Book Recommendation: The Trace of God by Joseph Hinman

I don't remember what year it was or exactly how old I was when it happened.  The kids were young: that much I remember, so I must have been in my mid-40s.  It was summer-- I remember that, too.   

I was standing in our tiny back yard behind the kitchen door, under a sky filled with stars. I think it was about 10 or 11 pm.  I was alone. For some reason more stars were showing than usual; maybe some of the street lights were out.  It was very quiet.
I looked up into the stars and thought of God. 

And then. . .  

Something indescribable fell away from my ordinary sense of things.  Perhaps it was the careful, reasoned categories I was accustomed to use to frame my thoughts.  I had a sensation of being lifted up and up, though I also knew I was still standing solidly in the night-sweet grass.  Over the horizon the moon swept up; it was a gibbous moon, about two-thirds full.  And I saw. 

Saw that all things were part of a serene and purposeful whole.  Saw that I myself was a valued and necessary part of that whole, as were the trees, the grass, the stars, the moon, and the minuscule flying creatures that brushed my face.  Felt a tender, loving purpose guiding it all towards some unknowable but beautiful end.    

"All is well. All is one.  I am here."

It wasn't a message spoken in words, but an indescribable knowing that was frankly impossible to doubt or question.  I didn't question it.  I breathed quickly, flutteringly-- completely astonished yet completely at ease, completely accepted and accepting. 

Slowly, slowly the feeling faded, drained away.  I was left there in the dark grass again, myself again, and I turned and drifted back through the door and into bed and sleep.

But I have never forgotten, and I have never been the same.  The memory of joy-- joy present in part now and expectant of fullness in time to come, has ever since held in peace the foundations of my soul. 

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"There is no proof of your god."

Several years before the experience I have shared above, I had a crisis of faith.  In my early 40s I encountered on the Internet people who knew a lot more about science than I did and who insisted that if something was real, science would support that it was real.  I found I didn't know how to answer them.  "There is no proof," the atheists said, and I knew they were right.  Anything that seemed to me to be a good enough reason to believe, was never going to be enough for scientific rationalism.  So what if they were right, and I was wrong?  Supposing I was only deluding myself about the existence of God?

I remember my frustration, how I cried to the heavens, "God, couldn't you just give one incontrovertible proof? Something so we could be sure?"

But there was no answer.  God, it seemed-- if he existed-- felt no need to answer such a prayer.  Or maybe he couldn't, because he wasn't really there. . .

For months I struggled, suspended between faith and doubt.  And then an online friend directed me to the Doxa website.  "Doxa" means "glory," and the website author, scholar/theologian Joe Hinman (who calls himself "Metacrock" online) showed me that the real problem was that I was letting the skeptics determine the rules of engagement, playing the rationalists' game on their own playing field.

They said my God was a big imaginary friend in the sky.  They made it sound so silly. But Doxa helped me see that I didn't-- and needn't-- believe in that little straw-man deity anyway.

The scientific rationalists said I needed to question all my assumptions.  But I began to understand that they were leaving most of their own assumptions unquestioned.  Could their assertion that everything that is real can be scientifically verified, itself be scientifically verified?

If I must doubt my faith, couldn't I also doubt their skepticism?

"Why should  I mistrust my own experiences of God's presence?" Joe Hinman taught me to ask. After all, we don't mistrust other things we experience.  We don't doubt that the chair we're sitting in will hold us, unless we have some good reason to think something has gone wrong with our senses.  We don't have to accept the self-proclaimed expert in science as an expert in metaphysics.  Nor need we accept the standard of "absolute proof" in terms of scientific categories that may be inadequate for the phenomenon in the first place.  We can have good, reasonable reasons -- what Hinman calls a "rational warrant" to believe.  His newer website, The Religious A Priori, explores belief and rational warrant from a number of different angles.

And now Joe Hinman has encapsulated some of his best thinking into a new book: The Trace of God: A Rational Warrant for Belief.

The Trace of God is a scholarly work, but written in a style that a layperson can follow.  Its main point is that experiences like the one I describe above (called "religious experiences" or "peak experiences"*) do constitute good evidence, even from a scientific point of view, of the existence of God.

God can't be absolutely proven, Hinman says, because God is "not just another thing in the universe." God is the source and foundation of everything material and empirical; God is not material himself, nor is the sense of God conveyed in human empirical senses such as sight or hearing.  Instead we must look for the "co-determinate":

The co-determinate is like. . . a fingerprint.  The trace is the sign that always accompanies the thing itself.  In other words, you can't see the invisible man, but you can see his footprints, and wherever he is in the snow his footprints will always follow.  We cannot directly observe God, but we can find the "trace," the co-determinate, the effect of God in the world. [p. 67]

Religious experience, and especially "peak" experience, is that footprint in the snow.  Hinman spends several chapters detailing the methodology and findings of the many careful scientific/sociological studies that have measured and quantified religious experience.  He details the real, empirical effects of these studies on those who experience them, in terms of their "ultimate, transformative effects":

The effects of these experiences are dramatic, positive and long-term. . . There is data to suggest that religious experience has enabled addicts to get off of heroin, alcoholics to stop drinking and even helps people quit smoking. . . [there is] a clear feeling of meaning in life. Many speak of losing their fear of death. [p. 85]

Hinman goes on (pp. 88-89) to highlight the findings of several studies showing that those who have peak experiences:

• Are less likely to value material possessions and money or status
• Give greater value to work for social change, solving social problems, helping the needy
• Are reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident
• Are less authoritarian and dogmatic**
• Exhibit integration, allocentrism
• Exhibit psychological maturity
• Show self-acceptance, self-worth
• Exhibit autonomy, authenticity
• Experience increased love and compassion

Hinman then spends several more chapters exploring the views of dissenting thinkers and alternate explanations for these transformative effects, and explaining why authentic experience of the divine is the explanation that most reasonably fits the phenomena.  For instance, the fact that children often have spontaneous peak experiences precludes the idea that this is a specialized state of mind caused by the self-discipline of meditation.

Finally, at the end of the book he addresses how his understanding of religious and peak experience (which can and does occur in all religious traditions and even happens at times to the non-religious) fits into a Christian viewpoint.  Hinman is himself an orthodox Christian, though he does not identify with the evangelical tradition.

I found the book enlightening and uplifting, and was also intrigued to find that the incident in my backyard under the stars was a quintessential "peak experience."  It certainly has had transformative effects on my life! I am less fearful of the future, more anchored and confident, and better able to navigate the trials of life (not that I never doubt or have disappointments in my faith, but that my memories of that time are something I can always fall back on).

As Hinman puts it:

[R]eligious experience enables us to know who we are and where we are going, fills us with purpose and gives us the sense that our lives are on track. . . It also enables us to face life's trammels and bitter experiences.  The upshot of the argument is that RE [religious experience] works for navigation in the world. . . it helps us live and make choices and keep going in a complex world. . . . [ p. 100]

I was honored to be one of those who got to preview this exciting book (which is now available for purchase).  I hope many of my readers will enjoy it too.


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*Note: Hinman uses the term "religious experience" to describe a variety of experiences on a sliding scale from the frequently felt sensation of a presence in prayer or worship, to the more rare, apex-type experience (what happened to me in my backyard is an example). This latter type he calls "peak experience" after Abraham Maslow's "M-scale" studies; see for instance p. 86.

**Note: The Trace of God is not concerned with cultic, authoritarian or spiritually abusive forms of religious involvement; indeed, my only real criticism of the book is that I think Hinman should have spent a little more time on the existence of this type of religious practice and its nearly opposite, negative effects, in order to differentiate this from normative religious experience.  However, he does briefly mention (as I myself have experienced) that often it is genuine religious experience that helps people endure and move out of authoritarian religious control.

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*** UPDATE:  Other bloggers' reviews of this terrific book are also now online.

N. K. Johel at Bollywood Storm

Jason Pratt at Evangelical Universalist

Male Headship and the Problem of Power

Several people have asked me privately to follow up on the radio conversation I participated in on Up For Debate last weekend on the topic "Does God Expect Men to be Spiritual Leaders?"  They asked me to focus specifically on what was said by the caller-in named "Linda."

The comments on my blog post about the radio show also were focused on that portion of the broadcast-- so I will say now what I wish I had been prepared and had time to say then.

Linda said she had been in a complementarian marriage to the same man for 50 years, but she had found that male headship "does not work without the husband loving the wife as Christ loves the church."  I got the impression that Linda believed in male headship, but in her own marriage it was not working-- because, she said, "he needs to lay down his ego, which my husband will not... He doesn't listen to anything I say, and we've been through great sorrow, because he doesn't value my opinions-- on anything.  So if he isn't loving her, that way, it doesn't work!"  I could hear the tears in this poor woman's voice, and I felt such deep sympathy as I tried to respond.

What I was seeing, and what I tried to address off the cuff in that broadcast, was the terrible position a wife was in when neither her husband nor she herself perceived that she had any power in the relationship.  I said that this was also not good for the man-- to have a wife who could not confront him because he didn't really feel, deep down in his heart, that he needed to listen to her.  In short, in a marriage where the man is considered the God-appointed leader of the wife, he is the only person with any real power in the marriage.  And in that case, whether the marriage is good or bad is entirely dependent on the character of the man.

This, as far as I can see, is the real weakness of the male headship teaching.

Jesus spoke several times during His ministry on the issue of power.  He said in Acts 1:8, just before His ascension into heaven, "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."  He also said in Luke 10:19, "Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you."  

Jesus was happy to give His followers "power-to."  Power to be His witnesses.  Power to tread on the power of the enemy.  But the one thing He never gave anyone was what I would call "power-over."  Yes, He said the disciples had "power over" the power of the devil.  But He never endorsed any of His followers having "power over" other human beings.  He said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. Not so with you.  But instead, whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant."  Matthew 20-25-26.

In Paul's advice to Christian marriages in the first-century Roman world-- a culture where only the husbands had any real power-- Paul told husbands in Ephesians 5:25-33 to treat their wives as their own bodies-- to imitate Christ in laying down their power and emptying themselves, in order to raise their wives up out of their lowly, powerless position, to stand with them in honor and glory.  That was what the head-to-body relationship meant for Christ and the church.  That was what he wanted it to mean for husbands and wives.  In effect, he was telling husbands to stop using power-over and to grant their wives power-to.  

The modern Christian male-headship teaching, on the other hand, gives power-over to husbands-- and then simply asks them to use it wisely.  To be kind and loving masters-- who also serve.

But what if the husband is not wise?  What if he likes power too much? What if he hears "be head, be master, be in charge" much louder than he hears "be kind, be loving, and serve"?

Then he should repent, the male-headship doctrine says.  Or he just shouldn't get married, the male-headship doctrine says.  And it counsels women not to marry such a man.  But then out of the other side of its mouth, it tells her to look for a man who can lead her spiritually.

So that is what the woman is going to look for-- someone who seems spiritual, who seems to have leadership potential.  How is she going to be able to tell, before his power over her is granted in marriage, whether he will be able to use it wisely or with character?  He has not yet been tried.  If it's their first marriage, he is almost certainly a young man, and she is a young woman.  How is either of them to know how well he can handle this power that is being handed to him for no other reason than that he is male?

When Paul wrote, the imbalance of power in marriage was an established fact of life that could not simply be changed-- any more than slavery could be changed, or the godlike status of the Emperor could be changed.  It was up to later civilizations to figure out ways to change these structures which were built on inequity and systemic injustice.

After all, how well a monarchy works is entirely dependent on how good the king or queen is.  And when the king's authority to rule is based only on his birth-- whose son he is-- then the kingdom will do well if the son who is born happens to have intelligence, moral strength, leadership ability and basic humility.  If he doesn't, the kingdom-- and the people-- suffer.

Unless they find a way to make the royal succession dependent on the heir having these skills. Or unless they limit the power of the monarch and give real leadership authority to those who have proven themselves.  Or unless they do away with monarchy altogether.

Our modern Western systems, in fact, are largely based on a balance of power.  We divide the rule of a country between different branches of government, each checking the power of the others.  We give our leaders power-to -- to stop each other from abusing power-over.

But Christian male-headship doctrine abandons this wisdom, to return to a system where one person has power over the other based only on his birth-- what sex he is.  So if the person given headship in the marriage happens to have intelligence, moral strength, leadership ability and basic humility, the marriage will do well.  If he doesn't, the marriage-- and the wife-- suffers.

Unless they find a way to limit his power by sharing it with her.  But then they are likely to be told that he is "wimping out" or "not stepping up," and that she is being unsubmissive and ungodly.

Is this really what God wants?  Hasn't He blessed us to be able to change our systems of government so that power is checked and balanced?  Why then, would He refuse us any such ability to change our systems of marriage?

Sarah Bessey, in her beautiful book Jesus Feminist, thinks otherwise:

In Christ, and because of Christ, we are invited to participate in the Kingdom of God through redemptive movement-- for both men and women-- towards equality and freedom. We can choose to move with God, further into justice and wholeness, or we can choose to prop up the world's dead systems, baptizing injustice and power in sacred language. (p. 14)

Male-headship marriage is a relic of a dead world system of power-over.  It's time to stop treating it like a mandate from above.  It's time we let it go, and started giving all God's people, male and female alike, power-to be free.

Power to a wife to be able to say, "Enough."  Power to tell her husband, "You're being selfish, and it's not my job to cater to that" -- and have enough clout of her own that he will respect her enough to listen. Power to stand up and say, "What you want of me violates my personhood, and the image of God in me is sacred.  Your whims are not."  Power to walk away from emotional, economic, spiritual or physical abuse.

Because let's face it.  Unless we empower spouses to say "no" to abuse in all its forms, we're enabling abuse.  Yes, men can be abused in marriage too.  But churches aren't telling men they have to submit. And churches aren't telling women they have God-given power and authority over their spouses, so please just be nice when you use it.

I didn't know what I could or should say to Linda on the radio last week, because I didn't know enough about her circumstances or what she wants to happen.  Telling her she should try to gain power in the relationship could be dangerous if she has no support systems, no expectation of backing by her church, nowhere to go if she should try to flee.  After 50 years of the status-quo in her male-headship marriage, her situation is too complicated to address in a sound-bite.  But I will say that when the moderator and Mr. Arnold on the show spoke to the husband as if he were listening (if he had been, would Linda have felt free to say any of that?) and told him he needed to repent and stop being selfish, that probably didn't do any real good.

So what I will say is this.  Anyone who knows Linda personally and could offer her support and a place of safety if she needs it, please do.  Readers who have found a way out of suffering like Linda's-- whether it's through a repentant spouse or through escape-- please share whatever you can that might help people in her situation.

And church leaders who are reading this-- you can bet there's at least one "Linda" in your congregation.  What can you do to stop power-over used against her?  How can you give her power-to become all God created her to be?  If you're going to insist that the man is the spiritual leader of the wife, at least come up with some way to give her power to check and balance his.  After all, the church has never had to submit to selfishness in Christ, or neglect, or cruelty, or refusal to listen. Shouldn't a wife's submission end here too?

Whether her husband likes it or not.  Because giving her only the power that he allows her to have, isn't enough.  That's really still just his power.

And it's not good enough, either, to say, "We, the church, will exercise our power to stop the husband from abusing his power in the marriage." Because unless there is power-to resist him in the wife's hands, he's still got no reason to respect her. The church needs to back her up, but it shouldn't take over.  That's bad for both the marriage and the church.

Unrestricted power is safe in Christ's hands.  But it's not safe in our human hands.  Our own basic Christian doctrines tell us so.

So let's stop giving power like that to mortal men, and then being surprised when they misuse it.

I'm Going to Be on the Radio!

UPDATE: Well, I did it!  And wow, it looks like the recorded show is already available for listening! Currently it is on the This Week's Program tab at Up for Debate. I'm sure that by next week it will be at the Past Programs link as I mentioned below. If you listen to it, I'd love to hear what you think!

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I was recently contacted by a major Christian radio broadcaster called Moody Bible Radio (a branch of Moody Bible Institute). They have a radio show called Up For Debate, which airs every Saturday morning, and they want me to be a featured speaker on one side of the topic, "Does God Expect Men to Be Leaders in Their Homes?" Of all the people who could cover the egalitarian side, they chose me! The other side is being taken by a guy named Carlton Arnold, who has a ministry of mentoring men and has written several books on how to apply the Bible to one's personal life, including God and Men: No Holds Barred.

The format is that we each get a short bio and then a presentation of our major talking points. Then we engage with each other, and then there's a call-in question and answer period. It's an hour-long show that begins at 8:00 am Chicago time. It's on live tomorrow-- the morning of May 17th. Because I'm on Pacific time, I have to be on the air at 6:00 am.!

For those who don't get a Moody Radio Station in your area, a recording will be available to listen to online at this link a week or two after the show.  There will be no regular blog post this Saturday morning, but I hope those of you who can, will tune in instead!

I'm very honored and proud to be chosen for this, and I hope those of my readers who pray will keep me in their prayers.  

America is Not the New Israel

I'm reading a book for my book club this month that I wouldn't have chosen myself.  It's called The Harbinger by Jonathan Cahn, and it uses a Dan Brown-style fiction approach to communicate the author's idea that certain events in American history are foretold in ancient Bible prophecy.  I'm not going to give an in-depth critique of the book at this time (partly because I haven't finished it!), but I do want to talk about its main premise, because it's a viewpoint that I've heard many times and which I think is doing more harm than good to Christianity in America.

Here it is in a nutshell, quoted directly from the book:

Israel was unique among the nations in that it was conceived and dedicated at its foundation for the purposes of God. . . But there was one other-- a civilization also conceived and dedicated to the will of God from its conception. . . America. . . Long before the Founding Fathers[,] those who laid America's foundations saw it as a new Israel, an Israel of the New World.  And as with ancient Israel, they saw it as in covenant with God. . .  

Not that [America] was ever without fault or sin, but it would aspire to fulfill its calling. . . To be a vessel of redemption, an instrument of God's purposes, a light to the world. . . No nation in the modern world has ever been given so much. None has been so blessed. . .  

[But] America began ruling God out of its life, turning, step by step, against His ways. . . In the middle of the twentieth century America began officially removing God from its national life.  It abolished prayer and Scripture in the public schools. . . removing the Ten Commandments from public view, banning it from its public squares, and taking it down, by government decree, from its walls. . . God was progressively driven out of the nation's public life. . . The standards and values it had long upheld were now abandoned. . . [what we call "tolerance" is] a tolerance that mocked, marginalized and condemned those who remained faithful to the values now being discarded.

The idea that America is the new Israel, the new chosen, covenant nation for God, does indeed go back to the Puritans and Separatists who came to the New World in the 1600s.  It has been part of our national mentality since its inception, and it is one of the main forces behind Christian engagement in the "culture wars" that seek to uphold America's symbolic civil religion as if this outward and cultural religious consciousness were the same as the actual faith that Jesus taught.  The loss of the hegemony of America's civil religion is thus held to be tantamount to the nation's "turning away from God."

But as far as I can see, the whole of the New Testament is against any idea of a new nation taking on the position or status of Israel; indeed, the New Covenant precludes any such notion.  America cannot be the new Israel, nor can it enter into a covenant with God as a nation in the way Israel did, because the New Covenant is about the kingdom of God, not about any nation on earth.

As 1 Peter 2:9-10 says:

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (Emphasis added)

To come to God through faith in Christ is to become part of a new, holy nation. The New Covenant is the covenant in Christ's blood (Mark 14:24) which makes us part of this spiritual nation; it simply does not envision covenants with earthly nations.  Ephesians 2:11-21 speaks of how all who are in Christ are part of one "new humanity" and "fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household."  The covenant God has made through Christ is sufficient; additional covenants with earthly nations are not envisioned.  Everything taught in the New Testament about God's covenant in Christ denies the concept of God making a new, Israel-type covenant with any earthly nation, America included. 

And of course, there's also the problem that despite what the Pilgrims hoped for their colony, the idea of America as dedicated to God from its inception is simply not true.  The first American settlement, Jamestown, was a secular colony established for profit and for the expansion of England's power.  The Dutch settlements in what would become northern New England tended towards religious pluralism and tolerance, and since the Dutch were eventually assimilated into the English colonial framework, their ideas became interwoven with the emerging nation's self-understanding:

By their actions, the Founding Fathers made clear that their primary concern was religious freedom, not the advancement of a state religion. Individuals, not the government, would define religious faith and practice in the United States. Thus the Founders ensured that in no official sense would America be a Christian Republic. Ten years after the Constitutional Convention ended its work, the country assured the world that the United States was a secular state, and that its negotiations would adhere to the rule of law, not the dictates of the Christian faith. The assurances were contained in the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797 and were intended to allay the fears of the Muslim state by insisting that religion would not govern how the treaty was interpreted and enforced.John Adams and the Senate made clear that the pact was between two sovereign states, not between two religious powers. (Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion, summarized by Princeton University Press.  Emphasis added.)

The idea that America was founded as a Christian nation and is viewed by God as the new Israel leads to a number of practical problems.

1.  It distracts us from seeking first the kingdom of God.

Jesus said, "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness (Matt. 6:33)."  When we focus on how America is supposedly falling away from its great destiny as God's chosen nation-- when we spend our energy on trying to restore the hegemony of American civil religion-- we can't pay much attention to building oneness as Christians, centered around love and service and the kingdom of God. And yet Jesus never prayed, "That they may all maintain Your Ten Commandments in public places and uphold traditional values throughout the land."  He prayed, "That they all may be one, so that the world may believe that You have sent Me (John 17:21)."

2.  It leads to spiritual pride.

Romans 12:3 says, "Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you."  To think of America as a chosen, covenant nation leads to thinking of ourselves as American Christians (intentionally or not) as somehow more chosen and in a better covenant relationship with God than other Christians.  And when the American civil religion begins to lose its former powerful monopolization of the public square, we begin to think of ourselves as virtuous victims of evil religious persecution-- whether that image is truly accurate or not.

3.  It focuses our attention on minor issues and passes over our nation's greatest sins.

This is the crux of the matter, I think.  When we get distracted by whether Christian "traditional values" have supremacy in the land, and when we decide that making room in the public square for other faiths means America has "abandoned God," we are actually majoring on the minors.  To Israel God once said that far more important than their sacrificial system was "To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8)."  But throughout its history, these things are exactly what America has failed to do, over and over again.  From the treaty-breaking appropriation of Native American lands and the genocide of Native peoples, to the enslaving of African captives and the disenfranchisement of their descendants, to the internment of Japanese Americans, to the strong-arming of American interests over weaker countries of the world, America has continually shown that it is not truly following Christ and His law of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

In fact, the "chosen nation" mentality can act as a justification for this very behavior. As Betty Wood said in The Origins of American Slavery,

In New England, Puritan settlers used slavery to reinforce their image of themselves as religious refugees. Those that could not enter into the covenant and be saved were subject to servitude as approved by Scripture.

And according to this Excerpt from "Joshua and the Promised Land" by Roy H. May, Jr. (on the Joshua Website of the United Methodist Church, Global Ministries):

The sense of divine election and the identification of the Americas with ancient Canaan were used to justify expelling America's Indigenous Peoples from their land. The colonists saw themselves as confronting "satanic forces" in the Native Americans. They were Canaanites to be destroyed or thrown out. . .

Land rights of Native Americans were never taken seriously. Rather, they were seen as obstacles to the colonists' need for land. The Puritans did not respect the farms of Native Americans. They sought "legal" ways to get their land. If a Native American broke one of the rigid Puritan religious laws, the fine was paid by giving up land. In this manner, some Puritans were able to amass large landholdings through the Massachusetts courts. John Winthrop, for example [the same man who preached that the colony was to be God's "city on hill"!], obtained some 1,260 acres along the Concord River.

If we truly face ourselves, we have to admit that these are America's besetting sins from the time of its inception, and that we ourselves often still participate in systems that harm whole groups of people while even blaming them for what happens to them.  Whether or not children are praying a government-sponsored prayer in school, or whether a copy of the Ten Commandments hangs in our public buildings-- these are really beside the point, aren't they?

To act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God.  To trust, believe in and follow Jesus, to love as He loved, to serve as He served.  This is what we are meant to be doing.

Not to be struggling and striving to keep America from "falling away" from something it never was in the first place.

America is not the new Israel.  No nation is, or should be.  This would be a good time to let go of the myth.

No Post This Week: Working on a Project

This week I'm assisting a colleague with a book project; the book will be featured on this blog later this month.  For now, in order to help meet a hard publication deadline, I've been unable to write anything of my own.

Here are some pictures from my garden earlier this spring, for your enjoyment in the meantime.  (My garden's a mess now, but I was sure proud of it two weeks ago!)

See you next week!

"Only Believe" - Jesus, the Little Girl and the Woman with the Issue of Blood

This double story appears in three of the four gospels.  Matthew's version (Matt. 9:18-26) is an abbreviated version.  Luke's version (Luke 8:40-56) and Mark's (Mark 5:21-43) are similar, but I will print Mark's here as it shows the most detail:

When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. Then one of the synagogue leaders, named Jairus, came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. He pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” So Jesus went with him.
A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
While Jesus was still speaking, some people came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. “Your daughter is dead,” they said. “Why bother the teacher anymore?”
Overhearing what they said, Jesus told him, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.”
He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James. When they came to the home of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said to them,“Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him.
After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”). Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Two females, one the privileged daughter of a prominent synagogue leader, the other an impoverished and ill woman who had spent all her money on doctors and whose impurity made her an outcast among her people.  The privileged girl takes no active part in the story; she is ill, and later she dies. When Jesus touches and speaks to her, she rises and is given back to her parents.  In keeping with the propriety of the day, the man to whom the girl belongs-- in this case, her father-- acts for her in public places.  Thus it is not just the girl who is juxtaposed to the hemorrhaging woman, but the girl's respected and influential father.

The woman, however, has no man to act for her.  She has been ritually unclean for so long that it is likely her husband divorced her long ago (see Lev. 18:19).  Where Jairus is at the center of the religious community, this woman has long been outcast from it. Jairus boldly and publicly calls on Jesus for aid on his daughter's behalf.  The woman must take action for herself, but she dares not do it openly. As I have shown earlier in this "Jesus and Women" series, respectable women did not cry out after rabbis on public streets.  Furthermore, unclean women were not supposed to push through crowds of people, as this article on Jewish Laws on Women's Purity in Jesus' Day explains:

According to the Bible, a woman is impure for seven days from the beginning of her menstrual flow (Lev. 12:2; 15:19). Anyone who touches a menstruous woman becomes unclean until evening (Lev. 15:19). Whoever touches her bed or anything she sits on during the week is unclean until evening and must wash his clothes and bathe with water (vss. 20-23). . .

Josephus states that women during the menstrual period were not permitted in any of the courts of the Temple (Against Apion 2:103-104; War 5:227). The social separation of women during their menses is further emphasized in the Talmud.

WomenintheBible.Net provides more detail:

Strictly speaking, she should not have been among other people. According to the laws of ritual purity, she should have been at home during her menstrual period, living quietly (see Leviticus 15:19-31). These laws worked very well for healthy women who had a menstrual period of five – seven days. It was a time out for them, when they were relieved of their normal duties and could rest.

But the woman in this story was not healthy. Her menstrual flow had lasted twelve years, so the purity laws had become an impossible burden for her. She could not go out, she could not touch members of her family, she could not enjoy a normal life, and she was constantly debilitated.

Jairus' daughter has been alive for roughly the same amount of time as the woman has been suffering: twelve years.  Twelve is a number representing completeness in the Bible; it is when a child comes of age, and here it brings a crisis and a turning point for both the young girl and the older woman. Though the two do not meet, their lives are intertwined by these events and by the way their narratives are told as an intercalcation.

This Biblewise article explains "intercalcation" as "a literary technique used by the gospel writers to enhance both stories, providing larger insights and lessons. The 'story within a story' is called an intercalation or a 'sandwiched' story."  The article's detailed comparisons are worth noting:

It becomes clear when they are told together that they belong together. There are too many verbal links to suggest otherwise. The daughter was twelve years old and on the brink of her womanhood. The woman had been hemorrhaging for twelve years and had become unclean and cast off because of her womanhood. The disparity in status and stature of the main characters cannot be overlooked. They are exact opposites. One was important and influential, a ruler in the synagogue; the other was an outcast with no standing in the community. Jairus was named; the woman was not. He had a family, a place in society; the woman had “lost all that she had.” (She’s probably homeless.) But there are some similarities, too. They both humbled themselves by falling at Jesus’ feet. They both had a great need. Jairus asked that Jesus come and lay his hands on his daughter; the woman wanted but to touch his clothes. They both believed that Jesus was the one to help them, but they came from opposite ends of the social spectrum. . . . 

Mark's version is significant not least because it gives us a very unusual glimpse into the inner life of this woman.  She thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed" -- and then she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.  In every way the reader is encouraged to see this woman, this silent social outcast, as a feeling, thinking human being.  Desperate for healing but mindful of the social mores, she intends to slip in and out of Jesus' life unnoticed by anyone.  In the process she becomes the only person who obtains healing outside of Christ's voluntary will.  The agency in her story is not His, but hers.

But when He feels power go out of Him, Jesus is determined to see and hear the invisible, voiceless recipient.  At this point the woman seems to become afraid that she has been too bold, but she is also brave.  She doesn't slip away in the crowd, but comes to Him and confesses.  "Daughter," He tells her (did she find it odd to be called so by a man who was at least her own age, if not younger than she?) "your faith has healed you."  The respect He gives her is as plain as His compassion.

During this exchange, the powerful and influential synagogue leader has had to stand and wait.  And while he waits, time runs out for his little girl.  He must have felt a kind of despairing impatience, waiting for Jesus to be finished with this interruption, but the texts do not record him as protesting.  If he thought his problem was more important than that of this lowly woman (who, though suffering, was not at the brink of death as his child was!) he doesn't say so.  I sincerely think I could not have been so patient in his place.

And it seems he's going to lose out because of it.  A messenger approaches to say it's too late.  His daughter has already died.

Jesus now allows Jairus' problem to interrupt his final interchange with the healed woman.  He is still speaking to her when the messenger comes, but He stops to hear what the messenger will say.  Then, with the same compassion He showed the woman, He tells the bereaved father not to be afraid, but only to believe.  And then He raises his daughter from the dead.

The Biblewise article interprets it like this:

In putting the stories together, Mark shows that there is no limit to the good that God can do. One is not healed at the expense of another. Those choices do not have to be made -- either/or, one wins/the other loses. Jesus demonstrated that God is present and caring for everyone – rich or poor. One is not more important than the other.

Most of us tend to err on one side or the other-- we give more weight to the concerns of the privileged and powerful, or we tend to despise them for their privilege while we focus on the marginalized.  But a sick child is a sick child, a bereaved father is a bereaved father, and a suffering woman is a suffering woman-- alike in their humanity no matter who they are. Jesus saw and cared about all three.

Now that she has died, Jairus' daughter is also unclean, and anyone who touched her would become unclean (Numbers 19:11), just as anyone who touched the hemorrhaging woman would become unclean.  Paula Fredricksen's article on Boston University's religion page shows that in general, Jesus as a practicing Jew would have followed the purity laws, and that the purity laws were about ritual cleanness for the worship of God; they were different from the moral laws about sin.  Being or becoming ritually unclean was not about sin, and of course people naturally incurred ritual uncleanness (through marital sex, childbirth, funerals and the like) in the course of their lives.  But uncleanness was something you'd generally incur through contact with family members and close friends; you didn't want to have to go to the time and trouble of undergoing a cleansing ritual for a stranger.

Jesus, however, touched unclean strangers frequently, in order to heal them.  And as David deSilva points out in his book Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity (pp. 284-285), something astonishing happened when Jesus touched an unclean person: rather than their uncleanness being transferred to Him, the person was healed by Him, thus becoming free of the source of the uncleanness:

The leper is perpetually unclean, but Jesus nevertheless touches him and makes him clean. . . The Gospels thus present Jesus encountering a stream of ritually impure and potentially polluting people, but in the encounter their contagion does not defile Jesus; rather his holiness purges their pollution, renders them clean and integrates them again into the mainstream of Jewish society where they can reclaim their birthright, as it were, among the people of God. 

The hemorrhaging woman and the dead daughter of Jairus thus both encounter Christ from the same place, regardless of the disparity in their social positions.  Both are unclean and thus outside of society.  Jesus' touching the girl and being touched by the woman restores both to the community. The purity laws, Jesus seems to be implying, should not be used as a justification for creating outcasts.

David deSilva elaborates:

Jesus' healings of the diseased and encounters with 'sinners' are immersed in issues of purity rules and pollution taboos in which we see Jesus consistently showing a willingness to cross the lines in order to bring the unclean ones back to a state of cleanness and integration into the community. . . [W]hen Pharisees, who seek to preserve purity through defensive strategies (abstaining from contact with the unclean or potentially unclean), challenge his eating with sinners and thus inviting pollution, he quotes Hosea 6:6, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice". . . The holiness God seeks, according to Jesus' understanding, entails reaching out in love and compassion. . . .

Mercy trumps sacrifice because (as I mentioned a few posts ago) people are more important than things.  The Christian faith as Jesus taught it was about inclusion not exclusion, not about keeping "pure" through ostracizing others, but about reaching out to others in love.  As Fred Clark at Slacktivist pointed out this week, if the end result was that we as Gentiles could be included in the people of God, who are we Gentiles to turn around and exclude one another? 

Jesus showed us the way through this story of a sick child, a desperate father and an I've-got-nothing-left-to-lose woman.  He didn't treat people as better-than or less-than.  He treated them all as people.  He didn't do us-vs.-them.  He only did "us."  And no one escaped His notice-- not even a woman who tried her best to do so. 

Christianity should be about going and doing likewise. 

Jesus in the Gardens: Undoing What Adam Did

It's Easter week, and I'm thinking about gardens.

My own garden is full of tulips and daffodils that are starting to fade now, but my cherry tree is still in bloom and dropping pink petals on the grass.  The grass is bursting out of itself, growing too fast, faster than a mower can keep up with.  And the birds are singing as they wing over my plantings. Gardens are beautiful in the spring.

Jesus' death and resurrection was in the spring-- right around the time of Passover.  Two gardens feature heavily in that story.  There was a garden at Gethsemane, where He prayed and cried on the night He was arrested.  And there was a garden where His body lay entombed.

When Adam and Eve first sinned, it was in a garden.  And they were driven out of the garden by an angel with a flaming sword.  In the garden stories of Gethsemane and the tomb, angels appear again.

Gardens. Temptation. Angels. Death.

Turning points.

I think that when we see Jesus in gardens, in narratives that repeat so many of the motifs of Eden, it's good to pay special attention.  Jesus, after all, is called "the second Adam" (1 Cor. 15:45).

Matthew and Mark tell the story of the "place called Gethsemane" (Matt. 26:36, Mark 14:32), but it is John who informs us that the place where Jesus withdrew after the Last Supper was in fact a garden (John 18:1).  The original readers, of course, would have recognized the name of this garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives (which is how Luke describes it in Chapter 22) without having to be told. But look what Jesus does in this garden:

Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Matt. 26:39)

The passage says He prayed this way three times.  Three is an interesting number, because that is the number of times Jesus asked Peter to reverse his denial of Him (John 21:15-17).  It is the number of times Jesus resisted the temptations of the devil in the wilderness (Luke 4:1-13).  Adam and Eve were tempted just once, and they fell.  Jesus, as the second Adam, resisted three times.  Somehow, three is the number of reversal, of undoing what has been done.

Adam in the garden at Eden, all of his life ahead of him in a place of joy and peace, chose his own will over God's.  Here in the garden at Gethsemane, Jesus in an agony of distress for the death He is facing, gasps out three affirmations of God's will.

And an angel comes (Luke 22:43).  Not with a flaming sword to drive out, but with outstretched arms to strengthen and comfort.

And then there was the other garden.

At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there. (John 19:41-42)

The narratives give several different versions of what happened next-- just as we might expect if a number of people all told individual eyewitness stories.  But several elements appear over and over again.

The stone was rolled away from the entrance of the tomb.

Angels appeared-- again not to drive out, but this time to proclaim: Jesus had risen from the dead.

And the first to see and speak to the risen Christ were women.

I want to focus on the story in John:

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved,and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.
Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).
Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her. [Emphases added.]

One thing stands out immediately.  Mary didn't see Jesus just because she happened to be the first one there.  Jesus could easily have appeared to Peter and John, but He didn't.  He waited until they had gone home. Then He appeared to Mary.  Why?

In the first garden, the garden of Eden, the woman who listened to the serpent was thinking about her own gain.  She saw that "the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom" (Genesis 3:6). And so she took, and she ate.

In this garden, the one with the empty tomb, the woman isn't thinking about herself at all.  She's thinking about something else.  Someone else.  Three times she says it: "They have taken Him away.  Where is He?"

The third time, He answers her Himself.  "Mary."

And she rushes into His arms and won't let go.

Just as Jesus reversed what Adam did, Mary has reversed what Eve did.

But He has something He needs her to do-- something He chose her, and not Peter or John, to do.  So He must ask her to let go of Him and do it.

After the scene in the garden of Eden, God warned Eve that now her husband will rule over her (Gen. 3:16)  And what we see in the biblical story from that time on, is men ruling over women.

Until Jesus came along.

Two years ago I wrote an answer to the question, Why Did Jesus Choose Twelve Men? 

The twelve were the main witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Christ. In the Ancient Near East and Roman cultures, the testimony of women was considered invalid. It was not accepted in court; it was not legally binding in any way. The world was simply not going to listen to women, and Jesus knew it.
So here’s what He did. His very first act upon Resurrection was to appear to the women. In fact, John tells us that though Peter and John ran ahead of Mary Magdalene on the way to the tomb, they saw nothing. Then after they left, Mary Magdalene was the first to see the Resurrected Christ. John 20:3-14. Other women also saw Him shortly afterwards– but no male saw the Lord, revealed for who He was, until that evening, eight hours or more afterwards. . .
The significance of this would not have been lost on the male disciples in that patriarchal culture. They knew that they themselves had refused to believe the women’s testimony that morning. Then when Jesus appeared to them, they realized the women had been telling the truth.
Jesus was communicating this very clearly (the fact that we miss it today is a product of our culture): “The world will not accept the testimony of your sisters, but I have just forced you to listen to it. My kingdom is to be different from the world. You are to listen to your women and allow them to testify of Me.”

 Before Jesus commissioned the apostles to take His message to the world in Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus commissioned Mary Magdalene and her sisters to take His message to the apostles.  This was a much bigger deal than it looks like.  As Christianity Today's online article Five Errors to Drop from Your Easter Sermon puts it:

As you preach this Easter, do not bypass the testimony of the women as an incidental detail. In the first century, women were not even eligible to testify in a Jewish court of law. Josephus said that even the witness of multiple women was not acceptable "because of the levity and boldness of their sex." Celsus, the second-century critic of Christianity, mocked the idea of Mary Magdalene as an alleged resurrection witness, referring to her as a "hysterical female … deluded by … sorcery."  

This background matters because it points to two crucial truths. First, it is a theological reminder that the kingdom of the Messiah turns the system of the world on its head. In this culture, Jesus radically affirmed the full dignity of women and the vital value of their witness. Second, it is a powerful apologetic reminder of the historical accuracy of the resurrection accounts. If these were "cleverly devised myths" (2 Pet. 1:16, ESV), women would never have been presented as the first eyewitnesses of the risen Christ.

 Jesus does not send Mary back to the male disciples to be ruled over by them.  He sends her back to them to teach and proclaim His truth.  Far from telling her to know her place, He deliberately raises her out of a woman's place and into a place of equality.

Mary, in desiring Christ above all else, has undone what Eve did. And Christ responds by undoing "he shall rule over you."

Last year Preston Yancy wrote the most beautiful blog post I have ever read anywhere.  He called it When It Matters Because of Two Gardens, and I probably would never have written this post if I had not first read that one, and thought about it ever since.  Here is a little of what he said, though I encourage everyone to read the whole thing:

I think of how one little verse, one little verse of a redemption in the twentieth chapter of the most beautiful Gospel, the story of us, could mean all this. 

Could mean systemic patriarchy has been overthrown. Could mean that equality is now. Could mean that the Law of Moses would be overcome by the law of grace. Could mean that a woman is a person not a thing, joy of father or husband, and that her word is worth, her voice use. . .

And I think of them, sometimes, of that second Man and that other woman, in that garden west of Golgotha, and I think of her as she was sent forth, running east, and I think of the tangled mess of grace tripping and dancing round her in her wake, her feet bringing the news of healed cosmos, healed creation, and He has done this, first, and we shall follow, and so comes the Light.

Jesus in the garden is an undoing and reversal of what drove humanity out of the garden. He has begun the righting of all that has been wrong-- and not least what has been wrong between men and women.

We should not read the rest of the New Testament in ways that negate this truth.

For He is risen indeed.