How Jesus Saved the World, Part 2

Continued from Part 1

By arresting, torturing, and killing Jesus, the authorities thought that they were securing well being and peace again in their society by means of the tried and true method of a single-victim scapegoat. Everyone’s thirst for violence will be satisfied and we can get on with the business of everyday life.

Once they decided on this violence, they were all unified. Everyone’s anger and frustration and hatred converged on a single victim. If we don’t understand this process we will just be baffled by the bizarre unity achieved in John 18–19.  The escalation of the rivalries and the advent of violence always witness the strangest about-faces and the most unexpected regroupings: Pharisees and Herodians; Zealots and Sadducees.  The bodyguards of the High Priests and the Roman Cohort garrisoned in Jerusalem. Judas and Peter. Caiaphas, Annas, and Pilate. Religious leaders cooperated with political.  Barrabas was accepted by the Jews.  Jews and Romans learned to work together! “Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other” (Luke 23:12).

We have a united kingdom—one society, one kingdom, a kingdom of this world unified in their hatred and violence. They all conspire together against the Lord and his anointed (Psalm 2).

And here is Jesus, the innocent victim, the scapegoat. “My kingdom is not of this world, Governor Pilate.”

Continue reading on the Trinity House blog.

Some Thoughts on Status & Position in the Gospels

I've preached through all four Gospels.  It took me 16 years of morning sermons to go through them all paragraph by paragraph.  After finishing them I want to go back and do it again.  One of the reasons is that I now have a better grasp on them all.  There's a great deal I could say about that. But what I want to call attention to in this post is the importance of reading the Gospels in the context of the early, Apostolic church.

I am convinced of the early church "Augustinian" view of the order the Gospels.  The first Gospel to be written was Matthew's, then Mark's, then Luke's, then John's.  The canonical order is the order in which they were composed.  In fact, I'm pretty radical.  I believe Matthew was written within a year or so of the church's formation in Acts 2.  The apostles needed a "book" to ground what they were teaching on the life and words of Jesus.  Mark was written about a decade later and reflects the intense persecution the church was experiencing at the hands of the Jewish leaders.  That was already going on at the time of Matthew's Gospel, but it had increased in the 40's.  Luke, of course, was written under the supervision of Paul and addresses the church's situation in the wider world, especially the inclusion of the Gentiles.  John penned his Gospel in the late 60's when the old world was about to be deconstructed with the judgment against Israel and the destruction of the Temple.

During this time of transition (AD 30–70) the disciples of Jesus were in a precarious position.  Having no status and position in the old world of Judaism, the challenge was to trust Jesus' promises that the church would one day be exalted and be at the center of a new civilization (= the Kingdom of God).

Letting it Settle in

So Barack Obama won.  He won pretty handily if you count the electoral votes (303-206).  The popular vote was a little closer (61 to 58 million), and some of the contested State votes that gave him the electoral advantage were very close.  Even so, take a moment to compare this to the 2008 election.   Back then Obama got almost 70 million votes and McCain about 60 million.  11 million less people voted this time around.  And what is a more surprising, Romney got 2 million less votes than McCain did back in 2008.

Okay. So three days after the election, what do I think about all of this?  First, whatever the numbers may be, I will be amazed if President Obama is able to do much of anything this term.  He's not a leader.  He's a campaigner.  He's been campaigning for the last 5 years.  He's got professionals that advise him well.  He knows what people want.  He's got a knack for appealing to certain kinds of people, which as this election has shown, turns out to be the majority of the voting public.  But he hasn't done anything in the past four years worthy of the name "leadership."  He's "led from behind" on every issue, even the big ones like the stimulus and Obama care.  He's not a leader.  He's a campaigner.

Whom Should We Thank?

Rodney Stark comes out swinging right from the bell in "The Victory of Reason," his fiercely polemical account of the rise of capitalism. Stark, the author of "The Rise of Christianity" and "One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism," is sick and tired of reading that religion impeded scientific progress and stunted human freedom. To those who say that capitalism and democracy developed only after secular-minded thinkers turned the light of reason on the obscurantism of the Dark Ages, he has a one-word answer: nonsense.

 "The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians," he argues in this provocative, exasperating and occasionally baffling exercise in revisionism. Capitalism, and the scientific revolution that powered it, did not emerge in spite of religion but because of it.

Read the rest of the NYT article here.

More Cool Stuff on Christendom

I'm back. Fixed my computer problems. Turned out they were all my fault. I hate reading manuals and "read first" documents. My MO with software upgrades is to click first and ask questions later. Sometimes that causes problems. Sometimes. But everything is fine now. And Leopard is really a quite a snappy operating system upgrade.

But back to the discussion about Christendom.

Someone challenged us with this question: if one had the option of living in a Christian culture that was experiencing a temporary setback with all the attendant problems and another culture that was dominated by Islam, what would you want for your wife and children? Only an insane person in the USA would choose to live in an Islamic state (unless, of course, one is going there to work for Christianization and change). That led to these comments by Rich Bledsoe:

To once again quote the Famous Father Herman, "Many Hindus are happy children, but Moslems are never happy, no matter where they are." Father Herman is from the very southern tip of India, and according to him, his family have been Christian since the days of Thomas the Apostle. He also says that "Allah is Lucifer." Strong language from a man who, as far as I can see, knows more about the workings of Satan than any other soul in my acquaintance.

I can still remember that before my trip to India, I had the very distinct opinion that surely it would be India that would be the
demon possessed nation, being essentially Hindu, and a nation that worshipped what must be demons (snakes, trees, animals, the sun, anything anywhere) and that the Islamic nations at least had a portion of the truth being monotheistic and a people that shared something of our Bible.

Alas, in practice, I was all backwards. India is a nation that is a feast to the senses, the streets filled with the world's most beautiful women dressed saris of every color imaginable. "Many Hindus are happy children..." something I heard Father Herman say long after I was back from India, but exactly true to my experience.

Then, we visited Pakistan to visit friends who were working for the Agha Khan in developing 200 schools for girls in that nation. The husband was an old church friend of ours and grew up in Pakistan, an MK of Pakistani Missionaries. The best kind of Missionary Kid who knew the Middle East in the deepest part of his gut. From the moment we flew into the country, we were overwhelmed with a sense of oppression and darkness that I have never experienced before or since. Women are never seen. White is the one drab color worn by the men. When we returned to India, we spoke with the missionaries about our experience. They laughed, and said, "Yes, quite so. But if you really want to feel oppressiveness, go to Saudi Arabia. That is the worst in the world."

Islam jet fueled the death impulse inherent in all of paganism. It fuel injected it with a simple monotheism and no atonement. Death has not been conquered, death is supreme. Far worse than paganism. Simple paganism is pretty innocent compared to what Islam is. Islam is a horror. Our ancestors were not wrong.

Cool Stuff on Christendom - Part I

Loconte's essay critiquing N.T. Wright's views about America was the occasion for a long, productive discussion among some friends on a private discussion list. I've asked some of he contributors for permission to post some of their comments and they have graciously consented. I'll give just a bit of context for each item, but I believe most of them can stand on their own.

A lot of people want to dump on Christendom and forget that the extension of the rule of Christ brought great benefits even if there were problems. Christendom is not the source of our current problems. Questions about the secularization of Christendom's ideals were discussed. And we spent a great deal of time talking about whether all of America's problems mean that we can say that we are no better than Islamic cultures. Weston Hicks made some telling comments:

We don't live in the world of ideas, hence "secular capitalism" doesn't actually exist. What exists is a Christianized Western Civilization that grew up in the church and when she went off to college she was seduced by pagan professors named Descartes and Marx.

So she thinks she's a "secular democrat". And if she doesn't return to her loyalty to Jesus, she'll eventually be destroyed. You can see her getting wrinkles beyond her age already.

But what she really is is an apostatized Christian kid who has no idea how much she is shaped by the Bible, and how much that training benefits her. Her Christian training and inheritance provide the strength and stability in her life, which she uses to live in all kinds of sin. That's sad.

But her invisible Christian inheritence also make her far more civil and human than she would otherwise be if she were a standard world-pagan, where a human life is worth about $.10 when the market is good.

And it seems to me that those enjoying the humanity that the gospel has brought to western civilization should be less flippant about denigrating it.

Just because our dads aren't all they could have been, is it okay for us to go around saying he's as much of a deadbeat as the worst dad we've ever seen?

The third way, as I see it, is work for something better and be thankful for what we've been given. That includes being realistic about the superiority of America to the Muslim world, however much that offends our cosmopolitan sensibilities.

James Jordan says

By siding with the thugocracies of the UN, N.T. Wright continues to blow it. If we offered free passage to anyone in the world who wanted to come to America, there would be a giant sucking sound as 95% of the world's population instantly moved here, leaving the thugs and the "nations" (that we "imperialize") and their Pharisee/Sadducee rulers (whom NTW seems to want to grant legitimacy to) with nothing to rule. You see, the Common People heard Jesus gladly, and the Common People hear America gladly also. We see all our faults; they still see something wonderful.

All over Eastern Europe, they waited for American to come save them. We failed, but still they hoped.

When American planes flew over Liberia a few years ago, the people cheered: The Marines were coming to save them. We didn't, but we might have. Of course, NTW would have said we are "imperialists." But a lot of Little People who are DEAD right now would be ALIVE if the US government had had the cojones to do what is right instead of what is PC.

All those people were much better off under Western imperialism. What's wrong with imperialism? God set up an empire. It's a legitimate phase of history. Western imperialism ended wife-murder in India (it's back now, of course); brought medicine, Jesus, and clean water to Africa (medicine and clean water are now gone, of course); and moved thugs and murderers and rapists out of power. In fact, when Europeans ruled Africa, PIGMIES WERE NO LONGER ON THE MENU, as they are once again, of course.

When God gives you strength, He expects you to use it to help the poor and the helpless.

The West failed the "third world" by giving up its colonies to the worst kinds of people.

NTW should learn to care about common, poor, helpless people, and stop caring about UN bureaucrats.

More to come. Stay tuned.

Christendom

Harvey Cox argues that modern religion was born when “God the maker of heaven and earth, became the deity of religion, approached through what came to be called religious experiences.” Then, “a faith which had once proclaimed a Lord who lifted up and cast down emperors, who condemned extortion and profit gouging, was now reduced to being concerned exclusively with the inner spirit or at most with frictions between individuals.”

The kingdom of God is not confined to the inner life of Christians, nor to relationships, nor to the family, but God rules over all realms of human knowledge, all realms of life, all things! His kingdom embraces all.

The church is the center of the kingdom, but the kingdom embraces all of life. Christ is lord of all. All means everything and every one. He doesn't simply rule over the church or religious individuals. The entire universe is a Christocracy. He's the rightful Lord that deserves the allegiance of individuals, families, presidents, kings, and countries.

This is a vision that once integrated and fueled our educational institutions in the West. This is a vision that once, when proclaimed from the puplits, called for absolute submission from men and women in every station of life. We owe fealty to our soveriegn king, the resurrected and ascended Lord Jesus.

This is a vision that once dominated the worship and prayers of the church and that God used to transform human culture.

Do you want to know what one of the most bizarre (from our point of view) facts about the content of the early post-apostolic church liturgies and prayers is? When churches . . .

. . . possessed nothing

. . . had no political power, nor representation

. . . were relatively poor

. . . met in secret for fear of the wrath of earthly authorities

One of the most amazing facts of history is that the prayers and liturgical texts of the early church . . .

. . . contain no complaints about their suffering,

. . . give almost no evidence of persecution,

. . . express no desire for escape from the world,

. . . do not whine about the church's conflicts and isolation and sufferings!

Rather, they pray that the world might become what it is under the new Lord Jesus. The worship of the early church although simple was much more majestic and triumphal than later Medieval worship. It was broader in its scope and inspiration. The prayers of the church resound with cosmic thanksgiving and embrace in its vision the whole of Creation, the whole of history. They span the entire spectrum of life and existence. Christ reigns over all, so the church saw herself at the very center of the world. She confessed herself absolutely necessarly for the life of the world. She was the royal queen at the Son's right hand. She was his chief and most respected adviser. She was a congregation of priests serving the entire cosmos.

We must recover that vision. We must appreciate the fact that God rules the world through the church, that the world belongs to Jesus and his church - all things belong to Jesus and to his Bride, the Queen. The scope of our prayers ought to be universal, comprehensive - as far as the curse is found.