Two Favorite Topics

As many of you know, two of my favorite topics are baseball and justice. It’s rare that I can connect the two, but a blog post from my friend Dean Anderson does just that. It’s a review of 42, the film about baseball great Jackie Robinson and the year he began to play in the major leagues as the first black player. As Dean points out, it came to be because of the particular sense of justice in both Robinson and the Dodgers GM Branch Rickey. In this fortunate case, the cause of justice accorded with winning. Which, according to the Bible, it always does in the long run. But, also according to the Bible, it does not necessarily do in the short run.

It’s a great, short post which includes a terrific quote from Martin Luther (though not about baseball–we’re still looking for that).

Thoughts on the Problem of Evil

A friend told me about a dinner conversation that turned to the question, “Do you believe in God?”

One couple said, “We don’t believe in a God who would allow such terrible things to happen.”

My friend didn’t know what to say. She had already admitted that she believed in God. Genuinely troubled, she came to me to ask, how could I have answered?

As I told her, it’s a tough question that philosophers and theologians have grappled with for thousands of years. The commonest response is to refer to free will. God made creatures with freedom. If he put a stop to all evil, he would violate those creatures’ freedom. Human beings would no longer be human, but something more like robots.

I think that’s a pretty helpful answer, though perhaps overly abstract.

Writing about God’s justice has made me think about it from a different angle. I have taken more seriously the Bible’s statement that God did, at one time, consider putting a sudden end to all human evil.

“The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said ‘I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created–and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground–for I regret that I have made them.’” (Genesis 6:5-7)

Would you really like God to do that?

I believe in a God who chose not to instantly put a stop to evil, but set about transforming the human heart– a very complicated operation.

Appreciation of N.T. Wright

I am in the early stages of working on God’s Justice, a Bible with notes on… drumroll…. God’s justice. At the moment I am slugging my way through Romans, one of the five biblical books I am using for a prototype we will publish in September.

For Romans I am using Douglas Moo’s commentary–a well written, thoughtful, irenic but fairly traditional Reformed view. And, I am using N.T. Wright, through his Romans commentary and a variety of his books on Paul and justification by faith.

Romans is rich, dense stuff, and while Wright is a fluent writer I sometimes feel as though I am drinking from a fire hose. Largely that is because he is presenting a new paradigm. For someone like me, who has read and studied Romans many times, it is hard to escape your prior readings. You try to hold in your mind the argument that Wright is making, but your mind keeps slipping back into comfortable categories.

Wright is trying to read Romans within a Jewish thought-world, which is to say: he sees it as addressing salvation from within the Old Testament narrative in which God’s creation has gone wrong and he has promised (to Abraham) to redeem it through Abraham’s children. For a highly traditional Jew like Paul, there are many, many crucial questions to understanding how these promises come true in Jesus. Questions about Abraham, circumcision, the Law. Romans addresses such questions, extending the story from Adam to Abraham to David to Jesus to us–both Jew and Gentile.

This is very much in line with what Wright did with Jesus in his scholarly works on the gospels. But in some ways the task was easier, because Protestants have never had a very developed understanding of the gospels. (Ask any good Protestant, for example, how the sheep and the goats can be divided on the basis of their treatment of the needy, as Jesus taught in Matthew 25, given that we are saved by grace.) In writing about the synoptic gospels Wright got substantial resistance to a new paradigm built around a Jewish story for Jesus, but nothing like he gets regarding Paul, where his fellow Protestants have a very well-developed, highly theological understanding. Whew! Some circles are very hot!

I can’t sum up a paradigm shift in a paragraph. I’ll just say that I am thoroughly sold on what Wright does. It makes a unified whole out of Romans in a way I have never seen. It ties Paul’s theology into Jesus’ seamlessly, so it’s not Jesus or Paul, but Jesus and Paul. And it fits with my understanding of faith and life, lived practically.

From what I can gather in my interactions with New Testament scholars, lots of people are reading Wright and working through this paradigm shift. Its impact could be very large, not least because it tells a story of global salvation, the flourishing of God’s creation, and the destruction of evil–a much larger and more action-oriented story than what much of Protestantism has fallen into, salvation limited to the forgiveness of personal sins so that I can experience God’s love and go to heaven when I die.

EnlightenUp

I want to tell you about a summer lecture series that I have been helping to lead at my church for 8 years. We stumbled on a format that has proven remarkably successful, in a modest way, and that affirms an important reality in a way nothing I am familiar with does to the same degree. We call the series EnlightenUp, and it is very simple. During the summer months, on Sunday evenings, we ask local people from a wide variety of backgrounds to talk about their work and/or their passion. Last Sunday we had a cellist from the San Francisco symphony. Next week we have an engineer who has thought a lot about the interaction of faith and innovation. We will have an agronomist, a member of our church, who is working in China growing grapes for wine. My daughter Katie will talk about her research into how the Spanish civil war is remembered. A woman who sells real estate will tell us about her work and its intersection with here faith. You get the idea. Once you start looking, you find all kinds of interesting people with interesting work. We don’t have money to pay more than gas, but nearly everybody seems delighted to come. Why? Because they never get asked to talk about their work in such personal terms– what it means to them, how they got involved. And they care about it, a lot.

Those who come are Christians, but they vary in the extent to which they talk about their faith. We leave it up to them, not wanting to force anything. Usually it comes out most during questions, which take up half our 90 minute program. I personally find, because they are unforced, rising from their own vocation, that these expressions are quite subtly wonderful.

Let me quote from our recent church bulletin:

“People sometimes wonder why we do Enlighten Up. It’s not a series with immediate practical value for your Christian life. It doesn’t teach theology or Bible or prayer or evangelism–at least not directly. Rather, it’s meant to accomplish something wider and deeper: to celebrate and learn from the wide diversity of gifts and callings, many of which have no direct place in the church, but all of which are very much part of what God cares for. The glory of God is displayed in his people, as they do his work with love and passion. In music, medicine, sports, astronomy, science, business–and in many, many more endeavors–God’s splendor shows.”

Naturally, not all our speakers are equally strong. The key is to get them to focus on their vocation. What doesn’t work so well are 1. Missionary or travel slide shows and 2. People advocating for a cause. Sometimes people in either of those categories find it hard to adjust to simply speaking personally. But when people do speak personally, it can be simply marvelously interesting. It draws people in.

Lots of people today are looking for ways to connect the church to the larger culture. EnLightenUp does it, simply and naturally. I think almost anybody could bring it off, and it makes a profound impact. So much of church life is devoted to church life. But God’s interests are much wider! And so should ours be.

A Counsel of Despair?

In a comment posted today, David Graham–for whom I have the greatest respect–writes:

Other questions to ponder are, “Would Joshua – in any of his battles – have done this?”  Or “would Ezra – he of the forced divorces for any Israelite married to a foreigner – have done this?”  Or “Is this how David treated Goliath’s body?”  Or “Would the Apostle Paul – he of the ‘if anyone preaches a different gospel, let him be damned’ – have done this?”  Deciding what is “biblical” behavior all depends on where the reader turns her gaze in the scriptures…

It’ s true what David notes: there are quite a number of horrifying things done and said in the pages of the Bible, and some of them are said to have God’s endorsement.

The way David frames it, though, seems to me to be a counsel of despair, as much as to say, “You can find any morality you want in the Bible.” Which I don’t think is quite true.

There is a strong, clear moral thrust in Scripture, which finds its heart in Jesus. And then there are acts and words that are hard to put together with Jesus, if not impossible. The right way to read the Bible is in Jesus, not in the spirit of suspicion, or in the mind of Enlightenment rationalism. That is the method that Jesus used with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, when he “explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” (Luke 24:29)

In fact, I think that is the way David reads when he raises  horrifying examples. They stand out because they  seem to stand against the story concerning Jesus.

We should read this way with humility. One would not want to imitate Thomas Jefferson, who snipped out of the Bible all the parts he did not like! We do not have permission to edit out the horrible parts any more than the miraculous. There may always be parts of the Bible that trouble us. Nevertheless, we read the Bible not so much to question God (though that is permitted) as to question ourselves. That generates increasing humility. That, too, is a reading we should do in Jesus.

Good news

I found this incredibly moving. It’s an interview with the woman who arranged for the burial of the Boston terrorist, though she had no personal linkage to him at all. Her calm, clear, non-presumptive articulation of her faith is extraordinary. Very challenging. Would I do this?

Justice and Love

I am working on a Bible with notes on God’s justice, to be called, surprisingly enough, God’s Justice. Subtitle: The Flourishing of Creation and the Destruction of Evil.

A major objection I often hear is rooted in a definition of justice based in the courtroom. Justice is “what’s coming to you,” it is retribution for wrongs. For anyone who believes in the ubiquity of sin, “what’s coming to you” is hardly good news. God’s justice is wrath and punishment, relieved only by God’s mercy and love. God’s justice and God’s love are opposed to each other.

This understanding of God torn between justice and love creeps into human ethics, too. How do I see the poor in my community? Through the eyes of justice, most of them appear to get what they deserve. They didn’t apply themselves in school, their work ethic is weak, they didn’t plan well. It isn’t “just” to help them. I’m torn between being just and being charitable. Somehow I try to find a balance between them. When I offer help, I feel weak and “unjust.”

I contend, however, that this division between justice and love does no justice to the God of the Bible. His justice is inextricably intertwined with love. His justice is not “settling accounts” but “setting things right.” To set things right in his beloved creation, he must destroy evil. Sin must be dealt with. But he deals with sin through love and sacrifice. He gives up himself to sin, in order that no one need be punished. He is all love and all justice, all the time.

That is not just a New Testament version of reality. All through the Old Testament, the “just person” is generous to the poor and stands up for their rights in court. See Psalm 72 for a potent description of the Just King. The law of Jubilee–Law, mind you–is that everybody gets their land back every fifty years, regardless of what mistakes have been made. In the book of Jonah, Jonah wants retribution on Nineveh, but God delights in restoration. Is God unjust? Jonah may have thought so, but God didn’t.

I see no sign of a God torn between justice and love. His love is justice, and his justice is love.

This is a profound mystery. Our best formulations fall short. How does God punish and destroy evil while redeeming everything? The closest we come to understanding is when we study the cross on which Jesus died.

The Pope and the Pentecostals

I was surprised in Argentina to find charismatics and Pentecostals genuinely excited about Pope Francis. Some of that was natural national pride, but some went deeper. Pentecostals in Latin America, you may know, are heavily infected with the “prosperity gospel.” In many cases this rationalizes their pastors’ extravagant lifestyle–their big houses, their fancy cars, even their airplanes–as signs of God’s blessing. The more blessing, the greater the prosperity, is how the thinking goes.

But, one pastor told me, if ordinary churchgoers see the Latin American pope living simply, washing the feet of poor people, and rejecting the perks of the Vatican, they get a different model of God’s blessing. It may not be so easy for pastors to claim the Mercedes.

Daring Question

I’ve been struck by Genesis 18, where Abraham engages God (who stops by for a meal) on his plans to judge Sodom. Abraham is not exercised on his own behalf, but for all the innocent people who will suffer in Sodom’s downfall.

Most of us fret about justice for ourselves, not other people.

Abraham asks God perhaps the most impertinent question in the Bible. “Far be it from you to do such a thing–to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”  (18:25)

That’s quite a question to ask God.

And here’s a question I have to ask myself: When did I last complain to God about the suffering of innocent people?

Attacks on Christians in Sri Lanka

You may know that I have a long-time interest in Sri Lanka. Today I got the following report from a friend there:

The attacks on Christians doing evangelism has really intensified. Many house prayer groups in homes of believers have been asked to stop. There are attacks on churches. A group has arisen which has taken it upon themselves even using force to protect Sri Lanka which they are saying belongs to a certain ethnic group and a certain religion. They have published a document on the so-called threat to Sri Lanka and listing dangerous organisations. We are in that list. Much wisdom is needed. Pastors are living with much fear. They are also hitting Muslim targets.

Please pray for us.