Let's Ban Christmas Again

For four decades in the middle of the 17th century, Americans experimented with outlawing the celebration of Christmas. In the rare cases when we've looked back on that time at all, it's as a curiosity, worthy of ridicule or puzzlement.

The time has come to take another look, and consider banning Christmas again.

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The War on Christmas is an annual tradition, but alas, only in the minds of Fox News personalities and viewers, for whom it consists of people saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," complaints about nativity scenes on public property, and—last year, anyway—debates over Santa's racial profile:

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Dave Mantel hashed out the racial issue in a piece here on In Progress last year, but we sadly neglected the larger issue of the War on Christmas itself. But no longer!

The idea that Christmas is under attack because people are saying "Happy Holidays" or (God forbid) writing "Xmas" instead of "Christmas" is nakedly, obscenely ridiculous, akin to the idea that "diversity = white genocide"¹ in its breathtakingly offensive logical leaping. This does not mean that there shouldn't be a War on Christmas, however, as Jezebel staff writer Kelly Faircloth has pointed out:

Christmas has overflowed its traditional borders, annexed Thanksgiving, and begun laying siege to Halloween. You know what? Let's do it. Let's declare war on Christmas. Let's take up arms against this bloated, exhausting, consumerist nightmare. The end of the year is starting to look like the last thirty minutes of Akira. Christmas is the aggressor here, and Christmas must be stopped...

The minute we cleared Halloween, the trailer for Grumpy Cat's Christmas movie dropped. Elf was already showing on cable this weekend. Dunkin' Donuts just announced its artery-hardening, teeth-rotting lineup of Christmas beverages. (Including a snickerdoodle and sugar cookie latte!) They were beaten to the punch by Starbucks, who announced the advent of their chestnut praline latte the week before Halloween. Around the country, the New York Times reports, radio stations devoted to 24/7 Christmas are activating like ill-natured seasonal cyborgs. Even as Halloween revelers are slinking back home in batter costumes on the first morning of November, stores are busting out bells and bows and boughs. Photographic evidence available here! The switch is carefully documented by local news outlets, thereby feeding the frenzy. (Of course the Neiman Marcus holiday catalog arrives in early October, because you gotta get your orders in early if you want a $65,000 floral peacock sculpture.) And make no mistake—retailers are already trying to start the party in September.

Yes, Christmas has gobbled up the preceding four-plus weeks, a period once known and loved as Advent, now unmourned and forgotten by all but a few solitary souls. All this would be bad enough, but for me, the straw that’s breaking the nativity camel's back is the ungodly monstrosity that is Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas.²

The history of the evangelical Christian movie is long and tedious history, best left unexamined if one is to retain any shred of faith in humanity, but the last few years have seen a surge in the budget and reach of Christian movie making, with movies like Heaven Is for Real and God’s Not Dead attracting widespread attention and unprecedented amounts of money. It goes without saying that these films are abysmal, but quality is beside the point. They are about shoring up the faith of people who already believe in something, which is essentially the opposite purpose of anything that can be called art.

That Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas is not art is beyond dispute: not only has it been universally reviled among film critics as utter trash, it also currently holds the highest rank on IMDB’s list of the worst-rated movies of all time. What is most offensive about it is not its art-free character, but its screeching defense of the material and cultural trappings around Christmas that have begun to make it unbearable.

The cherry on top is Cameron's defense of materialism itself, made in a recent Q&A about the film:

"Materialism is actually a fascinating concept. The eternal God took on a material body, something we can touch and see. That's a miracle! And so it's right that our Christmas isn't just some religious idea in our heads and in our hearts that we think about and get goosebumps over. It should be able to download into the world in the form of things that we can look upon and touch with our hands. Like gifts for those who love us."

As Kelly Faircloth put it, "Don't mind me, I'm just choking to death on some gingerbread cookies, watching Kirk Cameron defend materialism in the name of one of the world historical figures most famous for renouncing it."

If even Kirk Cameron, evangelical Christianity's pop culture stalwart, cannot be called upon to recognize the crassness of Christmas, then surely any hope of reclaiming the holiday as a public good is lost. If Christmas is doomed, then, let it burn, that we might grow something fresh in the ashes.

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The Puritans banned Christmas because it was celebrated with a great deal of behavior they found unsavory. In the words of one Puritan,

That more mischief is that time committed than in all the year besides, what masking and mumming, whereby robbery whoredom, murder and what not is committed? What dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting is then used, more than in all the year besides, to the great dishonour of God and impoverishing of the realm. 

They also objected to it because there was no biblical reason for celebrating Jesus’ birth on December 25. The whole thing smacked of a pagan holiday dressed up as something else, which of course it essentially was.³

Taken with permission from David Malki!'s excellent webcomic, Wondermark 

While the laws against Christmas were lifted in 1680, they effectively killed the old way of celebrating Christmas, and the holiday did not start to become what it is today until Americans began celebrating it in earnest again after the Civil War.

It seems to me that we could use something similar in our current age. Let's ban the public celebration of Christmas and its associated trappings. If forty years of law were enough to keep Americans from publicly celebrating Christmas with mumming, dicing, and carding, forty more years should be enough to erase the memory of Grumpy Cat's movie, Elf, crappy holiday beverages, and, we can only pray, Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas. People could still privately celebrate Christmas at home and at church if they chose, but the incessant public spectacle and strain would be washed away in the cleansing legal tide. The holiday would return to its natural state: a single day of gentle joy, spent with a few friends and family members, surrounded on all sides not by months of crass clangor and consumption, but merely by the clean, quiet, cool winter air and a crisp dusting of snow.

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1. A real, very racist idea that you will have to look up yourself, because I am certainly not linking to anything about it here.↩
2. Confession: I haven’t actually seen this. I’m comfortable citing others’ experiences, trusting that the man who made Left Behind: World at War will have had little trouble matching and exceeding his previous accomplishments in the desecration of cinema.↩
3. Though there are actually some fascinating theological reasons for using December 25 as Jesus’ birthday, quite outside of any association with/coopting of pagan holidays. ↩

What Is Faith? What Is It For? A Conversation

Video Summary:

James Alison says faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you. Lutheran idea: faith is trusting God's promises, not intellectually assenting to a set of theological propositions.

Faith is not given to individuals in sufficient quantities, but communities. Similar to how an individual might not believe every line of a creed, but the church as a whole does. In organizing her faith community, the statement of faith required of members will be participating in the liturgy and sharing the eucharist.


David Shay: My initial reaction to this was that it was awesome to hear something that made sense to me about faith, but that I haven't articulated myself before in this way. I've seen a lot of these concepts in books on orthodoxy that I've read, especially the idea of things being based more in the community, the body, not just the individual. What were your thoughts, Dave?


Dave Mantel: I did a quick word study on that 1 Corinthians passage she mentioned, where Paul is addressing a "y'all,"--the community responsibility for faith, rather than the individual--and it doesn't normally get translated that way, but it could be, which is cool. I think a lot of times with this kind of stuff most people will translate something a certain way because it's always been done like that. So that stuck out as something I really liked.

But there was something I'm not sure I know how I feel about, where she talks about the creed, and how not everybody has to believe everything, as long as it all gets believed in the end--that's okay. I can see how that would be encouraging. But I don't know where I stand with that kind of thinking yet.


David Shay: I get that, but don't think we can take what she's saying in this video as "the rules" of faith. It's kind of a catch-22; the way she's presenting it, you almost can't say you disagree, because what she's saying is "Exactly!" and you'd be like "But I don't agree with that" and she'd say "I know, exactly, but we both love Christ and believe he's God." And that's kind of why a lot of what she said makes sense to me. Which brings us back to the first part of what she says, which is that faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you. Most of the time we only talk about the rules and the function of us being in love with the Creator, and we don't focus on the relationship with the Creator; what are the emotions that you feel, what are the unwritable things that happen to you; that sense is something that would be nice to bask in.


Dave Mantel: I understand what's being communicated, but I have a problem with the way that it's being put. I think it's really cool--there's two ways to think about this: one is that you don't have to have 100% faith in every doctrine all the time, and that's okay, because faith isn't about having all the right ideas all the time; and the other way is this, that there are a lot of extra rules... Rob Bell has a similar problem in his book, Velvet Elvis, where he talks about "flexible doctrine," and he uses the example of the virgin birth, and I'm like "That's not a good example!" because the virgin birth important to all of Christianity, but if you were talking about something else- things that are really side issues that not the whole Church agrees on (I view the content of the creeds as main issues, not side issues)- it's okay to wrestle with those things during different seasons. James?


James Davisson: I have to admit that my initial gut reaction to this video was almost entirely negative. For whatever reason, my brain reacted to the sentence "James Alison says faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you" with the same kneejerk dislike I usually reserve for people proclaim inghow much they love eating organic produce while they do yoga. Liberal white people sitting around in a room agreeing with each other; I just reject the surface quality of this whole thing. Once I was able to get past that emotional response, I was able to get on board with a lot of what she was saying.

In fact, what I did with it was try to find someone more "orthodox" who might agree with or support her position, and what I came up with was something I remembered C.S. Lewis, that I think goes along with her second idea that faith might not require belief in every line of the creed:

The Resurrection and its consequences were the “gospel” or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the “gospels,” the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already converted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it.

To me, that sounds like Lewis saying something similar, that the essence of Christian faith is belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the impact that it has on humanity; everything else is commentary on that.


Dave Mantel: This goes back to our last conversation: what is the point of all this? What is it for? The end result of this conversation should not be "Do we all think the right things?" but "How does this help our relationship with God and each other?" So whatever we conclude should be in relation to those two things; not about doctrine, but relationship.


David Shay: Let me jump on that, relationship: I think that might be the cheesy part that James hated so much. My struggle with faith is that, when I look for someone who "has it going on" with their faith, it can be tought, I'm not actually sure I believe there's someone who actually knows who God is. I get emotional at church, but I'm just like a secular person in line at the Chiptole, or getting gift cards at Target; we live a very mundane life outside of church, outside of our practices. What is it actually like, though, when we analyze our lives and know we're dwelling beside the Creator; how does it make things different, what is the answer? It's not entirely to be found in what you believe, in doctrines, nor only in how you treat people, because we all know really nice people who don't believe in God. It's found in something else, I can't put it into words, but it's found in something that has no need to be proven to others; it's simply dwelling with God and letting God change you. I think we've lost touch as Christians because we're trying to prove too much to others, that what we believe makes sense, and we've forgotten to relate to God and each other. That's the obsession of the individual; all of us just trying to better our own lives instead of contribute to a community.


Dave Mantel: That's where I get sometimes; I get wrapped up in "head knowledge," in having the right ideas and telling other people about them. It's not something that changes my life; I'm not letting it. It's not expressed in loving other people, and that's the trap I get stuck in sometimes.


David Shay: Right. She says that maybe faith isn't for the individual, but I think it can be--there are people who have just, crazy amounts of faith, overflowing faith.

I know people who I admire as Christians, with very different theological views from me. I know a guy, he's very Reformed, and I am not, and I admire him, and I look up to him because of these weird moments we've had, like this time we were out with a group of people at camp in the woods, and it's midnight and crickets and animals are going off, and he says "Let's just stop for a second--y'all hear that song?" And we just stand there, silent, but the woods aren't silent--I think that sort of thing is more the point even than what this person even gave a sermon on earlier that evening, that is how the Kingdom of God can work. And that sounds pretty tree-huggish, wishy-washy, I get it, because I can't tell someone that story and it really hits them, necessarily, but I think that experience of community, faith, and God, that happen within that story, is an important thing. This person's theology that's different from mine, that's not as important.


James Davisson: Couple things. I question too what's important about Christianity and what sets us apart from good, secular people. And what does that is that we live in the age where Christ has come and changed things, and we can spread the word about that, and we can further his Kingdom even change the world for the better because of that story and the knowledge we have about it. And we too often look to the distant, end-of-time future, rather than this immediate future that we have the power to shape, as Christians. 

This other thing I was reminded of in listening to your comments was this item we've been meaning to talk about, this blog post called Twelve Myths Too Many Christians Believe, and the first myth is "Christianity is a relationship, not a religion." The idea is that we say things like this because we're uncomfortable with admitting that Christianity is a religion, because then maybe it's just one religion among many that are all equally right/wrong, the slippery slope of pluralism, etc. I'll quote from the post:

[I]it is entirely possible to believe that there are more religions than one while still holding to the perspective that yours is the right one. I feel that it is important to keep in mind that Christianity is indeed one religion among many because it will help us to see the Other as real – someone with beliefs that they hold as dear to them as we do ours. Naturally we think Christianity is the best religion available; if we did not, we would hold to a different one. Further, we believe that our particular church or denomination is the best expression of that faith; if we felt otherwise, we would go elsewhere. We must, however, allow ourselves to remember that there are others who do feel otherwise and are not idiots.

David Shay: My response is that God is not a religion, nor is Christ a religion; I think that our desire to know God is what created a religion. I think my biggest issue is that people don't acknowledge God as real, they acknowledge God as a figure, someone they know about that they read about in a book. But you have to experience God in the world.


James Davisson: I've heard some Christians speak on the idea that some people are given the ability to have faith, and some are not. Which is something that seems to be borne out in reality; cognitively speaking, there seem to be people who are and others who are not able to experience God, in terms of brain function. What do you guys think about that?


David Shay: I wonder about that; I wonder if it's something that appears outside of western societies. But it's an interesting question; what can you do? You love them, you share with them in experiences that you maybe see as spiritual and they maybe see as a good time. Go to a concert that you think is a spiritual experience and that they see as fun. And just believe what you believe; believe that the concert was spiritual and you shared it with someone who didn't feel that way.

Example, Erica and I went to a Sufjan Stevens concert and we all sang together, a capella, Come Thou Fount, I'm sure the theater was not filled with just Christians, but we all sang that song; people sang and closed their eyes, and I believe it glorified God. I don't know what the non-Christians would say about it, but I can say that I think it was good.



Dave Mantel: I've had similar experience; I was a Thrice farewell show, and there was a song where the bridge was "We are the image of the invisible," and I looked around and thought of the people singing along "Do you believe in that, or know what you're singing? Because it's true." That was one of those moments where I thought, this is interesting, it's a moment that glorifies God, this primal acknowledgement of God.

I think this ties into our other conversation about salvation and evangelism; if it's not about believing the right things- if someone is not predisposed to believe in or desire a deity, how do we interact with them? We have to live differently, not to make them conform to a doctrine, but to bring them into contact with the invisible.


David Shay: I think we've come full circle! Because that sounds a lot like "relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you." James, I want you to agree.


James Davisson: I mean, just after that sentence, I was like "I'm mostly on board," but before that I was like "Shut up!" That sentence just sounds so...homeopathic and new age-y to me.  My gut reaction, not my actual analysis.

Is "The Sinner's Prayer" Harmful?

This week, we sat down for a discussion, prompted by the video below, in which pastor David Platt talks about the Sinner's Prayer, a prayer that many evangelicals and people in other Christian groups ask people to pray when they convert to Christianity. The prayer consists of an admission of sin and a request for Jesus to "enter your heart" or become the central figure in the pray-er's life. Platt questions its validity and warns about its use, and that's the jumping off point for our conversation. Note that this is a transcript of a verbal conversation; we're speaking off the cuff. So feel free to take issue with things we've said, and talk to us in the comments section; we may very well agree with you, and at all events you'll give us a chance to clarify our thoughts.



James Davisson: Platt starts the video by claiming that people in churches are "missing the life of Christ" because of the sinner's prayer. What do you guys think of that?


David Shay: The main thing I disagree with David Platt about is a little outside the context of the video—I don't agree with him because I think that, there's a level of "the life of Christ" that reaches all life on this planet, regardless of a sinner's prayer. But in this context, he's saying there are people who aren't true followers of Christ because they are saying a prayer that doesn't really mean anything, that they're told to say, and it doesn't reveal the full essence of Christ to them. And I agree with that.

JD: Can you talk more about why you agree, David? Do you feel like you know a lot of people who fit his description, people who go to church but are missing the life of Christ?


DS: I can think of people, but of course I wouldn't want to say who I think is a "false Christian!" But I think this stems from a culture where, say, a person would be like "I said the sinner's prayer when I was four years old!" and then that person goes to church every Sunday, and they say they love Jesus, but you want to say to them "Remember when Jesus was yelling at the Pharisees for these reasons? You're kinda doing what the Pharisees were doing, every day. I think Jesus would yell at you." But you can't have that discussion with them.

So it's maybe not even the sinner's prayer that's the problem, but the culture of a church that thinks that all you gotta do is say the sinner's prayer and then you're in. There just isn't discipleship; the church becomes a hangout of people who have said this prayer at some point, and there's no difference between them and non-Christians. I've always wondered with people like this that I've met, like "Why don't you just not come to church on Sunday, and be productive on Sunday morning instead? It seems like almost nothing Jesus said matters to you."


Dave Mantel: And what is "salvation" anyway, right? Are there people in the church who really believe, in their heart of hearts, that doing a "repeat after me" thing is sufficient for an immediate, complete life change? Or is it something more? Something we don't actually understand, but over the years have consistently whittled down to these three or four sentences that somehow transform a person eternally? I know there's the whole "confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord" in Romans 10 but... I don't think what we're talking about is exactly what Paul had in mind.

JD: When English the word "salvation" comes up in the Old Testament, especially when it's used in the Psalms, it doesn't have the meaning that the New Testament does when it talks about "salvation," and it certainly doesn't mean what evangelicals mean when they use the word. In the OT, it just means, "[I am in physical danger right now and require] rescue [from said danger.]" It's a mistranslation or an imposition to call that eternal salvation. But we've stated elsewhere on the blog that reinterpretations and fresh meanings for older scriptures can be positive, so that's not to say that we can't use the Psalms to talk about a different kind of salvation from what the Psalmist meant.


DM: Right, and there are so many different kind of examples in the New Testament, too, of how salvation happens in people's life. Jesus told Zacchaeus that salvation had come to his house when he just said he was going to be a better person—he hadn't actually done anything yet. Just said he was going to. The criminal on the cross just asked to be remembered, the lame man was brought to Jesus by his friends and lowered through a roof—he technically didn't do anything except have cool friends...there are loads of other examples...it just seems to me that salvation comes in a lot of different ways and means a lot of different things in scripture, so to make up this thing about some kind of prayer happening and then a moment in time when you receive "salvation" seems a little silly (to put it mildly) to me.

Unfortunately, instead of simply accepting that salvation is something mysterious and possibly different for everyone, evangelicalism has created this kind of easy, one-size-fits-all answer, because Modernity had this need to create answers to every question, even if they're wrong. The focus in evangelicalism has been, for decades: get-saved-so-you-don't-go-to-Hell. But if that's not the point, since that doesn't seem to appear anywhere in scripture...if salvation isn't something to be achieved, per se, and doesn't take place in a single moment in time, and its primary purpose is not to save us from an eternity in Hell, then what is it, and how does it happen?


JD: It's a big question. Let's focus for now on shallowness of Christians that Platt is pointing toward, and how that's related to the sinner's prayer. Are there other sources of shallowness in Christianity, besides this notion that Christianity is about trying not to go to hell?


DS: I feel like that's the biggest one. That's almost why some people might say that Catholicism and "Christianity," western, Protestant Christianity, are two different religions. Western Protestantism today seems to be based around that notion of avoiding hell. I think there's all kinds of shallowness, though, there are shallow things Christians say all the time, and I think that's why many people raised in the church are becoming atheists. Do you know that there are people in the church who use Job to comfort people? "Hey guess what, God's just ruining your life to test you, are you going to follow God?" And people are like, "I would rather believe that there is no God and the world is chaotic than believe in a God who would torment me on earth just so I would still love God."

I'm bringing up that example because it's in the nature of what Dave Mantel was saying: there's something that we don't know, so we just insert an answer so we can sleep at night. Well you can't sleep at night, though, when your family members have died and say you then have a terminal illness, you know—when your life starts to look like Job. Before that point, you might say God tests people who say they love God by making their lives suck, but once that happens to you, you might think "I don't believe in a God that does this."

Another example: no one can say what happens after death. We can say what we think, but we can't know. And I was talking to a Christian friend, and he said, "People need direction!" And I said "Are you saying they need answers? Because what's worse, not telling people something that no one knows, or making up an answer to something that no one knows?" As far as life after death, we only have what we believe; we can't direct people to certain answers. I think you can be a Christian and still say that.

JD: For me, the big source of shallowness in Christianity is the failure to articulate really well the other reasons there are to be Christians outside of not going to hell. I got the message growing up that it was also about being free from sin and ceasing sin was part of it, and I think being free from sin is good and is a part of why being Christian is worthwhile. But the thing is, you can stop doing wrong without being a Christian, you can be an atheist who doesn't habitually do wrong things—there's lots of them, I know them.


DM: And there's another point where I feel like, at least for evangelicals, we've really missed the mark... because, what is the Gospel? What is the point of being a Christian? Is it to be able to stop doing bad things? To avoid hell when we die? I don't mean to sound like a broken record here, but if we don't know what the point of all of this stuff is—why we do what we do—then we're just following a morality paradigm and maybe being involved with a social group once or twice a week, you know?


DS: I feel like the only convincing argument for creating a religion out of Jesus' life is the Great Commission, "go and make disciples," and I don't even see that as being a convincing reason to make a religion. But I do think that making disciples is an essential part of the gospel; the book of Acts is full of this, it's a great follow-up to the gospels, because it's just the disciples going and being empowered to make connections with other people in other lands. I think we are meant to connect with each other, and I think that's part of the message of the gospel; you see Jesus breaking down walls and getting judged for it, eating with sinners, going to Zaccheus's house, talking to a woman at the well. That seems to me to be more in the nature of what God wants from us. I don't know if that would be on David Platt's agenda, but to me, that's the thing about the sinner's prayer, it distracts us from the importance of making connections.


JD: I think the gospel is something along the lines of: Jesus came to change human history, in part by teaching us not to exclude people and to love each other and be in community, and also in some mysterious way, by defeating death. I don't know how to define the gospel, and that's embarrassing. The big problem for me is that my definition of the gospel doesn't feel uniquely Christian enough—anyone can come along and say "love each other, and also we'll never really die."


DS: I think that's a pretty good answer though. I've had this conversation with others, atheists and agnostics, who are like "Anyone can be nice!" and I'm like "I know anyone can be nice, because Jesus is for everyone, God is for everyone; everyone can be nice because these things are from God and God wants them for everyone." Which is kind of a cheap answer, an infuriating answer, and it's one way that my theology is kind of cheap and shallow. It's kind of a cop out. But you can't believe in a God who is love, but the only way to experience that love is to say some words properly. What is more ridiculous, that a God has come and given us love, and everyone on the planet experience it and have it whether they know God by name or not, or the other thing, where some white guy from the U.S. comes to you and says "Say this! 'I'm a sinner and I accept Jesus.' You feel it? You feel the love?!"


JD: Any final thoughts?


DS: I agree with David Platt in that this prayer specifically is causing people to not really be Christians but believe that they are Christians. What an actual Christian is, he and I might disagree on, but we agree on that, and I think it's nice that he said it.

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Photo Sources: 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnragai/6999511358/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/powazny/2999422498/

What Is The Bible and What Does It Do?

by Dave Mantel

If you read the title of this post in the voice of Arnold in Kindergarten Cop...then we're starting on the right page.

An ongoing, and seemingly endless, conversation in evangelical circles is: how do we interpret the Bible in light of more and more historical and scientific discovery in this modern age? As a Christian, whether you claim belief in the Bible as 100% without error, or a book of stories outlining a moral code for humanity to live by, or something in the large gap between, there is an ongoing question of why we believe what we believe about the Bible.

Recently, Rob Bell has been writing a series on his blog entitled "What Is The Bible?" It's a great read, whatever your own preconceived answer to that question is, and I really recommend it. It compelled me to examine just what I believe about the Bible, its authorship, divine inspiration, and purpose.

Something I have been curious about for a long time is how devout Jews look at the Old Testament—the Torah, specifically—compared to the evangelical world. The morning I started writing this post, Rachel Held Evans had a Q&A in her "Ask A..." series with Rabbi Rachel Rose. In this post, she answered, in part, some of the questions I was having. When asked ,"How do you interpret the passages where God seems to command things that are immoral?" Rabbi Rose answered,

The classical Jewish answer is that these rules were never intended to be taken literally, and were in fact never followed at all. For instance, in the case of the commandment to stone an unruly child, our sages placed so many conditions and qualifications on that commandment that it could never have been carried out...

In Jewish tradition, we frequently speak in terms of "Written Torah" (the text of the Hebrew Scriptures as they have come down to us) and "Oral Torah" (the ensuing centuries of conversations and interpretations of our sages and rabbis, which are also considered to be holy.) We always read Torah in the context of generations of commentators and interpreters, Rashi, Talmud, Midrash, all the way to new interpretations in the modern age...

She references an excerpt from the Jewish Virtual Library, Rebellious Son, in which the author asserts, in reference to Deuteronomy 21:18–21,

"There is no record of a rebellious son ever having been executed, except for a dictum of R. Jonathan stating that he had once seen such a one and sat on his grave (Sanh. 71a). However, it is an old and probably valid tradition that there never had been, nor ever will be, a rebellious son, and that the law had been pronounced for educational and deterrent purposes only, so that parents be rewarded for bringing their children up properly (ibid.; Tosef. Sanh. 11:6)."

One of the more easy examples, no doubt—stoning the rebellious son. But what about some of the more problematic texts that were enacted? Slavery? Polygamy? What about texts like Jonah or the Exodus that seem to live far from the current reality we know today?

Jonah: known for, among other things, getting vomited out of a fish.

In the series mentioned above, "What Is The Bible?" Bell says with regard to the story of Jonah,

"If you don’t believe it literally happened, that’s fine. Lots of people of faith over the years have read this story as a parable about national forgiveness. They point to many aspects of the surreal nature of the story as simply great storytelling because the author has a larger point, one about the Israelites and the Assyrians and God’s call to be a light to everyone, especially your enemies.

Right on. Well said.

Just one problem. Some deny the swallowed-by-a-fish part not from a literary perspective, but on the basis of those things just don’t happen. Which raises a number of questions: What’s the criteria for the denial? Do we only affirm things that can be proven in a lab? Do we only believe things we have empirical evidence for? Do we believe or not believe something happened based on…whether we believe that things like that happen or not? (That was an awkward sentence. Intentionally.) Can we only affirm things that make sense to us? Are we closed to everything that we can’t explain?

If we reject all miraculous elements of all stories because we have made up our mind ahead of time that such things simply aren’t possible, we run the risk of shrinking the world down to what we can comprehend. And what fun is that?

That said, there are others who say Of course he was swallowed a fish, that’s what the story says happened!

Fine.

Just one problem. It’s possible to affirm the literal fact of a man being swallowed by a fish, making that the crux of the story in such a way that you defend that, believe that, argue about that, and in spending your energies on the defend-the-fish-part miss the point of the story, the point about allowing God’s redeeming love to flow through us with such power and grace that we are able to love and bless even our worst enemies."

The reality is, the Bible was written by human beings. They had agendas, they had stories to tell. They were from ancient times, writing to ancient peoples. Their world was completely different than our own. So what does that mean? It means that the most important questions we can ask when studying the Bible are, "Why is this here?" and "What was the author's intention in writing this this way?" Without beginning with those kinds of questions, it would be easy for us to start stoning our disobedient sons to death in the middle of town. And I, as an occasionally disobedient son, am not a fan of that outcome.

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ramsey.Psalter.1310.jpg
Photo 2: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Lastman_-_Jonah_and_the_Whale_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

My Theological Progress

by Dave Mantel

I remember my first crisis of faith. I was about 11 years old, sitting on my bedroom floor, when I asked my mother, “How do we know this stuff is real?”

I was raised in a pretty conservative household and had a pretty sheltered upbringing. Luckily, when I asked this question, my parents didn’t call for an exorcism or send me to some kind of camp for lost sheep. As I look back, I see how lucky I was. There are really two ways modernist Christians deal with doubt and questions of the faith, one: by reprimanding the doubter and reminding them that all the answers are found in inerrant scripture, or two: encouraging questions because all the answers are found in inerrant scripture. My mother’s response was the latter. She gave me some books that I don’t remember reading—probably something by Lee Strobel—and we called it a day.

I think probably the first time I heard that there was another view of scripture other than the two extremes of “inerrant” and “completely false” was in one of my first college courses at Olivet Nazarene University. We were going over the Nazarene statement of faith, and they read their view of scripture: that it was “inerrant in all things pertaining to salvation.” That caught my attention right away. This was in pretty stark contrast to the belief of my upbringing, even though most of the wording was the same. There was that “inerrant” word again. But the clause was that it was only applicable to things pertaining to salvation. I would come back to that idea many times over the next few years.

As I began to fully embrace college life and adulthood, I began reading some of the more “controversial” literature popular with some of my friends—books like The Irresistible Revolution, Jesus for President, Velvet Elvis, Love Is An Orientation, The Way of a Pilgrim…you get the idea. Not exactly controversial (though I guess they are in some conservative circles). As I started to read these books written by Christians who had worldviews that were so different than the one of my upbringing, I began to have more and more questions about the beliefs that I held.

I won’t bore you with the details, but as I started to ask more questions, I found that many of them didn’t seem to have black and white answers—even in this inerrant scripture I had been pointed to for so many years. It’s not that people couldn’t find answers. There were plenty of answers to the questions I was asking, often accompanied by a slew of references and verses as support. The pattern I began to see, though, was that sometimes there were two, or three, or more, completely different answers for the same questions, using the same inerrant scripture as reference. What was I supposed to do about that? Start verse counting? “OK, well, you have 37 verses to back up your point of view while the other side only has 23, so you win the Bible!”

Even more confusing was the fact that on many of the issues I was having my key conflicts with, I began to discover different whole sects of Christianity that had their own traditions and interpretations of the  issues, some for thousands of years, that differed greatly from my conservative, evangelical upbringing. Yet, they all still claimed Christianity as their religion, and they all claimed that their particular view on these issues is the correct and "orthodox" one.

Why do I bring all of this up; tell you this anecdote of my spiritual adolescence? Because I believe it’s not just my story, but the state of an entire generation of post-evangelical Millennials who have a lot of questions that they’ve been carrying around for a long time, but maybe have no idea what to do with them. Or maybe you’ve just grown weary or bitter from carrying these burdens for so long with nowhere to put them.

At this intersection of the modern/post-modern generations within Christianity, it is important for us to remember that many of the “answers” that have been spoon fed to many of us since birth are relatively new constructs, the idea of the complete inerrancy of scripture, for example.

That’s not to say that we should start throwing our babies out with all of our bath waters (side note: you realize that must have been a thing in order to become a colloquialism like this, right? Think about that.) There are many things that can and should be held to as orthodox within the Christian faith. However, those things might not necessarily be what you think they are—especially if you’re a protestant evangelical in the West. Believe it or not, 100-year-old traditions may seem long to you and your church plant, but compare them with Catholic or Orthodox traditions which are based on literally thousands of years, you hopefully begin to gain a little perspective.

So how do we, the post-modern, post-evangelical, Millennial generation get our stuff together and figure out what’s what? You may have seen this coming:

We need to ask more questions.

Shocker, I know. But this is so important. The modern evangelical old guard, if you will, the Pat Robertsons, the Mark Driscolls, and the John Pipers of the world, they will tell you that questions and doubting are not beneficial to your faith, that doubt will destroy your walk with the Lord and lead you straight to hell. They will tell you to fact check them, until you actually do, and then they will either reprimand you or blow you off. And this is all from a place—an indoctrination—of “We already have all the answers. If you’re asking questions, you are not a good enough Christian.” Shaming the very thing that I believe can transform the Church to be looked at as something more than the current homophobic, bigoted, child molesting, hateful, hypocritical thing we are now.

So start to ask questions. Do your homework. Start to refine your questions into scalpels that can help cut out some of this rotting offal that’s been sitting here for decades. Don’t be afraid of criticism, or Church history, and don’t be afraid of the questions. God is not scared by our little questions. There is nothing we can ask or look in to or seriously contend that God can’t answer. Don’t be afraid of the mystery, the unknowing. Some things are not meant to be answered. Some things don’t even have an answer. We must learn to be OK with that. And we must begin with ourselves.

And finally, don’t be afraid of doubt. Rob Bell says in his new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God,

“For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren’t opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it’s alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren’t opposites; they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.”

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/starfire2k/3631902258/ 
Photo 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Descent_of_the_Modernists,_E._J._Pace,_Christian_Cartoons,_1922.png

Moving Toward Christian Pacifism

Syria's Ethnic/Religious Distribution

by Dave Mantel

A few weeks back, when the U.S. was on the cusp of violent intervention in the Syrian civil war, I was reading these studies about how firmly Americans are against entering into another war. In fact, it's the most anti-war we have ever been as a nation. A Pew Research poll has the statistics at 49%-29% against a war in Syria, which I found quite staggering. I know that our country is pretty tired of war, but to have such a high anti-war percentage in the average population is still pretty shocking to me.
 
I've been a pretty staunch pacifist for a number of years, now. Growing up in a conservative Republican-Christian home, I was inundated with the Just War Theory for most of my adolescence, and so when the war in Iraq started, and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, I believed that it was God's will—that the only way for justice to be brought about was by militaristic methods. Then, in the summer of 2008, I went overseas for two months to Malawi, Africa, on a missions team.

Me, left with guitar, in Malawi

While I was on that trip I did a lot of reading, and a particular verse of scripture I read at the beginning of the summer kind of shaped my whole summer's reading agenda. It came from Isaiah: “He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”

When I read that verse, it began my journey down a road of questions. Important questions. Did war have a place in the Kingdom of God, or was there some greater, more perfect plan that God had in place for his people on “that day?” How do I reconcile a Kingdom in which God seems to desire to end war and a western Church that seems to perpetuate the idea that American military intervention is ordained by that same God? How much of my worldview was shaped by the culture I had been raised in, and was the shaping that had taken place bring me closer to or further from the truth of scripture?

I'll start with the presupposition that when Jesus came, he was the one to give us a clear, unfiltered vision of the Father, and what the will of the Father is for us going forward. Jesus gave us, humanity, interaction with the Father that we had never had before (“If you know me, you know the Father” (John 14:7), “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), etc). If we are to take Jesus' teaching at face value, we find things like “love your neighbor as yourself,” “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “those who live by the sword die by the sword,” “turn the other cheek,” “love your enemies,” and “blessed are the peacemakers.”

Roman gladius, a sword from Jesus' time

Much of the larger ideas of Jesus' teaching are based in these values—that others are more important ourselves, and that we should seek to reconcile all things, just like Jesus will do in The End (Colossians 1:20). The most common New Testament rebuttals to this kind of peace-oriented Jesus come from two isolated verses: Luke 22:36, when Jesus tells his disciples to go and sell their cloaks and buy swords before they enter Jerusalem, and Matthew 10:34, where Jesus says that he hasn't come to bring peace, but a sword. Contextually, the Matthew verse can be dismissed immediately, since it is very clear that Jesus is speaking not of a physical sword, but speaking metaphorically, the sword being a metaphor for spiritual and moral division. The Luke passage, however, presents a little more trouble, because it is not as clear what is actually on Jesus' mind when he tells his disciples to procure these swords. Here is the section in context:

Then Jesus asked them, "When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?""Nothing," they answered. He said to them, "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. It is written: 'And he was numbered with the transgressors'; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment." The disciples said, "See, Lord, here are two swords." "That is enough," he replied. (Luke 22:35-38, NIV)

This passage takes place right before Jesus is about to enter Jerusalem for the passover, right before the Last Supper, and right before he is arrested to be crucified. He quotes a passage that he is about to fulfill from Isaiah about being “numbered with the transgressors,” and then his disciples bring him two swords, to which Jesus replies that those are “enough.” We, the readers, should then be asking, “Enough for what?” Certainly not enough to overthrow the Roman empire like the Zealots were still hoping. Not enough to defend even against the high priest's guards, as we see in the garden of Gethsemane later on. It is also clear that Jesus did not mean for the swords to be physically used, because when Peter does use one (whose idea was it to give Peter one of the two swords, anyway?) to cut off the ear of the High Priest's servant in the garden, Jesus immediately rebukes Peter and undoes the violence done by Peter by healing the servant's ear.

Capture of Christ with the Malchus Episode, Dirk Van Baburen

It is likely that Jesus had his disciples carrying these two swords to help fulfill Isaiah's prophecy about being “numbered with the transgressors.” We know that Jesus was later crucified between two thieves (also read "insurrectionists"), and that political and religious insurrection was what the Pharisees feared the most from Jesus, and why they ultimately arrested and killed him. The fact that Jesus had two of his followers carrying weapons into Jerusalem no doubt expedited the process of the Pharisees in arresting Jesus, fulfilling Isaiah prophecy.

So, when viewed in context, the two biggest New Testament arguments against pacifism fall flat. Jesus' teaching, when taken as a whole, seems to overwhelmingly promote nonviolence, love, and peace over violence and war. For me, the simplest reason for becoming a pacifist was that when I read about and picture the Kingdom of God—the one in the future, after this world has passed away and we are living with a new Heaven and a new Earth—war does not exist there. Violence does not exist there. There is only peace and love toward one another. And not just putting up with one another, either. It's a true peace. That was enough for me.

P.S. The discussion of reconciling the many violent, war-filled Old Testament passages with the nonviolence of Jesus' teaching in the New Testament is a more difficult and much longer conversation than this one, but one worth having. I hope to cover that sometime in the near future as well.

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Photo sources: 
1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Syria_Ethnoreligious_Map.png 
2. Dave Mantel
3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uncrossed_gladius.jpg
4. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dirck_van_Baburen_-_The_Capture_of_Christ_with_the_Malchus_Episode_-_WGA01089.jpg