Repentance and the Kingdom

Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel.”

- Mark 1:14-15

I attended my first Ash Wednesday service this morning. It was a Protestant iteration, but still with songs of lament and thoughtful readings of confession and repentance. I’m new to Lent, but it seems to mean all sorts of things in American religion; often it’s seen as an opportunity for self-improvement, like abstaining from unhealthy food or Facebook (as announced on…Facebook). It’s wrapped up in Western selfishness and consumerism.*

But as far as I can tell, the cash value of Lent is repentance. It’s a chance to confess and consider the consequences of our sins. It’s a chance to ponder death, life without redemption, considering even the “loud cries and tears” of Jesus himself, who “learned obedience through what he suffered,” and in his perfect life “became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (Heb. 5:7-8). In other words, as others have pointed out, it’s not about what you give up but what you take on: meditation, prayer, Bible reading — however each of us can best consider Christ. How much chocolate you do or don’t eat is of little consequence.

In the text above, Mark has just finished describing in a torrid pace the baptism and desert testing of Jesus — both, we are told, being the work of the Spirit. After overcoming his foes in the desert (something I’ll say more about in a later post), Jesus enters Galilee and proclaims the advent of the kingdom — God’s restorative reign not just over Israel, but over the whole earth.

After centuries of anxious waiting, Israel will now see the coming of her king, and his kingdom comes with him. Look! Demons are cast out**, a leper is cleansed and restored to the community, a paralyzed man is healed and has his sins forgiven, huge crowds listen to Jesus preach the gospel —  and that’s just the first three chapters. The reign of God is here, right now — starting small and ostensibly as inconsequential as a mustard seed but growing into a tree, spreading so large that the birds (i.e., all people of the earth) can nest in its shade (Mk. 4:30-32, cf. Ezek. 31:6, Dan. 4:9-14).

And central to the coming kingdom are the two imperatives Jesus invokes: “repent and believe.” As we all heard in Sunday School, to repent is to make a radical turn, to suddenly change course, to about-face. This not only validates Jesus’ ministry by connecting it with John’s (1:4), but it also resonates with the regular prophetic call in the OT for Israel to turn back to Yahweh and obey him.

This, Jesus tells us, is the right response to the inaugurated kingdom. When God’s reign suddenly and dramatically breaks into our reality, no matter what else is going on, we repent and we believe. This is why I think Lent, thoughtfully celebrated, can be helpful — not because we labor to look good before God and others, but because we turn from our sin right where we are and look to God for forgiveness. We instead admit we’re not good, we’re actually really, really bad, but we trust in the anointed Messiah to heal us and forgive our sins (cf. 2:8-12).

The kingdom is here. You might not be ready, but it’s okay. Repent, and believe the gospel.

——–

* Sorry sorry, I promised on Twitter to not be didactic anymore, sorry.

** Interestingly, they are the only ones who see Jesus as the Son of God he really is (see 1:24, 1:34, 3:11). There is a profound spiritual battle going on beneath the surface of the Gospel accounts, perhaps even extensions of the showdown with Satan in the wilderness.

Hearing then speaking

So hi. After a lengthy break I want to start blogging again, because I’m tired of not having a writing outlet. I don’t know what I’m going to write about, or how often, but I need to get back into the habit of putting words on the page (or on the interwebs, potato/potahto). Seminary has done a lot of good for me, but it’s also taken a lot of my attention obviously and my creative output has all but dried up. Going with that metaphor, it’s time to repair the well.

During my absence I sometimes considered with guilt why I wasn’t writing more often, and by that I mean, at all. I think outright laziness had something to do with that, but I did quite well in my classes so that’s not all of it. I think I can explain it as a kind of blogging existential crisis. I came to a similar point once with exercising — it seemed so futile, meaningless, and vain that I couldn’t get myself to the gym every day.

With blogging, I began to feel like I was just doing it to exercise my own ego, since when people like what we write we feel good about ourselves. At the heart of all my vanities, or most of them at least, is pride — in my case, an unquenchable desire to be respected, well-thought-of, smart. I doubt I’m alone here, but I can only speak for myself. For example, I don’t mind “losing” arguments with people or “being wrong”, so long as my interlocutors think that I’m intelligent. So what I’m saying is that I’m a self-important person who takes himself (and his writing) way too seriously.

But the thing is I like writing way too much to go without it. So I’m writing again, considering the weighty words of James:

“Know this, my beloved brothers, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger — for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness, and received with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.”

My blog presents an opportunity to listen, then to speak. Notice the prepositional phrase right at the end: “receive with meekness the implanted word.” Seminary teaches us how to proclaim with boldness the implanted word, but in truth that only happens after we humbly receive. Listen. Consider.

Come listen with me.

Christmas Myths

Each year, there are several often-repeated Christmas images that circulate in Nativity plays, television specials, and pastoral sermons. A number of them are technically right but misunderstood (for example, there were wise men who brought Jesus gifts, but there probably weren’t exactly three of them and they didn’t see Jesus in the manger…more on that in a bit). Others probably aren’t as right. Here’s a brief Christmas Eve rundown:

Christmas, December 25, originated as a pagan holiday

This isn’t a Christmas story myth, per se, but it gets around this time of year on cable television. The popular view regarding the origin of Dec. 25 as Christmas is that the early Christians borrowed it from pagan solar festivals — particularly the mid-winter celebration of the birth of god Sol Invictus.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this if it were true, but it has some problems: (1) No early church writer (and no writer until the 12th Century, in fact) claims that Christians deliberately chose Dec. 25 to coincide with pagan celebrations. (2) Here’s the real kicker — there is lots of evidence that the church in the first to mid-fourth century was not very accommodating to pagan worship practices. Rather, it’s not difficult to see another reason that date would have been chosen: the early church thought that Jesus was conceived on the same day he was crucified — March 25. Add nine months and you have Dec. 25. Any correlation with pagan festivals was likely coincidental (and early church writers like St. Ambrose treat it as such).

Even if the Christian observance of Christmas on Dec. 25 emerged from pagan festivals, that’s really just an indication of the victory of the Christian faith over paganism.

For more discussion, though, check out this Fox News story from last year, featuring my Systematic Theology prof at Southern, Gregg Allison: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/12/21/back-story-december-25th-1209634885/

Angels sang to announce the birth of Jesus

Everyone likes this one, and I admit that I hear Handel’s Messiah in my head every time I read Luke 2:14: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, goodwill toward men.”

But the angels didn’t sing. Look at Luke 2:13 more carefully: “Suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying.” You don’t even need to appeal to Greek for this one. They even render it “saying” in Messiah. There was no singing. The angels just said it (or proclaimed it, if that sounds more Christmas-y).

Mary gave birth to Jesus in a cave, because the nearby Bethlehem inn was full

This one is problematic on a couple different levels. First, neither Matthew or Luke mentions anything about a cave (or a stable, for that matter), and as far as I can tell that idea originated in the apocryphal (and utterly strange) Protoevangelium of James.

The second problem surrounds the word “inn.” The traditional image here is of Joseph getting turned away from innkeeper after innkeeper as he searches for a place for Mary to give birth. As many have pointed out, it’s doubtful that a tiny Israelite town like Bethlehem would have even one commercial inn, let alone several. Additionally, Joseph would have had close relatives staying in Bethlehem for the same reason he was — the census. Near Eastern hospitality being what it is, Joseph would have very likely tried to stay with his relatives in Bethlehem, not in public lodging.

The word here in Luke 1:7 is katalumati, from kataluma, which is apparently flexible and could conceivably mean something like “inn.” BDAG lists a number of different usages in both the LXX and NT. But what’s really interesting is how Luke uses the word. It appears twice in Luke’s gospel — once here in the birth narrative, and again in 22:11 for the large, well-furnished “upper room” Jesus used for the Last Supper on the night he was betrayed.

It seems to me that if Luke had wanted to say “inn” he could have — and in fact he did in 10:34, for the place where the Good Samaritan took the injured Jewish man. Except the word here is different; the Good Samaritan took the man to the pandocheion, not a kataluma, the word Luke seems to prefer for something like a house.

With these details in mind, several scholars (e.g., Ben Witherington, Preston Sprinkle, my IBEX prof Abner Chou, etc.) have suggested a scandalous alternative to the traditional story. It’s possible that there was physically no room, but again, think of the hospitality of that culture and Joseph’s Davidic lineage. There’s really no room at all for a young son of David and his very, very pregnant wife?

Instead, some scholars suggest that when Joseph knocks on the door of his relatives’ house in Bethlehem, they see his extremely pregnant wife betrothed Mary and refuse to let him in. Perhaps word of Mary’s indiscretion and Joseph’s ostensible ambivalence had already reached them. Or perhaps they realize the two aren’t married, Mary is quite obviously pregnant, and Joseph still hasn’t divorced her, indicating his tacit approval of her actions (or even his complicity).

Either way, Luke’s wording here is full of the biting, almost sarcastic response of Joseph’s family — there’s “no room” for kin who sin and tolerate sin. So they send the disgraced couple down to the small add-on to the house, where the animals would sleep and eat, to let the consequences of their sin sink in a bit maybe.

This detail is admittedly speculative, but the arguments are convincing. Regardless, considering Luke’s use of that word and the very small size of Bethlehem, there probably was no inn, and no innkeeper either.

Joseph hurried Mary to Bethlehem, arriving just in the nick of time

This is a very popular view, appearing in the movie from a couple years ago, The Nativity Story. Mary goes into labor during the trip (conveniently right on the outskirts of Bethlehem, actually) and Joseph has to frantically search for lodging, getting turned away repeatedly by heartless innkeepers.

Of course, the Bible gets in the way here, too. In Luke’s account, after Joseph and Mary head to Bethlehem for the registration, Luke tells us that “while they were there, the time came for her to give birth.” Mary and Joseph had apparently been there for a little while when Jesus was born, and there’s no late-night, frenetic drama surrounding Jesus’ birth.

Since Mary and Joseph were traveling to Bethlehem for the census, they wouldn’t have needed to be there long, but it seems Joseph was a thoughtful and sensitive enough husband to stay in town until Mary gave birth.

[This is unrelated, but interesting: this myth also seems to have originated in the Protoevangelium of James, as just as they arrive in Bethlehem, Mary has a strange vision and goes into labor. Joseph searches frantically for a handmaiden to help deliver the child, eventually finding a woman named Salome (yes, the same Salome from Mark's resurrection narrative in Mark 16). Salome's Thomas-like unbelief regarding Mary's virginity is the strangest part of the story. I'll let you read it for yourself.]

Jesus was laid in a manger

Okay, this one isn’t a “myth” as such, but we usually think of the wrong thing when we hear “manger.” With all the Christmas pageants, it’s become such a cuddly word that we get desensitized to what it really is. A manger is an old English word for an animal feeding trough, not a comfy makeshift baby crib. There may not have been any straw and it certainly wasn’t made out of wood, but rather rough stone.

One could also imagine the remnants of some animal dinner still lingering in the trough. It’s a little bit like putting your newborn baby in a dog’s food bowl — an ignominious beginning of life for any child, let alone the King of Kings.

Three wise men visited Jesus on the night of his birth

First, as noted above, there weren’t three wise men but three gifts (each of which, by the way, were gifts due a king and have nothing to do with Jesus’ roles of prophet, priest, and king, which is something I read on Twitter this week).

Second, the wise men didn’t get to Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’ birth, and weren’t there at the same time as the shepherds (despite the indication of every Nativity scene ever). The wise men visited Jesus some time after his birth.

How long after? A small detail in Matthew’s account gives us a clue: we’re told that Herod ordered the murder of every male boy in Bethlehem “two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men” (Matt. 2:16). This is also evidence for the later arrival of the wise men, since there’s no other reason for Herod to slaughter children in a two-year age window. Based on this, the wise men could have visited Jesus as many as two years later.

Those are just a few I thought of. Do you have any others? Share them in the comments!

MMP 12.3

New Bruce Ware book on the humanity of Christ. And Dane Ortlund interviews him about it for 20 minutes. The discussion about Jesus’ permanent humanity starting at 18:13 is particularly mind-blowing. You can get the book here.

Theologian Trading Cards! They are real. I guess they’re primarily for getting familiar with figures in church history, but try convincing someone you’re not an enormous dork once they find them on your shelf. Honestly though, this isn’t really going to take off until they start selling ten-packs. BONUS: Win a free Kevin Vanhoozer!

HT: Koinonia

Language in Lincoln. There are lots of things to love about Steven Spielberg’s film about Abraham Lincoln’s political genius in the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, but what most impressed me was its sharp, compelling dialogue. Then I stumbled upon this excellent piece in the Boston Globe on screenwriter Tony Kushner. Here’s a great excerpt:

Kushner so immersed himself in the president’s earthy yet powerful language that he eventually felt comfortable coining his own Lincolnese. When the chief proponents of the 13th Amendment complain that they can’t convince enough House Democrats to break ranks, Lincoln snaps, “You grousle and heckle and dodge about like pettifogging Tammany Hall hucksters.” Good luck finding grousle in the OED: Kushner says he made it up. “I just liked the sound of it,” he admitted.

Read the whole thing. (HT: Scot McKnight)

Do you always begin conversations this way? ESPN’s NFL Kickoff crew decided to squeeze in as many Princess Bride allusions as they could in a 30 minute show. Some of you saw this on my Facebook feed but didn’t watch because you thought it was 30 minutes long. It’s actually less than two, and entirely worth it.

Also, according to one of the commenters, Trey Wingo said it wasn’t pre-planned, which makes it even better. Watch now.

HT: 22 Words

Monday Morning Press 11.19

As if we need another excuse. There are numerous reasons to drink coffee — some drink for quantity, using as fuel to push through the day; others drink for quality, brewing their own daily and refusing to settle for Folgers or Starbucks. A recent study suggests that our favorite hot drink doesn’t just give us energy or taste awesome, but it also may help us think faster:

Now, a study published today in the journal PLOS ONE suggests that 200 mg of caffeine—the equivalent of a couple of cups of coffee—can help the brain identify words more quickly and precisely. In a study conducted by psychologists Lars Kuchinke and Vanessa Lux from Ruhr University in Germany, healthy young adults given a 200 mg caffeine tablet exhibited improved speed and accuracy while completing a word recognition task.

HT: Scot McKnight

Perhaps Old Testament writers understood more that we give them credit for? Justin Taylor posts a helpful quote from G.K. Beale on the complexities of authorial intent in the OT.

Because one snobby, religious football school isn’t enough. Bobby Ross Jr. of GetReligion blog addresses Liberty University’s absurd wish be ascend to the elites of college football, and become the “Protestant Notre Dame.” Maybe Liberty will be ride wins over Boston College and Wake Forest on its way to getting hammered in the National Championship Game someday too!

Bible software stuff. Mark Hoffman gives three reasons to upgrade to/buy Logos 5. It’s the better searches, basically.

DFW biography. It exists, and Elaine Blair gives a nice review in the NYT. I’ve heard conflicting things about it, but I’m sure I’ll check it out at some point.

And everybody makes fun of how much I use it. Ben Yagoda in the NYT on the glory of the em-dash.

You’re back! Yeah, we’ll see how long it lasts. I’m pretty sure I’m just writing again for an excuse to say something glowing about Denard Robinson sometime this week.

* Three things: first, this will never happen. Second, they just hired former Nebraska star QB Turner Gill — who had substantial success at Buffalo (for Buffalo, anyway) before he left for Kansas, limped to a 5-19 record, and was fired after two seasons. It’s a good hire for Liberty, though, which tells you how close they are to even playing Notre Dame one time: they’re hiring major college football castoffs.Third, I wrote a story for the Cedarville student paper when I was there about why we didn’t have a football team, and the biggest reason was the sorry story of Liberty: ambition gets the best of all of us.

Class texts and bibliographical providence

I was already kind of grumpy when I started my first seminary class. Not angry, certainly not disappointed, just a tad peeved. Days before, I was in the seminary bookstore, collecting all the texts I would need for the semester.

Some of them excited me (Michael Horton’s “Covenant and Eschatology,” Courtney Anderson’s “To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson,” J.I. Packer’s “A Quest for Godliness” to name a few), and most of the others promised at least something interesting.

Except one — a 200-page, primary-sourced historical survey of church discipline in Southern Baptist churches from 1785-1900. To me, it seemed random, esoteric, perhaps a little pretenious; certainly not something I would find theologically engaging or immediately practical. It also didn’t help that the book was the professor’s dissertation, which made it both more expensive than other books and outside the tax exemption the seminary had arranged with most publishing houses.

So I figured this book couldn’t possibly be spiritually enriching or informative except in the most detached, some-day-you-might-have-to-deal-with-this sense.

I was wrong, of course.

But I write for a broader reason than to explain how surprisingly relevant I found “Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South.” This has caused me to reflect a little more on how we should view mundane, unexciting things in our lives, and more precisely, how we should respond to getting assignments or required readings for class we couldn’t care less about (and it’s happened to all of us).

Not long ago I read a book called Letters to a Young Calvinist by James K.A. Smith that contained an interesting chapter titled “Bibliographical Providence.” I’ve posted about this concept before, and the here’s the gist: we’ve all come across a book that just so happens to be precisely about something we’ve been thinking about recently. Maybe it’s a book about the will of God when there’s a particularly big decision we have to make, or a long-lost comic book that you enjoyed when you were a kid and were just recently thinking about. This happens to me all the time, actually. It seems like random chance.

But some of us have found the exactly right book at the exactly right time in an extremely unlikely place, and you can’t help but have a “hmm” moment. Smith has a great example: discovering a pristine edition of W.G.T. Shedd’s Dogmatic Theology in a tiny used bookstore in Ontario in the midst of his very early fascination with Reformed theology.

Okay, here’s mine: I studied in Israel for a spring semester, and the previous fall I had developed a serious book-crush on everything Cormac McCarthy — style, tone, narration, setting, all that. During a week excursion to the Galilee, I found myself thinking a lot about No Country for Old Men, one of his more popular books I’d not yet read. I had considered ordering it from Amazon but wasn’t willing to pay the shipping costs, so I tried to forget about it.

Well, during the trip we stopped for lunch at this Israeli mall, a not very big one at that. We had fifteen minutes to walk around the mall before we had to board the bus, so as I’m wont to do I went straight to the bookstore. It wasn’t a very big bookstore, and there were only a couple shelves of English books. But I looked through the titles anyway. One of them was, you guessed it, No Country for Old Men.

So you get the idea. Those times when we “randomly” uncover a book that is exactly what we need or want at that moment can seem like unique interventions of God in our lives — special gifts perhaps. And perhaps they are.

But what if it works the other way too? What if God not only brings books into our lives that directly relate to issues or interests we’re currently thinking through, but he also brings books to us that relate to something we won’t deal with for months or even years? And what if our class texts are among those books?

One of the things Smith calls for in Letters is a robust view of God’s sovereignty that changes the way we think about God, the way we view school, the way we do church, etc. Calvin, after all, didn’t teach a detached doctrine of predestination that only affected his soteriology; instead he taught a robust doctrine of God’s absolute, cosmic sovereignty that trickles down to every element of human experience—including salvation.

But it’s not just Jamie Smith and John Calvin who say this. “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined,” Paul writes in Romans 8, “to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first born among many brethren.”

In other words, God had a plan before the beginning of time, not only that we might be “elect” or “saved” in some general sense, but that we might be molded into the likeness of Jesus. Moreover, this isn’t some broad decree either, as if God just declares it to be so and watches us figure out how to get there. This point is preceded by Paul’s claim that “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”

God is actively involved in everything in our lives (that’s what I would argue Paul means by “all things,” after all) that we might become more like Jesus. The implications of this are enormous. I don’t think that it’s too grand to say that this changes the way we look at anything we experience, ever.

Even the books we read. Though we might not see it now, it’s not an accident that we’re in some class and the professor is giving us some assignment. It’s not random; there are no mistakes. God is involved in our lives on the smallest of levels, inserting things here and there to sanctify us for the eternal glory of Jesus. In a sense, there is nothing mundane. God cares about the most meaningless things you do, because he owns it all, and he has a plan.

So you don’t know why you’re taking that math Gen Ed, or reading that media law textbook, or spending every evening coming up with silly, embarrassing mnemonic methods to remember Greek vocab (okay maybe that’s just me)? Just wait. Who knows what purpose it might serve in that plan?

And even if you don’t find out in this life, trust that we’ll one day praise the same God who protected one small, cosmically insignificant child from slaughter in order to preserve the Davidic line (cf. II Kings 11), and who also orchestrates the small events of our lives, “working all things according to the council of his will” (Eph. 1).

Monday Morning Press 2.13

What would Jesus say about your church? Good thoughts here from Tim Gombis. Jesus probably wouldn’t criticize your church the way you want him to or embrace your causes, but instead encourage you to love the body as he does.

To whom much is given? G.E. Veith takes a look at an unfortunate comment from our president at a recent Prayer Breakfast.

Linsanity. Sports in New York City is, like everything else there, famously diverse—with all the teams to choose from New Yorkers tend to not agree on anything. The unexpected success of Jeremy Lin has excited just about everyone, however. He’s not only the first second-generation Asian-American NBA player ever, he’s also a Harvard graduate and an outspoken Christian (and not in just the generic Tebowian sense—his favorite books list includes John Stott, C.J. Maheney, and John Piper).

New York Times investigative reporter Michael Luo shares Lin’s ethnic heritage, Christian convictions, and Harvard education and reflected on it all in a weekend column.

Historical Adam. Discussion over  interpretation of Gen. 1-3 has again emerged to the forefront of the evangelical landscape, thanks in large measure to claims from Christian biologist Dennis Venema that recent genetic research indicates that “there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple.”* Even NPR took notice.

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth on the blogosphere since this story came out last August, but I won’t take the time to reference it all. Instead, look at this—Kevin DeYoung offered “Ten Reasons to Believe in the Historical Adam” at The Gospel Coalition last week, whereupon James F. McGrath countered with an enlightening response—”Ten Really Bad Reasons to Believe in the Historical Adam.”

This interaction gives a pretty accurate cross-section into the meat of the debate, I think. The fundamental issues here are how scientific knowledge and biblical knowledge should interact (perhaps as one put it: general revelation and special revelation), and whether inerrancy really matters.** I’m solidly with DeYoung here—I think McGrath too quickly jettisons the attestations of Luke, Paul, and Jesus—but the discussion is important to those of us who are serious about rightly understanding the Bible and applying it to our contemporary context. There’s a lot more to be said about science and the Bible, but I’ll leave it there for now.

*I apologize for linking to an article clearly biased against Venema’s position. I was looking for a more objective source, but alas.

**If the biblical writers thought Adam was a real person (and I think they clearly do—cf. I Chronicles 1, Luke 3, Romans 5) then it seems you have to either accept their account or argue that they were “men of their time” and read the OT wrongly. If you adopt the latter position, inerrancy’s dead, obviously.