I’m going away on holidays.

So I’m unlikely to be posting for a while. But I look forward to seeing you all when I return!

I was thinking about the consequences of moral influence theories of atonement. Readers probably are aware of my appreciation of Rene Girard’s version of this theory. But I realized that moral influence as a result of Christ’s sacrifice has a consequence I only considered this morning. Now first, I want to clarify what I’m saying – because I really am figuring out what I mean here as I go along.

Girard speaks of our contemporary passion for defending the rights of virtually every minority, of almost universal rejection of slavery by Christian-influenced culture, et cetera, as proof that Christ’s sacrifice was effective in influencing human morality.

However, if this is evident, it is also evident that this did not happen immediately: Minorities were still persecuted at the time of Christ’s sacrifice (his followers included) and still are, and slavery was once as much a Christian institution as it is still one in many countries around the world, and in all but name in many others.

In fact, these influences were barely evident even in the writings of the New Testament: Paul, for example, often treats women as second-class (as was the fashion at the time, and despite many modern believers arguing that he did not), and does similarly for slaves, and, to be honest, a wide selection of sinners.

This may suggest that, despite being in immediate receipt of Christ’s revelation, and being his contemporaries, the Apostles and the early church likely did not grasp the fullness of the implications of this moral influence, which in Girard’s terms is the rejection of tool of sacrificing the minority for the sake of the majority.

And this in turn might suggest a certain flaw in taking this early texts at face value. If the influence of what Christ did had not fully affected the culture at that time (and it has not two-thousand years later, so I don’t imagine that it did), then there will obviously be evidence of the non-Christological aspects of that culture (and there obviously is: Paul on slavery, for example).

Anyway, the point is that the whole thing got me thinking.

Doug has been revisiting the 38 Articles of the Anglican Faith, and I adored what he had to say about article ten:

The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God: Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.

I admire Doug Chaplin’s affirmations:

…that God is always graciously going before us, and drawing created order out of chaos, and free moral choices out of random coincidences and constrained actions.

…that we are in the process of becoming human, and the world on its way to becoming good creation, and that this is initiated, sustained and will be completed by God’s acting graciously.

…that process takes shape and focus from the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Son of God. God created (creates) and re-creates the world in such a way that he might enter into its estranged otherness, in order to bring it to completion. In that sense, our very existence, never mind our individual moral acts, depend on the prior gracious initiative of God, and his desire for our good and, indeed, our becoming good.

And his objections:

…the way in which Christians may take it – indeed have taken it – and the ideas it contains as a club with which to beat the other. “There’s no morality without God.” “You can’t do anything good until you repent.” “Only Christians can be really moral people” Those sorts of statements seem to me at best unhelpful, although I would tend to describe them as smugly repugnant.

I think I can affirm these statements in turn. It is very important to realise that our moral actions (our choices to do good) depend on the initiative that God takes and once took. However, it is also important (to me) to realise that the moral actions of others also depend on that same initiative. That is to say, a persons morality is independent of their Christianity, although it is still dependent on Christ (in that it stems from his actions at the cross).

I don’t know that that is what Doug meant, but it’s how I interpreted it.

Whilst I’ll happily admit that Doug’s amusing objections to the way that Brent Emery presents himself here, I certainly think there’s a lot to be learnt from Jewish prayer traditions as well as from Judaism in general. I don’t know a whole lot about Messianic Judaism (a Jewish friend of mine described them as travesties who can’t make up their minds), but I’ve written on what can be learnt from Judaism in the past – I really love Jewish prayer traditions, and think that modern Christianity has a lot to learn from them, in both their tradition of writing prayer, and their tradition of respecting and re-using the prayers of those who came before them.

I think Brent is right in pointing Christians to the 18 Benedictions as a place to find inspiration for prayer, although Doug is right that some of them are certainly inappropriate (just as many Talmudic instructions might be considered inappropriate for Christians). However, I wonder at Doug’s pointing the finger at Paul as one who objected to Gentiles following Torah. From my understandings of Paul, he judged a Christian life by their adherence to law, and yet did not believe that the Law itself saved anyone, anymore.

Reading a post at Christians in Context, made marvel at the oddness that is the complementarian interpretation of Ephesians 5. Yes, I know I shouldn’t keep bringing this up. This is what Andrew said:

Paul explains v. 21 in the passage that follows. The Ephesians will read and say, “Oh, o.k., we are to submit to one another in the fear of Christ- but what kind of submission?” Paul responds: wives to their own husbands, as to the Lord. The husband’s role? Quite the opposite: headship. Cruciform, Christ-modeled headship to be sure, but headship nonetheless.

This makes no sense. Ask a random person if you can submit to someone by being in authority over them, they would look at me like I was an idiot. Authority is not submission, people.

I’ve written my views on this before (headship in 21st century marriage, and complementarianism and egalitarianism), so I won’t repeat them. But I marvel.

I’m both perplexed and impressed by a recent post by Arturo Vasquez:

I could never take the writings of a “lay theologian” very seriously. True enough, there will always be exceptions, but the idea that the person I look to for ideas about God also has a family, deadlines, and has to punch a clock seems to me profoundly disturbing. How is one “good at theology” when she or he has to live his/her life like anyone else? How is this person closer to God than I am when he or she has the same trials and consolations, and has made the same decisions in life? What makes him or her a “real theologian” rather than just an “academic expert” who specializes in certain religious topics? How responsible / obedient must he or she be to the being of the Church as it exists throughout time and space?

He notes, of course, the irony of himself being a lay theologian and writing this. But his perspective leaves me torn: Why is someone who does not have family, deadlines, et cetera any holier or more able a theologian than someone who does not? Why is a person closer to God simply because they have made different decisions, undergone different trials and consolations?

I understand, of course, that Arturo writes from within the Catholic church, where the clergy are devoted to God and God alone. One could say they are professional theologians, but the truth is their time is taken as much with pastoring, paperwork, and I’m sure a million things I’m unaware of. If difference from me is the definition of a true theologian, then does that make an Indonesian Imam a truer theologian than I?

However, I’m also impressed: If someone is “good at theology”, if they are closer to God than I, surely it should be reflected in their lives? Perhaps in their trials, their decisions? In the choices they make about family or work?

So I’m both perplexed and impressed. Do you have any thoughts on the matter?

From a fun post at the Scriptorium Daily on the nameless characters in the bible:

Cain’s wife. Never mind where she came from, what was her name? Awan. And Seth’s wife was named Azura. Where does this information come from? the apocryphal Book of Jubiliees, chapter 4.

Noah’s wife? Metzger says that over 100 different names have been assigned her! Emzara is the one given in Jubilees.

Potiphar’s wife? Zuleika, according to postbiblical Jewish legends.

The daughter of Pharaoh who took Moses from the water and raised him as prince of Egypt? Thematis, or maybe Bithiah.

Job’s wife? Well, the first one was named Sitis, and the second one was Dinah, the daughter of Jacob.

Jephthah’s daughter? Seila.

The witch of Endor? Sedecla.

Click through for more. I think I’d like to read Metzger’s chapter on the nameless.

Joel’s recent post on the Deuterocanon finished on an amusing note:

Two of the silliest notions about these books are:

1. The Jews don’t accept them
2. They teach unChristian doctrines

To number one, I say, and? The Jews don’t accept the New Testament books either. Further, the Jewish canon wasn’t settled until after the New Testament was written – until after the Temple was destroyed.

And number two? So does Leviticus.

And number two? So does Leviticus. Ha! Good stuff, Joel.

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.