“We are sending our young people into the marriage bed as virgins (good) but also as morons (bad).”

— Carlos Rodríguez

And yet part of the ambiguity surrounding the human experience of creatures’ diversity is bound up with the fact that the multiplication of creatures is coupled with (and from a purely biological perspective, needed to compensate for) their regular destruction; rather than persisting in the capacious environments that God provides, living creatures, whether considered as individuals or as classes, die, so that, for example, only a small fraction of the terrestrial species that have existed in the half-billion years since the emergence of multicellular life survive today. Yet this fact in itself need not be viewed as inconsistent with creation’s goodness. Although death has most often been viewed in Christian tradition as a punishment for Adam’s transgression, Genesis 3:19, 22 (cf. 6:3) may also be read as teaching that humans (and by extension, other earth creatures) naturally return to the dust from which they were taken unless some other factor intervenes (see Gen. 2:7, 17 Ps. 103:13-16; Eccl. 3:19-20). Certainly there is nothing inconsistent with the goodness of creation that the “place” occupied by every creature should have temporal as well as spatial boundaries, entailing a limited life span no less than limited bodily dimensions; indeed, such temporal limits actually enhance the capaciousness of creation, since two creatures can occupy the same space if they do so at different times. Death can certainly be experienced as a violation of life and so as a curse, but Scripture also can speak of a kind of death that is a life’s natural conclusion, in which an individual dies “old and full of days’ (Gen. 35;29; 1Chr. 29:28: Job 42;17; cf. gen. 25;8; Isa. 65:20). Insofar as extinction of a species is the analogue to the death of an individual creature, one might equally conceive of classes of creatures—trilobites or dinosaurs, say, both of which thrived for tens of millions of years before becoming extinct—as having experience this sort of death. In this way we can understand death as temporal finitude, as a means by which the fullness of creation is arranged along a temporal axis as well as within contemporary physical spaces….

— Ian MacFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation

Ethan told me yesterday morning that a group of African protesters known as NO WHITE SAVIORS has been making waves among Adventures in Missions folks and making many points about short-term mission trips with which Ethan agrees. He indicated he wished to talk about it the next time we chat.

I was at the top of Balmoral Way today, and I asked You about it, and my thoughts poured out naturally: There is no answer to whether “short-term missions” are a good idea generally. There is only the question of whether a a given person being on a short-term mission trip is good, i.e., does his or her presence there produce love, unexploitative joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, or wisdom? If it does, then keep doing it; if it doesn’t, then stop.

I appear to have inadvertently discarded most of my skimpy annotations from Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion under the false understanding that there was no limit to the size of the notes field on Goodreads. Ah, well.

All I’m left with at the moment is the following Barth quotation:

What took place on the Cross of Golgotha is the last word of an old history and the first word of a new (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV).

This dovetails nicely with the idea that has matured in me in recent months and about which I taught at church a few weeks ago: The primary thrust of Jesus’ earthly mission was to fulfill both sides of the Levitical & Deuteronomic covenant with Israel.

Beyond the above quotation, the thing I am most impressed with about Rutledge’s points is her insistence that impunity is a very unjust thing.

I have asked You, Lord, for answers to the following questions, which are really the same:

• Why was it Your plan that Jesus be crucified?
• What, objectively, happened at the Crucifixion other than the obvious? Where, other than in the minds of humans, does the Crucifixion accomplish anything?

Tonight, I believe I received two more pieces to the answer in the form of questions put to me:

1. “What, objectively, happens when you spank a child or put him or her in timeout?” The answer is nothing. What happens is all in minds: the mind of the child, the mind of the parents, and the minds of observers.
2. “If Carla ignored you for a year, would it be OK to simply forgive her and let bygones be bygones, and pretend nothing happened?” The answer is no—for her sake and for mine, no.

That latter point is related to Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo.

I never before noticed the “perplexed but not despairing” line in 2 Corinthians 4:8. That would’ve been a good thread to hang onto through doubt.

I enjoyed today how although I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to bring anything to church, at the last minute as we approached our taking of the wine and bread, I thought of “What A Friend I’ve Found” by Delirious?, which I had just run through with Carla, the Rookes, and Ben last weekend on a whim. I need to remember not to worry so much. Just follow my whim. Especially with music making. I ought not make music simply because I have a voice for it. I ought to make music when it is in the service of love only. Is love the post hoc pretext that covers a selfish ambition for praise or usefulness? Or is love the actual, prompting reason I’m doing the singing? Let it always be the latter.

Apparently, it’s “deliver us from the evil one” (NRSV, NIV, NLT, HCSB) and not “deliver us from evil” (NAS, KJV, ESV) That makes more sense. Gets God closer to batting 1.000 for the prayer His son instructed us to pray.

“I’m not Atlas, on any conceivable level.”

— Tom Belt, in a pithy, poetic expression of our dependency of God and others

“It’s almost as if sex is not just a meaningless commodity traded between the consenting but, in fact, is an act so deeply powerful that we should consider wrapping it in an institution of personal commitment and public accountability.”

— Matt Popovits

friend:

In the next chapter Jesus seems to switch from Salvation by “what they do” to belief in Him. In chapter 5 he indicates that he’ll raise people who did good deeds up to life and those who did bad deeds to judgement, and then in Chapter 6 it’s those who behold and believe in him that he’ll raise up….

A bit conflicting…How do I get raised up to life!?

Also while I was in the US, one of our leaders here gave a passionate talk about the evils of homosexuality and how the bible “clearly” states this is sin. So that is causing some waves…

Fun fun.

me:

Hi Ethan –

I find my eleventh-grade math-class logic lessons useful here. First of all, there is no p → q statement in John 6:40. It does not say, “If you see the Son and believe in him, then you will have eternal life and I will raise you up on the last day.” So no need to worry about that one. But, you’ll say, at least two other verses in the chapter can be formulated as such:

1. “[W]hoever believes has eternal life” (v. 47) becomes “If you believe, then you have eternal life” and
2. “[T]he one who eats this bread will live forever” (v. 58) becomes “If you eat this bread, then you will live forever.”

So, the point is granted. But neither of these statements are “if and only if” statements. The only other thing you can say for sure from these statements is their contrapositives ('q → 'p):

1. If you don’t have eternal life, then you don’t believe.
2. If you aren’t living forever, than you haven’t eaten this bread.

You can’t say the original statements’ converses:

1. If you don’t believe, then you don’t have eternal life.
2. If you don’t eat this bread, you won’t live forever.

So nothing Jesus says here contradicts his earlier statement. Given this subset of verses, at least, there may be other ways to eternal life—indeed, as you’ve noted, in the earlier, John-5 statement, Jesus says so explicitly, insofar as “the resurrection of life” (ch. 5) and “eternal life” or “living forever” (ch. 6) are synonymous: He says, in effect, that if you do good, then you will come out of your grave to the resurrection of life.

So, assuming being raised up to life is synonymous with having eternal life, how do you get raised up to life? We have two ways that Jesus gives us here: Believe (eat this bread), and do good. Both appear to “work.”

All of the logical analysis above may be moot, however, if we observe that faith without works is dead and that it does no good to call Jesus Lord but not do what He says. Given those two additional data, it may be best to simply conflate the concepts of “believing” and “doing good." In other words, John, like many places in the New Testament, may be a great place to translate pisteuo as “to give allegiance.” Mere belief is no good.

Also, I’m sorry to hear about the waves! I hope your one gal there is OK. Hopefully your leader guy at least made a distinction between same-sex attraction and same-sex sexual activity.

Much love.

friend:

If we’re to take 1 Corinthians 15:22 as making any sense at all, and if we agree that all have sinned/died (in Adam), how can we not end in Universalism?

To not end there is to make Adam more powerful than Christ.

In reply, I wrote:

me:

I suppose one might interpret “made alive” in a very literal sense, affirming that everyone will be resurrected, but allowing that some of those resurrected will be wholly condemned.

But yes, I agree with your take below. Romans 5:18 is very similar.

Have you read “Universalism and the Bible” by Yale philosopher Keith DeRose? Reading it was probably the last straw for me.

friend:

As I read the words of Jesus as he talks about the afterlife or the “judgement day”, I do not think he got the memo of “Saved by Grace”. In the classical gospel representation, if you confess with your mouth, and believe in your heart that Jesus is lord, you will be saved. That “saved” is most often interpreted as “from the judgement”. All through the new testament it talks about having our sins washed away by the blood of Jesus, etc.

But Jesus in John 5:28 talks explicitly about those with good deeds being raised to life, and those with evil deeds to judgement. Matthew 25 gives the same criteria - how you lived, not what you believed. I would say that if you just read Jesus' words, you would never come away with a “his blood covers all my sins and makes me alright with God”. But I readily admit that the new testament authors did strongly imply this relationship - 1 John 1:7, Hebrews 9, Romans 10.

So what do we do with our assurances from John, Peter, and Paul that our sins are washed clean, but our message from Christ that “not so fast, your deeds will be judged”.

Honestly, the only way this makes sense to me is if “Salvation” is for right now and I have assurance that I can connect my heart and life to God NOW, having my conscience clean, starting over. But, at the final judgement, my works will be judged and everything I did not do for love will be consumed, but I myself will enter through His love.

Anyway - Romans man…why did Paul write Romans. I really think everything would be different without that book and it’s “Plan for sharing the good news of salvation by belief” . Of course the point of what Paul was saying was not saved by belief, but rather your lineage as a Jew was not the criteria, but your allegiance to Christ.

self:

In case we don’t get to it when you get here, I think you’re onto something.

I put it this way: We’re not saved by our good works, but only our good works will be saved.

Now, what it means that that which “I did not do for love will be consumed, but [that] I myself will enter through His love,” as you put it, is currently inconceivable for me. But just because I can’t imagine it doesn’t mean it can’t be true.

As for the plentiful talk in the New Testament about our being forgiven or washed of our sins, it is certainly true that He doesn’t count our sins against us. Maybe that’s another way of saying that we ourselves with enter through His love, and perhaps it’s through this idea that we can begin to conceive of how it can be true that our evildoing will be annihilated but we ourselves will not.

(In order for any of this to jibe with the New Testament talk of fire, the annihilation of our evildoing would have to terribly unpleasant.)

And at least in the minds of ancient Jews and, I think, Greco-Romans, blood sacrifice was required to elicit such favor from the gods. Hence all that talk.

As for Paul’s letter to the Romans, you are right about Paul’s point in the book as a whole. But moreover, read the second chapter of and tell me you don’t come away with the same impression as you do when you read Jesus: that everyone will be judged.

We inherit a “soterian” gospel from the Reformers that has, on balance, not been a good thing to have as Gospel.

love verb 1 to esteem someone or something as to be gladly willing to donate of one’s self (e.g., attention, energy, time, material resources, money) for the their good 2 to esteem someone or something as to prioritize their needs

“Now I know only in part; then I will know fully”—and in the meantime, it drives me my ignorance drives me crazy.

Is it possible that the anxiety that arises in me when I read the opinions of folks on the Internet about God arises because I overestimate other people’s reasonability?

“God loved us while we were yet monsters.”

— Richard Beck, riffing on Paul

In reply to an entry a year ago about “God sending a deluding influence” on people, I understand there to be a possible better translation: “And because [they refused to love the truth], God will abandon them to the strong influence of delusion, leading them to believe the lie, so that they…will be judged or condemned” (2 Thessalonians 2:11-12; see this hermeneutics Stack Exchange comment). This is God playing the, “OK, children, I give you over to what you already seem given to. It’s not going to turn out well for you.”

“I often think our broken church/social structures reflect our homes. Families teach us that even when are different and disagree, we are one.”

— Mike Friesen

From church last week in greatly abbreviated form: Jesus’ lesson of the fig tree is not embarrassing in the slightest if we hear Him to be saying, “Guys, don’t marvel at this. This is God we’re talking about. If you know God has set to do something, to intervene in some way in the created order, then know that He is God and that therefore all you’ll have to do is say the word, and He’ll do it. Fig trees? Mountains? No problem. He is God.” Jesus’ words aren’t carte blanche. They are carte divine, and while we get to sign it, God is the one who does the deed.

For us who are heterosexual, the task as it regards the sexual behavior of our brethren who are homosexual or bisexual is to support their clean conscience. If I am open and affirming of chaste homosexual expression but my gay friend is not, I will not try to persuade my gay friend toward my point of view. I will support him in his efforts to keep to the ethic he thinks is right. See Romans 14.

Smattering of recollections from venison roast dinner this evening with Sauders at their house: I got to share my Alan Jacobs story. They were delighted at God’s activity. They remarked that we’re funny—like, make-you-laugh funny—something they don’t have enough of among their friends at University Mennonite Church. I surmised that social justice warriors have a hard time smiling. Ruth insisted that people ought to grow more idiosyncratic as they age, as long it’s not grumpily idiosyncratic. As such, in reply to Carla’s question about whether the Sauders think I’m weird, her answer was a very positive affirmative. I picked up Ta-Nehisi Coates’ letter to his son as my next book. The kids made Ed the Rabbit some things to chew on. It was a delightful evening.

The politics of Jesus: serve widows & orphans. Welcome foreigners. Prefer outsiders over insiders. Be kind to sinners and tough on saints.

If “faith in Christ” should sometimes be re-rendered “the faithfulness of Christ” (e.g., Romans 3:22), should “believe in Him” be rendered “be faithful to Him”? That’s no minor soteriological point.

Lord, I find your commands in the Sermon on the Mount to be empowering.