Holiness and Justice, pt. 3

Ok, so now we move to a consideration of how the issues of holiness and justice were addressed and lived out in Israel and Judah from the time of the conquest to the time of the exile—basically the era of the judges and kings. This will definitely take a few posts to unpack, so I’ll start today with a few observations related to these themes from the time of Israel’s entry into the Promised Land to the beginning of the monarchy.

The first thing that it is important to note is that, in spite of the prolonged moral and ethical instruction that they had received in the wilderness, it did not take long for the Israelites to begin abandoning both holiness and justice once they had entered the Promised Land. An extremely early example of this is Achan’s theft at Jericho in Joshua 7, an act in which he displayed both a lack of concern for holiness by disobeying God’s express command, and the sort of greedy acquisitiveness that always serves to undermine justice. This episode, occuring as it did following the very first battle after Moses’ impassioned reiteration of the Law in Deuteronomy, obviously did not bode well for Israel’s chances of upholding their calling to embody holiness and justice.

The Book of Judges confirms, in a spectacular way, our suspicions that Israel may be in trouble. The book begins with the arrival of an angelic messenger who condemns the Israelites for failing to obey the Lord’s command to drive out the pagan nations who dwelt in the land, and the remainder of the book is a sad litany of Israel’s recurrent disobedience and idolatry (basically “holiness” issues), which periodically led to repentance and deliverance through the raising up of a ”judge,” only for the nation to quickly abandon its commitment to holiness and repeat the whole process again. By the time of Abimelech (Judges 9), justice had gone out the window along with holiness, as his reign was marked by officially sanctioned mass murder and counter-revolutionary banditry. The nadir of both holiness and justice in the period of the judges can be found in the horrific story of the rape and post-mortem dismemberment of the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19), an episode that ends with people saying in shock and disgust, “Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt” (19:30), and which proves the truth of the statement with which the entire Book of Judges concludes: “In those days . . . everyone did as he saw fit” (21:25).

As the story transitions from the period of Judges to the days of Samuel and Saul, we find that Eli’s sons were involved in a form of priestly misconduct that involved both disobeying God’s explicit instructions and regulations regarding sacrifices and thus dishonoring Him (holiness problem), and forcibly taking meat from the worshippers (justice problem). When God condemns their behavior, He addresses both sides of the issue, accusing them of scorning His instructions and of fattening themselves on the offerings of others (see 1 Samuel 2:12–36). This double failure on their part leads directly to their deaths, as well as to the death of their father, Eli, and the temporary loss of the Ark of the Covenant (1 Samuel 4), after which Samuel becomes the leader of Israel and seeks to restore holiness and justice.

Later, however, we learn that Samuel’s sons abandoned his example and chose instead to follow a path that was similar to that embraced by Eli’s sons: they “turned aside after dishonest gain and accepted bribes and perverted justice.” (1 Samuel 8:3). And it was partially in response to their unsuitability to lead that the people came and asked Samuel for a king “like all the other nations have.” This event marks a major turning point in the life of Israel as a nation, and serves to hasten the abandonment of both holiness and justice that had been ongoing since the time of their entry into the land. Indeed, God construes the people’s request for a king as an unequivocal rejection of Him and an illustration of the same lack of holiness that has caused them to serve other gods on and off for centuries (8:7–8). And, as Samuel clearly warns them, the establishment of a monarchy will also lead to great injustice as the king begins to dominate the life of the nation, demanding tribute and forcing the people into his service (8:11–18).

In the next post, I’ll begin to look at how holiness and justice continued to be eroded during the period of the kings (with a few brief and/or partial exceptions). But for now it should suffice to note that Israel’s early national history makes it abundantly clear that holiness and justice are closely linked, and that any neglect of one will inevitably bring about the abandonment of the other, at which point evil and chaos reign. The rest of the pre-exilic Old Testament narrative will make this point all too clear. More later…

Holiness and Justice, pt. 2

Next up, a consideration of how the themes of holiness and justice were embodied in the Law that God gave to Israel. Obviously, the core of this Law is the Ten Commandments, which clearly reflect a concern both with what we think of as “personal holiness” issues (don’t worship idols, don’t blaspheme God’s name, observe the Sabbath) and with “social justice” issues (don’t deprive other people of their lives, spouses, or property). Over the course of the remainder of Exodus, all of Leviticus, a few scattered chapters of Numbers, and the whole of Deuteronomy, these basic principles that are given in the Ten Commandments are fleshed out in greater (often minute) detail. While it is somewhat misleading to suggest any clear or firm divisions in this literature, it is nonetheless interesting to note the following:

• The laws that immediately follow the Ten Commandments and that lead up to Israel’s affirmation of the covenant (Exodus 21–23) are mostly concerned with issues of justice—how to treat servants, how to deal with issue of public violence, how to deal with injuries caused by or inflicted on animals that belong to someone else, how to settle property disputes, treating aliens, widows, and orphans with justice, and providing food for the poor.
• The overwhelming majority of the book of Leviticus, in contrast, is obsessed with issues of cultic practice and personal holiness. It consists of detailed instructions for offering the various types of ritual sacrifices that were necessary to atone for personal sin, as well as laws governing sexual morality, clean and unclean food, purification from disease, regulations for the priesthood, and the observance of feasts and holy days. The scattered legal passages in Numbers (such as Ch. 5–6, 18–19, and 28–29) tend to focus on similar themes.
• Deuteronomy, in which Moses delivers his farewell speech to Israel, recounting both the narrative of their journey from Egypt and the essence of the Law code that God has given them, seems to represent an attempt to turn Israel’s attention back to issues of justice and mercy, thus restoring some of the balance between personal holiness and public justice that was struck by the Ten Commandments themselves. (Indeed, Moses begins the legal instructions of Deuteronomy by reviewing the Ten Commandments in Chapter 5). While Deuteronomy does touch briefly on some of the same issues of purity that dominated Leviticus, it contains several important passages concerning justice and compassion (notably the programmatic statement of 16:18–20, the provisions for the periodic cancellation of debts and servitude in Ch. 15, and the laws concerning compassion for servants, aliens, widows, and orphans in 24:14–22). 

Once again, this division is somewhat artificial, but there is an inarguably strong contrast between the overall tenor of Leviticus and that of Deuteronomy, one that is echoed in the contemporary conservative/liberal divide in American politics and religion. I think it is worth reflecting on some of the possible narrative explanations for this apparent dichotomy. For example, Leviticus, with its focus on personal morality and sacrificial regulations which distinguishes it both from Deuteronomy and from Exodus 21–23, was delivered to the Israelites not long after their exodus from Egypt, where they had lived in the midst of a pagan culture for several generations, and immediately after they had constructed and worshipped a golden idol in the shape of a calf—a serious violation of their relationship with God and a profound distortion of proper corporate worship. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that God wanted to put a heavy emphasis on devotion to Him, purity of thought and action, and propriety in worship and sacrifice. Moses’ speech in Deuteronomy, in contrast, was given following a painful, 40-year lesson on the importance of honoring God, during which the rituals of sacrifice and purification had become ingrained parts of the community’s life. In their new context, on the threshhold of the Promised Land, the Israelites did not need a simple recapitulation of how to behave in their bedrooms and in the tabernacle, but rather fresh instructions for how to live together justly and compassionately in community. In the desert, God provided manna, quail, and water for everyone in equal measure, no one’s clothes or shoes wore out, the pillar of cloud provided shade and shelter by day, and the pillar of fire provided warmth by night. But in their new homeland, people would go without food, water, clothing, and shelter unless they faithfully exercised justice and mercy.

Thus, in light of the narrative, the differing emphases across this body of literature make a lot of sense. But the whole point is that the division is never complete. Leviticus, for all its focus on the minutiae of personal holiness, also contains the law concerning the Year of Jubilee (Ch. 25), the ultimate Old Testament provision for public justice. Deuteronomy, for all its emphasis on justice and compassion, also strongly condemns sexual immorality (Ch. 22) and the eating of unclean foods (Ch. 14). And, in the greatest (and most telling) of ironies, when Jesus was asked to name the Greatest Commandment in the entire Israelite legal corpus, He picked a verse about loving God wholeheartedly from the book about “public justice” (Deut. 6:5), and a verse about loving and caring for others from the book about “personal holiness” (Lev. 19:18). The implication is clear—while God’s people may need to be more forcefully reminded of one side of the coin or the other at different times in their journey with Him, holiness and justice, love of God and love of neighbor, are ultimately and essentially inseparable.

In my next post, I’ll examine what happened to Israel in the Promised Land as they slowly lost their grip on both holiness and justice.

Holiness and Justice, pt. 1

Sorry it’s been awhile since the last post. I think I was kind of holding myself to the lengthy standard I set with my first few posts and couldn’t seem to find enough free time to post anything as substantive as I wanted to. So I’ve decided to just divide my latest thought into several installments in the interest of getting something up. So you’ll have to stay tuned for a few days to see where this is all going.

I’ve been reflecting more on the dichotomy I’ve cited a few times between personal holiness and public justice, two important aspects of Christian practice which have a disturbing tendency to get severed from one another. In broad terms, religious and social conservatives tend to embrace the personal holiness side of things, while religious and social liberals tend to be more concerned with social justice. Rather than ranting about contemporary Western political and religious schisms, however, I thought it might be illuminating to examine this issue from a broader biblical and historical perspective to see how these two sides of the Christian life are supposed to be held together and how they have become so estranged from each other over the centuries.

So for starters, let’s look at the creation narrative in Genesis 1–2. Interestingly, it seems that the only instruction God gave Adam and Eve concerning personal holiness (or, if you like, their relationship with Him) was a negative one—do not eat the fruit of this one particular tree. There is nothing else in the creation accounts related to what we typically conceive of as “morality” or even what we conceive of as “worship.” Of course, the reason for this is clear enough—without the knowledge of good and evil that would come from disobeying God’s command concerning the tree, there was no distinction between “moral” and “immoral” behavior (at least not in a way that would have been comprehensible to Adam and Eve). In other words, God could not logically have said to them, “Do not do this, because it is evil and will corrupt your holiness before me” because the categories of good, evil, holiness, and sinfulness were simply not part of their consciousness before the Fall. Obedience to God’s single moral commandment concerning the tree had to be based instead only on the preexisting relationship of love and trust that they enjoyed with Him. This “relational obedience,” in turn, served as their appropriate act of worship and functioned as the only form of (what we would consider) “holiness” before God that was available to them at the time.

However, God also gave the first humans explicit instructions that governed their relationships with one another and their stewardship of the natural creation—things that would now tend to fall more under the “social justice” umbrella. Adam and Eve were called to ”become one flesh,” (a phrase which suggests not only physical intimacy, but also emotional union and loving care for one another) and to be fruitful in order that the earth might be populated. They were also given oversight of the plants, animals, and natural environment. Thus, Adam and Eve’s life prior to the Fall was marked by the existence of a web of caring, appropriate relationships that linked them to God, to one another, and to the entirety of the nonhuman creation. In such a situation, both holiness before God and just engagement with other people and with the rest of creation seemed assured.

The Fall, of course, damaged all of these relationships, making Adam and Eve aware of the difference between good and evil and granting them the ability to choose between them. (I realize that wording it in that way may sound heretical from a Reformed perspective, but I think that the biblical emphasis on making choices between good and evil, especially in passages like Deuteronomy 30:11–20 and Joshua 24:14–25, supports this wording). Not only was their relationship with God and their intimate access to fellowship with Him negatively affected by disobedience, guilt, shame, and fear, but their relationship with each other seems to have been damaged by blame and mistrust. In addition, they were forced to confront the new realities of physical pain, toil, and mortality, and to enter into conflict with a nonhuman creation (plants, animals, soil) that would now often work against them. 

Thus, the Fall clearly had profoundly adverse and far-reaching effects both for humanity’s exercise of holiness and obedience before a sovereign God, and for its compassionate care for others and for creation. While personal sin (anger, jealousy, pride, lust) certainly has its roots in the Fall, so do broader social and systemic evils (war, poverty, hunger, environmental degradation). So why, in our contemporary context, is there so often a lack of agreement among believers about how (or even whether) our concerns for these two sets of issues should be effectively combined? How did the two get separated to such a great extent? Stay tuned…

Worldview Questions

I’m reading a book right now called Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be by Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh. This was one of the earliest books (1995) to really tackle the implications of the postmodern transition for the Christian faith, and I’m not sure how I missed reading it for so long. It is informed by the thought of some of the contemporary theologians whose writings I have found most stimulating (Newbigin, Brueggemann, N.T. Wright), and it in turn was seminal in shaping the thinking of some of the people who went on to become important voices in the emerging church movement (notably Brian McLaren). So far, I have found this book to be much more helpful and thought-provoking than a lot of the stuff that has come out of the emerging church in the last decade or so, chiefly because it is a lot more academic and really digs into some critical philosophical and theological issues concerning modernity, postmodernity, and Christianity. 

One of the aspects of the book that has captured my imagination is what the authors label the four “worldview questions”:

1. Where are we?
2. Who are we?
3. What’s wrong?
4. What’s the solution?

They suggest that any group’s answers to those four questions will reveal the essential contours of their collective worldview. So, for example, they say that the modern world, with its focus on rational inividualism, science and technology, enlightened political systems, economic prosperity, and all-around human potential and progress, would have answered the four questions as follows:

1. Where are we? We are in a world of natural resources that can be known objectively by the scientific method and controlled by technological power.
2. Who are we? We are autonomous human beings, self-secure, self-formed, and self-conscious. We are the masters of our own destiny and the destiny of the world.
3. What’s wrong? Anything that that impedes our autonomy, inhibits our progress, and threatens our sense of world mastery.
4. What’s the solution? By scientifically grasping and technologically controlling and transforming the world, unimpeded by threats such as tradition, ignorance, or superstition, [threats which they would perceive as having been posed in the past by religion, among other things] we will devise the necessary remedies to any potential problems.

This is clearly a rather monolithic, highly powerful and efficient, yet frighteningly soulless worldview, and the effects of its predominance in Western society from roughly 1500 til at least the early decades of the 20th century are fairly obvious.

In contrast, the authors say that those with a postmodern worldview would typically answer the questions something like this:

1. Where are we? We are in a pluralistic world of our own construction.
2. Who are we? We are decentered, multiphrenic, nomadic selves, bouncing from one identity and set of commitments to another as we please. [The authors note that this answer implies a lack of enduring character, selective apathy, emotional disengagement from others, a renunciation of both the past and the future in order to live "one day at a time," difficulty achieving intimacy, and moral paralysis.]
3. What’s wrong? Historically, humanity has advanced large, totalizing stories and claims concerning the nature of reality [or "metanarratives"]. These include the story advanced by the Bible, for example, as well as the “story” of inevitable human progress through self-mastery and mastery over nature advanced by the proponents of modernism. All such metanarratives are ultimately oppressive and lead to violence and the marginalization of those who refuse to embrace its claims.
4. What’s the solution? We should abandon all metanarratives that claim to be absolutely true for everyone and encourage the emergence of a plurality of local and individual “truths” that are all to be considered equally valuable, but only finally valid for those who choose to embrace them.

While postmodernism clearly offers some important correctives to modernism (maybe I’ll do another post on that at some point), this is obviously a highly problematic worldview as well. 

In his excellent book The New Testament and the People of God, N. T. Wright applies Middleton and Walsh’s worldview questions to the Intertestamental Jewish community and comes up with the following answers (Wright inverts the order of the first two questions in his analysis):

1. Who are we? We are Israel, the chosen people of the Creator God.
2. Where are we? We are in the holy Land, focused on the Temple; but, paradoxically, we are still in exile. [As a result of the fact that they were under the rule of foreign powers—first Persian, then Greek, then Roman.]     
3. What’s wrong? We have the wrong rulers: pagans on the one hand, compromised Jews on the other, or, half-way between, Herod and his family. We are all involved in a less-than-ideal situation.
4. What is the solution? Our God must act again to give us the true sort of rule, that is, His own kingship exercised through properly appointed officials (a true priesthood, possibly a true king); and in the meantime Israel must be faithful to His covenant charter.

This presentation of the Jewish worldview just before the time of Christ certainly helps explain some of what goes on in the Gospels. If the Jews were looking for a reassuring restoration of the kingdom and priesthood of old, they would certainly not be very welcoming of the radical break with the past that Jesus’ ministry represented, and by this time their determination to remain faithful to God’s laws while they waited for His deliverance had begun to devolve into the sort of petty, legalistic pietism that we occasionally see displayed by the Pharisees.   

Wright then presents the early church’s worldview as follows:

1. Who are we? We are a new group, a new movement, and yet not new, because we claim to be the true people of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Creator of the world. We are the people for whom the Creator God was preparing the way through His dealings with Israel.
2. Where are we? We are living in the world that was made by the God we worship, the world that does not yet acknowledge this true and only God.
3. What is wrong? The powers of paganism still rule the world, and from time to time even find their way into the church. Persecutions arise from outside, heresies and schisms from within. These evils can sometimes be attributed to the supernatural agency of Satan. Even within the individual Christian there remain forces at work that need to be subdued, lusts which need to be put to death.
4. What is the solution? Israel’s hope has been realized; the true God has acted decisively to defeat the pagan gods, and to create a new people, through whom He is to rescue the world from evil. This He has done through the true King, Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, in particular through His death and resurrection. The process of implementing this victory, by means of the same God continuing to act through His own Spirit in His people, is not yet complete. One day the King will return to judge the world, and to set up a kingdom which is on a different level to the kingdoms of the present world order. When this happens those who have died as Christians will be raised to a new physical life. The present powers will be forced to acknowledge Jesus as Lord, and justice and peace will triumph at last.

This is clearly an extension of the Jewish worldview and, at the same time, a radical subversion, reinterpretation, and extension of it.

All of this led me to muse on the question of what we can learn about ourselves and our contemporary situation by posing these worldview questions of various groups. For example, going back to an earlier post, I wondered, how might the answers that the more conservative, individual salvation-oriented factions of the American church would give to these questions differ from those that the more liberal, social justice and public morality-oriented factions would offer? Here are my surmisings, beginning with the more conservative version:

1. Who are we? We are those who have been saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ and promised an eternal home with Him in heaven.
2. Where are we? We are living in a fallen world that is not our home, a world beset by sin and filled with pagan individuals and forces that would seek to lead us astray.
3. What’s wrong? We are trapped in decaying bodies in a decaying and cruel world, unable to be reunited with God for the time being. Meanwhile, a majority of the inhabitants of this planet have not accepted Christ as their Savior and thus are doomed to eternal torment.  
4. What is the solution? Jesus will soon come back to free our souls from our earthly, bodily prison and we will dwell with Him in joy eternally. Meanwhile, we are intent on saving as many individual souls as we can so that they too can go to heaven when they die and avoid hell.

Now the liberal version:

1. Who are we? We are those who have dedicated our lives to serving the God of the Bible, a God of justice and mercy, and His Son Jesus, the friend of the poor.
2. Where are we? We are living in God’s good world, the world that He created and loves, but a world that is marred by war, suffering, poverty, hunger, disease, and environmental degradation.
3. What is wrong? Those who wield power in this world have gained and kept that power by exploiting and doing violence against the poor, the weak, and the marginal. As a result, the world lacks justice, peace, and equity, all of which are chief concerns of God. Furthermore, most people in positions of power and influence (including many who claim to be followers of Christ) don’t seem to care, and are often complicit in perpetuating the problems.
4. What is the solution? Those of us who have accepted the call to become disciples of Jesus must serve as the vessels through which He can bring about the establishment of His kingdom as we work for peace, justice, and equity around the globe. Eventually, through our faithful efforts, His will may be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” 

Obviously these are caricatures to some extent, but I think that they are nevertheless fairly instructive. It seems painfully obvious to me from examining these two options that they are both woefully insufficient as summations of a holistic, biblical worldview. Though they both bear at least some similarity to the worldview that Wright ascribes to the early church, they also both deviate from it in significant ways. It is also obvious why proponents of each of these two worldviews have so much trouble seeing eye to eye regarding what it means to follow Christ. So what might a worldview that embraces what is true and faithful in each of these traditions (while screening out the parts that have deviated furthest from the claims of Scripture and the beliefs of the earliest Christians) look like? Would it be similar to what Wright suggests above, or something different? 

I think pondering how virtually any contemporary institution (government, corporation, ethnic group, socio-economic class, denomination, local church) might answer these four worldview questions would be an enormously fruitful and enlightening exercise. It seems to me that mission statements, vision statements, doctrinal creeds, political platforms, and distinctive corporate cultures all tend to reveal certain elements of a group’s worldview while potentially concealing others. I wonder if these worldview questions might allow us to probe deeper into the intentions, character, and moral compass of our contemporary institutions. I’d love to hear any thoughts on this topic.

interesting take on my (possible) future vocation

Many of you all know that my current plan is to begin pursuing my seminary education this fall (although there are still a lot of uncertainties and potential financial obstacles surrounding that decision), with the eventual goal of becoming a university or seminary professor. I have a real passion for teaching the Word and the essentials of the faith to others and, being the idealist that I am, I cherish the idea that perhaps I am helping to decisively impact people’s minds and hearts in a way that will strengthen their relationships with God and transform their life’s path in some meaningful way.

So I found the following quote from Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon’s Resident Aliens to be quite inspiring, one of those statements that immediately resonated deeply with my own feelings, even though I might not have thought to frame it in the same terms on my own:

“It is good to set aside some people to read and to write books in order to teach those who are called into the pastoral ministry. These people are reminders that seminary is not just a place where pastors are trained but also a place where we provide time for some to dedicate their lives to the intellectual love of God. Seminary professors . . . rightfully spend much of their lives reading books so that the Christian tradition may not be lost but be a continuing conversation between us and the dead. The dead are not dead insofar as we are bound together in the communion of saints, living and dead, and therefore our conversation cannot be limited to those who now live. As we said earlier, pastors are significant only because of what needs to happen in the church. Now we add that seminary professors . . . are significant only because of who pastors need to be. . . . Pastors fail if they have not evoked an exciting sense of adventure among their parishioners. Seminary professors have failed if we have not helped to empower pastors to evoke the sense of adventure in the laity.”

In my own tradition, I feel that there are far too few pastors who instill in their congregants this sense of adventure, of narrative progression, of being on a journey with God that stretches through history (binding us to the believers of the past and future as well as those around the globe in the present) and that subsumes every part of our daily lives. I long for that kind of holism and integrity in my own relationship with Christ (though I am far from it in many ways), I long to hear those ideals championed from pulpits across every Christian tradition, and I hope and pray that I will someday have the opportunity to gently but persistently shape minds in this direction as part of my service to God. 

Preaching as “Guerilla Theater”

In his book Ichabod Toward Home, Walter Brueggemann (borrowing language from Amos Wilder) speaks of the task of preaching the Word as “guerilla theater,” by which he means: (A) That in the midst of contemporary society, the proclamation of the truths of Scripture is essentially a subversive, countercultural, even revolutionary activity, since the claims and commands of the Bible are not easily reconcilable (if at all) with the claims of the dominant Western secular worldview, a worldview defined by rampant individualism, religious pluralism, consumerism, militarism, skepticism, and cynicism (that’s the “guerilla” part), and (B) That the task of the preacher in ministering the Word is in some sense to “enact,” to bring to life, the biblical alternative to the dominant secular worldview every time the community of faith gathers together, thus reminding the congregation of the particulars of the dramatic Scriptural narrative by which we are to order our lives (that’s the “theater” part).

As someone who spends a lot of time teaching the Word to young people, I think that this is a really cool and insightful way of thinking about what preachers and teachers are called to do. Obviously, many of the most pressing (and seemingly most insolvable) problems in the American church are a result of the facts that (A) the church has often not been subversive enough, but has rather accomodated secular Western ideals in a variety of ways while loudly protesting against the forces of secularization only when it came to a few select hot-button issues, and (B) far too many Christians (perhaps more noticeably in the evangelical and Pentecostal traditions) remain strangely ignorant of both the broad contours and the specific details of the biblical narrative, thus leaving them without a coherent ”script” by which to credibly and consistently live out their faith in the midst of a society that is not hospitable to it.

Of course, the effectiveness of “guerilla theater” preaching in mobilizing the church both to embrace its own story and to work to subvert the ideals of the dominant culture largely depends upon the willingness of preachers and teachers to fully embrace their vocations as “revolutionaries” and “dramatists” rather than remaining content to be sober custodians, moral cheerleaders, or CEOs. Sign me up.