Cody Cook's Blog, page 14

PODCAST: Leaving Sola Scriptura

Aree Spivey (of Failed Kingdoms) was my guest to discuss his move toward Eastern Orthodoxy and away from the Protestant idea of sola scriptura–that scripture alone is a God-breathed source of authority.

While Aree expressed his appreciation for the confidence that the Orthodox model has over the multiplicity of “individual interpretations” which he sees resulting from Protestant approaches, I highlighted my own reasons for believing in sola scriptura and rejecting Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic models of authority.

A thoughtful and informative conversation!

Audio:
http://cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20201215-LeavingSolaScriptura.mp3

Music:
F E E F I F O by Failed Kingdoms. Available here: https://soundcloud.com/failedk

PODCAST: Fight the Powers Revisited

Two years after the release of Fight the Powers, my reflections on what it meant for Christians to Fight the Powers under Trump and what it will mean under Biden.

Audio:
http://cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20201130-FightThePowersRevisited.mp3

Music:
F E E F I F O by Failed Kingdoms. Available here: https://soundcloud.com/failedk

A conversation with Matthew J. Korpman about his book Saying No to God: A Radical Approach to Reading the Bible Faithfully

I was a guest on the Failed Kingdoms podcast to discuss author Matthew J. Korpman’s book Saying No to God: A Radical Approach to Reading the Bible Faithfully.

The conversation seemed to get a little heated at times, but it brought out some interesting topics that are worth discussing. I hope you enjoy it!

Audio (with a new introduction from me):
http://www.cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20201118-FailedKingdomsSayingNo.mp3

Is Homosexuality Sinful?

I was invited to take part in a discussion with Aree Spivey and Matt Distefano about whether homosexuality is sinful. It was a bit last minute, but I think I did okay! Thanks Aree and Matt for a hospitable, friendly, but substantial conversation!

Audio:
http://www.cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20201111-FailedKingdomsHomosexuality.mp3

Judge Not?

Watch:

Listen:
http://cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20201027-JudgeNot.mp3

Read:
Christians are often told to follow Jesus’ command to not judge, often by non-Christians who perceive us, rightly or wrongly, of being nasty and judgmental. But is this command a blanket statement, or does it have limits?

Matthew 7:1
Do not judge so that you will not be judged.

The Greek word for judge here is κρίνω (krino).

It’s a broad word somewhat like our word “judge.”

It can refer to making a personal evaluation (Romans 14:5), to a committe making a declaration (Acts 16:4), or to trying someone in a divine or human court (John 7:51, Acts 25:10, 1 Corinthians 6:6, 2 Thessalonians 2:2).

The proper way to understand a word’s meaning is not to look at a list of its possible definitions and plug in the meaning we like the most, but to look at the surrounding context. What kind of judgment is Jesus speaking of?

To begin with, why does Jesus tell us not to judge? Because if we do, we will be judged ourselves:
“For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (Matthew 7:2).

Who will judge us? It is possible that he has other people in mind. When someone sees us, for instance, ruthlessly condemning some behavior in others and then turning around and engaging in that exact behavior, they will likely hold our standard up to us to show that we have condemned ourselves. If this is His meaning, Jesus is warning us against making personal judgments on others that will also condemn ourselves.

However, it is also possible (I would say likely) that Jesus had the divine judge in mind. If we look at people and deem them unable to be saved because of some sin in their lives, then God will remember that pronouncement of judgment and hold us accountable to it. Do you look at gay people and insist that there is no hope for them? Do so with great caution because Jesus informs us that it is as sinful to nurse lust in our hearts as it is to act on lusts. In this case, for us to “judge” is for us to act as the divine judge and pass sentence on those we despise. That is not our job, and if we insist on pounding the gavel, God will be there to make sure we eat our words.

This passage has a parallel in Luke which may be useful for understanding which kind of “judgment” Jesus has in mind:
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure– pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (Luke 6:37-38).

Note the use of legal language. Do not condemn (pass sentence), but forgive (release, set free). If you do so, it will be done for you–presumably by God. This strengthens the argument that in Matthew 5:1-2 judgment has a court room connotation–in particular the court room of divine judgment.

So, if Jesus doesn’t want us to judge hypocritically or condemn others to hell, does that mean we can make no personal judgments about moral behavior?

Certainly not! In this same passage He warns us to beware of false prophets and even gives us the tool to recognize them: “you will know them by their fruits… Every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit” (Matthew 7:16-17).

So what’s the takeaway? Be wise to make judgments about bad courses of action and do not hitch yourself to prophets and movements that are opposed to godly principles. But also remember that God has forgiven you when you didn’t deserve it, so you better not treat mercilessly those whom God wants to show mercy to.

Music credit:
F E E F I F O by Failed Kingdoms. Available here: https://soundcloud.com/failedk

PODCAST: How Should Christians Vote… or should they?

I chat with the Anti-War War Vet John Dangelo III about whether or not Christians ought to be voting, and if so, what should animate their concerns?

Audio:
http://cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20201102-ShouldChristiansVote.mp3

Music:
F E E F I F O by Failed Kingdoms. Available here: https://soundcloud.com/failedk

The False Gospel of No-Suffering

Watch:

Listen:
http://www.cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20201007-NoSuffering.mp3

Read:
A perennial challenge to belief in God is human suffering. If God is all good and all powerful, it is asked, why do the good and innocent suffer? All of us can probably name at least one friend or family member who has lost faith because of suffering—either their own or the suffering of others.

But while all of this is true, there’s this little anomaly that’s been bothering me lately—the fact that in societies with less suffering, there is more unbelief on account of it. Or, put another way, for centuries there have been countries with large Christian populations where suffering was prevalent and expected—people, even babies and young children, died of diseases that are easily treated today. But in the privileged west, where technology and free markets have alleviated so much of our suffering and lengthened our lives, and where death is often hidden from our view, suffering has become a fixation. It’s almost become a phobia. We suffer so little, comparatively, but we are inordinately terrified of suffering and death. Our comfort has become so important to us that the very thought that it might, some day, be challenged by sickness or death upsets our sense of a good world where God is in control. Instead of Jesus being the good news, we have made our false belief in a world that can alleviate all pain into our gospel. When we realize that this can’t happen, that there is no gospel of no-suffering, we cease to believe in the God that we constructed to reign over such a world—and we assume that the God we no longer believe in is the Christian God.

But here’s the problem—the Christian God never claimed that we wouldn’t suffer. For almost two millennia, Christians expected suffering as the natural course of life. In fact, if they read their New Testaments or heard them read, they would see that Christians were told to expect a greater portion of suffering than the rest of the world. The promise of the gospel was not seen as a promise that we would not suffer. Suffering was a given. That’s just obviously sewn into the fabric of life in this world. The gospel promise was that despite suffering and death, there would be a resurrection, a healing, a defeat of death, a God who would personally wipe away our tears, and a holding to account for those who caused their fellow human beings pain.

So, Jesus doesn’t save us from suffering. Not yet, anyway. But that isn’t the gospel message. The gospel is not the denial of suffering, but the answer to it. God will not prevent our suffering, but He will redeem our suffering. Don’t put your faith in a false gospel that can’t save. We’re going to suffer. That’s a given. The question is this—is our pain purposeless, meaningless? Or is there a Redeemer?

Music credit:
F E E F I F O by Failed Kingdoms. Available here: https://soundcloud.com/failedk

Interview: This Is Ohio 2020

I was interviewed by Pete Brown in conjunction with his project This Is Ohio 2020 about electoral politics in the state of Ohio. It was a fun conversation that ranged from my personal origin story to the psychology of fear in voting to what government should be and how Christians should look at it.

Click here to listen!
https://thisisohio2020.fireside.fm/6

Five Dumb Things People Believe About the Bible

Despite being one of the most read and most beloved books in human history, it’s also one of the most misunderstood. Here are some really dumb things that people believe about this ancient book.

1. It’s been translated too many times for us to know what it originally said.

This is a popular argument made by skeptics who simply don’t understand where our English Bibles come from. They assume that the Bible was originally written in an ancient language (if you’re lucky they’ll know it was Greek and Hebrew, but they’ll probably think it was Latin) and was then translated into a new language, somehow destroying the original language manuscripts in the process. Then manuscripts in that new language were translated into another language which replaced the previous language manuscripts, and so on. Finally, we get to English having lost the manuscripts from all previous languages. Thus, “the Bible has been translated too many times for us to know what it originally said.”

Thankfully, that’s not at all how it actually happened. True, the Bible has been translated into many, many languages. However, our English translations are not based on any of these other translated manuscripts. Instead, our English Old Testaments are translated from Hebrew manuscripts (usually medieval since many earlier manuscripts have been lost, though we can compare these medieval manuscripts to Hebrew and Greek manuscripts from around the time of Jesus) and our English New Testaments are based on Greek manuscripts which now number in the thousands, spanning from at least the 2nd century A.D. to the medieval period.

While there are some debates over minor textual variants in the Bible among the many manuscripts we’ve discovered, our English translations seek to be faithful to the original language manuscripts we have and continue to discover.

2. The Bible can be used for divination.

Some people think that the best way to read the Bible is to flip to any page during a time of trouble and stick your finger on a random Bible verse for divine guidance. While it would be presumptuous to say that God has never guided people through a process like this, that isn’t actually how you’re supposed to read the Bible. Every verse is part of a chapter, every chapter is part of a book, every book is part of the whole Bible, and even the Bible itself is part of a historical context which helps us to understand what it means. If you ignore the Bible’s context, you’ll end up coming up with all kinds of weird ideas. So never read a Bible verse…

Out of context, that is.

3. The Council of Nicea put together the first Bible by editing things out that they didn’t like.

For all of the talk about the Council of Nicea in popular culture, for instance in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, very little of it is actually true.

The Council of Nicea was an early fourth century church council called together by the Emperor Constantine to settle a church dispute started by a priest named Arius who was teaching that Jesus was the divine first creation of the Father and not God in the flesh. The bishops who came together agreed that Arius was wrong and crafted a statement about Jesus’ divine nature which we today call the Nicene Creed. What they didn’t do was declare what books should and shouldn’t be considered scripture.

That process happened organically among the churches over time. From a very early period, the church agreed on the four Gospels and the letters of Paul, with some disputes over which other New Testament books should be considered part of scripture. These disagreements seemed to have been mostly settled by the end of the fourth century, though the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches still disagree with Jews and Protestants about some books in the Old Testament (see the article Why Do Catholic Bibles Have More Books?).

4. The Bible should be taken literally

To take words literally means to understand them in their plainest sense without using metaphor or symbolism. If this is how the Bible should always be understood, then Jesus is not a person but a hinged barrier at the entrance to a building (“I am the door.” – John 10:9).

Instead of always taking the Bible literally, we should seek to understand it literarily, which is to say according to the literary rules by which each portion of it is supposed to be understood. For instance, parables read differently than history (and even ancient history may have different guidelines than modern history), poetry requires different rules of interpretation than apocalyptic literature, etc.

While it may be God’s intention to communicate truth using straight forward, literal language at times, it would be a mishandling of any writing to not read it according to its genre and its author’s intention.

5. The Bible is God’s instruction book.

Westerners in particular have a no-nonsense approach to truth. We like to have our truth laid out in simple propositions that can fit on a bumper sticker. It’s no wonder then, that we create actual bumper stickers that say things like, “B.I.B.L.E. = Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.”

But is the Bible simply an instruction book? Well, much of it is narrative–stories about people and places with very little direct instructions for readers to follow. Where there are direct instructions, most of them aren’t followed by Christians today because they involve sacrifices or the Israelite theocratic government which Jesus replaced with the cross and the Kingdom of God, respectively. This leaves some laws from Moses, some guidance from Jesus, and some letters from Paul–but even these often relate to issues specific to their own times which have to be reinterpreted for today’s context if they are going to be read as “instructions” for us.

So what is the Bible if it isn’t an instruction book? It’s a book about how God has dealt with His people, how His people have sought to follow Him, and His plans and purposes from original creation to re-creation in Christ. That doesn’t mean there isn’t guidance for how we should live today, but it comes out of our careful, prayerful, Spirit-led reflection on this ancient text written in times different from our own.

Should Christians Talk About Race?

Watch:

Listen:
http://www.cantus-firmus.com/Audio/20201014-TalkAboutRace.mp3

Read:
I’ve been seeing a lot of folks, especially on the right, saying that we should stop talking about race, that if we did stop talking about it, racism would simply go away. But is that true? Would we be better off if we stopped talking about race? Moreover, is that what the Bible encourages us to do?

Well, it is true that the biblical message is one of Jews and gentiles coming together to make “one new man” without regard to ethnicity.

But was that done by merely ignoring the differences and conflict that emerged from their different subcultures?

Let’s look at how ethnic conflicts between Jews and gentiles were addressed in the early church. In one sense, Jews were a privileged class since they were more closely connected with the faith and were the earliest leaders in the church. But in another sense, they had been colonized by the Roman pagans, some of whom were now seeking to join the movement. These distinctions in status created conflict between Jews and gentiles.
We see hints of these racialized conflicts very early on. In Acts chapter 6, we read that the Jews who had adopted more Greek cultural practices were complaining that their widows were being overlooked for food distribution by the more traditional Jews. Instead of saying, “well, lets just not talk about race,” the apostles appointed leaders to oversee the food project and make sure it was equitable. So here we find a principle–if there are inequities, we should address them.

This problem only gets worse once full-on, uncircumcised gentiles start converting to the faith. Circumcision had been practiced by the Jews for centuries. Since Christianity was a Jewish movement, these Jewish Christians felt that they had the prerogative to require that gentiles had to be circumcised before they could join in full fellowship with the Jewish believers.

But how did the apostles, those whom Jesus chose to lead his church, respond to this problem? According to Acts 15, they called a whole church council. After much deliberation, they declared that God does not discriminate but makes the Holy Spirit available to all without regard to race. However, since there were racial conflicts and discrepancies, they had to be addressed. They would not allow the Jews to require circumcision for gentiles, but they would ask that gentiles, out of respect for Jewish customs and sensitivities, not eat meat that had been sacrificed in pagan temples or in conjunction with other pagan customs. Here we find another principle–you’re all one people in Christ, but since cultural distinctions persist we must find ways to accommodate each other so that we can live together more peacefully.

Unfortunately many Jews persisted in requiring circumcision for gentiles. This angered the apostle Paul so much that he wrote to the church in Galatia that he wished those trying to force circumcision would go all the way and emasculate themselves!

So let’s remind ourselves of our principles–we should seek to live as one people where racial distinctions are unimportant, but where racial discrimination exists, we should address it and seek to end it. Where it creates conflict, both parties should seek to be sensitive to the other’s concerns so that the conflict won’t become greater.

In applying these principles today, we should be concerned with both facts and attitudes. Is it a fact that racial discrimination exists? If so, avoiding talking about it won’t fix the problem. The discrimination must be addressed. So a careful, unbiased assessment of the facts is important. But our attitude also matters. As white Christians, are we sensitive to the concerns and cultural distinctions of Christians of color, or do we, like some of the Jewish Christians, seek to force our cultural values and concerns onto them, making white Christianity the norm instead of just one unique expression of the faith, as we see in more conservative white strains of Christian practice?

As Christians of color, are we primarily concerned about creating a world where we are unified without regard to race, our are we seeking to make racial distinctions more prominent by strengthening racial separations and lumping people into good and bad broadly on the basis of race, as we find in the more progressive strains of black and woke thought?

Or are we looking to build what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the blessed community–where we are judged not by our ethnic identifiers but by the content of our character? Where, as Paul said, there is no Jew or gentile, for we are all one in Christ.

Music credit:
F E E F I F O by Failed Kingdoms. Available here: https://soundcloud.com/failedk