Author: Nathaniel Erickson

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Hurt and Hope

If you are following along on the read through the book of psalms plan during our sermon series on Psalms, then you are probably somewhere around Psalm 22 today/this week. Consider with me briefly a few verses from the beginning of this famous psalm: verse of hurt and hope.

3 Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;
    you are the one Israel praises.
4 In you our ancestors put their trust;
    they trusted and you delivered them.
5 To you they cried out and were saved;
    in you they trusted and were not put to shame.

Psalm 22.3-5 (NIV)

Reading a little more will make one things clear: David trusts that God did great acts of deliverance in the past; David feels like God is not acting to deliver him in his moment of despair.

When ‘Faithful’ Hurts

The memory of past faithfulness comes up in the midst of present torment, of uncertainty, of pain. Allowing for poetic license on the part of David, things at the point of his life Psalm 22 reflects on must have been pretty low. The nations gathered against him, friends turned out to be enemies, enemies turned out to be stronger than expected. He feels as helpless as an emaciated, skeletal body going into the Octagon to fight MMA with the heavyweights.

Two reflections come up. First, this Psalm feels so true to life. We feel the punch of crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?” (Psalm 22.1). We know the times when sure hope of deliverance are distant memories, obscured behind the enemies, mountains of muscle, who are poised to rip us limb from limb.

Second, the language in this Psalm of desperate uncertainty and pain felt so literal for Jesus, as his enemies conspired against him, as the Roman soldier MMA-heavyweights tore his skeletal body apart.

Hope and Rescue: Past, Present, Future

What value is the hope and rescue of the past in such a time of present despair?

That is a fair question to ask and one which, we can only trust, our lives will force us to wrestle with again and again and again.

Psalm 22, like so many other psalms, completes the journey from past hope to hope for the future. While aspects of Psalm 22 are unique because of the way that it foreshadows Jesus’ death and subsequent resurrection, the journey David travels in this Psalm is a familiar one.

The past gives way to the present which gives way to the future. In the verses we began with, we see the eye of longing gazing back to the past where things worked. Where God proved to be a deliverer in the time of difficulty. Reciting this history is not an intellectual exercise; reciting this history is a prop for faith. Sometimes no more than a flimsy prop for flagging faith, but a prop nonetheless. For when our eyes look around and see nothing but enemies and oppressors, failure and defeat, problems too great for us to deal with, where else shall we turn?

The Journey to Praise

The journey which Psalms teaches us to walk again and again is the journey back to the great acts of God. The journey back to God’s faithfulness in our past. And, in walking this journey, God cries out, sometimes forcefully, sometimes with a plaintive plea, “Hold on! The rescue of the past will be true again. Hold on!”

Reviewing God’s past faithfulness is not for the purpose of mocking our present pain, but of restoring our hearts to hope-filled praise. To praise for a God who became flesh to take on the tortures of humanity—and so much more—delivering hope to any who will join him “in the midst of the congregation” praising God (22.22).

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How Mark ends

Today, Bible scholars widely believe that the Gospel of Mark originally ended at Mark 16.8, rather than 16.20.[1] Agreement among biblical scholars about most questions is a hard to come by as consensus in the senate, so this is an odd state of affairs. To restate the basic assertion, the near-consensus view among New Testament scholars and specialists in the Gospels is that all the stuff in Mark 16.9-20 in your Bible is based on Greek written by somebody else rather than Mark, the author of the rest of the Gospel.[2] In fact, your Bible likely has a footnote, or brackets, or different font indicating this point.

While the issue quickly gets far more technical than what belongs on a blog like this, the basics are easy for any interested party to understand. In this post I will summarize (1) the basic lines of evidence, (2) a few possible explanations for what might have happened, and (3) give a few thoughts about what this means for those who believe the Bible is God’s word.

the evidence for how Mark ends

There are a variety of lines of evidence which support the conclusion that the Greek text written by Mark ends at 16.8. Here is a summary of the main evidence:[3]

  1. The material in vv. 9-20 doesn’t appear in our oldest and best manuscripts of the Book of Mark. Remember, there is no one single “Gospel of Mark” manuscript which contains everything and has no issues. When you read a bible translation, or even a Greek New Testament, you are reading a text which has been carefully assembled from the mountains of textual evidence we have in the form of handwritten manuscripts. The best manuscripts we have don’t have Mark 16.9-20.
  2. There are a few different endings in the manuscripts, which suggests that none of the ones we have are original to the Gospel.
  3. In the Greek text, the connection between v. 8 and any of the following different forms of ending—there are 3 or 4 different endings in the manuscripts—is really awkward. Your Bible likely smooths it over, but in the Greek v. 9 carries on as though Jesus were the person being talked about just before it, rather than the women. This suggests that Mark 16.9-20 was not originally written to be here at the end of Mark; rather, it was added later.
  4. The style of the Greek writing in Mark 16.9-20 differs from the rest of the Gospel. This suggests it was written by someone else.
  5. The information in vv. 9-20 reads like a compilation of resurrection appearances from the other Gospels summarized together. This point is a stronger argument the more one accepts the idea that Mark was the first Gospel written, as a majority of Gospel scholars believe today. It may have been. If Mark was written first, it shouldn’t end with a summary of information found in the other Gospels and Acts.

Far more could be said about any of these difficulties, but these and other lines of evidence have roundly convinced the world of New Testament scholarship that the Greek text of the Gospel of Mark did not originally include vv. 9-20 of chapter 16. While it is old, probably already around in some form in the 2nd century (that is the years AD 100-199), putting it among some of the earliest Christian literary evidence, it was not original to the Gospel of Mark.[4]

what happened to Mark’s end?

So, what happened to the end? Or was there an end? Bruce Metzger, one of the most influential modern scholars on the original text of the Greek New Testament, suggests the three obvious possibilities:[5]

(1) Mark intended to end the Gospel here, (2) the Gospel was never finished, or (3) there was an original ending, but it was lost before the Gospel manuscript was copied.

More and more scholars are arguing for (1), that Mark intended to finish the Gospel at what we call Mark 16.8. That is certainly possible. The main argument against this is that the Greek of Mark 16.8 ends in a very abrupt and unusual manner. Further, the storyline of the Gospel anticipates a resurrection and Jesus meeting with the disciples again after resurrection.

I have personally never come across someone who argues (2), but it is logically possible.

Finally, it is possible that the original copy of the Gospel of Mark had a different ending and it was lost or damaged somehow before copies were made (or very early in the copying process). The multiple different endings which we see in the different manuscripts suggests that even in ancient times people felt the Gospel did not really end at what we now call Mark 16.8. If the Gospel of Matthew is based closely on the Gospel of Mark—as many scholars believe—then the ending of Matthew may very well testify something about the original ending of the Gospel of Mark, assuming there was one.

And that is the difficulty. What we can be very confident of is that Mark 16.9-20 was not written by the same person who wrote the rest of the Gospel. When we try to answer the question why that is or how it came to be, we are on speculative grounds.

What to do about how Mark ends

Rather than trying to explain all of the technical details, I want to take a minute to contemplate what we should think about how Mark ends. That Mark likely had a different ending than what is in our Bibles today is interesting as a statement of history, but raises many difficulties for those who confess the Bible as God’s word to humanity. How do we handle the reasonable conclusion that Mark 16.9-20 was not part of the original Gospel of Mark?

We can briefly think in terms of two different issues: the authority of scripture and the usefulness of scripture.

The authority of Scripture

Undoubtedly the text as it stands at the end of Mark is old, and most Christians for most of history have read it as the end of the Gospel of Mark, that is, as Scripture. If we are convinced that Mark 16.9-20 was not original to the Gospel, should we read it today as authoritative scripture?

To answer this question requires us to grasp an important point from the history of the various books of the Bible which hides in plain sight. When Christians talk about Scripture, we usually are referring to what we could more precisely call the canonical form of Scripture. The canonical form refers to all the books of the Bible (together call the canon) and to the particular form of the book which we have in the canon.

This second point may seem trivial until we observe that many of the biblical books show evidence that the canonical form is not the only form they ever existed in. Many of our books of the Bible we’re written in a variety of forms and what we have is not what was first written. Now let me carefully nuance that with two examples from the OT: Jeremiah and Genesis.

Two examples of canonical form

In Jeremiah 36 we read a brief story of how the prophet Jeremiah sent a scroll of his prophecy to King Jehoiakim. King Jehoiakim was less than thrilled with the prophecy. He made his displeasure clear by slicing the scroll up and burning it. Towards the end of Jeremiah 36, Jeremiah has Baruch, his scribe, write the scroll of his prophecy again.

This brief account from Jeremiah 36 tells us that Jeremiah had a written form of his prophecies that’s different than the final form of the written book of his prophecies. He still had years of prophetic ministry left to go. Yet even before it was done, his words were meant to be heard/read by King Jehoiakim as a message with divine authority. The scroll he sent was authoritative but it was not the canonical form of the book/scroll of Jeremiah.

As a second example, consider briefly Genesis 14.4:

When Abram heard that his relative had been taken captive, he called out the 318 trained men born in his household and went in pursuit as far as Dan. (ESV)

This verse appears unremarkable, and in most respects it is. But, if you ponder closely your biblical history, you may remember that when Abram/Abraham was alive, there was no tribe of Dan. Dan was one of his great-great-grandsons, born after his death. Thus, there was no geographic location “Dan” in the land latter to be called Israel that Abram and his 318 trained men to could go to.[6]

What does this show us? At some point, the text of Genesis was “updated” to reflect later geographical names not part of the original text.[7]

The point of these two brief side notes—and more could be added—is just to remind us that already within our Bible we have indicators that sometimes other people finish writing or updating a book in the Bible. We have the canonical form, which is not necessarily identical with the form exactly as written by the original author. The canonical form is the book we hold to.

The key to take away in the question of whether it is authoritative scripture or not is this: whether we ultimately accept it as such or not, it doesn’t add anything that we don’t know from elsewhere or that is inconsistent with the message of God to his people through his word.

The usefulness of Scripture

A second consideration is the usefulness of scripture. As I’ve already noted, the on the regional longer ending of Mark doesn’t really add anything that we don’t know from elsewhere. The one curious exception is 16.18:

18 they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

This is the verse that the “snake-handlers” appeal to to justify their practice of playing with deadly snakes as a show of faith. First, it need not mean anything like that…and it certainly does not call for followers of Jesus to go out of their way to hold snakes or drink deadly poisons. Second, it is possible that this verse, along with verse 17, is a sort of poetic summation of events from the book of Acts: Paul gets bitten by a poisonous snake without dying and the Apostles in Acts heal lots of people. Since the rest of the material in vv. 9-20 appears to be summations of events recorded in the other Gospels, this is not a bad suggestion.

More significantly, though, Mark 16.9-20 do doesn’t add any information about God’s aims and intentions for his people through Jesus that we don’t see elsewhere. So, is it useful? Yes, it can be. Whether we accept it and use it as scripture or not, it is good and useful, as the church throughout history has testified.

summary of using Mark as Scripture

What reverence and authority should we give Mark 16.9-20? Both our instinct to read the rest of what’s in our Mark chapter 16 and our instinct to stop reading at verse eight of Mark 16 find precedent in the long history of the church. I am personally inclined to say that we should not consider Mark 16.9-20 as part of the Gospel of Mark. But, more significantly than that conclusion, we recognize that it does not make any significant difference. The verse there can be useful; they may be authoritative. Whichever way we land on how we receive them, they are a beneficial part of the tradition of the church across the centuries which can be read with profit as the ending of the Gospel of Mark. That is how most people have read them throughout the ages, and how lots of people will continue to read them.

[1] There are very few things in the world of biblical studies which command close to universal assent, and the conclusion that the Greek text of Mark ends at 16.8 is one of those, as France notes R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, The New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 685.

[2] Following the traditional identification of the Gospel author as Mark, probably John Mark, the traveling companion of both Paul and Peter.

[3] These points are a streamlined version of the lines of argument which can be found, in varying degrees of detail, in Mark L. Strauss, Four Portraits, One Jesus: An Introduction to Jesus and the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 194, Figure 7.9; Andreas J Köstenberger, L. Scott Kellum, and Charles L Quarles, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament (Nashville: B & H Academic, 2009), 239; Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1998), 103–6; France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, Appended Note.

[4] No doubt, the material is old. France indicates there is some evidence putting the longer version of the ending in the 2nd century, which would make it some of our earliest extant non-canonical Christian literature. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, 687–88.

[5] Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 103–6.

[6] One could argue that when Moses wrote, the land was “as good as divided” and he wrote from a later perspective. But Moses was dead when the land was apportioned, so this is weak. Of course, God could have prophetically shown him the boundaries of a later date. While we hold that as theoretically possible, it raises further difficulties—like why various authors of Scripture write with grammatical errors and different styles. Also, that various books contain reports of the death of their authors suggest that they were at the very least touched up by a subsequent writer.

[7] There are many more examples of this sort of updating in the book of Genesis. We could also add that all of the early books of the OT would have been written in a different form of Hebrew than we have them, at the very least because Hebrew was written in the paleo-script rather than the square script. Also, the general degree of standardization within OT Hebrew suggests that there was some “updating” of the language in the texts over the years.

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AI chat: some thoughts after a week of playing with generative AI

God touches robots finger

If you have been living under a rock, or are a dedicated Luddite, perhaps you have heard little to nothing about the AI revolution sweeping the internet. Okay, that’s a slightly overblown way to describe it (which fits in with the generally overblown way people talk about AI, which naturally refers to Artificial Intelligence). Ever since ChatGPT passed the Turing test back in Dec 2022, it has been making story after story (along with its other AI pals which use a Large Language Model to do cool things). After so many stories, the natural thing to do was try the AI chatbots out and see what they could do. If these models prefigure the future of humanity and our interaction with computers, it makes sense to me to get a little bit of experience and see what the future might be. So over Spring Break I took a journey up the mountain to see the future, and now come to report a few thoughts on it. After playing with ChatGPT and Bing’s new AI-powered search, the results ranged from amusing to alarming, trivial to transformative, and everywhere in between. If this is a glance of the future, buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

A brief introduction: how they work (in really simple terms)

There are many places where you can read a more robust description of how these programs basically work.

For any interested in a more technical review of things, with many helpful descriptions and clarifications, check out this WIRED article.

In essence, the AI program has worked through reams and reams of written data from the Internet—things like encyclopedias, web pages, and even chats from reddit. What is it doing with all this data? finding statistical correlations between words. It is “learning” what sort of words go together in what sort of contexts. The result is that the Large Language Model AIs can predict words that should go together to form sentences in response to a prompt. Using this method, they are able to produce sentences which look and sound like a human wrote them. It is really a clever approach to the problem of getting computers to work with human language (because they are awful at it).

It is both really capacious and really limited approach, all at the same time. As one writer at WIRED notes,

“Both [ChatGPT and Google Bard] use powerful AI models that predict the words that should follow a given sentence based on statistical patterns gleaned from enormous amounts of text training data. This turns out to be an incredibly effective way of mimicking human responses to questions, but it means that the algorithms will sometimes make up, or “hallucinate,” facts—a serious problem when a bot is supposed to be helping users find information or search the web.”

Sometimes the writing they come up with is astoundingly good; other times it is ugly. More interesting, sometimes the information the AI spits out is accurate and useful; other times it is downright wrong.

After a week of messing around, here are a few thoughts on chatbots, the future, and humanity.

I. the soul of humanity: who are we?

How do we define ourselves and understand ourselves? While there are lots of interesting things to comment on about these chatbots, I’ll start with the most related to the normal scope of this blog: how will these chatbots affect the way we understand ourselves? Like every piece of technology, these AI chatbots are a partial mirror held up to us. Whatever the future brings, in the present, they force the question upon us in a new way: what does it mean to be human?

For most of human history, we were the only things in the world that could use human language. While other animals exhibit varying degrees of ability to think in abstract ways and even to communicate, human language is utterly unique.

Not anymore.

We have created a machine which utilizes human language in at times a stunningly proficient manner. Who are we? Do we matter? How do we understand ourselves? These questions have all become much more difficult to answer. And, I’m willing to predict, that they’ll become increasingly more difficult to answer as the abilities of artificial intelligence bots increase. Because they certainly will. Although, it’s unlikely that anytime soon they will have “human-like” abilities. Because even if it gets a lot better at handling language, the amount of energy and computational power required by a large language model AI chatbot makes it extremely unlike a human.

In my time interacting with these chat bots, I was reminded of a movie scene from the 2004 Will Smith movie I, Robot (based ultimately on the writings of Isaac Asimov, the godfather of modern Sci-Fi). You might be able to watch the scene here. While interrogating a robot, the human detective asks:

“Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?”

To which the robot, Sonny, replies:

“Can you?”

Stunned silence.

The detective takes some traits of humanity as a whole and points out that robots don’t fulfill them. Humanity as a whole is creative and certain people create symphonies and masterpieces. The obvious logical flaw, which the robot points out, is that most members of humanity don’t share in these apex creative abilities. If we define humanity by the best of human accomplishments, then most of humanity fails to be truly human.

This scene is apropos in that we have now created a robotic chatbot which appears to use language at a reasonable human level. What does it mean to be human when our creations begin to behave in distinctly human terms? Is an AI that can use language with reasonable fluency more human than a person who has lost that ability? While our intuitive answers at this point is probably, “no,” as the years go by it’s going to be harder and harder to simply make that assertion.

We have something significant to contribute to the world at this moment in history. As followers of God, we believe and confess that people have value and identity not based on their abilities and not based on any distinctly human trait that nothing else shares, but based on their created identity. The identity of human as made in the image of God is not based on superior intellectual abilities (even though we have those as compared to other creatures God made), it is not based on language abilities, or even on the trappings of civilization. It’s based on relationship to God the creator.

There will be lots of difficult questions and decisions for society in the coming decades. AI chatbots are already pretty neat; they will only get better and more pervasive. More and more often we will interact with computers in ways that are difficult to distinguish from interacting with people. We will have need of being able to assert with clarity and confidence that people—all people—are valuable simply because they are made in the image of God, not because of any abilities or skills that they have.

II. accuracy: and what is truth?

I was generally impressed at the accuracy of the AI models. I queried them over questions about Ancient Greek and was pleasantly surprised to receive competent answers in short order. Answers of the quality that few Greek learners would be able to quickly provide. In fact, I would suggest that the best way to envision the sorts of responses these chatbots give (at least currently) is much like what a topic expert would give you if you asked for 15-30 second answer from them on a given question. Short. Superficial. A good place to start.

But it also did not take long to see how inaccurate and misleading they can be. From giving a wildly inaccurate summary of the plot of the book The Neverending Story,[1] to a sophomoric and deeply misleading summary of the debate over a verbal aspect in the Greek verbal system, in more than a few places I found the answers wanting.

The difficulty, though, is that even when wrong, the chatbots “sound” like they know what they are talking about. Most human beings are incapable of fluently “lying” (making up things that they do not believe to be correct). We are often able to tell when a person we are talking to is fudging their answer. Or, people will just tell you, “I’m not sure, but here is what I think.” Chatbots don’t do that—at least not yet. Unless you are well-versed in the topic, you may not even notice that the chatbot is making up an answer “out of thin air.” To say that the AI models lie is, I think, inaccurate. They are not, after all, designed to tell the truth but to work with human language in a way that produces coherent sentences. Being able to produce coherent sentences and paragraphs is a very different discipline from understanding and speaking truth.

How AI bots navigate this distinction in the future will be deeply important.

III. creativity: combining or creating?

The chatbots really shine at producing de novo compositions where the concern is creativity rather than truthfulness. A prompt to write a paragraph about a plywood door in the style of various authors—from Alexandre Dumas to Gregory McGuire to Patrick McManus, and everywhere in between—resulted in some paragraphs which would easily pass for excellent human writing. In fact, writing which, if you encountered it outside of the context of a query for an AI bot, you would be forgiven for thinking was laden with deep symbolism and life experience. Writing which is much better than most people will ever write in their lives. And yet, sometimes the response was flat and predictable and, for lack of a better word, lame. As though just adding the word “rune” to a string of otherwise insipid and poorly connected sentences is enough to make a paragraph in the style of J.R.R. Tolkien.

AI chatbots traffic in borrowed creativity.

But then, isn’t all creativity borrowed, in some sense or another? We learn to become creative in dialogue with others. The endless advice for aspiring writers is, after all, to read other writers and write more in response to them.

What exactly is creativity? And how would we know if and/or when a chatbot moves from clever imitation of human creativity through aping patterns found in writers to having its own? In fact, couldn’t we suspect that the algorithms currently in use are themselves an expression of creativity (human creativity), given to the chatbots by people? Questions about the nature of creativity will just be one of many which will become increasingly difficult to answer as large language model AI chatbots become more and more proficient.

In the meantime, good luck to you teachers who are trying to figure out what it means for students to write a paper in a world where they can get a unique paper generated in a matter of seconds (but probably a pretty poor one).

IV. economics: who pays for all this?

In the hoopla over AI chatbots, a noticeable lacuna deserves further attention: Who is going to pay for the internet?

We take it for granted that websites are (mostly) free. While we pay for an internet connection, and sometimes pay for access to certain parts of websites, most websites in the world are free to access and use. That works because behind every website is an individual/group paying to keep the website open and functional. They are either paying for it on their own or using adds.

Adds. The Faustian bargain of the internet. We love to hate them, yet the internet as we know it would not exist without the integration of adds. Advertisers (and, by logical extension, people who buy stuff which advertisers are advertising) pay for much of the internet. We get to use products like Google (or Duckduckgo), Gmail, yahoo, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, 4Square, Twitch, SnapChat, etc., for “free” because they generate the lion’s share of their income through advertisements (and selling data to interested buyers, which is, I suppose, sort of like advertisements).

Currently, the AI chatbots do not have adds. They make no (little) real money (though, monetization is already underway, and will proceed apace). People are expecting these things to make money (especially Microsoft who dropped $10 billion into Open AI).

How will AI be financed, and how will the internet of the future be financed? AI is more expensive to use than traditional searches—devouring tons of energy and computational resources by comparison.[2]

And, along with that, how will the financing mechanisms affect the accuracy and fairness of these AI large language models? Thoughtful users of the internet are already aware of this basic problem: if you don’t make the top page of the Google results, you don’t exist. Just 0.63% of people ever look at the second page of results. So, if First Baptist Church of Manistique doesn’t show up on the first page of Google results for “churches in Manistique,” virtually no one will find it through the internet—and that is where almost everyone looks for a church these days. This holds true for business, churches, you name it. Websites are largely in thrall to the whims of a search engine.

While no one knows exactly what logic stands behind Google’s search results (or those of other search engines), what is clear is that the decisions Google makes about what is important for internet searchers to see have huge implications for what people see. As advertisers and others look for ways to monetize these AI chatbots, who is going to make these decisions? Will Chatbot search results become corporate sponsored advertisements like the soap operas of yesteryear?

V. learning: what is going to change?

Teachers of all sort have to figure out how to integrate AI chatbots into the learning process. To the degree that people using these things—especially students—view them as aids to learning rather than means to evade learning, they present a great tool. But that is a difficult thing to navigate. For those who already don’t see much point in learning, the idea that a robot can “give the right answer” after just getting asked will certainly make the learning process more difficult. One way to use them at this point: get the chatbot to give an answer and then go through and find all the ways that the answer is wrong, or could be improved. The chatbots are good tools for provoking creativity.

We already perform a lot of learning today in tandem with computers to achieve answers that were not possible before the digital age (or were so time-consuming as to be improbable to the extreme). My own dissertation fits in this stream of work. Without searchable computer databases, my project would have been impossible. Having computers as tools opens up certain sorts of questions and ways of attending to knowledge which are impossible without. Yet it also closes other ways of attending to knowledge. We have certainly lost something which humanity through much of history has had in that we spend so little effort building a well-stocked and well-functioning memory.

There are difficult questions ahead; there are interesting times ahead.

Conclusions

If you have read this far, congratulations, you should win an award. As someone who has now spent a good amount of time talking at a computer (I regularly use Microsoft Word dictation and voice-to-text features) and who has been working with computers for most of my life, the whole interaction with an AI chatbot did not seem that strange. It’s a little weird that they often refer to themselves as “I.” If it were up to me, I would write that anthropomorphism out of the responses. However, it’s not up to me, so you know.

These are interesting technologies with interesting potential and will certainly be influential. But just how remains to be seen. There’s going to be a wave of legal cases in how they are employed. There’s going to be all sorts of practical and technological limitations. They’ll be fun to use and there’ll be ways in which they fail and are hurtful. As I reflect on this new technology from the perspective of a follower of Jesus, the big thing which it leads me to is contemplating the nature and value of people. It seems as though we’re still many years, likely decades, out from artificial intelligence that can competently and widely interact in a human way. Who knows? Maybe they’ll be here sooner or maybe never. But in an age of rapid technological change, becoming secure in how we understand ourselves as humans created in God’s image is probably more important than ever.

[1] I asked both Bing and ChatGPT to summarize the story under its German name, Die unendliche Geschichte. The results were amusing. Sometimes the answers in German, sometimes in English, without any obvious reason why one language or the other.

[2] “We’re getting a better idea of AI’s true carbon footprint,” Melissa Heikkliä.

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Evangelism, the church, and you

The outward facing relationship of the church to the world should involve evangelism and pursuit of biblical justice in society. The church is made up of people. What is the relationship which the people in the church have to that broader vision? While the church corporate must be evangelistic and pursuing justice, it is important to realize that each follower of Jesus ought to be evangelistic in their relationship to the world.

Evangelism as a church

The church ought to be evangelistic. If a church gathered is not engaging with the core truths of the gospel regularly and does not have concern for the spiritual welfare of the community it is in, then there’s big problems. The church, as a body of gathered followers of Jesus, ought to be evangelistic.

That means preaching and teaching on gospel truths. That means having programs and activities which are open to people who need the gospel. That means praying for people to put their lives into submission to Jesus. That means all this and more. The church needs to be evangelistic.

Personal evangelism

And the people in the church need to be evangelistic. It is great to be an evangelistic church and our church has lots of room to grow in that. But if we identify the responsibility for evangelism with just the church, we run into a significant practical issue: people who need to be evangelized almost never come to church.

Whatever else we talk and debate about regarding different ways the church should engage with non-churched people and be evangelistic, this practical issue is an issue. There was a day and time in the past when people flocked to massive evangelistic crusades (think Billy Graham), when people would come to evangelistic events at churches, and when people not associated with a church would come into the church with reasonable frequency. Evangelistic crusades and events were fine and good and God did some amazing work through some of those movements and efforts. But the simple pragmatic reality is that today that’s not happening.

Regardless of what we wish were happening, more often than not people aren’t coming to church. We’re a small enough congregation so that it’s pretty obvious when you look around that not a whole lot of new people show up with great regularity.

No matter how evangelistic we are as a church gathered, we have this simple and practical problem that that people needing to be evangelized aren’t showing up. Of course, there may be things we can do and ways we can change to encourage people to come. And those are concerns to pray over. But the fundamental issue remains that for most unchurched and non-churched people, going to church is a non-priority.

If the people around us are going to be reached, they need a point of contact. That point of contact is unlikely to be an advertisement for a church service. It is unlikely to be a neat social media marketing campaign, and it is unlikely to be a mass-mailing. Even though those efforts all are commendable. The most likely point of contact which may jar someone out of spiritual apathy is…you!

What to do

Living evangelistically is harder than not living evangelistically—which is why so many of us do it so little of the time. But it does not have to be that different. Here are a couple ideas:

  1. Pray (and read Scripture). The power for proclaiming the good news of Jesus ultimately comes from God. Nothing better directs and equips our hearts towards evangelism than consistent prayer. Pick a few people or groups and pray regularly that God will give you opportunities to point others to Jesus.
  2. Invite people to church. Sure, many people may not come, and inviting people to church is not the only part of evangelizing, but it is a worthwhile thing to do. Invite people to church events—Pioneer Club, winter reading challenge, picnics, etc. These are a chance to make a connection that may last.
  3. Go out to where people are. Where are you connecting with people in your life? What do you already do? What do you enjoy doing? Who are you connecting with doing what you do? People are more likely to connect with you rather than with the church. You can be a gateway and a guide to bring people in, to share truths, to teach people the basics about God. That can happen when you are with other people doing what you already do.

Moving forward

I don’t have the gift of foresight, but my assumption is that there is not going to be a time in the near future where lots of people in the community will one day decide, “Let’s all go to church.” The evidence suggests that more and more people are concluding, “Let’s not go to church.” To minister to the world around us is going to require more than just being present and having the church building here and open. That is a great starting point. But unless and until we take it upon ourselves to bring gospel hope to where it is needed, it is not going to get there.

“how then will they call on him and whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Romans 10.14)

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God’s judgement and hell: restorative and retributive justice

painting of the Last Judgement

Is God just? This question is bound to come up when considering what the Bible says about human destiny. After all, the Bible claims that those outside of Jesus will be punished in hell with no chance of change. While the exact scope and form of that punishment is not clear, there is no doubt that it is fearful, awful, and horrifying. How can God be just if he condemns people to hell? That’s a multi-layered question and here I will take a stab at one part of it: the difference between restorative and retributive justice.

At the outset, note that defining “justice” is notoriously difficult. I like to say that justice is “that state of affairs when perfect love of God and love of neighbor will no longer move our hearts to anger or sadness.” While a pretty idea, it is rather vague in practice. Further, most of the discussion about justice in our culture doesn’t give a hoot about theology. As we think about justice, here is a good touch point for how the concept of justice is commonly understood:

The most plausible candidate for a core definition [of justice] comes from the Institutes of Justinian, a codification of Roman Law from the sixth century AD, where justice is defined as ‘the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due’.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Justice as a moving target

To start making sense of how God can be just if he condemns people to hell, we do well to acknowledge that there is no agreed upon idea of what justice is. We have many different options for what we mean by justice today. When we try to make sense of God’s justice, we need to be careful. We can easily decide what justice ought to be and then blame God because he does not act like we tell him he should. It may be the case that our idea of justice is out of sync with God’s justice. Maybe our trouble with hell is due, in no small part, to God’s justice not making sense to us anymore.

We could call this relativity. A quick glance across societies from the past and present shows a wide variety of ideas regarding justice and judgment: do we chop a thief’s hand off, put them in jail, or make them pay restitution? Some people believe that justice demands each one of these judgments (and that the others are unjust). In practice, people tend to operate as though our idea of justice and judgment is both universal and obvious. In the US, we send criminals to jail because it is the just thing to do. Doesn’t everyone agree?

Recognizing that our idea of justice is neither universal nor self-evident is a good start. Knowing that there are different ideas of justice should caution us from absolutizing our current notions and demanding that God conform to them. To make sense of hell demands that we are willing to check some of our own assumptions about what must be right at the door.

God’s justice

To make sense of God’s justice, we need a proper frame of reference. A framework that does not simply assume the way we do things in the US in the 2020s (over which there is much debate in the US) is just. If we are to have any hope of making sense of the biblical teaching on hell, we have to realize that God and hell do not function according to the dictates of the US penal code. God’s justice is not dependent on the standards of behavior, payment, and consequences which our society decides are just at this point in time. God’s justice fits within the special relationship he has with all people as Creator and Covenant-Maker.

The biblical conception of God depicts him as one who is just or righteous, and who as such remains faithful to the demands of a relationship with human beings that is divinely established and constitutive of human well-being. God’s justice may be expressed in deeds that liberate the weak and vulnerable from bondage, as well as in judgment on the unfaithfulness of the people; yet both expressions reflect God’s role as Lord of a covenant relationship. Correspondingly, the justice of human activity is measured by its faithfulness to the covenanting God, who may be identified in creation and history, in the Law and the Prophets, and ultimately for Christians, in the story of Jesus Christ.

William Wepehowski, Dictionary of Christian Ethics, 330

In short, justice is whatever God does to set all things right (for more on the idea of justification and righteousness, see justification by faith and the courtroom). Justice is whatever puts things back into the pattern of how God created the world. And human activities are just insofar as they reflect the way God has ordered the world. Judgment and hell fit within God’s justice as the proper response to those who refuse to submit to God’s ways, who refuse to live in the divinely established ways of the world which ultimately lead to human well-being.

Justices observed: restorative and retributive

At this point, I find it beneficial to build upon two different notions of justice and judgment to help us see how judgment—including the judgment of hell—fits within God’s commitment to the world he created and to human well-being within that world. These ideas are restorative and retributive justice.

Restorative justice

In contemporary society, the idea of “restorative justice” is gaining more and more sway. Restorative Justice

is a response to wrongdoing that prioritizes repairing harm and recognizes that maintaining positive relationships with others is a core human need. It seeks to address the root causes of crime, even to the point of transforming unjust systems and structures.

“Three Core Elements of Restorative Justice“

Restorative justice finds justice in fixing and maintaining rather than punishing. The idea is to bring about a state of justice through releasing the tension, anger, fear, etc. which stands behind the act of violence in the first place. At issue here is the question, “What good can come out of the wrongdoing that happened?”

Restorative justice has been making inroads in areas like how discipline should be handled in schools all the way up to criminal cases.

Retributive justice

Retributive justice is more what we are familiar with in the context of the US legal system. The phrase, “I paid my debt to society” summarizes the basic idea of retributive justice: those who commit certain kinds of wrong acts morally deserve to suffer a proportionate punishment. The punishment is good and right regardless of whether any good comes to the person who was wronged. The death penalty is the ultimate form of retributive justice. The death penalty exacts justice by rendering a punishment deemed proportionate to the crime upon the guilty one, even though there is little to no demonstrable good which comes either to those who were wronged or to society at large. Retributive justice says that the just demands of good and right be upheld because they are good and right even if no one derives immediate benefit.

Of course, there are many ways which society can benefit from the quick and effective execution of retributive justice. They may not be immediately obvious, though, and the benefits may not accrue to those immediately affected by the crime/injustice at hand. The idea of benefits coming from justice is a useful low-level way to distinguish restorative and retributive justice, but it is not the whole story.

Summary

Much more could be said on either of these, as well as alternate theories of justice. Note, though, that justice is not the same as punishment. Sometimes justice moves in to restore a relationship; sometimes to restore stolen property; and sometimes to punish more directly. We embrace a mixture of different views of justice and believe that different ones should be used at different times. These different ideas of justice provide a helpful way to see what God’s justice is up to.

God’s program of justice: a both/and

The Bible, I submit, exhibits both these types of justice in action. God remains faithful to the demands of a relationship with human beings on the terms he has established as Creator and for the good of people. Both those must remain true.

God the Restorer: restorative justice

God is interested in bridging the brokenness between him and the world. Even though God is the aggrieved party—after all, humanity rejected and rejects God, not the other way around—he moves heaven and earth to make connection possible again. The good outcome he is looking for is relational connection to people whom he has created.

The entire gospel program is the ultimate program of restorative justice: God aims to bring his kingdom into the world through Jesus. In reaching out to humanity through Jesus, God seeks to short-circuit the system of sin, effect rehabilitation, address the suffering of victims and perpetrators alike, and create an environment where the marginalized are cared for. God exemplifies restorative justice. This is the easier part of God’s justice to deal with.

God the Avenger: retributive justice

However, God’s judgment is not exhausted by restorative justice. It contains a significant measure of retributive justice as well. God will exercise retributive justice most clearly at the end of all things. He will move into the world as an Avenger, bringing punishment where it is due.

What is God avenging in the punishment of hell? I submit that he is avenging his world. And, more profoundly, he is avenging himself by setting all things back to the way he created and intends them to be. For as long as God is reaching out to world in the move of restorative justice, he is choosing to bear with creatures who reject him and his intentions for them and the world he made. Restorative justice aims to redress those harms while there is still time. The attempts at restorative justice, though, have a limit.

The limits of restorative justice

There are at least two reasons why restorative justice is always limited: (1) temporal and (2) the integrity of the person.

Temporal limit of restorative justice

Temporally speaking, once one party in the victim/victimizer set is gone (whether dead or no longer present), any hope for restorative justice is gone. If a thief empties your bank accounts, spends all the money, then dies, restorative justice is simply not on the table. While the factors are a little different in that God is eternal and human beings will have an eternal existence, there is a temporal limitation. As the Bible lays it out, the time to engage with God in restorative justice is now. Not later. Death is the threshold past which all opportunity to turn towards God and engage his restorative justice in Jesus ceases.

There are some who argue for a postmortem evangelization, as if Jesus shares the gospel with everyone after they have died. While I sure hope that is the case, it is pure speculation. Nowhere in Scripture is such a thing revealed.

And so, if God is going to exact justice (set all things back in order)—and he has made it quite clear that he will—restorative justice ceases to be an option when the sinner dies.

Integrity limit of restorative justice

The second limit on the effectiveness of restorative justice is the concern for (2) the integrity of the person. Eventually, attempts at restorative justice will either work and effect change in the relationship between victim and victimizer, or they will not. There is no guarantee that people will change if just given more time. Like the habitual liar whose identity is so deeply wrapped up in their lies that they can no longer admit the truth and also remain true to who they believe they are, people who identify themselves as foes of God seem to lose the ability to enter into restorative justice with God.

In the case of sinful humanity, the basic grievance all human beings have against God is that he exists and that he has rights over us as God and Creator. Unless we are willing to drop our grievance against God, there is no way that he could enter into restorative justice with us. Unless he were to fundamentally destroy some part of us.

It seems possible that God could unmake and remake everyone by force. Then they would acknowledge him as God. But that would involve marring his creation at a fundamental level. God is committed to the integrity of his creation. Destroying our human ability to turn to God in love—which requires also the ability to turn away from God in spite—would be to destroy the very human well-being which God is committed to protecting in his justice.

And so, we reach the crucial point of the matter: God is committed to his creation the way he created it to be. God reaches out to wayward humanity through his restorative justice, but if anyone refuses that, then God must either: (a) give up his claim and rights as God to establish the world as he sees fit, or (b) bring justice through a fitting judgment against the rebel to his will.

Retributive justice ultimately acknowledges the integrity of the being who says to God, “Justice cannot be served so long as thou art.” Retributive justice—condemning to hell, in whatever exact fullness of details that means—is God yielding up such people to their own settled choice. In rejecting restoration, they choose retribution.

Hell and God’s justice

As we try to make sense of hell and its role in judgment and justice, there are many difficult questions to balance. It is important to remember that the point of judgment is not to let God blow off a little steam when he gets frustrated with how things are going on earth. The point of judgment is to channel humanity back towards God and the well-being for which he created us.

Judgment is meant to be restorative, bringing about restorative justice. It aims to bring people into relationship with God. Yet, many people refuse to submit to God on his terms and find the human well-being we were created for. Key to the reality of hell, though, is that our refusal does not change God’s commitment to the integrity of his creation. Whatever exactly hell entails, it is the removal of rebels to God’s will from within his creation. God’s retributive justice flows from his commitment to justice (setting the world in order as he created it) and his commitment to the integrity of human beings as he created us.

if we refuse God as God, then justice. And the final act of justice can’t be anything other than retributive.  

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On death and dying today

tombstones in french cemetary

God created us to live in bodies. And bodies die. Everyone dies eventually. Barring the imminent return of Jesus, anyone reading this will die sometime in the next few decades. A cheery thought to make your day. While I don’t suppose dying has ever been simple or fun, it has taken on a certain measure of difficulty and complexity in the times we live in. Dying can be really difficult, in many different ways. Being far from an expert on the matter, I wanted to share a couple thoughts on death and dying today.

The most immediate impetus for this came while reading a recent article by R. R. Reno in First Things. He writes:

Over the last few years, Canada has rolled out a program of doctor-assisted suicide. Originally restricted to those facing “reasonably foreseeable” natural death, in 2021 it was expanded to those whose illnesses need not be terminal. the Canadian government is considering an expransion of this program to cover “mature minors,” including those as young as twelve, who are deemed “fit” to make a decision to end their lives. These policies are widely popular. Polling suggests that 86 percent of Canadians approve of a “right” to die. We should not be surprised. As Leila Mechoui explains in Compact magazine (“Euthanasia Is LIberalism’s Endgame), “State-administered euthanasia on-demand is the logical endpoint of a society built on secular himanism and utilitarianism. These frameworks preclude any appeal to an absolute authority beyond the individual. The ultimate expression is as a state-protected ‘right’ to a ‘dignified’ death.” The future of the West: a culture of death under the sign of choice.

R. R. Reno, “The Public Square“

A culture of death. A culture where we come to feel that we are not truly alive and not fully human unless we have the right to kill others (abortion) and ourselves (euthanasia) when life is not desired any longer.

There’s a lot that could be said about this. I want to share three resources here that may be helpful in thinking about a culture of following Jesus in the midst of a culture of death.

Look here

Joel Cho, a doctor in San Francisco reflects on the role of a long obedience to Jesus when it comes to death and dying in A Doctor Shares the Secret to Dying Well. I especially appreciate how he talks about many people being “bewildered by death.”

Mélodie Kauffmann, a nurse in France, reflects on the human difficulties of suffering, especially as a caregiver for someone else who is dying, in Job’s Wife Urged Him to ‘Curse God and Die.’ Caregivers Get It. The suffering is real for all involved. We would do well to remember that, for most people, the “culture of death” is driven not by reasoned ideology, but by fear and compassion. Fear of suffering and death; compassion on those suffering expressed in a desire to end the suffering as soon as possible.

Last, check out this paper I wrote on passive euthanasia, active euthanasia, and suicide. It began its life in a seminary ethics class. I have thoroughly revised it and offer it as food for thought.

nje.passive-euthansia-and-suicide-is-there-a-moral-differenceDownload

A farewell to death

The hope in Jesus is that one day we will get to say “farewell” to death forever. We look forward to what Paul writes:

Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ

1 Corinthians 15.54b-57 (ESV)

Until that time, we will live and labor in a world where death is a tyrant and terror. The great hope is that Jesus has blazed a trail through death and can lead us through it into life. But even knowing that doesn’t make it easy to live faithfully in the world of complicated death and dying.

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Justification by faith and the courtroom

gavel on white marble background

In the New Testament, especially in the writings of Paul, a group of words show up frequently that we translate as, justify, justification, and righteousness, depending on the context. This concept comes from the legal world. A key idea in the concept is “to be in the (legal) right.” Recognizing the legal background is helpful. It is also helpful to know that the legal background works a little different than what we assume. This different legal background helps to underscore that justification has to do with God setting things right in the world.

Creation and Covenant in justification

Categories of creation and covenant stand behind justification. The juridical reality of justification is not about God deciding what is right between two different parties, as though that is up for debate. Rather, God has determined a right order for the world, as expressed in creation and covenant. As Creator, he intervenes to reestablish this order, particularly in defense of the marginalized.

Justification and the courts: a legal analogy

Since justification is a legal concept, we do well to consider how the idea in the Bible relates to the legal world.

The modern courtroom

In the modern courtroom, there are three parties: the plaintiff (those suing/accusing), the defendants (those accused), and then the judge. There may be lawyers, witnesses, juries, etc., but these all nuance the three party system, rather than adding a new party. A lawyer serves the interests of the plaintiff or defendant, a jury assists the judge, etc. In this system which we are used to, the judge is a neutral outside party who has the authority to settle the dispute. In a modern courtroom, justice is administered by a non-partisan third party.

The biblical courtroom

The vision of court cases arising in the Old Testament literature is different. Especially in the poetic and prophetic literature, God is pictured not as a neutral third party judge, but as someone involved in the contention.

Let me quote a chunk from New Testament scholar Mark Seifrid:

“It is important to recognize that the modern three-party courtroom is not an appropriate model for interpreting the biblical conception of justification, including that of Paul. The administration of justice always is a two-party affair. A more powerful third party who entered into a dispute took up the cause of one disputant or the other. Therefore, when God enters into a contention, he is not pictured as a judge who stands above the matter, but as a party to the dispute. In effecting justice for the one in the right (‘justifying’ them) and punishing the one in the wrong, he establishes his own cause, as in Psalm 98. His verdict, moreover, does not merely bring salvation, but re-establishes moral order within the world and his authority as creator over it. It is not that might makes right – as one must say, if one reduces ‘righteousness’ to the idea of salvation – but that God’s might restores what is right, especially his right as God. For this reason, we find the occasional confessions by the defeated parties that, ‘Yahweh is righteous, we are in the wrong’ (Ex. 9:27).”

Mark A. Seifrid, “The ‘New Perspective on Paul’ and Its Problems,” Themelios 25, no. 2, 15.

Let’s unpack that a little.

God as disputant enforcing the standard

The key point is that God is not a neutral judge. God has a vested interest in the cause of one party against another. God enters the courtroom as the “muscle” to accomplish what is right. And “right” is what is in line with God’s character and covenant promises.

Key in this whole arrangement is that God moves to enforce the standard. That is, he steps in to establish righteousness. We might summarize righteousness as “conformity to the way things are supposed to be.” Within the worldview of the Bible, that means “in line with how God created them to be.” Thus, living in love toward God and others, living in conformity to God’s will, etc. At the center of righteousness is God. He, as the Creator, establishes what righteousness is.

God enters into the dispute with his power to act on behalf of the one being wronged. And he shows up as a force for righteousness, a force to restore his world to order and deal with anything that stands in the way.

God the Adversary or Lover

Taking this background into the New Testament, we can more readily see that the problem humanity has is not to somehow convince God to judge in our favor, but to somehow avoid being destroyed by God. When God moves in to establish righteousness in his world, we will be destroyed. Unless we can someone be put to right before God moves as a righteous adversary against us.

The Law, the promises, God’s work in the world, these are how God has moved in history to provide a way for people to be righteous. That is, for sinful humanity to fit in once again with the pattern of the world that God made. That way, when he approaches us, it will be an embrace of love rather than destructive judgment.

When we talk about judgment, it is not as though God has a personal vendetta against you, me, or anyone else. He is not sitting in heaven with a divine axe to grind, just waiting to smite you. Instead, the picture in Scripture is of a God entering into humanity. But his approach will either destroy or give life. And the difference is whether we can find a little piece of righteousness to hide ourselves in. That way, God can be just to himself and also just to us, because we would be righteous, we would belong to the pattern.

Justification by faith is how God provides a little piece of righteousness for us hide in. Actually, it is an enormous piece of righteousness. It is Jesus, the Righteous One.

The grand story of the Bible is the story of God reaching out to humanity in a way to bring restoration, rather than destruction.

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The rest of the pattern: keeping Sabbath

Sabbath. God says, “Remember the Sabbath by keeping it holy” (Ex 20.8, NIV), so it must be important. What is the Sabbath? When is it? Should we keep it? Maybe you have a moment to think about those questions. More than likely, though, you’re just too busy to even know or care. In a world of restless and relentless busyness—with more piling up as you read—what should we do about the Sabbath?

The word “Sabbath” is just an English version of a Hebrew word. It means “rest,” or “cessation.”

The Sabbath in the Bible

Before considering some of our own time and culture, let’s take a moment to consider a little of what the Bible tells us about Sabbath. In the Old Testament, Sabbath is incredibly important.

  • Sabbath is a weekly reminder that God completes his work, teaching the people to hope that God will do it again.
  • Sabbath is a holy time in the best interest of the people and the animals in God’s Kingdom.
  • Sabbath is a sign that God set Israel apart for a special relationship with him.
  • Sabbath is a reminder that Israel was slaves in Egypt but have been redeemed from servitude into life that involves rest.
  • Sabbath is a day to celebrate that there is rest and cessation within creation, not just endless stream of more; that while there is much still to be shaped and done, there is much that is done and requires no more work.[1]

For reasons that I don’t want to delve into here (too long of a discussion), I don’t believe that we as followers of Jesus today are mandated to keep the Sabbath in the sense it’s talked about in the Old Testament Law. However, that doesn’t free us from considering the centrality of the Sabbath within God’s revelation of himself in this world. The Sabbath was not an afterthought or an accident. Sabbath is part of the foundational pattern of creation and of the way that time is meant to be marked, measured, and experienced. Within the order of creation, within the order of the way that God marks time, rest has a central role.

The Sabbath and Us

While we may not be mandated to keep the Sabbath as an expression of keeping God’s Law, we’re also not free to ignore the Sabbath as part of the pattern of creation. It may be fine for us to mark a different day than Saturday as holy (the Old Testament Sabbath), or to set aside different times within the week rather than a whole day, but for us to reject God’s pattern of setting aside time from the normal rhythm of work is to suggest that God’s plans and intentions are wrong.

Instead of equating Sabbath to Sunday (which is not bad, but not entirely necessary, either), let’s think of Sabbath instead as a pattern of working God-honoring rest into our lives. In a lifestyle of constant busyness and achievement, this pattern is not just about getting us some time to breathe, but teaching us to realign our hearts towards God and towards others in the right way.

You see, our hearts are desperately prone to idolatry, to fooling ourselves, and to avoiding the work of maturing in Christlikeness. Sabbath fights against all three of these issues. Sabbath puts us at rest before God and with others. Sabbath guards us against many key idols of the current era.

What idols? Consider with me 1) demi-god syndrome, 2) busyness as a distraction, and 3) busyness as self-worth.

demi-god syndrome

Demi-god syndrome is the belief or lifestyle which states that God needs me to be busy all the time because he can’t quite handle it without me getting things done. Whether driven by anxieties and fears, or by an overinflated sense of self-worth, or by having many abilities and needing to make sure things work great in different areas, demi-god syndrome is second nature to so many in our time and place. Well not said in so many words, those living with demi-god syndrome are laboring under the conclusion that God can’t hold things together without their constant input.

busyness as distraction from significant problems

Another destructive way that busyness functions in our lives is as a distraction from significant issues. There is a time and place for being busy in helping us through challenging times. But when busyness becomes a habitual way to escape the gospel and heart work needed to grow us in Christ-like maturity, we’ve got a major problem. When we start looking to busyness to give us what our hearts crave instead of turning to God who gives us rest and teaches us the path to wisdom, we are rejecting God’s work in our lives. For many of us, through habituation or difficulties in life, busyness has transformed into the normal way in which we get what our hearts crave—release from various burdens in life. God calls us to a much more challenging task than being busy. He calls us to the task of surrender and grace.

busyness as self-worth

Busyness also is a convenient way to judge your self-worth: “I’m busy, so I must be valuable.”

  • I must be important because I have so many people with so many claims on our time.
  • I must be important because I have visited so many neat places and done so many neat things.
  • I must be important because I never have a moment to rest when there isn’t something else to think about.

And the logic of this delusion is so simple: people who are important have lots of demands on their time and have lots of people looking to them and often are busy doing many neat things in neat places. When our sense of self and value becomes tied up in being busy and in the many things that we do while we’re busy, though, we’re flirting with idolatry.

Sabbath as a trainer

In all honesty, our hearts are really deceitful. The old Greek dictum, “know thyself,” is easy to say but hard to do. Busyness is an easy pattern of life to fall into, because most everyone else around us is also busy. Whether you have already turned busyness into an idol like those above or not, the busy lifestyle we tend towards trains our hearts toward these types of idolatry. How do we counteract this idolatry-in-training? Sabbath comes to mind.

Sabbath is rest. It is meant to be a time of realigning our hearts toward God and toward others. In putting it in these terms, I want us to see that Sabbath is not meant as a personal spa day in which we get to take it easy and cater to our every whim. Sabbath is a gift and practice given to us from God to challenge the idolatrous tendencies of our hearts. It a time—whether a day or split up around the week—of worship and wonder, of celebration and joy. It should be a day to learn what is important, not just what is urgent and significant. Sabbath should rekindle our hearts with love towards God and love towards others.

How to Sabbath?

It probably won’t look like sitting in an uncomfortable chair all day long, trying not to talk to anybody or avoiding doing any sort of work at all. Here is one general principle:

If you work with your mind, Sabbath with your body; if you work with your body, Sabbath with your mind.

Do something which connects your heart back to God and others in a joyful way. This should involve Scripture, truth, and worship; this will probably involve some sort of Christian fellowship; and it can involve more than that as well.

But one thing Sabbath should not involve: being busy about things that you are normally busy doing. After all, Sabbath means cessation. It is hard to turn to the new possibilities of life with God in this world if you never stop trudging along, head down, endlessly focused on the next task in front of you. God invites us to take a break and find our bearings again. That is Sabbath.

[1] Summarized from Bruce K. Waltke and Cathi J. Fredericks, Genesis: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), 71–73.

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The Strength of Tradition

Tradition is strong.

Tradition is strong like a straight-jacket, rigidly holding everything in place and constraining flexibility and innovation.

Tradition is strong like a brace, supporting a joint so that it can perform beyond its enfeebled ability.

That it isn’t, can’t be, strong in just one of these ways is what makes tradition such an insightful and challenging companion on the journey. Tradition is an endlessly inventive sparring partner.

The answer to who we are emerges in the discussion of the present and the past. Tradition is the major voice from the past.

The historic Baptist tradition

At the beginning of our series “Core Beliefs: Where Are We?”, we talked about our core beliefs and what they do for us. You can check that out here. In the preamble, we say that as a church we stand in the historic Baptist tradition.

There are good, bad, and ugly things about the historic Baptist tradition, itself a subset of the historic tradition of Christian orthodoxy (that is, right following of Jesus). The Preamble of our Core Beliefs summarizes a few aspects of this historic Baptist tradition. But here, I want to meditate for a little while on the value of standing in a tradition: tradition speaks into the present to help us better understand where we are in the midst of the fog. We will see that the historic Baptist tradition speaks with a helpful voice into current political questions.

Note that this post is longer than usual (~ 2,500 words, or about 2-3x longer than usual). Reader, you are warned.

Origin of the tradition

The historic Baptist tradition holds two important political values: liberty of conscience and separation of church and state. These two values are two sides of the same coin, answering the question, “What role should governing authorities have in the religious life of people being governed?” In the modern American context, we are used to the idea of separation of church and state.

What we may not have thought so much about, though, is that these values grew up in a very different time and place. When Baptists were first coalescing as a recognizable sub-group within Christianity in the early 1600s, basically everybody believed that the government should enforce “proper” worship in a state church. The point of separation of church and state within the Baptist tradition was that the state should not only tolerate different churches (or denominations) but that it also must not privilege a certain church. This is a long and interesting story involving many colorful people that can be read elsewhere.

These values which Baptists, among others, championed eventually—and often slowly and unevenly—made their way into the mainstream and are now enshrined in the US political system. The current multi-cultural, multi-religion US is the fruit of that legacy. People in the US generally believe that the system of government exists to regulate the well-being of how people relate to one another, but not to enforce or oversee the good of their souls by attempting to enforce religious observance.

Is our system the perfect solution to the problem of living together within a diverse society? No. But, looking back through history, I think it’s probably right up there at the top of ways that complex societies have yet come up with to enable diverse people to flourish together.

While the historic Baptist values of separation of church and state and soul liberty have largely gone mainstream in US culture, within the Baptist tradition they derive from certain theological convictions. Most importantly, the biblical convictions that 1) each person stands in direct relationship to God as an individual and 2) that true faith in Jesus cannot be legislated or coerced. Because of this understanding, we believe in tolerating members of other faiths so that their hearts can be turned to God through evangelism.

A contemporary conflict

Why belabor these points? Because in our current moment, the historic Baptist tradition speaks with a voice many Christians (and people who identify as “Christian” for political reasons) need to hear. In the current political moment, many conservative people—especially white Evangelicals, broadly construed—are talking about “Christian Nationalism.”

Paul D. Miller, an Evangelical sociologist, writing for Christianity Today, describes the movement this way:

Christian nationalism is the belief that the American nation is defined by Christianity, and that the government should take active steps to keep it that way. Popularly, Christian nationalists assert that America is and must remain a “Christian nation”—not merely as an observation about American history, but as a prescriptive program for what America must continue to be in the future. Scholars like Samuel Huntington have made a similar argument: that America is defined by its “Anglo-Protestant” past and that we will lose our identity and our freedom if we do not preserve our cultural inheritance.

Christian nationalists do not reject the First Amendment and do not advocate for theocracy, but they do believe that Christianity should enjoy a privileged position in the public square

Paul D. Miller, “What is Christian Nationalism?“

Whatever the particular merits of Christian Nationalism are—and for full disclosure there are people whom I deeply respect who describe themselves and their ideals as Christian Nationalist—we are wise to listen to the voice of the historic Baptist tradition we stand in as a church. The Christian Nationalist movement seems poised to try to push aside the values of liberty of conscience and separation of church and state. Giving special political privilege to Christianity and seeking to legislate Christian values on people who don’t want them looks like a rejection of the historic Baptist insight that the government’s job is not to enforce religious observance on people.

There is an important discussion to have about the degree to which Christian values represent values which are good for human society to follow in general. Some who fly under the Christian Nationalist banner appear to argue nothing further than this point. I agree in principle. When the Baptist tradition was solidifying, most people in “Christendom” broadly agreed to a general moral code that approximates many aspects of biblical virtues. That is clearly not the case today. But I would hasten to add that it is possible to labor for generically good social values and conditions without pursuing Christian Nationalism in the sense described above.

Appeal of Christian Nationalism

Christian Nationalism has some obvious appeal. In a cultural moment where Christian and conservative values—which are sometimes, but certainly not always, the same thing—seem to be on the retreat everywhere, people are looking for some way to hold on to what they believe America should be. I myself would be happy to see a conservative turn in the national moral landscape, regardless of peoples’ politics. Kevin DeYoung, a prominent theologian within the Evangelical movement, helpfully  describes the appeal of Christian Nationalism against the backdrop of major social change:

“We have to realize that people are scared and discouraged. They see America rapidly becoming less and less Christian. They see traditional morality—especially in areas of sex and gender—not only being tossed overboard but resolutely and legally opposed. Of course, we should not give way to ungodly fear and panic. We should not make an idol out of politics. We should not fight like jerks because that’s the way the world fights. But people want to see that their Christian leaders—pastors, thinkers, writers, institutional heads—are willing to fight for the truth. You may think your people spend too much time watching Tucker Carlson, or retweeting Ben Shapiro, or looking for Jordan Peterson videos on YouTube, or reading the latest stuff from Doug Wilson—and I have theological disagreements with all of them (after all, some of them aren’t even Christians)—but people are drawn to them because they offer a confident assertion of truth. Our people can see the world being overrun by moral chaos, and they want help in mounting a courageous resistance; instead, they are getting a respectable retreat [from Evangelical Christian leaders, NJE].

Kevin DeYoung, “The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism“

A confident assertion of truth. That is key. Christian Nationalism, in its various forms, is confident that it is right and is willing to stand toe-to-toe with the forces of cultural chaos, as it sees them.

The wise voice of the tradition

This is neither the time nor place for a robust discussion of Christian Nationalism. As I’ve mentioned above, it is a complex phenomenon with good, bad, and ugly motives and expressions. Having come this far in the post, I want to take a minute to converse with the voice of tradition which we stand in as First Baptist Church of Manistique. While our tradition does not answer all of our difficult questions about politics, it does give us some clear guiding considerations to help us in our disorienting times. As various voices clamor for some version of Christian Nationalism in an attempt to bolster up or recapture a culturally conservative America, we can ask some pointed questions drawn from our tradition.

How has Christian Nationalism worked in the past?

Baptists “came of age” in a time and place where the government sought actively to enforce some version of Christian values and church life upon all citizens. That is, most every government in Europe and in the American Colonies could be classed under some version of Christian Nationalism. And a lot of people didn’t like that. At all. Including lots of Christians who lived in those countries.

In fact, the modern, liberal form of government which we associate with the West rose partially in response to the devastating consequences of the wars of religion which shook Europe. Christians killing Christians in the name of Christianity.

While Christian Nationalism sounds like an appealing idea, especially when compared to the cultural chaos of the moment, we have to honestly acknowledge that it hasn’t worked well in the past. The historical record of countries where Christianity was politically embedded is quite terrible on a lot of fronts. When you mix politics and religion, you end up with politics. More on this below. That is one of the great insights enshrined in the Baptist tradition.

For a good contemporary example of the problems of religious nationalism, see the violent excesses of the Hindu Nationalist movement in India. For instance, consider the use of violence and social ostracization against non-Hindus to force conversions in the name of nationalism, or the increasing violence against any who report on Hindu Nationalism and religiously motivated violence.

Are the aims and values of Christian Nationalism Christian?

This question should always be on our minds whenever we see an attempt to mix politics and religion. One of the clear patterns of history is that when religion is a powerful social force people use religious language and symbols to achieve their own political ends (see next point). If we take a long and hard, or even short and cursory, look at Jesus in his ministry, one thing is evident: he did not organize a political force to take control of the government, the culture, or the world. He will do those things, in his own time, but it will be through his power as the Reigning King of the Universe, not through shrewd political machinations.

Are the aims of Christian Nationalism Christian?

That is a question which we must never stop asking. We can see from history that Christian Nationalism produces many social goods by enforcing a thin version of biblical ethics upon society. There is benefit there. But what Christian Nationalism obviously doesn’t do it build robust followers of Jesus. And, it is worth noting, it has not proven to be a sustainable model of society in the long run. The US Colonies and the Modern European Countries were all Christian Nationalist at one point. What happened? The very values needed to sustain Christian Nationalism grow up from people following Jesus, not from legislating morality.

The Baptist tradition also invites us to ask a more focused question about the role of the church in society. Is the church pursuing following Jesus, or is the church becoming enmeshed in trying to become the government? In a zeal to preserve vestiges of Christian culture from the ravages of militant “progressivism,” is the church living in such a way as to show hope and light of the gospel of Jesus to the world, or living in such a way to punch political opponents in the mouth? Attempting to force people to be Christian, or to live like it, never has worked in the past. Why would it now?

Do we suspect that we are being used for political ends?

Finally, dialoguing with the idea of the separation of church and state (and remembering that it arose out of a desire for Christians to not be forced to support other state churches), should alert us to the possibility that people may just use us for their political goals. In history, the church was intimately united with the state in the West. Why are some politicians interested in reviving this arrangement at the current moment? Might it have less to do with piety and theological convictions, and more to do with political power? That is always a concern to keep in mind.

Leaders can rise up and speak words that sound Christian for political purposes. Of course, there are politicians who are followers of Jesus. But when politicians speak the language of Christianity without actually showing a consistent devotion to growth in Christ-likeness, beware. As like it as not, they are trying to use the language of Jesus to gain earthly power for themselves—something which Jesus himself did not do. Remembering the tradition of separation of church and state serves to guard us from being swept away in the headiness of the moment.

Standing in our strength

The current interest in Christian Nationalism is complicated. There are many threads involved to consider in making sense of the tangled knot which we have. One thread we should hold to is the strong voice of tradition. Knowing the tradition in which we stand can help us ask important questions. Certainly, asking the questions doesn’t give us the answers of the good, bad, or ugly ways we can interact with the Christian Nationalist movement. As followers of Jesus, we need to be reminded that victory doesn’t come through politics. We serve a king who surrendered himself to an earthly government, yet who then, as now, is exalted over it.

How we vote or where our political allegiances fall will always be complicated. What our tradition helps us with, though, is to resist being drawn off course in our fervor for or against certain political events and movements. The course of a follower of Jesus is to follow Jesus. This may lead to places and governments that look decidedly Christian, or it may not.

In making these few remarks, I want us to see just how relevant even the preamble to our Core Beliefs is for us as we try to live together as followers of Jesus. There are lots of complicated forces pressing us in many different directions in life. These Core Beliefs, even if not always giving easy answers, at least can help keep us from being blown away by the storms around us.

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Core Beliefs: Where are We?

Where are we? How can we tell? How can we know where we are going if we are not sure where we are?

As we begin a new sermon series looking at our core beliefs week by week, I wanted to reflect a little on the front end about the sermon series graphic that I’ve put together.

Photo by Artur Aldyrkhanov on Unsplash

Since coming here to FBC Manistique, I’ve been making sermon series graphics. First, I’m not a graphic artist by training or disposition. While not unartistic, it is not an area of my skills which I have developed with any rigor. In fact, if anyone is gifted in the realm of graphic art, I’d be more than happy to engage your valuable services in designing sermon series graphics which can serve as a pictorial guide to engaging the sermon series.

This post is a reflection of what I am thinking in choosing this particular picture for the graphic for a series on our core beliefs.

An inheritance to stand on

As you can see above, the picture is of a person sitting on a lichen-covered rock up in a foggy, mountainous area.

Core beliefs are the firm and settled rock on which we stand. Core beliefs have to do with what we are certain of; the truths we base our lives on; the realities which serve as our firm foundation. They are solid. They are a rock.

We did not make up these core beliefs. While they are in some ways distinct to the particular church tradition that First Baptist Church happens to be in, within our core beliefs dwell the core teachings of the followers of Jesus across the millennia. They serve to sketch out the field and how we stand in it. They are solid.

An uncertain surrounding

But the most arresting part of this image is what you can’t see. The blanket of fog obscures everything else. The man in the grey-hoodie is on a solid rock, but we can only guess where he is in relation to anything else. The rock is firm, but the world is mist.

One of the difficulties which followers of Jesus are facing, and will continue to face, is that our surroundings are increasingly misty. It is getting harder and harder to locate just how the solid rock of beliefs we stand on relates to the rest of the world around us. Knowing the firm foundation even creates a bunch of further difficulties and questions that evade easy answer.

We live in a time and place which, to use a helpful scheme developed by Aaron Renn, is a culture that is hostile to the existence and message of followers of Jesus. I don’t mean by that to imply we face anything like the hostilities in many other countries of the world where Christians struggle and are persecuted. But what I do mean to imply is that holding the beliefs and values of followers of Jesus is increasingly looked upon as odd, socially backwards, and perhaps even threatening to the well-being of people and society around us. And, as a result, we are less certain how our solid rock relates to the world around us. We are increasingly wrestling with uncomfortable realities as our core beliefs become an island in the fog.

In a lot of ways, Manistique is a shelter from these broad cultural trends…so far. Who knows what the future will bring? It is shadows and fog.

Where are we?

What do we do in this situation? If I had a definitive answer to that, I’d happily share it—not to mention embrace it definitively in my own life. But I don’t have a definitive answer. We’re certainly not the first followers of Jesus in history to face the rolling fog enfolding our rock. Many real difficulties are here and coming. Yet, also, many opportunities.

One thing I am certain of: we must become more familiar with the rock we stand on. We must become more familiar not just with what we say we believe, not just with a set of social values generally conservative in nature, not just with an association to certain political movements, but an actual living and vital connection to the truths which have been passed down about who God is, who Jesus is, and the way that God’s spirit is at work in this world.

Our core beliefs are a touch point. They’re certainly not an exhaustive description, nor do they include everything that we need to stand and live and flourish, but they establish a core. And it is a strong enough core to answer the question “where are we,” even if we are never quite sure how that relates to the rest of the world. But, in a world of swirling mists, maybe it’s less relevant for us to be able to answer who other people are, and more important that we can show and say who we are; that we can display the truths which we stand on, live through, and live for.