Parts of the Bible Are Missing. What Does that Mean for Christians?

Third in a series of posts on Biblical interpretation. Read the previous entry in the series, or start at the beginning.

Detail of the War Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wikimedia

It's Easter, and we're in Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary's three-year cycle: the year of Mark. This means that this week’s gospel reading is the resurrection story in the gospel of Mark—or, as much as we have of that story, anyway. Let me explain:

The ending of Mark's gospel is very abrupt: Jesus' friends find his tomb empty, a man in white tells them Jesus is raised from the dead, and they run away frightened without telling anyone what they saw:

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:1-8, NRSV)

Many Bible scholars and literary critics think that the abruptness, the darkness, and the ambiguity of this ending are intentional. Here's Anglican priest and author John Drury on the subject, in The Literary Guide to the Bible (pg 410): "The end of Mark's story is outside his text; hence one of its most extraordinary features, the abruptness of the ending, which is neither happy nor resolved...[this] incomplete ending, impressively fortissimo, [is] poised toward an ending—the ending—which is beyond the text."

"The Empty Tomb," Robert Smirke. Wikimedia

But there's strong reasons to believe that Mark wrote a longer ending, and it is now lost.

+   +   +

Mark was probably the first gospel of the four in the New Testament to have been written. It's the shortest of the gospels, and written in the simplest language. But that doesn't mean it's a simple book: Mark is recognized by Bible scholars and literary critics alike as a rich, complex piece of literature. In particular, Mark does a very good job of laying out moments of foreshadowing or prediction early in the book and then following up with them by the end.¹ Some examples:

• 1:7 - someone will come who is “more powerful” than John the Baptist (see 1:21-28)
• 1:11 - a voice from heaven declares that Jesus is God’s beloved Son (comes back in the transfiguration, 9:7; and through the centurion at the crucifixion, 15:39)
• 1:14 - “after John was arrested” (arrest is narrated at 6:14-27)
• 2:20 - “the bridegroom will be taken away” (see the Passion narrative, 14:43-16:3)
• 3:6 - Pharisees and Herodians plot to destroy Jesus (see 8:15, 12:13)
• 14:17-21 - Jesus foretells his betrayal by Judas (see 14:10-11, 14:43-50)
• 14:26-31 - Jesus foretells the disciples’ desertion and Peter’s denial (see 14:50-52, 66-72)²

Jesus also predicts his coming death at the hands of the authorities (8:31, 9:31, 10:32-33), but each time he does so, he includes his resurrection in the prediction. And it's pretty strange that Mark doesn't actually deliver on the resurrection bit: we have an announcement at the tomb but no delivery—we never see Jesus actually show up and make his prediction a fact. 

There are a few other missing items that look like they would have been in Mark's original ending. John predicts that the one who will come after him will "baptize you with the Holy Spirit" (1:8), which never happens. Jesus tells the disciples at the Last Supper that he won't drink wine again, until he drinks it in the kingdom of God (that is, after his resurrection); this doesn't take place. And there is the man-in-white's own direction to tell the disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee, with no actual follow-up in Galilee. 

NT Wright points out many other such clues in the Mark chapter of The Resurrection of the Son of God,³ but in particular, it's worth paying attention to his point that Mark would have originally been written on a scroll, rather than a codex.⁴  Things written on scrolls often lose their beginnings and/or endings, as those parts wear out or get damaged much easier than the middle of the scroll.

So we have good reason to believe we are missing something at the end of Mark: an appearance of Jesus to his disciples in Galilee, where, perhaps, he drinks some wine with them,  and baptizes them with the Holy Spirit, and (if Wright is correct in his other proposals), where he also commissions the disciples to go out into the world to tell the good news, and explicitly forgives Peter for denying he knew Jesus when Jesus was on trial. (All of this sounds a lot like the endings of the other gospels [see, e.g., Jesus eating to show he’s not a ghost in Luke 24:41-43, imparting the Holy Spirit in John 20:22, commissioning the disciples in Matthew 26:16-20, and Jesus forgiving Peter in John 21:15-19], a compelling point in its favor—after all, Mark was source material for at least two of them.)⁵

+   +   +

Mark isn't the only place where we're missing the authors' original words in our Bibles. At least two other books, Job and Samuel, bear signs of poor textual transmission down through the years.⁶

The issues with Samuel are mostly issues of poor copying by scribes, so the text is scrambled and incomprehensible in a number of places, rather than missing obvious chunks. One notable counter-example: Saul's kingship is introduced in 1 Samuel 13:1 as "Saul was . . . years old when he began to reign; and he reigned . . . and two years over Israel" (NRSV)—the years of Saul's age and length of reign have somehow gone missing in that sentence.

Samuel fragment from a Dead Sea Scroll. BAR

The case of Job is even clearer: not only are many portions badly scrambled textually, there is at least one clear—and large—textual gap in chapters 26 and 27.⁷

Other books pose similar problems to modern interpreters: Isaiah, for example, is full of hapax legomena, or terms that occur only in that book, and whose translations can only be guessed from context.

+   +   +

All this textual uncertainty generates serious questions for the interpreter who reads the Bible as an infallible text. For example:

• Were the now-missing portions infallible?
• Were they "deleted" by God in some way, and if so, why were they there in the first place?
• What if a missing word or sentence completely reversed the meaning of a key passage—which meaning is infallibly true, the original meaning, or the meaning without the missing portion?
• What if a hapax legomenon means something completely different from its usual interpretation? What if it's crucial to the meaning of the text? 
• If God is transmitting infallible truths to humans through the medium of the Bible, why is God not also ensuring the accurate and complete transmission of Biblical texts?

I don't think these questions are checkmates for scriptural infallibility by any means. I'm sure answers could be had with enough thought and work.

The point is, rather, that these are irrelevant questions to ask about the Bible. They would be great questions to ask, for example, if there were missing portions of the Book of Mormon, or the Qu'ran, which are scriptures that adherents believe God communicated to humans directly through a single intermediary (Joseph Smith and Mohammed, respectively).⁸ The Qu'ran in particular holds an extremely crucial place in Islam, as it is the connecting point between God and humans—the only uncorrupted divine revelation to people—so questions about its transmission and fallibility would be highly relevant; if transmission has not occurred accurately, the link between God and humans might be broken.

But Christians are not united with God through the Bible. We are not baptized into the Bible. Christianity is older than the Bible—there were Christians long before there was a New Testament. Most Christians throughout history have not read the Bible, since neither Bibles nor literacy were common before the printing press, and the Bible was not widely translated into most Christians' native languages before the Protestant Revolution.

"Harrowing of Hades," fresco in the Chora Church, Istanbul. Wikimedia

Jesus is the center of Christian faith. It is Jesus who came to earth to show us the way back to God, not the Bible. Jesus is infallible; the Bible is not. Errors or gaps in transmission of the Bible do not matter. The Bible is good and useful and important, but it is not Jesus. Jesus is the lens of scripture; not vice versa. The Bible tells us good and important things about Jesus, but these are also communicated to us through the traditions of the church—which is how they were first communicated, and will continue to be communicated should the church somehow ever lose the Bible.

---

1. There are some instances where Mark alludes to future events that do not then take place within the text, but these are distant-future events, like the death of James and John (10:35-40) and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (13:1-26).^↩
2. I lifted these examples pretty much directly from The Gospel according to Mark: Literary Features & Thematic Emphases, by Felix Just, S.J., Ph.D.^↩
3. I really recommend reading his whole argument, which is where I got most of my ideas for the "missing ending of Mark" portion of this post; most notably, he thinks Peter is being set up for a redemption after he denies Jesus, and the disciples will get a commission to spread the good news. Check out his argument on Google Books for free right here; once you've clicked on the link, click on the pull-down navigation menu on the top right (it should say "Front Cover"), and scroll down to "Mark," where the second section (after the introduction to the chapter) is all about the missing ending of Mark. It's great stuff.^↩
4. That is, on a single long sheet of material rolled up (a scroll), rather than a bunch of single sheets bound together (a codex, aka A BOOK).^↩
5. Interestingly, the lack of an ending in Mark seems to have prompted at least two ancient readers to create their own endings. The shorter ending is basically "the women told the disciples what they'd seen, and then later Jesus sent the disciples into the world." The longer ending is pretty clearly a mashup of other New Testament stories: first the appearance to Mary Magdalene from John (Mark 16:9-11), then Luke's road to Emmaus story (Mark 16:11-12), then Jesus' appearance to the disciples in John (Mark 16:14-16), then what looks like a description of some of the disciples' activities in the book of Acts, and finally Jesus' ascension from Luke (Mark 16:19-20).^↩
6. Samuel probably got transmitted poorly because most of the material in the book also appears in the book of Chronicles, which seems to have been more popular in ancient times, perhaps because it makes King David, (the founder of the royal dynasty) look like less of a dick (to name just one example: in Samuel, he kills a guy and takes his wife, and he doesn't do that in Chronicles). Since there were fewer copies floating around, it was harder to cross-check for errors, and so problems that entered the manuscript tradition tended to stay there. (Remember: this is just dudes copying from one sheet onto another with their eyes and hands, so errors tend to creep in gradually over time, and tend to stay in once they're there.) Job is harder to pin down—it may also have been unpopular during ancient times for its radically dissenting theology of the origins and nature of evil, or it might just have been that a very early copy was damaged, and everything we have after that was copied from the damaged edition.^↩
7. The book of Job has a very clear structure: Job speaks for a set length of time (about how miserable he is, and his innocence of any crime or sin), and then each of his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, responds at roughly equal length (about how Job is surely wrong); this pattern repeats three times. Except the last time, Zophar's speech is cut off right at the beginning, and what few words he does say are actually assigned to Job in the texts we have, even though it's clear from context that Zohar is speaking. Given the immense skill of the author of Job (widely agreed to be some of the very finest Biblical poetry, even in spite of its sometimes very garbled state and lexically difficulty), it's virtually certain that this is a transmission problem and not the author's original intent.^↩
8. Technically, through an angel and a prophet (Moroni/Joseph Smith and Gabriel/Mohammed).^↩

Is There A Christian Duty To Vote?

Today is Election Day in America. On Sunday, my pastor encouraged the congregation to vote. Though he stopped short of calling voting a "Christian duty," it's a phrase I've heard before. And I wondered: Does such a duty exist?

As a Weslyan by background, I try to do theology by focusing on Wesley's elements of Tradition, Experience, Reason, and Scripture.

Church Tradition is perhaps the least helpful in this regard, as most of the history of the church has existed outside of democratic forms of government. Thus, as far as I'm aware, there has been little in the way of accepted tradition on the matter of participation in democracy. More broadly speaking, much church tradition has focused on the God-givenness of rulers (usually kings), and Christian participation in the government of states has been ongoing in one form or another since Constantine. So it seems that church tradition can at least be said not to forbid voting outright.

Experience is a bit more helpful, though only just. My personal experience is that voting has in no way harmed my ability to act in the world as a Christian. What's more, voting and other acts of participation in democracy have enriched my faith life, as it has given me an opportunity to act on behalf of others in the way that Jesus taught. Taking a wider view, we can see that, while the experience of Christians with democracy has been a mixed bag, direct participation in the democratic process has on occasion been the means for Christians to end great social injustices, American slavery being among the more noteworthy. Experience speaks in favor of voting.

Reason might point out that, in most cases, your vote is effectively worthless. In itself, it is highly unlikely to effect change one way or another. On the other hand, it can't do much harm, either. At worst, then, it is worthless, and at best, it's an opportunity to do some good in the world, to advocate for others, to at least attempt to enact justice. Reason tilts toward voting.

Scripture was written without contact with democratic forms of government, and so can only speak indirectly to this issue. As Christians, our focus in reading scripture must always be Christ. While Jesus was certainly a non-voter, one might point out that he was actively engaged with the governments of his own day in a couple key ways. Notably, he was against the idea of a violent revolution to overthrow the ruling power of his day, Rome, even going so far as to endorse paying its taxes. (He was rightly concerned that it would lead to the destruction of his country.) So at any rate, an explicitly anti-government stance is not the simplest reading, though it has its proponents. When it came to local rulers and authority figures, Jesus engaged in direct confrontation and even condemnation when it was called for. As one of our tools for communicating with those in power, voting is an appropriate, though modest, way for the Christian to imitate Christ in this regard.

+   +   +

So there are plentiful reasons for Christians to vote, and few if any not to. But it a duty?

Perhaps not: after all, it's not a commandment straight from Jesus' lips, or carved in stone on Mount Sinai: Thou shalt vote.

On the other hand, voting is certainly a means of carrying out the commandments. It is a small, indirect, but important way to love one's neighbor, and even to "do for the least of these," if we vote for candidates whose policies will shelter, feed, clothe, and take care of the needy.

So, though it is not a central pillar of the faith, I believe there is such a thing as a Christian duty to vote. And regardless of whether that duty is real, I'll be voting today, as an American, as a Christian, and I invite you, dear reader, to join me.

The Queen James Version - Deliberate Mistranslation and a Big, Fabulous Bible

So big. So fabulous. Source

A few days ago, a Facebook friend tagged me in a link he'd posted about the Queen James Bible (hereafter, "the QJV," for Queen James Version), which, in the words of its editors, "seeks to resolve interpretive ambiguity in the Bible as it pertains to homosexuality." I'd never heard of it, so I clicked on the link and read about it. I ended up having more to say than would fit easily into a Facebook comment, so I decided to talk about the QJV in depth here instead.

Before I say anything else, let me state up front that I am an LGBTQ-affirming Christian. I believe that minority sexualities and gender identities are a blessed part of God's good and ordered creation, and they should be affirmed and celebrated in God's church. (I've talked about some of the reasons for this here.) At the same time, I am a thoroughly orthodox Christian: I profess the universal creeds of the church on a weekly basis with profound faith in the truth of what I am saying.* I believe that church teaching should be grounded in a faithful reading of scripture, guided also by reason, tradition, and experience.

+   +   + 

Now that you know my biases, dear reader, let's dig into the QJV.

The QJV is actually just a King James Bible with alterations made to the eight Bible verses that are most commonly used to condemn homosexuals. (The name "Queen James" is an allusion to the fact that King James, the person who commissioned the King James Bible, is thought by some historians to have been gay or bisexual.) It's not a new Bible translation, but an old one that's been altered to serve a particular purpose. In this, it's unlike just about any Bible I'm familiar with, although Bibliotheca, which takes the American Standard Version and updates some of the language for easier comprehension, seems like a distant cousin.

So the QJV is a weird Bible, more like a publicity stunt or a piece of post-modern art than a traditional Bible edition. It's not clear to me that there's much demand for a "big, fabulous," but very slightly modified KJV with a big rainbow cross on the cover. While the KJV is probably the most beautiful, and certainly most influential, English Bible translation, it's also among the least accurate in its renderings of the original texts.** This makes it an odd choice for making the point that an accurate understanding of the original texts shows that they make no direct reference to homosexuality as we think of it today.

As at least one reviewer has pointed out, if you really want a QJV, you can save money by modifying your own KJV: just scratch out the relevant verses and insert the edits proposed on the QJV website.

+   +   +

What are the merits of the edits themselves? Some are simply rendering individual words differently than the KJV does, for what I see as legitimate reasons, but several of them are what I would call deliberate mistranslations. This is worth discussing in some depth.

When I say "deliberate mistranslation," what I mean is that the translators have intentionally rendered the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek original in English with words that do not accurately convey the strict sense of the original.† So this category includes, for example, the rendering of the Greek splagchnon as "heart" rather than "bowels" or "intestines," because the heart is the metaphorical seat of the emotions in English and the bowels are not; it includes the rendering of Hebrew zera' as "offspring" instead of "seed," because English speakers rarely refer to their children as their seed. It also includes instances where translators add words that are not in the text in order to clarify what they think the text is saying; for example, the NIV adds "the help of" to clarify that Eve is not claiming to have gotten pregnant by the Lord in Genesis 4:1.‡

Pictured: Eve and her kids.
Not pictured: Eve getting jiggy with the Lord.

Source

In this sense, nearly every English translation of the Bible is going to include some deliberate mistranslations. Looser translations that strive to achieve easy readability in English (the New Living Translation and especially The Message come to mind) are going to do this more than translations that strive to render the exact sense of the original language as strictly as possible (Young's Literal Translation or the New American Standard Bible, for example). The KJV is somewhere between; it tends to render individual words fairly literally, but often adds words for clarity. (It's worth mentioning that most printings of the KJV render added words in italics, which is a cool feature if you're trying to suss out what precisely the underlying text says, and annoying feature if you're trying to read the book out loud without sounding crazy).

Deliberate mistranslation is fine; what's important is that translators acknowledge that they are doing it and point it out when possible, so that readers can see it and investigate for themselves whether the text actually means something different. (An example of extreme deliberate mistranslation done well: The Inclusive Bible, which goes out of its way to interpret the Bible in non-sexist terms, including a refusal to use male pronouns for God. The translators lay out in detail what they're doing and make a good case for why it's worthwhile.) As far as I'm concerned, the QJV's editors are in the clear, since they're completely up front about what they're doing and include detailed explanations of each of their edits on the website. What I actually find more problematic is when translators make claims of high accuracy and then obscure their deliberate mistranslations and the ideology behind them. This is a particular problem with the NIV, for example; I've also discussed it with regard to the ESV. 

The deliberate mistranslations in the QJV are mostly added words; for example, the editors render Leviticus 20:13 with the addition "in the house of Molech" to indicate that they think the verse is about temple prostitution rather than consensual relationships. Romans 1:26-27 gets some more extensive additions and changes, but for essentially the same reason: this text is about paganism rather than homosexuality, the editors believe. The editors change "know" (in the sexual sense) in Genesis 19:5 to "rape and humiliate" to clarify that Sodom is condemned for the sin of not being hospitable to strangers, rather than for being a big ol' pile of gay (as tradition would have it).

But Lot's wife looked back at the big ol' burning pile of gay, and lo, she became a pillar of salt. Source

An exception to the rule is Jude 1:7, which does not add words, but changes "they went after strange flesh" to "they went after nonhuman flesh" to clarify that the sin of Sodom involves trying to rape angels, rather than dudes having sex with dudes. While these are not literal renderings of the exact wording of the original texts, they render interpretations of the texts that are widely, though not universally, accepted in Bible scholarship. Again, since the editors are up front about doing this, I don't see a particular problem.

The rest of the edits simply re-translate the individual Greek words arsenokenotai and malakoi, which are often rendered as if they referred to consensual gay sex between adults, though it is far from clear that that is the case for either. (The former, which means something like "male beds" or "male bedders," appears to have been coined by Paul, and it's unknown what exactly it refers to; the latter means, literally, "soft," and Paul uses it in a way that his contemporaries don't, so again, we're in the dark about what exactly it means.) I think the changes the editors make in translating these word are adequate, though they're not what I would have chosen. These edits are not deliberate mistranslations at all, but simply different interpretations of the exact meaning of the underlying word.

+++

So, is the QJV worth buying? Certainly not, except to prove a point, or if your church has some really specific and slightly bizarre liturgical needs. Do I have a problem with what its editors are doing? Certainly not, though I wouldn't personally have made all the changes they did.

What's important when considering the QJV is acknowledging the continuity between the QJV and other Bible translations. "Every translation is a betrayal" is a cliche among translators, but it's true: no translator can faithfully, completely render a text in another language. There will always be wordplay, connotation, allusions, and other elements that get lost in the new language, and the text in the new language will tend to generate (however unintentionally) its own wordplay, connotations, and allusions. In addition to this, every translator has some kind of agenda: at the very least, they must have some answer to the question, Why do we need (another) translation? The fact is that the QJV's editors have found an answer to that question, one that no one else came up with, and however odd its actual implementation, their answer is worth pondering.

---

*Note that in declaring myself an orthodox Christian, I make a distinction between affirming the dogmas of the church and the doctrines of the church(es). The dogmas of the church are the ideas that the whole church has, at some point, come together and agreed upon in a church council, such as the Council of Nicea. These ideas are affirmed in the creeds, like the Nicene Creed; they're things like the virgin birth of Jesus, his death and resurrection, God's creation of the world, and so forth. Human sexuality and gender identity are not topics that the whole church has ever come to an agreement on in a churchwide council, and given the fractured state of modern Christianity, it is unlikely that such a council will be convened any time soon. While many church denominations have different doctrines regarding human sexuality and gender identity, none of them has been affirmed by the whole church, and none can be a measure of Christian orthodoxy. I've written at length on the subject of who can and cannot be considered a Christian in an essay called The Church Is Bigger Than You Want It To Be.
**Not primarily because of what I'm calling "deliberate mistranslation," but because the 17th-century translators did not have a completely firm grasp of Hebrew, and they didn't have access to the vast library of manuscripts of the texts that modern archaeology has provided us with.
†Deliberate mistranslation, then, is related closely to what Robert Alter calls the "heresy of translation by explanation," which I've discussed at some length here. Alter's category is essentially a subset of the larger category of deliberate mistranslation.
‡The NIV reads “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” Young’s Literal Translation more accurately renders this, “I have gotten a man by Jehovah.”

Church Shopping

Source 1, Source 2*

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realise that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that "suits" him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. The reasons are obvious...the search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where the Enemy [God] wants him to be a pupil.

What He [God] wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise—does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going. (You see how grovelling, how unspiritual, how irredeemably vulgar He is!) This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper. So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighbouring churches as soon as possible. Your record up to date has not given us much satisfaction.

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter XVI, emphasis added

Like many Christians of the last several generations, I was influenced heavily by the thinking of CS Lewis growing up. My dad read The Chronicles of Narnia to me and my sisters when we were in elementary school, and after it dawned on me that Aslan was Jesus I started looking for other Lewis books to learn from.

The earliest one I found was The Screwtape Letters, which I read over and over again as a nighttime devotional. It continues to prompt me to ponder from time to time, though I haven't read it in years and realized recently that my childhood copy is no longer in my library.

The Screwtape Letters takes the form of a series of letters from a mentor demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood, an apprentice demon in charge of making sure a certain Englishman's soul will be damned rather than saved. In writing the book this way, Lewis creates a sort of theological treatise in reverse, one which must be read for the exact opposite of its surface sense in order to serve its intended purpose. As a teenager I found this to be irresistibly clever, and I have not ceased to find it charming in the years since.

In my teen years, I learned from The Screwtape Letters a list of the pitfalls available to Christians. I had only to notice my fellow Christians doing something heartily recommended by Screwtape, after all, and it was clear that it was a practice worth avoiding and, where practical, criticizing.

Few Christian practices were more obviously problematic to my teenage self than "church shopping," which is what it sounds like: going from church to church until you find one that suits you. In Letter XVI, Screwtape talks at length about the usefulness (read: danger) of church shopping; he highly recommends sending one's human round from place to place till they become "a taster or connoisseur of churches." The point of church, I reasoned, was not to feel comfortable or to demonstrate one's tastes, but to learn, to worship, and to be part of the body of Christ. I was flabbergasted that adults found it acceptable to be choosy about church. It was astonishing to me that people within my own denomination would drive past my parents' church on their way to one with a bigger scouting program, better music, or whatever.

I was a teenager, so it was easy to judge and difficult to empathize. It would only be a few short years, however, before I would be taking a train past a dozen churches in my own denomination (and hundreds in others) in order to keep going to my church from high school. This wasn't church shopping so much as staying where I was comfortable, but I still felt guilty, as it was, after all, a step away from "going to church where it makes sense" toward "going to church where I feel personally at home and comfortable."

David Shay and I have debated the question behind all this anxiety and hand-wringing a few times. "What," we've asked each other, "are the right reasons to go to a specific church?" For a while, he was feeling uncomfortable and unhappy at his church. He wanted to leave and go somewhere where he could be happy, but was happiness a legitimate reason to change churches? Meanwhile, I'd moved across town and was now an hour away from a church I originally joined because it was close to home. But I was a choir member and a Sunday school teacher there now! Was high participation in a particular church's life reason enough not to change churches (to somewhere that might need me more—or that simply wasn't as silly to get to)?

We didn't know. In the end, we both did what we thought made sense after prayer, reflection, and consultation with friends and mentors.

+   +   + 

I got married recently, and my wife and I moved to a new place to start our new life together. We are church shopping, heading to church after church, Sunday after Sunday, to find one that suits us. Each time we do, CS Lewis's warning via Screwtape's Letter XVI flashes through my brain: Don't be a "taster" or "connoisseur" of churches. Just pick one already and stick with it! And yet instead of heeding this warning, I hem and haw through the service, tabulating which elements of the service I do and don't like, evaluating what social opportunities are available, gauging whether the music or the architecture fits my taste.

Being a teenager is incredibly challenging in many ways, but a few things are easier than they are in young adulthood. I miss the self-righteous feeling of knowing I would never stoop to church shopping and that I could comfortably judge anyone who did.

+   +   + 

It takes only the eyes to see it to notice that American Christians are nothing like as radical as the men and women who founded our religion two millennia ago. They wandered from place to place, calling society to repentance, renewal, and change. We are sedentary, suspicious of change, and resistant to calls for radical action. My biggest worry in all this is that I'm simply not radical enough to truly follow Christ. If I were as radical as Christ was, as radical as Paul or Peter, I would just go down to the nearest church and do church there. Never mind doctrinal nitpicking, never mind the music; we're all the body of Christ, after all, so I'd just go be part of the body!

Over against this worry, though, I have learned to take some comfort in the idea (and perhaps, just perhaps, it is God who comforts me with it) that, in seeking and finding churches where I feel happy, at home, alive and nourished, that I will be preparing myself to be radical in other ways: radical in faith, radical in joy, radical in hope, and above all, radical in love. At all events, this is my prayer.

---

*Behold the magnificence of my photoshop skills.

The Church Is Bigger Than You Want It To Be

by James Davisson

Once when I was in college, a friend of mine made some disparaging remarks about Christians. I don't remember what he was objecting to—people who bomb abortion clinics or whatever, some extreme thing—and I helpfully pointed out that people who did that sort of thing aren't really Christians. "That's just the 'no true Scotsman' defense," he retorted.

I had nothing to say to that, mostly because I'd never heard the phrase "no true Scotsman." I think it's a phrase Christians would do well to remember.

First, an explanation: "no true Scotsman" is a logical fallacy that gets used sometimes when people argue. Person A states a generalization ("No Scotsman hates haggis!"), Person B finds a counterexample ("I'm a Scotsman and I hate haggis!") and Person A excludes that example with hand waving ("Well, no true Scotsman hates haggis!") without referring to any external, objective rule.

I definitely used this flawed defense in my argument with my friend. No one had ever told me I couldn't.

+   +   +

Christians are quite fond of dismissing each other as "not really Christian" when they disagree with each other's actions or beliefs. Three examples, running across a spectrum of beliefs and circumstances:

Rebels in northern CAR. Source.

1. As you may know, there is currently an ongoing crisis of horrific violence in the Central African Republic. In a recent article, local Catholic priests were described providing shelter for Muslims fleeing the people who would murder them, Christian militias known as "anti-balaka." In the article, one priest is quoted as saying, understandably, "the anti-Balaka are not Christians." 



2. Christian charity World Vision recently announced that, in view of the fact that many church denominations have become open and affirming towards LGBTQ persons, it would begin hiring people in same-sex marriages on its staff. When thousands of people decided to stop donating on the grounds that they could no longer consider World Vision a truly Christian organization, World Vision reversed its decision. Other Christians subsequently pointed out that refusing to hire gay people is, to their minds, not really Christian. 





Not Phelps, but one of his cronies. Source.

3. Notorious bigot Fred Phelps recently died. While Christians have had much to say about that fact, few are standing up and claiming that he was a Christian just like them. Phelps was, in fact, a pastor, who preached weekly from the same Bible as all Christians, from his church in Westboro, Kansas.

As far as the world is concerned, these people are Christians. They call themselves Christians, they go to church, they talk about Jesus, they read the Bible—these are the things Christians do. They are Christians. Our internal disputes about what a Christian really is—like, "someone who is for/against gay marriage," "someone who is pro-life/pro-choice," "someone who is patriotic/anti-war," "someone who is not a complete asshat"—are immaterial to outsiders, and what's more, they typically have little or nothing to do with the central tenets of the church that formally define the core of the Christian faith.*

Refusing the label "Christian" to people we disagree with—even when that disagreement is passionate and seems vital—is a crutch. It is an excuse to dismiss someone. And it is not convincing; to an outsider, it sounds like the old joke that the worst player on your team is actually the best player for the other team—it's funny, but few people are likely to take you at your word.

Dismissing others as "not really Christian" allows Christians to free themselves from blame for their actions and to make no effort to engage, correct, or counteract fellow Christians who do wrong. If people call themselves Christians, it is up to their fellow Christians to point out when they are not imitating Christ, and to actively oppose them when they do so. We neglect this duty when we simply reject them as Christians.

Conversely, we also risk missing possibly valid points of view, ideas that bear considering, when we dismiss others as "not really Christian." It's a lot easier to ignore fellow Christians if we simply refuse to consider them Christians at all.

+   +   +

Let me be clear: I am not saying anything about whether anyone in the list above is following the example of Christ. Several of them very plainly are not, to my mind. I am also making no claims about the nature, or reality, of the personal faith of those involved, or whether any of them are saved.

What I am saying instead is that, as Christians, anyone who confesses the central tenets of the faith, and claims the label "Christian," is our responsibility. To borrow an ecclesiastical term, all such persons are part of the "church visible"—the institution of the church and the body of believers on earth. Whether they are recognized by God as part of the "church invisible"—the "true" church of God (the true Scotsmen?) is simply unknown to any living person, and we therefore have no way to judge and should not try.**

In other words, it is not up to us sort the wheat from the tares ourselves. Let us instead focus on planting as many good seeds as possible.

---

*Human sexuality, the dignity of human life, and issues surrounding force and violence are all important matters, but you will not find any of them in the creeds set out by the early church councils, which formally define the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. The ideas inside these creeds are the dogmas of the faith; stepping outside of them is heresy. Important topics not addressed in the creeds are matters of doctrine; different denominations disagree on doctrines; all are still Christian so long as they do not stray from the central dogmas. Things outside of the central dogmas but permitted by the church are sometimes called adiaphora, "things not essential" or "matters of indifference." I like this word and don't get to use it very often.
**I note here that the church invisible is almost certainly not a smaller circle within the church visible; rather, the church visible is a circle in a Venn diagram that overlaps with the church invisible. In other words, there are undoubtedly people who do not profess Christianity yet nevertheless are members of the church, doing God's work in the world.