We take it all, straight up the middle, no matter who says “You can’t say that!”  We’re famous for it.

Except, of course, that we don’t.  I have to admit, I had believed our propaganda, and it was therefore with considerable surprise that I discovered that it just wasn’t true.  Not only that, but “I was quoting the Bible” turned out to be a highly inadequate defense for saying things that my community found uncomfortable.  With no further ado, I present to you seven such things.

1. Baptism saves you.
2. Belief takes place in the heart.
3. The purpose of holiness is eternal life.
4. In communion, we are sharing the body and blood of Christ.
5. The things that happened to the Exodus generation are all types for our benefit.
6. A cheerful Christian should be singing Psalms.
7. God’s children don’t sin.

______

See 1 Peter 3:21, Romans 10:9-10, Romans 6:22, 1 Corinthians 10:16, 1 Corinthians 10:11, James 5:13, 1 John 5:18.

______

Feel free to question, challenge, or discuss.  The more the merrier.

It’s quite a dilemma, isn’t it?  The race hatred of our fathers was a sin, and we must reject it.  We must speak against it.  We must say that it is incompatible with Christian life and faith.  We may not overlook it; we may not simply pretend it didn’t happen.  Period.

On the other hand, these men — Chrysostom, Luther, and so many others — are our fathers in the faith.  They paved the ancient paths on which we walk, and we may not overlook that, either.  We may not pretend that we have simply come de novo to the Bible, and we owe them nothing.  Even if we had come de novo to the Bible, we would owe them a debt we could never repay for their labor in recognizing, preserving and propagating the canonical books — but we owe them far more than that.  We have not come de novo to the Bible after all; we are taking part in a Tradition to which we owe a great deal.  Nor is it enough for us to simply say we owe them and then move on: genuine gratitude must be meaningfully incarnated, or it is just cheap sentimentality.

The fashion of the age is to avoid this sort of trouble by damning anyone* who indulges in race hatred.  Such a person (so goes conventional wisdom) is benighted, backwards, and useless, and could have nothing worthwhile to say.  For a Christian, this is not an acceptable stance to take.  First of all, we have our own sins, and if we would not have others dismiss us out of hand because of our failings, then we may not dismiss others for theirs.  Second, as a matter of historical fact, our fathers had quite a lot to say that was, and is, worth hearing.  The Spirit did not fail to speak through the teachers of past ages; Christ has been building His Church right along.  So the fashion of the age be damned; we’re Christians and we’ll have to do better than that.

I propose we do better by simply telling the truth, all the way around.  Luther was a great man whose great contributions we respect and use, and who fell into a great sin that we hate and renounce.  What’s so impossible about that?  We know that we can sing David’s psalms without falling into his adultery; why doesn’t it occur to us that we could acknowledge Luther’s contributions without expressing some sort of tacit approval of his antisemitism?

______

*Not actually true.  There are people who can get away with it, even today.  Louis Farrakhan’s antisemitic statements come to mind.

“Why did you put the brush stroke there?” the apprentice asked, watching from his shoulder.

“Do you see the way the shadow falls just there, on the model’s cheek?” the master said.

“Yes.”  The apprentice nods vigorously.  “The principle of attention to detail.  They drilled that into us in art school.”

“Do you see the way it changes the color of the blush on her cheek?” the master continued.

Again, the apprentice nodded vigorously.  “Sure.  The principle that light level changes the way that the colors look.  I’ve read all about it.”

The master looked back at his painting, frowning.  “So now you understand?”

“Completely, sir.  All the principles are in the textbooks we used at school.”

A grin tugged at one corner of the master’s mouth.  “Excellent.  Since it’s all in the principles you already know…where will I place the next stroke?  Will it be heavy or light?  Which brush will I use, and which color?”

The apprentice opened his mouth to speak, his finger reaching for a spot on the painting.  Halfway extended, his arm faltered, and his expression slowly changed until it was an open-mouthed gape.

Still here?  Well, then here we go.  The ‘good for the church’ part is easy.  On the one hand, we have churches with varying degrees of good, solid teaching who really think that if they just keep doing that, people will come to them.  It’s not happening, and it’s not going to — at least not fast enough to replace the ones that are leaving, moving away, dying off.  A renewed missional emphasis will get the church out of its siege mentality and return it to being an army on the march.  You can’t prevail against the gates of Hades from inside a castle; you’ve got to get out there and swing the battering ram. The missional movement brings this emphasis in spades.  This is a Good Thing, a return to the concerns and character of Jesus Christ, and through it, the missional movement will be one of God’s instruments for returning His church to greater effectiveness in the world.

On the other hand, the missional movement insists on defining itself as over against ‘Christendom.’  Various caveats attach to the use of the word in an attempt to avoid getting skewered for being sloppy, but…the use of the term is sloppy, and worse.  It’s fundamentally wrongheaded, and the caveats are an attempt to patch a ship that ought to be scuttled and replaced.

The first century church was on mission, but as the Roman world became Christian, the church got a little complacent.  God moved in the unwashed Germanic hordes next door, which woke the Roman Christians to their responsibility, and started one of the largest and most successful missions efforts in Christian history.  At the end of that mission effort, Europe was Christian for 1000 years: the phenomenon we know of as Christendom.  Even by a fairly minimal definition — the Church in the central position of power and influence in society, say — THIS WAS A GREAT THING!!!!  When a missions effort is successful, you get Christendom, the church at the center of power and influence in society, because all the people of power and influence are Christians.  This is an anticipation and partial realization of the Kingdom, and again, we pray for His Kingdom to come, so there’s no reason to complain when God answers our prayers.  (Sure, the people in question are fallible and the realization of Kingdom is only partial — but so what?  Your personal realization of eschatological perfection is only partial, too, but you don’t on that account stop walking with God.  No, you celebrate the successes, repent of the failures, and move on as best you can.  As with individuals, so with societies.)

Moreover, Christendom became the launch pad for the great missions movements of more recent history, which carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the uttermost parts of the earth.  That was a triumph, and we have Christendom to thank for it.  The North American church in particular ought to be aware of this, because we live in the uttermost parts of the earth.

Using ‘Christendom’ as a word to describe what’s gone wrong with the church is just lunacy, and this is where the missional movement is dropping the bowling ball on its own toes.  A missionary opposing Christendom is a missionary opposing the success of his own mission.  Seriously, think about how you would respond if you heard a bunch of Buddhist missionaries going on and on about how the whole Buddhist thing went off the rails when entire societies converted to Buddhism.  Huh?

Jesus took Europe by storm, and here we have a part of His Bride that’s unhappy about it.  Come again?  At best this is just cluelessness; at worst, it’s sedition against the Kingdom, and the only good thing I have to say about it is that it’s well-intentioned and utterly unwitting.

But it’s still sin; specifically, it’s ingratitude.

Yahweh don’t dig ingratitude, and this is where my prediction for the future of the missional movement comes in.  It will die off, because, unable to celebrate the victories of the past, it will in the end be unable to celebrate its own success.  What does not get celebrated, as Reggie McNeal is fond of pointing out, does not get done — and so one way or another, real success will not be forthcoming, because it is not valued.

Not that this is a huge problem.  Like many other movements that have come and gone in the Body over the last couple of millennia, this one will leave its residue — good and bad — and pass.  The children or grandchildren of the missional folks will take commitment to mission as a matter of bedrock necessity, and also begin asking how they can seek the redemption of the power structures of human society, rather than just railing against Christians who are involved in them. If the Lord tarries, we will yet have more earthly and imperfect portraits of how good a Christian kingdom can be.  And in the end, no matter how much some of us oppose big government and Christian involvement in same, Christ’s kingdom will come, and of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end.  Maranatha!

2011 had been a year of wreckage: God took my life apart, and I knew He wasn’t done yet.  Early in 2012, several friends confirmed this, some speaking prophetically and others speaking from God-given wisdom and long experience.  I wanted to start building, and it wasn’t time yet; there was more stuff that had to go.  Some of it was good stuff, but not for me, and not right now.  Most of that I can’t talk about here, Gentle Reader, because it involves other people — sensitive details, reputations and so on.  I’m not trying to hurt anybody here.

Let me say this much, though.  A year and a half ago, I tried to launch a thing I was initially calling the “Institute for Cultural Transformation.”  It was a boring name, and as we kicked around alternatives, we eventually settled on “Headwaters.”  As I look back, I can see the timing was bad, the mix of people was not right, the institutional ties were not where they needed to be — all kinds of external problems that I didn’t have the wisdom and leadership qualities to see at the time.  But even worse, I wasn’t ready.  I lacked the leadership ability, the internal compass, the relational development and credibility to pull the thing off.  Predictably, it was an absolute disaster.  Nor was it a simple case of “young guy bites off more than he can chew and then nature takes its course.”  There was that, but there were some people in the mix who did not have my interests at heart, and a few who were actively out to hurt me.  In the end, their designs didn’t matter; God took all that and used it to rip all kinds of things out of my life that needed to go.

Back when I was a lot younger, I used to think that the people I admired had a lot that I didn’t have yet — skill sets, resources, wisdom, alliances and so on.  I conceived of maturity as a process of gaining what they had that I lacked, and I aspired to that process.  Over time, I have come to realize that what most distinguishes the people I admire is what they don’t have — illusions, ego involvements, needs to please particular people, self-defeating commitments, selfishness, bureaucratic entanglements, fears of censure.  There is tremendous power in clarity and focus, and these mostly don’t come from trying harder; they come from what you aren’t, what you don’t have, what you don’t do.

God’s way is absolutely perfect.  Maybe He could have brought me here by a different road, but here’s what I know: what God is now giving me is a direct result of the “worst” things that happened in my life over the last 2 years.  As I look back at how everything came together, I can’t imagine it working if it had happened any differently.  God shook my whole world, as the author of Hebrews might say, that the things which cannot be shaken might remain.

The results have begun to roll in, so let me share some of the good news.  Just a couple months ago, we successfully formed  Headwaters Christian Resources, a nonprofit dedicated to local ministry in Englewood and resource development for the Body of Christ worldwide.  We launched the formal organization with the actual work largely already underway: youth ministry, middle school chronological Bible curriculum design, psalm-singing, and so on.  God gave us exactly the right people for our board, the resources we needed to do the work.  Almost immediately, we began to see additional opportunities.  There are a couple of fruitful possibilities for collaboration on the table right now (about which more if they pan out — I don’t want to be counting unhatched chickens here).

Meanwhile, God also began to nudge us to consider a church plant.  From several sources, God confirmed that we needed to move, so we set our first meeting for Good Friday, still not sure how well launching another community would mesh with the work we were already doing.  Then, at a Wednesday youth meeting, one of our kids (not knowing any of our plans) suddenly burst out with “You guys should start a church!  I would totally come to that!”  Confirmation.

On Good Friday, we met.  We ate a meal together, talked about where all this might go, sang, had a short devotional, and shared the Lord’s Table together.  (That last is a serious departure from common Good Friday ecclesiastical practice, but an Easter service was logistically impossible for us this year, so we kinda combined the two.)  It went well.

Today, some of us will gather for a pot-luck supper with members of two other recent church plants.  Next week, we’ll be joining one of those church plants for an evening of singing psalms and fellowship.  After that?  We don’t know yet.

The train has begun to roll.  How fast God adds momentum is up to Him.  Me?  I’m along for the duration.  My fellow-travelers are gems, each and all; I’d gladly join up just for the good company.

Ahem.  Anyway, the book is Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card.  It’s the second in a cycle of four stories (in order: Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind), but it stands alone well enough.  You can read Ender’s Game first if you want to, but you don’t really have to.  Late in the cycle, the peculiarities of Card’s LDS theology really come out into the limelight in some infelicitous ways, but Speaker is mostly free of that.  You ought to read it.

Moreover, you ought to read it for its epistemology.

The epistemology is personal, powerful, and simple enough: a person you don’t love is a person you don’t know, and can’t know.  As with most philosophical concepts, it is far easier to grasp fleshed out in story form than it would be in abstract discussion.  If it turns out that you don’t like the epistemology after all, it’s still a very good story.  You won’t have wasted your time.

If you want the abstract discussion, N. T. Wright’s Christian Hope in a Postmodern World makes the same epistemological point pretty concisely.  If you want it fleshed out philosophically and attended by (lots and lots of) footnotes, you can read Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology by Esther Lightcap Meeks.  Wright’s presentation is personable and accessible; Meeks is tougher to handle because she’s writing to fellow philosophers, but she’s very good at what she does.  But Speaker for the Dead is cheaper, and a lot more fun.  Just sayin’.

What if Christ did not rise?

The stock answer, of course, is straight out of 1 Corinthians 15: in that case, our faith is futile and we are of all men most to be pitied.  Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

I have no difficulty with Paul’s answer there.  It is born of Paul’s long reflection on Jesus and what He means, and there is deep wisdom in it.  However, for many conservative evangelicals, quoting Paul’s answer is not an indication of deep wisdom and reflection.  It has become a stock answer, a thing we can say that prevents us from thinking about the topic any further.   It’s like looking up the answer to an equation in the back of a math book: you can know x=3.5 without being any good at algebra.  However accurate the answer may be, though, just parroting it without thought is not the path to wisdom.

The path to wisdom is working through the problem yourself.

***

If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then He is not alive now.  The last people to see Him before He died were the last people to see Him, ever; the thing He said before He died was the last thing He said, ever.  He did not appear to the eleven.  Not only did He not appear to various people in Judea and Galilee in the weeks following the crucifixion, He also did not appear to Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road.  Saul remained, to the end of his days, a devotee of Gamaliel in the school of Hillel.  As he grew older, Saul wrote, of course, as brilliant rabbis are wont to do, and some of his works are preserved in the Jewish community to this day.

If Jesus is not presently alive, then He did not make His presence known to, for example, Anthony Bloom.  Bloom recounts his conversion experience:

I asked my mother whether she had a book of the Gospel, because I wanted to know whether the Gospel would support the monstrous impression I had derived from this talk. I expected nothing good from my reading, so I counted the chapters of the four Gospels to be sure that I read the shortest, not to waste time unnecessarily. And thus it was the Gospel according to St Mark which I began to read.

I do not know how to tell you of what happened. I will put it quite simply and those of you who have gone through a similar experience will know what came to pass. While I was reading the beginning of St Mark’s gospel, before I reached the third chapter, I became aware of a presence. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. It was no hallucination. It was a simple certainty that the Lord was standing there and that I was in the presence of him whose life I had begun to read with such revulsion and such ill-will.

This was my basic and essential meeting with the Lord. From then I knew that Christ did exist. I knew that he was thou, in other words that he was the Risen Christ. I met with the core of the Christian message, that message which St Paul formulated so sharply and clearly when he said, ‘If Christ is not risen we are the most miserable of all men’. Christ was the Risen Christ for me, because if the One Who had died nearly 2000 years before was there alive, he was the Risen Christ. I discovered then something absolutely essential to the Christian message — that the Resurrection is the only event of the Gospel which belongs to history not only past but also present. Christ rose again, twenty centuries ago, but he is the Risen Christ as long as history continues. Only in the light of the Resurrection did everything else make sense to me. Because Christ was alive and I had been in his presence I could say with certainty that what the Gospel said about the Crucifixion of the prophet of Galilee was true, and the centurion was right when he said, ‘Truly he is the Son of God’. It was in the light of the Resurrection that I could read with certainty the story of the Gospel, knowing that everything was true in it because the impossible event of the Resurrection was to me more certain than any event of history.

But if Jesus is not alive, that didn’t happen.  Bloom remained an angry young Marxist, and as angry young Marxists tend to, he found some problem or another in the Gospel of Mark and discarded it.

Of course, if Jesus is not alive, the last Mark ever saw of Jesus, soldiers were surrounding Him, and Mark was fleeing naked for his life.  He never wrote the Gospel of Mark — what could he use for an ending?

If Jesus did not rise, He did not ascend to the Father, and if He did not ascend to the Father, He did not send the Holy Spirit.  Pentecost never happened, and the signs Mark promised would follow those who believe did not happen, and we, today, do not hear God’s voice through the Holy Spirit or look to Him for intervention either.

If Jesus did not rise, biblical prophecy and proclamation is dead.  Micah predicted the place, Daniel predicted the time, Isaiah predicted the manner of His coming.  Jesus fulfilled every expectation…and then died prematurely, never to rise.  The God Jesus called Father set the whole thing up, but then He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get it done.  Of course the gospels and epistles were never written.  Why would God let the whole thing collapse like that?  Maybe He ran out of power.  Maybe He just lost interest in us — who knows?

Of course, this would not necessarily stop us from choosing to live by the principles of the Scriptures, such as they would be.  We could still live our lives by a biblical moral code — or try to.  We might have to gloss over some of the tougher bits, but that’s easy enough to do, isn’t it?  We could still have church services with music and teaching about the content of the Bible, just like we do now. We would not be the Body of Christ, of course, because He is not alive.  But we could still operate organizations and churches; there would just be no underlying unity that holds us all together.  We could still give money to support pastors and missionaries.  We could still have seminaries and Bible colleges.  What would we study?  What would we talk about?  Plenty.

We could still talk about the great miracles of the past: creation, the Red Sea, the raising of Lazarus.  We could still talk about how God spoke to great men in the past like Moses, giving him powerful principles for living well, or Samuel, helping him to lead Israel to victory over the Philistines.  Once upon a time, God was really something; He really did act in the affairs of men.  When He spoke, the fates of nations hung in the balance.  Once upon a time.

But that was before He hung Jesus out to dry.  That one failure changes everything.  After that, how do you trust God to intervene in your life today?  Why would you even want Him to speak to you today?  After He set us up to expect the Messiah, and sent Jesus, in every way fulfilling our expectations, and then allowed Him to die prematurely and descend into the grave forever — well, if He could betray His own prophets, His own people, His own Messiah in that way, then we certainly couldn’t trust Him with our lives.

So we wouldn’t.  With no Pentecost and no Holy Spirit, we wouldn’t even expect Him to show up, much less to do or say anything to us. We could not expect God to speak to us.  We would not expect to feel His presence — or value it if we did.  He wrote a book, once upon a time, and that’s as good as it’s going to get.  We’d just go on living by the principles.  Disagreements about the principles, of course, would balloon into huge fights — without the Body of Christ and the Holy Spirit, what have we got, besides agreement on some common principles?  So we’d huddle up with some folks we agree with on the principles, and hope that as we grow in wisdom over time, we’ll get better at living them out, and that would be it.

But it would take God betraying us to make us live like that…right?

***

And the Synchroblog link list:

• Marta – On Faith Seeking Understanding, Truth, and Theology
• Carol Kuniholm – Risen Indeed? The Hermeneutic Community
• Tim Nichols – How Would Life be Different if Jesus did not Rise?
• Glenn – Kingdom Come or Kingdom Now?
• Sonja Andrews – The Resurrection and the Life
• Josh Morgan – The Role of the Resurrection
• Abbie Watters – What if the Resurrection were a lie?
• Minnow – Resurrection Impact
• Leah – Resurrection – Or Not!
• Hey Sonnie – The Resurrection Hoax
• Liz Dyer – The Resurrection I Firmly Believe In
• Ellen Haroutunian – Is There a Christianity Without the Resurrection?
• Jeannette Altes – What if…
• Christine Sine – If the Resurrection did not happen, how would the world be different?
• KW Leslie – Supposing Jesus is Dead
• Travis Mamone – If the Resurrection was a Hoax
• Kathy Escobar – Jenga Faith
• Jeremy Myers – What if Jesus Did not Rise?

Good Friday is a day to consider what was nailed to the cross.  Jesus, of course.  Our sins, of course.  But all too often, we talk as if the whole meaning of our existence is to escape this earth and get to heaven.  If that’s true, then…

• the problem with sin is that it keeps us out of heaven
• the point of the cross is that it takes our sin and puts it on Jesus, and He takes care of it
• the point of the resurrection is that it really worked, and the sin is gone
• the next really significant event in your life is you dying and going to heaven.

In between now and then?  Well, just hang on.  In light of eternity, a few decades of quiet desperation isn’t so long, really.

The truth about the cross is so much more than that.  God put man and woman on the earth to guard and cultivate it, to lovingly rule over it and make it productive.  We were supposed to be the very image of the Triune God on the earth, walking with God, partaking in flourishing marriages, families, and friendships.  We were made to be healthy, strong and whole — in every possible sense of those words.

We ruined it, thoroughly, by sinning and bringing death into the world.  We gave the Serpent a foothold in our domain, and he has used it to steal, kill, and destroy.  But at the very beginning, God made a promise that the Seed of the Woman would crush the Serpent’s head.  The Serpent won a victory in the Garden, but it was only temporary.

Jesus did not come to gather a few bedraggled refugees to heaven before Adam’s failure finally makes the earth fall apart for the last time.  Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil and set the world right again.

What did Jesus die for?  Everything that keeps us from that. Every sin, yes.  Also every sickness, every death, every suffering; every physical and emotional wound ever inflicted; every broken relationship; everything without exception that stands in the way of human flourishing on earth.  This is why the blind, the lame, the maimed were excluded from the Old Covenant priesthood: because the Tabernacle (and later the Temple) is a new Garden of Eden, and those maladies have no place in the Garden — not because God rejects those who suffer from them, but because He heals them.  It’s what Jesus said when John the Baptist asked, “Are you the coming one, or do we look for another?”  “Go and tell John what you see: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”  In another place, Jesus read a Scripture in the synagogue: “The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed;  to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD.”  Then He sat down, and the eyes of all were upon Him as He said, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Our eyes should be on Him as well, because what He said is true.  He didn’t just bear our sins to the cross; according to Isaiah, He bore our griefs and sorrows, our weaknesses, our sicknesses.  That’s why Isaiah doesn’t just say “By His stripes we are made righteous.”  That’s true, and it’s important, but there’s so much more than that: “By His stripes we are healed.”

As Paul meditated on the meaning of Jesus to the Ephesian church, he took it further than just healing what is broken.  He said that we are already seated in the heavenly places with Christ, blessed by the Father with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, and commissioned and equipped to make war on spiritual armies of wickedness in the heavenly places — right now.

This is the furthest thing from pie-in-the-sky hope for eventual escape from this earth into heaven, and it’s a good thing.  If that’s all you’ve got, you haven’t got very much.  Even as great a man of faith as David sustained himself with faith that he would “see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  Jesus told us to pray for that: “Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  We are Christians; we don’t abandon earth for heaven.  We are agents of Almighty God taking part in an invasion — heaven invading earth.

You have what Christ bought for you.  Act like it.

***

On November 12, 1993,   the first Ultimate Fighting Championship took place in Denver, Colorado, and mixed martial arts entered the mainstream in the United States.  You have to understand that up to this point, most martial arts tournaments were held for a single style only. Karate guys went to karate tournaments; taekwondo guys when to taekwondo tournaments, etc., and all the tournaments had a long list of rules.  This tournament was different: eight fighters from eight different styles would face each other with no weight classes, no time limits, and almost no rules at all. For most martial artists, myself included, it was a night of surprises.  In the end, Royce Gracie, a Brazilian weighing less than 180 pounds, defeated a field of contenders far bigger than he was.  The audience was baffled.  The announcers were surprised.  The fighters were shocked — all but two: Gracie himself, of course, and another fighter named Ken Shamrock, who came from a similar (grappling) background.  Shamrock lost his bout to Gracie, but in the fight before that, he faced a big, strong kickboxer named Pat Smith.  (You can see the bout here.)  Shamrock won handily, placing Smith in a leg lock and forcing him to surrender.

The thing about those kind of locks is, they hurt like the dickens, but as soon as the guy lets up and you have a minute to recover, you feel okay.  You don’t even feel like you lost the fight — you feel like you were tricked somehow.  That’s what happened with Smith, and if you watch the video clip of the fight all the way to the end, you’ll see him tap and lose the fight, but then you’ll see him get up, shake it off, and start yelling at Shamrock and trying to restart the fight.  He lost, but he can’t accept it — he wants to keep fighting.

Can you imagine Shamrock actually letting Smith restart the fight?  Think about it — he’s already won.  It’s over.  How dumb would he have to be to let Smith talk him into giving up the victory he already won, and getting back into the ring to go again?

Isn’t that exactly what we do with the attacks of the devil?  Jesus already won the victory; the Serpent’s head is crushed.  But he likes to pretend that it’s not true; he wants to keep yelling at us to get back in the fight.  Why do we believe his lies?

Or as a pastor I heard a couple months ago put it: “I’m tired of listening to people talk about struggling with sin.  They come to me and say, ‘Pastor, I’m just struggling with this sin in my life,’ and I tell them, ‘Stop it!’  Stop struggling with your sin; rebuke it in Jesus’ name and get on with your life!”

And again, why stop with sin?  Let’s rebuke everything that Jesus died to deliver us from.  Let’s call for the space around us to be an outpost of God’s Kingdom, come to earth.  Yes, the coming of the Kingdom is a process, which is a fancy theological way of saying that God probably isn’t going to give us all the cookies at once.  But I believe we have yet to even scratch the surface of what He will give us, if only we will believe.

Back in Part Two of this series, we discussed how within North American church culture, we have created a monster through misconstruing (or just ignoring) what the Bible says a pastor is supposed to be.  Having failed to apprehend the biblical picture of a richly gifted team of leaders functioning in diverse ways in the church, we expect one pastor to fulfill all those roles.  By our lights, the lead pastor is supposed to cast the vision for the church, comfort the sick and afflicted, counsel the broken, resolve disputes, preach every Sunday, coach his staff, teach Sunday school, oversee the administration of the church, represent the church to the community, and much more.  He is, in short, supposed to have all the gifts at once, and use them all simultaneously.  This job description is not biblical, and it’s a recipe for disaster.  (This is not to say that nobody can live up to it.  In God’s providence, there are a few incredibly gifted and energetic folks who not only rise to this sort of challenge, but seem to thrive on it.  But they are few and far between — certainly not one for every church.)  Having created this Frankenstein paradigm of clerical ministry, we then use ordination as the vetting process for releasing someone into that ministry.

So if we’re going to return to a more biblical practice of church leadership (and I find encouraging signs that this is the case everywhere I look, these days), then it’s time to rethink ordination a bit.  At its core, ordination is the church recognizing the person’s calling, qualifications and character.  If we don’t think the person is called into the ministry to which we’re about to ordain him, then we won’t ordain him.  If we think he’s called, but he’s doesn’t yet have the skills he’ll need in the ministry, then we ask him to beef up his skill set before we ordain him.  If he’s got the calling and the skills, but is still struggling with immaturity or other character flaws that are going to significantly hamper his ministry, then again, we ask him to take some time and grow in the Lord before we ordain him.  To be ordained, he should have all three: calling, qualifications, and character.  He doesn’t have to be perfect, and there’s always room for improvement, so it’s always a judgment call.  But there comes a time when he’s ready to get out there and learn by doing, and the church’s job at that point is to appoint him to the ministry and send him out.

Stripped down to those basics, we actually see something similar to ordination in the New Testament.  The apostles laid hands on the seven (deacons?) appointed to the care of widows in the Jerusalem church (Acts 6:6).  The Antioch church laid hands on Paul and Barnabas to commission them for their missionary ministry (Acts 13:2-3).  The eldership laid hands on Timothy, apparently not only to consecrate him for ministry but to impart a gift to him (1 Tim. 4:14).  Paul did something similar for Timothy (2 Tim. 1:6).

What we see in New Testament practice, though, is specific.  A person is not ordained to “gospel ministry” in general.  When the church lays hands on someone, it is because God is separating that person to a specific ministry: care of widows, taking the gospel to the Gentiles, and so on.  Perhaps our practice of ordination should follow the same pattern.

Within the tribe that raised and trained me, we actually have an institution like this already: it’s called a “commissioning service,” although the only time we really did it was for missionaries that we were sending out from our own local congregation.  We would lay hands on them and consecrate them for their particular calling and mission.  However, in these cases, we didn’t do much in the way of due diligence, because we were outsourcing that to Pioneers, New Tribes, or whatever mission board that person was going with.  The mission board would have primary responsibility for the missionary once he was on the field, so we trusted them to examine the candidates thoroughly (and generally, they did, but notable lapses are not unheard of).

Within that tribe, ordination was taken to be entirely a church function, and so the church would delve quite a bit more intensively into the candidate’s life.  We would give notice to the congregation, several Sundays in a row, that John Doe was a candidate for ordination, and if anyone knew of reasons why he should not be ordained, that person should speak to the elders at once.  There would be interviews.  The candidate was often asked to prepare a doctrinal statement and/or philosophy of ministry statement, and then provide an oral defense for them.  The process would culminate in a grueling several-hour ordination exam, where the elders and other interested parties would grill the candidate on his calling, his Bible knowledge and practical wisdom, and his character and experience. If the candidate passed all tests, then a day would be appointed, and the whole church would come together to see the elders and pastors lay hands on the candidate and ordain him to the ministry.

What I propose for ordination is a blending of these two categories.  Let the examination of the candidate be as intensive as ordination exams have tended to be.  But let us not ordain someone to anything so general as “the gospel ministry.”  No single part of the Body is the whole Body, and so no single part should be ordained to do the whole Body’s ministry.  If we are going to the trouble to examine a candidate’s calling and qualifications in detail, then let us commission that candidate to the specific area of ministry for which which God has called and qualified him.  Or her.

Of course, “or her.”  Because once we agree that the commission should be to something specific, and not to some Frankensteinian polyglot called “the gospel ministry” (which necessarily includes teaching and exercising authority over men, along with practically all the other gifts and functions), then we immediately see a number of biblically sanctioned roles to which a woman can be called without violating even the strictest readings of 1 Timothy 2:12 or 1 Corinthians 14:34.  Deaconess and prophetess head the list of New Testament categories here, but it goes further than that.  1 Timothy 5 implies an office of “church widow” — a widow over 60, with no relatives to support her, who devotes herself to service to the church, and in turn is supported by the church.  There may be more biblically attested categories.

In addition to the “big box” categories, there are more specific callings.  Just as Paul and Barnabas were commissioned to a specific mission work, and not simply to a general calling of “evangelist” or “apostle”, so other believers also have specific callings.  For example, I have a friend whose calling in this season of her life is to devote herself to encouraging and mentoring women.  I dare say that if she were pursuing this ministry among brown people in Jakarta or Nairobi — or even white folks in Zagreb or Madrid — few churches would have difficulty laying hands on her and commissioning her for the work.  But instead, God has called her to Denver.  What difference does it make if the women she’s mentoring speak ‘Merican?  Should we not commission her to the work all the same?

We left off with two options to explore in 1 Corinthians 14.  How were the Corinthians to understand “let your women keep silent in the churches”?  We had two views to consider, each with problems and advantages.  Let’s take them each in turn.

Option A is that 14:34 is an absolute prohibition on female speaking in the church service.  When the church gathers, a number of people speak to share a prayer, a psalm, a prophecy, a tongue (if interpreted), a teaching, or what have you — all of them men.  Women are not to speak out in the church meeting, period.

Option B is that 14:34 is speaking about the judging of prophets.  When one prophet speaks, Paul says, the others are to judge.  Within this context, the women are to keep silent in the churches, and the men are to judge the word of the prophet.  In this narrower reading, Paul is not prohibiting a woman from sharing a psalm, prayer, prophecy, or what have you; he is prohibiting a woman from entering the discussion following a prophecy, in which a verdict will be rendered as to whether the prophecy was of God.

Neither of these readings sit well in our egalitarian era.  Allowing men to do anything and barring that same thing to women is a big no-no these days.  But we have to face the facts: Paul is certainly prohibiting the women from doing something.  How that prohibition might apply in our own place and time is a fascinating question, but it’s a question that will have to wait until we’ve figured out what Paul was asking of the Corinthians.  If we can’t work out what he was asking them to do, how are we supposed to apply the instruction to us?  So let’s consider the options here.

Option A: Total Ban on Women Speaking in Church

One of the first and most obvious advantages of this view is that it’s got immediate “curb appeal,” just based on its sheer simplicity(for folks from my fightin’ fundie roots, anyhow).  The verse says “let your women keep silent in the churches,” so they weren’t to let women speak in church.  Simple.

On this view, I’ve heard two different ways of handling chapter 11.  The first is that Paul’s just “handling one problem at a time.”  First he gets the prophetesses to cover their heads, thus ending the indecency, then three chapters later he tells them not to speak at all.  A more plausible approach is that ch. 11 is not talking about conduct in the church meeting, but Christian conduct generally.  Women certainly ought to pray, and prophetesses certainly ought to prophesy, and when they do, they ought to cover their heads.  However, within the church meeting, women are not to speak; the praying and prophesying takes place elsewhere.

As we come into chapter 14, obviously the speakers are all to be male, so “you may all prophesy” doesn’t really mean all, it means all the men.  (Women can prophesy too, of course, but somewhere else.)

A problem arises with the explanation that follows the prohibition, though.  “And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home….”  If what Paul has in view is preventing the Corinthian women from sharing a psalm, a prayer, or a prophecy in the church meeting –  this is not wanting to learn something, but wanting to share something so that others may learn.  I’ve not yet heard a plausible explanation for how v.35 fits in with this interpretation.  One possible answer involves a re-reading of v.31.  “For you may all prophesy one by one, so that all [of you prophets] may learn [how to exercise your gift of prophecy] and be encouraged [in the use of your gift for the benefit of the Body].”  If this is a proper understanding of v. 31, then exercising the gift in the church is a learning experience for the prophet, and we may read v.35 thus: “And if they want to learn something [through exercising their gift of prophecy], let them ask their husbands at home….”  It’s not clear to me why Paul would describe a woman exercising her prophetic gift at home as asking a question, though, so I’m not convinced on this one.

This interpretation also does not explicitly give a venue for the Corinthian women to use their gifts in prayer and prophecy for the benefit of the Body.  This seems problematic: if they were not to speak in church, then when, where and how were the prophetesses to use their gifts for the benefit of the Body?  However, this issue may arise only through the imposition of contemporary church paradigms (in which we only see our “church friends” at church once a week) on the text.  By contrast to our contemporary practice, if the Corinthian church functioned like the Jerusalem church (Acts 2:46-47), then the formal gathering of the church for worship was a tiny percentage of overall church life, and there would be many other opportunities outside the formal worship service.

Option B: Ban on Women Exercising Authority over Prophets

According to this understanding, Paul is not banning women speaking in the church meeting overall; he’s speaking to a more narrow circumstance defined in the immediate context.

On this understanding, the first half of chapter 11 could well be speaking about conduct in the church meeting, although it may also have reference beyond it.  This seems to fit the overall context better in any case.   Chapter 11 is an organic whole (note the pairing of “I praise you” in 11:1 and “I do not praise you” in 11:17).  Since the rest of the chapter (vv.17-34) is certainly speaking about the church meeting, it makes sense that the first half would be as well.

As we come into 14:26, “each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation…” means exactly that — everyone brings something to share.  But there are some protocols to follow. First, two or at most three tongues-speakers may speak, each one in turn (i.e., not all at once), and they must be interpreted.  If there is no interpreter for the utterance, the person should still speak — but only to himself and to God, not to the Body.  Second, two or three prophets may also speak, but their words should not be taken immediately as from God.  The others (in context, it seems to mean “other prophets”) are to judge what they are hearing.  As they are hearing the prophet speak, if something is revealed to another who sits by listening and judging, the first prophet must yield the floor to the second.  Subject to the judgment of the church and the limitations of two or three per meeting, “You may all prophesy” in 14:31 means exactly that — each of the people so gifted, male and female, may speak, so that all may learn and be encouraged.  Dodging the protocols can’t be excused on the grounds that “God took control of my mouth and made me speak,” because the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.  The prophets are each responsible for their own behavior, because God does not generate confusion, but peace, as He does in all the churches of the saints.  Lastly, with respect to this matter of judging the prophets, women are not part of the discussion; rather than taking on the mantle of authority they are to be submissive, as the Law also requires.  Women also may not participate in the discussion under the guise of “just asking a question” or “just trying to learn something.”  If a woman wants to understand why the judgment is rendered the way it is, she may ask her husband at home; it is shameful for a woman to speak in this fashion in church.

On this understanding, the reading of v. 34 meshes well with 1 Timothy 2:12.  The act of judging the prophets is an exercise of authority (often over a male prophet), and so Paul does not permit a woman to take that role.

The major problem with this reading is the underlined phrase above.  It is not immediately clear that vv.34-35 are specifically about judging the prophets.  It’s a relatively plausible reading, given the need to harmonize 14:34-35 with 14:31 and 11:1-16. But I’m certainly not satisfied that it’s the right reading.

How Did the Corinthians Read Chapter 14?

Paul closes the discussion of church protocols with a challenge: did the word of God come originally from Corinth?  Did it reach only Corinth?  Of course not; Corinth is one church among many, and it should conform with the practice of its sister churches.  Anyone in Corinth who thinks himself a prophet — or even just a spiritual believer — should acknowledge that Paul’s writing here is God’s commandment, but if someone insists on being ignorant, very well.  The Corinthians should abandon him to his ignorance.

Chapter 14 seems cryptic to us in part because Paul did not need to explain in detail what other churches did.  The charter members of the Corinthian church certainly knew what Paul’s worship services would look like; he would have led them in the beginning.  Also, Corinth was a port city; some of the members of the church would be well-traveled, and would have observed the worship at churches in other places. The Corinthian church would have been well aware of the mainstream worship practices of the New Testament church, and the ways in which their worship service was unique.  Paul is calling them to abandon (at least some of) that uniqueness and fall back into the mainstream practice of all the churches.  That part is clear enough.  Exactly what that practice was seems less clear.

I’d like very much to launch a discussion here.  In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll tell you that when I started writing this post 3 weeks ago, I was strongly disposed toward option B.  The more time I’ve spent with the text, the more skeptical of that I’ve become.  However, I continue to see serious problems with option A as well.  If I can’t resolve it, I’ll just have to “steer around” it for the time being, and rely on other passages to fill in the gaps.  It’s an imperfect solution, to be sure, but for the moment I’m stumped.