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Parenthood: Prepare for Chaos

Keith Edwin Schooley — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 08:55:00 +0000

The following post is excerpted from the chapter, "Prepare for Chaos," in my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God.

We all know them. The people who make statements that begin with, “When I have kids….” Like, “When I have kids, they’re going to be well-behaved.” Or, “When I have kids, I’m not going to allow them to make a mess of the house.” Or, “When I have kids, they’re never going to [insert behavior that the person has just observed and is particularly irritated by at the moment].”

Best not to get bent out of shape about statements like that. Best just to nod and smile and wait for the day when they find out….

Three Young Boys and a Library

I have a personal library that contains several shelves of books, developed while going to school to study English literature and theology. Yes, this all happened before you could get a whole library onto a tablet.

I used to like organizing my books. Fiction arranged alphabetically by author’s name and then by book title. Nonfiction arranged by category. It’s not that I’m an organizational nut. Far from it. Ask my parents about my room when I was a kid. But I liked being able to find specific books pretty easily, and I liked how it looked. Publishers often give books from a single author a similar cover and spine, so putting them together makes it look like they fit. It’s not so random.

So along came Daniel, my firstborn, and although having a baby changes your life immediately—because suddenly you’re responsible for this new life who can’t do anything for himself yet, and he’s crying and waking you up in the middle of the night—your life is changed, but your baby is still contained: contained to a crib, a car seat, a stroller. You, as parents, are still more or less in control. For the moment.

And then came my twins, David and Michael, and the next few years are a blur. You think that one infant is difficult, waking you up in the middle of the night, crying at random times because he needs to be fed, or changed, or he just feels cranky. But then make that two infants tag-teaming you, one waking up just as you’ve gotten the other one down to sleep, or both of them being needy at the same time for different things. It’s hard. Add to that a two-year-old, who is no longer contained, but is running around exploring and playing and infinitely curious about everything in the house.

And then the infants start growing and toddling around and being curious too. Daddy’s working a lot of the time and Mommy’s got her hands more than full and the boys are exploring their world, and it turns out that part of their world is shelf upon shelf of variously-colored rectangular thingies. What are these? Daddy seems to like them. He’ll take one out and open it up and play with it for a long time. What are these things? The first one just has black marks inside. So does the second one. But the pictures on the outside are pretty. Let’s take more out!

So I come home, and half my books are scattered all over the floor. Cecile will deny it to this day, but I swear she thought it was funny.

So I got the books together and scolded the boys, to the extent that it’s fair to scold small children who are just doing what children do. I arranged them back on their shelves in the correct order. And so we’re good, until a few days later when it happened again. And then again. And I didn’t always have time to rearrange the books, so they’d go on the shelf in some random order, and I’d make a mental note to get them organized again. And I did, too, a few times. But the books kept coming down and I kept putting them back up (“What a fun game!” my boys must have thought) and little by little I lost control of the organization. And then we moved a couple of times, so they’re all packed up in boxes and then reshelved when they’re unpacked and there’s way too much to do to worry about exactly where each one goes, especially when you’re losing hope that the effort you put into organization will last more than a week.

The boys are now all over 18, they’ve long since stopped playing with my books in that way, we’ve lived in one place for five years now, but my books are still a disordered mishmash. They’ve beaten me.

Choosing Between People and Order

I know that right now, reading this, there are some people who do not have children yet and are thinking to themselves, “I’d never let my children behave like that! When I have children, I’ll make sure they behave! When I have children, they’re going to know not to play with the grownup things! When I have children, we’re going to have order in this house and they’re going to learn to appreciate that!”

Yeah, good luck with that.

I don’t mind so much the single people and young couples who feel that way. No, the people who worry me are those who already have children and are actually trying to raise them that way. The parents who don’t allow their children any leeway, who are regimented and controlling, whose children exhibit all the discipline and order of the Von Trapp children obeying their father’s whistle. They are perfect in public, always neat, clean, and polite, and never give their parents any cause for embarrassment. These are the dangerous ones, the ones who are going to break out and break hard when they leave home—which will probably be as soon as they possibly can.

Because the only way to produce that picture-perfect family is to use a lot of discipline to rein in the natural curiosity and energy and impulsiveness and lack of experience that is childhood. Discipline is not the problem, in and of itself. It’s necessary to guide children and to protect them from the weightier consequences of their actions as they get older.

But the kind of discipline and the focus on picture-perfect order that I’m talking about sends a very damaging message to children: You are less important than my need for order and for the approval of other adults. (tweet this) Children can’t help feeling this way when they are continually checked and stopped and reined in and scolded for not being miniature adults. They aren’t miniature adults; they don’t have the experience. They’re being forced into a plastic, phony role that sooner or later they will resent and need to rebel against. Their entire life experience tells them that they are not valued for who they are by the people whose opinion matters the most.

No one wants to do that to their children. But some people are so focused on order and on how their children appear to others that they unintentionally squelch who their children are. Sometimes parents want their children to be just like themselves, or want their children to be completely different from themselves in a particular way. Sometimes parents have made significant mistakes that they don’t want their children to repeat, and so any tendency in that direction results in the parents overreacting.

Even worse than unrealistic parental expectations, though, is parental embarrassment. In essence, this is the same problem moved up a level: rather than parents imposing their own expectations, they are imposing the expectations that are coming—or that they believe are coming—from the people around them. This can create hypocritical standards, when things that are disregarded at home suddenly become grounds for punishment when they occur in public. Some parents, recognizing the hypocrisy of having different standards at home and in public, impose inauthentic standards all of the time, creating rules not based on scripture or on what the parents personally believe to be wrong, but rather based on the expectations of other people with whom the parents do not even agree. They are punishing their children based on other people’s convictions, not their own.

Fathers, Don't Exasperate Your Children

It is for this reason that Paul writes, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4) and “Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged” (Colossians 3:21).

In his own culture, what Paul had to say to those in a culturally subordinate position was unobjectionable and actually mild. However, the fact that any responsibilities were required of the culturally dominant person was a radical departure from the norm. So in the immediate context of the two passages, children being required to obey their parents would have been thought to be simply normal. But the fact that fathers—or parents: the Greek word could mean either, but in the culture of the day, fathers ruled the household—the fact that fathers were being called upon not to exasperate or embitter their children would have been astonishing.

This warning against exasperating and embittering one’s children indicates that these things can and do occur, and that we may be doing them without meaning to. How do we exasperate and embitter our children? Often, I think, it’s by doing exactly the things that were being discussed above: making the rules that we have for our children more important than our children themselves. Making rules not primarily for the benefit of our children, but for our own convenience and to secure the approval of others in our social circle. Making our children feel devalued because they know that our rules and discipline come not out of concern for them but out of selfish motivations.

In parenting, we tend to view things as a choice between discipline and indulgence. Instead, we should look at the difference between discipline motivated by love and discipline motivated by selfishness (tweet this). Are our rules and their enforcement intentionally grounded in concern for our children’s safety and development, or is it grounded in us wanting to impose our will on our children and wanting to gain the favor of other adults?

Sometimes these two motivations will coincide. As my children grew old enough to understand the difference between books and toys, I made it clear to them that pulling books down and leaving them all over the place was unacceptable. I don’t want them going into a library and destroying the place, leaving it to some hapless librarian to have to reshelve everything. There are valid issues that engender social disapproval of parents: when children are allowed to act selfishly and without regard to consequences, they don’t develop a recognition of when they are failing to love their neighbors as themselves. They can go through life carelessly offending other people, and then wondering why they are disliked. So teaching children to clean up after themselves not only serves to support our own desire for order, but also gives them skills they will need for their own lives in the future, and helps them to treat others with respect.

But the two motivations—concern for our children and concern for how we are viewed by others—sometimes don’t coincide. This comes out most strongly when we want to impose an order that our children aren’t developmentally ready to deal with yet, or when we want to punish them for behavior simply because it embarrasses us with other people. Our children know when we are disciplining them for selfish or inauthentic reasons. It makes them learn the wrong lessons, learn to hide behavior rather than to change it, and to evade and escape our influence whenever possible.

This tendency toward being overly strict, toward exasperating and embittering our children, is more common in religious circles than in the world at large. This may be the case because in religious circles we tend to derive our value more from law than from grace. Rather than frankly presenting ourselves to each other and to the world as forgiven people, we always seem to want to present ourselves as moral people, good people. We see our children as a reflection of ourselves, and to be fair, this is a human response to the fact that others do, in fact, judge us based on the behavior of our children. We want to be thought of as moral and respectable, so we punish our children when they don’t showcase us in a positive light. We are all too worried about how moral we appear, rather than about how deeply in God’s grace we reside.

Children are messy. They come out of the womb bloody, and no involved parent has escaped being pooped on, peed on, and vomited on. Children are incredibly curious about everything around them. They want to touch, smell, taste everything—this is why everything goes into a baby’s mouth. They will do and say absolutely anything at any time. They intrude upon the order we want to impose, they bring chaos wherever they go. And Jesus said that whoever comes into the Kingdom must come like one of these. They’re authentic. They’re real. They don’t have a carefully cultivated illusion of order and respectability that they have to maintain.

Perhaps the chaos they bring into our lives is God trying to tell us something.

To know more about my family's story, and for more of my perspective on biblical marriage and family, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

The Archie Bunker Effect; or, The Main Mistake Christians Make when Engaging with the World

Keith Edwin Schooley — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 06:00:00 +0000

I grew up watching All in the Family. (Yes, I'm that old.)

All in the Family was an American sitcom that aired in the 1970s. It revolved around the Bunker family: Archie, the loudmouthed, bigoted father; Edith, his dimwitted but goodhearted wife; Gloria, his married daughter; and Michael, Gloria's opinionated, liberal husband. Michael and Gloria lived with Archie and Edith because Michael was in college and unemployed. In the close quarters, Archie and Michael frequently squared off regarding controversial political and social topics.

That was the point of the show. All in the Family was the liberal Norman Lear's vehicle for propagating his views. While Michael was mocked as "Meathead" by Archie, he was actually the mouthpiece for Lear's progressive social and political views. The staging and the dialogue were brilliant. Archie would usually "win" his arguments, but only because he was so stubborn that he would come up with ridiculous rationalizations that no one but he could possibly find convincing. Michael would give up in frustration over Archie's obtuseness, only to fight again another day.

Michael was also an agnostic. Functionally, he was an atheist, but he didn't make the mistake of actually trying to prove the non-existence of God. Instead, he simply doubted the validity of any sort of evidence for a supreme being and refused to allow the relevance of God to any discussion. By contrast, Archie represented popular religiosity. Not a churchgoer himself, he nonetheless claimed a belief in God when it served his purposes. His wife Edith was much more of an actual Christian, but was almost as unintelligent as Archie accused her of being. She was usually an apologist for him as well, although her unaffected truthfulness often resulted in unintentional zingers against Archie's positions.

So here in a popular television show we had a social caricature being played out: the advocate for God, in power but older and on his way out, spewing bigoted, incoherent, ridiculous tirades, pitted against the youthful agnostic, still dependent but in the ascendency, articulating seemingly reasoned positions that were never heeded. The Christian is the old-fashioned racist, the agnostic is the vibrant rational thinker.

I got the message. I grew up never wanting to be Archie Bunker.

I never lost my faith, but I didn't want to say much about it either. The problem was that Michael always seemed to have it all figured out. I always thought that anyone who disagreed with me would have all the answers, and I would be reduced to blathering incoherence.

(Incidentally, the whole issue was inverted in the 80s sitcom Family Ties. There, however, in the battle between the young conservative and his erstwhile-hippy parents, the issue of God was neatly laid aside. This may help to explain the development of conservatism in the last few decades.)

I think I felt this way until an honors English seminar in college. The professor entitled the seminar, "What can one hope for," and we read everything from Ezekiel and Revelation to Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kafka. It was fascinating.

Since it was a discussion class, it ended up getting polarized between two older guys, articulating an athiestic viewpoint and quoting Nietzsche all the time, and me, the reluctant representative of a Christian viewpoint.

I felt that they were mopping the floor with me. They had read more than I had, and they had answers to everything I brought up. I felt foolish and inadequate. And at one point, I decided I had to read some Nietzsche for myself. I had to figure out whether I believed what I believed because that's what Mommy and Daddy had told me, or whether I believed that it was really true.

I think I was trembling as I went through the stacks at my university library. I didn't know if this was the step that was going to destroy my faith. But if my faith couldn't stand up to questions, then it wasn't much of a faith, was it? So I opened the books and began to read.

And there was nothing there. I had expected serious intellectual arguments with overwhelming logic. Instead, there was nothing but mockery. It all amounted to, See, terrible things happen. Where's your God NOW??? HA HA HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!! I came out of the experience with my faith strengthened, not broken.

Later on, I had an internship with another student in that class, a woman named Grace, and we developed a friendship. At one point, I told her how inadequate I felt in the class. She was astonished. "We never felt that way," she said, speaking of herself and a few others she knew in the class. "We always thought he came off arrogant and rude, and we thought you had some pretty interesting things to say." She told me that she knew that my main opponent (whose name I have long since forgotten) spent his evenings crying into his beer at a local bar. She told me that, although she hadn't become a Christian based on the experience, she had a much more positive view of Christianity than she had had previously.

A light breeze would have knocked me over.

That experience taught me a lot, and it has stayed with me for many years. Christian, the people who disagree with you don't have it all together. They don't know everything. It doesn't matter how polished or relentlessly logical or superior they seem: in the end, they're just people. And you don't have to win an argument to persuade people; most of the time, you don't even have to argue. You may not persuade the person who is confronting you (although it's possible that something you say will stick and have an effect at some point in the future). Your demeanor will have an effect on those who see you, far more than whatever points you think you are making or not making.

Don't succumb to the Archie Bunker effect. You're not him. Your faith is not foolish. Your critics don't have all the answers. And God will still touch people through you.

Well-Researched 3DM Warning

Keith Edwin Schooley — Wed, 15 Jul 2015 22:59:00 +0000

About a year and a half ago, I published a book review on Mike Breen's book, Building a Discipling Culture. This was in response to my own experience in a church that was adopting the 3DM discipleship strategy, and the flaws I saw in the exegesis and methodology I found in the book.

The book review lay dormant and, as I thought, forgotten for five months, when I began getting comments that turned out to be related to the struggles of North Heights Lutheran Church in Arden Hills, Minnesota. Comments began to pour in, and at the present time, there are 400 comments on that post, far more than on any other post on this blog--despite the fact that Blogger has problems dealing with more than 200 comments (go down to the bottom and click on where it says "Loading..." to access the more recent comments). In order to foster discussion, I've attempted to play the part of more-or-less impartial moderator (although I clearly have my own opinion). People on both sides have gotten angry at me, so I guess I've done my job reasonably well. :-)

It should be clear at this point that I have chosen not to capitalize on the success of that post by making this an "anti-3DM" blog. I have different interests, and my hope is that some people who find this blog by searching for things related to 3DM will be interested in some of the other things I am interested in.

But I have to break my silence. Bob Highlands from Sonrise Church has done extensive research into 3DM and has an excellent series of posts on his website documenting aspects 3DM. The series of three posts can be accessed from this page. In my opinion, the best of the three posts is the second one, in which Bob breaks down the main exegetical and doctrinal issues besetting 3DM. Bob writes from the doctrinal position of the Church of God, Anderson, Indiana, but most of his arguments can be appreciated from any evangelical position. Incidentally, Bob quotes me at one point, and I fully support and agree with his use of that quote.

Check out Bob's well-researched piece, and thanks to all the commenters who played a part in aiding Bob in that research.

Christian Married Sexuality (part 2)

Keith Edwin Schooley — Fri, 03 Jul 2015 06:35:00 +0000

The following post is adapted from the chapter, "Sexuality," from my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God.

Check out Part 1 of this series by clicking here.

Sex and the Christian Marriage

The previous post of course leads to the question: what is healthy sexuality in marriage? A favorite text that seems to address this topic is Hebrews 13:4, which reads in the King James Version, “Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.” This looks like an endorsement of marriage itself and of married sexuality (take that, Jerome!), and I recall having heard a number of sermons that focused on this endorsement as an affirmation of the goodness and rightness of married sex. Not only that, but it was pretty much interpreted to mean that anything goes within the marriage relationship. Nonetheless, contextual indicators lead most modern translations and commentators to take the passage as an imperative: “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral” (NIV). While this is doubtless the correct translation, it reopens the question of what keeps the marriage bed pure. Is an undefiled marriage bed one in which sexuality is restricted only to procreation? Is it one in which only the missionary position is used? Is there stuff that’s allowable and stuff that isn’t for a married couple?

Those looking for specific techniques and detailed strategies will have to go to other writers. However, the immediate context seems to spell out the intent of the author of Hebrews: what would defile the marriage bed is adultery and sexual immorality. That is to say, it wasn’t anything happening between the married partners, but rather when one of the partners committed infidelity of some sort. The kinds of things that defile the marriage bed are the same kinds of things that eventually lead to permissible divorce and remarriage, according to Jesus. When the author of Hebrews says that the “marriage bed [should be] kept pure,” he essentially means to keep other people out of it. (tweet this)

So as long as sexuality remains restricted just to the married couple, is it truly “anything goes” in marriage? Well, the Bible doesn’t give much more specific advice, but the commands to love one another and to submit to one another would seem to come into play. Married sex is sometimes rhapsodized about in terms of being a wonderful expression of married love, and it certainly can be that, but it can be other things too, for good and for not so good. Sometimes when the world has taken its toll, sex is a way of feeling better, feeling validated, feeling secure. Sometimes it’s a release of pent-up emotions. Sometimes it’s a way of expressing pride in the spouse’s accomplishment. Sometimes it’s the pure physical enjoyment. And sometimes it’s giving all these things to the other person because they need it, even if we’re not really in the mood. In other words, it can be an expression of lots of different types and aspects of love, or of need for love, even when a grand declaration of one’s love for one’s spouse is not really in view.

But then sex can also be something that wouldn’t serve as much of an expression of love in any event. Sex can be a means of dominating or even demeaning the other person, of using that person for one’s own pleasure without regard for that person’s feelings or needs. It can be a means of manipulation, withheld or parceled out as a means of obtaining something else that one wants. It can be cruel and thoughtless and selfish. It can be rude and demanding and petulant and unkind. None of this is made any better by the presence of a marriage certificate. (tweet this)

We humans—and I daresay, we Christians—have a tendency to want hard-and-fast rules. We want to have it spelled out that this technique is okay and that one is sinful, this practice is approved and that one is not. The truth is that what matters is less the specific act than it is the motive behind the act, the willingness to serve and honor and bless the other person more than just satisfying one’s own desire or curiosity. Is it “anything goes”? I suppose anything goes that the spouse can enter into joyfully and without being demeaned and degraded.

And that might mean that there are some activities that really are beyond the pale. It seems to me that there are certain things that cannot be done with mutual enjoyment by both parties, and it doesn’t really help to have an agreement that says, “I’ll get mine this time and next time you can get yours.” If something is degrading to the person you’ve committed yourself to love for a lifetime, should you be getting pleasure from it? And it seems to me that some things are inherently degrading—that the point of them is to be degrading. Once again, specific lists and activities will have to be found elsewhere. But we should understand that the specific act is less the issue than the intent. Do we want sexuality to be a mutual blessing, or do we want it to be a means of dominance? And this can be an issue even with activities that may be offensive to some couples but not to others.

Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 deal with “disputable matters,” things that different people have different convictions about. These passages are not very often brought up regarding marriage, but with regard to sexuality, they seem very appropriate. The upshot of both passages is that there are issues which are not objectively sinful in God’s eyes, but may be thought of as sinful by a specific believer, possibly based on one’s background. Paul’s advice in such matters is to let each person follow his or her own conscience, and not to judge or look down on another person for having differing convictions. However, there is one caveat: if exercising your own freedom in an area might induce another person to violate their own conscience in that area (sometimes referred to as “causing your brother to stumble,” Rom. 14:20-21; 1 Cor. 8:9-13), then you should forgo your freedom for the sake of that person.

So, there may be activities among married couples that are disputable—that are not objectively sinful, but may be felt to be sinful by some, who should not engage in them due to issues of conscience. Where this becomes problematic is when the two partners in a marriage relationship have differing convictions about sexuality. What to do then?

A stereotypical but common example might be most informative. The wife might have grown up in a home where sexuality was extremely repressed. She tends to think that sex is dirty, although she also wants a sexual relationship with her husband. She might be able to make her peace with what she thinks of as “normal” sexual intercourse, but not be at all adventurous in bed. Her husband, meanwhile, might have been influenced by pornography or even by sexual references in pop culture, and might want to try out various things in order to spice up their love life. Don’t let the stereotype throw you—the situation could as easily be reversed with regard to the male and female roles, or the person with more sexual experience or exposure to pornography might be the person who feels guilt over it and therefore is more inhibited in the marriage bed.

One might think that the right thing to do in this situation is for the person who wants to experiment more to understand his partner’s inhibitions and restrict their sex life to what she feels comfortable with. Doubtless, in the short term, that’s probably what should happen, but over the long term, it once again holds the person who has more freedom hostage to the person who doesn’t. Going back to 1 Corinthians 7, Paul seems to have been responding to people in marriage relationships who wondered if the sexuality in those relationships was sinful and whether they should abstain from sex even within marriage. Many post-apostolic church fathers, for a time, did in fact advocate sexless marriages in which one treated one’s spouse as a sibling. So we can see that allowing the more inhibited person in a marriage to hold all the cards can end up being very destructive, which is why Paul responded that the husband and wife, in some sense, own one another’s bodies, and that they should not abstain from the sexual relationship, except for times devoted to prayer by mutual consent, because such abstinence left them open to sexual temptation.

Note that Paul doesn’t condemn them for that temptation. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t even talk about the temptation as such; he merely says dia de tas porneias, “because of immorality.” Because there is immorality out there, no matter how spiritual we think we are, we are not immune from it, and husbands and wives therefore need to satisfy one another sexually.

So there’s a tension between avoiding things that we feel convicted about, or that draw other people into violating their own convictions on the one hand, and needing to satisfy one another’s sexual needs on the other. Kindness, love, and a lack of selfishness need to rule. (tweet this) But one little-discussed aspect of the issue of varying levels of freedom and conviction is that the matters that Paul is discussing are not sinful in and of themselves. The “weak” brother in Romans 14 is the one who is carrying an unnecessary scruple. God’s does not want his children to remain weak in this sense forever, much less to become the kind of legalistic person who uses their perpetual weakness to inhibit forever the freedom of the strong. Carrying this back into the bedroom, this would mean that while the less inhibited person needs to have respect and patience with the one who struggles with more inhibitions, the one who has more inhibitions needs to examine carefully the source of those inhibitions. Are all of my convictions really scriptural? Are there reasons other than moral for the fact that I pull back from certain things? Am I struggling with guilt for a sinful past that has been forgiven? Was I taught convictions on the subject that are not biblical? Are there aspects of my upbringing or previous sexual experiences or influences that are holding me back from the freedom that my spouse wants to enjoy? Am I using my unwillingness as a means of manipulation or control? Does God want me perhaps to be freer than what I am now?

The goal of all this is not for the more adventurous spouse to have it all their way, either. He or she also needs to ask some questions. Is what I want possible within a mutually loving and satisfying relationship? Am I being selfish in pushing for my desires to be satisfied? Am I actually wanting to subjugate or degrade my spouse?

The end goal of all of this is to have a sexual relationship within marriage that is mutually satisfying and rewarding for both people, where freedom and enjoyment of the gift God gave us is celebrated, and where dominating and degrading our spouse is out of bounds. And what this will require, in the long run, is for God to purify our sexual desires, making them a means for expressing love, not gratifying self, for enjoying pleasure without guilt, for renouncing manipulation and control. Like everything else in the Christian life, we ultimately find that it’s a work that only God can do. He’s the one who created sex in the beginning, and he’s the only one who can ensure that it is “very good.”

To know more about Cecile's and my story, and for more of my perspective on biblical marriage and family, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

Christian Married Sexuality (part 1)

Keith Edwin Schooley — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 06:00:00 +0000

The following post is adapted from the chapter, "Sexuality," from my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God.

On the evening when Cecile first came to church with me, a group of us went out afterward to a Big Boy restaurant. Pastor Bill, our College and Career pastor, came out to eat with us—probably to get to know Cecile better and witness to her—and sat down with Cecile, me, and my best friend Dave. He was asking her questions, and I was mostly nervously listening. I didn’t really know this woman all that well, although I knew enough to know she was liable to say anything. I felt that whatever she said would reflect on me, even though it wasn’t as though we were dating or anything.

After learning about her background, her divorce, and the loss of her children, Pastor Bill asked her, “So have you ever thought about becoming a Christian?”

“Well, I did for a while, but then I heard that you had to give up sex, so I thought, Forget that!”

Dave snorted Coke out of his nose, and I started slinking under the table. Pastor Bill didn’t miss a beat, though. He simply replied, “Well, that is an obstacle for a lot of people. What you have to decide is, what’s more important?”

Cecile didn’t betray that Pastor Bill was getting to her, but she went home thinking about the conversation, and within a week, she had given her life to Jesus. That was to be the beginning of living celibate for two years before we got married.

Church Attitudes

The church has been terribly muddled about sexuality for a long, long time. (tweet this) The true story isn’t quite as simple as the one most people imagine, which is that the church has always been puritanically repressed and treated sex as, at best, a necessary evil, up until very recently, when we’ve become much more enlightened and sophisticated. Nonetheless, this imagined history has actual roots that begin with the early church’s reaction to the pagan cultural background from which most Gentile believers had come. Rampant sexuality surrounded the early converts in their pagan culture, and was doubtless for most of them a part of their personal histories. It’s unsurprising that they would have had problems regarding it.

We read about some of these problems in 1 Corinthians. Corinth was one of the most sexually notorious cities, so much so that “a Corinthian” was a euphemism for a prostitute. Paul has to deal with one group of people in chapter 6, who are continuing to use prostitutes, since they consider that the physical body is meant to engage in the functions it was designed for—“Food for the stomach and the stomach for food,” they would say. The material world was going to be destroyed anyway, so why bother worrying about what the physical body does? Paul responds to them that the body was meant for the Lord, and not for sexual immorality, that far from being permanently destroyed, the body would be raised just as Jesus had been, and that the body is actually the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:12-20). God is the God of the material world, not just the spiritual.

But then in the following chapter, Paul has to deal with the opposite issue: another group of people who think that sexual relations should be eschewed even in marriage. Paul’s response is that, no, because of the temptation toward immorality, husbands and wives actually have a duty to fulfill one another’s sexual needs. He goes on to say that those who are unmarried and widows should marry if they “cannot control themselves,” although he personally prefers the freedom for ministry that celibate singleness offers, and counsels believers who are married to unbelievers to remain in the marriage (including the sexual relationship) unless the unbeliever leaves. He discusses different groups of people and situations, but his overall point of view remains constant: sexual indulgence outside marriage is wrong—is actually a sin against one’s own body—but within marriage it is good, especially since it acts as a safeguard against immorality. Those who are unmarried should consider staying unmarried “because of the present crisis” and because it offers undistracted devotion to the Lord—and this is Paul’s personal preference and counsel—but he recognizes that to do so is a gift, and not one that everyone has.

Like all of Paul’s letters, this is counsel given on a particular occasion to a particular group of people. While it embodies timeless truths, it is expressed in ways that are relevant to the original readers and might be misunderstood when taken out of that cultural context. In writing to both groups, Paul is dealing with people heavily influenced by Greek philosophy: specifically, who assumed that there was a Platonic dualism between matter and spirit, the physical world and the world of ideals. Plato viewed the material world as inherently corrupt and only his theoretical world of Forms as perfect and pristine. Greek converts to Christianity carried this cultural and philosophical baggage with them into their new lives in Christ, and split into two groups: those who believed that the physical world was transient and didn’t matter, and those who believed that the physical world was evil and needed to be suppressed. The libertine group saw sexuality as irrelevant to the spiritual life; the ascetic group saw sexuality as an inherently evil temptation that shouldn’t be indulged. Neither group was right, and Paul responded to each of them on their own terms.

This was sensible advice given to believers in the midst of a sexually debauched society, and it’s sensible advice to us now (for obvious reasons). But in the days when Christianity began to displace paganism, certain aspects of Paul’s argument were misunderstood and exaggerated.

The veneration of Jesus’ virgin birth is the beginning point. God chose to incarnate himself into human form by supernaturally impregnating a woman without any human male component. The point of the virgin birth is not that Mary had to be a virgin for Jesus to be incarnated. The point was that only by Jesus being conceived by a woman who had not been sexually active would the miracle be apparent—even to Mary herself.

But the Christianized Roman Empire was still deeply influenced by the same Greek philosophy that had bedeviled the Corinthian church, and God’s choice of a virgin to carry and give birth to Jesus seemed to indicate a divine preference for virginity above the married state. Viewed in this light, Paul’s advice to the Corinthians, to remain unmarried if they could without falling into immorality, seemed to be a divine and absolute endorsement of celibacy, rather than the personal and practical advice that Paul obviously intends in the passage. (tweet this) Paul’s frequent references to his own state of celibacy and his unusual qualification of passages by phrases like “I, not the Lord,” “I have no command from the Lord,” and “In my judgment” (1 Cor. 7:7-8, 12, 25, 40), make clear that he was giving individual and pragmatic advice.

But the Church Fathers read Paul’s advice to the Corinthians—to engage in sexual relations within marriage and to consider celibacy for those who were not married yet—as a reluctant permission for sex within marriage. They read him as an advocate for celibacy, not as a practical option, but as a higher and better spiritual state.

This interpretation of Paul found its climax in the church father Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate, who vociferously defended celibacy in terms that amounted to denigrating marriage. According to Jerome, Paul’s only reason for advocating sexual relations within marriage, or marriage at all, was as a concession to human lust. Jerome wrote:

Let us turn back to the chief point of the evidence: “It is good,” [Paul] says, “for a man not to touch a woman.” If it is good not to touch a woman, it is bad to touch one: for there is no opposite to goodness but badness. But if it be bad and the evil is pardoned, the reason for the concession is to prevent worse evil. But surely a thing which is only allowed because there may be something worse has only a slight degree of goodness. He would never have added “let each man have his own wife,” unless he had previously used the words “but, because of fornications.” Do away with fornication, and he will not say “let each man have his own wife.” … “But, because of fornications let each man have his own wife, and let each woman have her own husband.” He did not say, because of fornication let each man marry a wife: otherwise by this excuse he would have thrown the reins to lust, and whenever a man’s wife died, he would have to marry another to prevent fornication, but “have his own wife.” Let him he says have and use his own wife, whom he had before he became a believer, and whom it would have been good not to touch, and, when once he became a follower of Christ, to know only as a sister, not as a wife unless fornication should make it excusable to touch her.
(Against Jovinian)

So in other words, Jerome considers married sexuality an evil, only excusable because it is preferable to the evil of outright fornication. He assumes that the believer is only married in the first place because the marriage happened before conversion, and that even within marriage, it would be better for a Christian man to treat his wife “only as a sister, not as a wife.” This view might be considered bizarre in today’s world, but Jerome was not alone in advocating sexless marriage. He simply expressed the logical endpoint of that view of sexuality.

Jerome was viewed as overly harsh and the church later moderated in its stance, primarily by developing a two-tier version of Christianity in which celibacy was first encouraged and then mandated for the clergy, but in which a high level of sexual ethics was not required of the laity. However, the idea that celibacy is a higher, nobler, more spiritual state, and that sexuality, although allowable within marriage, is somehow lower, baser, and tainted, persisted and continues to persist, even among Protestant churches.

We still deal with the legacy of this early church development. Although not many people still hold the attitude that sex is a necessary evil for the procreation of children, there remains a curious dichotomy, in which both sex itself and even the desire for it are considered to be sinful, right up until the point at which the minister pronounces “man and wife,” when it suddenly becomes a beautiful and wonderful gift, as long as it is directed 100% toward the marriage partner.

I think it’s fair to wonder whether it is possible for anyone to make that kind of emotional and psychological leap within the course of one ceremony.

The truth is that human beings are not sexless creatures. Ever. Especially after puberty. The desire for sex is a part of being human. And I’m convinced that it is not a part of fallen humanity, but rather humanity as God intended it from the beginning. It was God who said that it was not good for the man to be alone; it was God who created a woman as the suitable companion for him. God created us to be sexual beings. “Male and female he created them…. and it was very good.”

Biblical Issues

So what, then, are we to make of the passages dealing with lust? That’s the real sticking point. The general attitude of the church can be summed up as a syllogism:

Sex outside of marriage is a sin.
The passages on lust make it clear that the mere desire for illicit sex is in itself sinful.
Therefore, anyone who is unmarried and desires sex is committing sin.

And with that, we condemn the natural human feelings of, let’s admit it, everyone to a state of sinfulness, something to be repented of, something to feel guilt and shame for. Those who are presently married and have a legitimate sexual outlet once weren’t married and didn’t have one. The most dangerous cases are people who came to faith in Christ as married adults, because if they engaged in sexual sin (by biblical standards, not the church’s) then they associate their sexuality while being single with a life of sin that they’ve come to reject, and then they may come to think that they can prevent their children from having sexual feelings by raising them as Christians. They end up shocked and heartbroken when they find out that their children are not immune from sexual feelings, either.

This post is about marriage, not singleness, but the problem here is that people bring these attitudes with them into their marriage relationships. Young men and women afflicted with the ingrained belief that their natural human desires are inherently sinful are not going to be able to turn this feeling off on the wedding night and suddenly rejoice in the wonderful gift of married sex. (tweet this) This applies, incidentally, to couples whether they have engaged in premarital sex or not. I’m not necessarily talking about naive innocents who have been completely repressed until marriage, as though a simple dose of carnal ecstasy would have been the answer. The issue here is not merely about experience, but about ingrained attitudes.

But this still leaves open the question of what to do about the passages dealing with lust. The most obvious one, of course, is in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says in Matthew 5:27-28, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” So there it is. Lust = adultery. QED.

Well, it’s not quite so simple. First of all, we get deceived by the fact that the word “lust” is used in English translations. The Greek words epithymeo (verb) and epithymia (noun) refer to desire, not just for sex, but for anything, and are translated as desire or longing in most other contexts. The words do not always have a negative connotation: in many cases the object of desire is a good thing, and the desire itself is positive. For instance, Jesus said regarding his own coming into the world, “For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed (epethymasan) to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it” (Matthew 13:17). He says of the rich man and Lazarus that Lazarus was “longing (epithymon) to eat what fell from the rich man’s table” (Luke 16:21). At the Last Supper, Jesus told his disciples, “I have eagerly desired (epithymia epethymasa) to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). And Paul wrote to Timothy that “Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires (epithymei) a noble task” (1 Timothy 3:1). Desire itself clearly is not bad. When we change our translation from “desire” to “lust” any time the context indicates that it is sexual in nature, we make desire out to be a separate and inherently evil thing in these cases, something the Greek text does not support.

It also seems that there is a reason why Jesus makes specific reference to adultery, and not to the more inclusive term, fornication (porneia) in this portion of the Sermon on the Mount. One has to be married for adultery to occur. Could it be that Jesus’ primary target here is not simply to condemn sexual desire in general, but rather to preserve the integrity of the marriage relationship from a husband’s wandering eyes? Certainly what follows in vv. 31 and 32, dealing with divorce, would lend credence to this idea.

What NIV translates by the single word “lustfully” would be literally rendered, “in order to desire her.” Rather than simply saying that sexual desire is equivalent to adultery—and is therefore inherently sinful—Jesus seems to be saying that a man (presumably married) who is looking at another woman in order to desire her (rather than his wife) has then committed adultery against his wife in his heart. The issue that Jesus is dealing with is marital faithfulness, not sexual desire in and of itself. Once the man has a one-flesh bond, he has no business looking outside that bond for sexual satisfaction—or, for that matter, anything else he might be tempted to desire about her. (tweet this)

By focusing on Jesus’ use of the term “adultery,” and therefore on the marriage relationship, I am not saying that single people are immune, due to a technicality, to sexual sins of thought. 1 Corinthians 6:18 tells us to “flee from sexual immorality” (porneia)—not merely adultery—and Paul advises Timothy to “flee also youthful lusts” (2 Tim. 2:22—although here again it is not necessarily only sexual desire that is in view). These commands are both broader than the narrow limits of adultery and include more than just married people. What I am saying is that if we teach young people to feel guilty about the simple fact that they are sexual beings and desire sex, then we are setting them up for sexual dysfunction within marriage. If they are led to believe that sexual feelings, in and of themselves, are sinful, then they are not going to stop believing that as soon as the wedding ceremony is over.

Read the second part of this post here: http://www.schooleyfiles.com/2015/07/christian-married-sexuality-part-2.html

To know more about Cecile's and my story, and for more of my perspective on biblical marriage and family, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

Finding "The Right One"

Keith Edwin Schooley — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 06:00:00 +0000

The following post is excerpted from the chapter, "Finding the Right One" in my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God.

The question of whether we married “the right person” hinges on a very faulty and foolish view of marriage. According to this view, God has planned out one and only one perfect person for you, and you need to find that person or your life will be a living hell from that moment on. Everything hinges on that choice.

Is it any wonder that young people are so freaked out by the prospect of marriage?

What this leads to is a very selfish view of what finding a spouse is like. Singles evaluate one another based on how well they think that other person is going to meet their needs, wants, desires, and ambitions. Everyone is trying to find the “right person” for themselves, and no one is trying to become the right person for someone else.(Tweet this!) When we expect someone else to meet all of our needs, hopes, and dreams, we set that person up for failure. No human being can fulfill us in that way. Meanwhile, while we’re constructing the pedestal for someone else to fall off of, we’re also short-circuiting the process by which God might be trying to tell us that our perceived needs, ambitions, dreams, and goals could be wrong. Why should we bother changing these expectations—or even evaluating them to see if they need to change—if the real problem is that we just haven’t found the Right Person to meet them yet?

We’re creating an idol out of that person—whether it’s someone we think we’ve already met, or whether they’re still just a figment of our imagination whom we’re sure is out there, somewhere. We’re putting them in the place of God. When a real person occupies that space, they can’t possibly live up to our pre-made image of them.

It’s clear that some marriage unions are a huge mistake. Usually this involves marriage to a person who doesn’t share our faith, or when someone who was simply desperate to get married marries someone who was domineering and abusive. Nonetheless, most marriages are made or lost within the marriage itself, not because the right person or wrong person was chosen.

If we look at the success of marriage as something that happens within the marriage itself, it changes the whole dynamic. First of all, it stifles the impulse to escape once the honeymoon has worn off and the reality has set in that the human being before you can’t possibly meet all your needs. Instead of trying to find someone who is a ready-made Right Person, we realize that God has us in a process of becoming a Right Person for one another, not only before marriage, but after, and throughout our lives.

If we’re believers, we’re all in a process of being conformed into the image of Jesus. The more like him we become, the more selfless we will be, and the more right for one another we will be. Once again, we find that the ultimate goal God has for each one of us actually works out to be the best thing in our own lives.

We’re all much too influenced by the way the entertainment industry deals with romantic love. Television and movies tell us that love is the only moral reason for marriage; love is something you don’t choose but rather fall into; love is primarily an emotion you experience; once you fall out of love, it’s time to call it quits. None of these things are true.

Hollywood tells us to follow our hearts. The Bible tells us that the heart is deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9). (tweet this) It lies to us. It plays tricks on us. Hollywood tells us that sticking with a relationship when you’re not feeling in love is a matter of being inauthentic, of not being true to ourselves. Being true to our commitments, true to our promises—none of that matters. If you had really been right for one another, you wouldn’t have fallen out of love.

But love is not the same thing as that romantic rush. It’s not something you fall into or fall out of. Love, ultimately, is something you do. You have to choose it, and then you have to follow through in your actions. You love others not by feeling warm fuzzies about them, but by giving of yourself to them, by sacrificing for them. Love is also an emotion, but it’s largely an emotion that comes out of that self-sacrificial giving. When you invest in someone, you love them. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” We are emotional beings, just as we are rational, physical, and spiritual beings. It would be foolish to say that the emotion of love plays no part. Love is felt as an emotion when we’ve invested in a person, but that emotion is not constant, because we as human beings are not emotionally constant. We need to trust that if we persevere in the action of love, the emotion of love will return. Not only will it return, but it will grow and endure.

So a Christian view of love is a completely different kind of thing than the idea that Hollywood has given us. Rather than falling in love, being swept up in emotion, and then falling out of it and leaving for another person, we instead make a choice to love, and to continue to love in our actions whether our emotions are in sync with those actions or not. We trust that as we continue to treat our spouses with love, the emotion of love will return, and we will form a deep and abiding bond over a lifetime. That bond reflects the love of God for us, and it is the reality that our emotional feeling of love when we’re dating only hints at.

That’s the final answer to the question, “How do I know that I’ve found the right one?” When you’ve chosen to love someone for a lifetime, when you’ve allowed God to make both you and your spouse more like him, and therefore, more right for one another, then you know. The answer doesn’t come at the beginning. It grows more and more clear throughout our lives. It’s not who you start out as that counts, but who you end up being in the end. That’s how you know.

To know more about Cecile's and my story, and for more of my perspective on biblical marriage and family, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Evangelicalism

Keith Edwin Schooley — Fri, 01 May 2015 10:06:00 +0000

For all you post-Evangelicals out there, Matthew Milliner writes an engaging piece on First Things entitled "All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Evangelicalism." Milliner makes the case that the roots of "shallow" Evangelicalism run deep. Check it out.

Feed My Sheep

Keith Edwin Schooley — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 14:28:00 +0000

There is really some excuse for the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks."
--CS Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

Jesus' charge to Peter, recalling him to ministry when Peter seems to have been bent on returning to his life of fishing, was to feed his sheep. It was a crucial moment - Peter seems to have been on the verge of throwing in the towel on the idea of ministry, having failed so badly in denying Jesus. Jesus repeatedly asks Peter if he loves him; Peter keeps insisting that he does. And Jesus' response to him is "Feed my lambs," "Tend my sheep," "Feed my sheep."

It's not enough to say that you love me, Peter. I'm not finished with you. I have a job for you to do. I need you to take care of my sheep.

Jesus' words hearken back to John 10, where he proclaims that he is the good shepherd. He talks about his sheep knowing his voice, and about laying down his life for his sheep. What he doesn't talk about in either John 10 or John 21 is breeding sheep. He doesn't talk about using sheep to get more sheep. He doesn't talk about expanding the flock. He does talk about bringing in the "other sheep that are not of this fold" - presumably, in historical context, those Gentiles who would trust in him. But his focus, especially when talking to Peter, is on care for the sheep.

There was nothing romantic, in Jesus' day, about caring for sheep. Nothing glamorous. It was a dirty, unskilled job that left one ceremonially unclean all the time. It was a humble occupation.

Caring for God's people - which is what Jesus was charging Peter with doing - is still a humble occupation. It's messy and difficult and frustrating, and it's unsurprising that so many pastors strain against it. We're told that the most effective form of church leadership is not to be a shepherd, but rather a rancher. This accords well with the American idea that bigger is always better, that the only alternative to growth is stagnation, and with the romantic idea of the cowboy on the lone prairie. It just doesn't accord all that well with Scripture, especially with Jesus' charge to Peter.

What I most object to about the rancher model is not that things like hospital ministry and counseling can be done by people other than the pastor, or that people's gifts should be encouraged so that the body ministers to the body. These things I strongly agree with. What I object to is the focus of ministry leadership being continually outward.

If you want to get needs met by the church world today, the best place you can possibly be is outside it. Be a prospect, not one of the faithful. The faithful are there to bring more people in, not to have their own needs met. That's the way it is, out on the ranch.

Somehow, that doesn't match what Jesus said about the world recognizing us as being his disciples because we love one another. Or what Acts says about the early believers providing for one another's needs, not as an outreach effort to those on the outside, but out of mutual love. And it doesn't match Jesus' simple command to Peter:

Feed my sheep.

If you like this post, you may be interested in my book, What's Wrong with Outreach?

New distribution for Marriage, Family, and the Image of God

Keith Edwin Schooley — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 19:56:00 +0000

I'm happy to report that my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God, is now available for the Apple universe on iTunes, as well as in ePub format at Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, and other online retailers.

It's also still available for Kindle on Amazon, and as a paperback at CreateSpace, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other retailers.

If you're interested in the big picture of what marriage and family are all about, and if you're interested in seeing how that connects with us being created in God's image, please check it out! And if you like it, please post an honest review on the site where you purchased it. That would really do a lot to help me spread the word. Thanks!

Fivefold ministry paper on the Studies page

Keith Edwin Schooley — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 12:30:00 +0000

I've collected a series of four posts on the so-called "fivefold" ministries of Ephesians 4:11 into one paper on the Studies page. The original posts are still some of the most frequently accessed on this blog. I hope they're a blessing to people collected together. Check it out.

Why I Married a Divorced Woman

Keith Edwin Schooley — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 12:25:00 +0000

Shiela over on To Love, Honor, and Vacuum has a very thoughtful, carefully-considered post entitled, "Why I'm Anti-Divorce and Pro Remarriage." I wouldn't necessarily dot every i or cross every t precisely as she has, but she has the main idea dead-on right: that even though God hates divorce (Malachi 2:16), he doesn't hate divorce in isolation, as though he just thought up something arbitrary to hate. He hates it for a reason, and that reason--stated in the verse--is because divorce is a form of violence against the person one has married. If he hates it for a reason, then there might be reasons why it would be allowed, if the marriage itself has become a form of violence, if one person has made it clear that he or she is refusing to honor the vows taken when they married. This is precisely what Jesus said: "Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so" (Matthew 19:8). God never intended marriage to be temporary, at least within this lifetime, but because people's hearts are hard, it had to be allowed to prevent the worse evil of someone being trapped by a marriage covenant that the other person has no intent to honor.

All of this became very real to me when I began getting to know my wife, Cecile, who had been divorced several months before I met her. The full story is told in my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God, but I want to share here, briefly, why a young man who had grown up in the church, was waiting for sex until marriage, and had dedicated his life to pursuing God's purposes, chose to marry a divorced woman.

Because God had forgiven her, just as he had forgiven me.

I'm going to be frank: if you live your life thinking you're basically a good person, trying to live by what the Bible says, and priding yourself on your morality, I seriously doubt that you're a Christian. Being a Christian means that you know you needed forgiveness, that you understand how sinful you really are, and that you live a life of gratitude to God for his mercy on your life. And once you understand that, you understand that everyone else is in need of the same mercy that God showed you. That's the point of the parable of the unmerciful servant. That's the point of Jesus' illustration of the Pharisee and the tax collector. That's why Jesus told a mob that he who is without sin should cast the first stone. That's the consistent message of scripture.

It doesn't matter if the sins God had forgiven me from are different from the sins that God had forgiven Cecile from. We both stand before God exactly the same, as forgiven people. If God was no longer holding Cecile's past against her, what right did I have to do so? No matter how you parse scriptures to embrace or avoid so-called "exception clauses," or what verses you use to trump other verses in support of your understanding of divorce, if you don't understand forgiveness, then you don't understand the Christian faith at all.
Because infidelity had already occurred, was ongoing, and there was no reasonable hope for a change.

But since I've brought up the exception clause, I may as well deal with it. Jesus says in Matthew 5:32 and Matthew 19:9 that divorce and remarriage constitute adultery "except for sexual immorality" (or, in some translations, "except for fornication"). The Greek word is porneia (I trust I won't have to explain the "porn" root-word) and is a broad term encompassing sexual sin in general. It is not a narrow word that means unfaithfulness during a betrothal period, as some have argued.

It's very interesting to me that Jesus is asked a question in terms of divorce, but he answers it in terms of marriage. He's asked when divorce is allowable; he responds by explaining what legal divorce and remarriage is: namely, adultery. Therefore, strictly speaking, Jesus isn't giving porneia as an exception that allows divorce in some cases. He's simply stating the fact that divorce and remarriage constitute adultery, except when they don't--which is in the case where sexual sin is already taking place. Jesus is saying that divorce and remarriage break the one-flesh bond that is created in marriage, except when the bond is already broken through sexual immorality.

In Cecile's case, her ex-husband was already living with his girlfriend, and the two of them were to get married before Cecile and I got married. I actually suggested to Cecile at the outset that God's first and best plan would be for her ex-husband to come to know Jesus and for the two of them to be reconciled and remarried. She was young in Christ and deeply hurt and didn't receive that advice well at all. But I still believe that that is the best possible outcome, even when the one-flesh bond has been broken by adultery, even when it is repeated and unrepented. But as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:15-16, "if the unbelieving partner separates, let it be so. In such cases the brother or sister is not enslaved. God has called you to peace." There are some amazing stories of people whom God has called to wait in singleness for their spouses to repent and return to them, and some seemingly irreconcilable marriages have been restored. I personally know a couple who were divorced for years and later remarried. It's an incredible testimony. But that doesn't always happen. "How do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?" Paul asks. Scripture does not require that the believer wait forever. God has called us to peace. God has called us to peace. God has called us to peace.
Because God is in the business of redeeming messed-up, broken, and sinful people, not avoiding them.

Growing up in church youth groups, you get the impression that God's perfect plan regarding marriage is that you remain a virgin and pray that God brings The Right One™ to you. The Right One™ will also be a virgin, perfectly suited to your needs and temperament, and will have no baggage to deal with in the marriage relationship. In fact, The Right One™ will have no history at all, having been created ex nihilo for you five minutes prior to your first meeting. You will then have 2.6 perfect children (5.7 in rural areas) and will never have any marital difficulties of any kind, because you've avoided the dreaded fate of marrying The Wrong One™.

But that's not how God interacts with his people. He didn't abandon Adam and Eve to their fate, and create a new pristine pure species who had never fallen to be his people. His plan for salvation didn't involve a command from On High, but rather involved God himself becoming human, choosing to be one of us, mixing together with sinful humanity--especially the most obviously sinful--and ultimately bearing our sin in his own flesh. People sometimes emphasize God's holiness by saying that he can't even look upon sin, based on a misunderstanding of Habakkuk 1:13, but the truth is that God has involved himself with sinful humanity throughout history, and I for one am deeply grateful.

If we are created in the image of God, if we are being conformed to the image of his Son, if our marriages are a picture of Christ and the Church, then we need to interact with other people, including our future spouses, as God does. And that means not holding their past against them once they've been forgiven.

Once I came to the conclusion that marrying Cecile would be acceptable in terms of my faith, I still had to decide if I actually wanted to deal with the practical implications of this particular relationship. Just because you can marry someone who has been divorced, and just because they can remarry, doesn't mean that you should do it. There are complications in my life that I never would have had to deal with if I'd married some naive young girl without a past. No one should blindly enter into a complicated situation without taking account of what it could cost.

But naivete is its own form of baggage. Everyone has a history. Bad things have happened to the person you're considering. Other bad things haven't, and the person may not be able to relate. No matter whom you choose, God will use what's in their life and what's in yours to refine and shape you. God uses everything. Nothing goes to waste.

I am deeply grateful for Cecile. She has been a blessing in my life like no one that I have ever known. In some ways, I may have brought more baggage into our relationship than she did, so her acceptance of me is at least as remarkable as my acceptance of her. I am grateful to God for bringing her into my life, and he is continuing to make us The Right Person for one another 23 years later.

To know more about Cecile's and my story, and for more of my perspective on biblical marriage and family, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

The Not-So-Romantic Tale of Jacob, Rachel and Leah

Keith Edwin Schooley — Fri, 09 Jan 2015 06:54:00 +0000

Those of us who grew up in the church are familiar with the story of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah. After fleeing for his life from his brother Esau, Jacob comes to his relative Laban in Haran to find a wife, and meets Rachel, Laban's daughter. He falls in love with her at once and makes an arrangement to work for seven years to earn her hand in marriage. At the end of the seven years, Laban tricks Jacob into marrying Rachel's older sister Leah instead, and Jacob works another seven years for Rachel. The story is almost always presented as a beautiful love story with a touch of intrigue thrown in. Laban is considered a rotten trickster, Leah his accomplice, Jacob is viewed as receiving a bit of poetic justice after having tricked his brother and his father out of the oldest child's traditional birthright, and Rachel has the role of the hapless heroine, caught in the middle of this mess through no fault of her own. It is often pointed out that "Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her" (Gen. 29:20).

We are told that "Leah's eyes were weak, but Rachel was beautiful in form and appearance. Jacob loved Rachel" (Gen 29:17-18). Commentators are not agreed on what the "weakness" of Leah's eyes means. Most seem not to believe that it reflects poor eyesight or blindness; the majority seem to believe that her eyes were simply unattractive--possibly blue, which may have been considered a defect in the ancient Middle East. Adam Clarke has an intriguing suggestion: that the "weakness" of Leah's eyes reflects not a negative quality but a positive one--that she did have pretty eyes, but by contrast, Rachel's entire "form and appearance" were attractive, and therefore Jacob gave his love to Rachel. One way or another, it was Rachel's beauty that swayed Jacob. There's nothing wrong with this, in and of itself: many significant women in the Bible are described as being beautiful. But if we look at the respective characters of Leah and Rachel, and the results that came from the two marriages, a picture emerges that is very different from the romantic one usually taught.

The first characteristic we see in Leah is a desperately sad desire for her husband's love. The text seems to indicate that God gave Leah children as a sort of compensation for the fact that Jacob hated her (Gen. 29:31). The names of her children reflect this desire for Jacob's love:

And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben, for she said, “Because the Lord has looked upon my affliction; for now my husband will love me.” She conceived again and bore a son, and said, “Because the Lord has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also.” And she called his name Simeon. Again she conceived and bore a son, and said, “Now this time my husband will be attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.” Therefore his name was called Levi. And she conceived again and bore a son, and said, “This time I will praise the Lord.” Therefore she called his name Judah. Then she ceased bearing.
Gen. 29:32-35

By the time she had Judah, she was resigned to her fate. Throughout all of this, however, there is no record that she reproached Jacob for his lack of love for her, blamed Rachel, or did anything other than to seek God for help. We may regard Leah as deserving the scorn of her husband due to having tricked him into marrying her, but we don't know whether she was forced into the subterfuge by her father, or what would have happened to her if she hadn't gone along with the plan. Maybe she was a willing participant and the deception was a horrible act. If so, she paid dearly for it.

We can contrast Leah's attitude with that of Rachel: "When Rachel saw that she bore Jacob no children, she envied her sister. She said to Jacob, 'Give me children, or I shall die!'" She then gives her servant Bilhah to Jacob as a wife in order to have surrogate children through her (Gen. 30:1-4). Seems that the lessons of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar hadn't been learned. In contrast with Leah's naming of her children, Rachel's naming of Bilhah's children shows her bitterness toward her sister:

And Bilhah conceived and bore Jacob a son. Then Rachel said, “God has judged me, and has also heard my voice and given me a son.” Therefore she called his name Dan. Rachel's servant Bilhah conceived again and bore Jacob a second son. Then Rachel said, “With mighty wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister and have prevailed.” So she called his name Naphtali.
Gen. 30:5-8

Leah then follows suit and gives Jacob her servant Zilpah, who also bears two children to Jacob. Once again, Leah's naming of the children reflects no ill will either to her envious sister or to her unloving husband:

Then Leah's servant Zilpah bore Jacob a son. And Leah said, “Good fortune has come!” so she called his name Gad. Leah's servant Zilpah bore Jacob a second son. And Leah said, “Happy am I! For women have called me happy.” So she called his name Asher.
Gen. 30:10-13

Subsequent to this is the passage about mandrakes. Leah's oldest son Reuben brings her some mandrakes (in Hebrew, literally "love plants") that he has found. The plant seems to have been thought of as some sort of aphrodisiac (cf. Song of Solomon 7:13) and possibly was credited with promoting fertility. Rachel asks Leah for the mandrakes, and Leah responds, "Is it a small matter that you have taken away my husband? Would you take away my son's mandrakes also?" (Gen. 30:15). This exchange has often been understood as poor barren Rachel begging for a chance finally to conceive, and jealous Leah spurning her request.

However, Rachel responds by offering Leah a night with Jacob in exchange for the mandrakes, an offer which Leah accepts (Gen. 30:15-16). What this tells us, quite clearly, is that Jacob is no longer sleeping with Leah, since he never loved her and she is no longer producing children for him. Otherwise, Leah would simply have held on to the mandrakes for the next opportunity to use them with Jacob. It also tells us that Rachel is evidently comfortable with bargaining away a night with her husband in order to get what she wants. Perhaps Leah's response to Rachel is less bitterly jealous than some have thought, and more a simple statement of the truth.

At any rate, the result was that "God listened to Leah" and she had another child, Issachar, so named because Leah said, "God has given me my wages because I gave my servant to my husband" (Gen. 30:17-18). This statement has been criticized because Leah is attributing God's favor to an immoral act. But Leah at least seems to have felt some sense of loss in giving Zilpah to her husband. If Rachel had the same qualms over offering Bilhah to him, we are never told so. Leah has one more son with Jacob, Zebulun, and Leah says, "God has endowed me with a good endowment; now my husband will honor me, because I have borne him six sons." If Leah cannot have her husband's love, she would at least like to have his respect. The final child given to Leah, that we know about from the scriptures, was a daughter, Dinah.

In the end, God also had compassion on Jacob's favored wife Rachel.

She conceived and bore a son and said, “God has taken away my reproach.” And she called his name Joseph, saying, “May the Lord add to me another son!”
Gen. 30:23-24

So if Leah suffered from the lack of her husband's love, Rachel had suffered from the social shame of barrenness, and correctly attributed rescue from that shame to God. Her desire for another child was granted in Benjamin, whose birth took Rachel's life. She gave the baby the name of Ben-oni, "Son of my sorrow," which Jacob changed to Benjamin, "Son of my right hand" (Gen. 35:16-19).

The one final thing that we know about Rachel's character involves the theft of her father's household idols. When Jacob decided to leave Laban stealthily and return to his own land, Rachel stole her father's household idols, and when Laban caught up to them, he confronted Jacob on their loss. Jacob invited Laban to search his family's belongings, not knowing that Rachel had stolen the idols, telling him that the person who had them would die (Gen. 31:19, 32). While Laban was searching, Rachel sat on the idols and claimed to her father to be having her period, so he did not discover them (Gen. 31:34-35).

Genesis does not record the reason why Rachel took the idols from her father. Various explanations have been suggested, including wanting to remove a means of divination by which her father might track down the family, wanting the precious metals in them for their monetary value, or wanting to remove idolatry from her father's household. All these seem to be evasions of the more simple and probable explanation: that Rachel was herself an idolater and took the idols because she wanted them for herself. Whatever motives she did have led her first to theft and then to deceit. She did not own up to having taken the idols, even though it seems unlikely that doing so would have led to Jacob carrying out his threat, since she was his beloved wife, and her father Laban, the aggrieved party, had not demanded it.

The overall portrait that scripture paints of Rachel, if we're willing to look at it, is of a woman who has only physical beauty to commend her. She is unreasonably demanding, selfish, manipulative, deceptive, and probably idolatrous. Though Genesis makes it clear that Jacob loved Rachel, it nowhere states that Rachel loved Jacob. The true love story here would be Leah's undying desire for the love of the husband who despised her. If she had a choice in the deception of Jacob that led to her marriage to him, she paid dearly for it.

What can we say of the outcome of the two marriages? Leah bore Jacob six of his twelve sons, including Levi and Judah, whose descendents would become the most significant of the twelve tribes, containing the priestly and kingly lines, the latter leading to Jesus, the Messiah. Rachel and the two servants bore Jacob two children each, the most notable of them being Joseph. Joseph becomes notable, however, as a result of his brothers' jealousy of him, a jealousy provoked by their father's favoring him over them, which stemmed from his father's favoring of Joseph's mother over theirs. The brother's jealousy leads them to sell him as a slave into Egypt, where by a miraculous set of events (and a lot of hardship along the way), Joseph ends up in a position to help Egypt and his family sustain a horrific famine. Joseph is truly one of the great heroes of scripture. He's a great example of what God can do with someone who began as a spoiled child in a dysfunctional family.

It's interesting to imagine, as a thought experiment: what would have happened if Jacob had recognized Rachel's character and chosen to marry Leah instead, or if he had accepted his marriage to Leah as God's will and never married Rachel. Of course, this is a tough pill to swallow. Tricked on your wedding day is pretty bad, and the society did accept polygamy. But what if?

Well, Jacob would have ended up with a wife who was devoted to him. She seems to have been devoted to him even when he hated her. They would have had six sons and a daughter. There would have been no reason for Jacob to have had children with Leah's servant. There would have been no reason for jealousy among the six sons since the son of a different, favored mother would not have existed. Presumably God would have found other means of saving the family from the famine--possibly avoiding the necessity of going down to Egypt and eventually being enslaved there. Levi and Judah were both children of Leah and would still have been the progenitors of the priestly and royal tribes. Jesus would still have come from the line of Judah. It would seem that a lot of things would have worked out much better in the long run.

I'm not saying that this is how things should have happened. God foreknew from the beginning what would happen, and factored all the human responses that occurred into account. He knew that six more children would be born to Jacob, and the tribes descended from Bilhah, Zilpah, and Rachel were just as much chosen Israelites as those descended from Leah.

But I don't think that we should read the story of Jacob and Rachel as a wonderful, sweet love story. It's rather a tragedy, a cautionary tale warning against the dangers of focusing too much on physical beauty. It also tells us to think twice about disappointments in our lives, situations in which our plans do not work out, in which we may even be sabotaged or cheated out of what we wanted. Perhaps what God gave us is actually better, if we had eyes to see it. Perhaps we shouldn't try so hard to force our way into what we think we want. We may regret the consequences.

For more on marriage, check out my book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God .

Stuff I Wish People Would Stop Writing about Christmas

Keith Edwin Schooley — Tue, 16 Dec 2014 11:02:00 +0000

Every year people trot out the same observations about Christmas. It's not so much the observations themselves I object to, but the air of smug intellectual superiority, the "I know something you don't know" attitude. Because we all know all this stuff already. And some of it isn't even true. Here's my list:

Jesus wasn't really born on Christmas Day.

celebrate

"We Three Kings" is an almost completely inaccurate song.
The Magi didn't arrive at the stable on the night of Jesus' birth.

I've written about this before.

most likely

Shepherds were outcasts so it's remarkable that God chose them as witnesses of Jesus' birth.
Jesus was born in a cave, not a stable.

Kenneth Bailey

So let's celebrate the Incarnation without worrying so much if people got every detail right. Let's stop worrying about which phrase people use to greet one another during the holiday season, since most people saying "Merry Christmas" are celebrating Santa-Fest, rather than Christ-Mass, anyway. Here's what Christmas means: "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost" (1 Tim. 1:15).

Marriage, Family, and the Image of God: If It's Permanent, Make It Good

Keith Edwin Schooley — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 09:12:00 +0000

This post is adapted from a chapter of my upcoming book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God.

Cecile and I decided, even before we got married, that if marriage was permanent, we needed to make a commitment to make it good. That, I believe, is one of the primary reasons that God created marriage to be permanent. Of course he wants to spare us the pain of broken marriages and families. But he also wants us to take the permanence seriously, so that we will decide to make it the best we can, and so that in doing so, we will suppress the individual selfishness that has plagued human beings since the Fall.

The best thing you can do, once you’ve decided to make marriage permanent, is to make it good. And the only way to make it good is to resolve that you are no longer two people but one, that all decisions need to be made with “us” and “we” as the focus, not “you” and “me.” And that takes a willingness for self-sacrifice that, humanly, we don’t have, which is why so many marriages end up miserable and broken. But by seeking God’s help to overcome our innate selfishness, God can use our marriages to mold us into his own self-sacrificial nature; in other words, to conform us into the image of his Son. Other life paths, of course, can accomplish the same thing—those who are married don’t have an exclusive avenue into the image of God. But marriage does have unique challenges. No other relationship is as capable of fostering so much intimacy and creating so much pain.

Of course, making your marriage good is not simply a matter of determining to do so. It can be very difficult. When Jesus impressed on his disciples the permanence of marriage in Matthew 19, they reacted in horror. “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry” (v. 10). Jesus responds, essentially, that remaining celibate for the Kingdom of God is a gift that not everyone has. So for those of us not gifted with celibacy, it’s still up to us to make our marriages as God-honoring and good as we can.

Along these lines, the apostle Paul writes something interesting in 1 Corinthians 7 about the marriage relationship:

I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband. I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.
(vv. 32-35)

Of course, Paul’s point is to persuade his readers that marriage may not be the best decision in the first place. He’s encouraging them to at least consider celibacy as an alternative to marriage, one that offers practical advantages to those devoting themselves to “the Lord’s affairs.” But notwithstanding Paul’s emphases, what he says about marriage is instructive. A married man “is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided.” While Paul appears to view this as an obstacle to single-mindedly devoting oneself to the Lord, he doesn’t say that things should be different. He doesn’t say that this should or should not be the case. He simply says that it is. He states it as a simple fact. Similarly, “a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband.” It’s simply a fact. Paul’s response to this fact is not to suggest another way of doing marriage; his solution is to consider avoiding marriage altogether! It seems a given that within the marriage relationship, pleasing one’s spouse is simply a part of the package.

The question here is, do we please our spouses reluctantly, out of necessity? (“Gotta keep the peace with the ol’ ball and chain, know what I mean?”) Or do we please them gladly, thoughtfully, because we want to, because it makes us happy to see them happy?

This, I think, is the key concept behind one of the most contentious passages about husband and wife relationships—Ephesians 5. Paul writes “Husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church” (vv. 28-29). “He who loves his wife loves himself.” It’s that simple. What you put into a relationship is what you get out of it. “A happy wife makes for a happy life,” as some say.

So then why is this so difficult? If it’s so self-evident that pleasing one’s spouse brings benefits to oneself, why isn’t everyone doing it? Why is marriage, far from being the picture of what was once called “wedded bliss,” viewed as a joyless trap, where romantic relationships go to die?

Selfishness

It’s viewed this way because of the innate selfishness that has dogged humanity ever since the Fall. Jesus wisely linked the two greatest commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The second commandment, he said, was “like” the first. When we sin, we are essentially putting our own self-interests above those of God and above everyone else’s. We want what we want, and we rage at the fact that we can’t have it. And, of course, so does everyone else.

Selfishness is very akin to pride, which is what it stems from. What C. S. Lewis says about pride applies to selfishness as well: “each person's pride is in competition with every one else's pride… Pride is essentially competitive—is competitive by its very nature.” So it is with selfishness. We never recognize our own selfishness; all we recognize is how other people’s selfishness impinges on us getting what we want. A good way to recognize how selfish we are is to think about how much we recognize selfishness in other people and how much it irritates us. The more bothered we are by another person’s selfishness, the more it indicates how selfish we are ourselves. And I don’t know of anyone who isn’t irritated by other people’s selfishness.

All this intrudes on the marriage relationship. Two individual human beings each want to go their own way. For a time, these ways may seem to coincide, or else we would never get married. But eventually, our individual, selfish natures take over. We take the marriage for granted, and we still want what we want. She wants nice clothes, and he wants a new car, so they fight over money. She wants to change him and he resents it. He wants her never to change, and that’s impossible for her. Each one wants to be together when they want it, and alone when they want it, and away from one another with friends when they want it, so both of them feel neglected and stifled by turns. Life forces them to make compromises, to take jobs they don’t want or make sacrifices they don’t want, and they blame one another for their situation. This is the thing behind the thing, the source of all the rest of the problems that people have in marriage.

This is why working on individual problems in a marriage seems so often not to work. We are told that the problems in marriage are finances, sex, communication, whatever. The real problem is always selfishness. Finances are a problem because each partner wants to spend (or save) the shared resources in the way that they want. Sex is a problem because each person wants what they want in bed, regardless of what the other person wants. Communication is a problem because each person wants to convince the other that they’re right and the other one is wrong so that they can have things their way. Of course, we don’t think that way consciously. Jeremiah tells us, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (17:9). We deceive ourselves about our own motivations. We rationalize. My point of view seems so reasonable to me; why are you being so unreasonable about it? We’re all in denial, all of us, about our own selfishness.

Marriage exposes that. In marriage, we’re supposed to be one, or to be becoming one, more and more. We all understand that there are compromises to be made; we all understand, on an intellectual level, that everything isn’t going to go our way. The problem comes when we pass the blissful honeymoon period and realize that there’s going to be a lot more compromise and self-sacrifice than we ever thought was necessary. It’s not possible that I’m that wrong! I might be a little out of line, but my partner—I never imagined that they could be so selfish!

The hardest part of dealing with problems in marriage is learning that the main problem is ourselves. I’m not saying that there aren’t abusive situations in which one person is truly trying to be the best for the other person that they can, and in which the other person is completely unreasonable. I’m not saying that we can’t learn things about finances and sex and communication that can help us. I am saying that the problem is almost never just one person’s fault.

Working without Working

At this point, the received wisdom says that marriages are a lot of work, and that only by continually working at our marriages can we make them good. I remember, before being married, being very depressed by this advice. Who wants their marriage to be a chore? Who wants to have to struggle to make things work? Isn’t that the antithesis of the cult of romantic love—isn’t love supposed to make everything easy and wonderful?

Well, the cult of romantic love makes a lot of promises it can’t fulfill, but the idea of marriage as a chore is also wrong. The key is not to think of the work you put into marriage as a job or a chore, but rather as working on a really captivating hobby. Most of us can relate to something that requires a lot of work from us, but which we enjoy doing. Maybe it’s painting or writing or playing a musical instrument. Maybe it’s a sport or an exercise regimen. Maybe it’s gardening or landscaping or fixing cars. Maybe it’s dance or chess or woodworking. You get the idea.

Whatever that thing is for each person, we should apply that same kind of energy to our relationships with our spouses. It may seem a little crass, but we need to make them our project. If we’re honest, we’ll probably see that that’s what we did while we were dating. You spent a little too much to take her out someplace nice, not because you liked it, but because she did. You spent time getting dressed up for him and trying to look just right, and you listened to him and acted interested in the things that interested him. You both did this to create memories, to share an experience and bond.

When the other person quits doing this, we immediately notice and recognize it as selfishness. He never takes me anywhere nice anymore. She’s let herself go. They don’t listen to me anymore. The problem is that we don’t recognize it as selfishness in ourselves when we’re the ones who are doing it. The excuses come so naturally. She should understand that we just don’t have the money. He doesn’t notice anyway, so why bother? They just keep yammering on and on when I’m trying to do something else.

What we’re doing in that situation, quite frankly, is taking one another for granted. She’s got the ring, he’s got the girl, let’s move on with life. But none of us are prizes to be won and then possessed. A relationship grows as it is cultivated, and when it’s cultivated, it bears fruit. A man or a woman who invests in his wife or her husband will usually receive much more in return.

Let me know what you think in the comments below. Also, check out the book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God, being released on Thanksgiving Day, 2014, and available for preorder on Amazon now.

Marriage, Family, and the Image of God - In the Beginning

Keith Edwin Schooley — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 05:30:00 +0000

This is a first draft of the first chapter of my upcoming book, Marriage, Family, and the Image of God. Enjoy!

Cecile and I first met during the summer after I had finished my first year in seminary. I was back home for the summer, and the job I thought I’d had lined up had fallen through. I got a temporary job doing data entry for a travel agency that was converting its files from one format into another. The job was from five at night to one in the morning, for about two and a half weeks.

I was one of three men among about a hundred women working on this project. Since I was shy, this was pretty intimidating, so when an attractive tall blonde in a red dress smiled at me, I stuck with her. Not for the reasons you might think. I went for short brunettes at the time, and I’d just had my heart broken, so I wasn’t looking for anything beyond a summer job. She smiled at me, so I thought she was safe.

She wasn’t safe.

Cecile liked to talk, so I soon found out that she had been divorced several months earlier and had just moved into her own apartment for the first time. She had three children who were living with their father, and she desperately wanted to get them back. Her divorce had been bitter. Another young woman who sat at our table was happily engaged; Cecile told her, “Give me five minutes, and I’ll have you talked out of it.”

And then she noticed my ring.

I wear a signet ring with a cross on it. It’s actually my college class ring. I decided when finishing college that I wanted a ring that I would want to wear forever, not a typical class ring that gets thrown into a box a year or so after graduation. Cecile saw my ring, grabbed my arm, and said, “You know God. Tell me everything.”
I had just been through a year of seminary. “Everything” seemed to be kind of a lot. “Ummm, what do you want to know?”

“Well, what’s this crap about women submitting to men, anyway?”

Oh, no. One of those.

I tried to give her an answer that would briefly smooth things over. “Well, it doesn’t really mean women submitting to men in general. It’s really about wives submitting to their own husbands.” I was young and naive. I thought that would mollify her.

Instead, I got a rundown of what a dictator her husband had been. How she had grown up Catholic and had wanted to be a submissive wife and how that had blown up in her face. How she was never going to put herself in that position again. Lord, I can’t back off on what the Bible says. What can I say that will be meaningful to her?

“Well, the Bible does say that women are supposed to submit to their own husbands. But let me tell you what the husband’s responsibility is. He’s supposed to love her like Jesus loved the church. That didn’t just mean that he died for us. It meant that he first lived for us, lived a perfect life in the middle of this corrupt world, took all kinds of suffering and abuse, all for us. That’s how husbands are supposed to love their wives. They don’t make decisions just for their own selfish reasons; they try to do what’s best based on what they truly believe is best for their wife and children, not for themselves. They do it in consultation with their wives; they make decisions as a team, as much as possible.”

I probably didn’t say anything quite so well put-together as all that, but whatever it was I managed to stammer out, Cecile seemed to accept without too much argument, and the conversation turned to other things. It wasn’t until much later that I found out her inward reaction: Really? You actually believe that? Do other guys know you talk like this?

The day our temporary job was finished was a Wednesday. I’d been actively involved in the College and Career ministry of my church and had been missing our Wednesday night services. Since we were off early, I invited her to come with me to the service.

“Um, I’m not dressed for church!”

“It’s casual, don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”

So she followed me to my church. I watched her in my rear view mirror smoking full tilt all the way there. When we got out of our cars, she grabbed my arm. “Don’t leave me!” Seems she was a little nervous to be around creepy church people.

But she came in and found that the girls weren’t catty and the guys looked her in the eyes, instead of other places, and a week later, she was back. Our pastor gave an invitation, uncharacteristically during the song service, and Cecile came up the aisle and publicly gave herself to Jesus. I found out later that two days earlier she had found a Bible in her apartment, began reading in Romans (just randomly chose Romans?), realized she’d committed every sin it described, and asked God how he could possibly forgive her. “But I do,” she felt in her spirit. And slept through the night for the first time in months.

To me, she was a baby Christian. To her, I was an innocent, not to be corrupted. We did a little dance, over the summer, pretending we weren’t attracted to one another, then admitting we were, then agreeing that it would be best if we didn’t act on it, then deciding we had to. We dated a few times before the end of the summer. I went back to seminary for the fall semester without knowing exactly where we stood.

Over the course of the next year, we were trying to figure that out. Specifically, I needed to figure out whether I wanted to get attached to a divorced woman with three children. Did I consider it morally okay? If I did, did I want this particular situation for my life? If I didn’t, what did that say about me and my integrity? As a helpful guy from my dorm told me, “Everyone comes with baggage, Keith. You can take this baggage, or you can take the naive young woman who hasn’t experienced any hardship and can’t relate to it. Or something else. You just have to decide what kind of baggage you’re willing to deal with.”

In the process of answering those questions, I had to do a lot of digging from scripture. What did God have to say about marriage and divorce? And although there would be plenty of passages I’d have to look up and deal with, I kept coming back to one particular event in Jesus’ life… which led me back even further.

Jesus and Genesis

The Pharisees, as usual, were trying to trap Jesus, this time asking him a stock question regarding divorce: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” It’s the “any and every” that gives it away. There was a debate between rabbinic schools during Jesus’ time. The school of Rabbi Shammai insisted that a wife could only be divorced for reasons of unchastity—improper sexual behavior—while the school of Rabbi Hillel argued that a wife could be divorced for “any and every reason”—for example, if she burned his meal. The Pharisees were evidently trying to bait Jesus into a debate on divorce which they expected to be waged on typical Shammai-Hillel lines. The school of Hillel was the more favored one, and the rabbis probably thought that they could beat Jesus, who was already known to have strict views regarding divorce, in such a contest.

The debate was based on two interpretations of a passage in Deuteronomy. The passage actually focuses on the circumstance of a woman who has been married and divorced twice, and forbids the first husband from remarrying his former wife in such a circumstance. The Rabbis appealed to that passage because there is little else in the Law that regulates divorce at all.

Jesus refused to take the bait. Rather than parsing the Deuteronomy passage, Jesus responded with the fact that, although “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard… it was not this way from the beginning.” Jesus is asked a question about divorce; he responds by talking about marriage. He is asked to interpret a particular law God had given through Moses; he responds by appealing to the order of creation itself. We would do well to follow Jesus’ wisdom.

We’re still asking questions about marriage and divorce. The right way to go about dealing with those questions is to go back to the beginning. The early chapters of Genesis describe the creation of human beings along with the creation of marriage and family relationships:

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness...." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it...."The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."... So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.... Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.... Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, "With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man." Later she gave birth to his brother Abel.... When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And when they were created, he called them "man." When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. (NIV)

In these passages, the elements of marriage, sexuality, parenthood, and the image of God are all woven together into one fabric. Marriage is the fundamental social relationship: it is the first one in existence, and it is the only one that is allowed to trump prior family ties. It is the context in which sexuality occurs, it is the context in which parenthood occurs, it reflects the image of God--the relationship among the members of the Trinity--and transmits that image to the children. All of these things are woven together; the Bible treats them as inseparable.

Our present-day world takes a different view, and is trying to rip this fabric into its constituent parts again. Why should marriage ("a piece of paper") be necessary for two people who are truly in love? Why should marriage be permanent, if the two fall out of love with one another? Why should sexuality be necessarily connected with marriage? In what ways should sexuality be connected with having children, when contraception, abortion, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy are available? Why should parenthood be reserved for married couples? Why should any of this be affected by a person's religious beliefs?
We seem to want to have each of these things separately: sexuality without marriage, marriage without parenthood, parenthood without marriage, and the image of God (when it is considered at all) as completely individual and separate from all the others. We want to have our cake and eat it too, and we’re shocked, shocked, when agonizing breakups, shattered families, and less-than-whole children are the result.

My relationship with Cecile led me to Jesus’ teaching on marriage. Jesus’ teaching led me to the Genesis account of how man and woman were made in the first place. And the Genesis account led me to recognize that marriage, family, sexuality, and the image of God were all interwoven in the plan of God for us from the very beginning. Even in Christian circles, we usually deal with these things separately—there are books on marriage, books on parenthood, books on sex, and theological treatises on the image of God—but God created them as being all a part of one thing. My hope, in this book, is to bring them back together again. Even though the book is divided into sections that will deal with these topics in turn, we need constantly to be reminded that they are facets of a single reality that was created by God in the beginning.

Interesting beginning? Let me know what you think!

New Book Coming Soon!

Keith Edwin Schooley — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 14:27:00 +0000

I just finished the first draft of a new book, tentatively entitled Marriage, Family, and the Image of God. Stay tuned for details!

What's Wrong with Visionary Dreaming

Keith Edwin Schooley — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 06:00:00 +0000

I just got blown away by this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it has sprung from a wish dream…He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the later, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial. God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dreams bind men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.” (Life Together, 27-28.)

How often have I seen this played out, in one version or another? The whole American Evangelical culture seems to be predicated on the cult of the visionary dreamer, the pastor who has God's great plan for his local church to have a fantastic impact on the surrounding community, to grow the church exponentially, to transform the spiritual and physical landscape of an area. Sometimes he goes from plan to plan to plan, abandoning each one when it doesn't produce the desired results as quickly as expected. Sometimes he stubbornly sticks to one plan and refuses to let go despite detrimental effects. Eventually, the sheep get blamed for not bringing to reality the visionary shepherd's dream.

All this happens, according to Bonhoeffer, because the visionary leader "loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself." Patient ministry to the flock just isn't sexy enough for many leaders. They end up abandoning the community God gave them in pursuit of the community they haven't gotten yet.

I think it's about time I read Life Together.

HT: This We Confess

What Does It Mean to Follow Jesus

Keith Edwin Schooley — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 11:26:00 +0000

As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.“Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.”At once they left their nets and followed him.
--Matthew 4:18-20 NIV

The phrase Jesus uses most often to call people to become his disciples is the familiar phrase, "Follow me." Most people are reasonably clear on what that meant in Jesus' day, at least for Peter, Andrew, and the rest of the twelve. They left their occupations and traveled with Jesus, being taught by him and being commissioned to do the things he was doing: preach the good news of the kingdom, drive out demons, and heal sicknesses (Matt. 10). Their "following" was quite literal: Jesus was an itinerant preacher and they went with him wherever he went. Following Jesus involved sacrifice: Peter once said to Jesus that his disciples had "left everything" to follow him, and Jesus didn't contradict Peter, but rather held out to him promises of reward (Mark 10:28-31).

It's difficult to say in what sense other people also followed Jesus. Crowds followed Jesus from one side of the Sea of Galilee to the other, and Jesus rebuked them for having wrong motives (John 6:24-26). However, it's clear that at least some people outside the circle of the Twelve were also disciples, or at least true believers who followed Jesus' teachings: Mary and Martha, along with their brother Lazarus, Mary Magdalene and the other women who went to anoint Jesus' body and found the tomb empty. Joseph of Arimathea is also identified as a disciple of Jesus, albeit secretly, along with Nicodemus (John 19:38-39). So to be a disciple or follower of Jesus did not necessarily mean to be one of those who actually went around with him physically.

These questions become relevant for us in the present day because there are some current teachings relating to discipleship that make assumptions regarding what following Jesus is all about, largely based on the biblical example of Jesus and the Twelve. These teachings also relate to how we understand the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), because Jesus' command was to "make disciples," not merely to make converts. What it means to be a disciple, what it means to follow Jesus, is thus very important.

Some have made Jesus' discipleship to be strictly modeled on rabbinic discipleship, in which the rabbi, or discipler, invites a group of people into a discipling relationship, and by a combination of verbal teaching, watching and emulating, and shared life experiences, the disciple learns to be as much as possible like the teacher. Those who espouse this discipling model view Jesus' command to disciple as a command to replicate the discipleship relationship he had had with the Twelve. The disciples, in a sense, become disciples not of Jesus directly, but of the person who is discipling them. This is moderated, however, by the understanding, "Follow me as I follow Christ" (1 Cor. 11:1). So we're not to follow the leader's example strictly in order to become like that leader (else we have an "I follow Paul, I follow Apollos" situation, a la 1 Cor. 1:12), but rather to follow that leader's example only insofar as the leader is demonstrating Christlikeness. Of course, what "Christlikeness" actually is is something most of us assume we know but is actually subject to quite a bit of debate.

Even among those who don't follow the process of discipling outlined above, there is a growing view of following Jesus as a matter of imitation. In other words, following Jesus is thought to be imitating his life--doing the things that Jesus did and taught. Certainly there are scriptures that imply exactly this sort of relationship: for example, John 14:12, "Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do," and 1 John 2:6 "Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked." Certainly Jesus' life and teachings form an excellent example of what our lives should look like, and yet there can be reasonable differences of opinion regarding what the content of that imitation should be. Jesus says in Mark 8:34, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." Does this mean that all true followers of Jesus will be literally crucified? Does it mean that they will be martyred in some form? What do we do with Luke's version, in which the believer is enjoined to "take up his cross daily?" (Luke 9:23). Does this mean accepting and embracing hardships and persecutions that arise as a result of being followers of Jesus? Or do we take it in the popular sense that any difficulty that we face for any reason is our cross to bear?

All believers would acknowledge that Jesus provides a perfect moral example for us to follow. What becomes more problematic is when we move beyond moral aspects. I've heard church leaders remark upon how strategic Jesus was in his ministry, and that we need to imitate his methods in order to reproduce his success. I've heard people assert that since Jesus said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" (John 14:15), this means that we are obligated to do everything that Jesus said to his disciples in the imperative mood. Perhaps we should all pay our taxes by looking for coins in fishes' mouths (Matthew 17:27). I've heard that we can learn to do the miraculous if we simply study Jesus' methodology and apply it correctly. I've heard that we shouldn't really move on from the Sermon on the Mount until we've mastered what it teaches us--the implication being that since that's a lifelong process, we never really need to move on from that Sermon.

Even when dealing with Jesus' moral example, we sometimes read our own biases into our view of Jesus. Is he "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," who let children come to him when his disciples didn't want him to be bothered? Or is he a macho, tough guy Jesus, flipping over the tables of money changers and driving them out of the Temple with a whip? One of my professors once acknowledged something that few of us want to face: "The problem with What Would Jesus Do is that we can only assume we know what he would do in a given situation; all we know for sure is what he actually did."

What I'm trying to do here is to disentangle the ways in which we should indeed be imitating Jesus from the aspects of his life that were unique to his own person and mission in this world. Not to do this is to reduce Jesus to merely "good teacher and life example" status. There is a movement that I've written about elsewhere toward a renewed focus on the Gospels, as opposed to a supposed previous overemphasis on the Pauline epistles. While most in this movement would strongly affirm Jesus' divinity and physical resurrection, they still often go around and around in the Gospels, looking for teachings to implement and examples to follow, seldom getting around to the crucifixion and resurrection, and even more rarely taking into account how the Passion event changes the picture of what following Jesus is all about. Even if they don't take the liberal line that Jesus was just a good teacher, that is the practical implication of this type of teaching.

What happens, in this scenario, is that Jesus is viewed as the founder of a movement. Following Jesus in this sense becomes no different than following Gandhi or Martin Luther King. Absorb the teachings, learn from the example, enlist others to do the same, propel the movement forward. When we follow this pattern, we're not looking to see people transformed by the power of the Spirit from the inside out. Rather, we're looking to modify people's behavior through instruction, group pressure, and accountability. This is true regardless of whether or not we give lip service to change happening by the power of the Spirit as opposed to striving in our own effort. The methods we use guarantee that personal effort is the focal point.

Of course, what all this is is a reaction to the kind of theology that reduces salvation by faith to a formula of repeating the words to a prayer and assenting to certain elements of Christian doctrine. It's also a response to the objection that Christianity is about Jesus, after all, and not about Paul, so why are we spending so much time studying Paul? Surely Paul himself would agree that Jesus, not Paul, should be our focus. And what are all the Gospels' teachings and stories of Jesus' life doing there if we're to pass over them on our way to the Roman Road?

While I heartily agree that the Christian life is much more than repeating a prayer and assenting to some propositions, I disagree that the Gospels exist mainly as a road map to pattern our lives after, and to propel the movement that Jesus got started. The Gospels, first and foremost, attest to who Jesus is. The point is not to tell us what to do, but to tell us what he did. They bridge the gap, from the Old Testament world of God's covenant of Law with a hopelessly rebellious and disobedient Israel, to the New Testament world of the good news of grace and kingdom fulfillment through Jesus' person and work on the cross, extended to all nations throughout the world.

The question raised by the Gospels is not, "How do we do what he did?" but rather, "Who is this man?" To read the Gospels as a selection of moral anecdotes and teachings that tell us how to live ignores the fact that each gospel builds inexorably toward the event of his crucifixion and resurrection. It's a product of preaching sermons and conducting Bible studies focused on discrete events and teachings, ignoring the way books of the Bible--like almost all other forms of literature--were intended to be read: straight through. Any Bible student knows that compared to ordinary biographies, the Gospels give an inordinate focus on the last days of Jesus' life and to the events surrounding his death. His death and resurrection are the key to the meaning of his life; to miss that is to miss the entire point of all of the Gospels.

So knowing what it means to follow Jesus is indeed found more completely and explicitly in Acts and in the Epistles than it is in the Gospels. That's where you find The Rest of the Story. It's where you see how the earliest generations of what became known as Christianity understood their faith and lived their lives. Every sermon in the book of Acts focuses, not on the events of Jesus' life and ministry, but on the fact and implications of his death and resurrection. Every epistle fleshes out in a different way what the implications of living in the light of his resurrection is all about. Following Jesus is different for different people, because God created us each to be different but to be united into one body of Christ. How you follow Jesus will be different from how I follow Jesus, because our personalities and missions are different. But both of us will be transformed by the power of the resurrected and living Christ.

To follow Jesus like we would follow the human leader of a great movement is to miss completely the unique life and purpose of Jesus. To read the gospels as a road map for moral or strategic ministry development is to miss their primary message. To try to imitate Jesus by working and trying harder, getting more accountability, and doing things with the rationale that "That's what Jesus would do"--regardless of whether he actually did anything like that or not--is to miss the radically transformative nature of the Resurrection. Salvation by faith, rather than works, is not an escape hatch into a vapid, "fire insurance" sort of Christianity. It's rather the entrance into the transforming power that Jesus died and rose again for us to have.

Top Ten Reasons Why Theological Debate Doesn't Work

Keith Edwin Schooley — Sat, 31 May 2014 11:06:00 +0000

... especially on the internet.

#10 - Everyone compares what they actually believe to the "logical implications" of what the other guy believes.

This is why you get Calvinists arguing that Arminianism logically implies that we want to take credit for our own salvation, and Arminians arguing that Calvinism logically implies that God is the author of evil. Complementarians think egalitarianism implies erasing of all gender differences and egalitarians think complementarians simply want to keep women down. None of these groups actually believes what the other side says they should, and we all cry foul when someone else does it to us, but we all have the tendency to do a reductio ad absurdum on someone else's argument, no matter how much they protest that that's not what they believe.

#9 - We're more interested in winning the debate than in learning from one another's perspectives.

There's way too much ego involved in these debates, much more than most of us are willing to admit. All of us think that we've just won the deciding point and the other guy is going to cry "Uncle!" at our masterful display of dizzying logic. But it never happens. Either they just don't see our point the way we do, or even if they feel cornered, nobody likes to admit failure, especially in public, and what's more public than the internet? Moreover, internet debates are generally "won" by whoever has the most time to sit at a computer and respond to everything point by point. The rhetorical ability to debate has little to do with truth, and we may as well all admit it.

#8 - We're profoundly influenced by what we grew up with, and so is everyone else.

"Influenced," by the way, applies whether we still cling to the same beliefs or whether we've rejected them. We're all, almost always, in the process of protecting or repudiating the beliefs we grew up with. It's the lens through which we learned to understand the world in the first place, and it continues to influence the way in which we frame truth claims, both ours and other people's. We should recognize that much of what we think we disagree with we actually don't understand, because it's been framed in a way that's foreign to our accustomed way of perceiving reality and thinking through things. This leads to....

#7 - Most of our disagreements are on the presuppositional level, so arguing doesn't get at the root issues.

This is why we go around in circles with someone and we can't understand why they can't understand the points we're making. The actual disagreement lies below the level of logical argumentation. Just as geometry has certain axioms--principles that themselves can't be proven but seem self-evident and so become the building blocks of all other proofs--logic always rests on presuppositions, things that seem obvious to us but are themselves unprovable. These are often buried, unstated premises, assumed but not consciously thought of by those who hold them. For example, some will hold that "God is love" necessarily implies a certain kind of egalitarianism, an equal measure of love given to all, and this will work itself out in certain ways when it comes to topics such as soteriology and ecclesiology. For others, "God is sovereign" necessarily implies other conclusions about how and to whom God bestows love, giftings, and position. These are the kinds of differences that make what is self-evidently true to one person incomprehensible and horrifying to another.

#6 - We assault one another's motives rather than assessing one another's arguments.

When we disagree with someone else, we find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine that they actually believe what they say they believe. They must have an agenda! They must have a bias! There must be some reason why they refuse to accept my clearly articulated and logically unassailable truth! So we accuse someone of arguing out of fear, or out of arrogance, or of accommodating culture, or of being blindly hostile to culture, or of being a modernist, or of being a postmodernist, of "giving in" to some kind of pressure, of being unreasonably stubborn. The truth is, none of these issues matters. Let's be honest: everyone has conscious and unconscious agendas, and conscious and unconscious fears. The truth may coincide or not coincide with any of these in various instances. What matters is not why someone takes a position, but whether the position they've taken is true.

#5 - We get bogged down in historical arguments that may have little relevance now.

You see this happening when, for example, someone argues that backing off on any particular point that the Reformers held is the first step on the road back to Rome. Or when we question the salvation of someone who has a different understanding of infant vs. believer's baptism. Or even when we label someone a Calvinist or a Pelagian, as though they were actually slavish devotees of these long-dead teachers. One of my favorite professors in seminary made the observation that conservative Methodists and Presbyterians had more in common with one another than either would have with liberal members of their own denominations. That should give us pause. Divisions persist even when the initial reasons for them have faded. How many of us know or care about the filioque clause of the ~~Apostles'~~ Nicene Creed or the distinction between three-dimensional statues and flat icons?

#4 - We data mine Scripture for answers to questions, whether or not those questions were intended to be addressed by those passages.

Throughout the two millenia since Jesus' time, a lot of questions have come up that weren't live issues to the people who were writing Scripture. Many doctrines, such as the Trinity and the divine and human natures of Jesus, were hammered out in the centuries following the close of the canon. While Scripture might have clear things to say on these or other questions that aren't directly addressed by the text, we need to be extraordinarily cautious about pulling passages out of context just because it seems to support a point of view that we hold. The first step in interpretation is to understand what the passage meant at the time it was written to its intended audience.

#3 - We play "My verse trumps your verse" instead of trying to understand each passage on its own terms.

Every theological point of view (yes, that includes yours) has difficulty with some passages. When such passages are brought up in debate, the usual means of dealing with them is to respond with, "Yeah, but what about <insert more congenial passage here>." The implication is that because my favorite passage is so self-evidently clear, your favorite passage cannot possibly mean what it seems to mean--in fact, I don't even feel the need to deal with yours until you deal with mine. We're all operating with a canon-within-the-canon, a set of favorite passages that form the lens through which we view all the others. If we were more honest, we'd try harder to deal with the "difficult" passages (those that don't say what we want them to say) on their own terms, in their own contexts, rather than simply running back to the ones that confirm our prior views.

#2 - A lot of what we believe comes from gut level response rather than logical analysis.

We're quite ready to recognize this in everyone other than ourselves. I've made a clear logical connection; you've made a faulty slippery slope argument. I've thought all these issues through; you're clearly talking off the top of your head. I have reasons for what I believe; you're just repeating the standard line. Let's face it, Sheldon, you're not nearly as logical as you think you are. Neither am I. In what we believe, we all have reasons in which reason plays no part.

And the number one reason why theological debate doesn't work (especially on the internet) is....

#1 - We're just too darned proud to back down and admit what we don't know.

Except for those whose stock in trade is asserting that they know nothing, implying that no one else really knows anything either. They always seem very sure about that.

Rediscovering Grace

Keith Edwin Schooley — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 18:12:00 +0000

My parents were both brought up in an extremely legalistic "Holiness" branch of the church. I have always been grateful that they broke away from most of that when I was very young. Since my family already understood that true holiness wasn't a matter of adhering to a bunch of mostly non-biblical rules and regulations, the question of what holiness or righteousness actually was was a live question to me growing up.

Somehow--I can only attribute it to the action of the Holy Spirit--I gained the insight that righteousness came through faith. I don't recall hearing it from anywhere, although I'm sure that it was present in sermons that I've heard and forgotten. I know that when I was young the Epistles were mostly opaque to me. ("Why should I care about some old letters that people wrote to other people a long time ago?") I was mostly into reading narrative at that time--Bible stories. So I didn't directly get the message from Paul. But somehow the story of Abraham in Genesis caught my imagination, and the line, "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness" stood out to me. I'm sure I got it from Genesis, and not Romans or Galatians.

Somehow, God had revealed to me the message of his grace--that the main thing about being a Christian wasn't living a perfectly moral life or picking up a certain number of good-deed plot coupons. It was an end to the ceaseless striving for the perfection that we've all already lost. That moment at an altar where you gave it all up and threw yourself on God's mercy--the Christian life didn't just start there; it kept going back there. I developed a pretty much Lutheran view of the Sermon on the Mount--that although it was a great ideal and set a direction for how we should live, it also largely intensified the Law for the purpose of driving us to recognize our need for a savior. It's all about the Savior, it's all about what He did for us. We can't live up to it; Jesus lived up to it for us. All we can do is be grateful.

But somehow, in the religious world, it seems to be almost impossible to hold on to that perspective.

The first thing that happened was that everyone else talking about grace seemed to be using it to justify sin. That might simply have been my perception--I'm sure not really everyone was using it in that way--but it was a serious problem, nonetheless. "I'm under grace, not under law" is right up there with "Only God can judge me" and "That's just your interpretation" as excuses for people who want to make stupid choices.

Of course, the true gospel of grace is liable to abuse: that's the accusation Paul makes reference to in Romans 3:8 and responding to it is what Romans 6 is all about. The fact that some people will use the word "grace" to justify sin doesn't invalidate the insight of real grace, but I think in my case it made me a little defensive about it.

The next thing that happens is that a lot of voices answer with "grace but." "We're under grace, not law, but grace enables us to live up to the law." "God gives us grace, but that's no excuse to sit back and do nothing." That attitude implies that grace is a starting point, but that in order to go further, we need to focus on works. Grace can only get us so far.

Paul responds to this accusation in Galatians 3:3: "After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh?" Grace actually accomplishes the work, not only of justification, but also of sanctification. Embracing true grace will change how we actually live our lives. But we must embrace the ongoing work of grace in our lives; taking our eyes off of grace and trusting in anything else--in our own effort, in confession, in accountability, in anything other than God's work in our lives--is completely counterproductive. Not only can't we take credit for our own salvation; we can't even take credit for the ongoing work of God perfecting us. But in most churches, you can't say this. Relying on grace is looked on as a cop-out. So you get sucked into striving with your own effort again.

Then there is the contemporary penchant for focusing on the gospels. The "red letter" approach stresses the ethical commands of Jesus' teaching, in response to a supposedly complacent Pauline approach of simply praying a prayer and being eternally secure ever afterward. After all, we are asked, "What if Jesus actually meant all that stuff he said?" This is a pretty difficult rhetorical statement to oppose, despite the fact that those who say it always apply Jesus' teachings and example selectively, since so much of it is culturally bound or related to his unique mission.

The thing is, the book of Acts and the Epistles are the record of what those who were best in a position to understand what Jesus wanted them to do next. And what you see there is not a commitment to certain types of political social action, or an emphasis on large, showy projects for the poor and needy in their communities, or a neo-rabbinical form of disciple-making. (I don't actually see much of these things in the Gospels, either, but these sorts of things are what some in this movement seem to think what being a Jesus-follower is all about.)

No, what you see in Acts and in the Epistles is the proclamation of Good News. It was the message of what Jesus had already done through His death and resurrection. "Therefore, my friends, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him everyone who believes is set free from every sin, a justification you were not able to obtain under the law of Moses." That was Paul in Acts 13:38-39. Some people think Paul hijacked the first-century Jesus movement, but I'm not willing to rip out half the New Testament in order to focus on Jesus as a teacher and a moral example, even if lip service gets paid to Jesus' divinity and resurrection.

So in lots of different ways, the religious world seems hostile to the message of grace that was the hallmark of the early church. You come to Jesus because of this amazing message of forgiveness and life and peace. And then over time it all gets replaced by a bunch of social conventions and rules and obligations. Law replaces grace. It's the religious way.

God in his mercy has brought me back around the circle and back to an appreciation of grace once again. It's the message that God put on my heart when I was young. It's the message that changed my life for the better more than my conscious intentions and striving ever could. It's the message I always wanted to share with others, especially those who grew up in the church like I did, but may have never experienced the freedom and relief of simply falling upon God's mercy.

Events in my life over the past year or so have brought me back to grace once again. I'm deeply grateful to be in a church that proclaims the message of grace clearly and unambiguously. I want, more than anything, never to lose this perspective. I'm convinced that it is the heart of the gospel. It's the heart of God toward us.

Christian Tribalism: does God call us to stand up for the truth?

Keith Edwin Schooley — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 08:28:00 +0000

There seems to be a great deal of emphasis in Christian circles involving "standing up for the truth": affirming an unpopular but Biblical position regarding some issue that conflicts with contemporary Western mores. The latest flap is about Phil Robertson of the Duck Dynasty TV show, his interview with the magazine GQ, and network A&E's banning of Phil from the show. Conservative Christians are up in arms about censorship and free speech and most of all Standing Up for Biblical Truth.

What I see in all of this is a mindset I'd call Christian Tribalism.

Christian Tribalism is merely the religious version of a mindset shared by most people throughout history. It's basic form is encapsulated in the phrase, "Us vs. Them." The basic idea is that We are at war, or at least in competition, with Them. We, of course, are the Good Guys, and They are the Bad Guys. Our job is to fight, or defend, or take a stand, for the Good Guys and for the principles that we believe in. We're looking to defeat the other guy, whether the weapons of our warfare are swords or guns or pens or tweets.

Let's go back to the current cause célèbre. In the GQ interview, at least the way it's printed, Phil is asked, What, in your mind, is sinful? Now I already realize that interviews like this are heavily edited. Even the typography—italics, not quotation marks—suggests that perhaps the quoted section immediately following that question may not be a direct answer to that direct question. Probably the reporter, Drew Magary, selected the juiciest parts of a much longer conversation. That's actually what I assume to be the case. So I have no idea what the original context of Phil's remarks actually was.

But all we have to go on is the article as it was printed. That's what people are arguing about, regardless of whether they've actually read the original—and it's clear that many people taking sides clearly haven't. So in the article as printed, Phil is asked the question What, in your mind, is sinful? And the quoted answer begins with, "Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there."

It's not my place to judge Phil. Like I said, I have no idea what the original context of the quote was. But if I were asked what I considered to be sinful, the last thing I would do is to start with a sin that doesn't actually tempt me and which I don't really understand.

That's tribal language. That's Us vs. Them. Sin is what those other people do. Not only don't I do things like that; I don't even understand the attraction. Obviously those other people need to repent. Not me.

What if, in response to the question, What, in your mind, is sinful? we answered, "Start with my own pride and just morph out from there"? Wouldn't that defuse the situation? Wouldn't it put the whole discussion in a new light? Wouldn't it give us a better chance to persuade the other person?

But usually in these situations, we're not trying to persuade anyone of anything. The intended audience is not the person who disagrees with us. It's rather the person who already agrees, the person who will Like our Facebook posts and leave rah rahs in the comments. We're playing to the base, preaching to the choir. We're looking for affirmation from those who already agree. It's our tribe against the other tribes.

Because the issue is not really what Phil Robertson said to Drew Magary. It's the representation of Jesus that every one of us gives every single time a controversial issue comes up. It's whether we attempt to defeat the other person, or whether we attempt to persuade them. It's whether we stand up for our rights to say what we believe, or be "all things to all people so that by all possible means" we "might save some" (1 Cor. 9:22).

Christian tribalism wants to defeat the other guy. Paul wanted to persuade him. Christian tribalism wants to stand up for our rights. Paul wrote, "Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?" (1 Cor. 6:7). Christian tribalism says to defeat our enemies, if not by force, then by debate and politics. Jesus said, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you" (Luke 6:27). And as soon as there aren't pagans to fight, Christian tribalism degenerates into an internecine tribalism of Calvinist vs. Arminian, Egalitarian vs. Complementarian, Evangelical vs. Emerging, Cessationist vs. Charismatic.

Despite the bravado, our tribalism betrays fear. We're afraid that if we don't push back against the false values of secular society, we'll look weak. If we don't assert our rights, they'll continue to be whittled away. If we don't stand up for truth, error will win. But we're missing the point. Our battle is not against flesh and blood. The weapons of our warfare are not fleshly. And most importantly, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" We have the best backup imaginable. We don't have to lash out like those who are weak. We can rely on the One who gives us strength. He doesn't need us to defend him.

It's not the weak, but the strong, who can remain calm in the midst of an assault. It's not the weak, but the strong, who can transcend the other guy attacking our values, our traditions, our faith, and seek to persuade instead of fighting back. It's not the weak, but the strong, who can carry the cross and suffer the shame for the joy that is set before us. It's not the weak, but the strong, who can show love instead of hate, kindness instead of bitterness, mercy instead of vengeance.

Someone should stop the childish war of words. Shouldn't it be us?

More on Rob Bell's "What Is the Bible?"

Keith Edwin Schooley — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 05:30:00 +0000

I have no intention of starting a running commentary on Rob Bell's "What Is the Bible?" series on Tumblr, but a couple of recent posts of his 1) answer some questions I had raised about how he was going to handle the Resurrection, and 2) provide a wonderful example of how not to do exegesis on Ephesians 1:9-10.

First, on the Resurrection. I had raised the question of how Rob would handle Jesus' resurrection, considering the fact that he had made a point of saying that the historicity of events in Scripture was beside the point. In his post #18 of the series, Rob gets to the Resurrection. And his conclusion is that, yes, literally, "Dude is alive!"(Rob is living in southern California now. And surfing a lot.)

So that's great: Rob and I agree that the Resurrection really happened. Rob gets there by an interesting path--he sees the discrepancies (or what he views as discrepancies) in the various Resurrection narratives and post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus as evidence that this was not propaganda and therefore really happened. (That it was women who saw Jesus first is additional evidence. A phony story would not have been set up that way.) So Rob manages to affirm the literal truth of the Resurrection while not having to affirm (or reconcile) the literal truth of any of the documents that document that fact. It all fits into his method pretty well.

But here's where Rob didn't give me an answer: why does the literal truth of Jesus' resurrection matter? Rob affirms it, and that's great, but given his method, does it make any difference? Why shouldn't we go all Joseph Campbell on this thing and just affirm that, yes, it's a great, moving, powerful story, and let's not nitpick on whether it really happened or not? By Rob's method, I have no idea what difference it makes.

Second, on Ephesians 1:9-10, Rob makes a big deal out of the Greek word pas. A tip: whenever a Bible teacher starts making a big deal out of the meanings of Greek words, beware. Rob had me going for a minute: since he didn't give some esoteric meaning of pas, I assumed he just went to the Greek as a bit of a joke. But he ends up adding more to it than that.

Pas means "all." That's it. It's an adjective, but it can be used as a noun, "all things" or "everything." There's nothing hidden or different or special about this word. It's probably not precisely the same as the English word "all"--translations are hardly ever a straight one-for-one correspondence--but it just basically means "all." It functions the same way.

But that's not how Rob handles it. Having established that pas means "all things," he then applies this to scripture itself. "All things" includes the bad old barbaric and possibly mythical things that came out of the culture that produced the Bible. God's purpose is to redeem all of it, so the nasty (and possibly mythical) stuff comes alongside the nice, progressive stuff. He brings in other examples of the word pas and stresses its inclusivity: God is about restoring and gathering together and redeeming "all things": poverty, abuse, racism, fractured relationships (these are Rob's examples).

Now on one level, I agree with him. God does want to restore all these things, including the bad stuff, and to redeem it in such a way that it makes remembering the bad stuff a part of the charm of the new. But that has nothing to do with Ephesians 1:9-10. You can't simply take "all" and make it mean "everything you could possibly think of" everywhere you see it.

One of the best things I ever learned about biblical interpretation is the phrase, "Context is king." Words don't just mean what they mean in isolation. They mean what they mean in a particular context. When we're communicating in our native language, we intuitively know this, and interpret contextually all the time. That's why I can write a sentence like, "I set the chess set on the TV set," and you know what I mean by "set" in each case. But somehow, when the original language is different, we tend to forget that fact.

This is why Rob can end up chanting, "All things, all things, all things, all things," and completely forget about the rest of the passage. "All things" means "everything we're talking about here at the moment." When a child is stubbornly looking at the vegetables left on his plate, and his mother says, "No, you need to eat it all," she doesn't mean he has to eat all the food in the world. "All," in this context, means "everything that's left on your plate."

Now, in Ephesians, Paul's just getting going in his argument, so the context is not yet completely clear. But Paul is building a case to show something that seems obvious to us now but desperately needed to be understood at the time he wrote: that God's intention had always been to bring Jews and Gentiles together into one unified people under His lordship. He makes the point explicitly in 2:14-18:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. (2:14-18)

The "all things" that Paul is talking about in 1:10 is, predominantly, all people, all races. What humanity sees as inherently divided God wants to unify. Perhaps one could make a case for extending the application of this meaning beyond its original context, but the case needs to be made, by something more than chanting "all things."

My point is not to knock or discredit Rob. Lots and lots of pastors and Bible teachers get away with bad interpretation because they work their way to making good points. But this dilutes Scripture, makes it more difficult for readers or listeners in the congregation to extract biblical truth for themselves. It makes them more dependent on the gifted interpreter. "I could never have gotten that out of that passage!" they say. They're right, but not for the reasons they think.

They couldn't have gotten it, because it isn't there.

Rob Bell's "What Is the Bible?" Series

Keith Edwin Schooley — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 09:29:00 +0000

Rob Bell has been blogging a series called "What Is the Bible?" If you're interested in reading it from the beginning, it starts here.

I'm neither a particular fan nor a particular detractor of Rob. (He strikes me as the kind of guy who'd like you to refer to him by his first name. Rob, feel free to call me Keith if you pop in.)

I read his Velvet Elvis, which didn't make a really significant impression; I think he was just tilting at different windmills than those that occupy my back yard. I haven't read any of this other books, including the controversial Love Wins. I was going to write that I have no particular axe to grind, but of course that isn't true; everyone has an axe to grind. I guess it's more true to write that I'm not jumping on board any particular pro-Rob or anti-Rob bandwagon.

So anyway, back to the "What Is the Bible?" series. A good summation of Rob's method can be found in Part 13: Consciousness and Violence. Rob's essential argument is that the Bible was written by people (he doesn't deny divine inspiration, but I suspect that what "inspiration" means is one of the things he'll get around to), those people were influenced by their own cultural biases and attitudes, those biases and attitudes become a part of the text, but also some new thoughts and ideas that weren't a part of the writers' culture also get introduced, which pulls the consciousness and attitudes of humanity forward. This process is very slow, because humanity is incapable of turning on a dime. God works from where we are, and draws us toward the next step forward.

So, for example, there are a lot of stories of violence and barbarism in the Bible. These, Rob contends, are a part of the culture in which the Old Testament was written, as were the claims that God (Israel's tribal god, to be precise) instigated and approved the violence and barbarism. That's just an aspect of life that the original storytellers and later scribes would have taken for granted. But on the other hand, there are ideas, like caring for the poor and needy, widows and orphans, and setting slaves free, that are genuinely new, genuine steps forward out of the barbarism in which the Bible was written.

Another issue which doesn't factor strongly into that particular post but does factor into earlier ones is the issue of historicity. Rob argues that our debates over historicity tend to obscure the intended point of the narrative; for example, arguing over the historicity of Jonah and the Great Fish can obscure the point of the story, which is God's willingness to forgive the Assyrians, the Assyrians' willingness to repent, and Jonah's unwillingness to forgive or accept their repentance.

I'm sympathetic to a lot of what Rob is doing here. I think he's right that arguing over historicity tends to obscure the main point of many passages (and I appreciate that he applies that critique to those who oppose historicity as much as to those who affirm it). He's right that the Bible was written by people, who wrote in a particular time, place, and culture, and that those factors strongly influence how the narrative is written (or even, how God was working in the lives of the people involved). He's right that people don't turn on a dime and that God has been working over a long period of time to change us, and that the issues that look barbaric and inexcusable from our point in history--tribal warfare, slavery, polygamy--were allowed by God because unless he miraculously overrides all human civilization by force, they simply couldn't change in a short period of time. Moreover, God wants to work in and through human beings to create change, not simply override us. Changing us is the point, and that takes time.

Still, I have reservations, too. Rob seems to want to relegate the story of the Flood to the kind of story that everyone else told about their gods getting mad at humans and sending massive floods, but the promise never to flood the world again he seems to want to take as a genuine insight, a new step forward. He wants to make the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac into a subversion of the kinds of demands that pagan gods made, which it is, but it also assumes that the real God never really asked a real Abraham (if there was a real Abraham) to do this. Although he doesn't say so straight out, his equivocation on whether these stories are literally true often assumes that they aren't, although he (rightly) asserts that them not being literally true is also not the point. Similarly, in Rob's view the tribal violence that Israel engaged in was not commanded by God, but the insight that this particular tribe was intended to benefit all tribes everywhere is genuine and real and compelling.

This is an attractive way to deal with the modern (okay, if you must, the post-modern) objection to the Bible as a horribly primitive violent outdated book which can't possibly speak to 21st century mores. If you oppose gay marriage on biblical grounds you're a bigot who must approve of polygamy and slavery and cutting off rival chieftan's heads and setting them up on poles. Rob's answer to that is very neat.

Except that it is also very subjective. Anything that conflicts with contemporary mores we can relegate to the bad, old past. This is just the kind of story that ancient, primitive people were liable to tell. You just have to ignore that old stuff and look for the glimmer of progress that culminated in, well, in where we are today. Or more to the point, in where progressives say we should be tomorrow.

So it just isn't possible that the real God could actually have asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a test. Or that he could have told the Israelites to conquer Canaan and yes, in some circumstances, to kill everyone in a city. He couldn't possibly have flooded the world and spared just one family. And we can leave open the questions (wink, nod) of whether fish can swallow people, snakes can talk, and things like that.

My only problem with this is that the only source material we have for the glimmers of progressivism is the same text that gives us the bad, old stories as well. Isn't it possible that the real, true God actually worked in and through the bad, old culture to produce results that he wanted? Is it possible that God spoke to Abraham as though he were one of the pagan gods Abraham had been used to, in order to show him a more excellent way? Is it possible that God actually did flood the world, just once, in order to show what the sinfulness of humanity could lead to, and the memory of that disaster is what has populated almost every ancient culture with a flood story? Is it possible that God did tell the Israelites to drive out the Canaanites and in some cities to put everyone to death because a) he knew they wouldn't go through with it anyway, and b) he knew that they would corrupt the Israelites into the same depraved, child-sacrificing, enemy-mutilating, horrible culture that they had, and c) in a society dominated by tribal warfare, a peacenik society would be (almost literally) eaten alive?

In other words, can we accept the insight that some of these things were temporary concessions to the culture, and also take them at a little more face value than Rob seems to want?

Because here's the point: I don't think any of the above divides me from Rob as brothers in Christ. I think it's acceptable to take some stories that appear to be literal history as possibly being something like parables instead. And I agree with Rob that the historicity of some of the stories is not the point, and that arguing over historicity often misses the point. If I didn't think that way, I'd have to reject not only Rob but people like CS Lewis as being believers as well. There's room for disagreement there.

But the real point is that I don't see anything in Rob's method that would stop us at the Old Testament. So then the question is, Is it necessary to believe in the Resurrection? Or is that just a part of the old mythical past, just another Corn King legend, that's supposed to illustrate some deeper and more profound point? If we're supposed to take it literally, why is that suddenly so important? Is the dividing line just arbitrary? If we don't take it literally, are we still in the realm of Christianity anymore?

I won't try to answer these questions. I'll wait to see what Rob has to say. Good or bad, I'm sure it will be interesting.

Mike Breen and Building a Discipling Culture: A Dissent

Keith Edwin Schooley — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Last summer, I commented on a review of Mike Breen's Building a Discipling Culture. The original review was at a blog entitled Notes from the Trail. In it, Jeff Noble offered a mixed review of Breen's book, lauding its intentional and structured approach to discipleship, but questioning the necessity of such a convoluted approach to discipleship and the effectiveness of the geometric images that Breen employs.

Based on my own experience in a church that had begun using Breen's approach, I commented on Noble's review. I've thought long and hard about whether to deal with the subject here on this blog, and decided that rather than saying a lot myself, I'd simply reprint my comment on the original review, along with a couple of the responses to me. I'm doing so because I think that Breen's approach is dangerous, and I feel that I need to let people know. My comment on the original review read as follows:

I have a fundamental problem with the exegesis in Building a Discipling Culture. Breen seems to want to shoehorn passages in order to fit his LifeShapes: for example, he uses what I can only term a fanciful exposition of the Sermon on the Mount in order to support the “Kairos circle,” one of the most fundamental tools of 3DM. Proponents call the Kairos circle learning to hear the voice of God; I think it’s learning to submit oneself to groupthink and possibly manipulation by the leader. If the principles in 3DM can’t be supported biblically without far-fetched interpretations, why should anyone submit to them?

I also have a problem with the fact that Breen insists on the necessity of a common language with which to do discipleship, but then instead of using the language that the Bible already gives us, he substitutes his own. I envision communities of people who go on and on about Kairos circles and Up, In, and Out triangles, but are biblically illiterate. How is creating an insider lingo going to expand the Kingdom of God?

I would say, listen to that holy caution. I don’t think that there is anything in the 3DM pyramidal approach that will prevent it from going down the same path as the Shepherding movement of the 70s and 80s. I’m sure that most people using it are well-meaning people who only want to help others become more Christlike, but if the foundation is not solidly biblical, the fruit won’t be, either.

I received the following response from a woman named Diane, whose church had been negatively affected by the teachings in Building a Discipling Culture:

Thank you, thank you, thank you Keith, for offering up a warning regarding 3dm, Mike Breen, and Building A Discipling Culture. Tragically, our church has been torn apart and dismembered by the promulgation of this material. Even in the face of the facts presently before us (a mass exodus of devoted disciples, including associate pastors) there is denial by our pastor that there is anything wrong with Breen’s program; in other words, there is no “bathwater” with the baby! Some of us also saw hermeneutical problems with BADC and have been told that we are interpreting Scripture “too narrowly.” What I perceived as a consistent “backfilling” with Scripture to support his agenda made reading Breen’s book an exercise in discernment and critical (not criticizing) thinking. I am prepared to agree that perhaps my pastor completely mishandled the introduction of this program (a term that Breen denies applies to his vision) but, having read BADC myself, I see that my pastor stuck to the playbook. The secrecy, the inherent divisiveness of the program (creating two classes of disciples) the “language” that must be learned AND the obvious similarities to the Shepherding Movement should be discussed openly with a church’s leadership before this program is implemented. Our pastor uses the dearth of a dissenting view online or in our denomination as “proof” that the people who have left our church ( and those that continue to offer up a differing viewpoint) are simply fearful! For any Bereans out there who are doing research about 3dm, “holy caution” is indeed warranted. In our case, the “end” has not justified the “means” no matter how well-intentioned Mike Breen, et al are.

A brother named Mike also responded regarding The Order of Mission, a neomonastic order that Breen leads:

Anyone considering the 3dm model with holy caution should also review the materials found at missionorder.org. You will find that Mike Breen, the leader of 3dm, is also the Senior Guardian of the Order of Mission, a self-proclaimed “neo-monastic order.” The Order of Mission aspires to be a small, radically committed group of people who will seek to usher in the next great awakening or next large move of God.

A person seeking to join the Order of Mission must make a multi-year commitment. The Missionorder.org website states the following:

Temporary Covenant

On taking their three year temporary vows for The Order of Mission, members take the following vows at Initiation:

In the name of the Father,
and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit,
I solemnly promise before God
to devote myself
to a life of simplicity, purity
and accountability
within The Order of Mission.

I vow before God and in the presence of the Senior Guardian (Guardians)
and the members of the Order,
to live and work according to its Rule.
I ask for the grace of Almighty God
and the prayers of all those present.
Amen

Interestingly, the vow requires members to live and work according to the Rules of Life of the Order. The Rules of Life of the order are based upon the concept of “Lifeshapes.” The Lifeshapes used by the Mission of Order are the same Lifeshapes that are taught by 3dm ministries. The Order uses geometric shapes to teach their “rule of life.” The shapes used are:
The Circle: Listening to God’s voice and responding obediently
The Triangle: Balanced and deep relationships
The Semi-Circle: Kingdom-oriented rhythms of life around Rest and Work
The Square: Multiplying the life of Jesus into the lives of others
The Pentagon: Personal calling
The Hexagon: Prayer
The Heptagon: Organic Health
The Octagon: Relational mission

Both 3dm and the Order of Mission think that in order to build a discipling culture, you must first have a discipling language. They believe that the language used creates the culture. Tthe language used by the Order of Mission and 3dm is completely different than that used to describe discipleship in the Bible. The 3dm groups call their meetings “huddles.” They engage in close knit missions or “oikos.” They talk about SWOT analysis and inflection points. They talk of high challenge, high invitation churches, etc., etc.

Members of the Order of Mission also take vows of Simplicity, Purity and Accountability.

The use of “accountability” and the ushering in of a “new” discipling language clearly makes the 3dm and Order of Mission potential candidates for a re-emergence of the abusive and heretical Shepherding Movement that ran from the 70s and 80s. I was part of a church involved in that movement and saw first-hand the damage that it did. When your desire is to create a system that requires people to take vows to live by the Rule of Life of the Order, you steep them in a “special” language, you tell them that they are a part of a radical movement that will usher in the next great awakening, and you make them accountable to you, you have taken far too many steps down the road of Shepherdship error. The steps outlined above can lead to “disciples” who are alienated from other Christians (who do not share their language), who have taken vows to live by something other than the Bible, and who voluntarily submit themselves to the authority of another human being under the guise of “accountability.” There really is only one mediator between God and man, and that is Jesus.

I never want to see the abuses of the Shepherdship movement repeated, and I don’t want believers to think that in order to be “radical” you have to learn something “deeper” and “more effective” than the language that Jesus and his disciples used to transform the world. If you are like the Bereans who studied the scriptures daily to see if what was taught them was true, you will find that Jesus did not use Lifeshapes, he did not require a special discipling language, he never authorized Senior Guardians or Guardians, and he never required anyone to take vows or oaths.

I appreciate the input of this sister and brother, which confirm to me what was bothering me about the 3DM program. I think it lends itself to control and manipulation by leaders, and takes its adherents' focus off of the Bible and the truths of the gospel.

First they came for Veteran's Day, but I wasn't a…

Keith Edwin Schooley — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 15:15:00 +0000

First they came for Veteran's Day, but I wasn't a veteran.
Then they came for President's Day, but I wasn't a president.
Then they came for Memorial Day, but I had no close relatives to honor.
Then they came for Labor Day, but I wasn't in the labor movement.
And now they're coming for Thanksgiving Day, and the precedent's already been set.

The So-Called Fivefold Ministries: a study on Ephesians 4:11

Keith Edwin Schooley — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 12:06:00 +0000

The traditional, cessationist understanding of Ephesians 4:11 is that the five gifts listed--apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers--were offices of the early church, leadership positions and types of ministry that God had established, and that some of them passed away at the end of the Apostolic age. By contrast, many people, especially within some charismatic congregations, view this verse as teaching that God has established these five offices as the model of church leadership which should remain functioning throughout the church age. A variation of this view has recently come into prominence, arguing that every believer possesses one or more of these five gifts and should function in ministry according to whichever one is primary. A closer examination of the passage yields an answer different from any of the above formulations.

In brief, the present study, originally published as four separate blog posts, argues that the so-called "fivefold" ministry gifts are only some of the many giftings that believers may have, and thus not all believers should be categorized as one of these five. They are indeed still functional and have been throughout the church age, but have in some cases been known under different names. Specifically, biblical Apostles are church-planting missionaries, and should be designated as missionaries to avoid confusion with the specific role of the Twelve. Prophets should be understood on the model of Old Testament prophets, typically people outside church leadership who call God's people (especially leaders) back to God's covenant. Evangelists are non-church-planting missionaries: i.e., their function is to preach the gospel to the unreached, not to stir up congregations of believers. Pastors and teachers should be considered as one group with two significant aspects (possibly with some members leaning toward one aspect or the other) that function as the primary leaders of an already-established local group of believers.

Apostles

The term "apostles" (Gr. apostoloi) is traditionally reserved for the original twelve that Jesus chose for intense discipleship and commission into ministry (Mat. 10:2; Lk. 6:13; Ac. 1:2) as well as the Apostle Paul (e.g., Rom. 1:1; 1 Cor. 1:1). Biblically, however, the term is used more broadly than that:

On Paul's first missionary journey, Barnabas is included with Paul as an apostle (Acts 14:4, 14);
Paul refers to "our brothers" (two men whom he was sending to Corinth along with Titus) as apostoloi (NIV, "representatives," 2 Cor. 8:23);
Epaphroditus is referred to as hymon apostolon (NIV, "your messenger" , Php. 2:25);
Paul refers to himself and his traveling companions Silvanus and Timothy as "apostles of Christ" (1 Th. 2:6);
Jesus is called an apostle in Hebrews 3:1.

Although translations in these passages tend to shy away from the term "apostle" if the referent does not include Paul, the Twelve, or Jesus, the same Greek term--of which our English word "apostle" is merely a transliteration--is used. It does not appear that the term is restricted as a technical term for a fixed group of people in the New Testament.

Based on this expanded understanding of the term "apostle," some church groups are choosing to adopt the term for themselves. While there is no universally-accepted definition of an "apostle," the term as it is used among these churches generally indicates some degree of authority above that of an ordinary pastor. It may be used of a senior pastor in a multi-staff church. C. Peter Wagner, in Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow!, argues that it is someone who exerts authority over a group of churches, using Pastor Chuck Smith of the Calvary Chapel fellowship of churches as an example.

However, while many references to apostles in the New Testament do indicate that those apostles were accorded authority and respect, neither the etymology of the word nor its usage in classical and Jewish parallels indicates authority as a primary component of its meaning. Literally meaning "one sent forth," the term refers to an emissary or ambassador: a messenger more official than an angelos. When we examine those described as apostoloi in the New Testament, especially in the larger circle beyond the Twelve and Paul, it becomes clear that those designated "apostles" were in fact missionaries. Paul, of course, in the New Testament becomes the apostle par excellence, and was largely responsible for the missionary work that evangelized the western world, and several of the others so designated were his traveling companions. This also makes sense of how Paul expresses his apostolic authority: he reasons with the churches that he has established on the basis of his prior relationship with them; he doesn't merely assert authority on the basis of God's having appointed him as an apostle. Additionally, if we assume that an apostle is in fact a missionary, the lack of the latter term's appearance in the New Testament is explained. For reasons that will become evident later, I would argue that an apostle is specifically a missionary who plants churches.

Since there are still church-planting missionaries today, I do believe that there are modern-day apostles, but I do not advocate restoring the term "apostle" to these modern-day counterparts. First, in the present-day context, the wrong people are being termed "apostles"--generally, senior pastors or leaders of denominations or fellowships of churches. Unless these leaders have become leaders by personally going out and planting these churches, they are not doing the work of New Testament apostles. This is not to denigrate them in any way; it is merely to say that their gifts lie in other directions. The term, "apostle," has become so identified with the Twelve and Paul that taking the appellation today seems necessarily to involve assuming an equality of authority with those early apostles; such an assumption is presumptuous at best. Since we have a modern term for those who do the work of a New Testament apostle--"missionary"--there is no reason to go back to the older term, which is really no more than a transliteration of the Greek term. "Missionary" is quite an apt term, deriving from "mission" in the same way that apostolos derives from apostello ("to send out"). There would be a better argument for translating apostolos as "missionary" throughout the New Testament than there would be for calling modern-day missionaries, "apostles." "He appointed twelve--designating them missionaries--that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach" (Mark 3:14). What's wrong with that?

Prophets

To get a sense of the role of prophets in the New Testament, a survey of New Testament references to prophets and to prophecy is necessary. Throughout the gospels, the term "prophet" refers most often to the prophets of the Old Testament, and usually to the fulfillment of their prophecies in the person of Jesus. The term is also used of Jesus; in fact, Jesus refers to himself as a prophet (Matt. 13:57, Lk. 4:24, Jn. 4:44) as well as John the Baptist (Lk. 7:26). There is a sense of continuity there: what the prophets are is defined in the Old Testament, and part of what Jesus and John are doing is continuing that prophetic tradition.

In Acts, references to Old Testament prophets and to Jesus as a prophet continue, but others are also referred to as prophets: Agabus, one of several in 11:27, who predicted a severe famine throughout the Roman world, and who also foretold the Apostle Paul's arrest in Jerusalem (21:10); the "prophets and teachers" who appear to have been leaders in the church at Antioch and who were led by God to comission Barnabas and Saul for what became the Apostle Paul's missionary journeys (13:1); Judas and Silas, who brought the news of the Jerusalem council to the Gentile believers (15:32); and the daughters of Philip the evangelist (21:9).

In the epistles, Paul mentions prophecy among the gifts given to the Body (1 Cor. 12:10, 28-29) and gives instructions for the proper use of that gift within the gathered assembly (1 Cor. 14:29), contrasting it positively in that context with the gift of tongues (1 Cor. 14:3-5, 22-24). Along with the apostles, they are called the "foundation" of "God's household" (Eph. 2:20). We can learn several things from this survey:

There is a continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament with regard to the role of the prophet. New Testament writers refer to Old Testament prophets as well as to contemporary prophets with equal ease and without distinguishing between the two. Just as Old Testament prophets spoke directly for God and yet did not supplant the foundational role of the Law, so New Testament prophets spoke directly for God and yet did not supplant the foundational role of Scripture. This should lead us to the position that New Testament prophets are essentially modeled after Old Testament prophets. Indeed, those living in the first century (especially Jewish believers) probably saw a renewal of an old gift, rather than the establishing of something radically different.

Prophets are not necessarily inspired writers of Scripture, and do not necessarily have authoritative roles such as the original Apostles had. The cessationist viewpoint almost always raises the objection that contemporary prophecy somehow negates the authority of Scripture, essentially identifying the prophetic role as necessary before the finishing of the canon of scripture, but superfluous (and somehow dangerous) afterward. If that were true, we would expect prophets to be the writers of Scripture, since the cessationist position essentially equates the two gifts. But Agabus, Judas, Silas, the daughters of Philip, and unnamed others are not writers of scripture; moreover, they are referred to by writers of scripture without any hint of threat or rivalry. Paul seems to have been able to write his inspired letters without any concern that the prophets (whom he views as foundational to the church) may set up some sort of rival authority.

Apart from a tortured interpretation of 1 Cor. 13:8-10, there is no sense in the New Testament that this gift of prophecy will cease prior to the parousia, the second coming of Jesus. Paul gives instructions regarding the use of the prophetic gift in 1 Cor. 14:29-33, 39 (including the encouragement to "be eager to prophesy") that would ordinarily be considered binding to the present day, were he not referring to a gift that some have regarded as having ceased.

Nothing in the New Testament ever equates prophesying with preaching the gospel. Attempts have been made to equate the two in order to have something of a nonthreatening continuationism. Paul's rules on prophesying in 1 Cor. 14 really don't make sense if one regards the "prophesying" as actually "sermonizing"--except perhaps in a Quaker context, in which no one person would take the lead but people would share as they felt led. However, this idea is far nearer to the Pentecostal model than the cessationist.

There also seems to be little support for the idea of a "personality gift" of being a prophet. On the supposition that the gifts listed in Romans 12:6-8 are functions of different sorts of personality, it has been thought by some that certain tendencies of mind--particularly negative and critical tendencies--amount to a prophetic "personality gift." While it is probable that certain personality types lend themselves to certain spiritual gifts (most evangelists are probably outgoing, for example) and God, in his wisdom, may often marry the two, it does not follow that certain personality types by themselves equate to spiritual gifts, let alone offices.

So what do we have, then? A prophetic ministry that builds on the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, extends throughout the New Testament period and implicitly beyond, is different than preaching or teaching or the writing of authoritative scripture, and is not identified with major, authoritative figures in the church. The link to the Old Testament model is particularly fruitful. By contrast to the priestly and kingly offices, both of which were formal and hereditary, the Old Testament prophets were usually outsiders, people whom God called from all walks of life, often to challenge unworthy examples of the hereditary offices to return to the ways of God. Far from threatening the foundational authority of the Law given by Moses, the prophets are sometimes called God's covenant lawyers, bringing a lawsuit against God's people for neglecting His Law. The Law and the Prophets are not rivals but work hand in hand. And although prophets at times did fortell events in the future, that was not their primary role. They were more "forthtellers" than "foretellers," calling God's people to account in their own contemporary setting--at times, warning of impending judgment if they did not change--more than simply predicting what was to come.

So should there be a office of "prophet" in the church today? While I believe that there are, in fact, contemporary prophets, I do not think that a formal office or title is necessary or desirable. The prophets were always informally related to the structure of Old Testament Israel and the New Testament church. To formalize the office would be to restrict God's hand in choosing whom He will to speak truth wherever it needs to be spoken. To take the title formally is both presumptuous and unnecessary. There may, in fact, be many who actually are in the role of prophets without necessarily being recognized as such or even recognizing themselves as such. I'm thinking of writers, people who are not actually in formal church ministry but who write, calling the church back to be what God wants it to be. I don't have any names to suggest; years ago I did, but I'm not so sure now. It may be that we are in a prophetic lull at the moment. But if there are prophets, it is likely that they are controversial and probably rejected by much of the church world. It was always that way.

Evangelists

When we come to the term, "evangelist," we are dealing with a term used far less often than "apostle" or "prophet." Euangelistes occurs only three times in the New Testament: Acts 21:8 refers to "Philip the Evangelist, one of the Seven.". In 2 Timothy 4:5, Paul encourages Timothy to "do the work of an evangelist." The third reference is in the verse presently under discussion, Ephesians 4:11.

Etymologically, euangelistes means "one who preaches the Gospel." Most often, it is Jesus and the apostles who preach the gospel (euangelizo); presumably, an evangelist would be someone who preached the gospel and who didn't fit into one of the other recognized ministries. If we look at the example of the one person actually named an "evangelist" in the New Testament, we can gain a better perspective of what this office entails.

As mentioned above, Philip is first mentioned in connection with the Seven who had been chosen to assist the Apostles in Acts 6:3. We next meet him in the aftermath of the persecution in Jerusalem that began with the stoning of Stephen (8:1-3). "Those who had been scattered preached [euangelizo] the word wherever they went. Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Christ there" (8:4-5). This is the first mission to non-Jewish people recorded in Acts. Philip's ministry was extremely effective--accompanied by miraculous signs and the evident conversion (signified by baptism) of many who had previously followed a sorcerer named Simon (8:6-12). It was only after the success of Philip's ministry ("the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God," 8:14) that Peter and John were sent to lay hands on the people for them to receive the Holy Spirit.

Philip was next used in the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch (8:26-40), the first recorded conversion of a fully ethnic Gentile. God had simply directed him to go by a certain route toward Gaza, which he never reached. He met the eunuch on the way, who was already reading one of the "suffering servant" passages in Isaiah, he "began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news [euangelizo] about Jesus" (8:35). The eunuch asked to be baptized, Philip did so, and was immediately transported to Azotus "and traveled about, preaching the gospel [euangelizo] in all the towns until he reached Caesarea" (8:40).

So what is Philip's ministry? He goes to unreached people, preaches the gospel with effectiveness and supernatural power, baptizes people--and then moves on. The key term here is "unreached people." It appears evident that the evangelist, biblically, is yet another type of missionary: one who is called specifically to reach the unreached and whose work essentially ends with conversion. An evangelist is supernaturally empowered to bring the Gospel to the lost with the result that they come to faith in Christ. The difference between an evangelist and an apostle is that while the latter is a church-planting missionary who not only brings people to salvation but also births, nurtures, and provides subsequent oversight to communities of faith, the evangelist's work is more specifically to introduce the gospel to people and to bring them to a saving knowledge of Christ. It may be the case, as it evidently was in Samaria, that the evangelist spearheads the work in an unreached area and the apostle comes in subsequently to establish and ground the work.

Or one person may fulfill both roles, as the Apostle Paul evidently did, and as did the other New Testament character associated with the term, "evangelist," Timothy. Included among the apostles in 1 Thess. 2:6, Timothy was appointed by Paul to stay behind in Ephesus while Paul traveled to Macedonia (1 Tim. 1:3), and in 2 Timothy, written when Paul was expecting to be martyred for his faith, Paul exhorts Timothy, in the midst of doctrinal confusion and rejection of the truth, to "keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry" (4:5). Timothy is never exactly called an evangelist, as is Philip; he is exhorted to "do the work of an evangelist"--presumably, one of Timothy's gifts is to preach the gospel to unbelievers and bring them to faith. Rather than being wholly distinct offices, we can see that the types of ministry that God had given to the church may be somewhat fluid; C. Peter Wagner profitably discusses a "gift mix" rather than each person having only one specific gift. But Philip most clearly embodies the evangelist qua evangelist: a missionary who reaches the unreached and brings them to faith in Christ.

What appears to be clear is that the evangelist, biblically, is not what is usually termed an evangelist today--an itinerent speaker who goes from church to church, possibly with a message of salvation, but largely to excite, motivate, or possibly teach or otherwise minister to believers. The modern-day evangelist might better be termed a "revivalist." This is not to say that there is necessarily anything wrong with having such "revivalists"; it is merely to say that when Paul writes that "it was he who gave some... to be evangelists," (Eph. 4:11), he had in mind more of a missions emphasis and less of a revival emphasis than we normally associate with the term. In some sense, "evangelist" is to "apostle" what "preacher" is to "pastor": the former term boils the much larger and complex role of the latter term down to the essence of proclamation. Just as with "apostle," in "evangelist," we are dealing essentially with a transliteration of a Greek word. A native Koine Greek speaker would have heard "good news" in the very term, "evangelist," and that good news is very specifically the message of salvation through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

Pastors and Teachers

On the "five-fold ministry" model, pastors and teachers are two separate ministries with differing gifts and roles to play in the Body of Christ. The Greek construction of this verse, however, strongly indicates that these are two different titles for the same group, or at least, that the two groups are being considered together in this context.

Without going into actual Greek wording, we can see even in an English translation the repeated, "some to be..." construction, which occurs not five but only four times, the last time, before "pastors and teachers." What is not seen in an English translation are the articles. In English, there are two types of articles: indefinite articles ("a," "an") and definite articles ("the"). Greek has only one type of article, roughly corresponding to the English definite article, which tends to be used much more often than articles are used in English. If we were to add the articles to the passage, we would get something like this: "It was he who gave some to be the apostles, some to be the prophets, some to be the evangelists, and some to be the pastors and teachers." The one article covers both "pastors" and "teachers," strongly suggesting that they are being considered together here. There are also Greek words that form a bit of an untranslatable marker dividing the different groups (if one were to translate them, one might say, "on the one hand... on the other hand..." except that there can be as many "hands" as needed). Once again, this marker appears four times, not five, grouping the final two words together.

So is it one group with two names, or two groups that are similar enough to be thought of together in this context? I would suggest that it doesn't really matter. Those with this gift ministering in a church setting are likely to be called pastors--but as we will see, a primary responsibility of the pastor is teaching. Those with this gift ministering in an academic setting are likely to be called teachers--but a teacher should teach with a "pastor's heart"; that is, with genuine concern for the spiritual development of each student. The two aspects of the gift go hand in hand.

I have done a much more in-depth study on the biblical role of a pastor, entitled "What Is a Pastor?" (Quodlibet Online Journal 2.2). It seems clear to me that the term "pastor" is the same thing as is meant by "elder" (or "presbyter") and "overseer" (or "bishop"). As the church was beginning to coalesce and the role of apostles was increasingly less direct, terms were needed to describe leaders in the church who were not apostles. Generally speaking, "elder" came from a Jewish background--leaders among Jews were often called elders--while the Greek term translated "overseer" or "bishop" was the preferred Greek term for a leader. "Pastor" literally means "shepherd," and picks up on Jesus' frequent shepherding analogies in His teaching, as well as the Old Testament use of "shepherd" as an analogical term to describe Israelite rulers (it was also used of other Middle Eastern rulers as well), especially in Ezekiel 34, a highly instructive passage.

When one looks at the passages referring to elders, overseers/bishops, and shepherds, when used metaphorically in Jesus' teachings and in the Old Testament, a pattern emerges:

God the Father and Jesus the Messiah are together the preeminent Shepherd/Pastor over all of the people of God; the authority of local pastors derives from this divine authority.

The focus of the ministry of the pastor is the welfare of the sheep--that is, the people who come under the leadership of that pastor. The pastor's work is not one of self-expression or self-gratification, but rather care for the sheep.

The conduct of the pastor is to be exemplary. Much of what the Bible discusses regarding church leadership in general has to do with godly behavioral characteristics. Pastors teach as much by how they live their lives as by what they say.

The content of the pastor's ministry is, largely, teaching. This becomes clear as one examines the pastoral epistles and sees how many times they focus on teaching and teachers. The one major difference between the qualifications of deacons and elders or overseers in the Pastoral Epistles is that the latter group need to be "able to teach" (1 Tim. 3:2, 5:17; Tit. 1:9). A large component of this teaching ministry is protection of the people of God from false teachers (1 Tim. 1:3-7, 4:1-3). Although this protection may come partially in the attempt to silence false teaching (1 Tim. 1:3, Tit. 1:11), to a larger extent it comes as a result of patient explanation of biblical truth and drawing people's attention to topics that are important, rather than those that are spurious.

Going back to the context of the verse we are studying, Ephesians 4:11, it is worth noting that the goal of what we may now see as a "four-fold" ministry--the spiritual maturity of the Body (4:13)--has as its result the effect of protecting the people from being "blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming" (4:14).

The role of the Pastor/Teacher largely comes on the heels of the other three groups: Apostles (church-planting missionaries) establish the church in a new territory, Prophets proclaim God's truth directly and draw people back to the ways of God, Evangelists (soul-winning missionaries) reach the unreached and bring them to saving faith, and Pastor/Teachers care for the Body, teaching by example and verbal instruction the truths of God's word and the right way to live. It may be that Barnabas is the best example of a Pastor/Teacher that Scripture gives us. More or less a washout on the mission field--when the going got tough, Saul, suddenly called Paul, stepped to the fore (Acts 13:6-12)--Barnabas had done his work for years previously, sticking his neck out and nurturing a former persecutor of the Church, Saul of Tarsus. Without Barnabas's patient instruction and godly example, would Paul have been able to be the foremost missionary the world has ever seen?

N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope

Keith Schooley — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:40:00 +0000

I read N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope last summer, and it made a big impact on me. The following article is a summary of what stood out to me in that book. Wright argues that Evangelical theology tends to gloss over the Resurrection of Jesus, and thus also glosses over the doctrines of physical resurrection of believers and the renewal of the earth that is promised in Romans 8 and Revelation 21. He writes that by recovering the centrality of the Resurrection to our understanding of faith, we can also recover a sense of purpose in our lives in present-day reality.

The Problem with a Cross-Centered Theology

Those who know me know that I wear a cross signet ring. It's actually my college class ring; I wanted something that I would want to continue wearing, and not just put in a box somewhere, so my parents bought me a plain signet ring and had a cross etched in it. It was intended as a statement of my faith, as an opportunity to share Jesus with others.

The cross has been the main symbol of Christianity for most of its history. Not all of its history--it wasn't until crucifixion stopped being actively used by the Romans as a means of torture and death that Christians began widely using it as the symbol of their faith. But it has long been Christianity's predominant symbol. Every church has at least one. Most Christian organizations use it in their logos. And it's not hard to see why. What Jesus did on the cross for us is central to what we believe.

Most Christians, if asked what they believe, would offer something like this: "God created human beings to be in a relationship with him, but we messed that up through sin, so he came to the earth as a human being--Jesus--and lived a sinless life and then died on a cross in our place, so we could be in a relationship with him again and spend eternity with him in heaven." You'll notice that the cross is at the very turning point of this statement of faith. It's completely central.

Now, although I agree with every part of that statement, there's something I think is missing--and it's more significant than simply the fact that the whole thing needs a lot of fleshing out and explanation. What's missing is the resurrection of Jesus. Having had this issue brought to my attention by N. T. Wright's fantastic book, Surprised by Hope, it is astonishing to me that any statement of Christian faith could ever be made without reference to the Resurrection. And yet I wonder how many people, reading that statement the first time through, noticed its absence or considered it significant.

Of course, you could tuck it in there, right between "place" and "so," and it would fit. And Christians do believe in the Resurrection and do think that affirming the Resurrection is important. My problem isn't that Christians don't believe in Jesus' resurrection; it's that the Resurrection ends up being an afterthought in the way most of us think about our faith.

Think about it: we view the central problem as sin, and the fact that a holy God can't simply let sin slide. The penalty--death--must be paid. The solution is a substitute: if someone who doesn't deserve to die dies in our place, then we don't have to die ourselves. The crime is paid for. And that's what Jesus did on the cross. But notice what we've done: Jesus' work on the cross solves the problem. When He said, "It is finished," it really was--that is to say, the whole problem is solved. It's like the end of a detective story: once the detective solves the crime, the story is, for all intents and purposes, over. The technical term for the ending of a story, after its climax, is denouement. It's really just window dressing, and a lot of modern writers try to get rid of it entirely, and just end at the climax. You can think up your own window dressing, imagine how it came out on your own.

That's what happens to the Resurrection, in the typical way of looking at it. It happened, and we believe in it, but it's not really crucial to the story. If it hadn't happened, it wouldn't really matter, because the sin problem is already taken care of at the Cross. We try to make it matter, by saying that it demonstrated that Jesus really was who he said he was, or that it proves that there is life after death. But whatever it demonstrated, or whatever it proves, really doesn't matter in the end--the real work had already been done.

But that's not how the Apostle Paul saw it. "if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith" (1 Cor. 15:14). For Paul, the Resurrection is absolutely central. All of the gospel messages preached in the book of Acts make the Resurrection central. What Jesus did on the Cross was very important. But the biblical writers seem to indicate that what he did by rising from the dead was equally important, maybe even more so.

In my next few blog posts, I'm going to sketch out why I think the Resurrection needs to occupy a more central place in our theology. And I'm wondering if we've missed a rather obvious symbol of the faith. The world has seen us as people of the cross for a long time. Maybe it's time we need to be seen as people of the empty tomb.

What Resurrection Means

In order to understand the importance of the Resurrection, we first have to understand what the first-century views of resurrection were. What were the prior expectations of the people who first heard the story of Jesus' resurrection?

In the non-Jewish Greco-Roman world, there were two predominant views of the afterlife. The first was the basic materialist stance that there is no afterlife. The Greek Epicurean philosophical school would be an example of this stance. Although construed somewhat differently than contemporary philosophers and scientists would use the terms, this point of view would hold that the material universe is all there is. There is no "spirit" apart from the body in which there is any consciousness, hence there is no continuing existence once the physical body ceases to function. Dead is dead.

The other major strand of Greco-Roman thought is well represented by Plato. There is a continued existence after death; in fact, this is what earthly existence longs for--a release from bondage to the body and the corrupted physical realm. We are essentially spirits trapped in bodies, longing for release. You may recognize this point of view--many Christians' view of "heaven" owes more to Plato than to the Bible. This earthly life is something merely to be endured until we escape it to live in heaven forevermore with God. More on this later.

For now, the relevant point is that no one in the Greco-Roman world was expecting anything like physical resurrection. It would either have been considered impossible or pointless. The spirit either didn't exist apart from the physical body, or if it did, the last thing it wanted was to be re-embodied. (The concept of reincarnation did exist, but this is different from resurrection--it is embodiment in a different body, not the same one, and was not considered the goal of existence, but rather a punishment or a continued stage on the way to fully-realized--that is, disembodied--spirituality.)

But that's the non-Jewish world. Christianity arose in a Jewish cultural context. What did the Jews believe regarding resurrection?

Once again, there were two predominant views. And once again, one of them precluded resurrection. The Sadducean group, which dominated the Temple priesthood, rejected resurrection (as well as angels and providence). While present-day Christians tend to scoff at this point of view, it actually accords with the Sadducees' generally more strict reading of the Hebrew scriptures, which must be admitted to have little to say on the afterlife in general and resurrection specifically.

On the other hand, the Pharisaical group which dominated the rabbis in the synagogues did believe in resurrection. However, this resurrection was not expected to occur until the eschaton--the final culmination of history. After the death of Lazarus in John 11, his sister Martha expresses this point of view in her dialogue with Jesus: "Martha answered, 'I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day'." So yes, there were Jews who believed in resurrection, but not in present-day reality--only at the end of history. It's also worth noting that resurrection played no part in Jewish messianic expectations. Messiah was to bring about the liberation of Israel as a nation and reestablish the throne of David; neither the death of the messiah nor a resurrection was envisioned.

What does this all mean with regard to Jesus' resurrection? Quite simply, it means that the usual explanations for why Jesus' resurrection is important are wrong, or at least beside the main point.

Christians generally view Jesus' resurrection in terms of God vindicating Jesus, demonstrating that he was the Messiah, God in flesh, and innocent of any crime or sin for which he should die. But while this all is true, it reflects backward reasoning: if we come to trust in Jesus and believe that he was God in human flesh, then his resurrection takes on all these meanings. But resurrection itself would not have demonstrated any of these things to anyone in the first-century world. Remember, nobody was expecting anyone to be resurrected--not in the Gentile world at all, and not in the Jewish world in the here-and-now.

But for those who were hoping for resurrection "at the last day," as Martha was, Jesus' resurrection would have meant something mind-blowing and worldview-changing: that something that had been hoped for at the end of time was a present reality, right now. It was a glimpse into a deeply longed-for future, breaking into the present. Evidently, when Jesus (and before him, John the Baptist) were proclaiming that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 3:2; 4:17), it really was.

Everything they had ever hoped for was beginning to come to pass. Right now.

What Resurrection Implies

What Jesus' resurrection meant was that what the Jews (at least some of them) were hoping for at the end of time was breaking into present-day reality. The technical way of saying this is that their eschatological hopes were being realized. Imagine everything you've ever longed for beginning to come true. That's what was going on for the first believers, the ones who saw Jesus after the resurrection.

But what did this imply to them? So far, just one guy had come back from the dead (I'm not counting Lazarus and other resuscitations--I mean permanent resurrection), and he didn't even stick around all that long. Granted, Jesus' followers would certainly be happy to see him return from death, but why would that have created a worldwide movement?

Well, it didn't simply mean that there was life after death after all, and that if we believe in Jesus then we can live with him in heaven forever after we die--and yet that is what most contemporary Christians believe today. That idea reflects the view that we are really spirits trapped in earthly bodies in a corrupt world, and what we are longing for is release from this corrupt world so we can live spiritually--that is, non-physically--forever, all of which reflects Platonic philosophy more than it does the Bible.

The biblical view is that Jesus' resurrection was not an isolated incident, however pivotal or unique. It was rather the spearheading of a new age coming into being in our present one. "But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man" (1 Cor 15:20-21). "Firstfruits" is an agricultural term meaning the beginning of a harvest. Its importance is not so much in itself as in the promise of the full harvest to come. The "harvest" of which Jesus was the firstfruits is not merely a harvest of souls to be saved (although it includes that) because Jesus didn't need saving. Jesus' resurrection was the firstfruits of a new age, a new creation, what Jesus and John the Baptist had called the Kingdom. God's plan is simply much larger than simply rescuing a few of us sinners off of this wicked old earth. He plans to bring into resurrection life the whole first creation:

The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. (Romans 8:19-24)

Christians generally look forward to being with God eternally in heaven, often looking to Revelation 21:1 for a new heaven and a new earth (although they are not really much interested in the new earth), especially noting that "the first heaven and the first earth had passed away." Let's not worry about this world, because God's going to scrap it anyway. But in the above passage from Romans, creation itself is eagerly longing and groaning like a woman in labor, not for its own destruction, but rather for liberation from its bondage to decay and for being brought into freedom and glory. God isn't going to scrap the old creation and start fresh, any more than he was willing to scrap us sinful human beings and start fresh with a new Adam and Eve on Venus. Just as God's desire is to renew and transform us, his plan is to renew and transform the old creation. If you will, the "new heaven and the new earth" are going to be made out of the old ones. God's not opposed to physical reality. He created it.

That's where the resurrection of our bodies fits in. Why are we going to be resurrected? Because we're going to inhabit the new physical reality that God is going to create by redeeming and transforming the old one. And just as we are still ourselves, but redeemed, purified, and changed, so also the creation will still be the same creation, but redeemed, purified, and changed. The last chapter of the Bible doesn't speak of us going off to heaven, ridding ourselves of this awful physical universe once and for all; rather, it speaks of the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven to earth. It's not us going off to live with God, but God coming down and inhabiting earth with us. The passage is worth quoting:

I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God." (Revelation 21:2-3)

God's plan is to come to earth and be with us eternally in an incorruptible world which will be born out of the world we are presently in. While you may go off to be with God in heaven after you die--for a while--your ultimate destiny, if your trust is in Jesus, is to be an eternal resident of this world, once God is through remaking it. Jesus first, and then those of us who trust in him, are the beginnings of that new creation. And therefore, Paul's challenge to us is to live as though we were resurrected people right now:

Where, O death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:55-58)

Here's the point: if we know we're going to be resurrected, we need to begin living as though we were resurrected; and if we know that this present creation is going to be redeemed, then we need to live in it as though we were an agent of that transformation.

Overcoming an Objection to Physical Resurrection

One of the stumbling blocks to Christians fully embracing the biblical teaching of physical resurrection lies right in Paul's exposition of the importance of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15. Verses 42-43 read,

So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.

The stumbling point is in the contrast between "natural" and "spiritual." In post-Enlightenment rationalistic thought, "natural" means material, physical, and "spiritual" means non-material, non-physical. So even though we'll affirm the reality of resurrection because it's there in the Bible, the really relevant teaching to us is "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord" (2 Cor. 5:8). Being reunited with the body seems mostly anticlimactic.

But this is a misreading of the words "natural" and "spiritual." "Natural" is Greek ψυχικον, psychikon; it refers not to the substance of which the body is composed, but rather the nature of the motivating force behind that body's activity. The "natural" body's activity is driven by the human psyche--i.e., the mind. Similarly, the "spiritual" body does not refer to the substance (or lack of it) of which that body is composed. The Greek word is πνευματικον, pneumatikon; the motivating force behind that body's activity is the Spirit of God. Paul is not saying, "It is sown a physical body, it is raised a non-material body"; he's saying, "It is sown a mentally-motivated body, it is raised a Spiritually-motivated body."

The main difference between the natural body and the spiritual body is not that the spiritual body is immaterial; it is that the spiritual body is imperishable, glorious, powerful, and motivated by God's Spirit. The main physical aspect of this resurrection body is that it is incorruptible, not subject to decay; but then, the entire creation will be incorruptible as well: "the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God" (Romans 8:21). Once again, we are confronted not with disembodied spirits sitting on clouds with harps, but with a renewed physical creation. The picture is more like Adam and Eve pre-fall than it is like what we generally think of as ghosts or spirits--or even, dare I say, the mental pictures most of us have involving heaven.

As I write this, I can look out my window on a beautiful spring day. The sun is shining, the trees are in bloom--I really should get outside today. I'm blessed to live in a place where I can see at least a little of the beauty of nature. But think of the difference in my perspective, if I think on the one hand, "This is beautiful, but temporary and corrupt. The real thing God has for me waits on the other side of death, or the Rapture. One glad morning, when this life is o'er, I'll fly away," or if I think on the other hand, "This is beautiful, and in some sense, this is the home God has given me forever. God is going to remake it, reshape it, remove the sting of sin and death; I may leave it for a while, but eventually I will be brought back, and therefore, in some sense, I am an eternal being in an eternal place."

If you are a disciple of Jesus, then today think of yourself as an eternal being in an eternal place, and see if it doesn't change your perspective on things.

"Your Labor Is Not In Vain"

To wrap up this summary of what was memorable to me in N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope, I'd like to focus on a particular verse that Wright points out as significant, and which ended up being perhaps the most significant insight in the book for me. It occurs at the end of 1 Corinthians 15--that is, at the end of Paul's powerful defense of physical resurrection as a necessary future event, and of his description of the resurrection body. In verse 58, Paul writes:

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

Here's the point: the traditional view of the afterlife, with us being whisked off into heaven and this present creation being destroyed, tends to leave a futile view of our actions in the present life. It's often said in Evangelical churches that the only thing that really counts is how many people we bring along with us into heaven. Although it's seldom directly stated, we're left to infer that everything else in life is pretty much just marking time until we die or until Jesus comes.

Even a view that takes resurrection seriously can be liable to the same distortion. This present life is just marking time. God's going to remake both our bodies and our world, so what we do in this lifetime doesn't ultimately have any value. What we do to this world, or to our bodies, might be regrettable--as when we give ourselves cancer through smoking or a poor diet, or poke a hole in the bottom of the ocean and let it spew oil into our oceans--but it's ultimately unimportant. God's going to right it all.

But that's not at all the point of view that Paul is espousing in this verse. Rather than ending his treatise on resurrection by saying, "Therefore, relax. Continue trusting in Jesus, and know that God will resurrect your bodies and remake this world," Paul specifically affirms to his readers the value of their work in the Lord. In some sense, our work is going to endure. What we do in the Lord's service, in this present fallen world, matters.

Most Evangelicals would see "your labor in the Lord" as referring, in some sense, to evangelism. What Paul means here is that our labor produces new followers of Jesus, who will then be resurrected and inhabit God's new creation: in that way, our labor is not in vain. That is how it endures.

Certainly that is at least part of what Paul means here. But it's hard to see that that's everything that he means. For one thing, there's very little about overt evangelism either in the context of this verse, or in 1 Corinthians in general--which deals much more with Christian character and behavior than it does with evangelism--or, to be honest, in the Pauline epistles in general. This is not to say that evangelism is unimportant; but taking "your labor in the Lord" to refer exclusively to evangelism is an assumption that has to be imported into the text. You can't get it out of what Paul writes here.

It seems much more likely to me that "your labor in the Lord" refers to anything and everything that we do in this life because we are followers of Jesus--whether it's fighting against the slave trade, conducting one's business in an honorable and charitable manner, working toward conservation of the environment, reaching people for Christ, standing against abortion, helping those who are oppressed, sharing grace and mercy to people, opposing unjust business or governmental practices, or anything else we do to live out Jesus' life in us. It all matters. It's all going to carry over into the future creation that God has envisioned for us.

As a matter of fact, it might be instructive to look at how prophecies in the Old Testament were fulfilled. Let's take the one about the city of Tyre in Ezekiel 26. While Ezekiel makes clear that God is accomplishing the judgment against Tyre, the actual fulfillment occurred through the actions of human beings. God worked through people, including some who were not following him and were not consciously trying to fulfill the prophecy, to accomplish his work.

While the new heavens and the new earth spoken of in Revelation 21:1 and Romans 8:21-22 certainly seem to involve a supernatural transformation, there may be in some sense a redemptive aspect to what we do in this age. Perhaps, instead of God just speaking the word and the world's transformation happening, we will be a part of it happening. Perhaps we are supposed to be a part of it happening even now. And maybe that's the way in which our labor is not in vain.

"Salt" and "Light" An Exercise in Biblical Allegory

Keith Schooley — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:00:00 +0000

Abstract: An attempt to find a methodological principle to control the interpretation of analogies in Scripture, with a focus on salt and light in Matthew 5:13-16 as a case study. Not all properties of an image used as a metaphor are fair game to be "spiritually applied."

Jesus' metaphorical use of salt and light to describe his disciples in Matthew 5:13-16 is one of the most familiar illustrations in scripture. It is also one of the most mishandled in interpretation, especially in interactive teaching settings. The usual procedure, often spelled out in Sunday school and youth group curricula, is for the participants to offer as many different properties and uses of salt and light as they can think of, then to find a "spiritual application" by way of analogy to each of these properties and uses. The leader is then to encourage the group to exhibit those applications in their own lives.

The problem with this type of interpretation, which amounts to allegorizing, is twofold. First, there is no control on the interpretations allowable. It is usually brought up that salt flavors food, acts as a preservative, was a valuable commodity, etc. But since there is no control--i.e., any property of salt is allowable--we may presumably find a "spiritual application" for the fact that salt is a stable crystalline compound, composed of the two highly reactive elements sodium and chlorine. Light illuminates darkness, makes vision possible, creates heat, etc.; we may again attempt to find a spiritual application for the fact that light acts both as a wave and a particle, and travels in a vacuum at a constant speed of about 186,000 miles per second. It may be objected that during Jesus' lifetime such scientific facts were unknown, but surely divine intelligence knew them when putting the metaphors in the Bible and knew that twenty centuries later we would learn them. At any rate, although such obscure facts usually do not come up in the context of an informal Bible study, the point is that there is nothing in the method to exclude them, precisely because the implied assumption is that everything about salt and light is somehow analogous to some aspect of the Christian life.

This brings us to the second problem with this type of interpretation: it ignores what the author (and in this case the speaker, Jesus) intended by the images used. It is not apparent, or even intrinsically likely, that Jesus meant that his disciples were similar to salt or light in every possible respect. Analogies normally resemble their objects in only one respect, or in a limited range of respects; usually the relationship is made clear by the context of the analogy itself. Therefore, the proper goal of interpretation in this case should be to discover in what way or ways Jesus' disciples are similar to salt and light. This is a point unfortunately lost even in some excellent commentaries.[1]

The first thing that should be noticed is that the examples are parallel. After the analogy itself is made, the point made about both of them is that they can be made ineffectual, and lose any benefit that they may otherwise offer. Therefore, the most reasonable assumption we may make is that both of these analogies are being used to illustrate a single point. If then salt and light are analogous to us in a similar way, they would therefore be similarly analogous to each other. This immediately precludes most of the interpretations we may make based on the properties or uses of light or salt individually--for these two substances are distinctly dissimilar to one another. Jesus is making a single point in these verses, reinforced by using two analogies, but a single point is being made.

That single point is evident by what is done with the analogies: in both cases, the useful property of the element involved is lost or made ineffectual. In verse 13, the salt "loses its saltiness"; in verse 14, the possibility of the lamp being lit and "put under a bowl" is envisioned (in the form of a rejection). Therefore, whatever it is that salt and light do, there are situations in which they are prevented from doing it. That is the point: believers can become ineffectual in this world, and Jesus is warning them against it.

In the case of the salt, losing its saltiness makes it worthless (v. 13). Nothing can be done with it; it can only be disposed of. "How can it be made salty again?" is a rhetorical question; there is no answer. The point is that unsalty salt is useless to anyone--therefore precautions were taken to protect salt from humidity, which would leech it out.[2] Putting a lamp under a bowl (v. 15) similarly makes it useless. No one can benefit from the light of a covered lamp. But everyone benefits from a lamp "on its stand" that "gives light to everyone in the house." It is for this reason--the common need for light--that "a city on a hill cannot be hidden." Jesus goes on in verse 16 to apply the analogy directly to his disciples: "let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven."

Herein lies the key to both analogies: letting one's light shine before people somehow involves letting them see one's good works--not in the ostentatious manner of the Pharisees (cf. Matt. 6:1-18), but in a way that gives glory to the Father in heaven. That is, what we are as believers--the fact that we are believers, and what that means in terms of what God is doing in our lives--must come out, find expression in our daily lives. This shouldn't have to be forced, but should be natural--as natural as a lamp being placed where it gives light, or salt being salty. Yet there is a danger that this will not be the case--else Jesus' warning loses its import.

If there is a difference in Jesus' handling of the two analogies, it would be that while the salt is actually lost, the lamp is only covered (although a covered flame, starved for oxygen, would presumably go out soon enough). Jesus may be saying that a disciple's testimony can be made ineffectual either by assimilation to the world (the salt losing its saltiness) or by hiding it from the world (the lamp covered by a bowl). But if such a distinction is made, it should be made on the basis of what Jesus actually does with the analogies, not on the basis of the intrinsic properties of salt and light themselves.

Examples of such overapplication of analogies are legion, and constitute a common fallacy in biblical interpretation. They have in some circumstances contributed to unbiblical Christian practice. One of the most common examples is that of "shepherd," applied (first metaphorically to Jesus) to Christian ministers. Everything that a shepherd does for his sheep is applied to the work of the pastor: feeding them, protecting them from enemies, leading them to water, etc. "Spiritual applications" can again be found for all of these aspects of shepherding. But careful study of how "shepherd" is used metaphorically in scripture indicates that it is used, in the Old Testament, never of the prophet and priest, but of the king; i.e., it is a leadership quality, not a prophetic and priestly one. In the New Testament, it is used primarily of leadership through teaching. Overapplying the shepherding analogy may be convenient for those parishioners who aren't interested in being anything but sheep, or for leaders who prefer to control every aspect of their people's lives, but it isn't biblical. It contributes to the overwork of pastors, the lack of responsible body ministry, and the general negligence of average Christians to grow into responsible positions of service.

In both academic and pastoral worlds, there is substantial pressure to come up with interpretations that are novel, creative, different. We want to pull out of a passage everything that may be gleaned from it. Unfortunately, we may at times overinterpret, discover meanings that were never intended by the writer, or the Holy Spirit. We need the discipline to distinguish between interpretations that are supported by the text and those that aren't.

Notes

[1] E.g., Carson, D.A., Matthew, in The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, ed. by Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984), p. 138-39.

[2] Salt could lose its saltiness if a cake of salt containing impurities had the actual salt leeched out by humidity (Carson, 138). This is relevant to the extent that it makes the image itself understandable to modern people, for whom salt losing its saltiness is not a common occurrence. It would not do, however, to spiritualize the impurities, the leeching process, etc.

Looking for the Pearl

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Schooley) — Sat, 21 Mar 2015 15:16:56 +0000

Here's a song I wrote years ago and finally got the ability to record it the way it should sound. Download it by clicking here, or play through the audio player below.

Looking for the Pearl

Words and Music by Keith Schooley

Bearded men stand in water and sand
Ignoring the cold
Gnarled hands clutch metal pans
Searching for gold

Hungry eyes under starry skies
Seek lips in the dark
Fingers touch, aching arms clutch
Coaxing fire from a spark

But it's fool's gold and a cold flame
Fool's gold and a deadly game

Keep on looking for the pearl
Keep on seeking
Keep on looking for the pearl

Keep on looking for the pearl
Keep on seeking
Keep on looking for the pearl

Pinstripes meet in an executive suite
To extend their domains
A senator's bought so they don't get caught
With hands on the reins

But it's fool's gold and a cold flame
Fool's gold and a ruined name

Keep on looking for the pearl
Keep on seeking
Keep on looking for the pearl

Keep on looking for the pearl
Keep on seeking
Keep on looking for the pearl

A pearl in a field, bought with innocent blood
A lamb on a cross in the darkness
One perfect pearl, one heavenly lamb
Without spot, without blemish

Keep on looking for the pearl
Keep on seeking
Keep on looking for the pearl

Keep on looking for the pearl
Keep on seeking
Keep on looking for the pearl

Keep on looking for the pearl

Recorded using Reaper digital audio workstation.
Recording Copyright 2013 Keith Schooley. All rights reserved.
Lyrics and Music Copyright 1988 Keith Schooley. All rights reserved.

Gratitude

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Schooley) — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 03:00:18 +0000

This message was preached on Sunday, November 23, 2008, about the thing we should all be most grateful for.

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The Church on the Edge of Revival

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Schooley) — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 03:01:41 +0000

This message is more deeply personal than most of the ones I have given. I shared it at Red Oaks Assembly of God on July 20, 2008. The recording begins rather abruptly; the first sentence is, "I have been in the church that was on the edge of revival all my life." I pray the message is a blessing to you.

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Living the Christian Life without Christ

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Schooley) — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 03:07:28 +0000

A message on the temptation to live the Christian life as a philosophy, rather than a life-giving relationship with Jesus.

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Nick at Nite

noreply@blogger.com (Keith Schooley) — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 03:35:42 +0000

This message was preached in April of 2006, on John 3:1-21. God bless.

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