Archive for the 'Ethics' Category

Formerly: Violent Zealot, Currently: Apostle of Peace

tom May 10th, 2008

There is some disagreement over exactly what kind of Pharisee the apostle Paul was before he converted to the Jesus movement on the Damascus road. One thing we do know from the book of Acts is that Paul was a righteously violent one. We read in the early chapters of Acts that Paul was probably quite influential in the stoning of the early Christian martyr Stephen, and that he was on his way to kill more Christians when he met the risen Christ on the Damascus road.

Whatever brand of Judaism he espoused, it was one that saw the early Christian movement as a heretical sect of Judaism – a sect that needed to be violently put down. Violence was considered a justifiable action. Violence, moreover, was the manner in which the true community of Yahweh remained pure. His justification of violence was not merely out of hatred, but more out of righteous anger. His actions were, indeed, justified by the Torah. He was, after all, going to kill those people who said they had experienced Yahweh in the flesh. If there were ever a justifiable reason for violence it would be the protection of the community of Yahweh.

This violent streak changes after Paul’s conversion. While seeing himself in line with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Paul does not act in the manner of Elijah in his interaction with the prophets of Baal. Paul does not see pagan peoples as undeserving of life – even those ones who were oppressive to him and his Christ. Rather, Paul takes the position that through his suffering at their hands, he will “fill up that which is lacking in Christ’s sufferings” (Colossians 1:24). That is, he will be a living example of Christ’s unjust suffering at the hands of violent, sinful people. He fully expects this witness (same Gk. word as martyr) to be a living narrative of the death of Christ, and His love for unbelievers.

What I find particularly interesting here is that Paul’s position on violence has a dramatic shift. Before his conversion he sees violence as a justifiable action – especially against heretics. In fact, his Hebrew Bible justifies violent actions against non-Jews as well*. But when Paul converts we find no desire or justification for aggression and violence. As I noted before, even in relationship to Rome Paul command submission as a means of overcoming “evil with good.”

This dramatic change in Paul, combined with other arguments, demonstrates for me that the violence justified and even commanded by God in the Hebrew Bible is not an option for the Christian. Even the Canaanite genocides were performed in order to take the Promised Land from the pagans. Now, for Paul and Christians in general, there is no Promised Land. The kingdom of God transcends a Promised Land.** A people who have no/limited nationalistic identity, a people whose new law of love has surpassed the divinely instructed violence, and a people whose chief example (besides Christ) Paul forsakes violence have no justification for violence.

Paul’s letters are filled with his comments that say something like, “formerly you were {insert something bad}, but now you are {insert something related to being saved by Christ}.” I think his life expemplifies this: Formerly: Righteous Zealot. Currently: Apostle of Peace.

*Yes, I am aware the Torah also provided means of accepting non-Jews. However, I am primarily responding here to the genocides of Joshua.

**Dispensationalists have got it backward.

An interesting quote…

cheapham April 24th, 2008

I heard an interesting quote the other day that I found interesting. I think I’ll present it without any context or commentary and see what sort of comments/responses in evokes. I have my own thoughts, but I think this quote could provoke very interesting (and hopefully fruitful) discussion. It’s short, so here it goes:

I’d rather do violence to a text than violence to a person.

 

Discuss.

This is a test.

Honzo March 5th, 2008

Faith lived out.

H/T: Scott Parsons.

Jesus, the Syrophoenician Woman, and a Reversal of Violence

tom February 28th, 2008

In one of the more misunderstood passages dealing with the life of Jesus, the Son of God encounters a gentile woman who seeks his assistance in casting a demon out of her daughter. The gospel of Mark provides her pedigree for us: “a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia.”[1] Before we get to hear Jesus’ response to her request, Mark supplies us with the three strikes against her from the average Jewish standpoint. She was A. a woman, B. a gentile woman, and C. gentile woman who hailed from the insufferable Syrophoenician region, a region filled with people who should have been destroyed in the Canaanite genocides – their very presence a continual reminder to the Jews of their failure to fully obey Yahweh. Even the most hated woman in the Hebrew Bible, Queen Jezebel, hailed from this region. But as we shall see, our narrative redeems the Canaanite people and our woman serves as a reminder that Yahweh’s mind has changed about the decedents of Queen Jezebel.

While others would have considered her unclean, Jesus has just completed teaching that uncleanness is a matter of the heart, not the body, “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean?’…What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’”[2]

In context, Jesus puts into practice what he preaches. Even trekking through the region of Tyre and Sidon betrayed an act of rebellion. 1st century Jewish stereotypes considered this an area of “seduction to false gods and hostility to the Jewish people.”[3] Instead of judging this woman based on her gender, ancestry, and the side of the tracks she came from, Jesus addresses her as a person, not a mere stereotype.[4] Interestingly Yahweh, who originally commanded the Canaanite genocide, is, in this text, informing us that power, dehumanization and domination are inadequate means by which to spread God’s kingdom. The superiority of the gospel to violence is a probable ethical principle one could draw from this passage.The Canaanites who were once supposed be destroyed now find a place within God’s redemptive plan. This text, then, is intended to counter the Canaanite genocides - this text, above that one, displays the character of God!

While Jesus response to this gentile woman may seem harsh, he does not respond to her with sexism or racism, for that would be a violation of the sermon he has just preached. Initially the text informs us that Jesus refuses the woman’s request. Jesus notifies the woman that, as a dog (gentile), she will have to wait for the children (Israel) to be finished feasting before she can eat. While this may sound offensive to us, the woman has no such reaction. She does not react as if Jesus has insulted her. More likely, she understands that Jesus is merely stating that the time for ministry among the gentiles has not yet arrived. Demonstrating great intelligence and wit[5], she tells Jesus that sometimes dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table as the children are eating. “Now is a good time for my daughter to be healed, even if the time of the gentiles has not arrived,” she says.

Without regard for her gender or race, Jesus grants the woman’s request. With no consideration for whether or not this woman or her daughter are deemed unclean because of their gender, Jesus heals them both. He casts the unclean spirit out of the daughter, symbolizing that the gentiles by virtue of their race, and women by virtue of their gender, should no longer be categorized as unclean. He shows this woman she is not subhuman simply because of her gender or race. Neither Jesus nor the gospel writers concerned themselves with her gender; they simply marveled at her “great faith.”[6]

——————————————————————————–

[1] Mark 7:26

[2] Mark 7:20-23 – Interestingly enough, Mark describes the evil spirit within this woman’s daughter as an unclean spirit. While many of our English translations translate the word evil, in context it seems infinitely more appropriate to translate the word as unclean.

[3] Mary Anne Getty-Sullivan, Women in the New Testament. (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2001), 87. Getty-Sullivan also notes that this area was considered profane to the ancient Jews because it represented their own failures. The area was originally given to the tribe of Asher, but they failed to completely occupy it as God had commanded. This was also the area that the most hated of all OT women was birthed: Queen Jezebel, who was the great persecutor of the prophet Elijah, and the great dominator of her puppet of a husband Ahab.

[4] Stereotypes are created by people in order to make sense of an increasingly complex world. The pluralistic world of Jesus’ day and ours is filled with stereotypes simply because people are groping for a simple way to understand their crazy pluralistic world. Unfortunately, this is never neutral. Stereotypes also dehumanize the ‘other’ and keep them perpetually in a state of being sub-human. They are a means of power maintenance.

[5] Intelligence and wit are only a small part of what this woman displays. Her determination to get what she has come to Jesus for is another quite remarkable attribute.

[6] Matt. 15:28 – Matthew adds this praise for the woman in his account of the event. Mark, the earlier gospel that Matthew used as a source for his gospel, does not record Jesus praising her for her great faith. We see, however, in Matthew’s addition, that it was important for him to correct first century assumptions about the faithlessness of women and gentiles.

Alvin Plantinga and the Definition of Fundamentalist

Travis Gilmore February 6th, 2008

So I found this quote by Alvin Plantinga taken from his magnum opus “Warranted Christian Belief.” To give a little context to the quote, Plantinga had been talking about his Calvin/Aquinas model for the necessity of the “internal instigation of the Holy Spirit” due to the noetic effects of sins. For fundamentalists like Plantinga (and myself) it offers some humor and insight.

“But isn’t this just endorsing a wholly outmoded and discredited fundamentalism, that condition than which, according to many academics, none lesser can be conceived? I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ’son of a bitch’, more exactly ’sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ’sumbitch.’ When the term is used in this way, no definition, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you fell obligated first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use); it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ’stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ’sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ’stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’” (Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 244-245).

Choices Suck or do they?

Casey December 28th, 2007

What do we do when two of God’s absolute laws conflict with each other?

An Installment on the Interaction of Intercourse and Economics

tom December 13th, 2007

One of the more disconcerting passages in all the Bible is the rape of Tamar, David’s daughter, by her half-brother Amnon (2 Samuel 13). As the narrative goes, Tamar is “loved” by her brother because he was tormented by her beauty. He feigns an illness to be alone with Tamar. When she brings him food to eat, he seizes her and rapes her despite her fervent resistance. After the rape, Amnon loathes his sister more than he ever “loved” her. He thrusts her away as a slave, a piece of property which was expended and now retains no value. To Amnon, she is no longer “Tamar,” she is now “this woman.” She is no longer a person who is “loved,” she is chattel to be discharged.1

Amnon learned this behavior from his father – that is, he learned to treat people, especially women, as property instead of humans created in God’s image. Just in the previous chapter David is finally confronted about his rape of Bathsheba and his clandestine execution of Uriah. People and their lives were mere objects to be consumed to David. He cared little for love, for family, for holiness. He cared only for consumption, and people are just another thing to be procured, retain, owned, and conquered.

What I find interesting in this whole matter is how intercourse and economics relate. As the narrative advances, we find Solomon, in the climax of his rule, with infinite wealth and thousands of sex-slaves. Women are objects to be owned – he too learned this from his father. Relationships, love, or devotion have no place in his world. Only objects exist, objects which are bought and sold, owned and operated, controlled and dominated.2

When economics and power become the chief agenda of a people, the objectification of others comes to dictate the landscape. This is particularly the case with sex. Sex becomes nothing more than, in our world, two consumers devouring one another, envision the other as an item whose individual purpose is to satisfy my desires without regards to the consequences of this behavior. That’s what consumerism is at its nastiest – a inexhaustible sport of stockpiling objects for one’s own agenda without considering the consequences of that consumption either for the earth, the other person, the community, or the world. It’s all about the ego.

Intercourse and economics – isn’t staggering how a person’s view on one stimulates certain assumptions about the other? When one views economics as merely a means of consumption and gaining wealth, power, and property, one will perceive sex the same way. But if economics is principally about honoring God through the giving away of one’s possessions, one will see sex differently as well. It is not about my desires, it is not about my consumption; it is about the other person, their will, their enjoyment, their desire. People are no longer objects to be owned and dominated (such as in pornography), they are people made in the Image of God! The denial of the ego in economic areas translates into the denial of the ego in the bedroom. This is why Paul lists greed right along side a bunch of sexual sins in Colossians 3. He realized the connection!

Its seems, then, that if we yearn for holiness, maybe our deity of covetousness and wealth ought to go first. If economics is linked to intercourse, imagine what else it is relates to – violence, anger, division, quarreling, pride! Maybe dispossession isn’t only about abnegation,3 but about sanctification in all areas of life.

  1. there is some credence to the thought that this objectification of women is inherent within the Torah. After all, women are listed among the property not to be coveted in the 10 Commandments. [↩]
  2. Solomon’s disregard for others in favor of his own economic advancement is well documented among biblical scholars. This actually ends up splitting the kingdom after he dies, if you remember. [↩]
  3. Thanks Theotica! [↩]

Two Moral Orders

Honzo November 21st, 2007

Is is possible that there are two moral orders, a lower justice-based moral order and a higher, mercy-based moral order? Just thinking out loud here.

The more I think about this, the more I am unsatisfied with a single moral system.

UPDATE: I wrote this hastily and as a consequent, I did not make the proper distinctions or descriptions necessary to really get at what I was wanting to express. Instead of re-writing the post, I invite you to peruse the comments to get everyone’s thoughts on the matter of God and ethical systems.

Golden Oldies

Honzo August 22nd, 2007

As I was studying me some Attic Greek tonight I was reminded of Hank’s retranslation of John 3:16. Hank did an excellent 5-part series on this verse and went through the translation process step-by-step. I would recommend reading reading through each of the five parts (one two three four five) to get a feel for the translation process.

His translation reads as follows:

“Thus in this manner God loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone that is believing in him will never perish but have life forever.”

I especially like two of his changes/emphases. First, Hank rightly translates the “so” in the phrase “For God so loved the world…” as “in this manner.” It describes how the love of God was shown to the world. God showed his love through a selfless sacrificial act.

The second aspect that I appreciated was Hank’s emphasis on the middle voice of ἀπόληται, or to perish. The emphasis on the middle voice demonstrates that the perishing was a result of our own actions. Restated, we perish ourselves. It demonstrates that although we have shot our selves in the foot, God action of love for us is his providing a way into eternal life despite our shooting of our own foot.

The only thing I would really change about his translation is restoring the subjunctive forms of “will never perish” and “have” in the last two clauses. The verbs are in the subjunctive form, which describe possible worlds, not actualized ones. Those that believe, by their believing enter into this possible world where they do not perish and instead have eternal life. This world is make possible by God’s giving of his son, Jesus.

My changes would read as follows:

“Thus in this manner God loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone that is believing in him might never perish but might have life forever.”

Question of the Day: Calling Out Sin

Honzo May 16th, 2007

Should Christians condemn sin in non-believers?

I am not talking about calling out sins within the Church, but outside the Church.

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