I came across this very old post on Jesus and macroeconomics:

No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. Luke 16: 13

Jesus probably didn’t know much about macroeconomics, even though he was God. But he really meant all those things he said about selling everything we have and giving to the poor and then following him.

The economics of Jesus is very simple. Live sparingly. Don’t waste anything. Take only what you need and leave the rest for others. If possible, replenish what you take. Leave things no worse than you found them. And most important, don’t become preoccupied with things, because they are not what your life is about.

The world as we know it could not run on the economics of Jesus. The consumption of goods, which drives the whole thing, would slow to a trickle. Most workers would be let go. The wealth of investors would disappear. The markets would crash. Instead of only half the world’s people being desperately poor, we would all be foraging for food. It almost makes you glad that no one takes Jesus seriously.

But if we want to be followers of Jesus, we really do need to take him seriously, even if no one else does. He meant everything he said about being poor in the things of this world in order to be rich in grace. And he ought to know; he is God. He never would have won a prize in economics for his teaching, but what he said is the gospel truth.

Of course, I think it’s more likely that God knows all about macroeconomics, but still requires us to reject the accumulation of wealth. Why would he do that? Would the world as we know it collapse if run on the economics of Jesus. Perhaps not. From an interview with Douglass Rushkoff:

The Vatican and central Rome did NOT build the cathedrals. The funds came from local currency, which was very different than money as we use it now. It was based on grain, which lost value over time. The grain would slowly rot or get eaten by rats or cost money to store, so the money needed to be spent as quickly as possible before it became devalued. And when people spend and spend and spend a lot of money, you end up with an economy that grows very quickly.

Now unlike a capitalist economy where money is hoarded, with local currency, money is moving. The same dollar can end up being the salary for three people rather than just one. There was so much money circulating that they had to figure out what to do with it, how to reinvest it. Saving money was not an option, you couldn’t just stick it in the bank and have it grow because it would not grow there, it would shrink. So they paid the workers really well and they shortened the work week to four and in some cases three days per week. And they invested in the future by way of infrastructure — they started to build cathedrals. They couldn’t build them all at once, but they took the long view — with three generations of investment they could build an entire cathedral, and their great-grandchildren could live in a rich town! That’s how the great cathedrals were built, like Chartres. Some historians actually term the late Middle Ages “The Age of Cathedrals.”

They were the best-fed people in the history of Europe; women in England were taller than they are today, and men were taller than they have been at any point in time until the 1970s or 80s (with the recent growth spurt largely the result of hormones in the food supply). Life expectancy of course was still lower; they lacked modern medicine, but people were actually healthier and stronger and better back then, in ways that we don’t admit.

It seems that, living off a local, subsistence income, people were healthier and more productive of incredibly expensive architecture and artwork than they are today, and that is without today’s technologies. Maybe God has a point?

Claude Mariottini links to an interesting article on occult Judaism, but I’m not sure about his conclusion:

…belief in the supernatural has existed throughout human history and is present in almost every culture of the world. The article also demonstrates that religious people are not immune from believing in the supernatural. Religious people believe in the supernatural because they believe in an order of existence that is beyond human understanding and that goes beyond the visible universe.

Superstition, however, is a distortion of true religious faith because it is a system of beliefs that is not based on historical facts, on human experience, or scientific knowledge. Superstitious claims are associated with the paranormal, occult practices, belief in magic and luck, and the fear that the lives of individuals can be affected by these elements.

Now, to me it seems that religion is, above anything else, a belief in the supernatural. Even the most simple form of Christianity believes in a supernatural resurrection, or in a supernatural God supernaturally made into flesh. I’m not sure how Christian belief- or any other religious belief – has any more grounding in historical fact, human experience, or scientific knowledge than someone who wears an amulet with the name of an angel on it to protect themselves from evil spirits. And to be honest, I think that most religious belief is based as much on fear – at the least a fear of being without communion with God, and at the worst a fear of God himself – as any superstition.

And I think Dr Mariottini might have missed the point of the article in interpreting it this way (or perhaps I misunderstood him?), as it ends like this:

And despite how far into the modern world Jews have moved, they continue to hear the echo of Sefer Hasdim, the famous medieval text, which advised, “One should not believe in superstitions, but it is best to be heedful of them.”

Which to me suggests that, whilst we should not believe in superstitions, we should not disregard them. Now, I’m not a superstitious person. But I hesitate in making the statements that Dr Mariottini makes in disregarding superstition as a distortion of true religious faith. I think that superstition often makes up a vibrant and rich part of religious faith, a part which I don’t think it intrinsic to Christianity – or to any religion – but that is certainly not a part that needs to be swiped at or treated as inferior.

Steve drew my attention to Cliff’s post on literal interpretation:

Inerrancy leads to distortions of the character of God. Sometimes, horrendous distortions. A few examples should suffice: In an inerrant Bible, God becomes one who endorses the practice of selling one’s daughters as sex-slaves (Exodus 21:7-11). The God of the Inerrantist commands that children who sass or stubbornly disobey their parents are to be killed for their transgressions (Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21). If God were speaking through Moses in the pages of Numbers 31:9-18, then God followed the pattern of many military conquerors, rewarding soldiers with virgins for their sexual indulgence (or please, Inerrantist, explain what else is going on in these verses!). The God of the Inerrantist was, on occasion, confused about biology, as when he identified rabbits as ruminants in Deuteronomy 14:7. Furthermore, an Inerrantist must view God as sometimes raging out-of-control, one who had to be talked out of venting his rage upon the Israelite nation by the cooler-headed Moses (Exodus 32:7-14). This list could be expanded. We haven’t even ventured beyond the first five books! But my point should be clear by now. Inerrancy is dangerous to a healthy view of God and his character. It leads to theological confusion and distortion.

There’s more good stuff, but I think this is the crux, and a well-said one at that. Thanks, Cliff.

Richard Beck recently wrote a long series on Purity and Defilement over on his blog, Experimental Theology. One post – one a while ago, actually – spoke about the reason why often much theological argument is doomed to failure:

Disgust is very different from anger…You can teach a young child to feel disgust at a substance–by strong parental reactions and other forms of psychological influence. Imagine, however, trying to convince someone who is not disgusted by a bat that bats are in fact disgusting. There are no publicly articulable reasons to be given that would make the dialogue a real piece of persuasion. All you could do would be to depict at some length the alleged properties of bats, trying to bring out some connection, some echo with what the interlocutor already finds disgusting: the wet greedy mouth, the rodentlike body. But if the person didn’t find those things disgusting, that’s that.

A similar analysis holds in the church. If the felt experiences of the divine (and, by definition, the profane) differs within the church then these groups will be at an impasse, literally dumbfounded by their inability to find common ground. One group finds the word “crap” intensely offensive. Others don’t. And, as Nussbaum notes, that’s that.

What I’m saying, in a strong form, is that if our experience of the divine is regulated by disgust psychology then our conversations about God, sin and holiness are being torpedoed at some deep level. A dumbfounding is occurring. Consequently, conversations about God are inherently difficult because the logic of the divine is being regulated by emotion rather than logic. I think people in the churches have always know this. I’m just trying to illuminate the mechanics or, rather, identifying the monkeywrench that keeps jamming up the gears.

So, we have difficulty having conversations about God, because we find the implications of each others’ theologies disgusting. And that’s that. It won’t change. It’s a basic, psychological reaction. So I’m dumbfounded by how you can believe what you believes. And you’re dumbfounded that I’m not moved by your arguments. But the reason is that we don’t believe because of our arguments: We believe what we believe based on our disgust psychology, and justify it with our arguments.

But that’s not the purpose of Beck’s series: His point is that Christianity’s goal is to overcome our disgust psychology. It’s about mixing with sinners, lepers, and tax collectors.

So the implication is that part of our responsibility as Christians is to overcome the barriers within theologies; barriers not brought on by disagreements of argument (although it seems that way), but rather brought on my basic differences in the perception of cleanliness. We are to show hospitality to those who disagree with us theologically, just as we are to show hospitality to strangers and sinners and the unclean. And hospitality, not just in the sense of welcoming into our homes, but in the sense of accepting who they are and that they seem unclean to us, and not enforcing change.

I’ve never had a host I’d considered hospitable, end the night by forcing me to change my mind.

The clayboy, Doug Chaplin, recently wrote a thought-provoking post on original sin and evolution. He entitled it ‘No Adam, No Fall’, because it struggled with the Pauline concept that that Adam’s failure was a decisive moment in history. I’ll be quoting exhaustively, because I loved some of what Doug said.

I note Paul’s method. He re-reads the earlier story in the light of Christ. He does this with most things. I wonder what ways are open to us if we take that method seriously and look at ways of re-reading the whole narrative in the light of Christ, an even more thorough-going move from solution to plight, in the knowledge of creation and evolution that we have subsequently acquired.

I think this is an important thing to realize; Paul’s interpretation of Adam in the light of Christ is something we should attempt to imitate in our own interpretation of the Old Testament. Paul writes many letters, all teaching his followers in the churches how to think theologically, and how to be like Christ. These two things are not entirely separate. But, I think because of the goals of these letters (education), if we disagree with how Paul re-reads the Old Testament, we are not negating God’s inspiration in his letters. Paul wouldn’t have minded if we disagreed with him about Adam, so long as we re-read the fall in the light of Christ. I think the rest of Doug’s provisional thesis is best read in this light.

Sin” (if I may be every bit as anthropomorphic and anachronistic as Richard Dawkins is) is not only in the world long before “Adam”, but is the mechanism whereby Adam’s species can emerge and flourish as the one who is able to name the animals (in increasingly sophisticated taxonomies) and tend to the garden of the earth’s ecosystem (or destroy it).

As regular readers know, I’m a thorough supporter of Rene Girard’s memetic theory as a theory of sin; and of Christ’s sacrifice as a miraculous overcoming of that sin, rather than a satiation of a wrathful God. And hence, I think Doug hits the nail on the head with this: Sin is, in fact, something intrinsic and important to not only our daily lives, but our ancestry, and it is what makes us what we are. We are both very good in the eyes of God (Genesis 1:31), and not (Genesis 2:18).

Creation is what God is about, creating order from chaos, drawing conscious forms of life able to love and praise out of the primordial soup, developing those who will come to find their true selves in the image of the one in whom God encounters his creation. The image of God, revealed in Jesus, is God’s intention for men and women, transcending the selfish gene to live in a self-giving love that mirrors and responds to the love of God.

But, most importantly, God drew us out to overcome this flaw that both made us thrive and (perhaps) disappointed him in us. Through Christ, we can transcend the sin that has made us thrive, we can live in a self-giving love mirror and respond to the love of God. A valuable concept, Doug, and one beautifully put.

Why do I say ‘perhaps’ when it comes to God’s disappointment in us?

…there are indeed those other traditions of the origins of evil in the world which go alongside and beyond the account of Adam, Eve and the serpent. [...] Some of them seem to lay the blame more clearly on God, who makes both darkness and light. I think we need to go back to a fuller exploration of those traditions, and see if they can help enrich our understanding.

I culled a little bit, because I wanted to draw attention to laying the blame more clearly on God. There is certainly testament in scripture to God’s control over both good and evil – and how could there not be, and he still be God? It is something we must live with, if we are to be truly monotheistic in our faith. However, to me this suggests that it is unlikely God was disappointed in us, because that sin that helped us thrive was likely something given to us to overcome. We were made in the image of God, and the eternal presence of sin might be a necessary balance to God’s difficult role as Lord over both good and evil. And yet, God’s to constantly transcend this dual character for good: So too, through Christ, we can transcend our sin, and respond to God’s love.

Thanks for provoking thought, Doug

Bryan Cross writes about self-gratification, contraception and abortion, noting that until the 1930s, Protestants as well as Catholics believed that contraception was against God’s will:

But when self-gratification becomes the conceived end of sexuality, then anyone or anything obstructing the way to that self-gratification is conceived as an impediment to the fulfillment of one’s sexuality. And Pope Paul VI was right. When an unborn child frustrates that self-gratification, the child must be destroyed [warning, obscene language at the link]. In this way, contraception is intrinsically linked to the violence of abortion. [...]

But let’s consider some uncomfortable questions. What if there is an intrinsic connection between the popular acceptance of contraceptives, and the legalization of abortion? And what if there is an intrinsic connection between the acceptance of contraception among Christians, and the popular acceptance of contraception? If so, then there is an intrinsic connection between the acceptance of contraception among Christians, and the legalization of abortion. In that case there is a deep contradiction between picketing in front of an abortion clinic, and using contraceptives or being in a Christian denomination that condemns abortion but condones the use of contraceptives.

Given this intrinsic causal relation between contraceptives and abortion, if Catholics and Protestants seek to stand united in opposition to abortion, we must stand united in opposition to the use of contraceptives and the contraceptive mentality. As important and worthwhile as protesting outside of abortion clinics is (especially in saving the lives of children whose mothers are persuaded by our presence not to abort their child), we are there confronting the deadly symptoms of the moral disease, not its fundamental cause. To stop abortion we must teach society the “birds and the bees” in its true sense. We must show the intrinsic evil of contracepted sex by showing the personal and teleological nature of sex in its God-given beauty and fullness. But this teaching cannot be only in words; it must first be in deeds. If Christians wish to stop abortion, we must throw out our prophylactics, and get off the pill. Protestants and Catholics cannot effectively teach the “birds and the bees” to society until we ourselves know and practice the virtue of chastity, i.e. true sexual excellence.

I find this Catholic argument against contraception very compelling, to be honest. I do believe that contraception has a place – especially in a world where population seems to be expanding at such a rate that it will soon overcome our ability to support it. However, it seems to me convincing that the adoption of contraception promotes goal of self-gratification as the goal of sex, and slowly shifted the meaning of sex in the popular consciousness from producing children to gratification. This culminates in the children produced in sex being unwanted (as if they weren’t an intrinsic part of the process).

I think Bryan makes a very good and important point, though, about “the birds and the bees”. When we teach children, we tell them that sex is for making babies. We don’t tell them that it is for feeling good. Yet as we grow older, the lines blur, and the message, especially in the popular media, is that sex is for pleasure, and most often the babies made are accidental – and interrupt ‘real life’. Perhaps adults should remind themselves of the “the birds and the bees”?

However, I think it would be difficult – and perhaps morally questionable – for every Christian to throw our contraception in this day and age. What can we do aside from publicize sex’s primary objective as the creating children? I don’t really have any answers. But Bryan, thanks for the thought-provoking post.

I really appreciated a few of Kevin Vanhoozer’s theses as ones that should be better publicised:

7. The Spirit who speaks with magisterial authority in the Scripture speaks with ministerial authority in church tradition.

Now, whilst I’m not sure of the difference between magisterial and ministerial (I’m guessing it’s related to the authority to define doctrine), I think it’s incredibly important to recognize that church tradition does speak with a kind of authority that directly proceeds from God. Hence, it’s not tenable to reject any tradition simply on the grounds that it does not appear in the Bible.

8. In an era marked by the conflict of interpretations, there is good reason provisionally to acknowledge the superiority of catholic interpretation.

I realize that here ‘catholic’ is not capitalized, so I wonder what Vanhoozer’s definition of ‘catholic’ is; but I suggest that the world ‘Catholic’ can be substituted, and be very reasonable, considering that, as one of the interpretations with the longest history, there is certainly good reason to provisionally acknowledge its superiority.

So, now that I’ve revealed my biases, how did you guys interpret these two theses?

The other day I was in a conversation where I mentioned the fact that I was not a ‘proud Protestant’. Why? Because I feel the disunity in the church caused by Protestantism has done far greater damage to the church than any correction of doctrine could ever balance. So, when Peter Kirk wrote about this in his recent post, I tuned in:

It still seems to me that there are two logical positions here, the same ones Newman outlined. One is to follow the authority of tradition which leads to Rome, or perhaps to Eastern Orthodoxy. The other is to follow the authority of sola scriptura which leads, whether we like it or not, to the kind of free for all which Robbie Low caricatured. There is, it seems to me as it did to Newman, no logically tenable middle way by which, for example, we reject the authority of the church up to 1517, accept the right of a few Reformers to their private judgment, and then imply that suddenly in about 1611 or 1662 everything changed and we have to abandon sola scriptura and follow the authority of a new Protestant magisterium and inquisition.

The conversation I mentioned took part because I consider myself Anglican, go to an Anglican cathedral, spend my time with Anglicans, and yet haven’t signed up for it. I don’t think I’m trying to walk the middle way that Peter mentions; what I’m doing is sitting on the fence hoping (with probably foolishness – but I keep my eye on the news on Principium Unitatis) that the Catholic and Orthodox conjoin and I can be a part of a united church. But I often wonder, as Peter says, is this foolish? And then he says this:

It is of course very sad when these informal groupings start bickering in public, and they should be encouraged not to. Nevertheless the system is not disastrously bad. Of course some of them have come off the doctrinal rails. But this is where the Gamaliel principle comes in: in most cases congregations which have become seriously liberal gradually decline and die, even though Anglican system tries its hardest to keep these dying congregations alive. The congregations which grow and divide are almost always those which are faithful to the word of God.

To me, you see, it is more important that groupings of Christians do not bicker in public (as they do), than whether or not they have come off the doctrinal rails; especially in todays saturated media, where every statement made can be and is broadcast to every corner of the globe. In a world where disunity is very, very public, I feel that the priority is to present a united Christianity, not to be right in every aspect of doctrine.

Now, perhaps this is foolish: Definitions of ‘Christianity’ then become very important. I, after all, define ‘Christian’ as following the basic historical creeds. But I have friends who do not. And is it disunity to reject these friends? May be. There are plenty of issues with Christian unity. But I nevertheless feel that a unified church, with numerous schisms and heretics, is preferable to schisms without count, and no church to speak of. The church isn’t supposed to be ’survival of the most faithful’. It’s supposed to be all-in-one.

Steve’s response to my two posts on Canon, as well as a few other posts on the general subject, have produced a few new thoughts.

E. Russo said:

…the Bible we have today is filled with all sorts of interpolations, additions, and other errors that clearly shows the handiwork of Man. But, I’m not going to toss it out because it may be theologically, politically, or even historically skewed (which seems like the direction that Ehrman is leaning towards). By realizing our own fallibility we come one step closer to walking a life of humility and love. And with that understanding we can grasp a deeper meaning found buried within the Bible.

What does it matter if the Comma Johanneum was not added until centuries after the closing of the canon? Do we keep it in there for tradition’s sake or just to support our theological views? Should we butcher the Bible like Thomas Jefferson did with his and take out what doesn’t jive with our worldview? And what about the non-canonical texts that the church decided were not divinely inspired? Can we grow spiritually from non-canonical texts like the Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of Paul, or even the deuterocanonical books in the Catholic bible? If a text is not “divinely inspired” does it carry any worth at all? What then guides us to read, say for instance, the Bible as oppose to the Book of Mormon?

Russo makes some good points here; I certainly think that we can grow spiritually from non-canonical texts. I think Christianity as a whole has established this as a standard belief, from the testimony of the booming Christian publishing industry. The question, rather, is what weight ‘divine inspiration’ really carries. Why is it that we consider the Bible more greatly inspired than other texts? Why are we to believe the bible over other texts? The Weekend Fisher (Steph, I believe?)  points out that:

Ehrman’s work doesn’t list every single piece of early Christian writing, but it does tally up an impressive 42 additional works. If you compare the 27 writings that did make the New Testament with the 42 that Ehrman lists that did not, we find that the church was, actually, fairly selective. If we just work with these two simple numbers — the list that the early church ultimately accepted and the list that Ehrman proposes — we find that the church screened out just over 60% of the proposed writings.

It’s a legitimate question: On what did the early church screen works as being “in” or “out”? But it’s not legitimate to say they weren’t screening.

That is, that something was certainly separating the choices that included our New and Old Testaments in ‘the List’ that became canon. We just don’t always know what it is; one such a characteristic seems to have been apostolic authorship, although not all texts purported to be written by the apostles were included in the canon (there are a number of additional letters of Paul, I believe). If they were indeed chosen according to a theological agenda, we have to be sure that agenda was God’s agenda. Or further, is ‘the List’ even valid if we’re interpreting outside of the agenda that produced it? Christians before this list was made believed other texts were ‘divinely inspired’. What characteristic made the texts on  ’the list’ the only ones that still own that label?

In current language, ‘inspiration’ is pretty general; this post was inspired by Steve, Steph, Russo and Jon. At this moment, I wonder if this is all that that phrase meant: The texts are inspired by God. But it was their theology that made these specific texts special. They were inspired by God and Orthodox. But then, there are plenty of Orthodox texts that did not make it into the New Testament – Didache and the letters of Clement, for example. And certainly, nobody would contend that much of the modern Christian publishing industry deserves to be in the New Testament. Jon Sweeney quoted from an interrogation of St Joan of Arc recently, which made me wonder about the nature of inspiration:

Joan: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.

Robert: They come from your imagination.

Joan: Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.

The solution for me lies not only in elevating the Church’s opinion of the extracanonical but in reining in our expectation of canonical authority. If we view the canonical books as divinely influenced rather than as divinely authored literature, I think the need for examining extracanonical literature becomes apparent.

I think Steve might be right; perhaps our solution is not to elevate texts outside the canon, but rather to expect less from the canon itself. The authority, for Steve, seems to be in the List and in the sufficiency of the list. It is not the texts (which are fallible), but rather the list (which is sufficient).

In Judaism, the Torah holds a place of extreme reverence; the rest of the Bible holds a lesser place; and the volumes and volumes of writing on God – agree or disagree with it – holds a place of esteem as well. We could equally hold the extra-canon, and everything written by Christians on the subject of God, in esteem; it’s inspired by God, in a flawed way that I have difficulty distinguishing from the way by which the Bible was inspired.

I recently found myself a copy of The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, and so I’ve had a chance to finally read through the writings of the Apostolic Fathers for the first time. Reading through the first letter of Clement, I came across two mentions of Justification. In this post, I’ll talk about the second (I wrote about the first yesterday):

And so we, having been called through his will in Christ Jesus, are not justified through ourselves or through our own wisdom or piety, or works that have been done in holiness of heart, but through faith, by which the Almighty God has justified all who have existed from the beginning; to whom be the glory for ever and ever. (32 v.2)

Now, I freely admit I’m not up on the ongoing debate on Justification. I haven’t read the most recent books by John Piper or Tom Wright. So I’m not talking about justification in the technical senses argued in those books (although, if you wish, you can bring it up for discussion – just be prepared to do a lot of explaining).

This passage – to me – seems to suggest something that I’ve argued in the past by virtue of efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice (in five parts: One, Two, Three, Four and Five). That is everyone who has existed, exists and will exists, have to be saved, simply because the sacrifice of a divinity is worth that much and so much more. To paraphrase what Clement says here: We Christians are not justified on our own, or through our wisdom, or by being devoted to God, or by manifesting our faith in actions, but through faith, and through faith God has justified everyone who has ever been, and everyone who ever will be.

There are two sides to this verse. The first ties into what we discussed yesterday. I said: Only God knows if we truly have faith. But the only true evidence of a life of faith are the actions a man takes regarding his faith. However, here Clement speaks (in my understanding, at least) as if not even our actions justify us. Contrary to what he said in 31 v.4, he says that none of these things, including our actions, can justify us.

But he says something furthermore that I found fascinating: We are justified through faith, by which God has justified all who have existed from the beginning. I must ask the question: How can faith justify those who have not the chance to have faith, that is, the dead? I suggest three possible answers:

• Clement is speaking of Christ descending to the dead: Hell is empty, and that all the dead have faith and are justified.
• Clement is speaking of a common faith: All who have ever existed have possessed faith, but only through Christ has that faith come to justify them.
• Clement is speaking of an abstract faith: Because faith can now be placed in Jesus, all are justified.

One way I find it hard to interpret Clement, is in the way that most view faith: Faith in Jesus justifies individuals. This is because Clement claims that all who have ever been born have been justified. To me, this passage of Clement, whatever his meaning, certainly lends credence to my belief that that for Christ’s sacrifice to regarded as effective, its effect must be universal. Is anyone aware of any interpretations of this passage in the literature or in commentaries?