Committed Critic

This is the transcript of a sermon I preached April 27 at Brookline Church of Christ in Brookline, MA. The text (which I read aloud before the sermon) is Acts 17:16-34.

OUR SOCIETY

Paul’s sermon in Athens is unique in Acts because of how far Paul goes to relate to his Greek audience. Paul is famous for saying (in 1 Cor 9:22) that he became all things to all people in order to save some, and today’s reading is the perfect example of that: Paul would ordinarily quote the OT, but here he’s in Athens, so he quotes a Greek writer instead, to try to tap into a tradition they would listen to. Paul needs to find a place for the God of Israel that’s somehow above the Greek pantheon (of Zeus, Hera, and Athena), so he turns to one of their own altars, which is inscribed, “to an unknown god.”

The word there for unknown is “agnostic,” which I think makes it very easy to connect the story with our society. Americans, on the whole, aren’t particularly atheists or polytheists—so most of us have something in us that insists there is a God, but we don’t tend to buy into stories about different Gods with different personalities. Instead, Americans are likely to sort of half-heartedly buy into the idea of an agnostic God that’s basically like the god the Athenians built the altar for.

I think even a lot of folks who attend church are basically agnostic, which is to say they aren’t particularly confident that God is any one way rather than some other way. My sense is, it’s pretty common for American Christians to stay in the tradition they were raised in, even if they stop believing that the Bible’s description of God is particularly more accurate or more true than any other religion. In others words, if you’re an agnostic who isn’t really sure who God is, but you still want to worship God, then whatever religion is comfortable is probably as good as any other. This actually makes a lot of sense: if you’re convinced that no one religion has a particular monopoly on divine revelation, then it’s not as if you could just keep looking until you found the right one. So you either stay where you are, or else you find a church where you feel comfortable, and you go with it.

PAUL IN ATHENS

But, turning back to Paul, we find that he’s not content to leave the agnostic god unknown. So he says to the Athenians: “What you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”

Paul gave his sermon in front of a group of philosophers in Athens—some of them were probably careful thinkers, and some of them were probably sloppy, but the important thing is that they wanted to think about who God is. So a big part of what I want to deal with today is the relationship between what we think about God, and what the Bible and the Christian tradition proclaim about God. Paul is going to use people’s ideas about God, and he’s going to say they have some truth, but he’s also going to say that human ideas about God aren’t enough if we don’t also have the proclamation—something that God reveals to us. So even though I can’t prove Christianity, I can say with confidence that Paul is claiming here that God can be known, that agnostic faith is insufficient—for us and for God. My goal here is to get at what that means for us.

If we look at Paul’s short sermon, about half of what he says about God is the things we can’t know, which leaves God still looking pretty agnostic: God doesn’t live in earthly temples, God is not like hand-made idols, and the nations are left groping in the dark trying to find him.

Most of the things that Paul does say about God are very general: God made the earth, made humanity, and appointed the times and places of the course of the nations. So we might say that God is (1) the beginning of all things, and (2) the sustainer of all things—which, interestingly, are two points that the philosophers in the crowd, the Stoics and Epicureans, would have fought over. These are also two points that lots of people in our world disagree about: Did God create the world, or did it come about by chance? Does God work in the world, or are our lives left up to chance? A lot of times, this breaks down to the argument between evangelical Christians and secular humanists, although I’d guess that most everyone has some opinion on the subject. This is a debate now, and it was a debate then, and Paul probably found a lot of allies in the crowd he was preaching to — at least as long as he stayed with the usual philosophical debates that the people in Athens were accustomed to.

But then Paul gets more specific and introduces the God of Israel. This is something the people of Athens weren’t so used to, and it came with a big catch: God wasn’t just an idea to be argued about, but Paul said that God was doing something new in their own time, and making a demand on the people who heard the sermon. God was calling everyone to repent, because soon the world would be judged by Christ. And Paul goes on: we have evidence, he says, that Christ is the one who will judge: because God raised him from the dead.

The Greeks tended to believe that the human soul was immortal, but they were happy to leave the body behind after death. So the Jewish idea of bodily resurrection from the dead — of dead corpses actually climbing up out of their graves — was not plausible or appealing. This may be why Paul says in 1 Corinthians that the cross is foolishness to the Greeks, and it’s certainly why Acts 17:32 says that some of Paul’s audience in Athens scoffed at his sermon. For most of them, the idea of God raising Christ from the dead was ridiculous — not just because of some skepticism about miracles, but because the resurrection didn’t really make sense to them.

What I’m getting at is that there’s a big difference between talking in generalities about the kind of God that philosophers discuss, and talking specifically about the God who reveals himself. There is a big difference between describing how God tends to act, and describing something specific that God has done. And above all, there’s a big difference between describing the kinds of ethical demands that are consistent with a good God, and proclaiming the call for repentance that God is issuing to the world right now.

I want to start with a fairly general point Paul is making here in Acts 17, and then build on it from some of Paul’s letters and the rest of the New Testament. Paul doesn’t say much about Christ here — and in fact he doesn’t even mention him by name — but Jesus is still there at the climax of the message.

So looking at the sermon, Paul claims that he’s going to tell the Athenians who the unknown God is, and it seems to me that he makes three basic points, what we might call the beginning, the middle, and the end: God created the world, God directs the times and places of the nations, and God has appointed Christ to judge the world on the last day. So God is the beginning of all things, and God is the sustainer of all things, but Christ is the end of all things.

NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTOLOGY

This is where I want break away from Acts for awhile, and consider what it means for Christ to stand at the climax of Paul’s sermon. As a modern person trying to figure out who God is, this is what jumps out at me from the sermon: If Jews from Israel and at least some Greeks from Athens can agree that God created the world, and that God cares for creation, then Christ is the unique and surprising part of the sermon. The outline of the sermon matches Paul’s outline of history: the beginning, the middle, and the end, describe the three parts of God’s work in the world: creation, providence, and judgment. The beginning and the middle of the sermon are points that Paul could expect to find some of the philosophers in the crowd to generally agree with him about, but the mention of Christ at the end is the place where the sermon takes its own turn.

I want to expand a little bit here on who Christ is and what he teaches us, which means I’m going to spread out from our text in Acts, to Paul’s letters and the rest of the NT. One of the most important points of theology, in the NT, is that the God who was unknown to the people of Athens, makes himself known in Jesus Christ.

Some places this is very simple and explicit, like in John, when Jesus says, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” But it goes beyond that. Jesus’ ministry began and ended with the God of Israel, the things God had done for them, and the promises God had made to them.

Part of my goal here is to contrast the God of Israel with the God of the philosophers. But I also have to admit that the Jews who wrote the OT were thinkers too, even if they weren’t exactly philosophers like the Greeks. Depending on how you read it, the OT can look a lot like a book of ideas, written by people who were trying to figure out who God is, a lot like the Greeks were.

Yet at the end of the day, the prophets also have a lot of oracles which simply claim, “Thus says the Lord,” and that kind of revelation is something that goes beyond philosophical arguments. Then we come to the NT, which insists that those oracles and promises are ultimately fulfilled in Christ. That means that if we want to know the unknown God, we have to look at what God has revealed, in both the OT and the NT. The OT tells us how God revealed himself to Israel, and it also tells us the promises God gave to Israel—which are also promises for us. In the NT, we are told how Christ reveals the Father to us more fully, and also how he fulfills the promises God has already given to Israel.

I think the key to NT theology is something that Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:20: “In Christ, every one of God’s promises is a ‘yes’” (NRSV). Paul doesn’t explain exactly what that means, but it becomes pretty clear when we start looking at the NT, and how it explains who Jesus was and what he did. As it turns out, you can pick virtually any major motif or figure from the OT, and there will be a passage somewhere in the NT that explains how it finds its fulfillment in Jesus. And just as before, this is true for beginning, middle, and end, past, present, and future. So looking at the OT, Jesus reenacts the major ways that God delivered Israel in the past, he fills every office of leader that the OT describes for the present, and he fulfills God’s promises to deliver Israel in the future.

In fact, you can basically walk through the OT looking for major themes, and each one of them has a matching NT passage that tells how Christ fulfills it:

• God creates the world? Paul tells us in Colossians that it was through Jesus that all things in heaven and on earth were created.
• Adam’s transgression brings death into the world? Paul tells us that Jesus became the New Adam, overcoming death for us.
• Abraham receives God promise to bless the world through his seed? Paul tells us that his seed was Christ, the blessing to the gentiles.
• God the Divine Warrior battles Pharaoh for the children of Israel? Revelation tells us that Christ will become the divine warrior, when he returns to bring vengeance on the wicked.
• For the first passover, the children of Israel sacrifice a lamb to protect their homes from the angel of death? Paul tells us that Christ is our Passover lamb, who has been sacrificed.
• Moses is sent by God to bring Israel out of Egypt and give them the law on Mount Sinai? In Matthew, Christ is the new Moses, who leads his people out of slavery, stands on the side of a mountain, and delivers a new law.
• In the wilderness, Israel endures 40 years of testing? The Gospels tell us that Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days, where he overcame the tests that Satan put before him.
• God sent Manna, the bread of heaven, to feed Israel in the wilderness? In John, Jesus tells us that he is the bread that comes down from heaven to feed God’s people.
• Moses lifts up a bronze serpent in the wilderness to save the people from snakebites? In John, Jesus is the one who is lifted up to give salvation.
• In the tabernacle, the High Priest of Israel makes atonement for the people in the Holy of Holies? Hebrews says that Jesus is our High Priest, who makes atonement with his own blood.
• David served as the anointed king of Israel, whose descendant would be the Messiah who would deliver Israel from its enemies? Jesus is that Messiah, who delivers Israel from their sins.
• Proverbs describes Wisdom as the first creation of God, through which he created the world? John tells us that Christ is the divine word of wisdom, who was already there with God, and through whom the world was created.
• Elijah the great signs prophet uses God’s power to heal and do miracles? Jesus becomes that kind of prophet, also healing and doing miracles.
• Isaiah and the other great preaching prophets proclaim God’s demand for social justice in Israel? Jesus defends the widows, befriends the tax collectors, and preaches the good news to the poor.
• The Suffering servant in Isaiah will take the sins of the people upon himself? 1 Peter tells us how Jesus becomes the suffering servant and submits himself to the crucifixion.
• Jeremiah and Ezekiel describe a new covenant, where God will empower his people through the Holy Spirit? Jesus seals the new covenant with his own blood, and then sends the Spirit as a guide.
• Daniel describes how one like a Son of Man will rise up to rule the nations and bring justice to the earth? Jesus is that Son of Man, who will rule and judge the nations on the last day.
• And finally, the resurrection is described in Daniel, when the righteous people who die will be raised on the last day? Jesus is the Resurrection and the life, the firstfruits from among the dead.

We see a pretty obvious pattern start to show up: like Paul said, the promises of God are “yes” in Christ. These claims are not the arguments of philosophers, even though a lot of thought obviously went in to all these NT passages. These passages are more specific than the generalities that philosophers deal with, and this promise of salvation is more than a person could figure out just by looking at the world.

CONCLUSIONS

So as a theology student, I’m torn: the grad student in me feels most comfortable talking about the philosopher’s God — which I think includes a lot of truth about God, and in fact Paul preaches in Athens that their philosophers have things partly right. The philosopher’s God is very appealing to worship, because he makes sense, and he’s attractive to outsiders when we try to give a defense for the hope we have, like our 1 Peter reading says.

But Paul refuses to stop with the philosopher’s God — it’s too general. For Paul, and throughout the NT, you don’t really know God until you see him as revealed in Jesus Christ. Our groping in the darkness can show us that God created the world, and that he works for the good of humanity, but we must turn to the Old Testament to see how God has actually acted to save his people in the past, and how God has promised to save his people in the future. This kind of salvation is not designed to be inferred by philosophers; instead, it rests on God’s faithfulness to specific promises.

Christ, according to the New Testament, reenacts the saving deeds of God from the past, he takes on the role of the Savior sent from God in the present, and his resurrection gives us assurance of God’s ultimate salvation in the future. As much as we can use philosophy and academic language to describe Jesus—and in fact, that’s my job as a grad student—what’s really important about him is not the ideas about him, but the fact of his life and the reality of what he did, and the hope he offers for what he will do.

Resurrection, for Paul, is not an idea, but an historical event—both when Jesus was raised, and when we will be raised. Repentance is not just an ethical scheme based on theological arguments; instead, it’s a direct warning from God that the world will end at an appointed time, and that we will be judged by Jesus.

So then, the Gospel of Christ is not designed just to be something we find interesting, or something we may wish to hear more about at some point in the future. The people in Athens who say this, that they want to hear more, but not right now, are missing the point if they think that Paul’s ideas are merely something new and interesting that they can think about. At least the ones who scoff show that they’ve understood Paul’s message, and they know they want to reject it. For the rest of us, we might not be convinced at the first hearing, but that shouldn’t lull us into being content in our agnosticism. Hearing the Gospel is meant to push us toward responding.

We can doubt whether the Gospel is true or not — whether or not God really did raise Jesus Christ from the dead — but the NT does everything it can to confute anyone who would claim that the time for repentance simply hasn’t come yet. If there’s one thing we are meant to learn from the New Testament, and all those examples that I listed earlier, it’s that salvation is now, present in Christ. This is why the NT tells us that Jesus is the embodiment of virtually every kind of salvation you can find in the OT and in the Jewish tradition: Salvation belongs to the Lord, and it is revealed in Christ. If you were waiting for salvation — any kind of salvation — there’s nothing else that you’ve been waiting for.

There’s a Rich Mullins song that says, “To say the time is short, just means the time is now.” The Christian claim is that all salvation is present in Jesus Christ, and the implication is that God will no longer overlook ignorance of who God really is. It’s as if God is saying, “If you don’t find salvation in Christ, then you don’t really want what I have to offer anyway.”

So philosophers can spend their time thinking, and create ideas about immortal souls if they want to, but there’s really nothing in our experience that tells us we should expect that. People might see ghosts, or they might have experiences of communicating with the dead — so it’s easy to see why people assume there is something after death, but a lot of us aren’t completely convinced those stories are true, and even if they are, they’re difficult to nail down or understand exactly — they’re not exactly the kind of thing you want to base your hope on. People might have general ideas about spirituality and morality, but those aren’t real reasons for hope. Our experience of the world is ultimately that everyone dies.

The only salvation there is to be had beyond the grave is resurrection in Christ, and we have a real reason to believe it: the tomb was empty, and witnesses saw Jesus show up, talk with them, and eat food. We still might doubt whether those stories is true, or whether something else could have happened to Jesus’ body, but at the end of the day, the Christian Gospel is more than just a philosophical argument — and for me, at least, that makes all the difference. Salvation is not an idea or an inference, but rather a gift that will be given on some real last day, to those who withstand judgment before Christ. This, Paul proclaims, is simply what will happen.

So what we’re faced with is fundamentally different than a set of ideas we need to consider. It’s certainly more than just a theological scheme for us to find interesting, even though the NT is full of fascinating theological ideas. But what we’re faced with is the reality of a judgment, and Paul’s sermon is not just calling us to understand or agree — it’s calling us to act, which means to repent and prepare for a real day that will come, whether we believe it or not.

Most of us here today are already Christians, but I think Paul’s sermon can challenge us to consider whether we’re still worshipping the unknown God they worshipped in Athens, or whether we’re preparing ourselves for a meeting with the living, revealed God of Israel, who we see in Jesus Christ. And as interesting as all this might be, the interesting ideas aren’t really the point. What we’re being called to should probably be the same thing that Paul was calling the Athenians to: not just to understand or believe, but to repent.

The apocalyptic worldview holds that God’s good world is now under the control of evil angels or demons. At its core, apocalypticism is a theodicy - - an attempt to reconcile a good God with evil in the world.

In most of the Old Testament, humans are responsible for their own wickedness (the serpent doesn’t force Eve to do anything), and God shows God’s justice by rewarding and punishing human deeds. But some OT texts challenge this idea: Job argues (correctly, according to the story) that he suffers unjustly, and Ecclesiastes laments that the good and bad in life simply happen, without any apparent reason.

Apocalypticism insists, instead, that fallen angels have taken control of creation, and that the justice of God (who has effectively relinquished control) will only be seen at the end of time, when wickedness reaches its climax and God steps in to end history, destroying the wicked and vindicating the righteous. The world will be transformed into a new age that will have no wickedness or suffering. God will again be in control, and the world will work like it’s supposed to work. Bits of apocalypticism can be found in the OT (esp. the end of Isaiah and the second half of Daniel), but it flourishes in Jewish literature in the centuries just before Jesus.

Apocalypticism is at the heart of New Testament theology. Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God meant that God would soon take back control of the world. Paul argued that Jesus had initiated the end times, and that he would soon return to set the world right again. Revelation insisted that a new heaven and earth would soon replace the old, fulfilling Isaiah 65:17.

This affects how Christians live, because we believe in the paradox that the world is a good place, but that it is influenced by forces of evil that will never be fully overcome until Jesus’ return. We work for good, but we know that human progress can never fully redeem the earth; that task is reserved for the avenging Son of Man at the end of time as we know it.

Reading suggestions: Within scripture, important apocalyptic passages include Isaiah 65:17–66:24; Daniel 7-12; Mark 13; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; 2 Peter 3:3-10; and of course the book of Revelation.

For secondary literature, I’m a big fan of John Collins, so I’d suggest his book The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. Also, see my related post here.

Today I voted for the first time since Bob Dole ran against Bill Clinton in 1996, and the experience of going to the polls calls my attention to two huge flaws in the American electoral process that I feel we should all be talking about. So, straying briefly from theology, here are my criticisms of, and proposals for, the two dynamics that I think ruin American politics.

PROBLEM ONE: You have to vote for a winner.

I have a housemate and another good friend who are strong supporters of Ron Paul, and I have a lot of sympathy for their choice. In particular, he’s the only candidate in either party who is opposed to both abortion and the Iraq war. I also like Barack Obama (whom I voted for today), but I have to admit that I would strongly consider giving my support to Paul instead, except for one thing: Ron Paul can’t win.

Normally, I believe in making decisions based on principle, but in this case the situation is more complicated. Aside from liking Obama as a leader (which I do), I’m also concerned about the alternatives.

To put it as briefly as I can, I don’t think Hillary can beat McCain or Romney, so a vote for anyone but Obama in the democratic primary simply makes it more likely that Clinton will win the nomination and that, therefore, McCain or Romney will be our next president.

Now, I could support Ron Paul as a Republican, but I don’t think he has a shot to win the nomination. And I can only vote in one Massachusetts primary — either Democrat or Republican. That means, paradoxically, that I am forced into a situation where a vote for Ron Paul basically amounts to a vote for McCain/Romney.

Some of this is unavoidable, especially in this case since it wouldn’t make sense to let everyone vote in both primaries — then we’d really see political games going on. But the problem in our system is that Ron Paul might actually have a shot to win if people were voting for exactly who they wanted, without worrying that it might help someone else win. Paul has a lot of appeal, but I’m sure there are many people who won’t vote for him simply because it would help one of the other candidates.

Solution:

There’s a clear (though only partial) solution here, that would complicate our current electoral process, but that I think is worthwhile. I’ll describe how it would work in the primaries.

The only truly just way to have an election with multiple candidates is to require a candidate to get more than 50% of the total vote in order to win. That way, if 60% of the Democrats don’t want Clinton, she can’t win the nomination with 40% just because the rest of the voters split 30/30 for Obama and Edwards. So none of those 60% percent have to worry about inadventently helping Clinton by voting for Obama or Edwards.

The way this works is, if no one gets 50% (which is likely in this case), you drop the lowest vote-getters from the ballot and then have a run-off election. I would suggest the best way to do this would be to keep the top four candidates, provided they each got at least 10% of the vote. Among the Democrats, you’d probably end up with Obama/Clinton/Edwards, and among the Republicans it would probably be McCain/Romney/Huckabee/Paul.

If someone in the run-off gets more than 50%, they win. But if they don’t (which would probably be the case in both parties this time), then you drop the lowest vote-getter and run it again.

This doesn’t solve the problem completely. For example, I still couldn’t support Hillary in the primary because I don’t think she can beat the Republicans in the general election. However, what this system does do is help candidates like Ron Paul — candidates who have a lot of supporters, but whom people doubt can really win.

The key point is that a vote for Paul in this system makes it no more likely that McCain or Romney will win. So for example, if I just want anyone but Romney, a vote for any of the other Republican candidates will take away from the number of votes Romney needs to get 50%. Once voters feel freer to vote for the candidate they actually want, Paul might end up having enough real supporters to beat Huckabee, which would leave McCain/Romney/Paul for the third run-off.

But — and here’s the key point — even if he doesn’t win, everyone who wanted Paul had the opportunity to vote for him. If it turns out that he doesn’t have enough support to make it to the next ballot, then the people who voted for him get to choose which of the other candidates to give their support to in the run-off. Not only has Paul been given a fair shot at winning (since he didn’t lose the votes of people who were scared of helping someone else), but also his supporters still get a voice in who the nominee will be, among the remaining candidates.

The same process would hold in the general election, which would give a third-party candidate (like Perot or Nader) a fair shot, for all the same reasons I’ve described.

People would object to this system because run-offs would require people to vote more than once, on different days. Also, you’d have a somewhat different electorate for each run-off, since different people would be busy or out of town each day. However, in light of the resources that America already pours into its absurdly long, year-and-a-half presidential election, surely people could find the time to vote three or four times in January and three of four times again in November.

PROBLEM TWO: The only real contests are in swing states

This is the common complaint about the electoral college, which many people think should be replaced with a direct popular vote. That could work, but you still have the problem that each person is only one out of tens of millions of votes, so no one vote seems particularly important.

I think an even better system would be to keep the electoral college, but for each state to divide up its delegates according to the percentage of the state-wide popular vote.

So imagine living in Texas, as I did, when George W. Bush was nominated in 2000. It was so obvious that he would win the state, that I didn’t bother to vote. People who supported him had no reason to doubt that he would beat Gore, and people who supported Gore knew they had no chance of taking the state.

But imagine if Texas’s 34 delegates were assigned by percentage of the state-wide popular vote. Then Democrats would have real hope of winning some delegates, and Republicans couldn’t just sit back knowing they would win the state. Each party would be fighting over real delegates that they had a real chance of winning or losing to the other side. We would no longer have the kind of nonsense from 2000, where Florida could swing the entire election with all of its 27 delegates having to go to one party or the other. Plus, a third-party candidate could win a substantial number of delegates nation-wide even if he or she couldn’t command a majority in a large state.

What’s more, because the parties would be fighting for delegates (rather than just having a national popular vote), a few thousand votes could swing an entire delegate, which could have a recognizable impact on the national election. There would be a real reason to campaign for your candidate locally, and a real reason to try to get out the vote. I have to think this would give a substantial boost to voter participation, and it would also increase the likelihood that the electoral college would mirror the national popular vote.

COULD THIS WORK?

Both of these suggestions have varying degrees of difficulty.

Having a run-off in the general election would require a constitutional amendment, so it seems the least likely to work out. At the primary level, however, I believe each state’s party can decide on its own procedures, so I see no reason why at least some states couldn’t adopt this kind of system right away.

Concerning the logistical complexity of having repeated run-offs, we might be able to solve the problem by setting up a virtual run-off, where each voter would rank their choices for president. For the first ballot, only first choices would be counted. But if a run-off was necessary, we would simply re-count all the same ballots, but for anyone whose first choice was no longer on the ballot, their second choice would be counted as their vote — and so on, until a candidate won more than 50% of the votes. News broadcasts could do a quick breakdown of each election to show how the various candidates were eliminated and what percentage of the vote they received in each run-off. This would work better in the primary election, since it would be difficult to have states assign their delegates to the electoral college in the same way. Of course, if we went to a national popular vote, this system would make sense at the national level.

As to dividing up states’ delegates according to state-wide popular vote, the difficulty is that the Republican voters of Texas aren’t going to want to pass a law that gives some of their delegates to the Democrats each election, any more than the Democratic voters of Massachusetts are going to want to give up delegates to the Republicans. So this method of choosing delegates would be the most feasible in swing states, where there is no clear majority that wants to protect its block vote. And since the constitution allows each state to decide how to choose its delegates, we can’t simply pass a federal law to change the system.

The other possibility is for various state legislatures to get together and make a binding agreement to apportion their delegates according to state-wide popular vote. (There has been recent talk of a similar suggestion using the national popular vote, but I’ll leave that to anyone else who wants to explain it.) There would have to be enough red states and enough blue states in on the deal, in order for people to feel that the agreement would result in a just election. For it to be truly fair, I think it would require all 50 states plus DC, so it’s hard to imagine how it would happen.

A constitutional amendment, dictating how states must choose their delegates, might be the only way to make it work.

I’d love to get some good discussion here. Surely our presidential elections demand a better system than what we have, but we need solutions that are feasible.

After Rome destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in A.D. 70, the city lay in ruins. In the 130’s, the Roman emperor Hadrian decided to rebuild Jerusalem, complete with a Roman temple to Jupiter. The Jews revolted. Historical details are murky, but we know that a warrior-prince named Simon bar Kosiba (bar means son of) led a band of rebels who recaptured much of Judea from Rome for about three years. Coins minted by Simon during the revolt proclaim “The Redemption of Israel.”

Popularly, Simon was known as “Bar Kokhba” (“Son of the Star”), an allusion to a messianic prophecy in Num 24:17. Many Judeans seem to have thought he was the Messiah under whom Israel would rule the world in eternal peace. In the meantime, there was little peace to be had, and the historian Dio Cassius, writing in the third century, claimed that 580,000 Jews were killed during the war. In the end, Rome leveled the city and banished all Jews from the region.

In studying early Christianity, understanding the revolt helps to put Jesus’ messiahship into perspective. The term “Messiah” (anointed one) can refer to any king or priest who is chosen by God for a task (see, e.g., Isa 45:1). Many Jews in Jesus’ day expected God’s deliverance, but this expectation didn’t always include a Messiah — many Jews expected an army of angels or God himself to show up and vindicate the righteous. Among the various Jewish uprisings in the first century, none of the leaders seems to have thought of himself as a unique end-time Messiah, as the Christians believed Jesus was. But by the second century, the tradition had developed into the expectation of a unique Messiah who would deliver Israel permanently, and Bar Kokhba seemed to fill this role.

Since A.D. 134, Jews have viewed Bar Kokhba usually either as a tragic hero or as a reckless revolutionary who brought ruin upon Israel. Either way, he remains the only Jew to have ruled the state of Israel as a Messiah in this strong sense.

Reading suggestions: The best place to get a more detailed overview of the Bar Kokba revolt is either the Anchor Bible Dictionary’s article on it (vol. 1, pages 598-601) or Peter Schäfer’s book History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World, published in 2003. If you’re interested in Archaeology, Yigael Yadin published a book in 1971 called Bar Kokhba: The rediscovery of the legendary hero of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome; it’s written in engaging prose for a popular audience, and it has lots of great color photos.

Virtually any movie about a leader facing a crisis––whether the movie is fictional or historical––includes a scene where the boss/king/president/warlord gives a speech to the beleaguered troops that inspires them to face the challenge at hand. As it turns out, history writers in the ancient world often used the same kind of dramatic scenes when they told the stories of real wars.

I want to look here at two renditions of one speech in the mouth of an ancient Jewish warlord, and what implications they may have for how we read the Bible.

Speeches outside the canon: Judas “the Hammer” addressing his men

This speech is set during the Maccabean revolt, which began in 167 B.C., and which amounted to a family of Jewish priests/warlords rising up in response to religious persecution under a Syrian king. 1 Maccabees 3:58-60 (NRSV) says that Judas, leading a small revolutionary army against a more powerful army of Syrians, gave this speech to encourage his men:

“Arm yourselves and be courageous. Be ready early in the morning to fight with these Gentiles who have assembled against us to destroy us and our sanctuary [the Temple]. It is better for us to die in battle than to see the misfortunes of our nation and of the sanctuary. But as his will in heaven may be, so shall he do.”

This is neither the first nor the best speech that Judas gives in the book, but it is a solid (if brief) piece of rhetoric.

Next, I want to consider the account of the same event by Josephus, whose Jewish Antiquities paraphrases huge portions 1 Maccabees. In fact, for much of this story, it appears that Josephus (writing around A.D. 90) used 1 Maccabees (written around 100 B.C.) as virtually his only source. (You can see how the two texts line up on this page.) Here’s how Josephus relates this same speech (adapted from Whiston’s edition):

When Judas had thus disposed his soldiers, he encouraged them to fight by the following speech, which he made to them:

“O my fellow soldiers, there is no time more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight bravely, you may recover your liberty, which, though it is a desirable to all people, is much more desirable for us, since it gives us the liberty to worship God. So, since you are in the present circumstances, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living (which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country), or submit to the most opprobrious sufferings.

No seed of your nation will remain if you lose this battle; so fight bravely, assuming that you must die even if you do not fight. Keep in mind, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, and of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory. Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning.”

And this was the speech which Judas made to encourage them. (Josephus, Ant 7.3)

It doesn’t require very careful attention to notice that Josephus’ version is several times longer than the same speech in 1 Maccabees.

There are two really important reasons why this matters for our interpretation of ancient historiography:

• Josephus introduces his book by insisting that he will “accurately describe what is contained in [Jewish] records…without adding anything to what is therein contained, or taking away anything therefrom” (Ant Preface, 3).

• Josephus is writing well over 200 years after the events he describes, and this speech occurs in a passage where he is completely dependent on 1 Maccabees; there is no reason to think Josephus had access to any other transcript of Judas’ speech.

The only reasonable conclusion is that Josephus invented almost the entirety of Judas’ speech, and then wrote, bluntly, that “this was the speech which Judas made to encourage them.”

Some people’s first reaction might be to say that Josephus was being dishonest, but it turns out that composing speeches for figures within historical works was standard practice in antiquity, and Josephus probably thought he was being a good historian by doing it. No one seems to have expected a word-by-word transcript in a book like this (and in any case no such transcript was available to Josephus), yet it obviously was important to these historians to include these speeches to add drama to their stories and help the reader interpret what was happening. In all probability, the author of 1 Maccabees had made up the original version of Judas’ speech in the first place.

Speeches within the canon: Major figures

This has enormous implications for how we read the Bible, because we find speeches throughout Scripture, often at the most climactic events in Israelite and Christian history:

• Moses’ last words to Joshua as Israel begins the conquest (Deut 31–34);
• Joshua’s exhortation to the tribes as they settle in the promised land (Josh 23:2–16);
• Samuel’s announcement of the transition from the rule of judges to the rule of kings (1 Sam 12);
• David’s prayer upon receiving the covenant of eternal kingship (2 Sam 7:18–29);
• Solomon’s dedication of the Temple (1 Kgs 8:14–61);
• Daniel’s prayer of confession in exile (Dan 9:1-19);
• Ezra’s prayer of confession when the people return from exile (Neh 9:6–37);
• Jesus’ announcement of the ethics of the kingdom of God (Matt 5–7);
• Peter’s presentation of the Gospel to the people of Jerusalem (Acts 2:14-36);
• Stephen’s explanation of how Jerusalem has rejected Jesus just like they rejected the prophets (Acts 7:1-53);
• Paul’s presentation of the Gospel to Jews and Gentiles living outside of Judea (Acts 13:16-41).

What we learn from Josephus (and others) is that there’s really no reason to think that any of these Scriptural speeches reflects anything like a transcript of what was said on a particular occasion. That kind of literal accuracy simply wasn’t expected, and I don’t know of anything in the way the Bible was written to suggest that its authors operated by a different standard.

The one exception to this would be Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which probably does reflect Jesus’ actual teachings, perhaps in many cases even word-for-word. But Jesus was a unique figure, whose particular teachings were very important to his followers and were written down within a generation or two of when he spoke them. And in any event, many of the teachings of the Sermon are found scattered throughout Luke, so it appears that Matthew is the one who gathered them here into a single “sermon.”

The rest of the biblical speeches I listed, however, make a lot more sense as compositions of later writers, perhaps with some scattered traditions to build on. The goal was not to give a transcript but to (1) engage their readers with dramatic speeches at climactic points in the story, and (2) teach their readers how to theologically interpret what had happened in their nation’s history. That’s what 1 Maccabees did, that’s what Josephus did, and that’s what it looks like the authors of Scripture have done as well.

Implications for reading the Bible

Part of the purpose of this post is to try to disabuse people of the idea that the speeches in the Bible were spoken word-for-word by the people they are attributed to. But my point isn’t just to be critical: understanding how these texts were composed is important for understanding what they mean.

As I have tried to argue here often, a literalist reading of Scripture sometimes manages to distract people from what a passage of Scripture is actually trying to say. It doesn’t do to fixate on something Paul says in Acts as a key to interpreting, say, Romans, when the speech in Acts probably represents simply the kind of thing that Luke thought Paul would have said.

Since Luke appears to have been a pretty good historian, the speeches in Acts probably really do reflect the kinds of things that were taught in the early church; we just need to understand that some of those teachings in the mouths of Peter and Paul might have actually been introduced only later, around the time Luke wrote. We probably have very little idea what Peter actually said in his first sermons.

We should still read the speeches as intended for our edification, and it’s useful to imagine Peter actually giving the sermon at the feast of Pentecost –– that’s what Luke wanted us to imagine, after all. But as careful readers of Scripture, we should also read the speeches as part of a theological argument that Luke is making about who Jesus was and what it meant (and means) for the church. This may end up being at odds with, for example, what the real Paul thought, and that’s an important point to remember if we want to understand Christian origins.

A few weeks back I wrote about why the word “Calvary” isn’t actually in the Bible, except for the King James Version.

Here I want to look at another example of a nonsense word that gets used pretty frequently, again because of a misreading of the KJV’s archaic/awkward English. People, especially from conservative Protestant traditions, sometimes refer to a man’s helpmeet, with reference to the wife (Eve) that God created for Adam. The problem is that the word doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Genesis 2:18 explains why God decides to create Woman. It says something like,

Then Yahweh God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make for him a helper that is suitable for him.”

This last phrase, “a helper that is suitable for him,” consists of two Hebrew words: ‘êzer ke-negdô. The first word means simply help or helper. The second word is actually a prepositional phrase, which would literally mean something like, “like that which corresponds to him.”

It’s pretty obvious that the text is trying to say that the Woman corresponded to the Man, or that she was appropriate for him (see Gen 2:20, which uses the same phrase ‘êzer ke-negdô), whereas the animals (2:18) were not. In other words, Eve was another human.

This is where the English of the KJV gets confusing. The KJV translators never used the words suitable or fitting, but they occasionally used the word meet, which had a similar meaning (see, e.g., Ex 8:26; Deut 3:18; Jud 5:30). As it turns out, the word is not particularly fitting or helpful for the modern reader, as Gen 2:18-20 demonstrates.

The KJV translates Gen 2:18,

And the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.”

A relative pronoun could have helped avoid misunderstanding (“I will make him a help that is meet for him”), but as the text stands it is easy to see why people have misread the phrase. The phrase “an help meet for him” doesn’t really make sense to modern readers, and so people have tended to combine help with meet to make a single term. Presumbably most people just assume that it’s an archaic word that people knew back when the KJV was translated, which of course is partly ironic because the original readers of the KJV (published in 1611) apparently would have understood it as two separate words.

Part of the blame for the misunderstanding goes back to the 17th century, where we have an author named John Dryden who used the two words as a hyphenated phrase (“help-meet”) to describe his wife in 1673. (These are the kinds of things you can find out in the Oxford English Dictionary.) Today, Webster’s simply lists it as a single word, helpmeet, which it notes is a combination of the noun and the adjective.

I probably shouldn’t talk about blame for the word, since in theory, any word is legitimate if it’s useful. If a man wants to refer to his wife using biblical language, helpmeet seems to get the job done.

But then, maybe it doesn’t work so well. My favorite part of all this is that the English language now also has the word helpmate. It’s possible that this word came about on its own, since its first known attestation (1715) refers to helpers in general rather that to a wife in particular. But in my copy of Webster’s, it’s listed simply as another way of writing helpmeet.

The convergence of these two words makes perfect sense considering that for the average person who hears the word helpmeet, the meaning of help is very clear, but the attached word meet doesn’t make any sense. So, people adjust the word (through an intuitive kind of folk etymology) to something that does make sense, and mate obviously fits when referring to one’s wife.

So, is it meet for us to judge a word like this? My tendency is to say yes: I think it should be phased out of use. Even though the word is useful for alluding quickly to Genesis, language should help us communicate clearly, and the alternative use of the word helpmate shows that for most people, this word is confusing. People who don’t know what meet originally meant in the KJV are likely to have a vague sense that it should be mate instead, and people who do know what it meant aren’t likely to use it at all.

Matt was raising the question under my last post whether Christianity could simply do away with its claim to end-time supremacy –– what I would call its apocalypticism –– and be ultimately better off. Or to put it another way, can you be a Christian but not think that God will condemn non-believers at the end of time?

With apologies to Matt, I’m not really going to consider here the suggestion that the Gospel writers added all of Jesus’ apocalypticism to his “real” teachings when they wrote the Gospels. I just don’t think that’s a reasonable historical claim, based on a number of points.

It seems to me that scholars who do try to claim Jesus wasn’t apocalyptic are simply trying to salvage a Jesus they like, and as a result they are left without any reasonable explanation for how Christianity came to be so thoroughly apocalyptic, as evidenced by just about every book in the New Testament. What’s more, pretty much the whole impetus behind apocalyptic literature is a preoccupation with justice and the belief that God will vindicate the righteous and punish the wicked, so I’m not sure how we could keep some apocalypticism and do away with Christ’s end-time supremacy (i.e., the idea that he will vindicate the righteous and punish the wicked), either.

NEW REVELATIONS IN SCRIPTURE

So, setting aside the historical question, I’d like to deal with this as an honest theological question. Can we strip Christianity of its apocalypticism –– that is, the idea of a coming end-time judgment in which people are judged and given either eternal life or eternal death based on their religious commitments and behavior –– and still have a viable religion?

Or more importantly to my mind, does God intend for us to somehow move beyond apocalyptic Christianity and embrace Christ as the founder a different kind of faith?

First of all, if we’re taking the Bible as a fully authoritative and final guide to truth about God, then the question pretty much falls apart. Virtually every part of the New Testament depends on this notion of a final judgment, and committment to Jesus is always central to the kind of judgment that’s going to take place.

So to set aside apocalypticism, you have to assume that descriptions in the Bible about how God deals with people are not necessarily eternally true. This may sound offensive at first, but it’s implicit in all the covenants reflected in Scripture, and it’s lurking in the background whenever the New Testament explains what Jesus’ death and resurrection mean––that they somehow replace the way God dealth with people under the old covenant.

One important point to realize is that the Old Testament reflects traditions from hundreds of years, and often its ideas about God change from an earlier time to a later. For example, different parts of the Old Testament disagree on how God deals with human wickedness: does God punish sin to the third and fourth generation (Ex 20:5), or does God only punish the person who commits a sin (Ezek 18:20), or are prosperity and suffering pretty much independent of whether a person is loyal to God (Job)?

We could take these as contradictions of one another (which I admit I’m prone to do), but they could also be seen simply as God choosing to deal with people differently at different times. The implication is that God may have said one thing then, but he’s saying something different now.

END-TIME REWARD AND PUNISHMENT?

To get closer to the point we’re dealing with here –– whether the church can lay aside its apocalyptic theolgoy –– I think it’s significant that the Sinai Covenant and the early history of Israel don’t say anything about an afterlife. The people of God were to be given a promised land, but there was no real notion of what would happen to them after death.

They did have a sort of mythical idea of Sheol, which is essentially the same thing as Hades in Greek thought, a sort of land of the dead. Rather than an actual afterlife, it appears to be a netherworld of only partial existence, more dull and hazy than joyful or painful.

As for heaven, it was described as the place where God and the angels were, but not as the place people went after they died. Elijah may have been taken up to heaven, but he went there alive, and anyway there’s no indication in the early history of Israel that righteous people in general expected to earn such an honor. When Saul raises Samuel’s ghost (a bizarre story in 1 Sam 28:3-25), Samuel comes up from the ground (28:13), not down from heaven.

Later on, however, God’s promises become grander. At the end of Isaiah, for example, we read about “new heavens and a new earth” (65:17; 66:22), in the day when God will set things right again. Yet it looks like this will all happen on earth, where people will continue to grow old and die (Isa 65:20). Isaiah’s vision is a lot like later apocalyptic teachings, but it doesn’t fit with what we see in Revelation (e.g., Rev 21:4).

Then we have the book of Daniel, which is set after Persia conquers Babylon in 539 B.C., but which was probably written after certain political events in Jerusalem in 167 B.C. It describes an actual resurrection of the dead at the end of time –– the only passage in the Old Testament that talks about this. Regardless of when the book was written, it claims that Daniel is told to keep his writings secret until the “time of the end” (Dan 12:4), which means that the message about the resurrection was not intended for people who lived earlier.

So what am I saying? Moses thought that the promised land was the best thing there was. Isaiah thought that God’s ultimate deliverance would be just like earthly life, only better. Daniel thought people would rise from the dead to eternal life, but he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it until after about 167 B.C.

Whatever you think about biblical inerrancy, it is difficult to deny that later biblical stories expand on the ideas from earlier stories. Just exactly what God will do is not the same in every part of Scripture, but instead we can see certain kinds of trajectories (maybe agreeing or maybe disagreeing with one another) that lead us into a huge assortment of Jewish literature in the centuries before Jesus. Much of that literature (especially 1 Enoch and the Dead Sea Scrolls) is heavily influenced by apocalyptic ideas.

By the time Jesus came around, many (but not all) Jews believed in the kind of salvation Daniel talked about, that at the end of time God will raise all the dead to be judged, at which time the righteous will be rewarded with eternal life while the wicked will be punished in hell. People naturally had different ideas about just who the “righteous” were.

Jesus continued this kind of teaching, as did all the authors whose books ended up in the New Testament.

DOES IT STOP THERE?

So the question is: Is that the final word on the matter?

Before we conclude too hastily that of course Jesus’ words are eternally true, it is important to remember that Jesus’ teachings about a final judgment were not given to the people in early Israel. Yet I don’t think most of us would conclude, based on that, that God was lying to Israel through Moses.

Rather, the entire history of the writing of the Bible consists of a mixture of affirming, reinterpreting, and overturning previously-held beliefs about God.

And it doesn’t quite work to say that God stopped revealing new things when Jesus came, because development continues even in the New Testament. 2 Peter is written to people who are pretty obviously anxious because Jesus’ promise to return “soon” doesn’t seem to have come true. Their neighbors are starting to mock them (3:4), and Peter reassures them by reinterpreting what his church thought they knew about the end: “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (3:8). Appropriately, this line is a virtual quotation from the Book of Jubilees (4:30), a popular Jewish text which used the line to try to explain why Adam didn’t die on the same day he ate the fruit.

Both of these texts are unwilling to say that the scripture they are interpreting is untrue, but both of them use reinterpretation to radically change what others considered to be the plain meaning of the earlier text.

HOW DOES THE CHURCH USE THE BIBLE?

Even for those who agree with this analysis, I don’t really think it gives us a clear answer for what to do with apocalypticism. So we are left with our three options: we can affirm, reinterpret, or overturn.

Should we assume, then, that since Jesus taught extensively (if ambiguously) about the end of the world, Christians are compelled to hold that same teaching? Or should we argue that God calls on the church to continually reinterpret the teachings of Scripture, perhaps seeing the end as a judgment outside of time, rather than a literal historical return of Jesus to earth? Or should we consider overturning the apocalyptic teachings of Jesus, suggesting perhaps that God wanted the church to hold to apocalypticism for a time, but that now we are to move on to other ways of understanding the world?

I tend to go with the first option, because I think the New Testament is too thoroughly apocalyptic for the teaching to be in any way optional. To use a medical analogy: You can remove a lung or a kidney, but you can’t remove, say, all the bone marrow from a person and expect their body to still function.

I imagine we’ll have some other perspectives here, though.

I can’t say that I own a lot of Bruce Springsteen music, but I love the tape of his that I have. He’s an excellent lyricist writing from a working class perspective, kind of like Bob Dylan but easier to follow. Plus his music has a ton of energy. Here is the verse of his that most catches my attention these days, from the song “Badlands” (1978):

Workin’ in the fields
till you get your back burned
Workin’ ’neath the wheel
till you get your facts learned
Baby I got my facts
learned real good right now
You better get it straight darling:

Poor man wanna be rich,
rich man wanna be king
And a king ain’t satisfied
till he rules everything
I wanna go out tonight,
I wanna find out what I got

Well I believe in the love that you gave me
I believe in the faith that could save me
I believe in the hope
and I pray that some day
It may raise me above these badlands…

The best word to describe the tone of the song as a whole (full lyrics here) is probably defiant. The singer seems to have no real expectation that his circumstances will improve, but he’s trying to convince himself (and his lover) that he’s determined to savor life anyway.

I don’t really think Springsteen is trying to be religious in any strong sense of the word, but the allusion to faith, hope, and love is a nice nod to people who know their Bible (1 Cor 13:13). It also highlights how much the idea of hope is wrapped up both in religious faith and in the experience especially of people who live on the border between poor and working class, which Springsteen likes to explore (see his remarkable song The River). It is no great stretch to see commonality between Springsteen’s words here and places in the Gospels that promise reversal of fortunes for the downtrodden (e.g., the beatitudes in Matthew 5 or the Magnificat in Luke 1:46ff).

There’s something here that should challenge religious folks, especially those of us who buy into an apocalyptic worldview where God is supposed to some day put everything right. I don’t know if Springsteen is a Christian, but what’s interesting is that his lyrics here don’t demand any particular religious commitment as the foundation for his hope. And since the situation of the song’s narrator doesn’t seem to offer good earthly reason for hope either, it begs a question: Should we see the song as just reflecting a human tendency to hope for the future whether we have any good reason to or not? And if that’s what humans do, should Christians suspect that our own apocalyptic faith is the same thing, just a groundless hope for a better future?

There’s an assumption in much academic study of religion that religious beliefs and texts arise ultimately from the needs of their adherents and authors, rather than from any explicit kind of divine revelation. That’s not quite to say that people invent their religion out of thin air, but rather that people express hopes or fears that become stories and religious doctrines, which eventually undergird a religion.

I suppose that as a confessing Christian, I’d have to say that this is what the other world religions are in their essence. Certainly God may reveal Godself in different ways to different peoples, but it is difficut (I would argue impossible) to reconcile Christian apocalypticism with the beliefs of religions that make competing claims. So I feel compelled to reject religious pluralism and assume a kind of exclusivism for Christianity. (I’m not a doctrinal purity zealot, but I would argue that some common belief or confession such as “Jesus is Lord” is necessary for Christians.)

The scary thing is that I can’t prove (even to myself) that a developmental process grounded only in wishful thinking isn’t the source of all religions, including mine. And as I’ve suggested here before, the only real reason that I find compelling for holding that Christianity is different is the resurrection of Jesus. This is a strong reason in my view, but it is hardly as thoroughgoing as, say, common Christian claims that the Bible is absolutely perfect and therefore obviously the word of God. Scripture is certainly beautiful, powerful, and brilliant, but its inspiration is impossible to prove even though I believe it, and its supposed perfection is hard to substantiate unless it’s simply assumed and posited at the outset.

Returning to where I started, I love Springsteen’s lyrics, because of their power, their apparent authenticity, and in this case the biblical intertext they play with. I also like that they force me to think critically about my faith, which used to really scare me, but which now just makes me (hopefully) less smug.

This is a sermon I preached yesterday at my church in Brookline, MA. (It took about 20 minutes to deliver.)

I’ve always been bothered by the apocalyptic passages in the New Testament –– the ones that seem to talk about the end of time. On the one hand, they’re inspiring and powerful –– God is going to show up in glory and set the world right. On the other hand, it’s been a long, long time now since those passages were written, so when exactly is God going to do all this?

In the New Testament, we get a range of answers. In 1 Thessalonians, Paul thinks it’ll be very soon, and he assumes that he’ll still be alive when Christ returns. In 1 Corinthians, he doesn’t think people should even bother getting married, apparently because he expects Christ to return before they would have time to raise kids. But as time wears on, Paul seems less confident that Jesus will return all that soon. By the time Paul writes Philippians, he’s talking about seeing Christ when Paul dies, not when Christ returns. That’s a very different notion of what the end means.

In Mark, Jesus talks as if the fall of the Temple in the year 70 will be the end of time, but then in Acts it seems as if the church is here for the long run –– though Jesus could still return at any moment.

And then time rolls on and we get 2 Peter, which seems to have been written long after Peter’s death, as if it were from Peter, like if I stood up and read a letter to the Brookline church from Alexander Campbell or some other important figure in our history. In 2 Peter, a day, for the Lord, is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day, so we shouldn’t worry if it’s taking a long time for Jesus to return. Well, maybe now we should say a day is more like 2,000 years, or longer. Why do we have to keep waiting?

We have Jesus’ promise, and so we have hope. But if we spend our time looking at the sky –– and there are lots of Christians in this country who do –– it sure seems like nothing ever happens. And it’s tempting to drift toward despair.

The choice between hope and despair is key for the Christian life, and it’s also in the background throughout the book of Jeremiah, which is where my main sermon text today comes from.

JERUSALEM UNDER SIEGE

To understand Jeremiah’s prophecy, you have to know something about the political situation of his day, in the years just before and just after 600 B.C. So these next couple of minutes will be not so much sermon, as history review.

There are three main points to get straight.

First, Israel was a small nation surrounded by superpowers who wanted to conquer them. We might imagine Afghanistan or Armenia during the rise of the Soviet Union –– it was just a matter of time till they got overwhelmed. The northern half of Israel had already been destroyed about a hundred years earlier by the Assyrian empire from the east –– a huge part of their population was deported and never heard from again.

And now a new empire –– Babylon –– had risen up, and was threatening to do the same thing to Jerusalem. We worry about terrorism today, but the people of Jerusalem were imagining vicious armies marching up to the city walls, laying siege, starving the city, and then rushing into Jerusalem and killing the men, raping the women, enslaving the children. This is how war worked, and you didn’t want to be on the losing end.

The second point is that the prophets of Israel had interpreted the fall of the northern kingdom a hundred years earlier as God’s punishment for turning their back on God’s covenant. And now Jeremiah claimed that the same thing would happen to Jerusalem for the same reasons. Jerusalem was worshipping other gods, beating down the poor, forsaking the covenant, and Jeremiah was adamant that the political situation was punishment, one of the curses for disobedience that the book of Deuteronomy describes. Meanwhile, the King was more interested in political or military solutions, and Jeremiah’s theology didn’t sound very helpful.

And then the third thing to understand about Jeremiah’s situation is that Jeremiah wasn’t the only prophet in Jerusalem, and most of the rest of them disagreed with him. Other prophets were saying that God would protect Jerusalem –– after all, it was God’s city, and God’s temple was there –– so the people should take heart. We know what it’s like to be in a war where some people say we’re going to win if we just fight hard enough, while others say we should give up now. But this was a little different, because giving up meant having your homeland occupied by foreigners. In any event, Jeremiah said that the other prophets were liars and that God would strike them dead with sword and famine.

So you have one very lonely voice preaching in Jerusalem that the city was about to be destroyed –– which looks a lot like treason, and in any case makes you lots of enemies.

So 3 points about Jeremiah’s situation: (1) the army of a superpower is marching into the country to take the people into exile; (2) Jeremiah says this is punishment from God for breaking the covenant; and (3) other prophets in Jerusalem disagree with Jeremiah and say “no”, that God will deliver Jerusalem after all.

Finally, king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon does show up, and Jerusalem gets lucky. Instead of destroying the city and the Temple, all he does is take away 10,000 of the most able-bodied people into captivity –– the king, and royal family, and everyone who knew how to govern, or fight, or make swords––anyone who could cause trouble if they were left in Jerusalem. (As a point of reference, this is when Daniel, and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego ended up in the Babylonian court, because they were exiled.) The rest of the people got to stay in Jerusalem, with a new king appointed by Nebuchadnezzar. It wouldn’t be till ten years later, when that new king rebelled, that Nebuchadnezzar would come back, tear down the walls, burn all the buildings, and destroy Solomon’s temple and the city of Jerusalem completely.

In the meantime, with the Temple still standing, Jeremiah stays in Jerusalem and continues to preach. He argues the very unpopular position that God has given the land to Babylon, and that the king and the people should continue to be obedient to Babylon, or else God (using Babylon) will do something worse. Other prophets, both in Jerusalem and with the exiles in Babylon, continue to preach that God will fix the situation quickly and bring the exiles back in a couple of years.

OK, done with the history lesson; back to the sermon.

SETTLING INTO EXILE

Jeremiah writes this letter to the exiles and Babylon, which is our lectionary text for today. I’ll be reading in Jeremiah 29, starting in verse 1, and I’ll go all the way to verse 14.

These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon…Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the Lord.

For thus says the Lord: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place [that is, Jerusalem]. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

This is one of the most powerful and most quoted passages in the Old Testament, and for good reason: no matter what our circumstances, it says, God always has plans for our welfare. Paul makes a similar claim in Romans: In all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.

But there are problems with quoting this passage as if God has a specific plan for the success of every individual Israelite –– or every individual Christian. And not the least is, no one that Jeremiah is writing to will actually see the restoration God is promising. It’s only going to be 70 years later, after their whole generation has died off, that their children and grandchildren are going to return to Jerusalem. In the book of Numbers, when God killed off a generation like that, it was called punishment, not hope for a future.

Jeremiah’s instructions are for the meantime. Reading again from verses 5-7

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Settling down in exile is completely counter-intuitive. The whole idea of exile is that you’re not at home, so why would you want to raise a family there? Surely that can’t be God’s plan for the people of Jerusalem. And yet, God’s word holds true, and a number of years later the people are allowed to return to Jerusalem, where they rebuild the walls, build a new temple, and begin sacrifices to God once again. But those who heard the promise weren’t the ones who got to see it fulfilled.

1 PETER’S EXILES

In the New Testament, Jeremiah’s message is echoed in 1 Peter, where Christians are called “exiles” in this world, but are still told to settle down, live good lives among the pagans, and do their civic duty by honoring the Roman emperor. Just like the Israelites in Babylon, Peter’s church would also end up watching their entire generation die off without seeing the fulfillment of God’s promise. Maybe their children would see it, but they had to make do in exile.

It doesn’t seem to make sense why God would leave his people in exile like that for so long, and that problem is compounded for us today. We talk about Christ’s return, but it’s a stretch to really think it’ll happen in my generation. It’s just been too long. One place in Scripture tells us that God is waiting so everyone will have a chance to repent, and yet most people don’t repent. Centuries go by of humans rejecting God’s call, and it’s not all that clear that the world is becoming a better place.

I’m sure Jeremiah’s audience didn’t really understand why they had to wait, and neither did Peter’s, and neither do we.

These passages highlight the paradox of the Christian life as something that is lived completely in this world, but also as something other-worldly.

On the one hand, this world matters, just like life in Babylon mattered to Jeremiah’s exiles. God had put them there for a reason, and he wanted them to throw themselves into that life while they were in Babylonia. And the same is true for us. We are the salt of the earth, the light of the world, as Jesus said. As God’s Holy Spirit acts through our lives, we embody the kingdom of God, helping God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

God may call different people to different roles, but on the whole there is no room in the Christian faith for ignoring the world God created by isolating ourselves from everyone else in an effort to be holy. There is no room for abusing or neglecting creation, either because we feel entitled to, or because we anticipate God destroying or recreating it at the end of time. There is no room for ignoring the physical needs of people who are hungry, sick, or homeless, even if we conclude that spiritual needs are more important in key ways. God told Israel to seek the welfare of the Babylonian city they lived in, and it seems his call to us is also to work for the welfare of our world.

So God calls us to live in this world. But the other side of the paradox is that we are still exiles here. We don’t seek the welfare of this world as if it is all we have. We pray for it, but we should never mistake it for our home. We serve those in the world around us, but we belong to God.

We must not resign ourselves to our work here as if it’s God’s final word –– as if there’s nothing more after death, so we’d better make the best of what we have here. That kind of attitude might look like hope for the future of this world, but in fact it is despair toward the promises of God.

As Christians, there’s actually quite a lot at stake in overcoming despair, since Paul says that our faith in God’s promises is wrapped up somehow in the way that God saves us. Judging just by the world around us, death seems pretty final –– we don’t see people come back from the dead. And so the only real reason we have for believing God will raise us from the dead is that we believe God raised Jesus. But then we might believe that God acted back then, and yet still doubt that God will act again. Despair is still an option. As I said, it’s been a long, long time. In light of this, having faith means holding fast to the promises of God even when it seems he may never return. We act in this world, but we hope for the next.

2 TIMOTHY AS PROMISE AND WARNING

Sometimes the difference between this world and the next is very clear, something we see especially in the life of Paul. He may have sought the welfare of his society, but they certainly didn’t seek his. Instead, he was often abused and beaten, and eventually he was thrown into prison, as we’ve seen in our lectionary readings these past two weeks.

Paul knows why someone might be tempted to despair of God’s promises, but he warns against that temptation, citing a poem that we read earlier from the lectionary. Paul calls it a trustworthy saying, and he uses it to warn Timothy and the church that they cannot give in to despair if they hope to receive God’s promise. This is 2 Timothy 2:11-13:

If we’ve died with him, we’ll also live with him.
If we endure, we’ll also reign with him.
If we deny him, he’ll also deny us.
If we are faithless, he’ll remain faithful ––
for he cannot deny himself.

The first part, “dying with Christ,” is easy. In Paul’s writings that means baptism, which most of us here have already done. So if we’ve died with him, we’ll live with him. It’s a powerful and important promise.

Next is an even better promise: If we endure, we’ll also reign with him. This is a little vague in Scripture, but apparently the plan is for Christians to have some kind of ruling role in the world to come, sitting alongside Christ to judge and govern the recreated world. Again, it’s a powerful promise, but this time it comes with a warning: if we endure. We might have Christ’s gift of life now, but reigning with him in the final resurrection requires endurance. Paul proclaims boldly that he is not ashamed of Christ, even when he’s thrown into prison for his preaching. Whether or not we face the same kind of suffering, we are called to the same kind of boldness.

Then, in the next line, Paul’s warning turns more explicit: If we deny Christ, the poem says, he’ll also deny us. Our salvation may be the work of God from start to finish, but it appears here that we can reject that salvation if we give in to despair. Christ makes no promise to vouch for those who turn away. We may be called to settle into the land of our exile, but we still have to be faithful to Christ while we’re here.

And so we settle into the paradox that Jeremiah has set up for us, of living in exile as if we are at home, yet knowing all along that we are not at home. And Paul tells us what is at stake in choosing hope –– in God’s promises –– over despair –– that we will be in exile forever. If we choose despair and deny Christ, he’ll deny us.

What remains is to say why exactly this is good news –– why this is the gospel, rather than just a contract that we have to try to live up to or else face dire consequences. And both Jeremiah and Paul give us this good news in memorable words.

In Jeremiah, it sounds like this: “Surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”

And in 2 Timothy, it sounds like this: “If we are faithless, Christ will remain faithful––for he cannot deny himself.”

God had a plan for bringing the exiles back to Jerusalem, and of course he has a plan for our future too, whether he shows up to renew the earth during our lifetime, or whether we’ll die and have to wait for salvation beyond the grave. Our salvation is always in Christ’s hands, and that is always the reason we can have hope.

Fields of academic study are typically named using a Greek word related to the field combined with the Greek root logos, which means word or reason. So for example, biology is the study of life (Greek bios).

When it came to the study of words, however, whoever decides these things apparently decided against the redundant logology, opting instead for philology, which literally means love of words. Whatever the reason for the choice, I think it’s appropriate, since I can’t imagine anyone ever studying the development of words simply because they thought it was useful. To get into something that technical, I think you have to love it.

And in this sense (as well as professionally, to an extent), I consider myself a philologist, which I suppose is the only possible explanation for this post.

An English transliteration of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of a place

Because Christians are constantly dealing with texts that have been translated from other languages, words and names from Scripture are frequently misunderstood or distorted as the tradition is passed along. Here I’ll deal with one that I find interesting: Calvary.

Believe it or not, this word––used so often in Christian sermons, songs, and church names––is not in the Bible, except for the King James Version.

It had bothered me for awhile that I couldn’t think where I had seen the word in Scripture, so finally I looked in my Greek concordance (where I would expect it to look something like Kaluaria) and found that it wasn’t there. A computer search of the KJV, however, turned up the word in Luke 23:33: “And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left.”

(Brief, important definitions: to translate something is of course to write what it means in another language. To transliterate is to just take the letters of the original word and write them, in the same order, in a different language or with a different alphabet. As an example, hallelujah is the English transliteration of a common Hebrew phrase; its translation would be Praise the Lord.)

What’s odd about the KJV reading of Calvary is that when you look at Luke 23:33 in Greek (the original language), the name of the place is Kranion, which means skull. In the three other Gospels (Matt 27:33, Mark 15:22, and John 19:17), when this same Greek word shows up at the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, the KJV translates it accordingly, as skull.

But even though they were supposed to be working from the original Greek, the KJV translators let their Latin creep into the process: it turns out that the Latin translation of Kranion is Calvaria, which is surely where the KJV translators got the name Calvary. Problem is, the original New Testament was wasn’t written in Latin, so there’s no reason a word transliterated from Latin should end up in any English translation.

There is at least a plausible explanation for why the KJV translators didn’t make this same mistake in the other Gospels, and this is where the situation gets (more) complex. In Matthew, Mark, and John, the name of the hill is identified as Golgotha, which is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew word Gulgoleth. The transliteration into Greek at this point makese sense, since Gulgoleth is probably the actual name that native speakers called the place near Jerusalem.

The authors of Matthew, Mark, and John wanted their audiences to know both the name of the place and what it meant, so all three of them included both Golgotha (the transliteration of the name from Hebrew) and Kravion (a translation of the Hebrew word that their Greek-speaking readers/hearers would understand).

It’s easy to see why the KJV translators didn’t make the mistake of using Calvary in these three passages like they did in Luke, since it would have made little sense for the text to say, “Golgotha, which means Kranion” or “Golgotha, which means Calvary.” English readers wouldn’t have understood what Kranion or Calvary meant, so instead the KJV refers to Golgotha and place of the skull.

But Luke never gives us the name Golgotha. He only writes, “they came to the place called Kranion,” which might suggest to a Greek reader that Kranion was the actual proper name of the place. In this case, the translators from Greek to Latin were quick enough to realize (probably from knowing the parallels in the other Gospels) that Kranion was just a translation of the name, so they translated it also, to the Latin Calvaria.

But the KJV translators, who probably knew the Latin translation of the Bible quite well, seem to have let the familiar reading affect their work. And so instead of translating the name (i.e., as Skull), they inserted the Latin transliteration and passed it along.

Great, so what?

I’m actually not sure what I’m contributing here; everyone knows that Calvary refers to where Jesus was crucified, so there should be no problem with going on using it.

I do suppose that I’m potentially ruining a bunch of pretty Christian songs for some people (think: “Jesus keep me near the cross: There a precious fountain / Free to all, a healing stream / Flows from Skull’s mountain”).

What is worth considering is how religious language functions for us. The frequency with which the word Calvary is used, coupled with the fact that I’ve never heard anyone question where exactly it comes from, suggests that the root meaning of a word need not have anything to do with its meaning for real people who participate in a religious tradition.

At the very least, the word points to how useful it is to have certain words that function as shorthand. You can say to any Bible-belt Christian, “Remember Calvary,” and they’ll probably know what you’re talking about. The Cross has a similar function.

Perhaps we like Calvary because it is a pretty word that fits well in names like Calvary Baptist Church, whereas the darker Golgotha, or the morbid Skull, might put people off. Of course, I suppose that if we can make crosses of gold, we could also knock the rough edges off the word skull if we wanted to.