A Conservative Bible?

This is just unreal. Perhaps you've already heard about this as its been recently highlighted by Steven Colbert and dozens of other media outlets, but the people of Conservapedia have committed to create a new, conservative translation of the Bible, that eradicates all the so-called liberal "translation bias" that exists in every existing English translation. Talk about "remaking Jesus in their own image." Rob Dreher at beliefnet.com depicts it best: "It's like what you'd get if you crossed the Jesus Seminar with the College Republican chapter at a rural institution of Bible learnin'."

The absurdity of this project is unimaginable, and the flaws in their logic, mindboggling. They seek a new translation that is without bias, as if they have no bias of their own. They seek to create a translation that avoids the "wordiness" and "ambiguities" of liberals (such as those updating the NIV) but is also not written at a dumbed down reading level (such as the NIV. How are they going to do that without using big words?). They seek to obtain an accurate translation of Scripture by resorting back to the KJV rather than original texts (and if you read any of what has already been translated, it basically reads like the NIV which they abhor), making it a translation of a(n) (outdated) translation. They state that one of the benefits of this project is that it will force the liberals who criticize them to read the Bible (but if they're the ones translating the NIV, wouldn't that mean they have not only read it, but quite closely?).

They claim terms such as "laborer" and "comrade" in the Bible are signs of socialism--but this political view didn't exist in the time the KJV was written--and propose substituting contemporary conservative terms instead, as if the authors of the Bible had 21st century America in mind when they were writing. They want to highlight the "numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning" (as if parables are meant to be literally interpreted...). And worst of all, they suggest excluding certain passages such as John 8:1-11 and Luke 23:34 because they are supposedly "later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic" (as if those who purportedly inserted these texts in the 2nd and 3rd centuries were left-wing radicals!). How is arbitrarily deleting passages considered conservative?

Really, I'm quite dumbfounded. When one is so right-wing leaning that even the Bible is now deemed "liberal" (whatever that means), something is definitely wrong. But this is a good reminder for all of us, no matter the lens we use to read Scripture (which we can never fully remove), that Ernesto Tinajero from Sojourners points out: "if you read the Bible and it does not challenge you, then you are reading yourself and not the Bible." If the Bible is not provocative, if it does not force us to rethink the way we live our lives and view the world, than we are not really reading it.

The Shack and Universalism (Part 2), [or why Brock could never get a job at a Baptist church]

In my previous post, I critiqued some of the arguments made to show that The Shack presents universalism. If it is not universalism, what position then, does it offer? [If this explanation is too long, sorry. I had material for more than double what I've placed here!]

Allow me to begin with an excerpt from The Shack:

“Who said anything about being a Christian? I’m not a Christian… Those who love me come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims, Democrats, Republicans and many who don’t vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions. I have followers who were murderers and many who were self-righteous. Some are bankers and bookies, Americans and Iraqis, Jews and Palestinians. I have no desire to make them Christian, but I do want to join them in their transformation into sons and daughters of my Papa, into my brothers and sisters, into my Beloved” (182).

There are at least three ways this passage can be read, but for the sake of the attention of my readers, I will focus on one: There are religiously practicing Buddhists, Mormons, Muslims, and even non-religious folk who are just as much followers of Jesus as Christians. Or we might say, some practitioners of other religious groups look a whole lot more like Jesus and live a life of agape love far better than some life-long members of Christianity.

On this reading, let’s pose the question: “Can a Buddhist/Mormon/Muslim go to heaven?” Well, for starters, since Buddhism can be conceived as a way of informing one’s life to connect with ultimate reality, rather than the worship of a particular deity, it’s certainly possible that one could engage in some of the life practices of Buddhism while maintain faith in Jesus Christ. As for Mormonism and Islam, if one views these religions as heresies of Christianity rather than entirely different religions, it’s possible to conceive there are some within these ranks that have managed to connect with the real Jesus. Indeed, there is testimony of Muslims, based solely on reading the excerpts about Jesus in the Koran who have believed in Jesus, and “if anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him” (1 Jn. 4:15).

But this answer only speaks to the possibility of people with other religious labels to also be connected with the real Jesus through some level of [untraditional] connection to the historical Jesus. But is it possible to be rightly related to God without having knowledge of the historical Jesus? This is the question posed by Christian Inclusivism (CI), a position held in some way or another by Justin Martyr, Origen, Karl Rahner, C.S. Lewis, Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo, Dallas Willard, and even Billy Graham in recent days. CI preaches the orthodox message of the Good News of Jesus, but leaves open God’s grace and mercy to extend beyond the walls of Christianity. To state it otherwise, CI teaches that Christ is “the way” (Jn. 14:6), but he may even be “the way” for people who have never heard of Jesus or been exposed to Christianity.

Let me backtrack to help make this clearer. Some Christians hold that knowledge of the historical person, known as Jesus of Nazareth, who died and rose again as a 1st century Jew is necessary for salvation. This view holds that there is some salvific power in the name spelled “J-E-S-U-S” and knowledge of the historical person who bore that name is necessary. But if knowledge of the historical Jesus is absolutely necessary, then Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, and every Old Testament saint do not qualify. Sure, the OT figures placed faith by looking forward to a future hope of a promised Messiah (as described in Gen 3:15; 12:3; 2 Sam. 7), but what they envisioned hardly amounts to Paul’s summary of the gospel message (1 Cor 15:3-4).

In other words, even the most fundamentalist, exclusivist Christians hold to some level of inclusivism. They must hold to some view of God’s mercy that extends beyond knowledge of the death and resurrection of Christ if OT figures are to be saved—as well as infants who die or the mentally incapable, a position held by many Christians.

In his latest book, Knowing Christ Today, Dallas Willard points out that belief in the “historical” Jesus was not even what his closest disciples needed to believe in. In John 14, “his closest disciples still did not know him (14:7-9), though they knew Jesus of Nazareth. It was not the historical Jesus that Philip did not know (v. 9). Who he was clearly amounted to much more than a carpenter of Nazareth… He was and is the eternal Word” (185). Thus, Willard distinguishes between the historical Christ and the “Cosmic Christ,” the eternal God and Savior.

Let’s put this conclusion into a question: Is it possible to be connected to Jesus, the Logos who was at the beginning with God (Jn. 1:1) without having knowledge of the historical Jesus? To this question, scholars throughout church history have answered, “Yes.” Justin Martyr, one of the first Christian theologians, suggested Plato, Socrates, and the Greek philosophers were Christians without realizing it by their commitment to the Logos (Reason) and their love for Wisdom/Truth.

Romans 2:14-16 suggests there will be Gentiles who stand before God on the day of judgment whose consciences will defend them even though they “do not have the law.” These individuals will be saved on account of God’s promise that “To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (2:7). Those who seek the Good (God) through faith will find him (cf. Heb. 11:6), even if this search amounts to an extremely limited blind groping for an “unknown God” (Acts 17: 27, cf. v. 23). God has “overlooked” ignorant and imperfect worship of him in times past (Acts 17:30) and pursues and finds even those who were not looking for him (Rom. 10:20; Isa. 65:1)! Indeed, he accepts imperfect worship from all of us!

What would be the content of such a person’s faith if they had never heard of the man known as Jesus of Nazareth? Paul’s message in Acts 17 provides clues where he neither mentions Jesus’ name nor even alludes to any atonement theory (instead, he quotes from two sources of pagan literature!). We get the most cryptic allusion to Jesus, namely that God is going to judge the world via a “man” he has raised from the dead. This was the content of those who believed Paul’s message. Sure, Paul would have encouraged the believers to increase their level of knowledge about God; but if such scant information is all that is necessary to “reach out for [God] and find him” (v. 27), clearly we can posit the possibility of people who have never heard of Jesus, contemplating a belief in a Supreme Judge, being convicted of a need to be put in right relationship with him, and concluding that God somehow has taken care of it.

Keeping the Acts 17 account in our minds, we might look at this issue from a literary perspective. Jesus, as a redemptive image, is an archetype and parallels of his story and message can be seen both in the Old Testament and in the surrounding religious and mythical stories of his time. In the Old Testament, the redemptive acts in the stories of Joseph, Moses, Joshua (which is the Hebrew name for the Greek, Iesou, or Jesus), and David all foreshadow Jesus as Messianic figures). And Rob Bell notes, (in his Nooma video entitled “You”) that at the time of the 1st century, one of the most popular gods of the Roman Empire was Mithra, a god believed to be born of a virgin, was a mediator between God and man, and had ascended to heaven. And Caesar Augustus believed himself to be the son of God, sent down from heaven to inaugurate an unprecedented reign of peace (in fact the disciples, in Acts 4:12, borrow from Augustus’ most famous catch phrase, “there is no other name under heaven by which men are saved but Caesar”). Many similar parallels have been made between Jesus and gods from other religious traditions, such as the ancient Egyptian sun-god, Horus.

So if Jesus is the ultimate redemptive archetype that all of these messianic stories point to, if all of these other redemptive stories ultimately culminate and are fulfilled in Jesus, what is to prevent one from becoming rightly related to God through other “redemptive analogies” (to quote Don Richardson from the “Peace Child”)? Consider this: what if there exists a person who has read The Chronicles of Narnia but has never read the Bible (which is quite possible), who believes in Aslan, hoping his message is true, and whose life is changed by the truths of Narnia? Are they in right relation to God? Lewis himself suggests something similar at the end of The Last Battle when Emeth, a Calormene and follower of Tash winds up in “heaven” standing before Aslan, the real God he took for a myth. When Emeth sees Aslan, he recognizes him as the “Glorious One” and despairs that he had worshiped in ignorance all of his life. But Aslan explains to Emeth, who was a sincere seeker of the truth, that all the good deeds he did in the name of Tash (who does not really exist) must have been for Aslan, the author of all things good.

This scene raises the question, going back to Romans 2:7, what would it look like for someone without knowledge of Christ to persist in doing good and seek glory, etc? Certainly it would involve more than what it means to “be a good person” in our common understanding today, and it would have to involve faith over some belief that I can attain God’s pleasure through my own deeds alone. In this vein, Dallas Willard (180) recalls 1 John 4:7 - “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” In other words, it is impossible to practice agape love without real connection with God. James reminds us, “Every good and perfect good is from above, coming down from the Father” (James 1:17). We might translate, all the goodness we see in the world, even the good actions of people, is evidence of God’s goodness in the world.

Who then determines if one passes such a test? I’m not running for that position and choose to leave it up to God. But CI leaves the door open for God’s mercy to extend as far as possible while providing an adequate interpretation of New Testament faith.

In Preparation for Holy Week

Today and over the course of the next several days, I will provide excerpts from my Palm Sunday sermon I am giving at my church, The Open Door, tomorrow night. Here's the first entry. It is a narrative that combines elements of the history of Israel and the story of Jesus with Psalm 31:9-16, the Psalm given in the Presbyterian Lectionary for March 16th, 2008.

* * *

We begin with David – and what better place to start when considering the Psalms? When King David, one of the possible authors of this Psalm, was approaching death, a squabble arose as to which of his sons would be appointed king in his stead. The Kingdom was thrown into chaos. Now in that day, when a king wanted to make known who had his special hand of blessing, one way he could do it was by placing that individual on the king’s foal. So, in order to show that Solomon was the heir to the throne, and to restore peace back to Israel, David sent three of his closest friends with an order that Solomon be placed on the king’s donkey and that he ride down through the city. And when this happened, and the people saw their new king, they rejoiced and sang and shook the earth with their noise (1 Kings 1:32-40).

When Solomon became king, he built a temple to be a house for Yahweh, the God of Israel. And when the priests brought the ark of the covenant to the temple, “the glory of the LORD filled the house” so much that the priests had to back away from the building (1 Kings 8:11). God had entered the building, giving evidence to his covenant relationship with Israel.

But Solomon, and the kings who came after him, led Israel into evil and away from their covenant with God. The Lord sent prophets to the people to warn them and woo them and turn them back from their wicked ways. But their hearts became hardened, the temple became a place of empty ritual, and rarely did anyone recognize their plight and cry out to God: “Be merciful to me, O LORD, for I am in distress; my eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and my body with grief.”(Ps. 31:9).

God sent Jeremiah, the other possible author of this song, but the people would not listen to his words either. And on the day the army of Babylon destroyed the city of Jerusalem and ransacked the temple of Yahweh, Jeremiah lamented, saying: “The Lord has rejected his altar and abandoned his sanctuary… We have suffered terror and pitfalls, ruin and destruction. Streams of tears flow from my eyes…” (Lam. 2:7, 3:46ff). And he very easily could have prayed, “My life is consumed by anguish and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction, and my bones grow weak” (Psalm 31:10). The covenant had been broken.

That day, a prophecy of Jeremiah’s came true – that Jerusalem would “fall and be shattered like fine pottery” (Jer. 15:34). In 586 B.C. the remnant of Israel was taken into captivity by Babylon, the entire royal family was put to death, and soldiers shackled Judah’s king and gouged out his eyes. And all Judah cried out, “Because of all my enemies, I am the utter contempt of my neighbors; I am a dread to my friends— those who see me on the street flee from me. I am forgotten by them as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery” (Ps. 31:11-12).

There in exile, God appointed a new prophet, Ezekiel, to tell the people to repent and look to the Lord to restore them and bring them back to their land. God gave Ezekiel visions, and in one of them, Ezekiel relived the day of Jerusalem’s fall. And as the gates of the city were stormed, the “glory of the Lord departed from over the threshold of the temple” (Ezekiel 10:18). Then, “the glory of the Lord went up from the midst of the city and stood over the mountain which is east of the city” (Ezek. 11:23). God had left the building. But before the Lord departed entirely from Jerusalem, he promised that he would keep his covenant with Israel. One day, he would bring them back to their land and give them one heart and a new spirit (Ezek. 11:17-20). And God would renew his covenant with them and return to the temple: “The glory of the God of Israel was coming from the way of the east… And the glory of the LORD came into the house by the way of the gate facing toward the east” (Ezek. 43:1-4).

In 536 B.C., a group of Israelites were released from captivity and allowed to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple. The promise would be fulfilled! With no wall, no formidable army, and no real city to speak of, the Israelites had to build the temple in utter fear of the unfriendly neighboring people groups surrounding them (Ezra 3:3). All they could do was trust the Lord who had been faithful enough to bring them this far. They prayed: “I hear the slander of many; there is terror on every side; they conspire against me and plot to take my life. But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, "You are my God." My times are in your hands; deliver me from my enemies and from those who pursue me” (Ps. 31:13-15).

This new temple was nowhere near the prestige and glamour of Solomon’s. In fact, there were some old men in this small band that remembered the old temple, who remembered the glory days. At the temple dedication, while many shook the earth with their shouts of joy, the men “wept with a loud voice when the foundation of [the] house was laid before their eyes… so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the shout of joy from the sound of the weeping of the people” (Ezra 3:12-13). The lights were on; nobody was home. There was no glory in this temple. Would Ezekiel’s final vision remain unfulfilled?

To Be Continued...