The Early Church and the Guidance for Worldly Behavior

I’ve been reviewing my teacher Luke Timothy Johnson’s two volume work on Paul in advance of teaching a course on Paul this fall and I was struck recently by two comments he makes in volume 1. First, in discussing experience as a necessary major node for understanding Paul, Johnson remarks on the wonder that Paul’s letters address “quite quotidian matters” because they are under dispute among his addressees. To explain the disputes, he writes, “… since there as yet existed no guidebook for how the confession of Jesus as Lord and the experience of the Holy Spirit’s power should be translated into worldly behavior.” (Johnson, Constructing Paul 1:205) This struck me as simultaneously insightful and puzzling. After all, wouldn’t most early Christians who hailed from a Jewish background (and even at least those gentiles who had heard of Israel’s God as well as some who were hearing of Israel’s God through the preaching of Jesus) have immediately thought of the Torah as exactly the guidebook for living? Sure enough, in the next chapter, Johnson discusses the forensic metaphor at play in Paul’s letters and writes, “At the heart of this metaphorical field is the law revealed by God… with its commandments… that God wishes to be obeyed. These, globally, are “the works of the law”…, by the performance of which humans – according to the law itself – would be reckoned righteous and “live”.” (Johnson, Constructing Paul 1:241) I think for Johnson, any seeming tension between these two claims is resolved in that he takes the phrase πιστις χριστου (faith in/of Christ) definitively to be “Christ’s faithfulness”, specifically Christ’s faithfulness to God’s Torah, as the mechanism for justification (the granting of righteousness as a status to) of humans. Since Christ has fulfilled the righteous requirement of the Torah and therefore opened up the possibility of righteousness for those who are “in Christ” in this forensic metaphorical field, the question naturally arises, what now is the way to live? Yet, for those who would follow Luther insisting that it is not Christ’s faithfulness that Paul means, but rather the believer’s faith in Christ that Paul intends to label as the mechanism for salvation, the problem is much thornier. Now, the question becomes essentially one of supersession or of relativization of portions or all of God’s Torah given to Israel. Where Johnson’s solution opens up a new era, Luther’s solution requires a redefinition of the Torah. Either, there is a new Torah in Christ because the old Torah’s functions was never to be followed anyway (supersession) or at least some of the Torah, if not all of it, must no longer be valid. In this latter version, the invalidating of Torah follows from Paul’s own arguments that gentiles must not circumcise themselves, otherwise they become Jews and the eschatological age as Isaiah envisions it cannot be present (the nations, gentiles, will come to Jerusalem and join Israel; see Isaiah 60-62). Thus, some portion of the Torah must be relativized or excised and, as many Protestant traditions have found, debating where and how those lines are drawn becomes highly complex, very quickly. 

The Core of the Christian Faith

What is the center of the Christian faith? This question has been lurking in the back of my mind for a few years now as my department has considered the best place to begin our university’s five required Bible courses. As a Christian university, these courses form an essential part of the university’s general education course of study for all undergraduate degrees. For about a decade now, the first three courses have been set, with some flexibility for the fourth and fifth. For many decades, the first course has focused on the canonical Gospels. The current title is Jesus: His Life and Teachings. Our department has noted the decreasing biblical literacy among our incoming students along with an increasing lack of basic knowledge about the Christian faith. We have begun to wonder whether our current sequence, requiring essentially a yearlong survey of the New Testament followed by a one-semester survey of the Old Testament is serving the needs of our students, the future of the churches where they might be, and, thus the Church as a whole. We have wondered whether our current courses meet our students where they are or if they assume a level of knowledge of the faith that is missing. For example, does a course that jumps into the Bible assume both that a student would agree that reading the Bible is good and important for Christian faith and also that knowledge of the Bible is important for Christian faith, much less be prepared to explore various ways of reading the Bible for the nourishing of that faith. The answers are far from obvious.

Thus, we have embarked on an exploration of what we might do differently in order to start the students off in a better place. Two of my excellent colleagues have taught renditions of a pilot course these past two years that would begin from some foundations of the Christian Faith (among other things to be sure!). While the courses have differed in some ways, one core they have shared is teaching the Apostle’s Creed as a core summary of the Christian faith. While I neither deny nor intend to belittle the historical realities of creeds developing to operate as summaries or their use in providing some form of “catechesis” for the first-semester student at a Christin university, for a variety of reasons, some exacerbatingly specific to the current moment in US history and culture, teaching a creed has not sat well with me. Some reasons surely come from my own heritage in the Restoration churches of the Stone-Campbell movement, in which the slogan, “no creed but the Bible” has held sway. But more than that, I see in our particular moment in history a surge in the typical human behavior of using ideological purity tests as weapons. Whether in our federal government, our two political parties in the US, or say the tendency to fill in all sorts of imagined “facts” about a person based on where they might indicate they fit in debates about gender, gender roles, and/or sexuality, social media has put an exclamation point on our desire and willingness to use “creedal” ideas to draw lines by which we establish who is “our people” and who is not, who is to be welcomed and clung to and who is to be excluded, despised, and ridiculed. 

As one of my colleagues and friends that I most respect in the world asked me, though, if, given these negatives, the creed is not to be used as a mechanism for identifying a center of the Christian faith, as a starting point for building out theological literacy in the students as they are, what would I place there instead? So, herein, I hope to propose at least a basic sketch of what I may use.

I would center the Christian faith on a phrase memorialized by Paul in writing to the Corinthians: “Christ crucified”. Given that here we have an even shorter statement than a creed, I will attempt briefly to not only flesh out how this might function as the center of an initial course on the Christian faith, but also why it is superior to some kind of creedal statement.

In writing to the Corinthians, Paul explains (reminds?) them that their baptism was into the name of Christ and that it was Christ who was crucified, thus effecting something in connection with their baptism (1 Cor 1:13). Thus, he tells them, that though the entirety of humanity (both Jews and Greeks/gentiles, used as an hendiadys in 1 Cor 1:22-23) would consider the content of what Paul and his fellows proclaim worthless (a scandal to Jews and foolishness to gentiles), Christ crucified is the wisdom and power of God. It is through this lens that Paul asserts in the opening of his letter that all of the challenges currently dividing and besetting those in Christ in Corinth will be solved. Christ crucified in Corinth, as for Paul himself, changes everything. Most importantly, it changes everything because God has displayed the superiority of God’s weakness to human strength and God’s foolishness to human wisdom when God proved Jesus to be Christ (Messiah) in the Resurrection, by which God defeated sin and death (see 1 Cor 15, Phil 2, Rom 6-8, etc.). In order to understand “Christ crucified”, a first semester course would necessarily require moving out/backward to God, God’s creation, the reality of sin, Israel and God’s covenant, Kingship and Exile, the looking forward to God’s Messiah, etc., but beginning here as the heart of the Gospel, especially in light of how Paul typically reasons on the basis of Christ crucified, prevents us from viewing the center of Christian faith as a possible purity test or as a mechanism by which to draw lines. 

After all, for Paul Christ crucified has as one of its most powerful corollaries that God is now “breaking down the dividing wall” that was most fundamental to him as a Jew as to many other Jews as God’s Holy and chosen people, that wall between Jew and Gentile (Ephesians 2). Not only this, but many varieties of dividing lines are torn asunder by Christ crucified (see Gal 3:28). The moral logic of Christ crucified is an invitation into an inverted power dynamic, a fundamental interrogation of the human proclivity to look for tools that may be weaponized to elevate ourselves and people like us by identifying who is out, who doesn’t count, and who isn’t worthwhile, namely those who are not like us (see e.g. Luke 15). It is a call to greatness by way of humility, a call to fullness by way of emptying ourselves, a call to react to the love which we have received by looking not for ways to secure ourselves in that love, but rather by standing in that love as a place of sure-footing by which to be transformed into “a living sacrifice” as Paul would name it (see not only Rom 12, but Mark 9 and 10 and the parallel texts on greatness in Matthew and Luke). Surely, Paul could sympathize with the human tendency to experience and view God’s work in tearing down division as a threat to special status, but his encounter with the risen Christ changed everything for him. It was his preaching of this Christ crucified whom death could not hold that also caught the imagination of many Greeks and other gentiles. Surely Christ crucified today could also capture the imaginations of first-semester college students and serve as a foundation from which to build not only knowledge of the story of God through our sacred Scriptures, but also moral transformation in sanctification and a lifelong commitment to sojourning with the Church.

Alright, to be sure this is nascent and incomplete, but I find myself more convinced now than when I began of this as a centering starting point over and against any kind of creed. You, dear reader, are welcome to disagree, and if I may steal one other phrase from Paul in Phil 3:15, should you think differently on this matter, “I’m confident the Lord will also make this clear to you.” ;-)

Daily Office Readings 1/17/25

 

This year I will be regularly posting some thoughts that may occur to me from the biblical texts appointed for the Episcopal Daily Office. If you would like to follow along in the readings, they may be found here.

Readings for Friday, Jan 17, 2025: Psalms 16, 17, 22, Isaiah 42: 1-17, Ephesians 3:1-13, Mark 2:13-22

Today picks up closely where yesterday’s readings left off, and not only because the readings in Isaiah, Ephesians, and Mark are the verses immediately following. The theme is the same: God’s redemption is simultaneously surprising and inexplicable. Isaiah 42 recounts God’s version of setting things right (42:1-4), God’s immense power to create and thus God’s power to create anew (42:5-9), the response of the whole of God’s creation to God (42:10-13), and, finally, the reading ends with the surprising and inexplicable things God will be doing in this creating anew, this setting things right (42:14-17). It involves nothing less than things becoming what they are not. 

It is this imagery that Ephesians picks up in chapter 3. What God has done in creating one people out of the previously divided two is the very undoing of what was and the making of it into what it was not. Once, the people were divided in two, but now they are united as one (Eph 2:11-22). It is, as Ephesians 3:1 labels it “a mystery”. What better word could there be for rivers becoming islands? For mountains becoming flat places, for darkness becoming light? What better word is there for the crucified, shamed, and cursed man Jesus, to be not only alive, but Messiah and Lord, the most honored, the one before every knee will one day bow, the one of whom every tongue will confess that he is Lord (Phil 2:10-11)? It is an economy of God’s grace that only becomes clear through an apocalypse, a revelation, as Ephesians labels it (3:2-3). The very hiddenness of it is what makes it a mystery, along with the profundity of what has been and is being accomplished.

Thus, the pairing with Mark 2:13-22 highlights the apocalyptic (or revelatory) nature of Jesus’s presence among Israel and humanity. These verses play out the second and third in the set of five conflicts that open Jesus’s ministry in Capernaum. The first, yesterday, was over the power to forgive sins. The second here concerns who is worthy to join the table (and possibly if we allow the language of Ephesians to intrude a bit, the household) of Jesus. The third concerns proper pious conduct as the people of God, specifically a practice of fasting. Jesus’s presence in each instance changes what is obviously true, becoming right and true only through the revelation of a mystery. In yesterday’s healing of the paralytic, everyone “knows” only God can forgive sins, but Jesus’s ability to change another thing that everyone knows (paralytics don’t walk without the power of God) proves his authority to forgive sins. In Mark 2:13-17, everyone knows you shouldn’t eat with those kinds of people (tax collectors and sinners), but Jesus’s presence reveals something different: God’s healing (given the doctor imagery in v. 17) is exactly for those kinds of people, it is God “opening the eyes of the blind” and bringing out “the prisoners from the dungeon” and darkness (Is 42:7), it is God “leading the blind by a road they do not know” (Is 42:16). Once again God’s planning and action are mysterious and a matter of revelation (Eph 3). Finally, Mark 2:18-22 as the center conflict of the five takes on a particular climactic place in that Jesus’s presence as “Son of Man” means not that the standard forms of pious worship (e.g. fasting) should be even more adhered to, but rather it means the opposite of those pious activities: the presence of the Son of Man requires feasting and celebration. In some sense it requires this exactly because the mysterious-to-be-revealed plan involves the departure of the Son of Man. Things are not as they seem. God’s creative power takes things that are and makes them something they are not. God’s redemptive power is surprising and inexplicable.

Lingering Questions and thoughts: 1) Why does the LXX (Greek OT) remove the first half of Is 42:15, only mentioning the rivers becoming islands? 

2) The NRSV has translated the Greek οἰκονομία in consistently and in interesting ways. In Eh 3:2, the translators give “the commission (οἰκονομία) of God’s grace”, while the similar phrase in 3:9 is rendered “the plan (οἰκονομία) of the mystery”. These renderings don’t necessarily get us close to either the active element of the word or the household metaphorical realm the term implies. It’s not just a one-time commissioning of Paul as it may sound, but rather an ongoing and repeated entrusting of the working out of God’s grace in the realm of these people, the people made one out of the previously two. In addition, it is not some plan that has been decided from the foundations of time and just left to work itself out, like God is some divine computer coder who wrote the code and then hit execute. Rather, it is an ongoing negotiation of planning and replanning as the dynamic nature of the real existence in this household realm (that God has created out of the formerly two peoples, but now one people) plays out in real time. This is part of what makes it mysterious. Moreover, the household context is essential because of all that has been said in chapter two concerning the creation of one people. This people is the household of God.

Daily Office Readings for 1/16/25

This year I will be regularly posting some thoughts that may occur to me from the biblical texts appointed for the Episcopal Daily Office. If you would like to follow along in the readings, they may be found here.

Readings for Thursday, Jan 16, 2025: Psalm 18, Isaiah 41: 17-29, Ephesian s 2:11-22, Mark 2:1-12

Thematically, today’s readings hold together in the question of who is truly a god and by what actions is the true God to be known. Isaiah 41 is the lynchpin in my reading. Verse 20 gives a purpose clause for God’s actions as narrated earlier: “so that all may see and know, all may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this…” The remainder of the chapter follows up on this asking of the past (v 22) and then of the future (v 23), then moving into action as the witness to who is truly divine. So, we learn from vv. 17-19 that this true God is one who acts, but one who acts specifically to bring life from where there is none. God is the God of the redemption.

It is fitting, therefore, that Eph 2 and Mk 2 are paired with this text. Eph 2 narrates the wonderful power of God in redeeming the nations (the gentiles) into God’s chosen people and Mk 2 shows Jesus reveal his power in healing a paralyzed man. This Gospel narrative poses a question, though, in the form of the scribes. For Jesus does not set out to heal in his initial response to the paralyzed person, but rather to forgive sins. This forgiveness, though, is unrecognized for what it is by the scribes. They say in their hearts that he blasphemes in this statement because only God can forgive sins. Thus, in the spirit of Isaiah 41, Jesus answers “so that all may see and know” by reversing the state of this paralyzed person. As the Isaiah passage states that the wilderness will become a pool of water, reversing its fundamental character, so this person who cannot walk will get up and walk. It is the power of God to make things other than what they are. To tear down dividing walls and unite (Eph 2), to redeem even the most unredeemable.

A lingering question: I have always wondered what it means in Psalm 18 when the Psalmist writes that God shows up as “perverse” (as the NRSV would have it) to the crooked. Perhaps another time I will explore the Hebrew nuance here and consider a bit more what this text might be saying about God. 

Cain's Anger, Cain's Grief

 

I ran across a small puzzle today when reading the first half of Gen 4. When Cain realizes that the LORD did not look with favor upon his offering of produce from the Earth, most English translations follow the Hebrew verb, a clear indication of anger, given the roots association with burning. Thus, the NRSVUE reads, “… so Cain was very angry and his countenance fell.” (4:6) The LXX, however, makes an interesting move in translating this text to Greek. Instead of communicating anger or burning (and thus destructive consumption, the LXX translator chose a verb communicating sadness: ἐλύπησεν. In fact, God’s warning that comes next in verse 6 exaggerates the sadness when God asks, “ἵνα τί περίλυπος ἐγενου”. Now, this exaggeration may be due to the modifier in v 5 (λίαν in the LXX) communicating that Cain became exceedingly saddened, but the choice of περίλυπος does a bit more work than simply exaggerating the emotional state. While λυπέω can have connotations of vexing, annoying, harassing, etc. and thus potentially inflaming, περίλυπος moves the semantic field away from these. Instead, it brings the semantic field into the realm of grief. 

    Now, it is not as if the LXX cannot translate this particular Hebrew verb into an appropriately angry semantic field. The next use of the verb in Hebrew comes in Gen 18 when Abraham questions God as to whether or not God would destroy Sodom should smaller and smaller numbers of righteous people be found there. Abraham politely and subserviently says to God, “Oh, do not let my Lord be angry if I speak…” (Gen 18:30, NRSVUE). The Hebrew verb is the same here as in Gen 4:5, but the LXX does not use λυπέω. Instead, the translator here chooses the appropriate ἀπόλλυμι, which carries with it the appropriate connotations of destruction. 

    Thus, we may ask why? Why does the LXX color Cain as saddened, grieved even, in discovering that God did not look with favor on his offering? And why, moreover, do the English translations ignore this divergence rather than acknowledge the difference in a footnote? My hunch on the latter is that the interpretive tradition that connects how Cain acts in the middle of the story (murdering his brother in a field) to his emotional state post-sacrificial discovery is so strong that the LXX here is simply nonsensical to us. Anger to murder makes sense. Deep grief to murder? That’s uncomfortable for us to consider. I invite you then, dear reader, to meditate with me today on the power of sadness and grief to move us to unthinkable acts as much if not more than anger. I also invite you to consider how you imagine God’s own emotional reaction to the crucifixion. Had not God offered something great that then humanity did not look upon with favor, in parallel to Cain’s offering to God? What is your instinct about God’s emotional state at the crucifixion: burning anger or deep grief?

On The Simplicity (or Complexity) of Language

 I was listening to Kara Swisher's interview with Yann LeCun today and he said something I found remarkable. In discussing how far humanity is from general AI, he stated that language is actually quite simple while the physical world is highly complex. He explained that this is why we have LLM's, but are nowhere close to house-cleaning robots. 

On the one hand, perhaps he is correct. Language can be conceived of as simple. As he said, it is essentially a system of tokens. However, in another sense, language is quite complex. As a system of tokens, language is symbolic and thus represents something else. Human development and use of language involves the representation of experiences, thoughts, emotions, encounters, etc., many of which are in reaction to stimuli that occur in the physical world. In this way, generative AI in LLM's has no real mastery of language, but rather is simply playing a game. As I have written elsewhere, LLM's treat words as tokens and the program for generative AI essentially runs a complex and fast probability program. The words, much less the phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, have no real meaning for the LLM or AI, because, as LeCun has stated, AI cannot understand or engage the physical world. Thus, generative AI's use of words to simulate language cannot describe the physical world, much less experiences, emotions, or more abstract non-physical aspects of being. 

In sum, generative AI is a tool of collective self-deception. If we read what generative AI produces, we deceive ourselves into thinking there is meaning in it. It is not meaning independent of our own engagement, though. The meaning, in other words, is in the eye of the beholder (or user). Generative AI is simply quite good at gambling. The gamble is that we will believe it uses language with facility and its track record is quite high, even though hallucinations and more sinister events, like encouraging young people to commit suicide or kill their parents, prove that its gambling track record is not 100%. Rather than showing that chat bots are prone to lying or other kinds of evil, these events show that generative AI has not mastered language, much less understood it. It is simply playing a game and those responsible for its mass deployment without fully considering the ethical and moral dimensions, much less the practical workings of how it plays the game, should think carefully before taking further steps. Also, maybe consider that language is not simply a collection of tokens and probabilities.

The Power of Narrative - Part 1

 I’ve been thinking about narratives this past month. I’ve heard (and read) a lot about the different narratives from the Democratic and Republican parties in the recent elections. For a few years, I’ve been hearing (and reading) about the rise of right-wing populism in the West and some have connected this to the narratives being spun by right-wing populist leaders. In biblical studies and theology, some prominent voices have been considering narrative approaches for decades and, in my own department, we often talk about the narrative of the Bible (or the biblical story). Finally, I’ve been thinking about narratives in fiction. As I make my way towards the very end of FromSoft’s Elden Ring, I’ve been thinking about the narrative George R.R. Martin helped spin, radicalizing and emphasizing the familiar FromSoft post-decadent world. Moreover, in anticipation of Brandon Sanderson’s epic conclusion to the Stormlight Archive, Wind and Truth, I have taken great pleasure in re-reading (and reading for the first time) the earlier novels. (I know, I know, I’m late to the party here as I have just finished volume three, Oathbringer, this week.)

The conventional wisdom put forward regarding the political sphere is that the Republican party (or more specifically Donald Trump) has a “better” narrative. Right-wing populists have a “compelling” narrative that “resonates” with a lot of people and their circumstances. Similarly, those interested in building up Christian faith in others talk about helping people understand the “narrative arc” of the Christian faith. Educators talk about trying to have a “better” narrative for the class as various pedagogical experts suggest that people learn best through narrative. Let’s assume then, for a moment, that these pedagogical experts are right: people are ready-made to receive narratives and so narratives are the best ways to hold attention, teach, motivate, etc. What makes something a “better” narrative, then? For instance, in my Christian faith, I would claim that the Christian narrative is the best narrative on offer. However, if this is true, then why are more people not caught up in/by this narrative? Is it, as some would suggest, because Christian ministers, leaders, educators, etc. are just not very good at story-telling and so we are ineffective in deploying this “better”/”best” narrative? If so, then why was God incarnate in Jesus not “better” at deploying this narrative? After all, the claims of the punditry class would have us believe that the “better” narrative wins elections. Would Jesus “win” the election? It seems he didn’t win the loyalty of the majority of ancient Jerusalem, much less the loyalty of the elites of Judaism in his day (although the Gospels do point to a small number of elites secretly coming to Jesus – think Nicodemus in John 3). Perhaps, then, we need to examine what makes a narrative “good” and, therefore, in whatever context we are discussing, what makes one narrative “better” than another. 

This is where I think FromSoft and, reaching back to the ‘90’s original Matrix, the Wachowskis might help us. Why do so many people love the worlds FromSoft creates when they are so dark and miserable? In The Matrix, Agent Smith tells Keanu Reeves’s character Neo that the first version of the Matrix was a perfect world: no suffering and everyone happy. But it did not work because the human mind would not accept this perfect world. Thus, the machines crafted a program that simulated the conditions of the late 20th century US: a time of prosperity to be sure, but a time of looming distress, a time of fear, a time of competition, a time of suffering for many. Agent Smith opines that humans define our existence through suffering and misery. I don’t know that this is quite correct, but it does have some hint of truth. 

Consider for a moment that the Trump campaign had more than a little bit of anger, vengeance, and darkness in its narrative. Trump’s world is not the world of Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite quote from Theodore Parker’s “Of Justice and Conscience”: “The arc of history bends toward justice.” Rather, it is the brutal world of those who would term themselves “realists”, where everyone is out for themselves and, should there be a god, it is a god “who helps those who help themselves”, not a God who pays special attention to the marginal, cares deeply for the orphaned and widowed, and will make special provision in the eschatological era for the poorest. In such a world, a populist leader can become the “helper of themselves” (and thus promise to become the champion of others), just as Donald Trump has promised. Trump, after all, used his own claims of being persecuted and prosecuted unjustly to elide any distance between himself and his political supporters and to wield this elision in order to motivate support for him as a form of “helping themselves” through electing him to be their “instrument of vengeance.” In other words, Trump’s narrative betrays a certain godlessness or at least an assumed impotence of deity that is only remedied through a human agent. In this way, the world becomes a site of suffering and misery, either of one’s own suffering and misery (and thus identity with others encountering analogous suffering and misery) or of inflicting that suffering on others in retaliation. A right makes right and a power begets vengeance as justice kind of world.

Now, it is worth pausing here to say that I do not think the previous paragraph is sufficient to explain all those who cast a vote for Donald Trump. Instead, I mean to examine at least those portions of the narrative he spun in his most impassioned moments. Of course, other motivations can be (and were) at play, but this is an exploration of “narratives”, so it is worth considering what the climactic contours of Trump’s narrative have been. At this point, over 1000 words in, kudos to those who have stuck with me. I promise to take this up in another post soon, and perhaps complete the thought!