Scripture

A Wedding Homily

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I recently had the great honor of being asked by my sister to perform her wedding ceremony. I’m not an ordained clergyperson, but that’s the sort of request that one just does not deny, and I remain so moved to have been asked.

At about the time this post goes live, the ceremony will be underway and, depending upon the timing, you might be reading this just about the same time that I’m saying these words to the gathered witnesses. Regardless of when you read them, here are the words I will speak, am speaking or have spoken for her homily:

“A few minutes ago, you heard a reading from 1 Corinthians 13. It’s a verse that’s often selected for weddings, being about love and all, but it’s worth considering what’s going on in the whole passage.

The passage begins with ‘If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.’

The scriptures here tell us that love must be the foundation of meaningful action; all action not based in love is ultimately fruitless and forgettable. Your successes do not matter; your failures do not matter; but your love, your love matters. Why?

Because the purpose and foundation of existence itself is relationship with God, with one another, and Creation. So important is this to our Creator that 1 John 4:7 and 8 tell us that ‘Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God…God is love.’

Jesus often uses the metaphor of marriage to describe the relationship between the church—as the body of believers—and the divine. The marriage relationship, the facing of life together where two people put their partner’s needs before their own, that’s the closest human relationship that exists to the relationship that God seeks with each of us.

The passage in Corinthians ends, ‘And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’ Faith, hope and love are so closely bound together as to be almost inseparable. Hope is the joy and peace stretching into the boundless future that comes from faith in the absolute love of another for us. This is the message of the gospel, but it’s also the foundation of marriage. A successful marriage must be founded upon those three: faith, hope and love.

That’s much easier said than done. Marriage is not always easy; it’s the careful fusion that makes two one but also retains and respects the individuality of both members. Here’s the paradox: you two love one another because of who you individually are, but your marriage is a promise to so bind yourselves together that you, for many purposes, are one. Sometimes, there will be a struggle between your own individuality and the needs or best interests of the marriage. That’s where you’ll need faith, hope, and love.

When I talked about the three above, I hope that I made it clear that love is the most important of the three—both faith and hope rely upon love to work. Fortunately, this same passage in Corinthians gives us something of a crib sheet if we’re wondering what that word “love” means.

You see, we use the word ‘love’ to mean a number of different things: I love my sister and I love my wife and I love chocolate, but none of those loves is the same as the others. This isn’t confined to the English language—the original Greek of the New Testament has, according to C.S. Lewis’s reading, four different types of love—conveniently, Greek actually uses different words for those different types of love.

Lewis tells us about storge, the love between people that comes from empathy and familiarity, the kind of love between parents and children. Then there’s philia, the brotherly love that people who share common values or interests. There’s eros, the romantic love of desire. Most important, there’s agape, the kind of self-sacrificial love that God demonstrates for us in the person of Jesus Christ.

In a marriage, you will have storge, you will have philia, and you will have eros. Those things are the rightful and righteous fruits of a marriage to be enjoyed, but they are not sufficient to keep a marriage solid. Only agape can do that.

Fortunately, 1 Corinthians gives us a map of agape. That was the description of love you heard earlier in this service. I won’t repeat it now—you’ve heard it many times before—but I do want to point something out. The things that define love in those passages, they are not feelings, they are not descriptions of conditions, and they don’t just occur. Those things that define love in the passage—patience, kindness, not boasting, humility, truthfulness, perseverance—those things are choices.

And that’s what your marriage vows are really about, about the promise between the two of you to continually choose agape, to choose to love one another and to protect and build your relationship, and not just when it’s easy. Especially when it’s not easy.

But remember that you are not alone. The people here before you have given their word that they will be there to help you when choosing love is difficult. And sometimes it will be.

It is my prayer for you that, through the continuous choice to love one another with that divine and unconditional love you will promise to one another in just a moment, the joy and peace that comes from hope, faith and love will be yours always, based in this moment you are about to share and the words you are about to say.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

The Name of God as an Answer to Existential Questions

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In Exodus 3:14, God tells Moses God’s name. In translation, this is usually written out as “I AM” or “I AM THAT I AM” or “I AM WHO I AM.” A while back, I started to think about the meaning of that and found myself amazed.

God’s name is not meant to be merely impressive title, nor is it simply something that sounds good. It is certainly not simply a logical theorem—such would not need to be spoken, because it is undeniable that a being is its being.

When God tells us that God’s name is “I AM,” God is giving us truth, giving us answers to questions we may not even have thought to ask (but, probably, at some time, have crossed our minds, however briefly).

Here are two things (certainly not an exhaustive list) that God’s name tells us:

The Impassibility of God

If we read God’s name as “I AM WHO I AM,” we are given a theological argument about God’s identity. The statement declares, or at least very strongly implies, God’s self-sufficiency and sovereignty. More important, it implies God’s impassibility. The theological term “impassibility” means that God’s person cannot be involuntarily changed by any event, force or influence outside of God’s self. In other words, God is perfectly according to God’s will and no other force in existence could make God be anything other than what God intends to be.

There is a caveat, though. Some theologians want to use God’s impassibility to argue that God does not have feelings in any sense that a human could understand, or that God could never be moved by something outside God’s self. I have tried to word the paragraph above to carefully avoid such an assertion. Yes, God cannot be moved by anything outside God’s self against God’s will, but to say that God could not allow God’s self to be moved by God’s own will to be vulnerable to an outside influence would logically negate the very idea of impassibility, because a force outside of God, some more law of existence that stands above God even, would be dictating God’s “impassibility,” and such an attribute must come from ontology to be logically consistent.

Rethink some of the things that God has done with and for humanity in light of this. When Abraham pleads with God for Sodom and Gomorrah, God must be making a choice to be persuadable in the first place. Whether this story should be read as historical fact or allegory does not matter—the point is that God willingly condescends to be in a responsive relationship with humanity. God is not distant and uncaring; God is personal and deeply involved in the experience of human existence. Think also of God choosing to suffer in the person of Jesus. An impassible God need never suffer—emotionally or physically—and yet the justice of our God is so great that God shows us that God will not allow any misfortune to befall us that God will not willingly suffer alongside us.

The Origin and Existence of God and Creation

“I AM.” The original Hebrew likely did not contain a period at the end of the statement, but it reads best, I think as “I AM [full stop].”

Have you ever thought to yourself, “If God created everything, where did God come from?” Or, perhaps, if you are not inclined to faith, “What happened before the universe started? What was before before?”

It is a question unanswerable in any meaningful way by the human mind. Two major mathematical solutions have been presented. In the first, something just is without reference to any timescale—at certain dimensions of scale time becomes irrelevant and it possible that, in some quantum physics calculations for example, the same result is generated regardless of the directionality of time (past to future versus future to past). The second major mathematical solution is an infinity of universes—one universe is generated by some event in a preceding universe and this stretches backward and forward in time infinitely. To a certain extent the two answers are really the same: existence just is.

Can we really do anything meaningful with either of those interpretations? No. The human mind is incapable of grasping the infinite in any truly tangible way and the attempt to do so is often met with nothing short of existential terror.

Before humans had any concept of quantum mechanics or advanced mathematics dealing with infinite solution sets, God gave us the answer to the primordial question. It only took God two words to explain in the entirety: “I AM.” God is, uncreated, eternal, without first cause. While we humans can say those sorts of words and understand in principle their meaning, we are, perhaps forever, incapable of actually understanding what they mean in their fullness. We cannot grok them.

We get a similar answer from God at the end of the Book of Job (perhaps my favorite in the Old Testament)—we are incapable of understanding all of existence, and this forces us to choose to either have faith in the creator God or not.

The End of Violence, Part IV: An Argument

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For the previous post in this series, click here.

As promised, I’m going to humbly offer here my own views as to the appropriate relationship between the Christian and violence. The best way to begin, I think, is to start with a few statements based upon the previous posts in this series (or from scripture not discussed) and which all readers could (I hope) agree upon. Following these statements are some questions raised by the previous analysis that represent issues that must be resolved.

First: When it has a chance of success, a non-violent approach is morally superior to a violent approach.

Second: Jesus never explicitly commands his followers not to do violence.

Third: Jesus wants us to love even our enemies.

Q: If some violence is acceptable, when and how much?

 Q: Does loving our enemies (or our friends, for that matter) necessarily mean punishing those who commit injustice?

Q: How do we resolve the tension that results when we are called to love both those who would do harm and those they target as victims?

The three statements and three questions give us a good foundation to build upon before we delve into the gray area. Here’s how we begin:

Precept 1: The Christian should, to the extent possible, avoid using violence.

Violence solves problems, yes, but it typically creates more problems than it solves. Thus, Matthew 26:52, “They who take the sword will perish by the sword.”

As a student of Renaissance history, I often think of the Wars of the Roses or the vendettas fought amongst the Italian nobility during the Quattrocento. One act of violence creates a need to “get justice” or “get even” or “punish wrongdoers.” We are left with a century of bloody conflicts, each subsequent engagement arising out of those fought before it. I’m not sure that any other century is different.

Machiavelli, writing about that time, offers the pragmatic advice in The Prince that, when one moves against one’s enemies, one ought to destroy every remnant, every vestige of the enemy and his friends and relations so that none is left to seek reprisal. In the struggle for power, as was the status quo in Machiavelli’s Italy, this is sound advice. But it also reflects the extremity to which violence must be used to prevent further violence.

We ought to realize that violence, even if used for just purposes, is a result of the fallenness of humanity. Were everyone to love his neighbor as himself, there would be no need for violence. Thus, while an individual act of violence may not be a particular sin, the use of violence is always the participation in the corporate sin of humanity. Because of this, it must be used only as a last resort and should be employed only with a since of sorrow that a better outcome could not be achieved.

Precept 2: Violence should only be used to prevent or stop violent injustice against a person, not after the fact. The need for violence must be immediate.

If there’s time to think of alternative solutions, there’s time to seek a non-violent resolution to a problem. On the other hand, if immediate action is required, however, the time for seeking de-escalation of the conflict has been lost. This precept helps us to comply with Precept 1.

Let’s also think of the collateral consequences here. One of the questions posed above was how we can balance loving victims and wrongdoers. When immediate action is not necessary, we can attempt to work on loving solutions for both parties. Yes, this may be punishment for a wrongdoer, but I leave that an open question for another series of posts. When immediate action is necessary to preserve life and limb, it seems just to intervene against the wrongdoer to protect the innocent. Not our first choice given the requirement to love even our enemies, but the choice to do something non-violent has been taken from us when immediate responsive violence becomes necessary.

This also means that we do not use violence to punish wrongdoers when there is no immediate threat. Violent punishment has largely been shown to be ineffective at deterring future offense (look at 18th Century England, where the death penalty was handed out like it was about to be outlawed). More important, punishment is more about the punisher and not the punishee. When we seek violent retribution for wrongs done to us or others, we are willingly participating in the fallenness that perpetuates violence in the world. “Vengeance is mine…sayeth the Lord” (Deuteronomy 32:35, Romans 12:19). Violence inflicted as punishment cannot restore to wholeness the party injured by a crime. Because only God is truly just, we ought to leave the meting out of retributive punishment to God. I’m not saying we should never punish wrongdoers; however, violently punishing them is nothing but retribution.

This also means that violence should not be employed to protect property—only people. I’d like to avoid (for now) debates about Jesus’ views on personal property and ownership. Without going into that, I think that we can agree that Jesus’ teachings and life made clear that he valued human life over any property rights he believes in (whatever those may be).

In Texas, where I live, the law explicitly allows justified use of force for the protection of property in specific circumstances. But the law and morality should not be confused—they are separate entities with separate goals and concerns, only sometimes aligned.

Precept 3: Only the necessary amount of violence ought to be used.

To the extent that we can avoid doing more harm than necessary, we should. This is an aspect of loving our enemies. Deadly force ought not to be used if less-than-deadly force could reasonably suffice. The amount of violence we use ought to be scaled to the injustice or violence we seek to prevent. This, perhaps, is what we should take away from Jesus’ statement about turning the other cheek—violence is not the answer to offense, even if violent, that does not really threaten life or limb.

I need to hedge and be absolutely clear that, while a solid precept from a philosophical/theological standpoint, strict adherence to this precept is extremely difficult in practice. When we apply force—especially deadly force—against another person, we have little surety in the ultimate results of the force. There’s plenty of second-guessing to be done in the aftermath of a violent engagement (Would fewer shots fired have been sufficient? Could I have done something differently to stop the attacker and injure him less?), but split-second decisions must be made in a fight and survival is on the line, so the objectively best choices may not be made in the moment.

I recently heard someone say, “if the bad guy is worth shooting once, he’s worth shooting five times.” This is tactically correct—while the human body is a frail thing and a single wound from a firearm may kill a person in a relatively short amount of time, the body is also highly resistant over the short term and a single shot from a weapon the likes of which a civilian would be wielding is unlikely to immediately physically stop the attacker (though it might psychologically). Since the goal of morally-applied violence is to stop the attacker as soon as possible, a high amount of force quickly applied may be necessary, making it less likely that the attacker will survive.

As another complicating factor, applying a lesser degree of force is often accompanied by a greater degree of risk of injury to ourselves. Having studied techniques of unarmed combat, I know (technically) how to defend and disarm someone with a knife. But the same training has made clear that, when fighting a person with a knife, you will get cut, and even expert fighters (which I do not claim to be) can be killed in a knife-fight because of bad luck. If knives come out and I have reasonable tactical distance from the threat, I’d rather be behind a gun. I’m not a big guy by any means, and there are plenty of people in this world with whom I’d prefer not to go toe-to-toe unless forced and, if I’ve decided that violence is morally justified, I’m going to fight to win. A disparity in force with my opponent means the stakes of the violence may be raised higher than I would have voluntarily raised them and I must respond in kind.

Where we can, though, we ought to mitigate the results of our violence to the extent possible. After the threat is over, we ought to provide all the medical attention we can to the injured parties—including and perhaps especially any wounded attacker(s). Again, this is a matter of loving our neighbors.

Precept 4: A Christian who is prepared to do violence must make efforts in the world to prevent the necessity of violence.

If, as I do, you stand willing to do violence to other human beings to protect the innocent, you must recognize some responsibility for participation in culture and human nature that permits violence. Recognizing that, you ought to make efforts to proactively prevent the causes of violence where possible.

By this, I mean actively trying to make the world a better place. Of course, the Christian is called to this anyhow; we are called to show mercy and love justice, so we ought to (non-violently) pursue justice for the oppressed where we can, and we ought to focus on giving wrongdoers the chance to atone and reintegrate into society rather than focusing on punishing them.

This means showing kindness and respect to others—especially those with who you disagree, helping the poor to escape poverty, helping to improve unjust systems and institutions, and showing the love of Christ to our neighbors.

The person willing to do violence ought not to be quick of temper and ought to be ready to forgive offenses—otherwise our readiness to do violence turns to definitely destructive and sinful ends. We ought to hope that we never have to do violence to another person, even if we devote time, talent and money to preparing for the possibility. We must recognize that the proper response to violence is not always more violence.

If we are prepared to do violence, we Christians must be more prepared to refrain from doing violence.

Conclusion

I’d like to summarize my argument thus: We ought to view violence itself as an evil, but one that may be occasionally be used to prevent greater evil. While Christ does not explicitly command us not to do violence, it is clear that love ought to prevail wherever it can. Violence should be employed only reluctantly and with sorrow for the alternative resolutions that have been lost, even if they have been lost through the will of someone other than ourselves. Most of all, we ought to do everything that we can to prevent violence, both in our immediate situation and in the world at large.

I think I probably have one more post on this topic to do, to clean up a few loose ends and address a few things that I realize I’ve left out (what about the Ten Commandments!). More to come.

 

 

 

The End of Violence, Part III: Re-examining Jesus and Violence

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For the previous post in this series, click here.

To be fair, there are several arguments (other than the one about the swords) given for the position that Jesus advocated for non-violence where possible but never took the position that violence was categorically impermissible.

An article on RealClearReligion.com by Jeffrey Mann organizes some of these arguments, so I’m going to make reference to it (from April 30th, 2014, available at: http://www.realclearreligion.org/articles/2014/04/30/the_myth_of_a_non-violent_jesus.html).

Mann makes a few good arguments, I think. In the original Greek, the word used in Jesus’ statement about turning the other cheek refers to an open-handed strike—an act of humiliation rather than of serious threat. For Mann, the statement does not preclude a permission to defend oneself. Mann also argues that the example of Jesus going to his death without fighting against it should not be viewed as the example for all people in all scenarios.

I want to agree with the second argument, but I have to acknowledge that we get into tricky territory when we start to say “follow Jesus in this, but not in this.” That difficulty, however, is not sufficient to say that the argument itself is incorrect.

Mann also brings up the point that, when we’re talking about the use of violence to protect others, there is a natural tension between loving the person against whom we might use violence and loving those who we seek to protect. I want to acknowledge that, but I want to argue against his statement (drawn from C.S. Lewis) that failing to punish criminals is a failure to love our neighbors. Punishment occurs when there is no immediate threat; that is a very different thing than using violence to stop an immediate danger to life and limb. I’ll talk about my views on justice in the legal system in other posts, but suffice to say for now that I believe that our punishment of criminals is more about us than them, and I stand against the death penalty as a punishment.

Mann asks the question, “Should we simply forgive them [our enemies] when they do awful things? This clearly cannot be what Jesus intended.” And yet, Jesus forgives those who persecute and kill him. I think that Jesus would have us attempt to love both victim and offender—to help restore the victim to wholeness (to the extent that we can) and help the offender to not offend again. We are called, ultimately, not to judgment but to healing. Unfortunately, people do not always give us the option to help them and sometimes wholeheartedly resist our attempts to love them.

There is also the passage in which Jesus takes a whip to the moneylenders in the temple. (John 2:15). It’s hard to call that a non-violent event; it’s even premeditated considering that we’re told that Jesus fashions the whip himself. On the other hand, the other Gospels make no mention of a whip in the same event, the word for “drove” is the same root as when Jesus “drives” demons out of the possessed and, after all, John is the most metaphorical and least literal of the Gospels.

Origen, the only church father to have commented on this passage in the first three centuries of the Church, reads it in purely a spiritual rather than a literal light. And, nowhere is it stated that Jesus even swings the whip at people, much less that he strikes anyone. For a great commentary on John 2:15, see “Jesus, the Whip, and Justifying Violence” by Nathan W. O-Halloran, SJ on The Jesuit Post blog on Patheos.com (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thejesuitpost/2015/03/jesus-the-whip-and-justifying-violence/).

Where I strongly disagree with Mann is in his use of the Old Testament scriptures as an argument for the permissibility of violence. I’m sure, dear Reader, that you have read my posts on Ambiguity in Scripture and therefore already know my thoughts on this matter. I just don’t think that God did authorize the slaughtering of innocents for the benefit of Israel. I have less trouble with the idea of defensive actions fought by the Isrealites, but the question of whether such behavior is acceptable under Jesus’ New Covenant stands.

Before I leave Mr. Mann aside, I do want to accentuate his excellent point about the theological danger of heaping judgment upon professional or volunteer soldiers if one believes that Jesus would never tolerate any violence under any circumstance. Jesus also told us that “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Soldiers end up in often horrifying circumstances not of their own choosing, being asked to give all to do things that others won’t do so that those same others don’t have to.

The soldiers I know, especially those who have seen combat, do not want to kill people but are willing to do so to perform their duty and to protect their brothers and sisters in arms. They have a tremendous respect for the enemy who faces them in open combat. They have a conviction of belief that makes them ready to shed blood for what they hold dear. That is a powerful thing, and to be respected.

On a different note, let us also not forget that Jesus also has hard—and sometimes downright terrifying—statements as well. He tells us that he has “not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). His pronouncements about the fate of the wicked often seem to be uncompromising, and he is unafraid to speak of the way that the world will hate those who follow him. Some of this is likely intended to be metaphorical, to be sure, but we cannot simply write off the apocalyptic sayings of Jesus.

Maybe I’m simply not capable of unambiguously dealing with an issue of importance. Or maybe it’s that every issue of importance remains ambiguous to some degree or another. Either way, we again end up with great ambiguity with the question of violence.

In the last (probably) post in this short series (here), I’ll try to offer a nuanced and workable approach that, I hope, seeks to follow Jesus intentionally and to the fullest extent possible while also accounting for the exigencies and realities of a fallen world.

The End of Violence, Part II: Jesus and Just War

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For the previous post in this series, click here.

Jesus is pretty clear about violence, it seems. We are to “turn the other cheek” to “do unto others as we would have them do unto us” and to “love our neighbors.”

The “sheepdog” community (those tactically-trained civilians who see it as their duty to protect the unarmed masses from threats—we’ll talk more about this later) often likes to refer to Luke 22:36, where Jesus tells the disciples, “And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one…” as justification for the carrying of weapons and use of defensive force. This, I think, takes the comment out of context. Just two lines later (Luke 22:38), the disciples bring Jesus two swords and he says “that is enough.” Something non-literal, something symbolic is taking place here.

Some theologians point to the passage as Jesus ensuring that a prophecy is fulfilled, without any real intention that the disciples take up arms. Indeed, Jesus has up to this point defied the expectations of those awaiting the Messiah and avoided leading an armed rebellion against Roman overlords.

The authors of the New Bible Commentary: Revised Third Edition go even further, comparing the statement with previous times Jesus has sent the disciples out with nothing—especially not swords—and they had been provided for without fail. The statement “That is enough,” is Jesus ending a conversation the disciples have failed to understand rather than commenting on the number of swords he has been brought.

This jibes well with the events in the garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus rebukes Peter for cutting the ear off of one of the men who comes to arrest Jesus, healing the man and warning that “they who take the sword shall perish by the sword”—violence begets violence (Matthew 26:52).

The entire thrust of Jesus’ ministry makes clear that Jesus would have us love, and that his conception of love does not brook violence, right?

I think that we can definitely say that Jesus tells us (and experience bears this out) that violence is never a good solution to a problem. But does that mean that the Christian should never use violence as a last resort?

An example of the other side of the coin can be found in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, where the main character’s civics teacher, a military veteran himself, retorts to a student who complains that “violence never solves anything” to “tell that to the Carthaginians!” (During the Punic Wars the Romans completely devastated the Carthaginians so that they could never again be a competing world power against the Republic.)

It is true; violence does solve problems. A person you’ve beaten into submission or killed is no longer someone you have to argue with (at least not directly). But that doesn’t mean that violence is ever a good solution. Still, the exchange in Starship Troopers does, I think, lay bare the purpose of violence—to end a conflict that cannot be ended through peace, agreement and reason. Let’s explore whether that end can ever be legitimate in light of Jesus’ example.

I’d like to talk about Just War Theory or Doctrine. Just War Theory (within Christianity) has two primary concerns: when it is just to go to war (or to use violence) and how war must be ethically conducted (how violence may permissibly be used). In essence, this is the same inquiry I’m making in these posts, but I’d like to point out some places where I disagree with the commonly propounded aspects of the doctrine.

Both Augustine and Aquinas believed that war could only be justified by a proper governmental institution. To them, this was a safeguard that the aim of a war complied with the greater good of the people. Unfortunately, I think there is a greater tendency for violence authorized by the state to be unjust than to be just. In many cases, the desire for the highest degree of national security and the desire to act ethically are diametrically opposed. To make the state the arbiter of when war is just or not implies that the actor contributes to the righteousness of the thing at least as much as intention.

I also disagree with doctrines of Just War that assert that the punishment of a guilty party is sufficient cause for war (see below) or that a preventative war might be permissible as just. One of the conclusions that I’ll ultimately arrive at is that violence must be used only to prevent an immediate threat. A peremptory strike may obviate the possibility of attempts at peaceful resolutions.

Regarding the conduct of war, experience shows that no war is just in its conduct. Even in the best of circumstances and the noblest of intents, there is death, suffering, exploitation, humiliation, fear and a whole host of other undesirable ripple effects. These are things that may be necessary, but should never be called just. Can war be conducted ethically? Yes, particularly on the individual level. In the greater scheme of things, I’m not so sure.

On the subject of justice, my reading of history seems to indicate that most wars simply set things up for the reasoning of the next war. Consider the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the first World War and the second, with the Treaty of Versailles placing Germany in such a position as to allow the rise of one like Hitler. Shouldn’t a just war result in lasting peace? I’m not sure that there’s ever been such a thing.

That said, I don’t want to say that wars are never necessary or that they never accomplish some good. Certainly, Hitler and the Third Reich needed to be stopped because greater suffering would have resulted from their victory than from fighting them, steep as the cost was. Even less do I want to say that soldiers are evil, or even necessarily wrong, in the professional practice of violence. I hope that this will become clear as these posts continue.

So, point and counterpoint—Jesus tells us to avoid violence, but World War II gives us a seeming example of when violence proved necessary. And here’s the crux of this whole issue: we Christians want (or at least ought to want) to love as fully and deeply as Jesus did and to avoid violence, but sometimes violence seems like the best of alternatives. How do we resolve that discrepancy?

For the next post in this series, click here.

The End of Violence, Part I: Introduction

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This Saturday, I’m going to a combined defensive pistol and defensive carbine class. It’s not my first tactical shooting class, and I’ve in the past been an NRA Pistol Instructor and a Texas Concealed Handgun Instructor. Regardless, the occasion seems a good one on which to share some of my thoughts about violence given my Christian faith.

This is not an easy subject and, while I’ve spent a fair amount of time studying various martial arts—krav maga, karate, sport fencing, historical European martial arts (swordplay, knife/dagger fighting and wrestling, mostly) and shooting—I can’t say that I’ve ever been in a real fight. As such, I simply don’t have access to the experience of either the event itself or the psychological aftermath. I invite those with such experience to comment on this series; I’m going to attempt to restrict myself to the abstract and philosophical side of things.

As a person of staunchly moderate political leanings and progressive theological positions, I’ve had the rare opportunity to be considered both conservative and liberal. Coming from one of the most diverse counties in the U.S. and being a theatre person with friends holding a diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities, moving to College Station put me solidly in the liberal minority, at least among the studentry (I nevertheless had no problem finding likeminded people—Texas A&M is a big school, after all). Then, going to Austin for graduate school, I suddenly found myself to be considered a conservative by my peers.

When many of my fellow students of medieval and renaissance literature discovered that I had a license to carry a concealed handgun, they suddenly had this idea that I had fashioned myself a vigilante; that I wanted to live in the Old West and have a shootout at high-noon; that I had naively decided that combat would be fun (or evilly decided that hurting other people could be enjoyable). When I explained myself, however, I often found them surprised.

I told them that I preferred to carry—legally, and not all of the time (campus carry was illegal back then, of course)— a firearm that I had trained seriously with because that way I knew that I would walk away from a violent confrontation (or, I at least had a good chance of doing so) and that I could try every non-violent dispute resolution technique I could think of rather than responding out of fear. Indeed, as a Resident Advisor at Texas A&M I had been trained in conflict de-escalation, and Texas requires similar training as part of the concealed handgun license coursework. I am convinced that there is no more valuable skill that a person may learn—whosoever they may be—than how to communicate peaceably, respectfully, empathetically and constructively with others, even if that results only in an agreement to disagree. In the broader scheme, more training in the world in how to relate and talk to people with competing interests would save more lives than all the firearms training in the world.

That was certainly my experience the only time I ever came even remotely close to drawing my weapon when carrying it. This was, conveniently, in Austin. K and I were living in an apartment on the southwest side in a suburban area well away from campus. Nevertheless, at about 2:30 in the morning one night, some undergrads in the next building over were blaring music, drinking heavily, and throwing beer bottles into the parking lot from their third floor balcony.

Admittedly, I am a very grumpy person when disturbed from my slumber. I got up, put some clothes on, and holstered my pistol in concealed holster just in case. The first move was mine, and I immediately made a mistake: upon getting close to their building I yelled up at them to turn the music down, using no expletives but not in the friendliest of voices. Immediately, three men, all very inebriated, ran down the stairs to confront me. I stood my ground but tried to backtrack, apologizing for yelling and explaining that I wanted to come ask them to turn the music down and stop throwing beer bottles rather than just calling the police.

They responded with threats. I kept my hands up and palms toward them in a non-threatening manner (also because it happened to be a good defensive position, just in case), but I also made clear that I was not intimidated. I repeated my request matter-of-factly, despite their threats at my mention of the police (they were happy to remind me that they outnumbered me, despite the fact that they were all practically falling over on their own and any collaboration between them was certainly out of the question). In the end, it became clear, perhaps as it should have been from the beginning, that I could not reason with them. I cautiously removed myself from the situation, returned to my apartment and called the police. The next day, I reported the confrontation (although not my possession of a firearm, which was immaterial as it was never produced) to the apartment management. The offending tenants were evicted for threatening fellow residents—a clear violation of the Texas Apartment Association form lease.

I’d like to think that, despite my rough start, the confrontation went about as well as I could have hoped for—I walked away unscathed and without the regret and what-ifs what would have attached if I had injured someone else—justifiably or not.

But the point of this post is not to talk about me (although I hope the long introduction has provided some background to my own biases and experience). Let’s talk about weapons, violence and Christianity. We’ll start in the next post.

Skepticism in Faith, Part 2: Logical Skepticism

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For the first post in this series, click here.

We talked about a general skepticism of what we can know and how we know what we know in the last post. From this point on, we’re going to take the position that, despite our inability to be absolutely certain about our knowledge, we humans are capable of gaining “functional” knowledge of at least some things—that is, knowledge that approximates capital “T” Truth closely enough that we can reasonably rely on it.

Under that position, the next point of skepticism I’d like to discuss is a healthy skepticism about the ways in which we achieve knowledge and about claims made about the limits (or lack thereof) about certain paths to knowledge.

Let’s talk about science. I must first admit that science does an excellent job of telling us how the world works. However, I would argue that we must maintain skepticism about the extent of science’s ability to tell us about existence, particularly when it comes to the spiritual or metaphysical.

Reputable science requires implementation of the scientific method.[1] Under scientific method, the researcher/investigator must be able to create testable predictions about the object or process under study, a falsifiable hypothesis that may potentially be disproven through experimentation. If the predictions cannot be evaluated in a way that actually tests them, scientific method cannot be applied.

In a way, scientific method follows with a form of epistemological skepticism. Despite talk about the “laws” of physics and such, science doesn’t actually prove things in the way we laypersons tend to think of proof. Instead, science steadily disproves alternative explanations until we reach explanations that seem to be creeping ever closer to reality, but never absolute certainty (although close enough to treat it as such—by this point, Newton’s laws are as much a certainty as is possible).

Science, and particularly theoretical physics (which I greatly enjoy learning about so long as you don’t ask me to do any calculations), does often start with a theory based on observation and testing for refinement, but the testing of theories still involves attempts to disprove them to see whether they survive such analysis.

Here’s the issue where skepticism of the scientific method (as a general example of what I’m calling “logical” skepticism) comes in: some purport that science “proves” things that cannot be falsified by experimentation. Here’s a short list of examples:

(1) The existence of God. There’s not a scientifically testable hypothesis here. Yes, you can have a hypothesis, but it’s only as good as something like “I speculate that the color blue looks the same to me as it does to other people.”

(2) The materialist worldview. Again, this is a hypocritical application of science to try to “disprove” the existence of a spiritual reality; science isn’t equipped to answer those questions and those who use materialist to assert the absence of a spiritual reality have created an atheistic religion around science; a certain threshold of honesty has been crossed. To me, just the fact that there are very intelligent scientists who say “science made me a believer” and also very intelligent scientists who say “science made me an atheist” reveals the failing of science to definitively answer such questions.

(3) Near-death or mystical religious experiences. The problem here is in the name; it’s an experience, and thus not fully communicable between individuals. That said, the thrust of materialist science has been to “prove” that such experiences are actually the result of chemicals affecting the brain (ketamine for one) or electromagnetic effects on the same (the famous “God Helmet” experiment). Scientifically, those types of experiments are flawed in that they can demonstrate correlation but not causation (which takes us back to Mr. Hume, interestingly)—they can say, “we notice high levels of ketamine in the brains of people who later claim near-death experiences,” but they can’t logically claim that that means that ketamine was the cause. It could be possible that a near-death experience causes a release of ketamine in the brain; we just can’t know. Further, many experiments of this nature have been shown to be irreproducible, a key factor in scientific theory—a group of northern European scientists attempting to recreate the “God Helmet” study concluded that the results came from bad scientific method and the power of suggestion upon test subjects, not electromagnetic fields.

(4) Qualia. The “thingness” of subjective conscious experience. Both philosophy and science have thus far proved of little help in the analysis of experience. This is a natural consequence of the existential fact that we do not have the ability to share our own experiences with others and are therefore inhibited by the constraints of language from making deep comparisons of subjective experience between individuals.

Perhaps advances in science and scientific understanding will help us to answer some of the questions above with experiments I simply cannot conceive of with the knowledge available. However, I choose to believe that there is a damn good reason the most important questions are not readily answerable, and I think that that reason points to God’s purposefulness. I digress; we can discuss that another time.

It has become popular among certain scientists, like Steven Pinker, to create new fields of science starting from preconceived suppositions about the way the world works and using the new field to support those suppositions—“evolutionary psychology” is, I think, the foremost offender in this field. If you’re not familiar, evolutionary psychology seeks to explain modern human psychology as the result of greater or lesser degrees of evolution, in a similar way to the evolution of the human physiology. Now, admittedly, the theories of evolutionary psychologists could be absolutely true (though I strongly doubt it). The problem is that they sell the field as science. We don’t know enough about the psychology of ancient homo sapiens and his predecessors to do anything but speculate about the origin of our own psychologies, much less create a falsifiable hypothesis that can be tested—the conditions in which to test such theories have long expired. Interesting ideas to be sure, but it remains disingenuous to call them science.

It is only fair, as someone who believes in both science and faith and sees the relative boundaries for their application to certain questions, to apply the same sort of logical skepticism to faith.

At the end of the day, faith is the belief in certain answers to questions we cannot otherwise answer. That does not mean that we should look only to faith and tradition to answer every question about the world around us.

In the first of two points I want to make about logical skepticism in faith (with, of course, particular reference to Christianity), let’s talk about the Book of Genesis.

There is a trend among evangelical Christians, particularly in America, to believe in the literal truth of the Bible. Having read some of my other posts, you should know that I do not ascribe to, and passionately resist, such a belief as a necessary (or even beneficial) aspect of Christian faith.

Genesis gives us a creation story that, if read for allegory and metaphor, actually doesn’t clash much with what science tells us about the Big Bang, evolution and other well-supported theories about the physical origins of matter and life. Adam Hamilton has written some good work going through the ways in which faith and science coincide in Genesis; I believe that this is in his Making Sense of the Bible but I’m not sure as I write this post.

And yet, many Christians want to read Genesis as a literal explanation of Creation. Here’s where logical skepticism comes in:

First, let’s apply some logical skepticism to Biblical literalism in general. The doctrine asks us to believe that every book in the Bible was written directly by God through some form of automatic writing in the humans that penned it. I would not say that God could not do this (that would be foolish), but experience indicates that this doesn’t seem to be God’s usual modus operandi. Of course, using strict logic, this is not a question that can be definitively answered.

So, let’s consider some additional thoughts. When Jesus speaks, he usually tells stories and uses metaphor (see my earlier posts on Ambiguity in Scripture for an examination of how this makes his words more powerful and effective); rarely does he speak in a straightforward and plain manner—when he does, it is almost certainly a command to love.

If we want to result to hard literary criticism, we can note definite stylistic differences in books of the Bible, sometimes competing purposes or concerns (each of the Gospels recounts many of the same events but with different perspectives, motivations and goals) and even different underlying ideologies (like Platonism in Paul’s epistles). While God is certainly capable of using different approaches and different purposes between books, multiple authorial voices may be a better explanation.

Historically, we can point to the different periods of writing of the books of the Bible—Paul didn’t have access to the Gospels, for instance—and the long history of the compilation of the certain books that form what is accepted as the canonical Bible with the selection of certain texts over others, concerns about forgeries, dubious authorship and poor copies all along the way. We didn’t have the Bible as we commonly think of it until rather late in the 4th century.

One that needs little explanation: If we take Jesus’s statement that we ought to cut off body parts that cause us to sin literally, we ought to have a lot more amputees.

Again, none of this disproves the position of Biblical literalism and infallibility, but the evidence taken together makes it highly unlikely that such a position can stand under its own weight.

More important, because it applies not only to the question of Biblical literalism but to theology in general is that any theological system must maintain internal consistency; it should not contradict itself. When we take literally both the Old Testament events in which we are told that God endorses wholesale slaughter and Jesus’s command to love our neighbors as ourselves, we have problems in logical consistency.

I have heard many seemingly-commonly-held theological positions within Christianity that openly court such contradiction. Take “God cannot stand to be in the presence of sin”, for instance, a statement that is sometimes used to explain the need for Jesus’s redemption. The very statement is self-contradictory, because Jesus spends most of his time (all of it really) in the presence of sinners. If Jesus is wholly human and wholly God, the statement cannot stand. That it begins with “God cannot…” should be our first clue. We can’t rightly talk about “God could not”, though we might talk about “God does not” (or, correctly, “God does not seem to”).

To combine our skepticisms of both science and theology, when there is dispute between science and scripture, we ought to rely on the science to tell us how the world works and our faith to explain to us how existence works. I believe in evolution as the likeliest explanation for how humans became humans, but that doesn’t tell us why there are humans, or why, in a cosmic sense, there is life at all. I believe that we should incorporate new scientific understandings into our understanding of God—if God created the world in a certain way, why might God have done that? The synthesis of science and faith can do much more for us than vainly attempting to pit the two against one another.

But this brings me to the ultimate point: logical skepticism gives us some intellectual honesty. The tendency to question whether certain evidences prove something (much less how they prove it) protects us from logical fallacies.

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[1] There are some competing theories of scientific methods, such as the “anything goes” approach espoused by Karl Feyerabend, but these I think are sufficiently held to be “out in left field” by the scientific community at large to be largely discounted.

Skepticism in Faith, Part I: Epistemological Skepticism

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I’ve said before, and will likely say many times again, I believe that a skeptical approach is essential to true faith, as it causes us to test ourselves and our beliefs. In this series of indeterminate length, I want to look at a few types of skepticism and why they are helpful to us. We start with epistemological skepticism.

If you haven’t studied formal philosophy (and why would you; you want to have a job, right?), epistemological skepticism is a pretentious way to say doubt (skepticism) about human knowledge (the study of which is called epistemology). I am of the opinion that is highly unlikely (perhaps impossible given the limits of our understanding) that humans have perfect knowledge of any aspect of reality.

Let me borrow an example from eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume. Let’s say you have a billiards table and balls on the table. When you shoot pool, you rely on the expectation that the angle and speed at which the cue ball hits your target ball will determine the direction and speed of that target; this is simply vector physics.

But think about that exchange for a minute. Why do you believe that hitting the target ball with the cue ball—or hitting the cue ball with the pool cue for that matter—will result in the struck object moving? Because every time you have done it before, that’s how it’s worked. In fact, every time you’ve applied force to any object in the physical world, it has reacted in relation to the intensity and direction of that force.

Now ask yourself whether that experience proves the relevant laws of physics. If your answer is “yes,” you’re unfortunately wrong. What you have is a one-hundred percent correlation between the cue ball striking the target ball and the target ball moving in a specific way. Correlation is not causation. You cannot prove that the balls might not do something different the next time they are struck, or that it is steady coincidence that they have moved in the way that they have.

Now, on the one hand, this is an argument ad absurdum.[1] You “know” that that’s how physics works, you’ve relied on that your whole life and regardless of what I say here, you’re going to continue to rely on that. You should; it would impossible to live a reasonable life without relying on that expectation.

On the other hand, it does pose some important questions: how do we know what we know? Do we know what we think we know? In short, the causalities that we rely on are really high levels of correlation that strongly imply but do not prove causality. This is just one example, and epistemological skepticism as a whole is doubt about our ability to accurate understand reality for what actually is.

Epistemological skepticism keeps us humble—it reminds us that we may only have good approximations of answers and not answers themselves. Such a thought requires us always to revisit our ideas to determine if they may be improved, if we may edge just a little closer to actual reality, understanding that we remain ever within a cloud of uncertainty around the actual point of truth.

If we humans through our own efforts can never know exact truth, do we have any access to capital “T” Truth? God’s omniscience understands all things as they actually are and God’s omniscience allows God to reveal that Truth to us according to divine will. Hence scriptures that tell us God’s understanding surpasses human understanding as the stars are far above the earth and that God’s wisdom makes fools of the (human) wise. We have, in modern society, lost much of the mystical and intuitive practice of the Christian faith.

On the flipside of this, skepticism about the quality of our knowledge also helps us discern what might be a revelation from God and what might be us fooling ourselves, or engaging in wish fulfillment, or trying to cover our own desires with God’s permissions.

More important, this kind of skepticism makes manifest the importance of where we put our faith and belief. If there’s little or nothing that we can be absolutely sure of, what statements of truth do you believe so fervently as to call them Truth and live as if they are absolutely true?

Such questions, I hope, make it clear why the Bible warns us not to judge others—can we really be so sure that our judgments are right? If this skepticism leads us to try to live in peace with one another despite our differences, it is priceless.

For the next post in this series, click here.

 

[1] Admittedly, there is a circular logic to the strictest of epistemological skepticisms—if we can’t know anything, how can we know that epistemological skepticism is a valid position? Like most philosophical statements, there is a rabbit-hole to be leapt down here into a wonderland of nuance and complexity. I’ll leave it to you to investigate further if you are so inclined.

Toward a Positive Morality

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When K gives Bess a bath, they blare music and sing along. A great time is had by all, I’m sure. Bess is a quick study of melody if not of words and her little voice combines with K’s in a pleasing microcosm of happy home life.

Cute as it is, I don’t really care for the music they listen to. Most of it is old Sunday School songs that K and I heard as kids (and K actually remembered). After bath time, recently, K asked me why I had that look on my face. She knows I’m not a big fan of Christian “genre” music and knew what was going on before she asked, I think.

“I don’t like the music,” I say.

“What’s the matter with it?” she asks.

“I don’t think it’s good theology.”

“What’s the problem.”

“It’s too simplistic.”

“They’re kid’s songs!” she exclaims.

The one that really got me was the “Ten Commandments Song,” and not just because it is still infuriatingly running through my head—“Number One, we’ve just begun; God should be first in your life…” If you keep singing this to yourself, you’re probably a child of the eighties.

I’m not a big fan of the Ten Commandments. Gasp if you must, but I’m just not. I don’t think that they really have much of a place in Christian morality. Gasp again, this time so others turn to look at you.

That’s because the Ten Commandments, like most of the Old Testament law, enforce a negative morality—“thou shalt not.” There are several problems with this.

First, negative morality gives us ample ammunition to infringe upon the warning that we “judge not, lest [we] be judged.” Matthew 7:1. It’s just so tempting to say, “But he did!” when comparing someone’s actions to one of the Big Ten.

Second, negative morality does not allow us to fulfill our calling to follow after Jesus. Consider the Rich Young Ruler episode (Mark 10:17-27; Matthew 19:16-22; Luke 18:18-23). The Rich Young Ruler has followed the commandments all of his life, and Jesus quite readily tells him that there’s still more he lacks.

Negative morality is legalistic. Trust me; I’m a lawyer. It allows one to say, “I have avoided doing those things; I have fulfilled my obligation.” Jesus continually confronts the Pharisees about this problem, largely because the Pharisees hoped to reclaim righteousness through jurisprudence and adherence to the letter of the law. Compare with Jesus’ commands, which seem to be largely positively framed: “forgive those who trespass against you” (Matthew 6:9-13); “give to him that asks of you” (Matthew 5:38-42); “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44-46); “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:46-48).

This is a point made by E. Stanley Jones in The Christ of the Mount, which I’ve referred to before. Jones argues that, unlike negative morality that allows us to say, “I’ve done (or haven’t done) that, box checked,” the positive morality of Jesus always calls us to do more. “Love your neighbor as yourself” has no resting place—you must always ask what more one can do to love your neighbor. Negative morality tells us not to get worse; positive morality calls us to be better. It brings the spirit of the law to the apex and allows the letter of the law to subside in importance.

There is a good place for negative definitions of behavior—the legal system. Negative commandments allow us to offer societal protection against evils while preserving the greatest amount of freedom in the individual—“if it doesn’t say I can’t do that, then I can.” Excellent for the needs of society to order itself, but not great for those on a journey of sanctification.

Third, negative morality is not terribly responsive to our moral needs. “Thou shalt not kill,” doesn’t help us with questions like, “Is it permissible to kill one person to protect ten from him?” The commandment against bearing false witness is even flatly contradicted in the Old Testament, or at least an exception is made. Rahab, a prostitute (or perhaps innkeeper depending upon how misogynistic you like your translation) hides the Israelite spies in Jericho, lying to the authorities about the presence of the Hebrews in her home. For this lying, she is rewarded and blessed.

We live in a fallen world, so we need moral guidance that allows us to understand and work morally within that world. Black and white commandments of “thou shalt not” do not make room for the myriad potential factors and circumstances that influence any particular moral choice. Our intuition tells us that there’s a difference between killing someone for profit and a soldier killing to protect the lives of his brothers-in-arms.[1]

The positive commandments of Jesus—to “love your neighbor as yourself” is at once imminently simple and infinitely complex and responsive to circumstance. We must ask ourselves, “What does it mean to most love my neighbor in this circumstance? What does it mean to love two neighbors who are in conflict with one another?” Etc.

Fourth—and this is what got me thinking about this in the first place—positive morality is a, well, more positive formulation of behavior for instructing young ones. Isn’t it far better to say, “It hurt little Jimmy when you did that; what would be a way to love him better next time?” than to say, “That’s bad; we don’t hit,” which carries with it the connotation of “you’re bad and defined by that one action.” Am I overthinking this? Perhaps? Is it hippy-dippy (to use the term for the first time in my life)? Definitely. But would it have a positive impact on children’s behavioral development? What little knowledge I have on the subject seems to indicate yes.

I’m fairly well convinced that it’s worth it to start thinking about how we can be better rather than focusing on how we’ve messed up—to avoid hurting others by focusing on our relationships with them rather than sterile commands. What do you think?

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[1] A few caveats here. First, one must admit that, being subject to a fallen world, our intuitions may not always be trustworthy. Nevertheless, I believe in C.S. Lewis’s arguments about “natural law” and the existence of conscience as a signpost to God. Additionally, when we talk about comparative morality—“X is okay in this kind of situation but not this”—we open ourselves up to far more ambiguity than we can handle in this post. Still, that gives a good reason for the theological point that we treat all sin as equal—we’re incapable of knowing with certainty how to rank one sin against another, so let’s not fool ourselves into thinking we can.

Ambiguity in Scripture, Part IV

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For the previous post in this series, click here.

Last time, we talked about how ambiguity in the Bible prevents us from absolute certainty about theological concepts, and how this leaves us all on level ground when it comes to really following after God. I concluded by mentioning that this does not mean that we should not seek to come to what we firmly believe is the closest approximation of God’s Truth of which we are capable.

In this post, I want to talk about the method of weighing competing theological positions when we find potential evidence for both positions within scripture—or when the same passages could be interpreted in different ways. Things will be clearer, I think, if we do this by looking at really tough and large-scale “problems” in scriptural interpretation.

Let’s start by way of example. In Exodus 22:20, God says, “Whoever sacrifices to any god, other than the Lord alone, shall be devoted to destruction.” Later, in Deuteronomy 2:34, we read, “And we captured all his cities at that time and devoted to destruction every city, men, women and children. We left no survivors.” In Deuteronomy 3:6: “And we devoted them to destruction, as we did to Sihon the king of Heshbon.”

In these passages (and many that surround them in the early story of the Israelites and their conquest of Canaan), we’re told that God has commanded the Israelites to murder the women and children—the non-combatant, civilian targets—of their enemies. That in and of itself is not ambiguous, but it becomes very much so when we compare it to the commands of Jesus to love our neighbor and to turn the other cheek.

What does God want from us? Is it simply that the words given to the Israelites were meant for them alone and the words of Jesus are meant for us? In other words, was this behavior okay then but not now? That answer may provide some moral guidance for us, but it leaves unresolved some very troubling questions about the nature of God.

Adam Hamilton does an excellent job of looking at this issue (and a great number of others) in his book Making Sense of the Bible: Rediscovering the Power of Scripture Today.

I favor the approach of German theologian Karl Barth. His systematic theology is daunting even to the most educated theologian (which is not me), but I’ll try to summarize the salient points for your use.

For Barth, we should not confuse the Bible and the Word of God. As the Book of John tells us, Jesus Christ is the Word of God, not the text of scripture. Though he takes a while to say it, when Barth uses the term “Word of God,” he means a personal encounter with the Christ. This sometimes occurs through the reading of the Bible (and perhaps the ability to bring one to a personal encounter with God is the greatest power of scripture) but the two are not synonymous. I have to admit that it took me a short while to wrap my brain around that (especially given Barth’s rather circumlocutious writing).

In short, what Barth is saying that its Christianity—our goal is to encounter, know and follow the living Christ, not simply to read about him. Reading scripture helps us open our hearts and minds to Jesus, but the reading is a means to an end more than an end in itself.

I’m reminded of a Magritte painting called (in English) “The Treachery of Images”. It’s a painting of a smoking pipe, under which is written “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” (“This is not a pipe.”). And it’s not a pipe; it’s a painting of a smoking pipe. You can’t smoke with it. It tells the observer something about pipes, but it’s no substitute for the knowledge gained by the experience of the real thing. Latinate languages capture this distinction well, using separate words to denote the cold intellectual knowledge of something (saber in Spanish, savoir in French) from the more intimate knowledge of familiarity (conocer in Spanish, connaître in French). That, I think, is what Barth is telling us about the Word of God.

With Barth’s conception comes a shrewd warning that we be careful not to make an idol out of the Bible. Shocking and perhaps offensive at first, the point that we worship God and not words about God remains a powerful one.[1]

Our understanding of Jesus, as the incarnation of the living God, ought then to be a lens through which we view the rest of scripture. When we see things like the murdering of innocents in Exodus and Deuteronomy, I think it’s fair to say that that behavior does not comport with the words and life of Jesus Christ. Those passages might better be understood as words put by the writers of those books in God’s mouth that represent their own understanding of the nature and person of God rather than the objective truth.

This brings us around in a complete circle to the kind of poetic truth that speaks to our hearts. Ambiguity in scriptures requires us to lean on Jesus to understand them—to put our faith in our savior to resolve discrepancies and inconsistencies in the text of the Bible. It’s not simply that ambiguity requires us to have faith; ambiguity shows us that faith in God—as we understand God through Jesus—works and moves.

Point Four: Ambiguity in scripture leads us to rely on the person of Jesus to interpret and harmonize differing passages within the Bible and to resolve difficulties.

 

P.S. – Since we’re talking about ambiguity, I’d like to throw just one more wrench into the works. Above, I’ve argued that ambiguity in scripture pushes us to seek the Christ to resolve ambiguity, but there’s another layer to all of this. Revelation and personal relationship with Jesus—understandings which cannot be proved to anyone else—aside, the scriptures themselves provide our best view of Jesus through his words and life. God-breathed though they are, the gospels were written by human hands and likely compiled decades after the events they describe, so we ought to be cautious in thinking about them as providing a prefect picture of Jesus.

There are many resources to investigate what scholars know and believe about the origins of the gospels. Having conducted my own exploration of the issue, I’m pretty comfortable in holding the gospels as generally reliable, but I still see plenty of room for reasonable disagreement in the interpretations of the scriptures about Jesus.

So, there is perhaps this inescapable level of ambiguity that lies below all the other things we’ve discussed, ambiguity that might beg the question, “How well do we know Jesus?” For an incarnation of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and infinite God, our answer can never be “completely.” But we might always try to know him better, and that journey itself bears fruit.

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[1] Interestingly, Islam has had a similar debate for much of its history about the nature of the Quran. Is it revelation about Allah or is it part of Allah? The answer is an important one and a key part of conservative and liberal theologies in Islam. Reza Aslan gives an excellent primer on the subject (and much more about Islam) in his book, No God but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam.