Wry Thoughts About Religion

Psychic Mediums and Christian Believers

2026-03-09T13:10:00.000-05:00

What is the difference between psychic mediums and Christian believers? Or is there a difference? A medium claims to have an inherent ability to communicate with the insubstantial spirits of the dead and a Christian-believer claims to have the ability to communicate with a divine insubstantial spirit (that is to say, God) through a spirit (Rom 8:26–27). The only evidence offered by either to prove their claims is their public confidence that said communication has taken place. The voices of the deceased arise (if at all) apparently in the mind of the medium and the voice of God arises (if at all) apparently in the mind of the one who prays. We outsiders are only privy to their claims and cannot listen in on their conversations or probe their minds for evidence of the “voice” messages they claim to have received from beyond the grave.

In the Christian Old Testament one who was thought to communicate with the dead was called a medium (Hebrew ‘ob) or necromancer (1 Sam 28:7). Generally, Bible dictionaries treat such figures and practices under the category of magic.¹ In general, in antiquity, nature itself was thought to be under the control of both gods and demons; one who practiced necromancy was thought to be in collusion with the dark spirits of the universe.² Thus, the Bible condemns those who were believed to practice magic by means of communication with the spirits of the dead³ but encourages those who through the Spirit seek communication with the God of Hebrew faith through prayer. Necromancy is defined by one Bible dictionary as a “[form] of divination using spirits of the dead to foretell the future.⁴ In 1 Sam 28, for example, King Saul solicits a medium, a woman of Endor, to call up the shade of the prophet Samuel to consult him as to “what he should do” (1 Sam 28:15 RSV).

In the New Testament there are several encounters of the apostles with those who practiced the magic arts involving divination through an insubstantial spirit and soothsaying (a person who claims to foretell the future through various means).⁵ Apparently there were books to consult in the practice of magic (Acts 19:19).

Today, the practice of necromancy has edged its way into modern culture to the point of respectability on the basis (it seems) that the medium provides a service to society (the medium brings comfort to those who have lost loved ones). The names of many of the mediums who currently have a television presence, or otherwise public persona, are known and consulted by many in society from presidents to dishwashers.⁶ A glance at the internet shows that contemporary Christian denominations overwhelmingly condemn the medium’s practice of necromancy, soothsaying, and the magic arts in general, but resolutely encourage Christians to maintain a constant practice of prayer.

With this observation I have come full circle to where I began: What is the difference between a psychic medium and a Christian believer, if any? The psychic medium claims an ability for communicating with insubstantial dead spirits and often uses a spiritual guide. The Christian believer claims an ability for communicating with an insubstantial divine spirit through the medium of an insubstantial holy spirit—that sounds rather similar to my ear. But absent any evidence, the claims of each are unsubstantiated, no matter how comforting the practice of each may be. At best, the claims of both could be genuine. At worst, their claims could be an elaborate scam, or each could be deceiving themselves. The bottom line is: do we share the cosmos with insubstantial spirits good and bad, and do the dead still “exist” in some kind of spirit “substance” somewhere?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Joanne K. Kuemmerlin-McLean, ABD 4.468–71, especially, 469 under A.1.g and h.

²Kimberly B. Stratton, “Magic,” NIDB 3.767–69. (767).

³For example, in Hebrew Bible: Lev 19:31; 20:6; 20:27; Deut 18:10–12; 1 Sam 28; 1 Chron 10:13—14.

⁴Joann Scurlock, “Necromancy,” NIDB 4.248.

⁵Acts 16:16–18; Acts 8:9–13.

⁶Here are the names of a few of the better-known mediums: https://www.keen.com/articles/psychic/well-known-psychic-mediums

https://www.aol.com/psychic-stars-rising-stars-netflix-135700140.html

Ash Wednesday and Lent

2026-02-18T07:29:00.000-06:00

Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, happens on Feb 18 this year. It is a church event that begins a forty-day season of penitence and fasting leading up to the celebration of Easter. On Ash Wednesday ashes are marked on worshipper's foreheads to symbolize they are beginning the Lenten journey. Lent (the word means Springtime) is one of those religious observances of the Christian Church worldwide that I did not experience in my youth.¹ Although some churches in the Anabaptist tradition do observe it,² the Baptist church of my youth did not (First Baptist Church, Greenville, Mississippi, 1940-52). On the other hand, the small Baptist church that I now attend (Grace Baptist, Gladstone, Missouri) does observe it—ashes and all.³

In the fourth century the church invented Lent institutionalizing it with prayer, fasting, and almsgiving as its basis and incorporating these religious acts into the Easter celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. Lent has been practiced as 40 days of self-denial, altruism, and spiritual renewal preceding Easter. The Lenten season is promoted as a time of religious renewal, incorporating, as it does, personal contemplation, simple living, and personal honesty. It begins on Ash Wednesday and extends 40 days to resurrection Sunday (this year April 5). The church modeled the 40-day period on Jesus' temptation by Satan in the Wilderness (Mark 1:12–13; compare Matt 4–11/Luke 4:1–13 from the Q tradition). Only Matthew describes it as a period of fasting, however. Luke says that Jesus did not eat during this period. Mark says nothing about food. The difference between dieting and fasting is that fasting is given a religious connotation.

The earliest date for the observance of Lent in Christianity is 325 CE, following the Council of Nicaea, although the custom of fasting in connection with Holy Week goes back to the second century.⁴Thus, Lent, as such, was not a part of the religious practices of the earliest first-century Jesus-gatherings as reflected in the genuine Pauline letters, for example. Nevertheless, fasting and prayer as a religious exercise were part of the Israelite tradition and hence were practiced in Judea during the time of Jesus (Luke 2:37). In fact, "the practice of fasting is found in all religions" and was "spread across the whole of the ancient world."⁵

Matthew gives a litany of criticisms attributed to Jesus as to how some practiced praying and fasting in Matt 6:1–18. One of these criticisms can easily be applied to the modern Christian practice of Lent, specifically with respect to marking one's face with ashes to indicate that one is observing the Lenten practice of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving:

And whenever you fast do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Matt 6:17–18 NRSV)

Do some make a parade of their almsgiving? Jesus criticized that practice, as well (Matt 6:1-4).⁶It is a mystery to me why some churches continue the practice of Ash Wednesday and persist in its observance of ashes on the forehead in the light of these rather pertinent remarks attributed to Jesus.

Another aspect of Lent, mentioned earlier in this essay, is that of self-denial, likely derived from the idea of denying oneself food. The earliest Jesus-followers did practice a kind of self-denial, but it wasn't like the Lenten practice of denying oneself a few things one enjoys for a short period, like not drinking beer or not eating sweets during Lent, for example. Paul described his commitment to Christ as an all-consuming life-commitment; everything else by comparison he considered trash, loss, rubbish (Phil 3:7–11; Luke 9:23–24). Compared to Paul's idea of self-denial, the contemporary observance of Lent pales in comparison—the personal sacrifices are too little, the time frame too short.⁷

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent

²https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anabaptists. Greenville First Baptist belonged to the Southern Baptist Convention.

³Grace Baptist Church belongs to the American Baptist Convention.

⁴https://groundworkonline.com/blog/a-short-version-of-the-long-history-of-lent

⁵J. Behm, "νῆστις" [nēstis, fasting], vol. 4.26 in G. Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (G. Bromiley, trans.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967).

⁶Hedrick, http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=Alms

⁷This essay appeared first on March 24, 2025. It appears here again edited and expanded: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=Lent

Greek Mythology in the New Testament: Tartarus

2026-02-06T06:20:00.000-06:00

Here is an interesting question for my friends who regard the Bible as being literally the Word of God, Himself: Must I believe everything written in its pages to be truth revealed from God?* There may be the odd equivocation here and there, but my impression is that religious leaders, whose beliefs about the Bible correspond to what a majority of Southern Baptists are said to believe, would answer that question in the affirmative.¹

There are reports in the Bible, however, that will cause a twenty-first century human being, who has had a basic science course, to pause before answering. One incident that comes immediately to mind is God causing the sun to remain at its zenith in the heavens and not go down for an entire day. Practically, this means the earth pauses in its journey around the sun. The incident is reported in the book of Jashar, which is not in the Bible, but it is also found in Joshua 10:12-14, which is in the Bible. There are also many other things in the Bible that might even tax the incredulity of a generally credulous true believer.²

There is one passage, however, in Second Peter that, if pondered, just might undermine how most Baptists (and others) view the Bible (well, except for true believers, who are generally disinclined to ponder what they read).

For if God did not spare the angels who had sinned, but delivered them down captive into Tartarus in chains of nether darkness in custody until judgment…(2 Pet 2:4a, my translation)³

The word translated Tartarus is tartarōsas. It does not signify a person, place, or thing; it is a participle from the verbal form tartaroō, describing an action. In this case, "being held captive in Tartarus."

I don't know of a story in the Bible about angels, who having sinned, were cast into nether darkness into Tartarus, but the Book of Enoch has a report about sinful angels and their fate (1 Enoch 10:4, 11-12).⁴ In Greek mythology Tartarus is both an earth-God (one of the earliest primeval Gods of Greek tradition, Hesiod, Theogony,115-129) and it is also a place, the deepest location beneath the earth. It is

as far beneath the earth as heaven is above the earth; for so far is it from earth to Tartarus. For a brazen anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth; and again, a brazen anvil falling from earth nine nights and days would reach Tartarus upon the tenth. (Hesiod, Theogony, 721–725)

Tartarus is lower even than Hades. The ancient Greek poet, Homer, describes the distance from Hades down to Tartarus being, "as far beneath Hades as heaven is above earth" (Iliad 8. 16). Hades is the abode of the dead and Tartarus is reserved for the enemies of the Gods.

Hadēs, is another bolt out of the Greek mythological blue: in Greek mythology Hades is also an ancient Greek God and a location beneath the earth, where people are punished for their sins.⁵

How are believers in the Bible, as in some sense "the Word of God," supposed to handle what are standard features of Greek mythology appearing in the Bible? Are they mandated to take aspects of Greek mythology as God's Word?

What they believe about these texts does not alter what they are, however: texts written by human beings whose inspiration by God could never be investigated; texts collected by human beings whose names are lost to memory; texts translated into numerous language, human beings choosing the modern language equivalent for the Greek and the Hebrew; texts whose Hebrew and Greek words that appear in the critical text are decided by human beings (text critics) and translators by judicious comparison of the ancient manuscripts that have survived.

The truth is: the Bible is a collection of selected Hebrew and Greek texts that point toward a particular understanding of God.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Here, for example, is what Southern Baptists say that a majority of Southern Baptists believe about the Scriptures: "The Baptist Faith and Message Statement 2000," https://bfm.sbc.net/bfm2000/#i

²See Charles W. Hedrick, "Superstition, faith, and the Marginal Relevance of the Bible" in Unmasking Biblical Faiths. The Marginal Relevance of the Bible for Contemporary Religious Faith (Eugene, Or: Cascade, 2019), 1-12.

³Compare a similar translation in the Holman Christian Standard Bible, a translation that is associated with the Southern Baptists.

⁴See also Gen 5:1-4; Jude 6.

⁵And a regular word for the place of punishment in the New Testament. For example, Hadēs: Matt 11:23, 16:18, Acts 2:31, Rev 1:18. Gehenna (generally translated Hell) is another name for a place of punishment in the New Testament: Matt 10:28, Luke 12:5, Mark 9:47, Jas 3:6.

The Theological Implications of Bird Poop

2026-01-22T20:06:00.003-06:00

Does everything happen for a reason? If I said that someone survived a car crash with barely a scratch, but four others in the car were killed outright, most people, religious or not, would likely observe, “stuff happens for a reason.” Behind that observation is the popular religious belief that God micromanages the world. But if I were to ask, was there some divine reason for a bird dropping poop on my forehead rather than on my shoulder this morning, many might think that my question was silly. Nevertheless, a serious issue lies behind both situations: is anyone completely in charge of the universe?

One answer is that God is in charge and micromanages the universe. If so, everything happens for a reason. A micromanaging God would scarcely leave anything to chance. This way of reasoning leads inevitably to the conclusion that even bad things (the recent pandemic, for example) are due to God’s deliberate management. Hence, since by popular definition God can do no wrong, whatever seems bad must really be good—and that includes the bird poop on my forehead. A micromanaging God would have had good reason for the bird poop—for under the theory of divine micromanagement, God makes everything happen for a benevolent reason

Perhaps, however, God only generally manages the universe and is simply not responsible for everything that happens. Under “general” management some things are divinely manipulated but other things are simply allowed to happen for no reason at all. Under this theory the universe has been set up to work in a well-regulated way, and God only intrudes every so often for whatever reason strikes the divine fancy. For the most part things do seem to work fairly well in our world. The world turns with general regularity and only an occasional glitch or two (cancer and destructive tornadoes come to mind). This theory raises the question: how can we ever really be certain what is caused by God, what is part of the regular pulse of the universe, and what is a glitch in the system? The bird poop is well accommodated by this explanation: it is just one of those billions of little things that never register on the divine radarscope, or are just part of the regular pulse of the universe where things happen for no particular reason—like a leaf falling off a tree or bird droppings. I simply happened to look up at an opportune moment this morning at the precise time the bird pooped. Such occurrences are part of the regular design of things, for leaves fall from trees and birds poop all over the place. But under this theory one can never be sure of anything God does or does not do.

It is also possible that God has chosen to be an observer of events in a universe designed to run itself, more or less—or worse God has gone missing. One may well ask, how is that possible? God created the world, so why would he abandon it? Good question! But since we cannot even prove that God exists, how could we possibly know whether God is missing? A missing God, however, does make a kind of perverted sense of our human situation, and could account for natural disasters and unconscionable human suffering (cancer, tsunamis, and hurricanes come to mind)—in short, no one is minding the store. Bird poop on the forehead makes excellent sense in such a world. A God absent for the big things could scarcely be expected to be around for the little things.

Perhaps we have simply misunderstood God’s character. If God were a bit devious, it could explain the general regularity of the cosmos and its blessings when things work without the glitches, such as natural disasters, the tragedies of human disease, and fatal accidents. In short, God may be prone to be a bit “impish,” so to speak. Certain passages in the Bible seem to support such a theory, at least the early Israelites and Christians must have thought so by some of the ways they portrayed God (the Book of Job comes to mind). Bird poop on the forehead is precisely the kind of thing one might expect from a mischievous God.

Of course, it is always possible there is no God. The only difference between this possibility and the last is that human tragedy and natural disaster could not be caused by a nonexistent God, but must be the result of randomness in the universe that never had a manager of any sort. We would be alone in a sort of well-regulated universe—except for the occasional glitch. Such a situation accommodates regularity, natural disasters, and bird poop on the forehead.

The five possibilities for explaining bird poop and divine management of the universe boil down to this. Do you choose to believe in an uptight micromanager, a lax general manager, a God gone missing, a mischievous deity or in no God at all? I suppose one could choose to ignore human experience (which the Bible is), and fashion a God of one’s own imagination. I suspect that is what most of us do.*

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

*This essay appeared originally in Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Cascade: Eugene, OR, 2009), 13–15.

A Quest for the Historical Jesus is a Necessary Task

2025-12-28T17:50:00.000-06:00

This is a short response to an anonymous brief essay sent to me by Bill Yarchin on Dec. 26^th, 2025, entitled “The Quest for the Historical Jesus was a Category Error.” The essay begins this way:

The so-called quest for the historical Jesus therefore emerges not as a difficult enterprise, but simply as a misframe. From Schweitzer onward, the Jesus-quest has rested on a fundamental mistake: the assumption that texts composed as mythological literature can be mined for biographical recovery. That assumption is not merely optimistic. It is categorically confused.

I am responding to this statement: “From Schweitzer onward, the Jesus-quest has rested on a fundamental mistake: the assumption that texts composed as mythological literature can be mined for biographical recovery.” I do not accept the author’s contention that the synoptic gospels were deliberately “composed as mythological literature.” Such a statement, however, is perhaps somewhat more accurate for the Gospel of John.¹

The synoptic gospels on the other hand present themselves, at least superficially so, as historical narrative but use the conventions of myth and legend in telling their story about an Israelite man, Jesus, an artisan, the son of Mary whose brothers (James, Joses, Judas, and Simon) and sisters were described as still living at the time of his public career (Mark 6:3).² The authors locate the events of their stories in a specific geographical location—in Judea of occupied Roman Palestine at specific times: In the days of Herod, the King (Matt 2:1; Luke 1:5, Matt 14:1, Mark 6:14)); during the administration the Roman Prefect, Pilate (Matt 27:1; Mark 15); when Caesar Augustus was issuing decrees (Luke 2:1) and Quirinus was Governor of Syria (Luke 2:2). In the 15^th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being Governor of Judea, Herod Tetrarch of Galilee, Philip, Tetrarch of the regions of Ituriae & Trachonitis, and Lysanius Tetrarch of Abilene, in the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiphas (Luke 3:1–5). The location of the space and time is not the stuff of myth and legend.

Their narratives were about a man (anthropos) whom, they report, his fellow countryman knew to be one of them (Mark 15:39) and about whom they were perplexed because of the mighty deeds (dunamis, Mark 6:2) attributed to him. He is described as experiencing human emotions, fear (Mark 14:32–36), grief (Luke 12:41; Heb 5:7; John 11:35), and anger (Mark 3:5). Among other things he was known as a teacher and there are substantial numbers of sayings attributed to him by the authors of the gospels. It is a fit subject of inquiry to ask which of these sayings more probably originated with the historical man than the divinized Lord of Christian faith and which may be due to faulty memory or some other origin.

Another thing with which I disagree is the way the anonymous author has framed the goal of the quest. S/he implies that the goal of the Quest of the Historical Jesus is the “recovery” of biography (see the statement above). In my view the goal is much less than what s/he implies. The goal is to recover historical aspects of the life of the historical man, Jesus, whom the authors of the gospels describe as someone who had a “hometown” (patrida, Mark 6:1) in Roman-occupied Palestine.

For these reasons I still regard the Quest for the historical Jesus as not only possible but necessary. Or put another way, why should I not inquire into historical aspects of the man’s life, since the gospel writers have invited the inquiry by also describing him in mythological and legendary language, the goal of the inquiry being to sort out in so far as possible the man from the myth.

Jesus, a first-century Israelite man “born of a woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4), was deprived of his humanity in the fourth/fifth century creeds of the Church. Aspects of his humanity were restored to him in the nineteenth and twentieth century Quest for the Historical Jesus. And now the anonymous author would erase even the scant bits of historical information restored to his human life. Such a retreat into myth and legend as s/he proposes would require the Church to completely surrender its curiosity, incredulity, and sapience.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹See Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths, 154–163. John does not know the difference between myth and history.

²Joseph is not mentioned in Mark. In Luke Joseph was assumed to be the father of Jesus (3:23; 4:22). In John Jesus is described as the son of Joseph (1:45; 6:42).

The Second Coming of Christ

2025-12-07T08:56:00.002-06:00

Contemporary churches, particularly of a conservative disposition, have as a prominent tenet of their faith the belief that Christ will come a "second time" at some point after his crucifixion/resurrection (around 30 CE).

This expression "second coming" appears, so far as I know, only one time in the New Testament:

[H]e has appeared once for all at the climax of history to abolish sin by the sacrifice of himself. Just as it is our human lot to die once, with judgment to follow, so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of mankind, and will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him. (Heb 9:26–28, Revised English Bible)¹

Here is the same passage in another translation:

[H]e has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes the judgment, so Christ having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. (RSV)

It is interesting to me that the second coming referred to in this passage in Hebrews does not sound as if it is part of the Day of God and the final judgment of the world as it appears in Rev 20:11–15; Matt 25:31–46; 2 Pet 3:10–13. The event in Hebrews (and 1 Thess 4:13–18) seems to be a different kind of event in which Christ returns "to save those eagerly waiting for him," as Hebrews puts it (RSV). This suggests that Christ followers will not face a final judgment at the end of time.

The usual expression in the New Testament for the return of the Lord is parousia. English words used to translate parousia are: "presence, coming, advent."² Only eleven of the twenty-four uses of parousia, however, reference the coming of Jesus/Christ/Lord Jesus Christ/Lord Jesus.³ The other thirteen refer to: the coming of the Son of Man, Stephanas, Fortunatus, Achaicus, Titus, Paul's bodily presence, Paul, the Lawless One, Day of God.⁴

There are several sayings of Jesus stating that he will come again.⁵ The earliest reference to a return of Jesus, however, is 1 Thess 4:13–18, where it is usually thought to be part of the Hebrew end-time Last Judgment scenario, the Day of God/Lord (see Isaiah 2 and 9, and Amos 2:1–3:21). Second Thessalonians is a disputed Pauline letter and its writer differs from Paul's own view in the undisputed First Thessalonians letter, where Paul held that "the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night" (1 Thess 5:2–3). In 2 Thess 2:1–12, on the other hand, the author writes that certain "signs" must happen before the parousia of the Lord Jesus Christ occurs. When those signs take place, people have fair warning that the parousia is near.

There is also to be considered a different idea about the (final?) Resurrection, a view held by Hymenaeus (who was excommunicated by the "Paul" of 1 Tim 1:19–20, a disputed Epistle attributed to Paul) and Philetus (2 Tim 2:18). Hymeneus believed that "the resurrection is past already." Apparently, these men denied the future resurrection of the physical body and held the resurrection to be a spiritual event in which one has died and risen with Christ, an event depicted in the experience of baptism (Rom 6:3–5). Compare the following statement in the later Gnostic essay, Treatise on Resurrection NHC I, 45.29–46.2:

Now if we are manifest in this world wearing him, we are that one's beams, and we are embraced by him until our setting, that is to say our death in this life. We are drawn to heaven by him, like beams by the sun, not being restrained by anything. This is the spiritual resurrection, which swallows up the psychic in the same way as the fleshly.⁶

The psychē is usually thought of as the soul, or if one prefers, from this contrast, the essential inner you, as opposed to the outer fleshly you. This writer claims that the "spiritual resurrection" incorporates them both. Hence, in the early second century there were two ways of viewing the resurrection of the dead: a completely spiritual experience and the physical events at the last judgment at the end of time. Paul would have agreed in part with Hymeneus (1 Cor 15:35–50).⁷Paul anticipated a resurrection of believers that was at once bodily and spiritual. This appears to be what he describes in 1 Thess 4:13–18 and refers to in Rom 8:23.

With respect to end time speculations, it might be wise to recall that toward the end of the first century there was a widespread belief that the Roman emperor Nero (who died 68 CE) would return to the throne of Rome again. It did not happen (or maybe it hasn't happened yet?). Believing a thing to be so, however, doesn't make it so.⁸

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹The date of Hebrews is uncertain. One recent dating (Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews [Hermeneia, 1989], 9]) dates the writing somewhere between 60–80. An earlier dating (Kϋmmel, Introduction to the New Testament [rev. ed.; SCM, 1975), 403] dates the writing between 80–90.

²W. Bauer and F. W. Danker, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. (3^rd ed.; University of Chicago, 2000).

³1 Cor 15:23; 1 Thess 2:19, 3:3, 4:15, 5:23; Jas 5:7, 8; 2 Pet 1:16, 3:4; 1 John 2:28; Matt 24:1.

⁴Matt 24:27, 37, 39; 1 Cor 16:17; 2 Cor 7:6, 7; 10:10; Phil 1:26, 2:12; 2 Thess 2:1, 8, 9; 2 Pet 3:12.

⁵For example, John 24:2–3, 18. I do not include the Son of Man sayings (Matt:24:27–30; Rev 16:15; 22:7, 12, 20) as the Son of Man may be a different figure.

⁶Malcolm Peel, Treatise on the Resurrection, vol. I, 123–57 in H. Attridge, ed. Nag Hammadi Codex I (The Jung Codex) (NHS 22; 2 vols.; Brill, 1985).

⁷1 Cor 15:51–55 is likely a reference to the "Second" coming (and not the Hebrew expectation of Judgment Day). at which time dead followers of Christ will "meet the Lord in the air" to forever be with him (1 Thess 4:13–18), the moment when the believer is changed in the "twinkling of an eye," receiving their "spiritual bodies" (Rom 8:23).

⁸http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Redivivus

What Do Gods Do?

2025-11-19T09:14:00.001-06:00

There is more than one God being worshipped around the world, so answering this question will depend on knowing which God one is referring-to and what is being said about that God, since all Gods do not behave alike. With those two caveats stated, this (it seems to me) is the rule: Gods do what they are thought to do—no more, no less! Basically, God is an idea that "exists" in most human minds. Hence, God has no "objectified existence"—that is, an "over-there-ness away from me" that can be pointed-to. God "is" (only in a sense) akin to an invisible immaterial spirit—and even that is too concrete. There is no spot in the entire universe where God can be located as a "material existing thing" as a person might be. Nor is God spread pervasively throughout the universe "in all things." To think in such a way is to objectify God by identifying God in some way with living creatures and plants (flora and fauna), and inanimate objects. A saying in the Gospel of Thomas attributed to Jesus, however, says precisely that: "Split a piece of wood; I am there. Take up a stone and you will find me there" (77b; cf. Colossians 1:17). All Gods (if Gods there be) do not inhabit a space time continuum in the universe as human beings do.

Primitive societies, however, did make one-to-one identifications between their idols (things representing God) and the spirit of mana thought to infuse their idols. The Greeks and Romans also objectified their Gods, representing them in statuary and even thinking that sometimes the God had taken human form. They even believed their statuary possessed some of the essential power of the God. For example, in the council chamber of the city of Stratonicea (West Coast of Asia Minor) there stood the statues of Zeus and Hecate, which were said in a formal city decree to "perform good deeds of great power." The citizenry celebrated their miracles daily by sacrifice, burning incense, praying, and giving thanks.

Christians, on the other hand, generally have not objectified God, with one noticeable exception. In the 5^th century Nicene Creed Jesus, the Jewish sage, is elevated to "true God of true God" and worshipped and glorified. This is apparently a dual movement consisting of God becoming man and man becoming God: it may be thought of as an instance of divine spirit "infused" into flesh and blood, or the materializing of immaterial divine spirit into human matter. He was not always the Son of God (Rom 1:3).

An easier answered historical question, however, is what is God represented as doing in the Bible? That question can at least be investigated. The Bible is divided into two divisions: Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Among other things these divisions are characterized by two completely different thought worlds: Semitic (Hebrew Bible) and Hellenistic (New Testament). Hebrew Bible describes what God does from the perspective of Old Testament faiths according to Hebrew tradition, and the New Testament, drawing on the Old Testament, describes what earlier followers of Jesus believed about God's behavior from the perspective of New Testament faiths.

"Christian" ideas about what God does come much later as expressed in the early Christian creeds of the fourth and fifth centuries and later, which are not part of the biblical tradition, although Christians argue that both the Hebrew tradition and the early Jesus tradition inform Christian beliefs.

Between the two divisions of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament lies Jesus of Nazareth. The thought world (how he expressed himself) of Jesus is indebted to the Hebrew/Jewish traditions. Christian theology is partly based on the sayings of Jesus, the Jewish sage, and partly on Graeco-Roman ideas of divinity. The question becomes: according to Jesus, the Jewish sage, what does God do? The most critical sifting of all sayings attributed to Jesus in early Christian literature of the first and second centuries by the Jesus Seminar suggests that there is only modest God-language to be found in the residue of Jesus sayings that survived the lapses of memory of his earliest followers, and what was attributed to him in the piety of the later church. What little there is suggests that God is not sectarian but cares for good people and bad people alike (Matt 5:45b), even to the extent of providing for their daily needs, like feeding and clothing them (Matt 5:25–30; 7:11; 10:29–31). Jesus prayed for the daily provision of the basic necessities of life, as though he himself were indigent (Matt 5:11), and he thought that God's watch-care over the world extended to "numbering the hair on peoples' heads" and micromanaging the deaths of sparrows (Matt 10:29-31). He knows how to give good things to those who ask him (Matt 7:7–11). People of means, on the other hand, will have difficulty entering God's imperial rule (Mark 10:28; Matt 6:24).

When it comes to Gods, the biggest mistake most people make is thinking that their personal beliefs control what God does. As Job said, in a sudden flash of understanding, "Shall we receive good at the hand of God and not evil" (Job 2:10, cf. 30:26). In short, the ways of the Gods (if Gods there be) are inscrutable.¹

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹This essay first appeared on this blog on June 13, 2013. It later appeared in print in Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths (2019). It appears here again reedited and expanded.

Some Personal Perspectives on Religion

2025-11-06T06:42:00.000-06:00

This essay describes a few practical guidelines for engaging religious traditions that have evolved from my personal experience and pondering. So far as I know they are not yet writ in any book; they are personal insights to which I have come through the years. I consider them to be truisms¹for me in the practice and the study of religions. They are simply commonsense observations of which it is easy to lose sight, particularly in the practice of religion.

What is true in religion depends on whom you ask. There is no ultimate religious truth, but all people hold religious views as seem right to them. Religious truths are not verifiable and that is religion’s Achilles heel, a fact leading to competing religious truths.

Religious faith cannot reasonably demand that I believe whatever I find to be patently false or illogical. Actually, religion does make such truth claims, but, if I think about it, I am under no obligation to believe what I am told, if I find it to be incredulous.

I have discovered through the years that I have no independent knowledge of Gods, spirits, or other supernatural “entities.” I only know what I have read, what others have told me and what I have worked out for myself through my own ponderings. In general, religious professionals are too partisan, in favor of their own set of beliefs, to be trusted with giving unbiased and objective answers to questions about religion. They give answers based on the perspectives of their own personal faith.

I cannot read the minds of those closest to me; so, I never know what others are thinking; even if they tell me what they think, I have no way to verify it. The same is true of literary characters in a narrative. When a reader is told by the narrator what is going on in the mind of a character that is the author putting thoughts in the minds of his characters. In short, do not confuse the literary character of a gospel, for example, with the actual historical figure on which the literary character is based, for literary characters in a narrative are always inventions of authors.

Many believe the Bible to be a Holy collection of texts, divinely inspired. That idea cannot be proven in whole or in part. It is an opinion. What can be proven is that the Bible owes its existence to human ingenuity and labor. The role human beings played in creating the Bible is easily demonstrated. Human beings authored the ancient manuscripts that comprise the Bible. Others gathered them from the literary stream of Western civilization into collections. Scholars (called text critics) decide what the words of your Bible probably originally read from among the ancient copies of manuscripts. And human beings translate these ancient texts into modern languages. Text Critics and translators do not always agree. Hence various translations of the Bible do not agree in all particulars.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Truism: “a statement, the truth of which is obvious or well-known, commonplace.” Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4^th ed., 2002), under “truism.”

Things Jesus may have said

2025-10-19T07:25:00.002-05:00

Or perhaps he didn’t say it after all. In Luke 14:1–6 there is a certain disagreement in the manuscript tradition between manuscripts. The question is what is the earliest recoverable reading for Luke 14:5?

And he said to them, “Which of you shall have…or an ox fall into a well, will not immediately draw him/it out on the Sabbath Day?”

Here is the problem: The oldest reading for the missing word in the passage above is uios (son). It pairs up with ox (bous) to make a rather incongruous pair: if your son or your ox falls into a well will you not immediately draw him out? Of course, you would; you would break sabbath laws and rescue your son! Children are a heritage from God, the psalmist believed (Ps 127:3). You have absolutely no choice assuming you are humane, religiously inclined, and concerned about pleasing God. And the saying seems to assume that to be the case on the part of those hearing the saying.

Later copyists, however, in some manuscripts changed son (uios) to ass (onos) as making a better pairing (compare Luke 13:15) with ox (bous), or changed the word son to sheep (probaton). A few manuscripts even use all three words: son, donkey, sheep.* Since one of the canons of textual criticism is “the more difficult reading is to be preferred,” the preferred reading, text critics aver, appears to be son.**

The similar saying in Luke 13:15 reads:

You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manager, and lead it away to water it?

There is a third saying appearing in Matt 12:11, which reads:

What man of you, if he has one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out?

None of these three sayings, as related as they are in concept and style, have parallels in the other two synoptics.

The Jesus Seminar in its deliberations did not regard Luke 13:15 as originating with Jesus. On the other hand, Luke 14:5 and Matthew 12:11 were given gray ratings.***

The rationale of the Fellows of the Seminar with regard to Luke 14:5 was that the historical Jesus did not debate the finer point of Torah nor did he debate about sabbath observance (like the rabbis). “The Fellows of the Seminar strongly agreed that Jesus did engage in activities that suggested that he had little concern for sabbath observance.”**** His actions, however, could have provoked those who did care about sabbath observance, which could have led to arguments about proper sabbath observance.

The two earliest texts (P⁴⁵P⁷⁵) that read “son” are from the third century. This time frame allows for over 100 years from original composition of Luke to the copyists in the third century, during which time texts were copied and altered. In other words, earliest recoverable forms are not the original and are still suspect.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

*Metzger, Textual Commentary, 138–39.

**The King James Version, however, reads ass/donkey, as does the New King James Version.

***See Funk, et al., The Five Gospels, 36. A gray rating indicates: “Jesus did not say this, but the ideas contained in it are close to his own.”

****Funk, et al., Five Gospels, 350.

Parenthetical Statements in Mark

2025-10-01T05:30:00.000-05:00

The ancient Greeks did not punctuate their literature by using two curved half-circle marks known from the sixteenth century as parentheses, although they did write what we today call parenthetical statements that jump off the page screaming “additions to the sentence” for the careful reader.¹ Here is an example of a parenthetical statement in Mark 3:30, for which the translators do not provide parenthesis: “because they said he has an unclean spirit.” The phrase explains why Jesus said what he did in 3:28–29. One translation (NRSV) set the phrase off from verse 30 by a dash; another translation (REB) turned the phrase into a complete sentence (adding words not present in the Greek): “He said this because they had declared he was possessed by an unclean spirit.”

In other cases, translators use parentheses to set off the parenthetical phrase/sentence. The word parenthesis is Greek (parenthesis), which translated means “putting in beside”; that is, adding something additional to the sentence. The “something additional” is extraneous and always subordinate to the main statement.² In the Gospel of Mark, however, they also have the character of an explanation. In Mark 3:30 the parenthetical statement explains why Jesus said what he did: his interlocuters had accused him of being spirit possessed, and that is what prompted his response in Mark 3:28-29.³

There are several other instances of parenthetical statements in Mark, or at least some translators think so: 2:10–11; 5:42; 7:3–4; 7:11; 7:19; 13:14; 15:22; 15:34. Modern translators⁴ use parentheses or dashes to designate the statement as parenthetical. In some cases, however, they do not even acknowledge its parenthetical character (for example, Mark 15:34, which is exactly like Mark 15:22). And in some cases, they seem to skip over parenthetical statements (for example, Mark 16:4: which reads: “for it was very large”).

Readers will remember that ancient scribes in ancient Greek manuscripts did not separate words from one another. Here is how my last statement would have appeared in an ancient Greek manuscript: greekmanuscriptsdidnotseparatewordsfromoneanother

They did not use punctuation marks, except in rare cases. All of that is supplied by the modern text critics, translators, and editors.⁵

Given the propensity of ancient scribes to introduce new readings into ancient Greek manuscripts,⁶ one wonders if some of these parenthetical statements in Mark might be marginal notes made by ancient scribes that eventually made their way into the body of the text during the first and second centuries, a period for which we have virtually no ancient manuscripts preserved.⁷

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Britannica, *“Parenthesis, grammar,” https://britannica.com/topic/parenthesis

²J. A. Cuddon, Literary Terms and Literary Theory (3^rd ed.; Penguin, 1998), 639.

³There are a great number of such statements in John. See C. W. Hedrick, “Authorial Presence and Narrator in John. Commentary and Story,” in Gospel Origins and Christian Beginnings, 74–93 (edited by James Goehring, et al.; Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1990).

⁴The two translations I am using for this essay are NRSV, New Revised Standard Version and REB, Revised English Bible.

⁵C. W, Hedrick, Wry Guy Blog. ”The Lowly Punctuation Mark in the New Testament.”

http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=lowly+punctuation+mark

⁶For example, Mark 9:44 and 46 are added to the text of Mark. These two verses repeat Mark 9:48 and do not appear in early manuscripts of Mark. Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2^nd ed.; United Bible Societies,1994), 86–87.

⁷See the dates given in the back (pages 792–819) of the 28^th revised edition of the Nestle, Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece (Greek-English New Testament).

Does God care about Baseball?

2025-09-11T06:00:00.000-05:00

Judging from life among the thorns in the Vale of Tears we call earth, it is at least questionable that God is concerned with the minutiae of individual human lives, or for that matter even with the mega problems that plague whole nations on the globe. During the second world war the belt buckles of German soldiers were etched with the slogan, “Gott mit uns” (God is with us). Of course, the allied troops thought the same thing, because they too believed their cause was just. And this clash of claims for God’s concern and support in the enterprises of our lives naturally raises my question about the minutiae of individual lives. For example, the nation cares about baseball. It is referred to as our “national pastime,” part of the minutiae of our lives. But does God care about baseball, about who wins and loses?

Are we to suppose that God follows baseball and the individual statistics of each athlete, perhaps has a favorite baseball team, and even decides the outcomes of games? I once saw a pitcher, who, after throwing the winning pitch in a baseball game, made the sign of the cross, kissed his fingers, and pointed upward, thanking God for the win. In American popular religion most of us believe God does get involved in the minutiae of human life, even numbering the hairs on certain human heads and deciding the deaths of sparrows (Matt 10:29-30). But with such a complicated universe to run, surely God has weightier concerns than sparrows, hairs in the drain—and the Cardinals/Royals game. In terms of universal importance, which team wins the pennant seems a rather insignificant event. Other events clearly have a more profound impact on human life than baseball games. True, the outcome of a Cardinals/Royals game is more significant than the number of hairs that showed up in my drain this morning, but totally insignificant when compared to the Israeli/Hamas war and the plight of families in the war zone. Some diehard fans may disagree, but in terms of significant impact on human life baseball games fall completely off the radar screen for everyone, except, perhaps, for those involved in the industry.

It comforts us to think there is a master plan to life. Believing that life is “scripted” helps us cope with tragedy and loss. Life must make sense, and our individual tragedies must have some meaning in the grand scheme of things—or so we insist. Even the death of a butterfly must have a place in God’s “master plan” for the universe. The alternative—thinking that we live in an “unscripted” and arbitrary universe is a frightening concept. In an arbitrary universe no master plan exists. What happens, just happens! Under those conditions, life’s meaning is what each of us makes of the random events that constitute our lives. I personally do not like that alternative and hope, as everyone else, that affairs in my life are part of some grand benevolent design for the universe. Yet, I am a little dubious when someone tells me God spends time counting the hairs in my drain, marking the demise of individual sparrows, or following the progress of a favorite baseball team. Such micromanaging will not work for CEO’s in large organizations—and the universe, if anything, is large. Effective management gives priority to the more significant. In a global crisis, I don’t want to think of God worrying with minutiae, like the welfare of the one barren tomato plant in my garden. Micromanagement on God’s part may be why we have natural disasters, like floods, earthquakes, and epidemics—because God has taken his eyes off the big picture. Other disasters, like wars, are inevitably the result of human contrivance, although even God is given credit for starting wars in the Bible.¹

One should not too quickly criticize the divine Administrator of the universe, however, since we have only the barest inkling of what’s involved in running the universe. The universe may be unlimited, and if so, that is a lot of turf to cover, even for God—or so God suggested to Job (Job 38–41) when Job bitterly complained that God had treated him unfairly. If God is weighing the outcomes of ballgames and neglecting the causes of war, he has likely fallen out of touch with what is really happening in the universe—or at least in this small corner of an out-of-the-way galaxy. Surely God can find better things to do with his time than ponder the pennant.²

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹See, for example, Numbers 31:1–31, the war God began with the Midianites. Why did God begin the war? See Numbers 25:16–18.

²This essay first appeared sometime before 2006 as an editorial in the Springfield, Missouri Newsleader. It was published later, in 2009 in a collection of essays: Charles W. Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2009), 7-9. It appears here edited, revised, and updated.

The Human Genome, Gene Therapy, and the Irrelevancy of God

2025-08-24T05:19:00.002-05:00

Roots. We all have them, embedded somewhere in our past. I don’t recall my birth father and have never visited his grave in Biloxi, Mississippi. My parents were married in 1932, when he was 41 and she 27. I was born in 1934, and he died in 1939. I never had a chance to observe him for the ways in which I might be a chip off his old block. Nevertheless, a good part of who I have become has been determined by who he was and his contribution to my inherited gene pool.

Who we are physically is heavily rooted in the combined gene pool of our parents. Such features of ourselves as the color of our eyes, hair, and skin, our height and gender, and our susceptibility to various diseases are all an outgrowth of our parental gene pool. Your inherited genes can even influence such things as mental abilities, personality traits, and predisposition to certain kinds of talents and abilities. If a person, upon looking in a mirror one morning, is pondering the image that stares back, s/he might check out some old family photos. On the other hand, s/he might consider gene therapy. As incredible as it may sound, gene therapy can involve replacing a defective gene in your present genetic code, silencing a faulty gene, or editing specific DNA sequences.¹

Depending on your politics and/or religious persuasion, gene therapy may sound like science fiction to the unpracticed ear but, like it or not, gene therapy has quietly moved into real life. Messing about in the human genome may evoke images of Dr. Mengele² or Victor Frankenstein (a character in Mary Shelley’s 1818 fiction novel Frankenstein), but if such treatment can improve the human situation, why not?

If you are religious in a traditional sense (an avid church/synagogue/mosque attender), gene therapy may also suggest that those involved in genome research are playing God. At bottom, such an accusation “refers to the powers that science, engineering, and technology confer on human beings to understand and to control the natural world, including you.”³ In aiming at the ability to create life in a petri dish such researchers encroach on a role that has traditionally belonged to God (Gen 1:1-31, for example). And in fact, they have successfully created a kind of artificial life, the first synthetic cell: “it is the first self-replicating cell on the planet [whose] parent is a computer.”⁴

If (or when) they succeed in discovering how to create life de novo, however, they will not have proven the non-existence of God but rather threatened the relevancy of the concept of God. If human beings can create life, even artificial life, and change the human genome so as to alter what God is believed to have accomplished through Mother Nature, God becomes something like a good luck charm to which many may turn in times of crisis—when the limits of human knowledge and ability are reached.

All of what I have just described evokes aspects of the biblical Tower of Babel story (Gen 11:1-9). The sons of men built a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.” And Yahweh, upon coming down to see the city and the tower, said: “this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (Gen 11:5 RSV). The story portrays Yahweh and his court (“Let us go down and confuse their language so they may not understand one another’s speech,” Gen 11:7 RSV) being intimidated by human accomplishments. Hence, God destroyed their ability to communicate and scattered them around the world (Gen 11:8-9). Apparently, Yahweh sensed that given their present course the sons of men would render the divine Self irrelevant.

Losing relevancy is a genuine, practical, existential threat to a God. Just consider how many Gods through history have fallen into irrelevancy and, eventually, into oblivion. Irrelevant Gods wait, one assumes, in a kind of mythical Nirvana to be rediscovered, to wait until someone calls upon them again and thereby renders them relevant. Or does irrelevancy mean actual death for a God? Has anyone out there ever heard of an irrelevant God being restored to relevancy to “run” the world again?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/cellular-gene-therapy-products/what-gene-therapy

And: en-wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-therapy

²en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele

³https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/playing-god

⁴newscientist.com/article/dn18942-immaculate-creation-birth-of-the-first-synthetic-cell/

Losing your Soul

2025-08-07T06:30:00.001-05:00

Several years before I retired from Missouri State University in 2005, I was so caught up in an active academic career, involved in campus life, community activities, professional activities, and serving in the Army Reserve that I felt like my very soul was at risk. Somewhere between completing a terminal degree (1977) and retiring from Missouri State University (2005), my soul seemed to have gone missing or was so shriveled I could not find it. Souls need attention, special feeding and watering, to flourish. I suspect that I am not the only person to come to this realization.

You might not think it possible for people to lose their souls, but Jesus thought so. “What is the profit,” he said, “in gaining the world and losing your soul” (Mark 8:36). Charles Dickens also thought so, and in his novel (A Christmas Carol) portrayed Ebenezer Scrooge as a soulless man, who rediscovers his soul at the end of the novel. “Soul” is the essence of being truly human—a quality always pushing us, come hell or high water, toward moral excellence. A man or a woman with no soul has lost the qualitative edge of being human, of keeping life in balance and everything in perspective—in other words, “losing yourself to gain the world” (Luke 9:25) distorts perspective and throws life into serious imbalance. Clearly Scrooge was disoriented. He had fed his soul so much material “stuff” that he had lost touch with humanity—particularly his humanity. In my case, somewhat like Bob Cratchit, I sat in a tiny windowless office cluttered with neglected professional projects (real soul food by the way), and fed my soul unimaginative papers by incurious students, but in the grand scheme of things virtually irrelevant. Souls cannot survive on such an unbalanced diet.

Can governments lose their souls? Certainly, they can. Government at every level involves people who set a tone for the administration and carry out its policies. National socialism in Hitler’s Germany, at best, was government without conscience or humanity, and its systematic massacre of Jews and other eastern Europeans clearly qualifies it as soulless. The same is true of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government, for attempting to annihilate its own citizens, the Kurds. In our own country, the suppressive disfranchisement (and worse!) of black citizens in the deep south for over one hundred years can only be explained by the shriveled souls of white citizens. And what should we say about attempts in various states to eliminate budgetary support for our most vulnerable citizens—the mentally ill, disabled, children, and the elderly? At best, it is not an action that anyone would confuse with moral excellence. And Mr. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” by congress? The Congressional Budget Office estimates that its passage may cause some 10 million American citizens to lose their health insurance by 2034, with some $900 billion in cuts to Medicare. Only shriveled souls could be pleased at such an inhumane result.¹

Can a church lose its soul? You wouldn’t think so, but in my religious tradition it has been happening for some time now. For the sake of what some in the tradition regard as “right” theology, Southern Baptist intolerants dismantled a fellowship of, more or less, independent cooperating churches. They centralized their authority and have been, since 1985, purging the denomination of diversity. Shortening the borders of the tent and shallow thinking make for better control but do not encourage the development of healthy souls.

Without a healthy soul, we will never find our way to the moral high road, or as Paul put it, to the more excellent way (1 Cor 12:3–13:13). Without soul one is condemned to sit among the mattresses of the dead (a line from a poem by Wallace Stevens, The Man on the Dump). Allowing a soul to shrivel away is bad enough. Being unaware of the loss altogether is a crisis of epic proportions!²

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/by-the-numbers-republican-reconciliation-law-will-take-health-coverage-away-from#:~:text=as%20their%20employment.-,Medicaid,had%20an%20illness%20or%20disability

²This essay, reedited and updated in part, was first published in the newspaper, the Springfield News Leader, Springfield, MO, before 2009, and republished in my book, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest? American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Cascade, 2009), 34-35.

Does God Wink?

2025-06-18T05:24:00.001-05:00

The ancient writers of the Bible tended to describe God anthropomorphically, meaning they generally described God as having humanoid characteristics (having an appearance or character resembling that of a human). The ancient Greeks and Romans even represented their Gods as humans in statuary, only the statues were much larger than humans, suggesting they conceived their Gods as oversized humans who behaved in a similar human manner. The ancient Israelites were forbidden to make graven images (Lev 26:1), but that apparently did not stop them from conceiving God anthropomorphically.

My brief comment above points out the difficulty of conceiving and describing Gods (if Gods there be). Language fails when it comes to describing God. In the later New Testament postscript, God is spirit (John 4:24), which means God is unseen (John 1:18).¹ Although the writer of Exodus may have described Moses as having seen God's backside (Exod 33:17-23), spirits don't have backsides, or even front sides, for that matter.

I was prompted to raise the question posited in my title last week when a checker (a fiftyish attractive lady) at the grocery store winked at this nonagenarian. It has happened before with grocery store checkers, usually accompanied by a term of endearment with which one would address a child, like "sweetie" (a sort of tribute to my advanced age). But in this case, the wink did not seem age-related. I am told there are many reasons one may wink. It is after all a non-verbal act, so the wink's recipient must guess its meaning.

Here is what I got from Google's AI when I googled winking:

People wink to communicate subtly, expressing things like friendliness, sexual interest, or that they're not being serious. It can also be a way of indicating shared knowledge or a secret. Essentially, winking is a deliberate, subtle signal that can convey various meanings depending on the context.²

There are at least three words in the Bible of which I am aware that translators have rendered into English using the word "wink." In Hebrew, they are qarats (Ps 35:19, Prov 6:13, 10:10) and razzam (Job 15:12). In the New Testament the Greek huperoraō (Acts 17:30), and in the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books there is one, the Greek word dianeuō (Sirach 27:22). None of the passages in Hebrew Bible represent God winking, but they all portray winking as a negative act. For example, Sirach 27:22 RSV reads, "He that winks with the eyes works evil…"

To judge from the several English translations on my shelf, only the King James Version of 1611 represents God as winking (Acts 17:30), a translation rejected by the New King James Version of 1982 that reads "overlooked" for huperoraō. The Bauer/Danker Greek-English Lexicon (3^rd ed., 2000) recommends as translations for huperoraō: "to indulgently take no notice of, overlook, disregard." It appears that the 1611 King James Version has translated the Greek by rendering huperoraō metaphorically, for "to wink at" is defined in the dictionary as "to pretend not to see, as in connivance"³—or to disregard. The Modern Greek version of Acts 17:30 reads in part: Ho Theos pareblepse to chronia tēs agnoias (God turns a blind eye to the times of their ignorance…"), which is another metaphorical way of saying "winks at" or disregards.⁴

Does God wink? Well if he has eyes, as some biblical writers seemed to think (Gen 6:3; Deut 11:12; 2 Chron 16:9; Amos 9:8; Heb 4:13), I suppose he could have managed a wink or two. The biblical writers do not chronicle God's activities 24/7.

Describing God as having human feelings and physical characteristics, is surely far off the mark. God (if God there be) is the Indescribable Other, whom "no one has ever seen" (John 1:18). The fact of the matter is that we only know about God from what we read and from what others tell us, or from what we conjecture, which is surely conditioned by information from reading and the testimony of others.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths, 172-77.

²Compare Wikipedia's statement on winking" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wink

³Webster's New World College Dictionary, under wink.

⁴A metaphor is describing one thing in terms appropriate for another thing—like describing God in terms appropriate for a human being.

A Discrepancy in John’s Gospel

2025-06-02T06:09:00.000-05:00

A discrepancy is defined as "a lack of agreement."¹ This essay ponders an interesting disagreement in the Greek manuscripts at the end to the prologue (1:1-18) to John's Gospel. The issue is the following: what did the original flesh-and-blood author of the Gospel write in the original author's copy (the autograph) of John 1:18? As most regular readers of this blog are aware no autograph (original author's copy) of the Greek New Testament is known to exist. Only later copies (and copies of copies) of the autographs made through the years exist. A very few of the over 5000 manuscripts of the Greek New Testament are dated in the second century but most (one might even say, virtually all) date from the third century and later.

In the late fourteenth century, the English translation of John 1:18 by Wycliffe-Purvey read (in Middle English, translated from the Latin):

No man sai euer God, no but the 'oon bigetun sone, that is in the bosom of the fadir, he hath teld out.²

In the sixteenth century the King James translation read (translated from the Greek):

No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.³

The phrase in which I am interested appears here as "the only begotten son." The two English words "only begotten" are used to translate one Greek word, monogenēs, which carries the meaning of the only one of his kind, or the one and only. Thus, a clearer translation is "the only son." The term "begotten" is misleading since it suggests that the son had a beginning, which is specifically denied in John 1:1-3.

Here, however, the problems begin. Although the translation of "only son" corresponds well with the similar readings in John 3:16, 18 and 1 John 4:9, text critics consider the reading "son" (huios) to be an early scribal change of John 1:18 to agree with the passages just cited above.⁴ The earliest manuscripts to preserve this verse in John (P⁶⁶ and P⁷⁵), however, have the reading "unique God" (monogenēs theos) not "only son":

Unique God, the one being in the bosom of the Father— that one has made [him] known.⁵

What this unique God in the bosom of the Father makes known is the God whom no one has ever seen. This reading of John 1:18b was thought by a majority of the text critical committee considering the verse to be the earliest reading, although P⁷⁵(dated at the beginning of the third century) reads "the unique God" (o monogenēs Theos). The word "him," lacking in the Greek, refers to the invisible God whom no one has ever seen in the first half of verse 18. And that makes the conundrum facing the translator of John 1:18 evident: The sentence has [the] unique God revealing the God whom no one has ever seen. The reading "the only Son" (o monogenēs uios), which makes better sense, is regarded as a scribal correction because of the obvious difficulty. In textual criticism, the more difficult reading is to be preferred.

One member of the committee thought it doubtful that the original author would have written monogenēs Theos ("Only God") and suggested in an addendum to the full committee's report that even this earliest reading might itself be a primitive transcriptional error. This suggestion was printed in square brackets and signed A. W. (Allen Wikgren?).

As most text critics are aware, a reconstruction of the earliest reading is "if not the original, at least of the most reliable form of the text that can still be reached on the basis [o]f the material that has been preserved."⁶ Hence, the text situation in John 1:18 in the light of Wikgren's corrective comment points out the limitations of textual criticism as a critical study: it does not restore the original author's copy. In this case, however, the text-critical judgment of the Editorial Committee neither restores the original, nor restores the most reliable form of the text attainable given the material preserved from antiquity. And it raises the specter of a flawed original author's copy. Errors are something that every author knows only too well, as my correction of the quoted material in the first sentence of this paragraph demonstrates. Someone's typo there, after eluding the eagle eye of its author and the professional proofreaders of volume five of the NIDB, entered the print media world flawed.

Faced with this difficulty, modern translators of the Gospel of John find different ways to resolve the difficulty. The translations, to judge from those Bible translations on my shelf, print later scribal corrections to the Greek text in some cases. The reading that seems to occur with frequency is "the only son" (o monogenēs uios).

One creative solution is to punctuate the sentence differently so that there are three separate designations for the son: "monogenēs,⁷ God, the One That Is, in the bosom of the Father—that one has made him known"⁸ But few translators of the English language Bible have followed this suggestion.

How does your Bible read for John 1:18?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Webster's New World College Dictionary (2002), under "discrepancy."

²Wycliffe Bible PDF, "Wycliffe Bible PDF Middle English," https://ebible.org/pdf/engWycliffe/

³The word him is written in italics because it is not in Greek.

⁴Bruce M. Metzger, ed. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2^nd ed.; Stuttgart: German Bible Society, 2000), 169-70. The text critics in this case have also published the 28^th revised edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament edited by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Germany.

⁵My translation.

⁶Joseph Verheyden, "TEXT, NT," in NIDB 5.540.

⁷The word monogenēs is actually an adjective but this solution reads it as if it were a noun.

⁸E. A. Abbott, Johannine Grammar (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006), 42, 55-56.

Is the Gospel of John Fictional?

2025-05-16T07:31:00.000-05:00

What the stakes are, if it is at least partially fiction, is this: not everything written in the gospel happened, but some of it was created by authorial imagination. Around a month ago, I published a blog entitled, "Trickery in the Gospel of Mark,"¹ where I demonstrated that Mark was partially fiction ("a making up of imaginary happenings").²

The narrator of the story in John becomes evident as a persona in the narrative when he directly addresses the readers, freezing the story in mid-telling and commenting on some aspect of what had just been shown and again resuming its telling.³ These comments are like parenthetical expressions interrupting the flow of the narrative. By comparison there is only one instance of this narrative device in the Gospel of Mark where the narrator becomes personified and directly addresses the reader (Mark 13:14).

Among other things, the author uses this narrative device to present interior views (explain thoughts and motives) of characters in the drama and to explain what they are thinking and feeling. In real life, of course, the thoughts and motivations of others are hidden from us. We never know what people are thinking or their reasons for what they do. Even if they tell us, we only know what they told us they were thinking, and what they thought may well be different from what they said. The problem is also complicated by the fact that the Gospel of John is written around sixty years or so after the events narrated in the text,⁴ and the author was not an eyewitness to the events.⁵ This narrative device whereby the author presents interior views of characters in the narrative drama belongs more to the novelistic arts than to the historian's craft.

What follows are several examples of this artifice by which the narrator reads the minds of characters in the drama including the mind of his created character, Jesus.⁶

The Narrator Reads the Mind of Characters in John's Gospel:

1 The narrator knows the steward did not know the source of the wine, but that the servants did know (2:9).

2 The narrator knows what the disciples remembered (2:22).

3 The narrator knows the inner motivation of those who persecuted Jesus (5:16).

4 The narrator knows what Jesus knew "within himself" (en eautō) (6:61).

5 The narrator knows the motivation of the parents of the man born blind (9:22–23).

6 The narrator knows what the disciples were thinking (11:13).

7 Judas questions why ointment was not sold and the proceeds given to the poor. The narrator knows Judas' motive for saying this (12:6).

8 The narrator reads Jesus' mind. Jesus knew from the beginning who did not believe and who would betray him (6:64).

9 The narrator reads the mind of Jesus and Judas (13:1–4).

10 The narrator knows that Satan had entered into Judas (13:27).

11. The Narrator reads Peter's mind and explains what Peter meant by the proverb Peter spoke (21:18–19).

What does it mean for a text when its author is found to engage in an unhistorical methodology, but chooses to use the conventions of literary fiction instead? At the least, it means that its narrative should be read very carefully. How should one read a text known to be novelistic? My suggestion is that one read it like one would read the historical novel Gone with the Wind. By recognizing that although it may have some historical features, the narrative itself is compromised as history. In the case of John, the author is more a Christian theologian than a disinterested historian.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Wry Guy Blog, "Trickery in the Gospel of Mark," April 11, 2025: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=Trickery+in+the+Gospel+of+Mark

²Webster's New World College Dictionary (4^th ed), under "fiction."

³Hedrick, "Authorial Presence and Narrator in John. Commentary and Story," in J. E. Goehring, et al., eds., Gospel Origins and Christian Beginnings (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1990), 74–93. I found 121 instances of this narrative device, p. 81.

⁴W. G. Kϋmmel, Introduction to the New Testament (trans., H. C. Kee; Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1975), 246.

⁵Kϋmmel, Introduction, 245.

⁶After a cursory reading in English, I found over thirty examples of this device used by the author of John. Here are several other examples of mind reading by the narrator of John: 1:43; 2:22; 2:23; 4:1; 4:17-18; 4:39; 4:41; 6:61; 6:64; 10:6; 11:13; 12:16-17; 12:18; 12:33; 12:41; 12:42-43; 13:11; 13:21; 13:29; 16:19; 18:4; 18:9; 18:32; 19:28; 21:12.

Pondering Christianity's Legacy

2025-04-30T05:56:00.000-05:00

A Millenium, hence, when the final hymn has been sung, and the last parish priest has laid by his chasuble for a final time at the close of Mass; when the only functioning baptistry is filled with dust, and the vibrant edifices of Christian worship are crumbling mausoleums housing the bodies of the faithful awaiting resurrection day, secular historians will ponder the Christian faiths of the twenty-fifth century much as historians today ponder the Greco-Roman religions of some two Millenia ago.

I personally am unaware of any residual influence those religions of Greece and Rome play in contemporary religious life. No one today, so far as I know, calls in prayer the names of the eternal Gods of the Greco-Roman world. What remains of their crumbling temples are stark testimonies to the once great influence of their religions. What then served as their religious literature is today relegated to ancient history classes, much as might be the case with the Bible in a Millenium or so. The corridors of history are cluttered with the remains of “true” religions. (Everyone’s religion is the true religion.) This observation raises the issue of the legacy of Christianity; what will today’s Christian faiths have bequeathed to the generations after its demise and final gasp as a vital force in human life?

Legacies are only a matter of opinion, but there is one feature sparked by the Judeo-Christian faiths that has elbowed its way into contemporary human culture as perhaps a lasting residue of Biblical, Jewish, and Christian faiths. It is the caring concern for the most vulnerable in society. Until recently, such a humane concern was even inculcated into some USA governmental programs (USAID, for example, which Mr. Trump has effectively all but eliminated) but is found primarily in innumerable private benevolent programs for the poor and disfranchised of society.

In Hebrew Bible God was the protector of the most vulnerable in Israelite society, widows, orphans/fatherless, strangers/sojourners, and the poor.¹ For example:

You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. (Exod 22:21-22 RSV)

You shall not strip your vineyards bare; neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the sojourner: I am the Lord your God. (Lev 19:10 RSV)

Christian faiths used the old covenant texts as Holy Scripture and to them added several postscripts in the form of what they called new covenant texts: gospels, letters/epistles, and an apocalypse. Within these postscript epistles/letters and gospels there is evidence that the gatherings of the earliest Christ followers continued the Israelite tradition of caring for the most vulnerable.

Jesus said, “Congratulations, you poor! God’s domain belongs to you. Congratulations, you hungry! You will have a feast. (Luke 6:20–21 SV)

In a parable: “Quick! Go out in the streets and alleys of the town, and usher in the poor, and crippled, the blind, and the lame.” (Luke 14:21 SV)

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (Jas 1:27 RSV)

First Timothy 5:9–16 reflects the existence in the second century of an organized ministry to pious church widows and Paul coordinated a collection of money to support the poor saints in Jerusalem (1 Cor 16:1–4; Rom 15:25–29; 2 Cor 8–9; Gal 2:10; Jas 2:16–17).

Many of the references about care for the disadvantaged in the New Testament relate to those in the household of faith but at several points the concern seems to shade over into care for anyone in need (for example, Rom 12:19–20; 1 Cor 13:8–10; Gal 6:10). The clearest example of humane care for the nobodies of the world, however, is found is a story Jesus told about an unknown man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. The man is mugged and left beside the road half dead. Two other men, likely officials of the Judean temple at Jerusalem, pass by him with a furtive glance while a third man, a Samaritan (despised by Judeans) was moved to act compassionately. He tended the wounds of the half-dead man, and took him to an inn, where he cared for him that evening. The next day he paid the innkeeper what amounted to two day’s pay and told him “Take care of him and whatever more you spend I will repay you when I come back” (Luke 10:29b–35). The Samaritan’s abundant benevolence is simply astonishing!² The story is a product of the history of Judaism, but it has been garnered from history’s dustbins by early Jesus followers, who elevated its putative creator to divine status. It represents (in my view) the best example of disinterested benevolence that Christianity has to offer. What in your view will be the most positive legacy of Judeo-Christianity?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹M. G. Vanzant, “Orphan,” NIDB, 4.343; B. B. Thurston, “Widow,” NIDB, 5.846–47.

²The story recalls an aphorism in the Gospel of Thomas attributed to Jesus: “Blessed are those who go hungry to fill the starving belly of another.” Gospel of Thomas 69b (my translation).

Trickery in the Gospel of Mark

2025-04-11T04:40:00.000-05:00

Artifice is defined as “a sly or artful trick”¹ and is regularly found in fiction literature, when an author informs a reader what characters are thinking or feeling:

[A]rtifice is unmistakably present whenever the author tells us what no one in so-called real life could possibly know.²

In life such views are not to be had. The act of providing them in fiction is itself an obtrusion by the author.³

Such obtrusions are especially obvious in narration that purports to be historical. And yet intelligent men were until quite recently able to read ostensibly historical accounts, like the Bible, packed with such illicit entries into private minds with no distress whatever.⁴

Booth continues by citing several New Testament passages in the canonical gospels where the authors perform the trick of reading Jesus’ mind. Specifically, he mentions two mind-reading tricks in Mark (1:41 and 5:30) and Jesus’ crisis of conscience in Gethsemane (Mark 14:32–42). How was it that this prayer came to be recorded in the Gospel of Mark when all of Jesus’ companions were fast asleep (14:37–40)? It turns out, however, that they might have overheard it, since scholars think that in antiquity people prayed out loud and not silently.

Ancient Prayer used to be spoken aloud. Silent or whispered prayer was reserved for offensive, indecent, erotic, or magical uses, but was later adopted as the normal rule in Christian practice.⁵

Imagine my surprise when I read through Mark looking for interior views in which the narrator told readers what characters were thinking and/or feeling. Mark uses this novelistic deception over 30 times! Here are ten instances in which Mark informs readers what characters are thinking and/or feeling:

Mark 2:8 Jesus perceives in his spirit that they questioned within themselves.

Mark 5:29 She felt in her body that she was healed.

Mark 6:20 Herod feared John; when he heard John, he was perplexed but heard him gladly.

Mark 6:34 Jesus had compassion on them.

Mark 6:51–52 Disciples were utterly astounded and did not understand about the loaves.

Mark 9:6 Peter did not know what to say and the disciples were exceedingly afraid.

Mark 9:15 All the crowd were greatly amazed when they saw Jesus.

Mark 9:32 Disciples did not understand Jesus and were afraid to ask him.

Mark 12:15 Jesus knew their hypocrisy.

Mark 15:10 Pilate perceived that the chief priests delivered Jesus up out of envy.⁶

Such obtrusions are invented by the flesh and blood author, who attributes thoughts and feelings to the characters in the narrative for the purpose of advancing the narrative plot and developing characters in line with the narrative plot. The technique belongs to the rhetoric of fiction literature rather than the historians’ craft. Even had the flesh and blood author of the Gospel of Mark been present during the events being narrated (which s/he was not) the private thoughts and feelings of people would simply not have been accessible. Even when others tell us what they are thinking and feeling, we only know what they tell us. We can never have direct access to their private thoughts and emotions. Hence, exposing private thoughts and feelings is a deception performed by novelists, charlatans, libelers, and gospel writers. This one literary feature alone is enough to challenge the historical character of Mark’s Gospel.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4^th ed.). s. v. “artifice.”

²Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (2^nd ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 3.

³Both, Rhetoric of Fiction, 17.

⁴Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, 17-18, note 10.

⁵H. S. Versnel, “Prayer,” Oxford Classical Dictionary (3^rd ed., 1999), 1243. There were, however, exceptions to praying aloud. See Hannah’s prayer which was clearly silent (1 Sam 1:9–20).

⁶Here are the other interior views: Mark 2:8; 6:26; 7:27; 8:12; 10:22, 24, 26, 32, 41; 11:18, 32; 12:12,17; 14:4–5, 19, 33, 40; 15:44; 16:6; 16:8.

Lent

2025-03-24T06:48:00.000-05:00

Lent (the word means Springtime) is one of those religious observances of the Christian Church worldwide that I did not experience in my youth.¹ Although some churches in the Anabaptist tradition do observe it,² the Baptist church of my youth did not (First Baptist Church, Greenville, Mississippi, 1940-52). On the other hand, the small Baptist church that I now attend (Grace Baptist, Gladstone, Missouri) does observe it—ashes and all.³

In the fourth century the church invented Lent institutionalizing it with prayer, fasting, and almsgiving as its basis and incorporating these religious acts into the Easter celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. Lent has been practiced as 40 days of self-denial, altruism, and spiritual renewal preceding Easter. The Lenten season is promoted as a time of religious renewal, incorporating, as it does, personal contemplation, simple living, and personal honesty. It begins on Ash Wednesday and extends 40 days to resurrection Sunday (this year April 20). The church modeled the 40-day period on Jesus' temptation by Satan in the Wilderness (Mark 1:12–13; compare Matt 4–11/Luke 4:1–13 from the Q tradition). Only Matthew describes it as a period of fasting, however. Luke says that he did not eat during this period. Mark says nothing about food. The difference between not eating and fasting is that fasting has a religious connotation.

And when you fast do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Matt 6:17–18).

Do some make a parade of their almsgiving? Jesus criticized that practice, as well (Matt 6:1-4).⁶

Another aspect of Lent, mentioned earlier in this essay, is that of self-denial, likely derived from the idea of denying oneself food. The earliest Jesus-followers did practice a kind of self-denial, but it wasn't like the Lenten practice of denying oneself of a few things one enjoys for a short period, like giving up beer or not eating sweets, for example. Paul described his commitment to Christ as an all-consuming life-commitment; everything else by comparison he considered trash, loss, rubbish (Phil 3:7–11; Luke 9:23–24). Compared to Paul's idea of self-denial, the contemporary observance of Lent pales in comparison—the personal sacrifices are too little, the time frame too short.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent

²https://www.britannica.com/topic/Anabaptists. Greenville First Baptist belonged to the Southern Baptist Convention.

³Grace Baptist Church belongs to the American Baptist Convention.

⁴https://groundworkonline.com/blog/a-short-version-of-the-long-history-of-lent

⁵J. Behm, "νῆστις" [nēstis, fasting], vol. 4.26 in G. Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (G. Bromiley, trans.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967).

⁶Hedrick, http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=Alms

When did Jesus stop talking?

2025-03-07T05:43:00.001-06:00

It sounds like a trick question, right? Nevertheless, I will attempt to show you that it is quite serious. When Jesus died by crucifixion at the hands of the Romans somewhere around 30,¹ his early followers believed that God restored him to life and the three authors (whoever they may have been) of the canonical gospels (which Christians today affirm as God’s Word) conclude their gospels with resurrection narratives.² All but Mark end their gospels with a series of post-crucifixion appearances of Jesus in which Jesus (back to the land of the living) speaks. None of the sayings of Jesus in these appearance stories, however, are regarded by historians as sayings of the historical man, Jesus.³

Later followers of Jesus (30-70), before the canonical gospels began to be written, apparently believed that resurrection appearances of Jesus confirmed that Jesus had, in fact, been raised from the dead. See Paul’s statement (1 Cor 15:3-8) that after the crucifixion Jesus had appeared to Cephas (Peter), to the twelve (disciples), more than 500 people on one occasion, James, all the apostles, and even to Paul himself. And the voice of the living Jesus continued to be heard through the mouths of prophets whom, as it was believed, God had appointed to speak in the name of the Lord in the gatherings of Jesus followers (1 Cor 12:10, 28).⁴

The early Christian prophet was an immediately-inspired spokesperson for God, the risen Jesus, or the spirit who received intelligible oracles that he or she felt impelled to deliver to the Christian community or, representing the community, to the general public.⁵

The most intense period of early Christian prophecy was roughly 30-70 before sayings of Jesus were incorporated into gospels.⁶ During this period prophets circulated among gatherings of Jesus followers and, when prompted, spoke the Word of the Lord to their contemporaries (Didache 11:3-13:7). Hence, the oral tradition about Jesus’ sayings and doings contained both sayings of the (dirty-footed) historical man and sayings of the (spiritually?) resurrected Lord. Such sayings entered the stream of Christian oral tradition, which was the resource used, in part,⁷ by the authors of the canonical gospels in narrating the teaching and deeds of Jesus reported in their gospels.⁸

A case on point is a saying of the resurrected Lord spoken by the early Christian prophet, John the revelator:

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. (Rev 3:20 RSV)

Should this saying be regarded as spoken by Jesus? John regards it as part of the revelation of Jesus Christ (Rev 1:1), which came to him through the Lord’s angel (Rev 1:2) while he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day (Rev 1:11) as a part of a “letter” to the Jesus gathering in Laodicea (Rev 3:14). If you regard it as a saying of Jesus, should it be accorded equal weight with sayings that came out of Jesus’s own mouth? The big question, however, is how does one sort out sayings in the gospels that probably came from the Lord’s own mouth from sayings that may have come from an early Christian prophet or the creative imagination of the evangelists?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Jesus was crucified at some point within the Prefecture of Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea, 26-36: Tessa Rajak, “Pontius Pilatus,” Oxford Classical Dictionary (3^rd ed., 1999), 1220.

²Mark 16:1-8; Matt 28:1-8; Luke 24:1-12; John 20:1-10.

³The empty tomb stories, resurrection appearances, and ascension of Jesus are not printed at their narrated place in each of the gospels but handled in a separate section in the back of R. W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus (HarperCollins, 1998), 449-95.

⁴http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=early+Christian+prophets

⁵M. E. Boring, “Prophecy (Early Christian),” Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992). 5:495-502.

⁶Although the oral tradition was still influential into the second century.

⁷Matthew, Luke, and John also drew from other written texts, and their own creative imaginations. None of them were eyewitnesses to what they reported.

⁸Hedrick, When History and Faith Collide, 127.

Jesus said: "Love Your Enemies"

2025-02-20T05:36:00.000-06:00

In this most outlandishly stated, mind-boggling, aphorism Jesus says “Love your enemies.”¹ Such a statement prompts me to ask,

Now wait a minute Jesus, do you mean that I should respond with love to someone who wants to destroy me? Love them like I love those closest to me in whose behalf I would gladly do anything humanly possible? Or do you simply mean that I should treat them kindly and humanely? Actually loving an enemy could well get another loved one, or myself, injured or killed.

The saying, “love your enemies,” enters the stream of the written Jesus traditions through the now lost (or hypothetical) Gospel Q² The earliest the saying appears is the second half of the first century, (arguably) copied independently at different times from Q by Matthew (5:44) and Luke (who uses it twice, Luke 6:27, 35). The raw statistical records of the voting of the Jesus Seminar do not agree and hence send mixed signals as to whether the aphorism originated with Jesus.³ In the Five Gospels, however, two of these sayings are colored red and one (Luke 6:35) is colored pink.⁴ The color red/pink accords the saying the status of having probably originated with the historical man, Jesus of Nazareth (as opposed to it being a saying from an early Christian prophet, or borrowed from elsewhere and attributed to Jesus).

By contrast, in the Israelite tradition, one is directed to love one’s neighbor (Lev 19:18), who is identified as a fellow Israelite (Deut 15:2-3). Israelites also have the obligation to help enemies (Exod 23:4-5) and treat them humanely (Prov 25:21).⁵ Even the stranger or alien in the land is to be treated as a native of the land (Lev19:33-34). The Israelite tradition sets a high ethical standard for the Israelite to follow, without enjoining the extraordinary, perhaps even preposterous (that is, utterly absurd or ridiculous), injunction to love the enemy. On the other hand, In Ps 139:21-22 the psalmist says that he “hates the enemies of the Lord.” That is to say, the Lord’s enemies are his enemies too, but even hating the Lord’s enemies is excluded by the unqualified assertion of Jesus. People who love their enemies, from their own perspective, have no enemies. Nevertheless, those whom one previously regarded as an enemy may not reciprocate that sentiment and may still regard you as an enemy anyway, even though you love them.

Matthew and Luke, however, offer a practical interpretation of the radical saying of Jesus by which one can treat enemies humanely and religiously without actually loving them (Matt 5:43b: “pray for those who persecute you”; Luke 27b: “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you”). Their suggestions for understanding the radical saying effectively explain the saying in actions that one can perform without becoming sentimental.

The saying itself and its interpretation by the evangelists raise the following two questions: Do I heed the radical call of Jesus to an unconditional love for all God’s creatures regardless of their attitude toward me or may I follow the more practically minded evangelists and simply treat enemies humanely? And if I decide the former, how am I supposed to make myself love someone who is sworn to destroy me?

Would someone please advise me?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹For the definition of an aphorism see Hedrick, “Aphorisms of Jesus,” Wry Guy Blog: August 9, 2020, note 1: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2024/08/aphorisms-of-jesus.html

²For a brief discussion of Q, see Hedrick, When History and Faith Collide. Studying Jesus (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999; 2^nd printing, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock,2013), 95-109.

³The reason I say that is because the aphorism was classified both certain and doubtful at the same meeting. See “Voting Records,” Foundations and Facets Forum 6.3-4 (September/December 1990), 245-352.

⁴Robert Funk and Roy Hoover, eds., The Five Gospels (New York: Macmillan, 1993).

⁵https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5756-enemy-treatment-of-an

What's Good About the Church?

2025-02-05T09:23:00.001-06:00

In many ways, today we appear to be headed toward a post-Christian era. One indicator of this turn of affairs is the large number of people who have joined the “Church Alumni Association” (CAA). People who are part of the CAA have either quit the church or their participation in regular formal religious activities has taken a far backseat in their lives. They might claim to be spiritual, but are not formally religious. This is not something new. Even at the dawn of the Christian era there were those who, for one reason or another, abandoned what we know traditionally as the Christian community.¹ Church leaders labeled such people apostates (Heb 6:4-6), but we do not know how they thought of themselves. Were they apostates or heretics?² A few of them are named in early Christian texts. For example, a certain Demas is mentioned positively as a companion of Paul (Col 4:14; Philemon 24), but he is also remembered negatively as having “forsaken” Paul and the Pauline church (2 Tim 4:16).³

The situation of the CAA raises the question: how does one maintain a connection to the Christian tradition when one no longer considers oneself a traditional Christian in terms of the fourth century confessions and creeds of the church, which are still universally used to define post-reformation Christianity? Naturally, there is a prior question: why would one even want to stay connected to the traditional Christian community, when one acknowledges that one is no longer traditionally Christian in terms of the modern church’s confessions and creeds?

Pondering an answer to the “why” question leads me to three personal observations in defense of staying connected to the post-reformation church. In my case the church is my heritage. I grew up regularly attending church, and it has played a major part in my adult life. No one ever completely escapes their own history. I can no more shake the church out of my system, than I can shake off my southern accent and Mississippi upbringing. Church, southern accent, and the Mississippi Delta in part define who I have become. For good or ill I will always be a Baptist “Delta boy,” although I have been exposed to strange and novel ideas, traveled a bit in the Western world, and lived for a spell in some exotic places.⁴ Even “progressive Christians” who, in their more extreme forms have abandoned traditional Christology and theology, have remained traditional in terms of their ecclesiology—that is, they still hold to the idea of the church as a positive social institution for housing their activities; however, they reorient the significance and meaning of the ordinances (baptism and Eucharist). In a sense progressive Christians are still a part of the ecclesiastical scene in society as churches that compete with traditional Christian Christology and theology.

As a responsible citizen of these United States, I have an interest in seeing the traditional church succeed. For all its ills, imperfections, warts, and blemishes, it aims to be a positive force in human society. The Gospel of Matthew (5:13-14) cites Jesus as telling his followers “You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world” (Gospel of the Savior 1:4; compare Matt 5:13-14). Salt is a well-known preservative that enhances the flavors of the ingredients of food—it makes food tastier. And light is essentially necessary for life in a world that becomes dark about every 12 hours. This directive of Jesus is frequently interpreted as humanitarian service that is quite apart from their primary functions. Who would not want to be associated in some way with an institution that aims for the betterment of human life, society, and culture, even if it often misses the mark? A major focus of many progressive churches is “justice in the social order”—something progressive Christians learned from the traditional Christianity from which they have emerged.

As a retired educator, what I find best about the church, however, is that as an institution it sets aside one day a week for pondering, among other things, human values, ethics, and life’s eternal verities (if such there be).⁵ At its finest, it encourages church members to reflect on societal issues and on what one might consider life’s “enduring mysteries” (that is to say: things beyond the material aspects of life). There is no other institution in society that makes such focal points a weekly event. To be sure, one can also find a similar focus in university classes in philosophy and religious studies, but classes end every quarter or semester—and not everyone is able to go to the university. The church, however, is open every week. Because of the iconic role of the Bible in Western culture, weekly Bible study provides a focus for reflecting on such issues.

What, in your view, is good about the church that you can express in non-confessional “secular” language?⁶

Charles W. Hedrick
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹By this I mean to indicate the communities of those authors whose writings have found their way into the New Testament. There were also nontraditional communities in the earliest period who claimed the term “Christian” for themselves as well, although they were very different in thought from those who called themselves the “Orthodox”—like the author of the Gospel of Philip, for example.

²http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=apostates+or+heretics

³Three others are Hymenaus, Alexander, and Philetus (1 Tim 1:20; 2 Tim 4:16).

⁴The term “Delta boy” was coined (so far as I know) by the Rev. Dr. Buddy Shurden, another Mississippi Delta boy.

⁵http://blog.charleshedrick.com/search?q=why+go+to+church

⁶This essay first appeared five years ago, Dec 20, 2019. It appears here edited, updated, and expanded.

Was Paul a follower of Jesus?

2025-01-21T06:37:00.002-06:00

My title begs for definitions. By Paul I mean to designate the author of the seven undisputed first-century letters attributed to him: Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, First Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon. By Jesus I mean to designate the early first-century Judean man who was crucified by Roman authority between AD 26 and 36. By follower I mean to raise the question was Paul an adherent, disciple, or partisan of, and loyal to, the ideas he gleaned from the man from Galilee of Judea, who died when Pontius Pilate was Prefect of Judea.

Paul knew bits of data about the life of the Judean man that came to him through the tradition: Jesus was born of woman under the Israelite Torah (Gal 4:4); Paul knew that Jesus had a brother (Gal 1:19). Paul also mentions three incidents from the life of Jesus. He ate a meal on the night he was arrested (1 Cor 11:23-25), he was crucified (Gal 3:1) and was buried (1 Cor 15:4).¹ Paul also was aware of certain sayings that perhaps can be traced back to sayings attributable to the man from Galilee (1 Cor 11:23-25, 7:10-11; 2 Cor 12:9; 1 Thess 4:15). But he attributes these sayings to "the Lord."² By the use of this title is he referring to the Judean man or the spirit of the resurrected Lord of faith who, he claimed, dwelled within the believer (Rom 8:9-11)? What is at issue is precisely whom does he follow.

Paul uses the name of the Judean man, Jesus, only ten times alone in the undisputed letters without the Christological titles awarded to him by the faith of the later religious community. Generally, he uses the name of Jesus in combination with the theological titles. The titles are, Christ and Lord, or some combination thereof, but in these ten instances Paul uses the name of the Judean man alone. Which figure does he seem to be evoking by using the name Jesus alone: the Judean man or the Christ spirit within him?

Rom 3:26 concludes: "…that he [God] is righteous, justifying a person by the faith of Jesus."³ Here he appears to be speaking about the Judean man, not the Christ spirit that motivates him.

Rom 10:9: "Jesus is Lord"; Jesus refers to the Judean man and the title Lord refers to the resurrected Lord of faith, whom Jesus became by his resurrection from the dead.

1 Cor 12:3: in both cases, the name Jesus refers to the Judean man and the title Lord refers to the Christ spirit within Paul.

2 Cor 4:10-11: "the death of Jesus" evokes the death of the Judean man, while "the life of Jesus" evokes the resurrected Lord of faith.

2 Cor 11:4: the "Jesus" that Paul proclaimed was Christ crucified (1 Cor 1:23), an expression evoking the death of the Judean man.

Gal 6:17: the "marks of Jesus on Paul's body" could only refer to the crucified Judean man.

1 Thess 1:10: it was the Judean man who was "raised from the dead," albeit spiritually (1 Cor 15:44, 50).

1 Thess 4:14: The Jesus who died and rose again was the Judean man, albeit spiritually resurrected (1 Cor 15:44, 50).

Phil 2:10: Phil 2:6-11 has long been regarded as an early pre-Pauline hymn that Paul quoted and in doing so added the following words to verse 8, "even death on a cross." In the hymn, Jesus (2:10) is the Judean man whom God exalts. I suggest that Phil 2:11 are Paul's own words added to the hymn to harmonize the Judean man with the spirit of the resurrected Lord of faith. Compare in the first half of Phil 2:11 the words "every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord" to Rom 10:9 and in the second half of the verse the words "by the glory of God, the Father" to Rom 6:4.This latter phrase appears as a standard Pauline element of the epistolary salutation in his letters: "Grace to you and peace from God, our Father…" (Rom 1:7; 1 Cor 1:3; 2 Cor 1:2; Phil 1:2; Philemon 3), as well as in Pauline doxologies (2 Cor 1:3; Gal 1:4; Phil 4:20) and thanksgivings (1 Thess 1:3).

Here is a statement Paul makes in 2 Cor 5:16: "…if also we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we no longer think [of him that way]."⁴ If this statement were applied to the situation in this essay, it would suggest that Paul no longer thinks of Jesus as a Judean man become divine (i.e., a half human⁵), rather he now thinks of Jesus as the Lord Jesus Christ, God's son, rather than Mary's son.⁶

This essay is incomplete; it is more suggestive than definitive.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Hedrick, The Wisdom of Jesus, 1-2.

²In Rom 13:9 Paul does not cite the Lord as source; he likely knew it through reading Hebrew Bible (Lev 19:18).

³The Greek reads: dikaiounta tov ek pisteōs Iēsou. See the translation of Rom 3:26 in A. Dewey, et al., The Authentic Letters of Paul (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2010), 219. See also the cameo essay on Gal 2:16, pp. 65-66.

⁴The literal expression "according to the flesh" (kata sarka) in the Danker-Bauer Greek-English Lexicon is translated as: "according to human standards."

⁵A term (ēmianthrōpos) used of Dionysus by Lucian in the second century (the Parliament of the Gods, 4). For a list of the Demigods in ancient belief see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_demigods.

⁶The statement by Paul has created a great deal of difficulty for commentators on the text of second Corinthians. See Victor Paul Furnish, II Corinthians. A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 32 A; New York: Doubleday: 1984), 312-14, 329-32.

A New Year's Introspection

2025-01-05T07:08:00.000-06:00

When I was younger, I perceived my future bright with prospects and promise. On waxing old and being full of days, however, I have discovered my interests now are more about retrospect than prospect. We elderly live in another country, and even though like Moses we may be permitted to view the prospects of the New Year's promised land (Deuteronomy 34:4), we are fated to remain in the land of Moab, in our own country and time (Deuteronomy 34:5-6). In the late autumn of life and with the onrush of winter, our vengeful enemy time has taken a terrible toll: sagging skin, thinning hair, a diminishing of the life force, failing eyesight, lapsing memory, other assorted aches and pains, and physical impairments. Few of us nonagenarians are like Moses, of whom it was fabled: "his eye was not dimmed, nor his natural force abated" (Deuteronomy 34:7). But we elderly have "eternity in our minds" (Ecclesiastes 3:11) and seem to think we should live forever.

I prefer to think of aging and our eventual physical demise as the natural course of things. A prime axiom of the universe is obsolescence—things just wear out, become obsolete, and disappear. Or put another way, they die out and pass out of existence. We instinctively know it is true—whether of nations, neighborhoods, sump pumps, or, alas, of people. Such is the way of all life and things in the universe as we know it.

I could, of course, be wrong. Paul turned what in my view is a natural occurrence into a theological dogma. Based on the Hebrew myth of creation, he argued that because the first human beings sinned (Genesis 2:17) the human potential for death entered the world and passed onto all human beings, in that all have sinned (Rom 5:12, 17; 1 Corinthians 15:21). Apparently, Adam's sin even affected the universe, as it too is under bondage to decay (Romans 8:20-23) and obsolescence (1 Corinthians 7:31). So, in part, Paul and I are of the same mind—except that he thinks theologically, and my statements are made based on simple observation. It must be said that the universe is expanding at a rapid rate, and its acceleration seems to be increasing.

The Psalmist seems to regard a limited life span as a natural phenomenon: The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even by reason of strength fourscore; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away (Psalm 90:10 RSV). There is no talk here of our lifespan being reduced by God's judgment because of sin. The situation seems to be that the Psalmist has observed only the natural way of life in the universe. The human lifespan is only so long because of the prime axiom of the universe. It is likewise the view of Koheleth (Ecclesiastes 1:1), who philosophizes about those things he "has seen under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:14; 2:17; 3:16, 22; 4:1, 7; 5:13: 6:1; 7:15; 8:9, 17; 9:11, 13; 10:5). There is no appeal here to divine revelation, rather Koheleth appeals to human experience in a similar way that proverbs appeal to human wisdom.

For those who have lived into their yellow leaf the New Year is not about resolutions but rather reminiscences. We in the twilight of life are poised on the threshold of life's greatest adventure, and what matters now is not the coming year and its prospects, but what lies behind along with our regrets and personal satisfactions. Perhaps that is why I don't have a "bucket list." These days I think about those things I have left undone, the roads never taken, the questions never asked, the books never read, old friends with whom I have lost contact, the essays never finished. Have I left a deep enough footprint in the sand that the first high tide will not erase? I suppose in long term it does not matter. Very few things endure the ravages of time.

Is there a lesson in all this introspection? In the last chapter of Ecclesiastes (12:1-14) a later editor has concluded: "The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man" (Ecclesiastes 12:13 RSV). I prefer thinking on the views of the principal author of the text: these I regard as the "intellectually honest ponderings of a man who looked at the world primarily from a rational perspective rather than through the eyes of faith. He struggled with the question: what is the point of life—and found no satisfactory answer."¹ But the point is he continued struggling with the questions, and in the final analysis gave-up neither on life nor God. His struggles with the dichotomy between the answers of traditional religion, and what he sees going on in the world around him have led him to be satisfied with the simple pleasures of life (2:24; 10:19).

So, the New Year arrives! Yet the first day of a New Year, after all the fuss, is just another day around the sun in a succession of many others. Those of us fortunate enough to see its dawning should rejoice and be glad in it (Psalm 118:24). Koheleth would appreciate that sentiment; he thought of life as a great gift—hope is only for the living. Or as he put it: "a living dog is better than a dead lion" (Ecclesiastes 9:4).

For my tribe, you elderly: may your New Year's Day be full of happy memories that bring smiles to your face, rather than blushes to your cheeks. For those who are younger: may your new country be full of bright prospects.²

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Quotation from Hedrick, The Wisdom of Jesus. Between the Sages of Israel and the Apostles of the Church (Cascade, 2014), 72.

²I initially published this essay on my blog on Dec 31, 2015.

A Christmas Tapestry1

2024-12-21T07:50:00.000-06:00

Christmas in America has something for virtually everyone—even the Scrooges, and particularly the Bob Cratchits. Ancient customs (Christian and non-Christian) and diverse modern traditions have become so mingled, it is difficult to know what it all means—if anything. Christmas in the marketplace now begins before Thanksgiving and ends sometime after the beginning of the New Year (or whenever you take down your Christmas tree). Merchants capitalize on every trapping of Christmas from Rudolph to the crèche, and music, serenading your shopping, ranges from “Jingle Bells” to “Away in a Manger.” Christmas Marketing is highly successful, and at this time of year we are in a mood to be separated from our money—whether giving gifts or responding to some obscure charity making its appeal after our second trip to the wassail bowl. Commercialism is not all bad, however. In many ways, what is good for the marketplace is good for the country, and what is good for the country generally translates into chickens in our Christmas pots.

The season has religious roots as well—a lot of different roots, it seems. Naturally we are reminded of the baby born in Bethlehem. But before Christians started celebrating the birth of Jesus in late December (begun in the middle of the fourth century) the Roman empire celebrated Saturnalia, a Roman agricultural festival incorporating many of the same customs we still observe today at Christmas. Saturn was a venerable deity in Italy fabled to have reigned during a period of peace and happiness. The twenty-fifth of December (then reckoned as the winter solstice) was celebrated both as the birth of the Invincible Sun and Mithras, the Persian deity of light. The ancient Jewish Feast of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, which commemorates the rededication of the Jewish Temple and Jewish political Independence also falls in December. Kwanzaa, an African American celebration, based on African harvest traditions, has been celebrated in America since 1966. The customs and symbols of these non-Christian festivals have merged with the Christian and continue to be celebrated in the American winter solstice: lights, candles, gift-giving, feasting, family gatherings, shopping, evergreen trees, garnishes of holly and mistletoe, and black-eyed peas and collard greens. Somehow, it all seems to make sense even to narrowly Christian America. There is something distinctly egalitarian and democratic about our winter solstice. The “huddled masses” brought their winter customs with them, and we later generations have woven them all together (menorah, piñata, wassail bowl, parties, Santa Claus, Christmas trees, midnight masses, Yule logs, and candles) into a textured winter-solstice tapestry.

I like the diversity—even its commercialism. It all enriches the texture of the tapestry. But it is difficult to know how it all fits together. What does it all mean? We celebrate both the religious and the secular aspects of Christmas. We are nostalgic when Bing Crosby sings “White Christmas,” and enjoy the cycles of parties and receptions with their tinsel, lights, food stuffs, and spirits (hopefully in moderation). On the other hand, the sobering thought that some two thousand years ago the secular was uniquely invaded by the holy, as Christian faith affirms it, still encourages hope in even the most skeptical Scrooge.

Making sense of the collage of diverse symbols and customs in its entirety and finding some significant reason for the season as we now celebrate it, however, is a challenge. Of course, some people have all the answers and dismiss everything different with a “Bah! Humbug! I prefer to embrace it all. In my more reflective moments, I see the American winter solstice symbolizing a search for stability and happiness. In the confusion and uncertainty seemingly dominating the world around us, these mingled traditions, which we hold onto, serve as anchors for the soul. We return to them annually because they are familiar and comforting. They nourish a deep-seated hope in Western culture, best expressed for me by the ancient Jewish longing for the advent of an ideal ruler, whose eternal reign is characterized by peace, justice, and righteousness (Isaiah 9:6-7). This is a hope shared by all people of good will and well worth celebrating.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹This essay was originally published as a newspaper opinion piece in the Springfield, MO, News-Leader and later, edited for publication in Charles Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest? American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Eugene OR: Cascade: 2009), 70-71 (the book has a glossary).