Christianity

On God’s Government

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Within modern Christianity (and admittedly, throughout historic Christianity as well), there is a strong tendency to view the governmental style of God as a monarchy. I beg to differ.

Part of this is because we confuse discussion of “God’s sovereignty” with God’s rulership. Like most philosophical discussions, we need to be clear about our definitions. When we talk about God’s “sovereignty”, what we are really talking about is God’s power and control. For me, there’s not really any doubt about God’s omnipotence, but it’s not the same as governance or rulership. Governance combines power with goodness (or evil) and forbearance in the use of that power. Put simply, perhaps, governance is not just how much power there is, but also its source and when, where, why and how that power is used.

Human governments can at best be analogies to divine government, but let’s take a look at some human ideas on the subject to glean what we can before going to the scriptures and looking at God’s way of doing things.

Perhaps we should start with the purpose of governments. I think that we can agree that there is a valid reason for human governments. At the highest level, good governments provide for those things that individuals or small groups of people cannot. This includes collective defense from internal and external threats (i.e. military and police/judiciary power), logistics (the building of major infrastructure to support life and commerce, think of the U.S. Highway system for one) and the organization of collective resources to provide benefits to citizens, whether in general or targeted to specific needs (i.e. European subsidies to pay for university educations for those who qualify or pension programs, like Social Security). All of this is predicated upon the government having coercive power over its citizens to provide for the collective good—the ability to collect taxes, to punish those who break laws, to regulate certain aspects of daily life, etc.

Coercive power is either given (à la social contract theory from Socrates to Hobbes) or taken (as in dictatorships, old-school monarchies and other governments formed by groups with the power to use force to subjugate others). That coercive force must then be legitimized in some way because such legitimacy makes the use of the coercive power more palatable by those against whom it is used. The emperors of Rome and Japan claimed a semi-divine status that entitled them to rulership. Likewise, the medieval kings of Europe claimed a divine mandate to rule such that opposition to them was opposition to God (convenient, no?). In modern democracy we ascribe to the idea that coercive power exercised by a government ultimately answerable to the people best provides for the collective good.

In gross oversimplification, we can reduce human government to this three things: purpose, coercive power, and legitimacy. And we can see that God, too has all of these things—we have faith in God’s purpose in Creation, believe in God’s ultimate power over all things, and hold that, as the uncreated source of everything, God is as legitimate as it gets. So, under a human view of things, God seems perfectly entitled to have monarchical dominion over all things. I don’t argue with that, but I would point out that it doesn’t seem that God has that in mind. Let me explain.

First, some examples of God’s disavowal of human-style government. In broad strokes, much of the story of Judges and Chronicles is the litany of consequences that arise precisely because Israel asks for a human government in place of the (perhaps more-difficult-to-comprehend divine one). Jesus famously tells the Pharisees to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21; c.f. Romans 13:1, where Paul makes a claim for a divine right of kings). In fact, the entirety of the gospel juxtaposes Jesus’s heralding of a supernal kingdom (and lack of concern for temporal politics) with the messianic expectation of the Jews and the fear of the Romans of a Jesus who comes to conquer and bring a worldly government. Jesus is crucified as “King of the Jews,” but—as far as we know—never takes steps to foment rebellion or create a movement for any rival governmental authority (unlike other messianic figures before and after him).

This circumstantial evidence points to a divine purpose in government that defies our worldly expectations and understandings. But, even better, God tells us of God’s ultimate plan very plainly in Jeremiah as God proclaims the New Covenant to be found in the Christ:

       31“Behold the days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will
make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of
Judah,
       32“not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the
day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My
covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares
the Lord.
33“But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.
34“They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying ‘Know the Lord, ‘for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the Lord, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

This passage, I think, is what John Milton refers to in Book 3 of Paradise Lost when he declares that “God shall be All in All.”

What God describes in the above passage from Jeremiah is a future state where the law—righteousness—is so ingrained within humanity that there becomes no need for external coercive force to provide for the great collective good. Remember that the whole of the law hangs on Jesus’s commandments to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind…You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

At the fullest achievement of the “Kingdom of God”, there is no need for government. God’s purpose seems not to be a king to rule over us, but to sanctify us so that we need no rulership—so that each person is so good as to be able to act freely without harm to others and collectively for the good of all. Is this not the ultimate rectification of the Fall, the marriage within mankind of both righteousness and free will?

So, in a curious way that nevertheless makes complete sense given God’s sacrificial behavior toward us and God’s desire for relationship with us, God seeks to destroy the idea of government itself, to render it obsolete.

What does this really look like? Like much of the heavenly state, our own fallenness precludes our imagination from truly grasping the idea. The closest idea in human political thought, I think, is collectivist anarchism. Most people are familiar with anarchy as that 19th– and early 20th-century specter (alongside communism and socialism) threatening the Western way of doing things. The idea of anarchy is usually portrayed as utter chaos, lawlessness and the rule of power to the greatest possible extreme. In a practical sense, given the state of mankind, that’s a fair conception if we were to attempt to apply the practice of anarchy to any given group of people. But, that conception is far from what anarchist philosophers had in mind when developing their ideas—they looked to a time where people could be free of the coercive force of government and its many abuses—an issue that has not left us today.

The theorists of collectivist anarchism (like Mikhail Bakunin) sought a form of government (or lack of government) under which people were free to self-determine but collaborated to provide for the greater needs of humanity—sharing the resources of production and allowing the use of each person’s abilities in service to the whole while eschewing a need for private property and allowing for technological and logistic growth through principles of free self-organization rather than coercive force. Compare this with the early church as described in the Book of Acts!

Now, I’m a firm believer in Churchill’s sentiment that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” I have many complaints about the way democracy works, but these are more or less complaints about human nature itself, and I believe that democracy is the best system of government (though far from perfect) that humans have developed to date. Given the state of humanity at present, I have no belief that collectivist anarchism has any chance of ending in anything other than exploitation and misery.

But, I believe that one day, God will have led us to be sanctified such that we care for one another without the need for any form of government humans can create on this earth. What is important for me, here, is nothing about politics itself, but what it says about the nature of God and the extent of God’s love for Creation. There is an ineffable poetry to this scheme that I have no power to deny.

Ambiguity in Scripture, Part III

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In Part II of this series of posts, we talked about how ambiguity expands the number of things that scripture can say to us in a single passage. This time, let’s talk about how ambiguity makes room for faith, theology and humility.

We have discussed a few examples of ambiguity in scripture, so I’m not going to devote time to trying to prove that scripture is often ambiguous and subject to human interpretation.

If you want more than a literary analysis to reveal Biblical ambiguities, I would suggest reading Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus. As you’ll probably see in other posts, I have some significant reservations about Ehrman’s approach to the historical Jesus, but I can guarantee that you will learn something valuable if you listen to or read something he’s done. I don’t remember anything in Misquoting Jesus that my general criticism of his work extends to.

Misquoting Jesus will walk you through the many practical problems with interpreting and understanding the Bible. In the New Testament, for example, Koine Greek was written without punctuation and without spacing between words (writing media were quite expensive, after all). When we read the gospels in English (or anything other than the original Greek), all those interpretive aids of syntax and structure are at best guesses by the scholars who edit translations of the Bible. By way of example about how a mere comma can change meaning entirely, compare, “Let’s eat, Grandma!” to, “Let’s eat Grandma!” With a little research, you can find a number of passages in the New Testament—some of them the words of Jesus—about which the proper punctuation and structure remains hotly debated by Biblical scholars.

Here’s my first new point about how ambiguity in the scriptures really is a good thing: without ambiguity, there can be no faith. Faith, by definition, is a conviction of the truth of something that cannot be proved. Existentially, we could not have faith in God if we could readily prove God’s existence—God’s hiddenness from us creates room for faith. The same is true on a smaller scale within Biblical interpretation—because ambiguity allows for multiple interpretations, none of which can be unassailably shown to be correct—none can claim to have the definitive understanding of Jesus.

On the one hand, as we’ve already touched on, this allows us to see more of an infinite God through competing possible interpretations, some of which may be dismissed when weighed against other passages of the scripture, experience, tradition or reason, some of which remain simultaneously potentially valid.

For purposes of this post, I want to focus on the fact that ambiguity is the great equalizer in terms of our faith in God and our following of Jesus. Were salvation, or even an understanding of Jesus, predicated upon intellect, education or interpretive ability, we would have a de facto form of Calvinist or Augustinian election. But, as Ephesians 2:8-9 tells us, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” This includes works of interpretation, I think.

As important, we are told, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 8). If God is love, by the transitive property the converse must also be true: anyone who knows love also knows God.

One cannot know love except by experience and personal encounter with it. One cannot reason one’s way into understanding love by intellect alone. In this way, human experience itself allows (through the experience and practice of love) the ability to follow Jesus and to be sanctified.

In this way, theology ought to be viewed as an exploration of what it means to love, what it means to follow Jesus, but it is not the thing itself. Those who do not grasp complex theological concepts, whether by choice or ability, are not to be excluded from Christ’s reach. I find the egalitarianism of that concept awesome in the classical sense of the word.

As someone who derives a great amount of his identity from being an intellectual, I find this realization amazingly humbling. For all my theologizing (which, obviously, I greatly enjoy), I’m not going to enlighten someone; I’m not going to reveal some truth heretofore unknown. As an amateur theologian, all I really do is help people to find ways to think about what it means to follow God or to live in a world where God exists. I’m at best a glorified moving guy—I can help you unpack, but I can’t get you the stuff in the first place.

There’s also an important point in how we deal with theological disagreements. Because we cannot be absolutely sure of the truth of our own theology (or theologies in the collective), we ought not to be too oppositional when discussing matters of faith with others. Overconfidence in one’s theological position leads to persecution of others, turning away the unchurched and generally working against Christ’s goals for us.

Important caveats here. First, I am not saying that theology is relative. I firmly believe that there is an objective truth to reality in all things, including theological matters and the way we are supposed to think about and relate to God and each other. My thoughts are not borne from a lack of belief in objective truth, but a healthy dose of skepticism about human intellectual capacity to clearly understand that truth.

Direct human knowledge of the capital “T” Truth, I think only comes from direct revelation from God. Every other method of understanding requires approximation. I believe that direct revelation from God has occurred and continues to occur, but this doesn’t really change things for humans as a whole. One person may have a revelation from God and know the truth, but since I cannot occupy that person’s consciousness to verify the reality of claims to know the truth, I cannot rule out the possibilities of self-delusion, misinterpretation of experiences, or outright lying. Someone else’s revelation carries with it the same ambiguity as any other form of indirect revelation—like the scriptures. Unless I’m the one who directly receives the revelation, I cannot be absolutely sure of its truth. To date, I have not received any direct revelation of truth from God—nor do I expect to. Everything I have to say is interpretation and should be treated as such.

Along with this, I don’t mean to imply that the lack of direct access to the Truth makes theology worthless. Quite the contrary. We need continuous theological investigation to evaluate our theology and allow it to progress into what we think is the closest approximation of the Truth. Theology may be an asymptote that comes ever closer to infinity but never touches it.

There is still ground for theological debate, and competing theologies can be weighed against one another by the amount of support we find for them through scripture, the application of logic and conformity with experience.

And, as I’ve mentioned above, I think that there is one thing in scripture (and reality) that is completely unambiguous. We are to love God and one another. For me, that’s the only Truth I need; I can live with the ambiguity of everything that follows.

Point Three: Ambiguity in scripture shows us that we are equal in the eyes of God, regardless of interpretive or intellectual ability.

For the next post in this series, click here.

Ambiguity in Scripture, Part II

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In the previous post in this series, we looked quite generally at ambiguity in scripture and how it draws us in to wrestle with difficult concepts of theology, metaphysics and existence in general. Today, I want to look at one passage in particular.

It’s the passage often referred to as “The Rich Young Ruler.” It appears in both all three synoptic gospels, but I’m taking the text here from Matthew 19:16-22 in the English Standard Version:

16And behold, a man came up to him [Jesus], saying, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” 17And he [Jesus] said to him [the rich young ruler], “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.” 18He said to him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “You shall not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not bear false witness, 19Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 20The young man said to him, “All these I have kept. What do I still lack?” 21Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” 22When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.”

What happens at the end of this passage? Does the young man surrender his possessions and follow Jesus? The traditional answer is, “No,” and the following statement of Jesus about rich people and camels and heaven seems to support this interpretation.

But look closer. We don’t actually know what the rich young ruler does, we only know that he goes away with sorrow. We assume that he goes away sorrowful because he is not willing to give away his wealth, but he could just as easily be going away sorrowful because he has decided to give away his wealth and is suffering the angst and upset that inevitably follows the loss of material things.

Jesus’s statement about getting into heaven being more difficult for a rich man than a camel passing through the eye of the needle doesn’t really tell us anything that gives us logical support for either interpretation. Jesus could be implying that this young man has triumphed where others may not, or that this man, like many others, will be unable to let go of worldly things, or even that we don’t yet know what the young man will do and Jesus is simply describing the difficulty of the choice he has to make.

Which is the correct answer? We don’t know, and—purposefully, I think—we cannot know. Without a definite answer, we have to consider each possibility; we cannot cast any aside.

When we acknowledge the ambiguity in this story instead of glossing it over with the traditional answer, we are given to contemplate: (1) the difficulty of surrendering worldly things to follow Jesus, (2) the inevitable sorrow that would result from choosing to give up worldly things to follow Jesus, and (3) the difficulty of being within that choice, the struggle to decide one way or the other and to be willing to live with the consequences.

One story, three points. If we were definitively told that the rich young ruler goes away because he will not do what Jesus has asked, we lose meaning in this passage rather than gaining meaning.

Ambiguity allows several points to be put forth at the same time, simultaneously multiplying the meaning to be found in a passage while providing syntactic and stylistic efficiency the communication of those multiple meanings. In other words, the Bible says more with less when ambiguity is (under the right circumstances, of course) employed, as it is throughout.

Think about why Jesus speaks in parables. Parables are analogies; analogies have slippage between the two things compared, creating ambiguity. Thus, in parables, Jesus can convey more complex meaning than by making direct and unequivocal statements. This is, in part, why we often hear people say, “Every time I reread the Bible (or a particular passage), I get something new out of it.”

Your state of mind at the time you read a passage will influence how you resolve ambiguities. Therefore, at different times in your life and under different circumstances, the scriptures will speak to you in different ways, with the most applicable ideas from a particular passage always seeming to float to the top.

This is not to say that there is relativism in what Jesus says; on the topics of greatest importance, Jesus speaks clearly—“Love your neighbor as yourself,” for instance. Even in this passage, the meaning that following Jesus is the goal is not equivocated or made ambivalent. The Bible uses ambiguity selectively to force us to consider those things that are not ambiguous. It is clear that we are to love our neighbors, but what does it mean to love them? This is a serious theological question and, in current church issues, at the heart of the debates in various denominations about the approach to the LGBTQ community within the Christian faith.

I’ll talk a little about how I think we should approach resolving difficult ambiguities like the one above in a later post in this series. For now, I want to point something out about the ambiguity of how we love our neighbors. If Jesus meant for us to move away from the legalism of the Old Testament, such an ambiguous command is a perfect way to do it. Without detailed and clear guidance, we cannot easily say to ourselves, “I have done enough; I need do no more for my neighbors.” Instead, we must always ask ourselves, “Am I loving my neighbors? What more can I do, or what can I do differently, to love them better?” The ambiguity of how to carry out the command demands more of us than a black-and-white commandment, elevating, empowering and extending the exhortation itself.

Point 2: Ambiguity allows greater meaning in fewer words through the incorporation of alternative possible resolutions of the ambiguity.

For the next post in this series, click here.

Ambiguity in Scripture, Part I

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In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, a German Jew who had fled to Istanbul to avoid the Nazis wrote what I think is one of the foundational books for any literary understanding of the scriptures. His name was Erich Auerbach; the book was Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

If the stories are to be believed, circumstances forced Auerbach to do much of his work by memory, for he did not have access to all of the texts drawn from and cited to in Mimesis. While a fascinating thought, it is largely irrelevant; Auerbach was a genius whatever the strength of his memory.

It is only the first chapter of the book, entitled “Odysseus’ Scar,” that concerns us for the time being. In that chapter, Auerbach argues that there are two major iconic styles of storytelling running through western civilization, at least historically speaking. Like Tolkien, Auerbach was a philologist by training, born at the end of the 19th Century, and with a penchant for looking backward, far backward, rather than at the contemporary.

Two iconic styles of literature in historic western writing. Only two. The first, Auerbach tells us, is the style best exemplified by the works of Homer, in the Iliad and (as the chapter’s title suggests) the Odyssey. By way of example, Auerbach carefully describes the scene in which Odysseus has returned home in disguise after his long journey. He is recognized for his true self by a scar on his leg, and Homer gives us great detail about that scar—how it was got, where it is, etc.—as it plays its pivotal role in the plot.

That is Homer in a nutshell, overflowing with detail, carefully crafting images in our mind’s eye, little left out for us, all with the purpose (Auerbach says) of giving us a profound sense of awe, and therefore pleasure. This is a pagan style, rich in sensory data and concerned with worldly delight.

Homer is to be contrasted with the Biblical style—a Dragnet-style, “Just the facts, ma’am,” and not even all of the facts we want to know. We get the bare bones of the story, just enough information to understand the flow of events, but not enough to become cognizant of all that is going on in the story.

Auerbach’s example of this is one I never forget and often use. You should play along. Think about Abraham and Isaac in Genesis. We know that Isaac is Abraham’s son, that God has commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a test of his faith, that Isaac seems to go along willingly. But how old is Isaac? Before you go back to the text to check, I want you to see if you can recall the answer by memory. What does Isaac look like in your memory? How old is he?

Of course, I’m pulling one over on you. Genesis doesn’t tell us Isaac’s age at the time of Abraham’s trial. We tend to think of him as young, perhaps pre-adolescent, seemingly innocent and only wanting to please his father. But that’s not the only possibility.

In the middle ages, theologians largely believed that Isaac was thirty-three when Abraham took him to be sacrificed. An adult! One who might have moved out of his parents’ home! Who might have his own children! My age, in fact.

Does an adult Isaac willingly going along with Abraham seem strange to you? For the medieval theologians, it was strange to think that he was only a boy. Why? Because they believed that Jesus was thirty-three at the time of his crucifixion; they were searching for parallels that showed continuity between the Old Testament and the New.

What Auerbach wants to show us here is that the Bible often, seemingly purposefully, leaves out details from the story, even potentially important ones for the story’s meaning. The literary effect could not be farther from the Homeric one. Where Homer fills in all the details, forcing the reader to step back and spectate in awe, the Bible forces the reader to fill in the blanks, engaging with the story. The reader of scripture must make choices to resolve ambiguities in the text, must interpret, must participate.

It is commonly argued that the gospels are written in both style and substance in such a way as to force the reader to ask and answer the same question as everyone else in the narrative: who do you believe Jesus is? But Auerbach takes this idea even further—the very style of the entire scriptures (though he was more focused perhaps on the Old Testament) does not allow us to stand idly by and watch—we must struggle with the text (and here Jacob wrestling with God comes to mind quite readily) to make it mean something. We must invest ourselves in it and synthesize it with ourselves for the text to come alive. The sparsity of detail naturally pulls us in to do just this, even if you don’t recognize it’s happening.

Point One: Ambiguity forces us to engage; we cannot simply absorb.

For the next post in this series, click here.

Paganism in Christianity, Part II

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In my earlier post on this subject, I talked about my distaste for military imagery in Christian thought and theology. This time, I’d like to talk about something I think is even more dangerous—the quid-pro-quo.

We all know what the phrase means (from Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs if from nowhere else): “something for something”, a bargain, an exchange—perhaps especially driven by need more than desire.

The quid-pro-quo formed a foundational aspect of Greco-Roman religion. Given that the gods could be cruel and easily took offense at the unintentional misdeeds of humans, it seems that one might wish to avoid the attention of the gods to the extent possible. Similar to me and cats, for the same reasons.

On the other hand, the Greco-Roman pagans did seek otherworldly assistance in their lives. But, they asked and prayed for things more worldly than we might think of as proper (in Christianity). They wanted good harvests, protection from their enemies (or curses upon them, as many ritual objects attest), the love of someone they desired. Far less time was spent praying for things that would be considered “spiritual” or that concerned cosmic redemption or punishment.

There were many gods to ask favors of as well. There were the Olympian gods, the most powerful of the supernatural beings, but there were also daemones (not to be confused with demons—the daimones or daemones were nature spirits and tutelary spirits, who could be good, evil, or somewhat more ambiguous), genii loci (the spirits of places that had influence over that place) and many other beings of all manner of rank who were believed to have the power to effectuate change in the visible world.

For the ancient Romans (and probably also the Greeks, but I am somewhat less familiar with their religious practices—though fascinating), one simply did not approach a supernatural being empty-handed. Something must be given for something asked, a quid-pro-quo. And so sacrifices were made to the gods when a request was made of them. This could be something personal—an oath or vow made to a god if a request was granted—but animal sacrifice was common and human sacrifice, though quite rare, was not unheard of.

While we may have left animal and human sacrifices behind us, we to a large extent not abandoned the paradigm of the quid-pro-quo when dealing with the divine. This concept runs deeper than the place in prayer we’ve all been: “God if you do X for me, I promise I’ll never do X again,” or “God if X happens, I promise I’ll go to church more.” Other theologians have popularly described this as the “vending machine-God” approach.

It is comforting because it gives us some illusion of control, some ability to predict the movement of the divine so long as we hold up our end of the bargain. And yet, when we repeatedly find that that’s not how God works, our faith is shaken because it stands of the weakest of foundations.

This approach is also tied into the gospel of wealth movement: “If I’m a good Christian, God will make me wealthy and well-liked and powerful and important.” This empty theology has become concerningly popular and widespread in recent decades. Keep in mind, though, that this is only part of the reason the doctrine is so seductive; the inverse can also be a source of comfort from reality: “If I am rich and well-liked and powerful, I must be godly.” Dangerous stuff, that.

But this is not a post about the gospel of wealth. It’s about a more insidious type of quid-pro-quo—the spiritual bargain.

E. Stanley Jones, in his book form the early 20th century called The Christ of the Mount, tells us that we’ve been doing things the wrong way in Christianity  because we mistakenly believe that the point of Christianity is to “get into heaven.” For Jones, the point is “to become perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect,” but for now let’s focus on moving away from the wrong way rather than finding the right one.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Pascal’s Wager, named for apologist and philosopher Blaise Pascal. It goes like this: God is either real or not. In choosing how to live, we are told that God wants us to do certain things but not others, and that there are eternal rewards for those who follow God’s desires and eternal punishments for those who do not—again, if God is real. Without knowing for sure whether God is real or not (is the universe bluffing?), we must bet on whether we believe God is real. There are four possibilities then, based upon our bet and whether God is real. One, God is real and we believed and acted like God is real, so we get to go to heaven. Two, God is real and we ignored God and so we have to go to hell. Three, God is not real but we have lived our lives as though God is real, perhaps sacrificing some worldly pleasures and desires we might otherwise have enjoyed. Four, God is not real and we do not act as if God is real, nothing lost but nothing gained.

For Pascal, the answer to such a quandary is simple—one ought to act like the Christian God is real and try to obey God and be holy. If you’re wrong, your loss is minimal compared to God being real and not trying to obey, falling into perdition. It’s a betting man’s approach to faith, based upon probabilities, severity of the various possible outcomes, and the quid-pro-quo of what each possibility might net compared to the cost of the bet.

Pascal’s bet exemplifies the cynical quid-pro-quo approach to spirituality: “Don’t be faithful because of who God is; be faithful because it’s the fastest ticket to Heaven-town.” If this is the kind of faith that we have, it is no faith at all and we only deceive ourselves that we are seeking relationship with God.

The only way to avoid the illusion of the divine quid-pro-quo is to adopt an attitude of love—the kind of selfless love that we call agape—for God. It is a love that does not expect something in return, that does is not contingent upon a particular situation, that will not be rescinded when the unfortunate comes to pass.

Our God has negated the quid-pro-quo altogether. The work of Jesus Christ cleared the way to salvation and eternal life, not the bargaining or righteousness of man. We are called to sanctify ourselves to be sure, to pursue holiness and to become Christ-like. But this has been separated from salvation freely given by grace without cost. Our desire to be sanctified must come from our love for God, for by the time we make such a decision or have such a desire, God has long since given us the gift of life eternal. There can be no quid-pro-quo; the gifts have been poured upon us until our cups runneth over. We ought to act like it.

The Girl with the Former Tattoo

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I encounter her waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store, where our humanity is laid bare by the frustration of waiting and other people and uncomfortable awareness of self.

Like our very humanity, her shoulders are bare. Above her left shoulder-blade, there is a mottled patch of skin, scar tissue telling the tale of her life. The pattern it makes is undeniable: a large cross. The ink is long gone, but the shape of it remains impressed upon her.

Immediately, I am filled with curiosity, which I imagine (and hope) is mixed with compassion. The very idea of it tells the story in my mind’s eye, unfolding in short vignettes and clips formed of my own reverie.

This woman once held such profound faith that she elected to suffer for it, even with a cross. She displayed her faithfulness proudly, perhaps defiantly, a badge of honor, the tattoo an external reflection of the inner truth that her faith could not be separated from her. But the analogy is incomplete, for the tattoo can be, and has been, removed.

Not having a tattoo myself, I understand the pain it costs only by resemblance and conjecture. I know enough to know that it is not a small thing. Thousands of pin pricks to pierce the skin and deposit pigment, blood welling up from below. But the pain of removing a tattoo—I later learn—is worse.

She spent hours under a laser over many weeks, the spear of light heating the ink until it began to break down. Most report the pain as far greater than that of getting the tattoo in the first place. Despite this, the motley skin on her shoulder can only mean one thing: something happened so that keeping the tattoo of a cross became more painful to her than searing it off.

In my mind I play through many scenarios—the death of a loved one, rejection or harsh treatment by fellow believers, interpretation of scripture that clashed head-on with what she had been told was acceptable, the hypocrisy of the faithful or some other unfortunate event that left her broken. It seems to me that the hurt must be deeply personal to have moved her to bear the physical pain of tattoo removal.

As I imagine her life and her pain—too afraid (or, as I’d prefer to think, too polite) to ask her about it—I begin to wonder how much we Christians, acting in our capacity as professing Christians, do to hurt others and turn them away from the church. Or worse, from Christ.

We, collectively as Christians, regardless of denomination, do a poor job of admitting our faults, holding back our judgments and, as John Wesley warned us, refraining from doing harm. It is true that some of the pain and offense results from willing misconception that the church is God, but we could always be clearer that we have our own failings and are no better than anyone else. As important, how do we order our lives and our witness to do no harm, to avoid misrepresenting Christ to the world?

Reading Matthew 18:15-17 as a Joke.

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The passage Matthew 18:15-17, where Jesus talks about how to treat believers who continue to sin, is often pointed to as permission to “speak authority into the lives of others” or to cast out particular members of a church. But is Jesus, who generally seems to hate rigid systems, really giving us legal procedure for excommunication in this passage, or is something else going on?

The passage reads as follows:

15 “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother.

16 “But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed.

17 “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

I think that the last phrase, “let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” should be thought of as something of a punchline of sorts. By way of explanation, let’s look at how Jesus treats a tax collector. In Luke 19, Jesus (as my Bible titles it) “Brings Salvation to Zaccheus’s home.”[1]

In that passage, Jesus elects to stay with Zaccheus, a tax collector. Luke 19:5. This is phrased as a statement rather than a request. We are even told that the crowd “began to grumble, saying, ‘He has gone to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.’” Luke 19:7. Note that the crowd wants to condemn, while Jesus wants to demonstrate compassion.

The presence of Jesus, as it is wont to do, brings about a transformation in Zaccheus, who promises to right his wrongs. Luke 19:8. Then, Jesus tells him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” Luke 19-9-10.

This takes us back to Matthew. Based on Jesus’ treatment of Zaccheus, I would suggest a paraphrase of Matthew 18:15-17 that does something like this:

“Jesus said, ‘If a believer in your midst is a sinner, go and help him not to sin. If you win him over, he wasn’t an intentional sinner. If he continues to sin, take some other people to talk to him again, to make sure that it’s clear what was said. If he still continues to sin, he might be a true sinner, and you need to put him before the church. If even after being put before the church he continues to sin, he might be a really bad sinner, so you should continue to do the best you can to love him like I’ve been telling you to do this whole time!’”[2]

Comedian Bo Burnham says, “For me, if you distill comedy down, it is surprise and the unexpected. That has to be it on its most base level, in any form.” I think many professional comics would agree, and that’s exactly what Jesus is playing off of here—he knows that (as we see in the Luke passage) the crowd expects condemnation. He twists that expectation with an exhortation to compassion, and there is a hopeful humor to be found there.

It is important to note that Matthew 18:15-17 is followed by the Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor (Matthew 18:21-35), which Jesus begins by warning Peter not to forgive just seven times, but “seventy times seven” times. Matthew 18:22. Keep in mind that seven is a number of Biblical completeness.

In the parable, Jesus contrasts the righteousness of one who will forgive an insurmountable debt with one who, having been forgiven, will not himself forgive a (relatively speaking, of course) trifling debt. The passage concludes with a stern warning from Jesus: “My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart.”

If we take the “traditional” approach of interpreting Matthew 18:15-17 as the proper procedure to earn the “right” to condemn someone and to cast them out, the Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor is a strange passage to follow. But if we believe that the ultimate point of Matthew 18:15-17 is to tell us not to condemn but to love (and I think it’s fair to say that Jesus’ words in the scriptures never give us permission to condemn), then there is no apparent conflict between the two passages.

Some caveats are probably due here. I am not asserting that we should not oppose sin and help others to defeat their own sin, although how we do that is worth a (very) complex discussion at another time. Instead, I’m trying to communicate through the above interpretation that Jesus wants us to be compassionate to others above all else, and that we are not to condemn.

As important, I want to affirm that there is a difference between distancing yourself from some people and casting them out with condemnation. There will be people in all of our lives who, for many different reasons, it is not beneficial for us to associate with. This could be about temptation, or the abusive behavior or one of many other difficult social and psychological issues. If a destructive person does not want to change, you don’t need to put yourself in that person’s path to be left in his wake. But, as much as you can, as often as you can, in every way that you can, you ought to be compassionate.

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[1] Admittedly, there is a disconnect in jumping from one Gospel to another for explanation here, and there are certainly historical and literary criticisms to be made for my doing so. In one sense, such criticism is lessened if we are to believe Q theory as the source of both Matthew and Luke. For my part, I’m going to take a more Barthian and Tillichian approach and assert that we should use the person of Christ (as the manifest Word of God) as the lens through which all scripture is interpreted. I assume that both passages are generally reliable relations of actual events meant to be taken seriously (even while claiming one is a joke—the best jokes educate and delight).

[2] I am tempted to add expletives for effect to the last line of the paraphrase (mostly because it makes it funnier to me), but I think you get the point as it is.