R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 127
January 22, 2013
Leading from Behind
Real leaders don’t try to be the boss.
One day two of Jesus’ disciples, John and James, who also happened to be brothers, got their mom to ask Jesus for good jobs in his kingdom. “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.” (Matthew 20:21).
Jesus denied the request, but unsurprisingly, the other disciples still didn’t take kindly to their attempt. Jesus then turned the event into a learning opportunity, explaining that among Christians, leadership is not what it is out in the world, with bosses lording it over those beneath them. Instead, just as Jesus himself came to serve people and die for them, so those who wish to be great must become servants. The way of leadership in the church is not the way of leadership in the world. Certainly you can take modern business practices and have a well-running, prosperous organization. It’s just that it won’t be doing things the way Jesus wants. Success in the kingdom is not necessarily the same thing as success in the world.
There’s an old story about a young man who wanted to be a minister. Joseph had only recently begun attending the church. One day, he approached his pastor and told him that he believed that God was calling him into the ministry. “I’d like to become a preacher. Is there some job here at the church I could do? Maybe lead a youth group, or teach a Sunday School class?”
The pastor studied the young man’s earnest face and scratched his head, then asked him, “Yes, we do have some jobs here that you could do that would help you learn the ministry. Come with me.”
Excited, Joseph followed the pastor down the hall. The pastor stopped in front of a door, opened it and pulled out a toilet brush. “Here, the bathrooms need to be cleaned.”
Joseph’s eyes went wide. “But I wanted to do something worthwhile.”
“Then you should get to work on those toilets. They’re looking mighty skuzzy.” And he thrust the brush into his hand.
Joseph tossed the brush back into the closet and stormed out of the building, never to be seen again.
“Well, I’m glad we got that settled,” sighed the pastor.
January 21, 2013
The Underserving
Tamar’s was an arranged marriage, set up by Judah for his oldest son, Er. According to the account in Genesis 38, Er was a wicked man and as a consequence, God killed him. The reader is not given any details as to what Er’s misdeeds might have been that made God want him dead. Judah then gave Tamar to his next born son, Onan. According to the law in force at the time, since Er had died childless, Onan’s firstborn son would be counted as Er’s son, and would then inherit all of Er’s property. If, on the other hand, Tamar remained childless, Onan would get to keep Er’s property for himself. Therefore, Onan made certain, whenever he had sex with Tamar, that she would not get pregnant. This greedy behavior attracted God’s wrath as well, and so God killed Onan.
Judah promised Tamar that when his next boy, Shelah, came of age, that he would give her to him. But when the time came, Judah gave Shelah a different wife. Tamar realized that Judah was not likely to fulfill his obligations toward her and so she decided to take matters into her own hand. According to the law, if a brother wouldn’t fulfil his duty to marry the widow of his other brother, then it was the duty of the next nearest relative to do the job. In Tamar’s case, that next nearest relative was Judah himself. His wife had recently died and so she knew it wouldn’t be too difficult to force his hand. She dressed up as a prostitute and then positioned herself along the side of a road she knew Judah would be using. Judah came along, took notice of her, negotiated a price and gave her his staff, cord and seal as security, and then had sex with her. Afterward, Tamar put on her normal garments and went back home to go about her business.
When her pregnancy became known, Judah’s reaction was typical of the era: she’d obviously behaved wrongly and needed to be excecuted. But then Tamar sent him his own staff and cord and seal and told him that she was pregnant by the man those items belonged to. Judah cancelled the execution and announced that she was more righteous than him. He recognized that his behavior had been inappropriate.
For the reader of the story, it is clear that the inequity Tamar’s situation, the injustice she faces on all sides, is the whole point of the story. Judah is perfectly willing to pay a prostitute for sex, but if his daughter-in-law were to engage in prostitution, then that’s deserving of a death penalty? Not quite fair. With this story, the author intends to make his readers reconsider their views about the status of women in society.
Prostitution in the Bible is not put forward as a profession to be chosen, but it is inescapable that prostitutes play important roles. Judah treats his daughter-in-law as a prostitute, but she is described then as righteous; and one of the twins born as a consequence of her encounter with her father-in-law is an ancestor of David. A prostitute, Rahab, hundreds of years later will save the Israelite spies, thus helping the Israelites in their conquest of the Promised Land. Then in the New Testament, during the life of Christ prostitutes and other “damaged” women will play significant and pivotal roles. It is the underdogs, the downtrodden of society, those who suffer the worst of life, that God seems very concerned about. He uses them often to serve him and do great things. God does not restrict himself to those who,from a human point of view, seem more honorable and “deserving.” The undeserving are the ones on whom God pours his grace. The concept of favoritism, of treating some better than others because of their social status, their wealth, or any other reason, comes to be rejected by the early Christian community.
January 20, 2013
Not Even Wrong
I recently saw a rather ignorant and twisted summary of Christianity from an atheist cartoon. It ended with this: “Eventually, the all-knowing man in the sky got fed up with the people doing things he knew they were going to do that would piss him off, so he takes his son and nails him to a cross, and says, ‘See? Now Look what you made me do. You should be ashamed of yourselves.’”
Kind of misses what really happened. Reminds me of something the physicist Wolfgang Pauli is quoted as saying. Rudolf Peierls writes that “a friend showed Pauli the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly, ‘It is not even wrong.’” Generally speaking in science nowadays it is applied to pseudoscience, crackpot theories, and theories that cannot be falsified. I’m twisting it a bit here to mean that the statement or argument is so wrong that it’s hard to track back to where it went off into crazyland.
The cartoon kind of misses the whole point so badly that it’s hard to respond to; that is, one must track back and undo a bunch of odd preconceptions and then insert new ones. It would take a long time to correct all the wrong-headed notions.
So, here’s a short version. Jesus’ death was not designed to shame the human race. It was designed to rescue it. Jesus died for our sins and it was a voluntary act on his part, not forced on him by a vengeful Father. As an analogy to sort of explain it, think in terms of a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save his buddies, or maybe a fireman who dies saving a family from a burning building.
The details of the crucifixion of Jesus are unpleasant: how he was beaten and humiliated, and finally nailed to a Roman cross to experience a slow and painful death. In fact, the cross was not even a Roman invention. They’d borrowed the idea from the Persians who had invented it as a means of killing criminals as slowly and as painfully as possible. Sometimes it could take nearly a week for a miscreant to finally reach room temperature.
The Romans, who adopted this execution method adopted it for the same reasons that the Persians had invented it: it was public, it was grueling, and it served as a useful warning to others who might think of getting out of line. The Romans believed crucifixion was a useful deterrent to future bad behavior, especially those who might be thinking of rebelling against Roman hegemony. Rebellious sorts were, the Romans believed, likely to think twice before they would take up arms against the Roman state when they saw the highways lined by the writhing bodies of their colleagues.
Jesus was executed by the Romans for the crime of rebellion: they saw him as a threat to civil order, as someone who might attempt to lead a Jewish revolt against Roman control.
Jesus’ disciples also initially saw his death as the end of the line: the smashing of their dreams that Jesus was the Messiah who would overthrow the Romans and re-establish the old Davidic monarchy. It was only Jesus’ resurrection three days later that began the process of forcing them to re-evaluate what they thought they knew about the Messiah and what it was that Jesus had actually been all about. Just as God had rescued the Israelites from physical slavery when Moses led them from Egypt, so now God had rescued them from spiritual slavery when Jesus died and rose again.
The problem with the cartoon summary of Christianity by the atheist is that it misses both the motivation of the actors and the outcome of the story (among other things; missing the resurrection is a serious flaw). Just as a flatearther is woefully ignorant of science, so this atheist is woefully ignorant of Christianity and the Bible.
January 19, 2013
Being Quoted as an “Expert”
On Tuesday I happened to get an email requesting “Bible experts” for an ongoing series of articles on the Bible and such, so I responded to the request. Billy Hallowell, Faith Editor/Assistant Editor of The Blaze then contacted me. He wrote,
Thanks so much for your participation! I will be relying upon you as a source for our ongoing Bible series. The first preview story relies upon getting your response to the following news story. Can you send a response by noon ET tomorrow? Thanks, again. Very glad to have you:
Last week, something very interesting happened. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell took aim at the Bible. I have included the link here: MSNBC’S LAWRENCE O’DONNELL MOCKS THE BIBLE & URGES OBAMA TO EXCLUDE IT FROM THE INAUGURATION
Laurence O’Donnell, a commentator on MSNBC, the cable news channel, said some nasty and ignorant things about the Bible. If you care to waste nine and a half minutes, you can watch it by clicking on the link above.
I wrote about 1800 words in response and sent it off to Billy Hallowell; today, his article reacting to Lawrence O’Donnell’s ignorant rant appeared and I was quoted extensively. If you’d care to read the article, you can click here: FAITH EXPERTS SKEWER MSNBC’S LAWRENCE O’DONNELL OVER HIS ANTI-BIBLE TIRADE: ‘AN IGNORANCE OF OUR HISTORY & DEMOCRACY’
I’m very pleased with how I was quoted. I was also surprised to see that the article has subsequently been reprinted verbatim on several other websites:
Dallas – Faith Experts Skewer MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Over His Anti-Bible Tirade
As to who Laurence O’Donnell is. Besides being the Senior Analyst at MSNBC and having been associated with the channel since its inception, he was the executive producer of the TV series, West Wing, has done quite a bit of acting, having appeared in such series as Monk, West Wing, and The Practice. He won two Emmys for West Wing. See his full .
January 18, 2013
Why Am I Here?
My favorite book in the Bible is Ecclesiastes. Many people will think that is peculiar. Perhaps my attraction to that particular section of the Bible has something to do with my personality, or perhaps it’s due to the out-of-placeness and genuine weirdness of the book. Of all the books of the Bible, it seems to be hardest (next to Revelation) for people to make sense of. It is rarely a book people will approach when they need comfort.
But the book of Ecclesiastes is actually very useful for putting life in perspective, and for handling crisis. The book of Ecclesiastes faces some of the biggest questions that people have: does my life really have any purpose? Why am I here? What should I be doing? The author of Ecclesiastes is a long philosophical essay. The author builds his argument, step by step, leading toward his inevitable conclusion. To make sense of it, Ecclesiastes must be read as a whole. Of all the books of the Bible, it is perhaps the easiest to miss its point and to take statements from it out of context and run in the wrong direction.
The author’s purpose in Ecclesiastes is relatively straightforward: he wants to discover, by way of experiment, what the purpose of a human life might be. His presupposition is that all we know of the workings of the universe comes from our own efforts, experience and learning. He assumes that God is silent and inscrutablee.
The author’s conclusion, when all is said and done, is that God is powerful, he does what as he pleases, and it’s impossible for any human being to figure out what he expects from us, since good things happen to bad people and bad things to good people. Therefore, the only rational response for a human being to this life is to have a healthy fear of this God and to attempt to act with as much wisdom as possible. The author of Ecclesiastes believes that wisdom may improve one’s chances of a happy life, but there are no guarantees. In the end, no matter what you do, whether you’re good or bad, wise or foolish, God is going to get you: you will die. Life, when all has been examined, is essentially absurd and futile.
Ecclesiastes takes a very existential view of life.
However, Ecclesiastes is true only as far as it goes, and only given the author’s pressupositions: if God has never talked to people and told them what he wants and what he thinks about them, then life is absurd and ultimately meaningless. But if that presupposition isn’t right, then the essay’s conclusion will be different. What Ecclesiastes does, therefore, is demonstrate the importance of God’s self-disclosure, his revelation to the human race through scripture and Jesus Christ. If all we knew of God was through what theologians call general or natural revelation (as described in Psalm 14: the heaven’s declare the glory of God), our understanding of God could never be more than what the author of Ecclesiastes presents. We’d never know for sure that God loves us and we’d never know what he wants, or what his plans for us might be. Ecclesiastes is a biblical argument for the need of the Bible.
January 17, 2013
What Would Satan Do? The Devil’s Theology
Another of my books is now available as an e-book for the Kindle: What Would Satan Do? The Devil’s Theology. It’s written for non-academics, which means it might not be so boring after all.
If the Devil were to write down his theology, what would he write? What exactly does the Devil believe about God, humanity, and sin? What motivates him? What drives his thoughts? It is a truism that everyone has a theology. The Devil’s no different. He has a point of view. He has a philosophy of life.
So what is it?
In what ways has his theology been influenced by, or perhaps influenced that of human beings?
Others have done the theology of John, the theology of Paul, or the theology of the Gospels. There are Old Testament theologies and New Testament Theologies. What Would Satan Do? The Devil’s Theology attempts to express the theology of Satan, that is, what Satan believes about life, the universe and everything.
The book will answer the questions that readers have about the Devil, and may also serve as a corrective to some misinformation. Much of what people think they know about Satan is derived more from Hollywood and tradition than from what the Bible actually has to say about him. From the Bible, the following questions will be answered, based on what it tells us about how Satan thinks:
What does he think about God—his attributes, his character?
What does he think about human beings and what they most need?
What does he think about sin?
What are his thoughts on justice?
What does he believe about himself?
Just as with people, what Satan thinks plays out in his actions. Peter warns his readers to beware of the Devil, who is like a lion seeking whom he may devour. Understanding the Devil more clearly—how he thinks, what motivates him—can help readers to have a better picture of who he is and just what to watch out for. Readers will discover that Satan’s thinking rarely follows the path they would expect.
Traditional systematic theology is all too often very dry and boring. It usually covers the following topics: epistemology, bibliology, theology proper, Christology, pneumatology, anthropology, harmartiology, eschatology, ecclesiology, and angelology. Although I’ve tried to break down Satan’s theology and systematize it according to the traditional categories, I’ve tried to avoid the technical jargon. I compare and contrast Satan’s theology with normative modern theology and Christianity. It turns out that Satan’s views are generally not heretical. That is, he recognizes that there is only one God (he’s talked to Him, after all, and he can count), he knows who Jesus is and what he did. He’s certainly aware of sin. But he’s got some serious disagreements with God.
The reader of What Would Satan Do? The Devil’s Theology will learn about what the Devil thinks. In the process, he or she will gain a clear understanding of what the Bible actually teaches about the subjects at hand, in contrast to Satan’s mistaken beliefs about them—and how many popular, un-examined and often common Christian notions are too often identical to Satan’s point of view. Easily and naturally, readers will learn proper theology and how to develop their own.
January 16, 2013
Patience
Moses took care of a bunch of sheep forty years before God let him do anything else. We may not enjoy learning patience, but we really have no choice. The forty years Moses spent tending sheep were not a waste: they had to happen in order for Moses to become the person that God needed to lead his people from Egypt. In that time he got married to a beautiful young woman named Zipporah, the daughter of a priest of Midian. They had a son named Gershom, and he had a career working in his father-in-law’s sheep business.
But God had not forgotten about his people back in Egypt; he knew he had a covenant with them; he heard all their cries for help. But it wasn’t yet time for God to act. He had to finish training the man who would rescue them. As the forty long years passed, the Pharoah that had issued the death sentence against Moses for the crime of murder.
The man who killed an Egyptian overseer who had been beating a Jewish slave, was not the sort of man God wanted to rescue his people. The man God needed was the one who had been a shepherd for forty years, who was married, who had a son, and who no longer had much interest in rescuing slaves from their masters. But the events and circumstance of Moses’ life, his time with the sheep, gave him just the skills he needed to lead a bunch of slaves to freedom.
From the point of view of the Israelites suffering during those forty years–many who spent their whole lives without rescue and then died in slavery and oppression–God’s patience looked like inaction and unconcern. Where was God? Why wasn’t he doing anything? But of course God was doing something: he was busy training their rescuer.
We can look at the methods God used to rescue his people after four hundred years of slavery and wonder why he did it the way he did it. In the first place, why allow them to be enslaved at all? Why did Moses have to be the one to rescue them? Why did his training take forty years? Why did it take ten plagues to convince the Pharaoh to let the people go? Why did they have to spend another forty years wandering in the desert? Why did they have to fight a series of wars against the indigenous peoples of Canaan before they could move in? Why all those problems and years before the Israelites could take possession of their Promised Land? Couldn’t God just have snapped his fingers, waved his hands or said some magic words and made it all perfect instantly?
I think the story of Moses and the Israelites reveals something about God and about how God works in his universe. It also illustrates the importance of patience: God seems not to be in the habit of doing things quickly. The creation of the universe, despite what Creationists argue, did not happen very fast. Nothing in the Bible happened quickly. Even Jesus lived thirty years as a carpenter before he began his public ministry—and God hadn’t even sent the Savior to Earth in Bethlehem until quite late in human history. Just like how the Israelites had to endure slavery before God saved them.
Just because you don’t see God doing anything about your problems, just because your dreams seem far from ever coming true, it does not mean that God is not there, or that he is not at work on your concerns. You just have to be patient.
January 15, 2013
When You Least Expect It
Jesus learned that his friend Lazarus was seriously ill, but he made no attempt to go visit him. In fact, Jesus delayed going to visit his friends, Martha and Mary of Bethany, and their brother Lazarus so that Lazarus could die. After he’d been dead for four days, he finally arrived at their house. He asked Mary if she believed in the resurrection of the dead. “Of course,” she replied.
“I’m the resurrection and the life,” he told her, and then insisted on going to visit the tomb. After weeping over his dead friend, he ordered the stone covering it moved away, then called Lazarus out. The man who had been dead four days, whose body had decayed and was causing a bit of a stink, came hopping out, wrapped in grave clothes but very much alive and well. (See John 11)
Sometimes God acts in a completely unexpected manner, after all is obviously lost.
Years ago my wife and I faced a significant crisis early in our marriage. My wife had decided not to sign a new contract at the private school where she taught. I was a college professor at a small Christian college, which decided to make radical changes in the Bible department so that my contract was not renewed. By the end of that first summer after the academic year, our paychecks came to an end–and neither of us had found a new position yet.
During the first week of September, an envelope arrived from an old friend. When I opened it, a bit of currency fluttered to the floor. To my surprise, it was a hundred dollar bill. Five identical bills then spilled out and floated to the ground.
The words in the letter were short and simple. “God told me that you were in need of money. Would you mind if I sent you six hundred dollars every month?”
My friend didn’t even know we were unemployed. But faithfully, every month, an envelope arrived with cash. After about five months, my wife and I got new jobs. Before we could tell our friend, another envelope arrived:
“My sister and brother are going to Mozambique to become medical missionaries. Would you mind if I sent them the money now instead?”
January 14, 2013
Objects in the Mirror are Smaller than They Appear
Sometimes it doesn’t get better. John the Baptist was a faithful prophet of God. His life had been a hard one, born to an old man and old woman, who, according to tradition died when he was still quite young, he had spent most of his life living in the desert, subsisting on whatever food he could find there, usually bugs and sometimes a bit of wild honey. After announcing that his cousin, Jesus, was the Messiah, he saw his followers drift away after the new man; although he understood it had to be that way, he was still human.
Then, after criticizing the king and his wife, he found himself arrested and kept in a prison; at last, to satisfy the vengeance of the king’s wife, the king—on account of a drunken promise to a dancing strumpet, his wife’s daughter—has him beheaded. So John died, alone and on a whim. (see Matthew 14:1-13, Mark 6:16-29)
And yet, Jesus had this to say about John:
“What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind? If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear expensive clothes and indulge in luxury are in palaces. 26 But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written:
“ ‘I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way before you.’
I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” (Luke 7:24-28)
As the author of Hebrews wrote about other people of faith:
There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. 36 Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; y they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated—38 the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground.
These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised…(Hebrews 11:35-39)
Like John the Baptist, they received no comfort, blesssing, prosperity or everything working out okay.
Here.
But notice what the author of Hebrews wrote after the sadness above: “since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.” (Hebrews 11:40)
If we remain locked into seeing only our seventy odd years here on Earth, then John’s life, the life of the other faithful people who suffered and died, who experienced deprivation or martyrdom may seem empty and bleak. But we need to regain our perspective: we are eternal creatures, granted everlasting life thanks to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. There is more to the story than our life here, and our physical death. From eternity, our seventy years here will be an ever smaller part of our existence, fading into the distance in our rear view mirrors. Objects in the mirror are smaller than they appear.
