an argument and tried to bridge the gap. This seems to happen a lot within Christianity, where two people are just talking past each other because each side has their “team” and thus are defined by who they associate themselves with. Rather than simply pick a team and support it unapologetically, we are to be “always reforming” based on what Scripture says, even when that flies in the face of our tradition.

I found this interesting quote from John Stott in his book “Between Two Worlds”:

“First, God spoke through the prophets… Next, and supremely, he spoke in his Son… Thirdly, he speaks through his Spirit…”

This seems to be a great way to speak of the mystery of the Trinity from within Scripture itself. It seems really simple, but I think it’s a great way to follow the thrust of the entire Bible and highlight specific roles of each person within the Trinity.

I was recently listening to a prominent evangelical preacher on the great biblical doctrine of total depravity. He used Luther to say, essentially, that we cannot come to Christ until we hate ourselves. He then went on for at least ten minutes (I got a little bored after that) about how in and of ourselves we are nothing - we are despicable, sinful, worthless. I tried to put myself into someone’s shoes who had never heard the gospel and how they would respond to a message like this. Granted, I’m sure this preacher went on to speak of how we are remade in Christ. But, I also wonder how much of speaking of depravity, specifically in this way, is necessary.

I’m not at all denying the doctrine of total depravity. But, to me, this particular way of presenting this doctrine came off more like “utter depravity” - like every single human is as wicked as they could possibly be. But, that is not what the doctrine teaches. Total depravity means that every aspect of who we are has been distorted by sin - heart, will, mind, etc. Although I do think Tim Keller’s frequent statement that “we are far more wicked than we want to admit, but in Christ we are far more loved than we can imagine” is a great balance to this. Here’s where my thinking is heading…

What of the image of God? Total depravity implies that though we were created to reflect God to the world, because of sin we can no long do so faithfully. Every attempt to do so is tainted, distorted. We sin because we are essentially sinners. But, when we speak of “nature” I think a distinction must be made. The world God created (original nature) was harmony. Humans were placed into that harmony, but the original nature of things has been screwed up. However, the Image of God inherent in every human being is not totally lost. Rather, every aspect of every person has been damaged. So, in a sense, being renewed/reborn in Christ is the beginning of the restoration of the original nature of humanity. Jesus was the only perfect image of God, the perfect representative of God on earth - the only truly perfect human. As we are “in Him” we are transformed gradually into His image (while never neglecting the idea that we will not be fully “as He is” until the presence and effects of sin have been eliminated).

But, to follow the biblical structure of the story, should we not first emphasize the fact that, originally, we were created in God’s image? Should we start at the point of sin (like one system does), or at the point of creation? If we start with sin and its effects, then I don’t think we even get the full weight of how bad things truly are. But, if we start with a beautiful, harmonious creation in which heaven and earth were one and God Himself “walked” in harmony with all of creation, then we can begin to understand what we so desperately long for - the thing which the first human and all subsequent humans have lost.

How does this relate to “hating ourselves”? I think there must be an aspect of this, especially since in our culture to love yourself is what we think being human is all about. We live in a culture of narcissism. But, we also must emphasize that in Christ we have been given a “new self.” We should not hate the new self, because the new self is being renewed, but also we should not simply “love ourselves” because we still remain sinful. This is similar to the whole “self esteem” debate within Christian circles - what should we be esteeming? (I personally don’t prefer to use terminology like “self esteem” because I think it’s been highly abused and misunderstood.) We should hate the “flesh” we war against, but obviously not the Jesus in us. To use another Keller cliche, “The gospel causes us not to think less of ourselves, but rather to think of ourselves less.”

So, I think we can go wrong in these two directions. The reason we treat others with respect and dignity is not based on if they have a “renewed self” in Christ (for the simple reason that we cannot truly know if someone else is in Christ or not), but rather on the basis that all humans have been created in God’s image. This is what James point out in the context of “blessing and cursing” others with our mouths - “With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God” (3:9).

I really think this has massive implications. We cannot ignore the reality of our own or anyone else’s sinfulness, but we cannot also neglect to speak of the inherent goodness in the original creation of humanity (Gen. 1:31). This also leads to the promises we have been given about the future, which were present in Jesus himself (which are meant to inspire faithfulness in the present rather than apathy). When Jesus returns and fully and finally eliminates sin, He will not simply destroy this present earth (which would essentially leave Satan and sin and death as the victors over God’s good creation), but rather He will refine/purify/restore/renew the entire creation to the way things are supposed to be. (Therefore, the prayer “Come quickly, Lord Jesus” is not the prayer of a hermit with a lot of canned foods in his basement, but rather one who is striving to be fully and faithfully engaged with his responsibilities in the present age.)

I think another implication is the relationship between saving grace and common grace. Those who tend to overemphasize our wickedness also tend to deemphasize the reality that God showers His blessings on the righteous and the wicked. But, if we overemphasize that reality and underemphasize sin, then those who hear our gospel message will think they can simply appeal to the Image of God as a basis of being “in the right” with God. No, our righteousness is and only can be on the basis of Christ’s righteousness on our behalf. To neglect that truth is to essentially neglect the gospel. God doesn’t choose people because they are worthy of his choosing, but rather He pours out His saving love on those who don’t deserve to be rescued. (Election is in spite of sin, not because of worth.)

(This is a repost from Tim Chester’s blog)

1. If people tell the story of the blind men and the elephant, ask them: ‘How do you know it’s an elephant?’

2. People may say: ‘If you were born in, you’d be a Muslim not a Christian.’ But the same goes for the pluralist. ‘If you’d been born in Iran you wouldn’t be a pluralist.’ In other words, your belief that all religions are equal (or misguided) is as culturally and social conditioned as my belief in Jesus.

3. Jesus claimed that he was the only way to God (John 14:6). If all religious roads lead to God then Jesus was a liar and Christianity is false. In which case, not all religions lead to God.

4. People sometimes ask if you fully investigated all religions before deciding to follow Christ. Two responses: (1) You don’t need comprehensive knowledge before you can be confident something is true. You don’t read every newspaper and interview multiple eye-witnesses before believing a sports result. (2) I didn’t decide Christianity was the best religion; Jesus laid claim to my life.

5. Ask people to define religion. Jesus is not another religious figure, but the end or opposite of all religion. Religion is about an upwards movement of humanity towards God. Jesus represents a downward movement of God towards humanity.

6. Because Jesus is God’s initiative towards humanity, the message of Jesus is a message of grace. It is not dependant on human achievement, but upon God’s gracious and completed work. So Jesus alone gives assurance of salvation.

Recently I’ve read a lot of great books, but I haven’t done a very good job responding to what I’m reading through this blog. I’m going to try to start writing short (or not so short) summaries of the stuff I am reading…

Chris Wright has quickly become one of my favorite authors/teachers. A few days ago I finished his newest book, Salvation Belongs to Our God: Celebrating the Bible’s Central Story. It’s basically an overview of all the different ways the Bible speaks about salvation. I think it’s easy when we come from a certain tradition to only speak about salvation in a certain way and avoid the rest of the way the Bible approaches the subject. So, I think this is a much needed, balanced approach toward it.

The first chapter is called “Salvation and Human Need.” In the first few pages he says, “We human beings need a lot of saving. And God does a lot of saving in the Bible.” The implication is that we are messed up, we are broken, and we need to be fixed. We are fallen and we need to be made whole. And, the truth is that only God can do anything substantial toward solving the problem. He begins with the Old Testament, laying out different passages that speak of God delivering people from their oppressors or enemies, God giving victory in battle, God healing sickness, and God giving judicial vindication. Then, in the New Testament, he talks about Jesus rescuing people from drowning, Jesus healing people of sickness, disease or disability, and Jesus rescuing people from death, spiritual or physical dangers.

But, he goes on to say that all these types of “saving” are part of a much bigger problem, a “far deeper disorder” - sin. He says that “human rebellion and disobedience against God have injected their dismal effects into every dimension of the human person, into every dimension of human society and into the ongoing sad story of human history, escalating with every generation.” If we want to know what’s wrong with the world, the answer can only be somehow related to the sin problem. If there were no sin, we would have no need to be saved from anything. Wright speaks of salvation from sin in the Old and New Testaments, with the climax mounting in “this newborn Jesus [who is] above all else, the salvation of God arrived on earth.”

(To think deeply about the “holistic mess” that necessitates “holistic salvation,” I definitely recommend Plantinga’s fascinating book Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be.)

He does address a very important point in this whole discussion. This came out the other day when I was teaching my boys about “what we need to be saved from.” I talked about sin and death and Satan. And then I got to the hardest part of it all, that we need to be saved from God. They didn’t really understand at first, but then I tried to explain God’s wrath to them (a topic that should literally scare the hell out of us). I’ve posted about this before, but really I think Romans Chapter 1 lays it out pretty well. God’s wrath is his personal “letting go” of humans who refuse to fall under His righteous reign. Wright says, “God’s judgment is the inescapably bad news without which the good news has no real meaning, or even reason for existence.” Judgment is used both positively and negatively in the Bible, like the word “discernment.” God’s judgment is his “exposing” someone’s heart, the true motivation for their life - finding out who someone truly is.

But, I think we need to back track to really feel the weight of wrath or righteous judgment. If we believe that people are basically “good” or that we are born “good” then God’s wrath makes no sense. But, if we believe that people are inherently wicked, that people are born “hating God” and running from Him, then for God to simply ignore this would make Him an unjust God. We might not want to think this way, but if we are trying to be faithful to what Scripture says, then we must accept that, because of the sinful nature inherited by all humanity through Adam and Eve’s sin AND the sin we all commit ourselves on a daily basis, we are sinners. We’re not sinners simply because we sin, but rather we sin because we are sinners. If there were no fall, there would be no need of rescue - the world would’ve remained in a state of shalom, of universal flourishing.

As humans, we shouldn’t simply “let sin go” but rather we are to confront it, in love, and work to restore relationships when they have been damaged. We can’t ignore it, and we shouldn’t expect that God can either. Either Jesus suffers the wrath of (separation from) God in our place, or we personally experience separation from God - in the present and for eternity. This, to me, is the essence of hell. Hell is a present reality of declaring yourself in no need of God, which continues into eternity as you simply live out the implications of your own narcissism. If you want to be autonomous, God will let you.

(This is where I hit auto-pilot and suggest you all listen to Tim Keller’s talk on hell - http://download.redeemer.com/sermons/Hell_Isnt_the_God_of_Christianity.mp3)

The next chapter goes into how salvation is “God’s property.” It isn’t our way of earning a right-standing with God, but rather salvation is: “initiated by God’s grace; achieved by God’s power; offered on God’s terms; accomplished by God’s Son; secured by God’s promises; and guaranteed by God’s sovereignty.”

One of the most interesting parts of this book is his answer to the question, “Is there salvation in other religions?” He says this is the wrong kind of question to ask, because salvation isn’t the result of religion. Salvation is what God does. Christianity itself is a response to God’s saving. We are not saved by our Christianity, but because God has saved us, we want to be like Christ (”Christian”). Of course God is sovereign and can do whatever God wants to do, but in the Bible the only way to be saved is by Jesus.

This gets into three dominant views about salvation:
1. exclusivism - This takes into account all the verses that speak of salvation only being available in Christ, but says that God cannot save people in any other way.
2. inclusivism - This view says that salvation is only through Christ, but God can and does save people who may have never heard the name of Christ (most notably before Christ in the Old Testament).
3. pluralism - This view says that religion is our effort to connect with an “ultimate being,” and that there are multiple “ways” to satisfy that being and therefore be “saved.”

If we accept that Jesus is the only one who saves, then we obviously can’t accept the third view. But, I think the first view puts God in a tight box rather than letting God be God. But, there’s another good point to be made. We are not condemned based on whether we have heard the gospel of Jesus. We are “born condemned” (as Jesus said) because of our sin. But, we are not the ultimate judge of anyone’s eternal fate - that’s God’s job. And He is known for “turning enemies into friends.” We follow Jesus who said that “the first will be last.”

He also brings up a good point in relation to the “proto-evangelion” - the first “good news” promise of Genesis 3:15. I think it’s easy to skip right over the role of Israel in God’s history, but as Wright points out, “It is with the call of Abraham and God’s promise to him that we see the beginning of the implementation of that initial promise… This will be the route by which God’s redemptive blessing will come to the nations.” The mission of Israel was to fulfill the promise, but ultimately they failed. Jesus came into the picture of perfectly fulfilled the promise, but part of His mission was to judge Israel because of their failure. God’s way of rescuing His creation is through humanity - which was ultimately accomplished by the human Jesus. “God’s work of redemption will take place within and for the created order.”

He also points out that salvation cannot be individualistic: “Biblical salvation is not something I enjoy all by myself; it makes me part of the community of God’s people. And biblical salvation is not something I can keep all to myself; it demands that I share its blessing with others.” This is our mission, to make known the gospel of Jesus through our words and deeds. Selfish salvation is an oxymoron.

He brings out the reality that salvation is past, present, and future: “Salvation is what God has done already in the past, as a result of which certain outcomes are assured in the future, and because of which we live changed lives in the present.” This is a holistic understanding of salvation, and if we miss one part we’ve missed the whole.

The final chapter is about the cross. It’s short, but deep: “Ultimately all that will be there in the new and redeemed creation will be there because of the cross. And conversely, all that will not be there (suffering, tears, sin, corruption, decay and death) will not be there because they will have been destroyed by the cross.” This is very good news. The cross is the center of everything.

There’s a lot of great stuff in this book, but it would take hours for me to go into much more detail. I highly recommend it.

This is a question that I’ve been trying to answer for a long time now. It seems there are a lot of opinions about what the word meant in the first century, what it refers to in the Bible, and what it means today. Tim Keller just recently wrote a great article about the unity and diversity in Scripture regarding “the gospel,” and it’s definitely worth checking out:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2008/002/9.74.html

But, I want to address something that I haven’t seen much good explanation for. Galatians is blatantly about “the gospel,” so much so that to reject the one true gospel is to deserve damnation. Obviously, Paul thinks “getting the gospel” is pretty important. But, there is an interesting twist to our typical understanding of what the gospel is in Galatians 3:8 - “And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham…” So, whatever the gospel is, it was preached to Abraham. If our gospel is simply “Jesus died and rose again” that doesn’t really make sense of the passage. Paul goes in the next verse to explain what he means by the gospel that was preached to Abraham: “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” The promise was given to Abraham, that all nations on the earth would be blessed through him. That promise was and is good news. “The gospel” contains that promise.

Obviously, the gospel is part of a much bigger story than the story of Jesus. We have to understand the promise to Abraham to understand Jesus. Israel was given the responsibility (mission) to be different among and a light to the nations, and therefore to point everyone to Yahweh. But, Israel failed. Jesus perfectly fulfilled Israel’s original mission.

Each story points to Jesus, but each story is unique, on its own, within the larger story. Ultimately, all nations are being blessed through the seed of Abraham (Jesus). And, we have been entrusted with the gospel to participate in God’s blessing of all nations.

I’ve been trying to wade through the differences in how we can be faithful to Jesus but also encounter the culture(s) in which God has sent us for a long time now. There is a vast array of differences between teams on how this should be done. But, here are some thoughts that can help us think through these things, in the bigger picture:

1. Shalom will not ultimately be achieved through human means, and is not promised until the new creation.

2. The depth of the effects of sin on shalom will be experienced until the new creation.

3. But, we have been given promises that are for the present. The future we await should empower us in the present. Jesus is building His Church, and we are indwelled by the Spirit to participate in God’s mission to redeem all of creation. Present transformation is substantial, but not total.

I think this framework is very helpful when thinking about how much can actually be done in the present. If we believe that by our efforts we can achieve “another world,” then we will all be continually frustrated. This completely ignores the holistic effects of sin on all of creation. But, if we so stress that truth and ignore the promises given to us in the present, that God’s Kingdom has been and will continue to spread, then we won’t do anything.

Maybe this is too simplistic, but when I hear about pacifism/nonviolence, this is typically where my mind goes. If we truly believed that another world was possible, then we would outlaw prisons and locks on our houses. That is anarchy, and that is not a world I want to live in. Yes, power has been and will continue to be abused. But, we can’t be so naive as to think that allowing bad things to happen to those we love will somehow change the world in the present. Sin is a big deal, and there have to boundaries.

Last night went really well. Most of the group stuck around to ask questions and discuss, so it was definitely less depressing than I had foreseen. I’d love to get some interaction with this:

http://www.mediafire.com/?vd2mzl0lmyu