CHRISTIAN RIGHTS?

In my current culture, many people calling themselves “Evangelical Christians” are grasping for power and exaltation in the form of political control through secular, civil authorities.  They demand that the civil authorities protect “their rights.”  On the civil side, it sometimes appears they want to elevate themselves over the constitutional rights of those with different beliefs.  On the biblical side, there is no manifesto of Christian “rights.”  (Such behavior, of course, is the opposite of the nature of the Kingdom of God.)

Jesus’ response to civil authorities was, as Philip explains to the Ethiopian, to be “led like a sheep to the slaughter…in humiliation he was deprived of justice” (Act 8:31-34, quoting Isa 53:7-8).  Jesus refused to rely on his own access to divine power to protect his rights: “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?” (Mat 26:53 NIV).

This same Jesus proclaims that “blessed” (makarios¹) people are “the poor in spirit… those who mourn… the meek (praus²)… those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… the merciful… the pure in heart… the peacemakers… and the persecuted” (Matt 5:1-12).  Such people are the opposite of the worldly powerful and exalted.

Jesus describes the Beatitude people further as “salt” and “light” (Matt 5:13-16).  Both salt and light work their wonders of preserving and illuminating without force, without taking control, but by being who they are called to be.  Salt and light serve for the good of others.  When Jesus’ people act as salt and light, they produce “good deeds” that result in people praising God (vs 16).

Lord Jesus, I give any “rights” that I think I might have to you.  Help motivate me to serve people by being salt and light to them.  Amen.
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1.  I have a hypothesis that I sometime want to explore about makarios.  The Greek is a translation of the Hebrew ʾshry, both of which are translated as either “blessed” or “happy.”  But the Hebrew term seems to come from the word ʾshr which can have the sense of “going straight,” is used frequently in wisdom sayings, and where the verb form is found in Pro 9:6 is about going in the way of understanding.  My hypothesis is that both the Hebrew and Greek have the sense of “going in the right (godly) way.”
2.  Important to this point is the term for “meek” (praus) in Matt 5:5, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”  Too many Christian Internet sites want to claim, without citing support, that that “meek” is a quality of a strong, mighty, warhorse that is under control.  (See the discussion debunking this notion by Marg Mowczko, “The Greek Word 'Praus' and Meek Warhorses” at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1176/pg1176-images.html)  The sense if the term is “gentle/mild.”  Moreover, Jesus appears to be quoting Psalm 37:11, “But the meek (Hebrew ʽnw) will inherit the land” (NIV).  The Hebrew equivalent for Greek praus-related words are words that come from the Hebrew root ‘nh, the action of bowing down.  The noun form in Ps 37:11 carries the notion of being humble.  A related noun ‘ny in Zech 9:9 describes the Messiah: "... See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly (‘ny) and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey" (NIV).  If, as it seems likely, Greek praus is being used for Hebrew ‘nw by Jewish NT authors, then the idea of meekness describes someone who is humble/lowly before God and others.  As with the rest of the Beatitude qualities, it is contrary to exalting oneself over others.

BEING WHO I WAS CREATED TO BE: LIGHT

I know that I have written on this topic before.  I am repeating myself because I am the one who needs frequent reminders.  Being God's Light is a theme that has come in up in recent meditations by Richard Rohr.¹  Today’s statement that penetrated to my heart was,

And if we think of our homes as the place where our light shines, we are more likely to be patient with the children or with those whose minds have reverted to childhood; we are more likely to find that light within ourselves as we go through the day.²

My first thought turned to friends who are dealing with spouses with dementia.  I admire their model of faithfulness to Jesus that is revealed in their faithfulness to their spouses.  Their witness challenges me – I have a healthy wife – to be salt and light in all my contexts: wife and extended family down to my wonderful grand-children, friends, colleagues, and simply those whom I encounter in daily activities.  (I don’t know which context is harder for me: the company of closest family or passing strangers?)

The Christmas season is about how Light came into the world and how that Light remains and is meant to shine in and through those who call on Jesus (John 1:1-9).  When someone is trapped in darkness, they will – unless considerably hardened of heart – be drawn to light.  Light penetrates the chaos of darkness.  Light encourages people to move forward.  Light shows people where to step.  Light promises a better life.  God’s Light is Life.

The question, then, that I face daily is: Does my life offer this Light to others?

Lord, keep me close to you so that your Light might shine in and through me.  I do not want to contribute to the darkness in this world.  I want to be part of the Light.  Amen.
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1.  Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations (on line).
2.  https://cac.org/daily-meditations/being-a-light-for-others/

MISREADING IN GENESIS 1-3 POSTSCRIPT: READING SCRIPTURE (ADAM AND EVE)(1)

 Main Point
Although for good comprehension of the Bible, one needs to recognize that it contains different types of literature (e.g. law, letters, psalms, narratives) that each have to be read differently according to their communicative purposes and unique literary features (e.g. Paul’s letters have the parts of a typical Greek letter), for application Scripture should be read primarily for how it provides us wisdom that leads to salvation and how it prepares us to do God’s good works (2 Tim 3:15-17).

Issue: Historicity of Adam and Eve
Having taught biblical studies for over 30 years, I understand how speaking about the narratives of Adam and Eve raises concerns.  Without much forethought, people tend to think simplistically that fact equals true and fiction equals false.  However, the instructive value of narrative communication cannot be reduced that simply.  In our own culture as in the ancient Near East, we actually have different types of narrative (e.g. scholarly history, popular history, dramatized history, historicized fiction, realistic fiction, parables, tall tales, legends, fairy tells, fables). All of these types are useful for instruction.  This is because narratives create an inner world of characters, actions, and consequences that can portray true-to-life experiences.  Although we rightly speak of learning from history (the first types in the above list), we actually use the latter types for more direct wisdom teaching about life.  That is to say, even the fiction of fables can be true to life and teach us how to live wisely.  It should not surprise us, then, that the Bible also has different types of narratives.  As noted in the post "Background,"² some of the biblical composers of the first few chapters of Genesis have adopted and adaptively rewritten ancient narratives that were already present in the cultural environment of the Hebrews/Israelites.

The narratives about Adam and Eve are explanatory narratives.  To understand what that means about their historicity we have to understand the purpose of these narratives.  The biblical composers, with inspired insight, projected back into the past theologically and biologically (so to speak) to explain what “must have happened” to account for the origin of the universal human condition regarding temptation and sin, disobedience and the resultant encroachment of chaos.³  One might say, then, that these narratives do make a historical claim that something like this must have happened.  However, their main intention is not to provide a modern historical or scientific account of the birth of sin.  These narratives teach universal truths in order to provides us wisdom that leads to salvation.

The text in Hebrew more clearly demonstrates this blend of historicity with universality.  First, the personal names of the two characters are generic.  The noun adam is a wordplay on the Hebrew word adamah ("ground") from which humanity’s substance comes.  Depending on the context, adam can mean "man,” “human,” or “humankind” generically (e.g Gen 2:5); or it can be used as a proper name, “Adam.”  The name "Eve" (chavah) is a wordplay on the verb meaning “to live, to breath, to give life,” as explained in Gen 3:20.  This usage of generic terms would be like hearing a story in which the world's first parents name their two children "Son" and "Daughter."  Second, although some English translations are misleading, in all of Chapters 2-3, “adam” as a proper name is rarely used (possibly Gen 2:20b, 3:17,21).  Instead, the noun adam occurs with a particle of definiteness (ha-adam) that never occurs with a proper name and means something like “the man,” or “the human.”  Moreover, “the man” is not clearly called Adam until Gen 4:25.  As a result, the original Hebrew-speaking audience would have understood the universal implications of these narratives of Adam and Eve.  These texts explain the human condition in regard to temptation, sin, and its consequences.

Lord, help me to receive your Word such a way that it makes me wise unto salvation and prepares me to a better servant of your will.  Amen.
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1. Preceding this post was a short series “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3.”  I meant for the last post to close the series, but thought that a follow-up about reading Scripture could be helpful.
2. See, Nov. 22, 2024, “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3: Background.”
3. See, Dec. 10, 2024, “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3: Why Humans Die” and Dec. 16, 2024, “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3: ‘Original Sin’ and the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”

MISREADINGS IN GENESIS 1-3: “ORIGINAL SIN” AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL(1)

Sin and Death
Death, the consequence of sin, is the encroachment of chaos in to God’s intended order.  In my last post, I noted that the “Fall” is not a biblical term; and, unless qualified (see "Moral Evil" below), it is not a biblical concept.  Rather, the so-called “Fall” story, the narrative of Genesis 3, is about the loss of the opportunity of immortality,² (although there is more to learn from this narrative).  Adam and Eve had access to immortality through the Tree of Life, but they lost that access when they ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. 
     The first point to observe is that death, mortality, belongs to the realm of chaos.  In the second post in this short series, I explored how the first creation story (Gen 1:1-2:3) starts with initial physical chaos, elements that are contra life.³  God’s creative activity by the Spirit is to breathe order into the midst of that chaos, bringing it under God’s reign, so that life may be produced and sustained.  Working to the opposite effect, Adam’s and Eve’s sin places them under the reign of death; that is, chaos encroached into God’s intended order.  Chaos/death is the consequence of sin.

Moral Evil
Second, it should be noted that just as the first creation account begins with unexplained surd evil (physical chaos), similarly, Genesis 3 opens with unexplained moral evil/chaos in the figure of a serpent.  The serpent is an ancient Near Eastern symbol of chaos.  Temptation is about listening to the allure of the false promises (of chaos) rather than submitting to God and the creational order.  Such temptation, then, has always been present as a part of human experience, with the result that Paul can say, "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23).  In a qualified sense, then, we can speak of Genesis 3 as a fall story; it narrates how humans fall short of God’s intended order.

Original Sin
Third, Augustine’s popularized notion of Adam’s seed becoming corrupted and “original sin” being passed down seminally misses the point of Genesis 3.⁴  As long as the man and woman walked in harmony with their Creator, order was maintained.  However, they succumbed to temptation.  The temptation of original sin is clearly stated by the chaos figure of the serpent: “You (plural) will become like God."⁵ The temptation is to usurp God’s role and to reverse the creational order by elevating oneself to divine status; that is living by self-rule rather than under the divine rule of one’s Creator.  All “sin” (singular) originates from the desire of self-rule.

The Knowledge of Good and Evil
Fourth, the phrase "the knowledge of good and evil” refers to concept that is over debated. Its meaning here should be clear enough.  The idiom “to know good and evil” (yd’ tov wr’) in used in the case of a child coming of age and being recognized as a moral agent; that is, as an adult (see Deut 1:39).  [Traditionally in Judaism this is by the age of 13 for a male.]  Therefore, some scholars have postulated – wrongly – that Adam’s and Eve’s sin was a good thing that brought them into maturity!  However, in the context of the serpent-chaos figure tempting them to “become like God," the conclusion must be drawn that Adam and Eve wanted self-accountability rather than accountability to God. The idiom may be parallel to a child moving from parent-accountability to self-accountability; but, in our text it does not signify maturity.  When Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they are rebelling against God and the creational order.  Again, the narrative portrait displays that sin is about self-rule, running one’s own life.⁶

Consequences of Sin: Chaos and Death, A Reversal of Creation
The consequences of Adam’s and Eve’s rebellious disobedience (Gen 3:7-24) is that order and harmony are lost.  Chaos encroaches into their relationship with God (8-13) into their relationship with the natural world – fruit-bearing is laborious (16-19) – and into their relationship with each other (16).⁷  That is, sin results in reversing the creational order, an important motif that is found in the OT prophets.⁸ Moreover, due to their rebellious state of "becoming like God" in terms of asserting self-accountability, God bans them from the Tree of Life and they have to face their mortality (3:22-24).  Humans come under the reign of sin and death that Paul writes of in Romans 5.

Summary
Genesis 3 portrays the nature of sin and the condition of humanity. We readily succumb to temptation, to the false promises of self-rule rather than accepting the creational order of walking with God under God's rule. That is sin. Such sin yields to the encroachment of chaos and reverses the creational order. It brings discord into all of our relationships, with God, with others, and even with our natural environment. It brings us under the reign of death.

Lord, you know how often I try to rule my own life. It is folly. It has only brought me disorder, discontentment, and despair. Help me to continually seek your face, your will, you pleasure, your gracious rule in my life. Amen.
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1. This is the last of a short series of posts on Genesis 1-3.  For the introduction, see Nov. 22, 2024, “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3: Background.”
2. Dec. 10, 2024, “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3: Why Humans Die.”
3. Nov. 22, 2024, “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3: Order in the Midst of Chaos.”
4. A form of Augustine’s theology is often read into Romans 5:12-19.  I invite the reader to read that text afresh AFTER reading the following discussion.
5. The term here, elohim, can legitimately mean “gods/divine beings” or “God.”  Since the narrative starting at 2:4 has not to this point explicitly mentioned other heavenly beings, and Adam and Eve know but one God, I would translate it as “God.”
6. Perhaps for another “devotional,” one could bring in the biblical notions of discernment and the “heart.”  Separated from God, not only do humans lack sufficient knowledge to discern good from evil (2Sam 19:35) without hearts that seek God, they will not volitionally choose good over evil.  Moreover, as their hearts become hardened, they become increasingly addicted to sin.
7. See post of “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3: The Role of Woman.”
8. Recognizing this motif of the prophets is also key to understanding Paul's train of thought in Romans 1:18-32.

MISREADINGS IN GENESIS 1-3: WHY HUMANS DIE(1)

What Fall Story?
The “Fall” is not a biblical term; and, unless qualified, it is not a biblical concept.  The so-called “Fall” story, the narrative of Genesis 3, explains the loss of the opportunity to immortality.  Well before there was such people as Hebrews/Israelites, ancient myths addressed why humans are not immortal.  For example, in the ancient Mesopotamian myth, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” probably going back to the Sumerians, a snake ate the plant of immortal life before Gilgamesh could.  In another Mesopotamian myth, “Adapa,” a god tricks him into not drinking the water of immortality.  The Bible, along with its very different worldview, presents a contrasting account:  God had given Adam and Eve access to immortality through the Tree of Life, but they lost that access when they ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.²  As a consequence, they/humanity face their mortality.

Created Mortal, Not Immortal
The first point to note is that in Genesis, humans are never said to have been created immortal.  That belief came into Christian thinking through the acceptance of Greek dualism.  (In Greek thought, humans were composed of a decomposable body and an eternal soul, the latter possessing the essence of life.  Since this line of Greek thought believed nothing could be lost or gained in an eternal cosmos, the soul had to be immortal; the essence of people is immortal.)  The Old Testament presents a different picture of the nature of humans, a wholistic one.  In the second narrative in Genesis, God takes soil, breathes into it – “breath” being related to “spirit,” and the man becomes a living “soul” (nephesh) (2:7).  The Hebrew concept of nephesh/soul is different from the Greek concept.  The Hebrew term is related to the bodily passages through which the breath flows.  A breathing animal, like a person, is also called a nephesh/soul.  There is no Greek dualism of an eternal soul entering a disposable body.  In the biblical anthropology, people are not alive apart from being embodied.  [For this reason, the first Christians would not have accepted a figurative resurrection.  To be resurrected, Jesus had to be embodied, even if that body was a “spiritual body,” as per Paul’s discussion in 1Cor 15:42-44.]  Moreover, there is nothing in the Gen 1-3 about humans being immortal.  With the cessation of breathing, a person expires (“breathes out”), dies.³  In this biblical revised version of ancient myth, however, the man had free access to the Tree of Life (2:9,16); that is, the man originally possessed the opportunity of immortality.

Facing Mortality
God told the man that if he ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he would die.  Although there are other key consequences to Adam’s disobedience [to be treated in the next blog post], the main one here that parallels the ancient Near Eastern myths is that now Adam and Eve face their mortality.  In the rebellious state of having chosen to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God bans them from the Tree of Life and from the Garden of Eden in which they had closely walked and talked with God (3:22-24).  Now, apart from God, they must die.

Application
Sin results in death.  Pop-level Christianity should take a fresh look at New Testament texts regarding the consequences of sin and take them more literally than figuratively.  When Paul states that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23), he means it literally.  When John’s Gospel states that “that whoever believes in him [God’s Son] shall not perish (John 3:16), “perish” is meant literally.  Throughout the NT, the judgement on sin is death, literally.  All have sinned; all face death.  The biblical logic is crystal clear: cut off from the Source of Life (represented by walking and talking with God in the Garden) and being banned from the Tree of Life, leaves humanity facing death.  How could it not?  This is why Paul writes that because death entered the world through sin (Rom 5:12), “death has reigned from the time of Adam” (Rom 5:14).  So, too, the opposite state is clear: to be reconciled by grace back to the Source of Life results in eternal life.  How could it not?⁴  This simple truth is the heart of atonement message of the Good News.  Those who are reconciled to God now have life now.  They do not die, go to heaven, and THEN get eternal life.  They are now members of the Kingdom of God.  As Paul would say, they are now under the reign of the Spirit and life (see Romans 5-6).

Lord, apart from you, I have nothing, I am nothing, I have no hope.  I am dead.  However, I praise and worship you that solely by your grace, you have taken me back into relationship with you, into Life!  Help me to share that message of restored life with others.  Amen.
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1. For an introduction to this short series on Gen 1-3, see Nov. 22, 2024, “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3: Background.”
2. The specific temptation and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil will be explained in the next post.
3. The Gospels preserve this view of the nature of man in Greek: When Jesus’ dies on the cross, having made his last cry, he breathes out his spirit (e.g. Matt 27:50); he “expires.”
4. I recognize that it is problematic to introduce this OT concept of the nature of humanity in a “devotional” and not explore the implications further regarding judgement.  In brief, I will note that pop-level Christian readings of eschatological texts about judgement tend to face three problems: 1) not understanding what the figurative and symbolic language used meant in the first century AD, 2) foisting the Greek notion of an eternal soul into the texts, and 3) not recognizing that the Greek terms “Hades” and “Gehenna” had distinct meanings in the first century.  In regard to the last item: our earliest Anglo-Saxon translations (c. 10^th century) translated both Greek terms by the same word (“hell” in English) and, by conflating them, created a foreign construct.  I discuss these issues in a couple of academic articles:  Duke, Rodney, "Eternal Torment or Destruction? Interpreting Final Judgment Texts," Evangelical Quarterly 88.3 (2016/17) 237-58 and "The Idiom of 'Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth' in the Gospels: A Funerary Formula" Perspectives in Religious Studies 47/3 (2020) 283–98.

MISREADINGS IN GENESIS 1-3: THE ROLE OF WOMAN(1)

This thought follows up to the previous one on our calling as ones made in the image of God and is important if not very “devotional.”  Despite clear biblical texts to the contrary, I still hear some church-people who talk of the subordinate role of women to men.  Genesis 1-3 addresses this issue.  In the narrative of Gen 1:1-2:3, when God states that he will make humanity in God’s image, God does so, male and female (1:26-28).  Both represent God.  That was “good” (Hebrew tov), which here ties in with order.

In the second narrative that begins at 2:4, when God desired for the man to have a “like-corresponding-to-him (kngd) helper” (‘zr), no existing creature would do (2:18-20).  Neither of the Hebrew terms in the quoted expression imply subordination: the first term has the notion of a proper counterpart, and the second, translated “helper,” is a term that may be used in reference to the divine aid of God (Psalm 121:1).  To provide such an entity for the man, God does not create (br’) new kind of being.  Rather, God extracts a section from the side of the man and forms (bnh) the women from it.  The point is that the woman is the exact same essence as the man and not a new kind of creature.  The man acknowledges this fact with a wordplay in Hebrew that works as well in English, "This one at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one will be called 'woman' (isshah) for she was taken out of man (ish)" (Gen 2:23).  [The explanatory note about marriage in 2:24 (“that is why a man (ish) leaves…and is united to his woman (isshah), and they become one flesh”) is not about sexual intercourse, but about how the unity of the two complementary humans form a kinship entity.]

When one gets to the Chapter Three, after Eve’s and Adam’s act of disobedience, 3:16 is sometime used to defend the subordination of women, “And toward your husband [will be] your intent, but he should rule over you.”  This text does not command that husbands rule over their wives.  First, this statement presents the effect of a cause.  It is presented as a consequence of chaos encroaching on their relationship due to their rebellion toward God.  A major biblical principle of creation theology exhibited in Genesis 3, a principle particularly picked up by the prophets, is that when one defies the Creator of order, chaos returns and impedes the proper creational order.²  In Gen 3:16, chaos hinders the originally intended relational order between a husband and wife.  This resultant state is not the divine goal.  Those who seek to obey God and to bring order into chaos will work for a harmonious relationship, one in which male and female are both in the image of God and are both expected to bring order into the domains of the earth.

Second, although the Hebrew of 3:16 is rather vague and difficult to translate, a parallel text in wording, but not in implied tense and mood, regarding Cain and sin sheds light on 3:16: “And toward you [is] its [sin’s] desire (tshwqh), but you must rule over it” (4:7).  This parallel construction to 3:16 reveals that the word for “desire” (tshwqh) of the women in 3:16, which can have a positive connotation (Song of Sol 7:11, Eng. 7:10), is here something negative.  Like the negative “desire” of sin personified, it should be thwarted.  Due to this parallel text in 4:7, the NET translates our text, “You [the woman] will want to control your husband, but he will dominate you" (Gen. 3:16).  Moreover, this reading makes sense in light of the preceding event in which the woman succumbed to the temptation of the serpent and the man, instead of refusing her offer and thwarting sin, willingly followed.

Application:
In God’s creational order, males and females were made in the image of God to represent God.  In this creational order, the woman is of the same essence as the man and not a lesser or defective being (as in ancient Greek thought).  Together male and female complement one another.  Those who seek God should not take the consequential chaos of sin as a state to maintain.  Rather, as ones created in the image of God, they should strive to being order into that chaos.  Complementarily made men and women should work together to obey and serve their Creator.

Lord, once again I see that you want order and light, not chaos and darkness.  Guide me and your Church to bring order into chaos, particularly as we respect our complementary helpers.  Amen.
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1. This post of Dec. 5, 2024, was amended on Dec. 9, 2024 to address a comment asking for clarification.  In regard to the background on this post, see the previous posts, Nov. 22, 2024, “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3: Background” and Dec. 5, 2024, “Misreadings in Genesis 1-3: Our Calling: The “Image of God.”
2. This principle of sin causing the encroachment of chaos will be developed in a subsequent post.