John G. Stackhouse Jr.'s Blog, page 5

The Microphone Is Always Hot

Jesus is the Master of the pay-off sentence at the end of a parable or other teaching.

 

“Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’” (Mark 2:27).

 

“Then he said to them, ‘Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?’” (Mark 3:4).

Jesus even scores a one-two punch in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount:

 

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided to you” (Matthew 6:33).

 

“So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34).

 

Other Biblical voices have their moments, too. Nathan the prophet nails the self-righteous “God favourite” King David with “You are the man!” (2 Samuel 12:7).

 

My personal favourite prophet, Micaiah (patron saint of the sarcastic), scores a number of excellent lines in I Kings 22, concluding with this mic drop: “If you ever return safely, the Lord has not spoken through me” (v. 28).

 

Buried in another Old Testament passage, however, is a line so brief and laconic that it is easy to read right over it without noticing. Not noticing it would be a grim mistake.

 

In Numbers 12, Moses’ older sister and brother, Miriam and Aaron, grumble against him for marrying a foreign woman, even if a godly one. That’s what they say is the presenting problem.

They then go right on, however, to aver that they’re tired of living in the shadow of their little brother. That seems to be the real issue. (That problematic wife of Moses doesn't show up again in the story.)

 

After all, didn’t Miriam save baby Moses’s life in that little basket on the Nile? Didn’t she later sing the great song of triumph on the Red Sea shore?

 

And, after all, wasn’t Aaron God’s appointed high priest?

 

So they complain: “While [Israel was] at Hazeroth, Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman whom he had married (for he had indeed married a Cushite woman), and they said, ‘Has Yhwh spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?’”

 

Hmm. Maybe not a good idea to moan about not getting enough glory in the economy of God. Maybe a worse thing to speak against the one God clearly favours.

 

And here’s the punch line, tucked into the end of verse 2: “And Yhwh heard it.”

 

Those are four of the most chilling words in all of Scripture. God listens to us. All the time. Every single thing we say. And he takes us seriously.

 

God summons the family trio to the tent of meeting. God makes clear to Miriam and Aaron that Moses is not like anyone else, and particularly not like either of his siblings:

 

Hear my words:

When there are prophets among you,    

I Yhwh make myself known to them in visions;    

I speak to them in dreams.

Not so with my servant Moses;    

he is faithful in all my house.

With him I speak face to face—clearly, not in riddles,    

and he beholds the form of Yhwh.

Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?

 

God is angry, and Miriam—the eldest, and named first in the story (indicating her priority in this gripe)—is struck with leposy, head to foot, a pale horror.

 

She has nothing to say in the remainder of the story, having already said too much. Aaron, aghast, immediately and humbly pleads with Moses to save her.

 

Moses, to his credit, immediately prays for her healing. Yhwh himself, however, withholds immediate mercy:

“If her father had but spit in her face [in anger at her disrespect], would she not bear her shame for seven days? Let her be shut out of the camp for seven days, and after that she may be brought in again.” So Miriam was shut out of the camp for seven days.

 

I have been musing of late over the complicated territory of speech. The Bible has a lot to say about what we say, and I hope to write a short book about what God has been teaching me—and has yet to get through to me—about what I am to say as his child, his coworker, his ambassador, and his friend.

 

Today, then, just this: “And Yhwh heard it.” Every. Single. Thing. I. Say.

 

Jesus, the Master wordsmith, punches this lesson home:

I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned. (Matthew 12:36–37).

 

Time to say less, and better.

Just in Time for 1 & 4 July

Here is the opening post of our Mini-Course on the Origin Myths of Canada and the U.S.A.—and how Christianity did, and didn't, figure in those myths. Understanding those myths helps to understand why the two countries celebrate so differently on their respective national holidays.

The Fourth of July is a party. A big party. Every year.

Independence Day, as it is officially known, commemorates the Declaration of Independence, which was ratified by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, and established the United States of America as a new nation separate from Great Britain—and, perforce, the other British colonies in North America, some of which became Canada a century later. Americans—as individuals, as families, as communities, even as (sometimes especially as) churches—celebrate the Fourth of July with patriotic fervor and festivities great and small.

Three days earlier in the calendar, on July 1, Canada Day is celebrated also with a party. Every year. Just not a big party.

Yes, there is generally a public concert held in the square before the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, attended by thousands wearing red and white and waving red-and-white flags. Other municipalities might host a small parade and later shoot off some fireworks over the ocean, lake or river. (Most Canadian towns of any size are on an ocean, lake, or river.) And families generally gather for a picnic or a “barbecue,” the latter being Canadians’ erroneous term for what is actually, ahem, grilling.

So there is a party in Canada, too, on Canada Day. But not a big party. This series explains the difference in the two holidays—and why it matters every day, not just once a year, in terms of the very different experiences of nationalism, diversity, church-state relations, and even foreign policy between the two countries.

  *

In the beginning, the Earth was flooded. The Creator had condemned the planet’s feuding peoples and wiped them out with water. A few animals, however, survived the flood: the loon, the muskrat, and the turtle. And there was also Nanabush, sometimes called Nanabozo, or Weesakayjack—from which we get “whiskey jack,” the popular name for the Canada jay.

Nanabush was a great spirit with the power to create life. Nanabush asked the remaining animals to swim deep beneath the waters to retrieve soil that could be used to recreate the world.

One by one the animals attempted to obey, but one by one they failed. Eventually, the last animal, the muskrat, dove deep and stayed down longer than any other. It finally resurfaced—with wet soil in its paws. Alas, the little creature expired from the effort. But Nanabush took the soil and put it on the back of a willing turtle.

Turtle Island was born, the center of the new world. (And “Turtle Island” has since become a popular name for Canada among those interested in the traditions of First Nations.)

This is a dull and simplified version—borrowed from the Ojibwe—of one of many colourful “earth-diver” myths told in northeastern North America. Such tales vary with the tribe and even the teller, and they are usually much more complex and interesting.

Across the continent, Pacific Coast tribal lore speaks of creation also in terms of animals, but now these are the godlike Raven, Crow, Thunderbird, Wolf, and Bear. Up north, Inuit stories feature the goddess Sedna, whose father, angry at her love affair with Wolf, throws her out of his kayak and then, as she tries to cling to the side, cuts off her fingers and arms, which become the small and large animals of the Arctic. She then gives birth to half-wolf, half-human offspring—the Cree and the whites.

The Plains peoples tell a different sort of story. The Sioux say that the Old Man, Waziya, lived beneath the Earth with his wife. Their daughter married the Wind and bore four sons, the winds North, East, South, and West. Together with the Sun and the Moon, the winds controlled the universe. And as the rest of the world was being formed, Iktoma the trickster made trouble wherever he could.

The Crow tribes speak of Old Woman’s Grandchild, the son of an Indian woman and the Sun, who destroys monsters. He then goes to the sky and becomes Morning Star. In a Cheyenne version of the Dog Husband story (note the resemblance to the Sedna myth), the mother and her children go to the sky and become the Pleiades constellation.

The Comanche believe that the Great Spirit created some people but that there were white people existing before them. A flood washed away these white people, however, and they turned into white birds and flew off. A secondary spirit was then sent to create the Comanche. But they were not perfect at first, so the spirit came a second time, giving them intelligence and showing them how to make everything. And there are the usual trickster stories, featuring Old Coyote as the central figure.

Across the globe, tribal peoples tell stories with certain formal similarities. Great beings interact—in games, battles, sex, murder—and out of those interactions come the features of the world: mountains, trees, waters, animals, people. Behind it all is usually a single Creator, but somehow (the myths often don’t specify why) we have lost contact with this Sky Father. Foremost instead tends to be a trickster, whose antics range from the amusing to the lethal.

The world thus created is a strange place, a natural order emerging out of chaos into a state now of beauty and vitality, but also of perpetual danger. Life is precarious; bad things can happen in a moment. The best thing to do is to obey the teachings of the elders—who got to be elders by behaving themselves wisely—and to stay on the right side of the spirits and other powerful creatures who can, if offended, make life miserable, or just short.

The often-cited “harmony with nature” motif is thus revealed to be prudently pragmatic, not softly sentimental. Understand the way things came about and you will see how things continue to be. Humans are terribly vulnerable and therefore must get along with the rest of the world as carefully as possible.

Origin myths tell us not only about the past, but about how to conduct ourselves in the present. What then about the origins of the actual countries of Canada and the United States? What explains the excitement of the Fourth of July and the relatively muted enthusiasm of July 1? That’s what the rest of this series will explain.

To continue this series, sign up for the Mini-Course on Canadian and American Origin Myths—included in Companion and Sustainer memberships, and available at a small cost to everyone HERE .

Spelling Lessons

Spelling is one of my good things. And good things can get in the way of better things.

 

I don’t have the training of the spelling bee whiz kids one sees on TV or YouTube. They seem extraterrestrial. I learned to spell the old-fashioned way: phonics, rules, exceptions, usage, and brute force memorization of peculiar words I supposed I would have to use again.

Being good at spelling, however, hasn’t proved to the life-enhancing skill one might have thought it would be. I remember getting precisely zero dates in high school because of my prowess.

 

I did enjoy one brief, shining moment in a very small spotlight. Some time ago, CBC Radio thought it might be cute to go to the campus of the University of Manitoba as classes resumed one autumn and host a spelling contest between students and professors. The word went out from the Dean of Arts: Would three intrepid faculty members take on whoever was nominated as student champions by the U of M Student Association?

 

Wisely, not one member of the English Department agreed to serve. No upside: Win and you look like a bully; lose and you look like a chump.

 

I, however, was glad to fight for the honour of my colleagues, so when the phone call came, I answered that call. Three o’clock in the afternoon on a fine September day, outside on a campus courtyard, to spell for glory.

 

The students acquitted themselves well, and my faculty colleagues were up to the challenge. The deciding word, however, stumped five out of six: “idiosyncrasy.” (Almost everybody thinks of “democracy.”)

 

Your servant remembered that idiosyncratic word (sorry, but this is my story and I’m going to milk it to the last drop) and triumphed on behalf of professors everywhere. Not on this day would faculty dignity be compromised.

 

After we were off the air and the techs were packing up, the host said she had “jodhpur” in the chamber to shoot next. But I spelled that correctly, too. (I did have a bit of special knowledge here, though, teaching religious studies and encountering the Sanskrit/Hindi “dh” all the time: “Buddha,” “dharma,” “Gandhi.”)

 

The nice CBC reporter then just smiled, and she left—pretty much like everyone in high school did, too, now that I think about it….

 

Nowadays, The New York Times has been running a popular “Spelling Bee” game for a while. I’m fairly good at that, also. The fastest I have gotten to the top level (“Genius”) is nine-and-a-half minutes, and I arrive at that level more days than I don’t.

 

But, yes, many days I don’t. And that shameful allowance brings me to today’s point.

 

As I stare at the screen, I realize that in this game the answers are all literally right in front of me. There are no additional letters hiding somewhere. The agonizing truth is that there are words staring back at me that I simply cannot yet recognize. Everything I need to score perfectly is available, and my failure to score perfectly is completely my failure.

 

(Okay, I simply must pause to point out that on numerous occasions I have thought of a genuine word—a Merriam-Webster-endorsed word—that is not recognized by the game. While I’m at it, I protest that some of the words the game allows strike me as so slangy as to be, well, simply not thinkable by a gentleman. Harrumph. But I press on…)

 

The moral and spiritual lesson that occurs to me this morning is this: Just because I can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just because I can’t see the remaining words in the Spelling Bee doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And just because I can’t see what God is doing at this juncture of my life doesn’t mean God isn’t doing something, and something excellent.

 

Paul tells his Philippian friends: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (4:6–7).

 

I want to fasten today on the phrase “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding.” First, Paul does not promise that all will suddenly become calm and friction-free, our usual definition of “peace.” Instead, as a former rabbi who has the Old Testament always in mind, he means that we will enjoy shalom (= “flourishing”).

 

Second, Paul says that this is “the shalom of God.” This is the flourishing provided by the Maker of heaven and earth. As such, it is the product of God’s transcendent power and goodness: those divine ways that are not our ways but are as much greater than ours as the heavens are high above the earth (Isaiah 55:8–9).

 

Third, it may be that God will bring to bear on my situation “off-screen letters,” so to speak: elements and agents that I do not and cannot see. I need to trust that the God who made all will make whatever is necessary in this situation to turn it to good.

 

Fourth, however, it may also be that everything God needs to bring shalom in this situation is already present. I just lack the capacity to appreciate it. In fact, I may even be balking at experiences and circumstances that God has graciously provided for my improvement, rejecting as bad what God intends for good.

 

(The Apostle James tells us to “count it all joy when you encounter various trials” and the author of Hebrews tells us to value, not despise, the Father’s loving discipline; James 1:2–4; Hebrews 12:1–13).

 

Just because I don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Just because I can’t (yet) appreciate God’s gracious governance of my situation doesn’t mean that God isn’t graciously governing my situation.

 

I may be good at spelling—even at the level of what the New York Times (with ridiculous elasticity of definition) calls a “genius”—but I still miss a lot of words. I am certainly no spiritual genius, so I should simply expect not to be able to recognize what God is doing.

 

In many situations, yes, as in many Spelling Bees, all I see is a meaningless, frustrating jumble. So I should do as Paul (a true spiritual genius) advised us all to do: refer everything upstairs, and expect the puzzle to be solved completely in due time, whether or not I ever see the result.

 

Maybe God will whisper the answer to me. Maybe he’ll deal with it some other way. Meanwhile, my duty is to do what the Bible keeps telling me to do: Wait on God. Trust in God. Obey God so far as he has indeed commanded.

 

Pull on my jodhpurs and just get back in the saddle, full of expectant hope that God will do what God always does: Get it all right.

"Graduate School Advice" Reposted

Over the years, I've given lots of advice, some of it good, to folks asking me about seminary and other forms of graduate work in religous and theological studies. I've pulled together an index to a half-dozen or so of those posts here.

Please pass this along to anyone you know who is considering that fateful step.And because graphics help sell text nowadays, here is an otherwise gratuitous shot of my last alma mater: (Swift Hall, home of the Divinity School at The University of Chicago)

Creation Care for Non-Gardeners: First, You Have to Care

British Columbia annoyed me. Then it spoiled me.

I grew up on the Canadian Shield, a lovely giant geological horseshoe surrounding James Bay (at the southern end of Hudson’s Bay) of deep forests dotted by a million lakes on a bed of mineral-rich granite. Country so lovely that the Group of Seven and Tom Thompson immortalized it in paint.

 

My Ontario university, however, included some British Columbians in the student body. And they were insufferable, going on and on about the glories of their native province. Even their license plate motto was smug: “Beautiful British Columbia,” indeed.

 

I finally got to B.C. to visit a few years later. And I was aghast. It really was that beautiful.

 

Like trees? Coastal B.C., where I visited and then later lived for almost twenty years, is a temperate rain forest. My last property there alone had thirty gorgeous trees—mostly Douglas fir and hemlock, each of which was big enough to kill a house if it fell.

 

Flowers? My former Regent College colleague Maxine Hancock nicely used Vancouver in the springtime as it exploded with flowering trees and bushes on every block as a parallel to the New Jerusalem being a bride bedecked for her bridegroom.

 

Water? Mountains? Why not both? The mighty Fraser River and its many tributaries. Burrard Inlet and False Creek. Waterfalls on three—count ‘em, three—mountains within a half-hour’s drive of the city centre featuring ski hills, not to mention hiking and biking in every direction.

 

And then the bugs came to eat the trees: bugs that weren’t supposed to survive B.C. winters, and formerly didn’t, but now did, because the winters were warmer. Bugs that ruined whole hillsides, visible from the highway as massive golden-brown blights as one drove inland, over the coastal mountains toward vacation destinations like Kelowna and Vernon.

 

And then the fires came among the bug-weakened forests, fires of incomprehensible size, ferocity, and speed. Massive, sky-changing fires that kept us looking out our car windows as we drove back toward Vancouver from those vacations, wondering if the highway would be shut down and we would have to turn back—or be caught between fires.

 

(Have you ever come across a forest fire site? It’s horrifying. Even if no human beings were killed in it, it was Hiroshima for everyone else.)

 

Beautiful British Columbia on fire. It’s now June 2024, and another fire season has begun. How much more devastation can it take—along with the neighbouring prairie provinces and the northern territories?

 

On that Canadian Shield on which I grew up, we had water. Plenty of water, fresh and pure. Water so clean that you could drink the lake water you swam in. We did, just as our city drew its water supply from our lake with only minimal filtration.

 

Now I live in far eastern Canada in a province also blessed with water, both fresh and salt. The most popular seaside beach near my town, however, is regularly closed to swimming each summer.

 

The province professes utter mystification as to the source of the pollution. But cottagers are convinced that the province simply lacks enforced sewage guidelines for those living in the watershed and on the beach—including people running sewage lines directly into the bay—so that sewage overtaxes even the Northumberland Strait’s capacity to take it away.

 

Speaking of summertime and beaches, I love to grill, with beef, pork, and chicken regularly on the family menu. Having lived in Texas and Iowa, however, I have had occasion to visit “finishing” sites for both cattle and hogs. And I recall vividly passing on the highway a massive truck carrying tiny cages of chickens being toted to their doom. Factory farming remains, in the minds of many of us, a nightmare.

 

My more creation-conscious friends have all read Wendell Berry and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. (I’m sure those references are outdated, which kinda makes my point: I’m not that green.) They carefully compost, sort their recyclables, drive noble vehicles (or take public transit), and wear what one might magnanimously call distinctive clothes.

 

I, however, am no gardener. Or farmer. I don’t hug trees. I barely remember to water our household plants.

 

Sorting recycling seems, from what I’ve read, to be mere ecological theatre, since almost everything we send away gets thrown away into the landfill. Plastic seems still to me to be one of the world’s most brilliant inventions, and the cloth and paper bags that have returned to grocery and other stores to replace plastic bags irritate me yet.

 

So what does “creation care” have to do with someone like me? Let’s start by being honest.

 

Do I care? Should I care? Does it matter whether I care?

 

Since the Bible tells us literally on page one that God put human beings in charge of the world and commissioned us to look after it—well, then, yes, I suppose I should care.

 

And I did get anxious about those forests when I lived in B.C.

 

And I do think it’s revolting that Parlee Beach gets so gross that even the tourism-dependent province has to shut it down.

 

And I do hate the idea of animals suffering, especially since almost every cow, pig, and chicken I’ve ever met has seemed perfectly pleasant.

 

To care for creation, we have to care about creation. I suppose I do care. If you do, too, then this Mini-Course is designed to help.

 

Over a handful of posts, we’ll look at some basic questions, from “What is creation?” to “Why does it exist?” and from “Whose is it?” to “Where is it supposed to go?” We’ll look hard at the so-called creation commandment, or “cultural mandate,” given to the first humans by our Creator—and trace the implication of that Genesis word to the last words of Revelation.

 

We’ll then look at a popular Christian approach being advocated today by creation-focused writers and speakers. They try (spoiler: and fail) to use the Christological category of kenōsis (“self-emptying,” from Philippians 2) to describe how God relates, and thus also how we humans should relate, to the rest of creation.

 

We will pause to consider some basics of an outlook I call “evangelical realism” (an intentionally evangelical version of the ethical stance called “Christian realism”). We will acknowledge our involvement in unjust political, economic, and cultural regimes that can do creation some good even as they perpetuate despoliation and even the diversion of attention and resources away from solving problems. And we will set out a few key principles to guide our reflection specifically on creation care.

 

A positive creation-care ethic will conclude our Mini-Course, an ethic that will do as little harm and as much good as possible all things considered—and if that sounds like a heavily qualified, not-particularly-heroic ethic, then you’re hearing it right. But that’s what you’ll have to expect from an evangelical realist, and it might be the best way available until the Master Gardener returns once and for all.

 

Let’s roll up our sleeves, then, shall we?

[This is the first in a six-post Mini-Course called "Creation Care 101," available here .]

Have You Seen God Lately?

Two big Sundays in the Church Year have just come and gone. Pentecost is the commemoration of the coming of the Holy Spirit in power on the first disciples. (The British charmingly call it “Whitsunday” for the white robes worn by catechumens or, in another etymology, the “wit” (wisdom) of the Holy Spirit descending upon the Church.)

The second, which follows Pentecost, is Trinity Sunday, when the doctrine of the Trinity is celebrated as crucial to Christian understanding and piety.

 

Why, however, does the Church believe in the Holy Spirit?

 

It’s one thing to believe in a Supreme Being, God. Most people in the world do, in one form or another.

 

It’s another thing to trust in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. But we have lots of description of Jesus in the New Testament such that we, like the first converts, can have good grounds to conclude that he is Something More than a prophet, or angel, or even a theophany. (The lifework of my friend the late Larry Hurtado set out that process by which the disciples came to worship and affirm Jesus as divine.)

 

It is quite another thing, however, to believe that God is three, and that the Third is the ghostly wind of God, the Holy Spirit.

 

The “holy” part is obvious enough. “Holy” most basically means “set apart as special,” and in Biblical terminology “holy” comes to refer to the province of God, the “most special.” So the most special parts of the tabernacle and temple in the old covenant were designated “the holy place” and “the holiest of holies.” Likewise, our most special book is the Holy Bible.

 

What about this “Spirit,” though? In older Bibles, he is referred to as the Holy Ghost. This word connects back to a root shared with Germanic languages: Geist means “ghost,” “spirit,” and “mind.” Nowadays, to avoid the meaning of “spooky apparition,” we use Spirit.

 

The Bible words for “spirit,” in both Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament), also mean “breath” and “wind.” So it is symbolically apt that when the early Christians were awaiting the promised Spirit in an upstairs room in Jerusalem on that Pentecost Sunday, there came the sound as of a violent wind.

 

That sound was accompanied by a visual symbol. Over each person’s head, a flame or “tongue” as of fire came to rest, also symbolic of the presence of God—as in the Old Testament fire of Mount Sinai and the pillar of fire that led ancient Israel toward the Promised Land. (The text of Acts makes clear that the wind and the fire are “as if,” not literally a blast of air or an eruption of little flames.)

 

On the night he was betrayed and arrested, Jesus had promised the Twelve (detailed in the Upper Room Discourse of John 13-17) that he would go away. And, in the face of the dismayed disciples, Jesus asserted that it was better that he went away. Why?

 

Jesus said that he would ask the Father for Another One to come. And this One would do even better than what Jesus did. Jesus came to dwell among us (John 1 has the idea of the Word of God tabernacling among us, tenting among our tents) in order to perform signs for us and preach to us, as well as to model right living before us.

 

The Holy Spirit would come to dwell within us in order that we would perform miracles, proclaim the gospel, and live as examples to the world.

 

I hope to write a Mini-Course on the Holy Spirit before long, so I’ll rein myself in here before detailing too much more about who the Spirit is and what he does. For now, let’s resume our focus on why we believe there is such a person as to make the Godhead three.

 

Canadian schoolkids in my day were often assigned a little Bildungsroman by W. O. Mitchell called Who Has Seen the Wind? (1947). (I went to an advanced school in the bush of northern Ontario, so we used technical terms such as “Bildungsroman” all the time. No, we did not.)

 

The title comes from a little rhyme the boys at the centre of the story have themselves learned in school:

 

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I.

But when the trees bow down their heads,

The wind is passing by.

 

In the same way, the earliest believers came to expand their belief in God to include a third Person by experiencing the Spirit and by rightly attributing what they saw and heard to his divine work.

 

In his Pentecost sermon (Acts 2), Peter chides those who have mocked the work of the Spirit as signs merely of drunkenness with a light observation: “They’re not drunk: It’s only nine in the morning!” But by the end of his fiery oration, he is calling everyone to account before Almighty God. And some continue to write off what they have seen as not from God, while others believed and were added to the Church.

 

The Spirit continues to this day to manifest himself—in spectacular gifts, such as speaking in tongues, prophecy, and healing, yes, and more commonly in other gifts, such as (effective) teaching, evangelism, leadership, service, and hospitality.

 

The Holy Spirit continues to give people the New Birth. God animates us by his Spirit: anima in Latin means “the breath of life,” hence animal. And then God “holifies” us by the Holy Spirit, in the process of sanctification (sanctus being Latin for “holy”) to make us mature children of God.

 

If you attend a church and if you attend to what is happening in that church, you will see lives transformed. You will see addictions and ailments healed. You will see marriages saved. You will see relationships restored.

 

You will hear and see things that are best accounted for by the work of an unseen Agent. This Agent breathes life into us and among us, making us alive in God and growing us up into the image of God’s Son.

 

But you have to look for that evidence of the Spirit. And you have to know what you are looking for—and at.

 

As Jonathan Edwards wisely advised centuries ago in his Treatise concerning the Religious Affections (1746), the unusual behaviour that sometimes shows up in charismatic- and Pentecostal-type meetings may be prompted by the Spirit. But it may arise instead out of mental illness, a need for attention, or even an evil spirit. What counts as genuine evidence of the Spirit is a life increasingly conformed to the image of Christ, in loving worship of Christ, according to God’s Word about Christ in Scripture.

 

(I daresay that this evidence will not be as evident in a Sunday morning public worship service as it will be in a weekday evening small group. In that latter, homey context, people speak more freely about their ongoing life with God. Be advised: the Spirit more often shows up clearly at the retail level rather than the wholesale.)

 

Mitchell’s schoolboys quickly get tired of their little rhyme. Eventually one of them cracks up the others as they trudge home again from school by an inventive bit of naughtiness:

 

Who has seen the wind?

Neither you nor I.

But when the trees bow down their heads,

Nobody gives a damn.

 

I remember snorting with delight when reading this line in a book I otherwise didn’t much enjoy. But I’ve come to see a solemn, even menacing, shadow to the joke.

 

The trees are bowing down their heads in any healthy congregation. And all around the world, the Spirit is blowing new life into individuals, families, congregations—even nations. Trees are bowing down their heads there, too.

 

It is because Jesus promised the Spirit and then the disciples experienced the Spirit that the Church came to affirm the presence and power of the Spirit on two successive Sundays: Pentecost and Trinity. It is because Christians experience Spiritual gifts and Spiritual growth and Spiritual miracles that we believe in that Spirit.

 

Yes, one can write it all off as merely psychological and sociological wish-fulfilment, or “groupthink,” or hysteria. Dismissing the work of God by attributing it to the work of something else has a long history. And sometimes what purports to be the work of the Spirit is, indeed, the work of charlatans or fools.

 

Still, the Wind of God somehow blew up that little coterie of Jews in a Jerusalem upper room into the world’s largest and most influential religion. And that religion makes remarkable differences in human lives globally to this day.

 

Searching for the Cause of Christianity might well be worthwhile for the serious inquirer. Seeking the full influence of that Holy Spirit on one’s life and the life of one’s congregation is well worth the earnest effort of any serious Christian.

 

The trees are bowing down their heads all around us, all over the world. Who will give a damn?

What I Know about Israel and Palestine

I have visited Israel only once: twenty years ago or more, for an interfaith conference held at a study centre just outside Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate, and then a quick tour up and around the Galilee. I came away thinking that “the question of Israel/Palestine” was the first subject I had ever studied that got more complicated and confusing the more I studied it.

I think I understand the situation better today than I did then. But it remains a conundrum—and now a conundrum on fire.

 

Meanwhile, lots of people think it isn’t a conundrum at all. Student protesters think it’s obviously true and good that Israel must withdraw from Gaza, that the Palestinians must have their own state, and that Israel instead must—well, what?

 

“From the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, Palestine must be free” is a phrase—going back to the 1960s coined by the Palestine Liberation Organization (the Hamas of its day)—to indicate a Palestinian state replacing the Jewish one. That sounds simplistic, if not genocidal, to me.

 

But I was also nonplussed by the recent utterance of a Christian pastor. He told his congregation that we Christians ought to “pray for the peace of Israel” and in particular support the local synagogue, who could be presumed to be anxious about the rise of antisemitism.

 

I wasn’t sure he quite understood the scriptural source of that phrase, about which more below. More bothersome, however: I waited in vain for him to mention other people in that region and in our own locale for whom we ought also to pray.

 

He didn’t mention Palestinian Christians, there or here, who are our brothers and sisters in Christ. Nor did he mention Islamic Palestinians, who have a list of significant grievances and who are undergoing most of the suffering there today, as well as Muslims here in Canada who stand with them as cobelievers—and who are our neighbours.

 

I worried about how this well-intentioned gesture might actually damage the reputation of the church among the community—taking sides in a fraught situation, implicitly disparaging a growing immigrant population, and so on. It was a dangerous move to make on its own.

 

Still, I certainly can’t solve the situation in Israel today. (I apologize to those of you who have read this far in hopes that I would.) Instead, I offer a short list of what I do think I know about it, in hopes that readers will both protest and pray appropriately.

 

• Mass movements sputter out for lack of focus, such as the Occupy movement did. If they have a key and clear objective, the results can be piecemeal and often unexpected, as in the civil rights and Vietnam War protests of a generation ago.

 

(The anti-apartheid protests commend themselves to some as ideal models for today. I will leave it to more-informed minds to comment on useful parallels between the two situations, but they clearly aren’t just the same.)

 

The situation in Israel nowadays strikes me as probably the least simple situation most university students have ever encountered. It is therefore utterly unsuitable as a matter for the blunt instrument of coercive campus protests.

 

Learning about it all? Yes, of course. Discussion, even debate? Indeed. Professors turning their class periods into political rallies, and demonstrations preventing the normal business of the university? No sympathy for any of that from this career academician.

 

• “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” comes from Psalm 122, a “psalm of ascent” sung by ancient Israelites as they slowly made their way up to Jerusalem for festivals. The psalm celebrates Jerusalem, however, not as the centre of ethnic Israel, the Jewish people.

 

Jerusalem is extolled instead as the centre of the worship of Yhwh and the place of righteous political judgment:

 

That is where the tribes go up—    the tribes of Yhwh—to praise the name of Yhwh    according to the statute given to Israel.There stand the thrones for judgment,    the thrones of the house of David.

 

Contemporary Jerusalem is not, of course, either of those things: neither the centre of the worship of Yhwh nor a place of righteous political judgment.

 

• What would it mean, then, for Christians to join ancient Israelites in prayer for the peace of Jerusalem today?

 

It means to truly pray for the free and flourishing worship of God and for the righteous administration of justice.

 

To the extent that any actor in the Middle East today is furthering the worship of God— such as, say, Palestinian Christians who faithfully maintain and preach the gospel in a singularly hostile situation—we should pray for their peace.

 

To the extent that any actor in the Middle East is working against justice, we pray for God’s corrective judgment upon them—wherever they happen to live, whatever flag they wave, and whatever identity they claim.

 

• It also means to pray for shalom, a much richer word than our English “peace.” It means flourishing. It means for something to be the best it can be, according to its design by God.

 

So we pray that shalom will come to Jerusalem—and, by extension, all Israel—and, by extension, all of the world loved by Israel’s God. The shalom of Jerusalem is for the blessing of the world, not just for Israel, just as the nation of Israel itself was elected by God to bless the entire world, not just itself.

 

The true shalom of Jerusalem cannot come at the expense of other nations God loves, and especially not at the expense of our fellow Christians.

 

• What would it mean for shalom to be enjoyed by Jerusalem?

 

It would mean justice for all. Welfare for all. Repentance by all and forgiveness for all. It would mean generosity among all.

 

What it does not mean is just the cessation of armed hostilities. A mere ceasefire is not in view. Indeed, a ceasefire at the wrong time and under the wrong conditions might produce less shalom, not more.

 

• There is no way to roll the calendar back, to move all the players back to some putative “first position.” Too much history has been overlaid on too little territory.

 

The only way forward in resolving these land claims (as in resolving others) lies in good will and good action. We must earnestly try to understand the others’ position and to acknowledge the justice of their claims (including sincere regret for historic injustices). We must fairly put our own situation and claims on the table (including willingness to forgive past wrongs). We must recognize the limits inherent in the situation and its possible resolutions. And we must aim for a lasting peace, which will mean compromise and cooperation.

 

Our jaded age will respond to such recommendations with rolled eyes. Many of us prefer Alexander’s solution to the Gordian knot of political complexity: Just take a sword to it!

 

Yet only these principles—Biblical principles, principles also of common sense given to us by our common Creator—have availed in the past to produce enduring resolutions. Even wise imperial regimes have engaged in such conversations rather than trust in mere military power to keep everyone in line.

 

• Antisemitism and Islamophobia alike are ugly enemies of the common good. Christians should indeed be quick to support the local synagogue—and also the local mosque. Christians should indeed be quick to support all of those who are suffering today in Israel. “For God so loved the world….”

 

In conclusion, I want to affirm the good instinct of that pastor who reached out to the local synagogue. Frankly, who cares what you or I think about the crisis in Israel/Palestine? Precious few of us have a flyspeck’s worth of influence on that situation.

 

The important question is whether you and I are fostering good relations among Jews, Muslims and Christians here: where we live, where God has placed us to cultivate shalom.

 

Let us indeed pray for the shalom of faraway Jerusalem—and then return, each of us, to our proper work: whatever it is to which God has called us, and whomever it is to whom God has called us, to promote shalom wherever and however we can.

More than I (Can) Imagine

This post is humiliating to write, but let us see if glory waits on the other side of mortification.

I came across these phrases in the Book of Common Prayer this morning:

“O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding . . . . Your promises . . . exceed all that we can desire.” So says the collect for the Sixth Sunday of Easter.

In this prayer, Thomas Cranmer echoes scriptures such as these:

 

“To him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us . . .” (Ephesians 3:20).

 

“However, as it is written: ‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’ [Isaiah 64:4]—the things God has prepared for those who love him . . .” (I Corinthians 2:9).

 

It’s funny—and by “funny” I mean “pitiful, even contemptible”—that throughout my life when I have read or heard God’s promises of “such good things as surpass our understanding” prepared for his heirs, my mind has immediately gone to—well, where does your mind go?

 

My imagination has instantly and always conjured up grand houses on gorgeous properties: Château de Chambord meets Fallingwater meets Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild meets Three Forks Ranch on Lake Como meets Lake Louise meets Iguazu Falls meets the Maldives. (Yes, I have a flexible imagination!) Those houses naturally were equipped with garages stuffed with fabulous automobiles and motorcycles, and kitchens staffed with angelic chefs turning out gourmet meals from morning ‘til night.

 

Where my mind has never gone, until today, was to a very different range of possibilities “beyond what I could ask or imagine”: the fruit of the Spirit, the beatific vision, true fellowship with my co-believers, evangelistic successes, and shalom for all creation.

Sure, I would sometimes think of heavenly choirs and the great throne of God when I thought of the life to come. And I have taught at length on the new creation ahead of us as depicted in Revelation 21-22. But somehow these verses triggered in me very specific, very material aspirations.

 

Not once, until today, did “surpassing expectations” mean anything regarding personal growth, relational health, or the healing of the world. Instead, my mind would play some version—sorry, some personally curated version—of the execrable old TV show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Ugh. So awkward to confess.

 

Still, however belatedly it has come—and it is shameful for it to have come so late in life—it is a lovely thought:

 

• to be more confident and expectant of the Lord’s faithfulness than I can imagine;

• to be more thankful for God’s goodness than I can imagine;

• to be more joyful, no matter what, than I can imagine;

• to be more intimate and constant in my walk with God than I can imagine;

• to be more committed to holiness, justice, and love than I can imagine;

• to be more powerful in the Spirit to advance the Kingdom than I can imagine;

• to be in closer and happier fellowship with my wife, my kin, my friends, and my neighbours than I can imagine;

• to be more content than I can imagine....

 

For human society to be truly cooperative in every way; for all of creation to be brimming and humming and laughing without fears or tears; and for God to be fully, finally, and always all in all—the imagination reels in wonder, even disbelief, and barely dared hope.

 

If I had only traced the quoted scriptures back to their original contexts, however, I would have seen that the Apostle knew very well what mattered most. And he said so in the verses on either side.

 

How much better are these hopes than mere creature comforts! And how lovely it will be to have those comforts “added unto you,” in whatever version our loving, creative Parent sees fit to bestow when I finally have my priorities straight and my loves properly ordered. Then I will enjoy them in the proper way, amid the greater glories of the spiritual and relational.

 

Even so, come, Lord Jesus—and come today afresh into my heart to purify, correct, and enlarge it with the values and virtues of the world to come. I dare not rest content with aspirations to wander around the houses and grounds of the great King when I have been invited inside for an audience—and even supper!

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Evangelicals, Homosexuality, and the Bible: What Is at Stake in the Hayses’ New Book?

Social media exploded recently with the news that retired Duke University professor Richard B. Hays has teamed up with his son, Fuller Theological Seminary professor Christopher B. Hays, to write a new book: The Widening of God's Mercy: Sexuality within the Biblical Story (Yale: forthcoming in September).

 

What has evangelicals reaching for top-drawer expressions of dismay is the loss of a big gun in their campaign against the ecclesiastical acceptance of same-sex relationships. Richard Hays, a New Testament scholar of considerable repute, published his widely used textbook, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, a generation ago. And it has done doughty service for evangelicals (and Catholics and Orthodox) because its chapter on homosexuality took a generally traditional line.

“See? Even a Duke professor agrees with us!” And now, alas, he doesn’t.

 

It isn’t only evangelicals, moreover, who are making noise. Jonathan Merritt, ex-vangelical and now “out” columnist for Religion News Service, crows that “Conservative Christians just lost their scholarly trump card on same-sex relationships.” In undisguised Schadenfreude, Merritt quotes a range of conservatives immediately bemoaning the loss of Hays from their ranks.

 

What makes the situation more interesting, and complicated, is that Hays fils is a professor of Old Testament at evangelical Fuller Seminary.  This is a school that has not yet tolerated someone on the faculty who will defend the legitimacy of same-sex marriage, and only recently fired a director over the issue.

 

What makes the situation most interesting to some observers, however, is that evangelicals are—to use the appropriate scholarly expression—freaking out about a book that isn’t yet published. At least two intriguing points come to mind.

 

First, the publisher’s summary outlines the basic dynamic of the book’s argument, and it’s not obvious why evangelicals should be bothered by it:

 

“[The authors] remind us of a dynamic and gracious God who is willing to change his mind, consistently broadening his grace to include more and more people. Those who were once outsiders find themselves surprisingly embraced within the people of God, while those who sought to enforce exclusive boundaries are challenged to rethink their understanding of God’s ways. . . . God has already gone on ahead of our debates and expanded his grace to people of different sexualities. If the Bible shows us a God who changes his mind, they say, perhaps today’s Christians should do the same.”

 

If indeed the thrust of the Hayses’ argument is that God has changed his mind, precious few evangelicals (and Catholics and Orthodox) will be persuaded to change theirs. Only Open Theists among evangelicals—a small minority—entertain the idea that Scripture ever depicts God truly changing his mind. The few expressions along those lines have been interpreted for two millennia by the vast majority of Christians as anthropomorphic (or, better, anthropopathic) accommodations to human sensibilities. And even the Open Theists don’t generally argue that God has changed God’s mind on matters as basic as this one.

 

In fact, if the best the Hayses can argue is that God has changed his mind, then they might well play into the hands of the traditionalists. “The only way you can justify your position is to say that the Bible generally agrees with us and that somehow you think God has changed his mind—which God doesn’t, so we’re still right.”

 

So why be so alarmed?

 

Second, if in fact the Hayses can convincingly demonstrate that the Bible does provide solid grounds to endorse same-sex marriage today, then evangelicals, of all people, should welcome the enlightenment. Catholics, Orthodox, and other Christians who lean hard on tradition will have a tougher time with such an approach. But evangelicals’ staunch Biblicism should prompt them to a “wait and see” stance just in case, in the words of John Robinson’s benediction over the Mayflower Pilgrims, “the Lord hath more truth yet to break forth out of His Holy Word.”

(On evangelical Biblicism, please take a look at Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction.)

 

Indeed, it isn’t consistent with evangelical Biblicism to fret about whether this or that scholar changes his or her mind. Yes, it has been polemically helpful to have a prominent scholar agree. The late Larry Hurtado of the University of Edinburgh (and a longtime friend) took the same stance as Hays did back in the 1990s, and lots of other worthy scholars have done so as well. The only thing that ought to decide the matter for evangelicals, however, is what the Bible says, regardless of who says what the Bible says.

 

Orthodox Christians once excommunicated each other for holding different views of baptism, or the Lord’s Supper, or ecclesiastical polity. Eventually, though, evangelicals saw that serious theological work grounded in Scripture underlay each other’s views, and fellowship was extended on the basis of a common faith in God and common submission to the Bible.

 

In the last century, Pentecostals were excluded from evangelical fellowship for a while until it became evident that solid Biblical arguments justified each other’s positions regarding spiritual gifts. Evangelicals since then have likewise, if painfully, grown to accept differing views of women in pastoral ministry as genuinely evangelical because Biblically argued.

 

To be sure, not just any view argued just any way from the Bible has met with general evangelical acceptance. Evangelical arguments for slavery—mooted as recently as 160 years ago—wouldn’t get traction today. There are complicated reasons for this consensus, but among them would be a lack of respect for the Biblical reasoning offered on slavery’s behalf.

 

So far, few arguments among evangelicals for same-sex marriage and related LGB issues have been offered in anything approaching a rigorously exegetical way. Even those that have emerged have not passed the standard of “good enough to be taken seriously.” (Jim Brownson’s volume, Bible, Gender Sexuality [Eerdmans, 2011], is perhaps the best to date, and it doesn’t elude the fusillade of arguments presented in, say, Robert Gagnon’s work.)

 

What has to surface is an argument so thickly and properly Biblical as to command respect from those who see things differently—as evangelicals have agreed that the other side makes good points, if not finally convincing ones, about baptism, communion, or bishops. If such an argument does arise, my point is that evangelicals will be duty-bound to honour it as such, as we (often grudgingly) have done in the past with arguments for positions we didn’t heretofore acknowledge as evangelically admissible.

 

It remains to be seen, therefore, whether the Hayses’ argument will convince—or even impress evangelicals as worthy of serious consideration. Until it is published, we evangelicals might simply calm down and look forward to reading the book.

 

That’s what I’m doing.

The New Yorker's Weird Double Standard

I once wrote a review of a novel. I shouldn’t have, but I did.

 

I had published several dozen book reviews previously. And that set me up for hubristic failure. All of those books were in my academic fields: theology, history, and philosophy. Precious little of that training prepared me to review Margaret Atwood.

A small journal invited me to do so, however, and I arrogantly picked up The Robber Bride (1993) and set to work.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed it (it was nominated for Canada’s highest literary honour, the Governor-General’s Award) and said so in the review. (What I didn’t say in the review, but believe to this day, is that Atwood is at least as good in reporting on Toronto’s smart set as she is in her more famous historical and science fiction. She could have been that city’s Jane Austen—or, perhaps, Tom Wolfe. But I digress.)

 

The review was duly published—as was my first book around the same time. So I excitedly packaged up both and sent them to her—as if she would want to read a review by a literary nobody published in a marginal periodical plus a scholarly history about, of all things, Canadian evangelicals.

 

Amazingly, Ms. Atwood wrote back a postcard of thanks—crammed, in fact, with comments both kind and witty. When I eventually met her several years later, I badly hoped she had forgotten all about my little parcel. We had only a few minutes together before she was to give a reading, so all was mere pleasantries. But she kept sending a feline smile my way, and I’ll bet she remembered, alas.

 

My few courses in English and American literature hardly prepared me to write a proper review of a major novelist. Still, those few courses made me vastly more qualified than writers who frequently show up in The New Yorker to review works on religion, and particularly about Christianity.

 

My case in point is James Wood’s recent review of Marilynne Robinson’s book Reading Genesis. The review is so bad—and, for this long-time New Yorker reader, predictably bad—that it prompts this review of a review to make the point that something strange is going on in the editorial offices of that estimable publication.

 

At first blush, all seems to be well. James Wood is an accomplished critic who divides his professional life between teaching at Harvard and writing for The New Yorker. Seems like a good gig, and his long career merits it.

 

The book in question comes from an esteemed contemporary novelist, she of Gilead fame. So we have a critic and a novelist. Dog bites man. Let’s just move along.

 

What Wood decides to fasten on, however, is not Robinson’s literary art, and only desultorily her ideas. What immediately gets him going and keeps him going is hatred—hatred spawned in his northeastern English childhood toward Marilynne Robinson’s God. And that hatred almost literally crosses Wood’s eyes so that he can’t see what’s in front of him.

 

His review begins by citing an uninspired and uninspiring hymn from his days at school that includes these lines: “The time will surely be:/When the earth shall be filled with the glory of God/As the waters cover the sea.”

 

“These words,” Wood writes, “were mystifying to me before they were repellent. How could the waters cover the sea, given that the sea is made of water?”

 

Now, I am second to none in mocking worship songs for metaphor malfunctions. But is James Wood really making fun of the Book of Isaiah (which, he acknowledges, is the source of the image) as if to suggest that this ancient literary genius, plus several millennia of Jewish and Christian critics, haven’t seen plainly what appeared so obvious to his childish eyes?

 

Surely a literary critic has heard of idiom?

 

Turns out, yes, he has: “Once I’d decided that the phrase simply meant a great deal of water”—good for you. But why are you telling us about this elementary mistake of interpretation, as if it redounds to the discredit of the hymn?

 

Ah. It’s because this image “promised an annihilating but glorious flood,” “a dearly desired apocalypse that sounded highly undesirable to me, because it apparently had no space for human beings. Where would we be when water covered the sea?”

 

Surely, the fair-minded reader would say, Wood—critic Wood, Professor Wood—isn’t making such an obvious mistake as to miss the simile. What covers the world at the end of the world, according to Isaiah and the hymn, is the glory of God in the manner of a flood: “as the waters cover the sea.” Yet he never demurs from this juvenile mistake.

 

Indeed, much in the manner of the bored, disaffected Etonian he surely was, the sport continues: “Unless we’d bobbing on it, alongside Noah and his ark.” Such impious wit doubtless elicited shocked laughter from his fellow swells. But what’s it doing in a serious review of a serious book in a serious magazine?

 

“Victorian hymns are cheap targets,” Wood allows, only then to take cheap shots throughout the rest of this long (four-page!) review.

 

Herewith, a sampling:

 

“Nonbelievers may suspect that the Christian notion of Providence is itself whimsical, in its conceit of a Creator who, one day, just fancied us into life.” The superficiality of this remark is breathtaking.

 

What Christianity actually says is that God Almighty decided to create our world because God loves to create (consider merely the number of species of beetles) and God loves to share love with creatures capable of reciprocation. Thus God made this world and, in particular, humans in his image.

 

This project of God, the Bible goes on to say, was hardly a caprice. For God foreknew that creating and loving human beings would entail the eventual incarnation, suffering, and death of the Son of God as the climax of a very long story, still going on, of God suffering alongside, on behalf of, and always in the interest of saving those human beings and this marred planet God loves.

 

So, no, not a whimsical fancy, you silly little snot.

 

“And, besides, what is intrinsically meaningful about eternal life anyway?” This from a critic who one might suppose would be aware of literature popping up occasionally here and there (which is to say, globally) about quests for fountains of youth, elixirs of eternal life, portals to immortality, transhuman quests to evade death, and so on, and so on.

 

The pose of insouciance here (“Living forever? What’s the big deal?”) is perfect for a middle-class English male fourteen-year-old who perforce takes his own immortality for granted. But such a remark seems bizarre coming from an adult, let alone an educated person.

 

John Calvin, Robinson’s own favourite theologian, is the villain of this piece. No, his persecution of Servetus doesn’t show up, surprisingly. But his predestination is front and centre.

 

Indeed, Wood says that Calvin himself “makes the doctrine central.” But that’s what you’d expect a clever teen to say. Actual scholars (such as my best teacher of Calvin, B. A. Gerrish at The University of Chicago) mildly point out that one has to look hard for predestination deep inside Book III of Calvin’s Institutes.

 

It’s a strong doctrine Calvin propagates, that’s for certain. (Calvin himself called it the decretum horribile.) But he certainly doesn’t make it central.

 

What is central for Calvin is what even Wood recognizes is central in Robinson, too: Providence, the sovereignty of God. But Wood can’t see what Providence means here—a doctrine she seems to link with a loving and caring God—and, tellingly, he gives little space for Robinson’s telling of it.

 

What we get instead is Wood railing against the unfairness of election (not a new idea; Calvin saw it, also) and even more the way God’s great sovereignty must, in a zero-sum conceptualization of the matter, mean the diminishing of human agency to the vanishing point. “If the story could never have been otherwise, it is not quite a story.”

 

A little theology, however, would go a long way here to assuage Wood’s worries. Theologians for quite some time (back to, say, at least Isaiah) have seen human freedom and responsibility as gifts of this same sovereign God. God chooses to grant space and time in which we humans can make choices that matter.

 

Yes, some Christians (although not most) do hold to a strong doctrine of (ultimate) election to salvation or damnation. But even Calvinists believe in some version of free will. They have to, since the entire moral economy of the Bible depends on it.

 

Indeed, Wood himself sees that to be the case as, a few hundred words after indicting Robinson’s God as a kind of puppetmaster, he then chides God for being a Mafia capo who offers his covenant to Abraham as “his particular protection racket.”

 

Well, that’s one way to look at the Old Testament. And, consistent with that way, Wood goes on to damn God with “divine caprice and favouritism” on behalf of his chosen people and murderously against their rivals.

 

He thus utterly misses the lesson that courses through the covenantal language of the Tanakh from Abram’s initial arrangement to the Chronicles at the end of it—namely, that Israel is to be “a light to the nations,” an object lesson and a beacon to which the nations of the earth will eventually come to be likewise saved and welcomed into that self-same covenant.

 

Wood’s hatred for this God keeps blurring his vision. “I have spent much of my life hating the God who replies to Job, the God who bullies and blusters out of the whirlwind.” Indeed, for “the God of the Hebrew Bible comes up short, morally," since he is, as Jack Miles (don't get me started on Jack Miles) is quoted as saying, “maximally powerful and minimally kind.”

 

This, despite the testimony of, well, pretty much everyone who addresses God in the Bible. Their uniform verdict is that God is actually extraordinarily kind toward people who keep flouting his instructions, betraying his trust, and breaking his heart.

 

Wood seems to imply that Robinson would be better off, as would we all, if she just paid attention to those critics who see the Bible for what he believes it is: a collection of ancient books of religious reflection, nothing more. Thus “the God of the Hebrew Bible is not God himself but a collection of human approximations and reckonings and inspired fictions,” a view that goes back through Feuerbach to unbelievers in the ancient world.

 

“Calm rationality”—I do love it when such people congratulate themselves so ingenuously—“should remind me that this God speaks words written by a human or group of humans. From a literary point of view, it makes no more sense to hate this God than to hate King Lear.”

 

Still, as much as Wood professes to believe in “pinching ourselves from time to time with good, strong secular fingers” (how wonderful to be so ruggedly enlightened!), he can’t help hating. And he hates on the basis of a view of the Bible, Christian theology, and hermeneutics apparently innocent of actual education in any of those fields.

 

From someone with a single university degree, and in English, one might not hope for much more. What other than cheap shots can be expected from someone whose education and sensibilities about Christianity both seem to have been arrested somewhere in early adolescence?

 

The New Yorker, however, keeps letting literary critics embarrass themselves in writing about religion. The late Christopher Hitchens kept doing so, ultimately disgracing himself with his God Is Not Great, an extended rant that made Richard Dawkins’s porous The God Delusion look like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. And Adam Gopnik, delightful on other subjects, indulges himself in the same querulous nonsense today.

 

Look, there are serious questions to be raised about Christianity. They have been raised, answered, and yet they recur. Let the conversation continue.

 

Wood himself rightly seems to sense some of them. But he lacks the categories and terms even to put the questions properly, let alone wrestle with the answers offered by Robinson, or Calvin, or the Bible. That’s the mark of someone out of his depth. As one wag put it, many of his remarks are so inappropriate they aren’t even wrong.  

 

These critics settle for the idle lobbing of silly non-problems or trading in elementary misconstruals that might have stumped an earnest Sunday School teacher but hardly trouble actual scholars. Wood, Hitchens, et al. keep giving themselves away: they aren’t even trying to be fair, since fairness starts with being adequately informed, and they patently are not.

 

The larger issue is, indeed, The New Yorker’s commissioning such essays, or tolerating them from staff writers, no matter how distinguished. Even a Harvard professorship does not imply omnicompetence. (As a Chicago grad myself, I would add, especially not a Harvard professorship.)

 

The same thing happens over at The Atlantic and at lesser periodicals. It’s a weird double standard that is applied only to Christianity. (Imagine the heat they would take if someone bumbled his way through the Qur’an like this, or made similar fun of the Buddha.)

 

Maybe I should start writing literary criticism for them?

 

God forbid.

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