Dots and strokes — zeal for whom?

The accounts in Joshua of the destruction and massacre of the inhabitants of Canaan (e.g. Joshua 8 ) are pretty difficult, as are the commandments to Israel to do so in the Law (e.g. Deuteronomy 7). They’re very hard to understand, and are, of course, picked on frequently by opponents of Christianity.

I’m not going to pretend to answer all the questions about these, but I do think we need to understand them rightly. One passage that has an interesting bearing on this issue is 2 Samuel 21:1–2:

“Now there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year; and David inquired of the Lord. The Lord said, ‘There is blood-guilt on Saul and on his house, because he put the Gibeonites to death.’ So the king called the Gibeonites and spoke to them. (Now the Gibeonites were not of the people of Israel, but of the remnant of the Amorites; although the people of Israel had sworn to spare them, Saul had tried to wipe them out in his zeal for the people of Israel and Judah.)”

The story of the Gibeonites’ deception of Israel, resulting in the treaty that saved them, is recorded in Joshua 9. What’s interesting here, though, is the mention that Saul’s attempted genocide of them was (a) immoral, at least partly because of the treaty, and (b) motivated by nationalistic fervour — “zeal for the people of Israel and Judah”.

I think this is important to notice, because it reminds us that the devastations of Joshua etc. were not simply a matter of ethnic cleansing or nationalistic zeal (and so can never be taken as any kind of mandate for nationalistic expansion — in fact, Saul’s doing precisely that led to the famine). The “ban” on the inhabitants of Canaan was not really about Israel at all (cf. Deuteronomy 9:5). If we get that wrong, I don’t think we have a hope of making sense of them.

David Bentley Hart on the sadness of paganism

Another highlight from Hart’s book, Atheist Delusions, is his discussion of how Christianity brought a message of joy and life to a world shaped by a profound sense of melancholy, what Hart calls paganism’s “glorious sadness”.

“[T]he Christianity of the early centuries did not invade a world of noonday joy, vitality, mirth, and cheerful earthiness, and darken it with malicious slanders of the senses, or chill it with a severe and bloodless otherworldliness. Rather, it entered into a twilight world of pervasive spiritual despondency and religious yearning, not as a cult of cosmic renunciation (pagan religious and philosophical culture required no tutelage in that) but as a religion of glad tidings, of new life, and that in all abundance. It was pagan society that had become ever more otherworldly and joyless, ever wearier of the burden of itself, and ever more resentful of the soul’s incarceration in the closed system of a universe governed by fate. It was pagan society that seemed unable to conceive of any spiritual aspiration higher than escape—higher, that is, than the emancipation of a few select spirits from the toils of an otherwise irredeemable world—and that could imagine no philosophical virtue more impressive than resignation to the impossibility of escape. The church, by contrast, was obliged to preach a gospel of salvation that somehow embraced the entire created order.” (143–44)

“Pervasive spiritual despondency and religious yearning”—sounds like Nick Cave. Bring on the glad tidings!

like an evening gone?

The poem I began this blog with is kind of about how our experience of this life will connect with that of the age to come. I recently came across a passage in the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, which floats around the same questions. The narratorial “I” is the dying Reverend John Ames writing to his son.

“I have always wondered what relationship this present reality bears to an ultimate reality.
A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone…
No doubt that is true.Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life. For example, at this very moment I feel a kind of loving grief for you as you read this, because I do not know you, and because you have grown up fatherless, you poor child, lying on your belly now in the sun with Soapy [the cat] asleep on the small of your back. You are drawing those terrible little pictures that you will bring me to admires, and which I will admire because I have not the heart to say one word that you might remember against me.” (118–19)

Contra Miroslav Volf!

Biblical narrative and artful sermons

Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 1981), which I have only just belatedly read, thanks to Chris’ recommendations, is stunning. Alter compellingly describes biblical narrative as historical prose fiction, and outlines numerous techniques and styles used by the biblical authors to create their accounts. Even more interestingly, Alter shows how the literary style of the Bible is of a piece with the underlying theological convictions of the Hebrew faith. Here’s an example:

“The underlying biblical conception of character as often unpredictable, in some ways impenetrable, constantly emerging from and slipping back into a penumbra of ambiguity, in fact has greater affinity with dominant modern notions than do the habits of conceiving character typical of the Greek epics. The monotheistic revolution in consciousness profoundly altered the ways in which man as well as God was imagined, and the effects of that revolution probably still determine certain aspects of our conceptual world more than we suspect. This altered consciousness was of course expressed ideologically in the legislative and prophetic impulses of the Bible, but in biblical narrative it was also realized through the bold and subtle articulation of an innovative literary form. The narrative art of the Bible, then, is more than an aesthetic enterprise, and learning to read its fine calibrations may bring us closer than the broad-gauge concepts of intellectual history and comparative religion to a structure of imagination in whose shadow we still stand.”

To my mind, Alter convincingly shows that the biblical narratives are carefully constructed stories, with deliberate and stylized arrangement; and that this is not at all in conflict with their status as theological works.

This, to me, suggests an application for preaching on narratives: sermons split up unified stories into “points” to their peril. Biblical narratives are narratives, designed to be read as such. This means they do not simply make “points”. The truths they seek to communicate are reducible to propositions only at the cost of their generic presentation. This is not to say they cannot be explained in terms of propositions; but their value is not equivalent to these propositional explications. They teach us as stories. They are not simply ideas expanded into story form, which we can then unpick and restate simply. If we will be taught through these parts of Scripture, we need to experience them as stories. Perhaps this will make preaching more difficult; but perhaps it will also make it better.

Interesting things

Meredith posts a great quote and reflection on Australian spiritual temperament.

Matt posts a great quote about Christianity and politics (I think Andrew Goddard has been reading O’Donovan).

Byron is absurd. Happy Birthday Byron!

And Chris has just finished a dense and interesting series on the relevance of Jesus.

Articulating the heart of the gospel

When I am giving a talk in which I am seeking to explain what Jesus has done and how he has saved us, I often find the hardest bit is talking about his work on the cross. This does not surprise me, of course—the cross is a deep mystery before which all my words are pathetically inadequate. However, I work hard on these sections of talks.

I thought I’d post the key paragraph from my latest attempt. See what you think.

The Christian belief is that through his life, death and resurrection, Jesus has won eternal life for human beings. Jesus lived the life human beings were made to live. He loved God, and he loved other people, deeply, completely, and without failure. Jesus won the battle that every other human being fails, the battle against sin. And this victory, his perfection, enabled him then to do something no other human being could do: to give his life as what the Bible calls a “sacrifice of atonement”, that is, an offering to God that dealt with the problem of sin. In Jesus’ death, he, the perfect man, took upon himself all the consequences of humanity’s rebellion against God that have distorted creation. On the cross he, the only one who did not deserve it, suffered God’s righteous judgment upon sin. And the teaching of the Bible, the astonishing teaching of the Bible, is that he did it for us. He did it on our behalf. He died the death you and I deserved. But precisely because of this, because of his righteousness, because he gave himself freely up to death in love for us and for his Father, the power of sin and death was broken in this amazing act. And so he did not remain dead but was raised to life again by his Father and is now alive forever and ever. In Jesus’ cross and resurrection, therefore, the terrible stranglehold that sin and death had on the world were broken. In him there is life.

David Bentley Hart on modernity and freedom

One of the central theses of Hart’s book Atheist Delusions is that our age is marked by a belief that there is nothing which legitimately informs or shapes individual autonomy. The freely self-determining individual is literally the highest good in existence. As Hart is at pains to point out, however, this has very little to do with “reason”.

The modern period has never been especially devoted to reason as such; the notion that it ever was is merely one of its “originary” myths. The true essence of modernity is a particular conception of what it is to be free… and the Enlightenment language of an “age of reason” was always really just a way of placing a frame around that idea of freedom, so as to portray it as the rational autonomy and moral independence that lay beyond the intellectual infancy of “irrational” belief. But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed to “my truth” than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead. The myth of “enlightenment” served well to liberate us from any antique notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills; but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric. And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant. Freedom for us today is something transcendent even of reason, and we no longer really feel that we must justify our liberties by recourse to some prior standard of responsible rationality. Freedom—conceived as the perfect, unconstrained spontaneity of individual will—is its own justification, its own highest standard, its own unquestionable truth. (105)

Series finished!

This is just a quick note to say the series I planned on the Synoptic Gospels and the Nature of Scripture has been completed. Many thanks to those who provided interesting discussion along the way. I’ve put links to all the posts on the series introduction, which would be a good place to start if anyone wanted to link to it:)

I hope you’ve found it interesting. I certainly have.

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The synoptic gospels and the nature of Scripture (5)

5. Matthew 24:15–22 || Mark 13:14–20 || Luke 21:20–24. Editing and “errors” (Part 3)

The different synoptic accounts of the “Olivet Discourse” (Jesus’ famous speech given while overlooking Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives) offer a fascinating comparison and give us a nice insight into the processes that went on in producing the gospels. A key part of the speech is Jesus’ prediction about “the desolating sacrilege” and what to do when it comes:

‘But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains; someone on the housetop must not go down or enter the house to take anything away; someone in the field must not turn back to get a coat. Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that it may not be in winter. For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, no, and never will be. And if the Lord had not cut short those days, no one would be saved; but for the sake of the elect, whom he chose, he has cut short those days. (Mark 13:14–20)

‘So when you see the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place, as was spoken of by the prophet Daniel (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains; someone on the housetop must not go down to take what is in the house; someone in the field must not turn back to get a coat. Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that your flight may not be in winter or on a sabbath. For at that time there will be great suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. And if those days had not been cut short, no one would be saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short. (Matthew 24:15–22)

‘When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then those in Judea must flee to the mountains, and those inside the city must leave it, and those out in the country must not enter it; for these are days of vengeance, as a fulfilment of all that is written. Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! For there will be great distress on the earth and wrath against this people; they will fall by the edge of the sword and be taken away as captives among all nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. (Luke 21:20–24)

What is fascinating here is to see the way Jesus’ speech was interpreted by Matthew and Luke (assuming what we said in earlier posts about the priority of Mark is right, although even if you think Matthew came first, it’s still interesting). Both Matthew and Luke make adjustments to make the speech a little easier to understand. Matthew’s adjustments are far more minor. Notably, he clarifies that “the desolating sacrilege” is a reference to Daniel (Note that he puts this clarification on the lips of Jesus). He also simplifies some of the final section, sometimes changing the tense of some verbs, as well as adding the idea of the flight not being on a sabbath (which may tell us something about the purpose or audience of his gospel).

Luke, however, completely overhauls this section. He completely demystifies the cryptic reference to “the desolating sacrilege” and writes, “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near.” In fact, this whole section is rewritten to give no doubt that this is a prophecy about the impending destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Gentiles. Luke is still keenly aware that this is not just any old political event. It will happen “as a fulfilment of all that is written”; and the categories in which the speech is written are soaked in imagery from the prophets. Nevertheless, this is a major revision.

What does this tell us about Scripture? Nothing, I don’t think, we haven’t seen already. But it’s a particularly clear example of how the evangelists seem to have been happy on occasion to reinterpret Jesus’ words in order to make them clearer, or shorter, or perhaps to make them appropriate for a new context. Luke may very well have been writing after the destruction of Jerusalem did in fact take place (AD70). Perhaps he wanted to draw attention to the accuracy of Jesus’ prediction?

Why does it matter? Well, mainly because it’s good to have a clear-sighted understanding what kind of thing Scripture is. But also, in this case, because the comparison may significantly effect interpretation. To my mind, we would need special bravado to deny that when Jesus originally spoke on the Mount of Olives, he had in mind the destruction of Jerusalem, given the way Luke interprets this speech.

David Bentley Hart on witches and science

I have been reading David Bentley Hart’s new tirade against the “New Atheists”, titled Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale, 2009). It’s very interesting (and frequently highly amusing). Here’s a fascinating bit about witchcraft:

In truth, the rise of modern science and the early modern obsession with sorcery were not merely contemporaneous currents within Western society but were two closely allied manifestations of the development of a new post-Christian sense of human mastery over the world. There is nothing especially outrageous in such a claim. After all, magic is essentially a species of materialism; if it envokes any agencies beyond the visible sphere, they are not supernatural—in the theological sense of “transcendent”—but at most preternatural: they are merely, that is to say, subtler, more potent aspects of the physical cosmos. Hermetic magic and modern science (in its most Baconian form at least) are both concerned with hidden forces within the material order, forces that are largely impersonal and morally neutral, which one can learn to manipulate, and which may be turned to ends fair or foul; both, that is to say, are concerned with domination of the physical cosmos, the instrumental subjection of nature to humanity, and the constant increase of human power. Hence, there was not really any late modern triumph of science over magic, so much as there was a natural dissolution of the latter into the former, as the power of science to accomplish what magic could only adumbrate became progressively more obvious. Or, rather, “magic” and “science” in the modern period are distinguishable only retrospectively, according to relative degress of efficacy. There never was, however, an antagonism between the two: metaphysically, morally, and conceptually, they belonged to a single continuum. (82)