Michael S. Heiser's Blog, page 70

Can Unbelievers Ever Please God? Part 2

While I won’t repeat what I said in Part 1, the comments to that post have left me thinking that some readers still don’t understand what I’m saying and not saying – and so are missing the point of the question. So, by way of review …

What I’m Not Saying and Not Asking

I’m not saying that an unbeliever can do things to please God so that the result is salvation. I’m not suggesting an unbeliever can merit saving grace (which is oxymoronic). I’m therefore not asking the question of whether an unbeliever can do something that results in their no longer being “under wrath” or under less wrath.

Consequently, verses that are clearly in the context of “coming to God” in a faith sense (like Hebrews 11:6) have nothing to do with either my question or the question. That verse (and others like them) cannot therefore be a rebuttal to my contention that unbelievers can please God.

What I’m Saying

What I’m saying is not complicated, though I can (again) tell from comments that readers are over-thinking it. I’m asking whether an unbeliever can do *anything* in life that makes God glad, or happy, or pleased. Does God ever look at something an unbeliever does and take pleasure in it? Or is it the case, as the theologians I quoted in Part 1 insist, that no matter what an unbeliever does, God takes no pleasure in it at all. I simply don’t believe that, and I think there are scriptural examples that support my view—and therefore deny the other (more common in evangelical circles) view.

Sketching My Argument

So how would I argue that unbelievers can do things in which God takes pleasure? I’ll start with what I think is  clear case of my position.

When God came to the unbelieving Abimelech, the king of Gerar (we have no reason to view him as a believer), and told him not to touch Sarah, the wife of Abraham, consider what God says in Genesis 20:

3 But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night and said to him, “Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a man’s wife.” 4 Now Abimelech had not approached her. So he said, “Lord, will you kill an innocent people? 5 Did he not himself say to me, ‘She is my sister’? And she herself said, ‘He is my brother.’ In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands I have done this.” 6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart, and it was I who kept you from sinning against me. Therefore I did not let you touch her. 7 Now then, return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, so that he will pray for you, and you shall live. But if you do not return her, know that you shall surely die, you and all who are yours.”

Notice that God gives Abimelech credit for integrity. He doesn’t say, “Sure, buddy,” or (more to my point), “I know Abimelech, but don’t expect me to be pleased by true integrity when it comes from a pagan.” The comment by God makes it clear that, had Abimelech known Sarah was the wife of another man, he would never have procured her–since that would be wrong. His decision was based on personal, true integrity, and God acknowledges that. So are we to conclude God wasn’t pleased by it? I don’t believe that.

Other things I wonder about in this regard in include the following (some random selections):

1. In 1 Cor 7:12 Paul mentions the issue of a believer married to an unbeliever, then notes that if the unbeliever consents to remain married to the believer (as opposed to desertion or divorce) then the believer should not divorce the unbeliever. Are we to conclude that God was displeased when the unbeliever decided to preserve the marriage?

2. Eccl 7:26 says: “And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her.” Do only believers resist sexual temptation? Hardly. I have to assume that this verse is broad; that it’s axiomatic – anyone who resists violating their marriage pleases God when they do so.

3. Cyrus the Persian – In Isa 45:1-13 it is clear that Cyrus not a believer (God says more than once that Cyrus doesn’t know Him) and yet he is God’s anointed servant. When Cyrus carried out God’s will, was God displeased? I don’t think so. If we reject the idea that all Cyrus did was predestined—that he could not resist doing God’s will—then how is it that believers can resist the Spirit (Eph 4:30; 1 Thess 5:19)? I’d think that unbelievers could do that if believers can, and so I have to conclude Cyrus could have done some things that would have irritated God while conquering Babylon and letting the Jews return. Had Cyrus changed his mind or not issued the decree to let the Jews return, God would have been angry. So how is it that God wasn’t pleased when Cyrus let them go?  Just wondering.

4. How does it make any sense that, if the unbeliever has the law of God written on the heart, and has a God-given conscience to go with that law, that when the unbeliever obeys the conscience and the law of God written on the heart, God isn’t happy? I need an explanation of how that’s at all coherent–excluding the issue of earning saving grace.

5. How about utterly innocuous acts, done with no thought of attention, personal glory, or personal interest—in fact, good things done with literally no thought at all in many cases. By way of some examples (I’m using atheists in the examples, since they wouldn’t be doing things to earn brownie points with God—they don’t believe God is real):

An atheist is in a store and accidentally knocks an item off the shelf. It’s a stuffed animal, so it isn’t broken. She picks it up and puts it back. Is God angry with her? If she did the right thing, is God glad? Did she not do the right thing?
An atheist is taking a walk in the park. He spies a homeless woman. It’s just the two of them. Moved with pity, he reaches into his pocket and gives her the spare change. It’s all he has since he uses plastic 99% of the time. No one notices, he just does something nice. Is God angry with him? Did he do the wrong thing?
An atheist/unbeliever gets angry when he overhears that a Christian he knows tell someone else that he knowingly cheated on his taxes. The atheist believes in being honest. Is God angry with the atheist’s feelings and his standard? Does it make sense that God would be angry with the unbeliever who honors His law when the believer did not?
An atheist provides for her pet because she believes we ought to be kind to animals and not abuse them. Is God angry with her for doing that and thinking that? Is God glad she takes care of her pet? (You can’t say God doesn’t care here, since that would mean God would not be angry with her even if she abused her pet).

I could go on and on with examples. More theologically, I have a problem with the general idea offered by the theologians I quoted who try to assert God is still angry no matter what an unbeliever does because the unbeliever will always do a right thing with an imperfect motive. That is, there will be something about how they do it or why they do it that isn’t perfectly righteous in God’s eyes. Honestly, how many of us believers would be comfortable standing before God and telling him eye-to-eye that we obeyed him perfectly? Seriously–how can any human do anything perfectly in God’s judgment? It’s a dumb argument.

I think this whole issue and the position I’m shooting at is either an over-reading of the biblical idea of the “lost-ness” of humanity, or a careless reading of it. For me, it’s a good example of theologizing that doesn’t conform to careful thinking.

 

Technorati Tags: conscience, depravity, doing, God, good, heart, morality, pleasing, sin, unbeliever

Ancient Culture and Bible Translation

(No, I haven’t forgotten about Part 2 to my “can unbelievers please God”; that will come.)

Until then, I thought readers would find this post by Charles Halton: “Why the Study of Ancient Culture is Inseparable from Translation.” It will especially be of interest to those following the podcast series regarding interpreting the Bible in its own context.

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Naked Bible Episode 026: Advice for Interpreting Parables

In the last podcast episode I continued the series on studying the Bible in light of its various types of literature – its literary genres. I looked at an example related to the New Testament – how the literary features of Greco-Roman phantom tales and “post-mortem appearances” of the dead inform our reading of NT resurrection accounts. In this episode, I focus on a type of literature that appears in both testaments, but which is most familiar in the New Testament:  the parable.

Technorati Tags: context, genre, literary, New Testament, parables

Can Unbelievers Please God? Part 1

Most readers are familiar with the idea of “total depravity” as taught by many Christian theologians over the centuries — the idea that (in overly broad strokes) humans are unable to turn themselves to God and are inherently sinful. Those who have read with some depth in theology know that theologians disagree as to how to articulate total depravity, at least in part because it touches on many things.

One of the issues raised in a discussion of total depravity is whether unbelievers, those who have not been regenerated and “saved” through personal faith in Christ, can ever actually please God in any way. Put another way, the idea is that an unbeliever can never truly do something that God would look at and say something like, “good job”; “I liked that”; “glad to see you did that”; etc., but would always have some point of dissatisfaction or spiritual criticism — the act would further sour God’s disposition toward the unbeliever who is “under wrath.” The counter assumption is, then, that believers can indeed satisfy God in this way — meet this standard — whereas the unbeliever cannot (ever).

I think this way of looking at things is theologically amiss, but I won’t say why until Part 2. Suffice it to say now that I reject any notion that an unbeliever can turn themselves toward God in any salvation sense, or merit God’s grace in any way. That is, an unbeliever cannot do anything “spiritually good” with respect to meriting or moving toward salvation in any causative way. But that’s different than the question I’m raising: can an unbeliever ever please God? I say they can. God can indeed look at something an unbeliever does and approve of it and take pleasure in it (or be indifferent to it) and that such occasions have nothing to do with the “salvation distance” between God and that person becoming more narrow. They are two separate issues.

For now, I’d like to hear what readers think — both about the doctrinal idea and how they might suppose I’d argue against it. Lest some think I’m caricaturing a position, here are some excerpts from well-known Christian theologians:

Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, 497.

a. In Our Natures We Totally Lack Spiritual Good Before God: It is not just that some parts of us are sinful and others are pure. Rather, every part of our being is affected by sin—our intellects, our emotions and desires, our hearts (the center of our desires and decision-making processes), our goals and motives, and even our physical bodies. Paul says, “I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh” (Rom. 7:18), and, “to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure; their very minds and consciences are corrupted” (Titus 1:15). Moreover, Jeremiah tells us that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). In these passages Scripture is not denying that unbelievers can do good in human society in some senses. But it is denying that they can do any spiritual good or be good in terms of a relationship with God. Apart from the work of Christ in our lives, we are like all other unbelievers who are “darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart” (Eph. 4:18)

Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology, 637-638.

1. Depravity partial or total?

The Scriptures represent human nature as totally depraved. The phrase “total depravity,” however, is liable to misinterpretation, and should not be used without explanation. By the total depravity of universal humanity we mean:

A. Negatively,—not that every sinner is: (a) Destitute of conscience, for—the existence of strong impulses to right, and of remorse for wrongdoing, show that conscience is often keen; (b) devoid of all qualities pleasing to men, and useful when judged by a human standard,—for the existence of such qualities is recognized by Christ; (c) prone to every form of sin,—for certain forms of sin exclude certain others; (d) intense as he can be in his selfishness and opposition to God,—for he becomes worse every day.

B. Positively,—that every sinner is: (a) totally destitute of that love to God which constitutes the fundamental and all-inclusive demand of the law; (b) chargeable with elevating some lower affection or desire above regard for God and this law; (c) supremely determined, in his whole inward and outward life, by a preference of self to God; (d) possessed of an aversion to God which, though sometimes latent, becomes active enmity, so soon as God’s will comes into manifest conflict with his own; (e) disordered and corrupted in every faculty, through this substitution of selfishness for supreme affection toward God; (f) credited with no thought, emotion, or act of which divine holiness can fully approve; (g) subject to a law of constant progress in depravity, which he has no recuperative energy to enable him successfully to resist.

2. Ability or inability?

In opposition to the plenary ability taught by the Pelagians, the gracious ability of the Arminians, and the natural ability of the New School theologians, the Scriptures declare the total inability of the sinner to turn himself to God or to do that which is truly good in God’s sight (see Scripture proof below). A proper conception also of the law, as reflecting the holiness of God and as expressing the ideal of human nature, leads us to the conclusion that no man whose powers are weakened by either original or actual sin can of himself come up to that perfect standard. Yet there is a certain remnant of freedom left to man. The sinner can (a) avoid the sin against the Holy Ghost; (b) choose the less sin rather than the greater; (c) refuse altogether to yield to certain temptations; (d) do outwardly good acts, though with imperfect motives; (e) seek God from motives of self-interest.

But on the other hand the sinner cannot (a) by a single volition bring his character and life into complete conformity to God’s law; (b) change his fundamental preference for self and sin to supreme love for God; nor (c) do any act, however insignificant, which shall meet with God’s approval or answer fully to the demands of law.

So, let’s hear your thoughts. Would you agree with these quotations? Say things differently? Disagree? (and why – scriptural arguments / illustrations, please). Should be fun.

Technorati Tags: Christian, depravity, God, inability, obedience, please, sin, theology

The Humanity of Jesus: Could Jesus Have Been Married?

I’m sure by now readers have heard the recent announcement that Dr. Karen King of Harvard has announced (in Rome at a conference) that she is in possession of a small fragment of a Coptic manuscript that has Jesus addressing his wife (the line reads: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’”). The manuscript also mentions a woman named Mary. (For all the lines translated into English, go here - an NBC news item that kindly includes a link to my initial thoughts on the fragment posted on my PaleoBabble blog.)

While the fragment doesn’t provide evidence that Jesus was married (it only provides evidence that someone living a few centuries after Jesus thought he was married, or at least wanted to cast him as such), I don’t see any theological problem with him being married. But there’s no evidence for it, especially in the New Testament. There is certainly no sexual problem, unless your theology is twisted into some idea that intercourse is inherently wrong. My point here is that Jesus would not have recoiled from marriage because it would have meant he’d have to consummate the marriage. That’s quite an unbiblical view of sex (let’s just cut the creation mandate out of our Bibles, shall we?). In biblical theology, Jesus was as human as the rest of us, though he was certainly more. As I posted earlier about his humanity, he grew up as any of us did, which means he went through puberty. He would have experienced sexual attraction. Sexual impulse is not sinful; it’s human — our bodies working the way God made them, with a procreative impulse. Biblical morality, however, prescribes boundaries for their expression; it just doesn’t require their execration. Again, how biblical is your theology about the humanity of Jesus? Sadly, this is one area that tends to be awfully tradition-driven.

Rather than problems, though, I’d say there might have been practical and theological obstacles to marriage for Jesus, though an obstacle doesn’t mean it couldn’t be so. What do I mean by obstacles?

I think the text is clear (Luke 2:41-52) that by the time of the temple incident, when Jesus had reached his teen years, he knew who he was and that he was on earth to fulfill God’s plan for salvation history. (By the way, this passage ends with the noteworthy Luke 2:52 – another interesting juxtaposition of divinity and humanity). While that would not of necessity have caused Jesus to refrain from marriage, it feels a little callous of him taking a wife knowing he was going to die in the near future. But that read naturally depends on the debate over whether Jesus did (or could have) offered the kingdom to Israel in a genuine way (i.e., could the Jews have embraced him as messiah in view of OT prophecies that called for a suffering messiah). This is a significant debate in biblical studies with good arguments on all sides. If the answer turned out to be “yes,” then Jesus would have only known he was going to die for sure after his rejection. The gospels record that “from that time forward” Jesus began to tell them he would die. (But if that’s the case, what about those OT prophecies? I have my own answer for that, but I won’t digress.) You get the picture.

Another obstacle, or at least potential reason to avoid marriage on Jesus’ part, would have been the issues raised by having children. I’m thinking here of succession struggles (read the books of Kings for that) and any superstitious weirdness that might ensue about the nature of any children (I don’t think that would have been complicated — they’d have been human and nothing more, since deity doesn’t have DNA, and is not transmitted by DNA — but in a pre-scientific culture, that would not have been an easy parsing).

Anyway, just thought I’d muse a bit in the wake of the new manuscript find.

Technorati Tags: Coptic, fragment, Gnostic, Jesus, manuscript, married, Mary

Are You Missing the Naked Bible Podcast?

In case you’re not a listener, here’s a link to the “Bibliography and Resources” tab at the Naked Bible podcast site so you get an idea of what I’ve been covering in recent podcasts.

You can go to the podcast website to listen, subscribe to the podcast at the site, or subscribe via iTunes.

Naked Bible Podcast Episode 025: Greco-Roman Genres of Ghost Stories and Post-Mortem Apparitions and the Gospels

I’ve blogged before about recent articles about these Greco-Roman genres. In this episode of the podcast I look at two familiar episodes in the life of Jesus: the incident where he walks on the water and his disciples think they are seeing a ghost, and his appearances to the disciples after his resurrection. It may sound surprising, but the ancient world of which the NT was part actually had many stories about ghosts and what scholars call “post-mortem appearances” of the dead. New Testament scholars have investigated how the New Testament writers both utilized and subverted these genres in their attempts to communicate what it was they experienced and believed about Jesus.

Technorati Tags: apparition, genre, ghost, Jesus, literary, Luke, Mark, phantom, resurrection

Interpreting Genesis 1: Who’s the Literalist Now?

I appreciated this post from James McGrath, whose short essay was stimulated by Robin Parry’s post, to whom James directs his readers. The issue is how “literal creationists” are actually only selective literalists (or, as I would call them, “inconsistent literalists”). If one was truly consistent in interpreting the creation description in Genesis 1 at face value (along with other creation descriptions in both testaments), you’d come out with a round, flat earth, complete with solid dome over the earth, and earth supported by pillars, with Sheol underneath, etc.  But creationists who claim the literal mantel don’t do that, since the results are clearly non-scientific. My view, as readers know, is that we ought to simply let the text say what it says, and let it be what it is. It was God’s choice to prompt people living millennia ago to produce this thing we call the Bible, and so we dishonor it when we impose our own interpretive context on it. Our modern evangelical contexts are alien to the Bible. Frankly, any context other than the context in which the biblical writers were moved to write is foreign to the Bible.

So, who’s the literalist now?

I’ve pointed out this inconsistency before in, for example, my online lecture about Genesis and it’s pre-scientific cosmology.  What Genesis describes is consistent with all other ancient Near Eastern creation models, and shares the vocabulary and motifs of those other pre-scientific cosmologies.  Not a surprise, given God’s own choices about when to produce the material and who would do that. If God’s point had been to give us scientific precision, he would have done so (and we’d probably not understand it, unless we want to presume our own knowledge of the created world has pretty much solved everything and answered all the questions — in which case you must be doing your science reading in popular magazines). The point is no one alive today could handle all the detail known to the mind of God — and the same goes for the second millennium B.C. writer. But the fact that we don’t have this sort of indecipherable item informs us that such wasn’t the goal of inspiration, and so the “scientific details” cannot be viewed as the truth claim/assertion God meant to be communicated to posterity. As such, it is unreasonable to define inerrancy / errancy by such criteria. That would be like deciding if a new house was constructed to code based on whether you liked its color scheme. And poking fun at the Bible’s cosmology makes about as much sense as getting mad at your cat for not being a dog — why get irritated at something for not being what it was never intended to be? Where’s the intellectual integrity in that? (And does that have any greater intellectual integrity than inconsistent literalism?) The point is that the trustworthiness of Scripture ought to be based on the coherence of its truth claims — the points of intention God had in mind when he moved human writers to write it in the first place.

Technorati Tags: ancient, cosmology, creation, creationists, Genesis, inspiration, literalism, pre-scientific, science

How Human Was Jesus?

A trick question? Depends on how much theological and logical clarity your thoughts about the question are.

I was reminded of this issue (which, I’ll admit, is one of my pet issues) last week as I had the honor of hosting Doug Bookman at Logos. Doug was one of my three original undergrad Bible professors (Ed Glenny and Mike Stitzinger were the other two). I know now just how spoiled I was. Doug was in for filming a series on the Life of Christ. It irritates me (and him) when Christians don’t appreciate the humanity of Jesus. That point of biblical theology is as important as the deity of Jesus, but the latter gets all the love. But you can’t truly have a high priest and Savior who understands your own temptations, emotions, and needs without a fully human Jesus (Heb 4:14-15).  And yet I have known Christians who stumble over some pretty simple realities of Jesus being the “second Adam,” born of a woman as a mortal human (that theological thing we call the incarnation). Jesus learned and experience lots of things as he grew:

How to talk (he didn’t pop out of the womb speaking)
How to walk
How to go potty
How to eat with a spoon (or whatever utensil they used)
Puberty
Arithmetic
Reading
Writing
What pleases God (Luke 2:52)
Wise behavior / living (Luke 2:52)
Etc., etc.

In one of Doug’s sessions he brought up John 11 in this regard. It’s a wonderful (and, I think, humorous) example of how the NT itself juxtaposes Jesus’ deity and human limitations in the same context or scene. But I am interested to see if Naked Bible readers can spot the juxtaposition. Go ahead and read the passage and let me know. Hint: female readers will especially find the discovery funny.

 

Technorati Tags: christ, humanity, Jesus

Two Weeks Left for MEMRA 2012 Language Course Enrollment

Just wanted to issue the last call. Module 2 begins September 24, so registration is soon closing. There are three 52-week courses being offered: Biblical Hebrew, Biblical Greek, and Ugaritic.

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