ACU Graduate School of Theology

This post concludes the series on why we love the Bible, even when we also struggle with it. Thank you for reading and thinking along with me.

     Why, then, do Christians love the Bible?  In prior posts in this series, we considered some reasons for not loving it, perhaps even for rejecting it.  Some of those reasons are more interesting or challenging than others.  How one answers them does not change the fact that many reasonable, thoughtful, even kind and gracious people love the Bible and are willing to sacrifice comfort, success, and even their own lives to carry out their understandings of its basic message.  Why?

            The answers probably vary with the lover.  For some, the sheer literary artistry of the book dazzles and fascinates.  Stories and poems, proverbs and songs, laments and thanksgivings all grace the pages of the Good Book.  Who can easily forget David and Bathsheba or Daniel in the lion’s den or Mary Magdalene at the tomb?  The Bible’s ability to surface the voices of the powerless, even when the authors themselves bore some bit of power as they sometimes did, compels admiration.  Anybody with any literary sensibility at all can see that.

            But there is something more to the love than just artistic appreciation, though that is real and noteworthy.  The larger point is that we love the Bible because it talks about the human love for God, our deep longing not to be alone, and our profound awareness that we are not and cannot be.  It is a book of hope, which one must carefully distinguish from wishful thinking.  Far too gritty and realistic a book to offer false hopes or easy solutions to complex problems – unlike some of its defenders and alleged fans – the Bible nevertheless assumes the highest possible things about the nature and destiny of the human race.  Made in God’s image, accountable, redeemable, resurrect-able, capable of great good as well as great evil, human beings appear in Scripture in ways that are both honest and hope-filled.  Not an easy trick to pull off, for authors of books or any of the rest of us.

            The greatest interpreters of the Bible, whether technical scholars or preachers or artists, have understood the coherence of its ideas about human beings.  Thus Handel ends his great oratorio “Messiah,” the libretto of which consists entirely of biblical passages, with the great hymn of the angels in Revelation: “Worthy is the lamb who was slain….”  And then the Amen.  Death and pain do not get the last word; there is a resurrection in every graveyard.  Or think of the joyous opening of Haydn’s “Creation” with the word “Light” sung again and again in joy.  Darkness has its place – we need it in some ways – but it does not win in the end.  Or more recently Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms” with the glorious resolution of all the storm and stress in Hinneh mah tov umana’im shevet achim gam yachad (“How good and how pleasant it is when brethren dwell together in unity”).  Humans can live together and that still unrealized possibility is worth aspiring toward.  There is something in the Bible, then, that speaks to the full resolution and restoration of all things.  Peace.  Wholeness.  Shalom.  And that is why we love the Bible.  We are not naïve about its challenges.  Not at all.  But we know that inside its riddles, past its dark paths and hidden traps lie a deeper truth.  That truth is that God is making all things new.  Who couldn’t love that?

            In the previous post, I talked about objections that many people lodge against the Bible and thus against those of us who understand it as a book representing in some fashion a window onto the true character, practices, and convictions of God.  Obviously, the discussion here can only hint at some of the depths of the issues.  For some of them, you might consider the profound new book by Feldmeier and Spieckermann, The God of the Living (Baylor University Press, 2011).  It’s not an easy read, but is well worth the effort.

            The final two objections I noted consisted of the claims that the Bible advocates the mistreatment of various groups of vulnerable people, most notoriously the Canaanites but also women.  Let me briefly think about those issues.

            First, the Canaanites.  A number of biblical texts seem to advocate the eradication of the aboriginal settlers in Palestine.  The Bible never advocates ethnic cleansing of anyone else, indicating that the writers considered the Canaanites a special case.  The authors of Deuteronomy and the texts influenced by it (notably, Joshua) were concerned lest the local people persuade Israel to practice idolatry, or at least those are their stated reasons.

            Does the fact that the Canaanites present a special case reduce the horrible level of immorality associated with their extermination, if it actually happened?  No, of course not.  Can we reasonably argue that, well, they were uniquely horrible human beings and so their removal was justified, much as some people believe capital punishment for heinous criminals is justified?  Doubtful, since it is hard to imagine an entire population, including women and children, so sunk into depravity that execution was the only way to prevent the spread of their contaminating influence.

            There is, we must admit, not easy way to deal with the case of the Canaanites.  Christians who take seriously Jesus’ calls to love or the earlier prophets’ call to justice will find it impossible to work toward a fully convincing defense of the anti-Canaanite texts.  There are a few qualifications to be made, however:

1. The ethnic cleansing never happened.  There is no archaeological evidence of mass destructions of the pre-Israelite population.
2. In fact, the Canaanites survived as a recognizable population for centuries after the birth of Israel.  Solomon impressed them into forced labor, for example.  They were “the other” for much of this time, but were not eliminated.
3. The texts advocating their elimination seem to be much later than the events they purport to describe.  The first few chapters of Deuteronomy, for example, assume settlement in the land and arguably even exile and deportation for Israel and Judah (scholars debate this point).  That is, the call for elimination seems to be a sort of historical fiction retrojected into the past in order to show how things went off the rails.  (Remember what I said last time about how texts may not be what they seem at first.)
4. This means that the texts about the Canaanites aren’t really about them at all, but about the desire for a sort of national purity.  Still a problematic idea, perhaps, but not the same as massacre and mayhem.
5. And, yes, the Bible does contain some apparently old stories about how various Canaanite individuals and groups became integral parts of Israel.  Think of Rahab, the ancestor of David, and also the Gibeonites.  There must have been many others, and probably a DNA test of these ancient people, if such a thing were possible (which it is not), would have found lots of Canaanite ancestors for some Israelites at least.  This is not very surprising, by the way.  You may have seen the recent study of the gene pool in Scotland, which found lots of folks with Moorish, Asian, Corsican, and other gene markers in people with unobjectionable Scottish names like Hamilton, McDonald, and Stewart.

There is more to say here – much more – but maybe this suffices for now.

            But what about the women, to paraphrase Abigail Adams?  We have to acknowledge two things: (1) ancient texts assume a world of limited choices for many people, including women; and (2) Christianity has a very mixed record of validating the lives of women.  Here a good bit of history would help us.  We would learn that the history of women’s roles in Christianity has been very complex.  On the one hand, Christianity made space for women to be something other than a commodity under the control of a father or husband.  The creation of monastic life for men and women in the Middle Ages made space for a new way of living that made gender roles worked out in the dominant culture far less important.  Many of the modern moves toward full equality have their foundations in this earlier period.

            Moreover, it should be clear that much of the contemporary religious defense of sharply delineated gender roles has little real backing in the Bible itself.  For example, conservative Christians often speak of male headship and the need for women to have a primary responsibility in the home while men work outside it.  Both of these are simply bogus ideas.  Or at least they are greatly oversimplified.  Male headship is not a biblical term or concept in any meaningful sense.  It is a ghost idea, a misreading of texts.  And the situation in which home and workplace are sharply differentiated is a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not the first.  Much of the current discussion in church thus seems to reflect a fairly gross ignorance of history.  It is almost as deep as the ignorance outside the church.

            Having said all that, on the other hand, we should not pretend that the Bible is really a modern feminist tract very cleverly disguised.  Rather, I would argue that the Bible reports gender roles of past eras without necessarily endorsing them, and that, more importantly, it shows how real human beings work toward general principles of dignity and honor for all within the realities that they face.  Today we face different realities, but we still seek the dignity of human beings before God just as our ancient forebears did.  We could simply reject that history and the texts that came from it, but as the historian Simon Schama put it once in an interview on Dutch television (which you can see on Youtube), to be ignorant of the past is to be locked inside the mind of a small child aware neither of where we come from nor where we might go.  So we do not ignore this history or dismiss this book simply because it does not reflect our own historically conditioned, flawed, and temporary perspectives.  Rather, we seek to find behind the surface appearance of things the ideas that really matter.  When we do, we learn that all human beings are made in the image of God and are worthy of the fullest consideration.

Next time, Part 4 of 4 will appear!  We will return to the original topic of why we Christians love the Bible, in spite of all the difficulties we can name, of which we are all certainly aware.

This is a continuation of a prior post on the Bible and what it does and does not say.  The series will continue next time as well.

To respond to the claim that the Bible is immoral, a claim often made in our current world,  it makes sense to try to unravel several distinct charges that can be made against the Bible on moral grounds:

1. The authors claim that God favors some people over others, while also arguing that “God is no respecter of persons”;
2. They attribute to God behaviors, attitudes, and values that in a human being would be considered highly unworthy or immoral;
3. They advocate, or at least defend, violence against vulnerable people, most notably the Canaanites, but also others; and
4. They turn a blind eye toward slavery and the mistreatment of women.

All of these would be serious charges if true.  A demonstration of them would reduce the Bible to a heap of nationalistic texts more worthy of Fox News than of a great religion.  The fact that some Christians attempt to defend imperialism, warfare, racial or economic discrimination, and other horrendous practices in the name of the Bible certainly makes the task of defending it harder.  Still, I will try to understand it, in part by rescuing it from some of its self-appointed defenders and in part by showing that many of the charges against have little or no basis in fact.

To take the first charge first, it is very important to understand what the Bible actually says about the election of Israel.  Hate-groups on both the left and right of the political spectrum have often used the biblical notion of election to brand Jews as arrogant or dishonest.  At many historical points, the attack on election has linked directly to persecution.  It is thus highly surprising that some enlightened secular critics of Christianity on the political left should employ such simplistic understandings of biblical teaching.  In the Bible, election does not imply some sort of special treatment.  It implies higher standards of justice and peace.  Nor is election an end in itself, for as the single most important text on the subject, Genesis 12 puts it, “in you shall all the nations of the world be blessed.”  Judaism’s contribution to human civilization has been almost incalculable, especially given the small number of Jews who have lived at any given time.

Nor does the Christian understanding of the Church’s election as a grafting onto Israel (see Romans 9-11) imply special treatment, since the Church understood itself as people redeemed from sin, not as people who have merited a relationship with an ever-benevolent God.  When critics charge Jews and Christians, and thus the Bible, with self-promotion in pursuing a doctrine of election, they simply do not understand what we are saying.  In fairness, we often do not understand well ourselves.  But the problem lies much less with the Bible or the religious doctrines of the two faiths than with our failure to live out the implications of our own beliefs.

The second objection is more serious, and it has occupied biblical interpreters since at least the first century BC.  The great Jewish biblical interpreter Philo, roughly a contemporary of Jesus, already addressed this question in a series of commentaries on the Pentateuch.  His answer, which has often been followed in one way or another, was to interpret the biblical texts about God’s emotions and actions metaphorically, even allegorically.  In such a construal, God does not really express anger or joy, sorrow or frustration.  Such attributions of character or behavior are simply the closest human equivalents for untutored minds.

Such a strategy has obvious problems, not least that it seems simply to dodge the text’s plain statements in the interests of a predetermined agenda.  But is this really what Philo and his countless followers are doing?  After all, texts do signify in many different ways, and metaphor is an important one, widespread in many cultures and bodies of literature.  Moreover, given the fragility of human language, its lack of precision even for describing human lives, is it really so implausible to think that our words and discourses would suffer from serious limitations in their talking about an infinite being?  Surely Philo’s approach is not as off-base as it seems at first.

To get hold of the biblical approach to divine characterization, we might propose several considerations.  (1) Things may not always be what they seem in a text.  For example, when Yahweh asks the Satan to consider his servant Job and then allows the poor man to experience various trials that would prove his valor, we do well to ask what is going on.  On the one hand, the Almighty seems to have immense confidence – almost too much confidence – in human capacity for virtue.  On the other, Yahweh’s motivations are not entirely clear.  Not only must the reader allow for the demands of a narrative – a character has to initiate a trial in order for the following theological discourse to have some connection to human experience – but the precise motivations of Yahweh are not entirely clear even within the narrative.  By wagering on human integrity, doesn’t God (in the story at least) intend to disagree with those human beings who would defend cosmic justice by erasing the dignity of their own species?  In other words, how do we take the narrative itself, as a realistic representation of an event in history or a history-like happening, or as a parable not to be taken literally?  Surely the last options makes most sense of the literary goals of the book of Job.  Thus it would be silly to imagine that the author of Job imagines God as a puppet-master working humans through their paces to illustrate his own superiority (which is never in question in the book of Job or the Bible as a whole).

(2) If texts are not always what a superficial analysis of them would make them seem to be, how do we know when we’re giving them due consideration?  The short answer is that we have to become better readers, attentive to subtlety.  This is not some exercise for a small elite group.  It is a task available to all, and in fact, a very democratic task in many ways.  The church and the synagogue have always existed as reading societies – among other things! – fostering thoughtful, engaged, life-changing consideration of story and song, prophecy and wisdom.  At least we try.  And we should keep trying.

(3) So, to continue the response to the second charge, we have to be very careful not to assume that the various biblical texts’ portrayal of God are straightforward.  We should always ask, if a text portrays God as angry, say, what the source of the anger is.  Is anger about injustice inappropriate, for example?  Would a deity unmoved by suffering or oppression be preferable to one who loved good and hated evil in some way or another?  Something to consider.

            Why do Christians love the Bible?  Since many millions of us read it fairly frequently, and hundreds of millions of us revere it as a communication from, or at least about, a benevolent God, what in it makes reasonably intelligent people take it seriously?  These questions seem particularly acute when we recognize that many of the props that supported the Bible for some of its readers (belief in its scientific accuracy, for example) have been kicked out from under it.  They also become pressing because many of the efforts to “save” the Bible only work by suppressing any sort of careful reading or questioning of it.  Too often, Christians take refuge in sentimental, “what does it mean to you?” approaches that substitute a certain kind of approved experience or even emotional profile for any sort of activity that deserves the name of thinking.  So, we should ask the question, again, is the Bible reliable?  Why do we love it so?

            Perhaps we might begin with what the Bible is and is not.  It is not a book of science.  It says nothing about how species develop, the hydrology or geology of the earth, the size of the observable universe, or any number of other questions that we modern people are legitimately interested in.  People who love the Bible are thus free to pursue scientific inquiry full on without worrying that they will somehow transgress a spiritual boundary.  Since science is not the only way of understanding reality – and in many ways is a far less interesting and informative way than philosophy, history, or poetry – to say that the Bible is not a scientific work in no way denigrates it, anymore than saying that my child is not a supernova somehow makes her less interesting or important.  Only the crudest sort of eighteenth-century reductionism (which often is still being played out in the popular media, oddly enough) could think of “non-scientific” as a flaw.

            Also, the Bible is not a blueprint for all human societies in every time and place.  Although many of its readers attempt to read off its pages some sort of map for their lives either individually or collectively, it simply does not work this way, at least not in a simple, straightforward fashion.  There is not always a straight line between a given biblical statement and a behavior or practice in the real world of believers.  There never has been, and sensitive readers have always known that.  Moving from Bible to behavior requires careful thought in the context of a community of faith.

            What is the Bible, then?   A simple read-through would reveal a great many forms of literature, a multitude of ideas and commitment, and, in short, an extraordinary collection of human experiences and emotions.  Page after page of soaring poetry in every mode of human life from ecstasy to horror and despair.  Stories about kings and prophets, and of course Jesus of Nazareth and his marvelously self-deprecating disciples (who after all, gave us the stories of their own failures).  Visions of redeemed worlds and cosmic struggles.  All these things and more populate the pages of the Bible.  Much of it is poetry to be relished for its imagery and its profound insight into human existence.  Much else is narrative to be entered into with imagination and sympathy for the predicaments in which we find ourselves.  The very earthiness of the Bible, its refusal to embrace churchy, sentimental (that word again!), washed-out views of reality makes it both challenging and endearing.  It is still the inevitable book.

            At this point, however, many modern readers may offer objections that seems to them serious (though I personally find them much less so than I used to).  “If the Bible is just poetry or just story, then in what sense is it true?  Isn’t it just propaganda for somebody’s beliefs somewhere, maybe even just a power play?”  One hears this sort of thing all the time, and it makes sense to try to respond to it in some way.

            The first objection strikes me as the less serious.  We might well ask a question or two in response.  “What do you mean by true?”  Surely you don’t mean simply “verifiable” or “repeatable” in the way scientific experiments allegedly are.  If you do, then you are simply begging the question: only things that are verifiable and accessible to all are true because only things that are verifiable and accessible are true.  How do you know that the statement itself is true, since it can’t be testable in any timeframe or circumstance that would be manageable?

            Take, for example, the lovely little line from the Song of Songs: “Love is as strong as death.”  It comes near the end of the book after some of the most gorgeous passages in literature describing frustrated longing for one’s lover.  Is it true?  If empirical verification is our only avenue to truth, then of course we are at sea, since we can’t measure, much less compare, the strength of love or death.  Their  inevitability is our experience so far, but who can speak of the future, and who can say if “strength” and “inevitability” are the same thing?  Yet is it true?  Certainly our experience seems to indicate reasons to believe that it might be, and we often act as though it is.  I think we could multiply such examples a thousandfold, not only from the Bible, of course, but from all of human literature.  There is simply no reason to reject the Bible on grounds of scientism, since the belief that only science provides truth is simply a prejudice, an unwarranted assumption that is self-contradictory on its face.

            The second objection is thus more serious, in my view, and it is where most modern critics of the Bible land.  The claim we often hear is that the Bible is simply immoral, that it advocates practices and beliefs that hurt real people and that it attributes to God attitudes and beliefs that in a human being would be considered reprehensible.  This claim is so serious that many religious thinkers have felt a need to address it, going back more than two thousand years.  That will be the subject of my next post….

The previous sections of this discussion emerged from my reflections on the future of theological education in Churches of Christ, which is deeply bound up with what we imagine the future of this part of Christianity to be.  Educating young men and women – the Millennials along with Gen Xers and Baby Boomers entering second and third careers – will look different in the future because of the church’s needs will look different.  But different how?  What do we need to innovate, and what to conserve?  How do we help men and women cultivate the imagination necessary for bearers of God’s good tidings in our time?

Let me suggest a few things for discussion.

Rule # 1: Self-awareness is good.

Over the past half century, Churches of Christ have gone through a number of phases, not everywhere and not all at once, but still in fairly recognizable ways.  We shifted from a confessional group that defined itself by a fairly small set of doctrinal distinctives (some biblically rich and some not) to a group more focused on self-help and consumerist approaches.  Sermons changed from “God’s views of appropriate music in worship” to “10 steps to a better family life.”  And since the shift was largely driven by Baby Boomers, the emphasis on programming, media, popular music, and other practices that made us less different from the dominant culture were all the rage.  Some of that change was helpful, some was inevitable, and some is worth keeping.  Much of it, however, was pretty lightweight stuff, and the processes of change sometimes expended a huge amount of energy that left congregations incapacitated for further spiritual growth and addicted to finding the next cool gimmick, when they weren’t blown apart completely.  Surely it is time that those of us in progressive churches acknowledged at least some of these problems.  Sectarian legalism sometimes – too often – has given way to a cheap grace that glibly demands that God forgive us no matter how uncommitted we are.

Of course, it is easy to overstate the problems, and no one could reasonably want to return to the sectarian past.  Or, to put things much more carefully, the truth is that the Holy Spirit worked to enable men and women to live Christian lives both during the times we want to forget and the times we spent forgetting them (forgetting them over and over, ironically – but that’s another story).   Christian men and women in our churches have done extraordinarily good and gracious things over and over regardless of the dominant ambience of our congregational lives.   So maybe the first thing we should say about our identity – the first step in self-awareness – is that we have been and are a blessed people through whom God has helped many others.  We can celebrate that, in spite of our very real flaws.

Rule # 2: It’s not about programs.

It is tempting in our environment of change to fall back on learned behavior, and for churches that means seeking the next dramatic program.  Millennials not part of your church?  No problem!  We’ll create a program that will bring them in.

The problem with such an approach, however, is that it assumes that human beings are just out there waiting for us to market to them, if only we can do it correctly, but that once the marketing has taken effect, we can just turn it off and convert folks to a lifestyle of commitment impervious to other marketing messages.  As many Baby Boomer churches in the Willow Creek mold have learned, however, the outreach program that soft-pedals commitment does not naturally lead to a Christian lifestyle unless significant re-messaging happens.  But in that process, the risk of the bait and switch approach is high.  In other words, we risk treating human beings as something less than that title would deserve.  Our methods do not honor people as God’s creation sufficiently well.

For Millennials, in particular, such an approach is highly unlikely to work because this is a generation that is (1) highly sophisticated in its consumption of media messages; (2) fairly cynical about the motives of powerful people trying to sell them something; (3) interested, however, in genuine community and long-term service; and (4) significantly less familiar with Christianity than the Boomers were.  That is, we can no longer operate parasitically on prior generations of Christian experiences in the way that Baby Boomer churches did.  We have to start over.  And just launching programs without trying to launch community will not work.  In truth, it ought not to work because it demeans people and separates them from God, who calls us all into full humanness in imitation of the gracious autonomy of Jesus Christ.  These claims, if they are even close to being right, lead us to Rule 3.

Rule # 3: It’s about community.

I have been fascinated, like many others, with the Occupy Movement and its attempts at democratic, participatory decision-making.  My fascination comes in part because I am sympathetic with many of the movement’s desires and demands and because I think that, with all its problems, it has put its finger on something many Americans feel today.  Many of us, especially those just entering adulthood, feel radically disenchanted with the dominant culture’s construal of power, status, and wealth.  Interestingly, the mostly secular people involved in Occupy share some deep instincts that are pervasive in Scripture and front and center in the gospel message.  They believe that the economy exists for people, not people for the economy.  And they want to do something, somehow to bring about that healthier reality.  Shouldn’t churches be on board with that sentiment?  Surely the Jesus we preach and worship was, at least if you believe the Four Gospels.

So what to do?  How do we give our young people a stake in the church’s work as it lives into the mission of bearing good news?  Can we (1) make sure that our news really is good, (2) that is live-outable day to day, (3) that it includes a lifestyle of truth-speaking in love, and (4) that it is open to everyone, including the most vulnerable among us?  It would be hard to argue that most congregations look like community, but in even the most frozen, formalized, fractious churches there are tokens of God’s community because the Holy Spirit continues to act among us.  Can we not, then, build from what we have to something richer and more robust?  Has not God given us all we need to be what we need to be?  Yes, if we allow this to happen.

Unlike the artificial communities sometimes created by church programming, authentic Christian community cannot simply include people whose values, experiences, and expectations are just like mine.  Somewhere I read, “What thank have you, if you love those who love you?”  Christian community must include the vulnerable, the outcasts, the dysfunctional, the unsuccessful.  Otherwise, it is not Christian enough.  Of course, such community demands much harder work than the homogeneous units we often seek to create, but out of the struggle and joy of life together, we come closer to the God who created and loved us all.  Hence the next idea.

Rule # 4: It’s about God, who is for us.

Like many other American Christians, I have heard all my life the extraordinary text of St. Paul, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”  Not an offer of cheap grace, the rhetorical question functions as a sort of invitation.  Do we not wish to be in the presence of the Almighty Creator who ordered the world in such a way that we could flourish within it, gave a history and a set of norms to a people so they could live freely, and triumphed over death itself by raising Jesus as the “firstfruits of those who sleep”?  Would it not be the case that, if such ideas are true, they would compel a radical alteration in my way of being with others?  And would not a community that resulted from such an idea, or rather, such an experience, spend much of its time seeking to be in God’s presence by pursuing the means of grace such as prayer, forgiveness, service, and so on?  Christian answers to these questions would surely lead us to rethink our ways of worshiping, serving, and sharing the gospel with others.

Yet the truth is that many of our congregations do anything but this.  When we speak of God at all we take refuge in easy clichés and, frankly, a sort of thinly disguised narcissism.  So, for example, Jeremiah’s great promise that God has not forgotten Israel (plural “you”) and will work to redeem a whole people devastated by foreign invasion, enslavement, and death so that it can find its place anew (Jeremiah 29:29) has become a pretty little plaque on a wall about God’s alleged provision of whatever we want whenever we want it (singular “you”).  Far from being just an innocent little bit of bad interpretation of the Bible,  is not this domestication of a powerful, but raw text, really just a travesty?  Do we really imagine that God has nothing better to do than provide us with the things we can easily provide for ourselves while we neglect to care for those among us who are vulnerable?  What Bible do we read?  What reality do we see around us?

As I write this, I see my own attempts to control God and feel keenly the “we” in the paragraph above.  There is no “I” vs. “you” here.  For all of us, can we let God be God, and ourselves be God’s servants, and thus the servants of each other?  Can the church be humble enough to speak on behalf of God rather than using God language as a warrant for doing what we wanted to do all along?  I hope so.  And I believe so.  Because God is for us, and even when we are against ourselves, as we often are, nothing can separate us from this God.  There is a future for our churches, if we let there be.  If we are humble enough, imaginative enough, and generous enough a new generation of leaders will arise among us who can help us seek the table of a generous God nurturing a generous people.

Please respond to these ruminations, scattered and imperfect as they are.  Let us reason together, so that our sins can be as white as snow!

This is part 2 of 3.  Thank you for your comments to the first part of the essay.  I am grateful for the encouragement and look forward to the ongoing conversation!

The Theological Landscape Today

            But if the news is good, what precisely is it about?  To answer the question, let me step back to an event many of you remember because you were there.  In the summer of 1967, a new magazine was launched, Mission.  You know its history.  Some of you made it.  The impression one has in reading the early issues now is just how uncontroversial they seem, especially during the early years.  The academics and others who wrote it seemed to fit the basic theology of Churches of Christ rather well.  (I leave to one side cartoons of Nixon as a watch salesman on Fifth Avenue!)  Page 1 of the first number describes the journal’s three purposes as “to explore thoroughly the scriptures and their meaning,” “to understand as fully as possible the world in which the church lives and has her mission,” and “to provide a vehicle for communicating the meaning of God’s Word to our contemporary world.”  One might object to the hermeneutics of translation (kernel and husk) implied by the statements or note that the world was hardly as homogeneous as the sentences imply, but, after all, journal prospectuses are not the usual venue for subtlety, and so we can overlook those faults, if they are faults.

The curious and revolutionary part of the statement is that it seems to assume that we do not yet know fully what the Bible teaches and that the world as we experience it requires serious interpretation.  Both of these assumptions would seem to be givens today, but of course they have not always been.  This is why, within two years of the launch of Mission, other Church of Christ leaders, also mostly academics, founded The Spiritual Sword.  Page 1 of the first number of that journal set its course (by which it still sails, alas) by noting “The church is faced with critical challenges,” and promising to “meet these challenges,” especially the “threat of Liberalism.”  Their “defense of the faith” would “meet a specific and immediate challenge with a direct counter thrust of truth.”  The language of “combat” (their word, not mine) pervades the journal, and in fact has until this day.  So much for solidarity!  And so much for reasoned discourse!

Now my goal here is not to stroll down memory lane, especially since it’s not even my own memory but a bit of history.  I was just getting out of diapers when Mission was founded and was being taught in 1969 to avoid sharp objects, spiritual swords or not.  My point is, rather, to note that we have for a long time had different approaches to theological education.  One sought to understand and engage the theological worlds of Scripture and whatever else we could manage, and the other believed itself to command Scripture and to be able to ignore all else, or perhaps better, to learn about it so as to convert it (rather as a general would know his enemy).  It should be obvious with which approach my sympathies lie.

If we are to take the first tack stated so well by Mission and by my own teachers, we must ask where we are today.  Only in this way can we “understand as fully as possible the world in which the church lives and has her mission,” and “provide a vehicle for communicating the meaning of God’s Word to our contemporary world.”  This theological world differs very widely from that of the 1960s and 1970s, and the responses worked out then, I would argue, are almost completely irrelevant today.  It seems to me that three significant movements inform Christianity around the world today, albeit in many subforms.

The first is the critical reappropriation of tradition.  The second is the reinvigoration of structures, especially the congregation.  The third is renewed attention to spirituality.  These strands cut across denominational and even religious lines, and they are in large measure responses to the moves of two generations ago as well as the profound corruptions that secularization, and I would argue the birth of a form of capitalism utterly detached from its own social ends, has brought.  The theological models we worked out in the 1960s are ill prepared to deal with these movements, in my view, though we can do better.  Let me explain.

The Critical Reappropriation of Tradition.  Some of the most exciting work going on in theology today centers on the reclamation of the Christian tradition.  At some level, this is a reaction to the 1960s attempts at “modernization” and cultural accommodation to the secular city after the death of God.  Whether we are speaking of a generous orthodoxy, or critical realist reading strategies, or canonical theism, or the missional church, a major impetus to contemporary theology is the attempt to correct what is widely perceived as an excessive accommodation to one of several forms of modernity.  Thus we find a Sarah Coakley writing on the relationships between feminism and the Cappadocian notions of the Trinity or David Brown on the Bible and theological imagination or Nicholas Lash on hope after Marx, or whatever.  The various post-critical reappropriations of the Bible are part of this move, as we see in the work of scholars like Ellen Davis or, on the Jewish side, Jon Levenson.  But the task of reappropriation is much wider.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of this move.  It is also hard to know how a tradition like ours that began with an attempt to cut through tradition (talk about a self-effacing strategy!) to find a pure Christianity in the words of the New Testament should respond.  To me, we should begin by acknowledging the utter failure of restorationism as some of us have conceived of it.  The belief of high modernism in its Protestant expression that one could peel away layers of accretions to find the pristine core simply has proven intellectually untenable and institutionally unsustainable.  Moreover, the focus on institutions and practices (a focus both conservative and liberal strands in the Stone-Campbell movement perpetuate) stripped of theological underpinnings has proven a serious error, not only because it ignores the interests of the Bible itself but because it seems to forget the role of the Bible as a trigger of the Christian imagination.  In other words, the restorationism we inherited is radically reductionistic.  It is based on a logical fallacy – the genetic fallacy – and it eliminates more than it preserves.  It is an acid that dissolves too much.

At the same time, it is possible to construe restorationism in different ways, perhaps even in the language of Alexander Campbell himself, who wrote in the Christian System (p. 110):

First. Nothing is essential to the conversion of the world, but the union and co-operation of Christians.

Second. Nothing is essential to the union of Christians, but the Apostles’ teaching or testimony.

Or does he [Campbell’s imagined interlocutor] choose to express the plan of the Self-Existent in other words? Then he may change the order, and say,

First. The testimony of the Apostles, is the only and all-sufficient means of uniting all Christians.

Second. The union of Christians with the Apostles’ testimony, is all-sufficient, and alone sufficient, to the conversion of the world.

Neither truth alone, nor union alone, is sufficient to subdue the unbelieving nations; but truth and union combined, are omnipotent. They are omnipotent, for God is in them and with them, and has consecrated and blessed them for this very purpose.

In any event, we need a serious discussion here.  Our goal must be to reimagine the ends of our movement.

The Reinvigoration of Structures.  One of the most important insights of the Stone-Campbell movement was its confidence in the local congregation and its belief that denominational structures, however light, should be tested by their ability to serve the local church in its most fundamental work.  Perhaps we can take this congregationalism too far, but the basic orientation to the local community seems well-placed.

At the same time, we cannot merely be content with considering how to maintain basically well-functioning congregations.  Rather, ours is a time of renewal.  The need for renewal and the reexamination of cherished beliefs and practices that renewal presupposes should point us to the shape and content of our theological curriculum, both in the congregation and in the school of theology serving the church.  Shrinking congregations that are often mono-racial and increasingly out of touch with their neighborhoods and the spiritual needs of younger people (who often have no stake in the congregation’s success or failure) pose a serious threat to the survival of our fellowship.  We need to be honest about that.  Projects of renewal that draw on the best of our past and deepen our vision of our future require vigorous leadership, the training of which is surely the task of our schools of theology.

Even more difficult will be the reclamation of a pan-congregational consciousness.  The radical congregationalism that we inherited, which sees no legitimate structure between the local gathering of the saints and the ethereal Church Universal, provides us few resources for renewal except those intimately linked to sectarianism.  Can we imagine a collective identity that is not simply tribal or nostalgic, that does not depend on fear, family ties, or inertia, but seeks a worthy goal or end game (telos, for the Grecophiles among us!) that contributes to the whole Church?   This is a question for all of us, and how we answer it (indeed, how we ask it) will profoundly shape theological education for the next generation or more.

The Reclamation of Spirituality.  The widespread, cross-denominational turn toward prayer, fasting, acts of service in community, and the ordinances of baptism and communion mark a significant change in the contemporary church and a much needed correction of the disembodied Christianity of much of the evangelical world, including some parts of Churches of Christ.  Younger people seek to live as authentic servants of Jesus Christ, and those who enter ministry seek environments in which they can lead others to be disciples, not in which they will be caretakers of institutions they did not build.  Too many of us seem increasingly to believe that the congregation is a place in which they must silently avoid controversy so as not to upset the sleeping generations of Christians present there.  Such a view of congregations is too pessimistic, to be sure, but it has merit.  In some sense, this wider spiritual turn reflects a deeper awareness of the emphases of Scripture itself and thus should be welcomed by a movement that sets such store by the words of the Bible.  On the other hand, the turn also offers a major challenge to our churches, because the practices of Christian spirituality are often highly attenuated in most of them.

I see this complex mix of desires and ideas often with my students.  They long to pray, and they long to serve.  They often have not learned to do so in their congregations or families.  The school of theology must pick up much of that slack.  Doing so requires deep thought about curriculum, the formation of faculty, the relationships between congregations and the school, and other issues.

On Theological Ends and, therefore Means

All of these changes, then, raise a key question: what is the goal of theological education?  What is its end?  How does theological education serve the church as it serves the Triune God?  In what ways does our teaching of Scripture, church history, systematic theology, the history of doctrine, ecumenics, liturgics, homiletics, pastoral care, congregational leadership, and whatever else we think vital to a theological school work to form persons who can equip leaders to equip saints for ministries of justice, peace, and love?  (And it is important to distinguish these means from the ends of our work.)

There are perhaps three ways to describe the end of theological education.  The first is doxology: our work should bring glory to God the Father who redeems the world through Jesus Christ and dwells in the church through the Holy Spirit in bringing that redemption to completion.  Considered from this point of view, our work is thus a form of worship, a move of the human soul to the contemplation of God.

The second word is mission: the church has a goal beyond its own self-preservation or even growth.  The practices of theological education serve to form leaders who will help the church engage in its mission.  Thus our old distinctions between missions and ministry or missionaries and ministers prove to be empty or even destructive.

The third word, or rather phrase, is traditioned imagination: I mean by this that we who teach in schools of theology should induct leaders into a tradition that is not fixed but that requires by its very nature and history that its leaders find ways to help it develop faithfully as the work of God continues in our world.  Thus church structures and the ways in which we create and disseminate theological knowledge (in the congregation and outside it) give shape, albeit temporarily and provisionally, to a corporate reality formed in communion with God.  (If you want to connect these three items to the immanent Trinity in some way, that is your business, and I will not object, though I’m not sure I feel much need to do so.)

The point is that, however we articulate the ends of theological education, we should acknowledge that there are ends, that we should distinguish them carefully from means and measure the latter in terms of the former, that the ends do not revolve around the maintenance of the status quo, and that therefore, there will inevitably be tensions between our schools of theology and the rest of the church.  Whether this tension is creative or merely tense will depend on our ability to foster the kinds of broad and deep conversations that have hitherto been very difficult in our movement.

To be continued….

Once upon a time, a group of cousins inherited a large mansion, one of those plantation houses with wide be-columned porches all about, from which the owners could gaze across verdant lawns down to the river.  It had once been glorious, and parts of it still were, though it had recently fallen into decay.  “What shall we do with it,” said the cousins to each other.  “It’s beautiful just the way it is,” said one.  “Don’t change a thing.  This is the way it was planned, and no one should touch it”  “No, no,” insisted another.   “Nothing good ever happened in this house, and nothing good ever will.  Tear it down or sell it.  There’s a lot of rot and mildew and who knows what.”  A third chimed in, “Granted there are problems with the plumbing on the east side of the house, but we don’t have to go there.  The west side is where we used to get together at Christmas and tell stories and sing songs.  Don’t you remember the time….”  Her voice trailed off wistfully.  “Maybe we can just stay in this part and not go in the other.”  Then the last answered, “Cousins, we have to fix the house.  It’s got some great bones, but it does need work.  We need to fix it for our kids and their kids.”

Now you might ask me to explain my little allegory.  The interpretation is this: Churches of Christ in my lifetime have experienced a two-generations-long identity crisis.  The cousins have fought and cussed and argued, sometimes for good reason, sometimes not.  Some of us practice systematic denial of reality (both the arch-conservatives and the neo-denominationalists, albeit differently), others seem wedded to archness and snide criticism of the past (the so-called progressives), but some of us must work to repair and remodel the old house so that it can be a fit residence for the future.  What must we do?

Part of the reform will involve the training and support of leaders and thus the purposes and practices of theological education.  To reform Churches of Christ, we must reconsider the roles and especially the ends of theological education.  We must identify the contradictions and problems in what we inherited, the theological landscape of our time and place, and the resources and strategies for moving into the future.  Let me do that as part of this response.

Where we have been

To retrace our steps to this point, we might begin at the beginning.  In his 1839 prospectus for Bethany College, Alexander Campbell envisioned a school in which students would learn all that was “rational, moral, and subservient to good taste,” in which critical study of the Bible without “scholastic or traditionary [sic] theology” would create an environment hospitable to the formation of Christian persons.  No one would be trained for clerical leadership, for the movement neither wanted nor needed a professional clergy. This model for education of all Christians in a liberal arts environment has shaped Churches of Christ profoundly, as can be attested to by the tens of thousands of alumni of our colleges in leadership positions in our churches – and a lot of other churches – around the world.

Yet there is a problem here, and we must name it.  It became clear by the end of the nineteenth century that the failure to train clergy as such was a serious mistake.  Not only was it not possible to teach everyone all the things required by ministry as it had evolved over the centuries, but also it was not possible to train ministers properly in a strictly liberal arts environment.  Thus as early as the 1920s, schools like ACC attempted and failed to build full-fledged seminaries, and by the late 1940s Harding and ACC and shortly thereafter the rest of our schools had moved toward a mixed model.  Bible departments taught every student the rudiments of biblical theology, and they formed ministers at increasingly advanced educational levels.  Faculty carried heavy burdens in doing all this, but they managed, often at significant personal sacrifice, as long as the schools’ student bodies were relatively homogeneous theologically, ethnically, and socioeconomically. It was possible to pretend not to be training a professional clergy because we were also training everyone at some level and because the theological gaps between pulpit and pew were relatively narrow.  This mixed model has often served us well in creating vigorous lay leadership but has left unanswered the vital questions of just what it means to be ministers of the gospel in a full-time, ordained sort of way.  Our language betrays us here because we seem unwilling to call our ministers what they in fact are (and I think should be), a professional clergy.

This brings me, then, to a second problem.  Until the past decade, most of our Church of Christ colleges were extremely homogeneous institutions, especially theologically.  Most students, except at Pepperdine, identified their religious commitments with Churches of Christ, and all faculty members did.  The insider stories, assumptions, and even jokes formed part of the discourse.  That discourse could be critiqued in various ways – and was – and students could read far beyond its boundaries – and did, at least in some places – but the world of our schools was still comparatively closed theologically speaking.  We read about this or that theological movement, but no exponent of them ever taught at our schools.  The non-denomination could have many of the trappings of a denomination without acknowledging them.  I do not mean that everyone was sectarian.  Not at all.  But the non-sectarianism of even our most progressive schools had no practical implications in terms of hiring, student selection, curriculum development, the choice of outside speakers, and other tangible practices.  Nor did we encourage students entering full-time ministry to practice their theoretical ecumenism.  Rather, theological diversity lay hidden under a bushel.

This double-mindedness has become untenable today.  Undergraduate student bodies in many of our schools are well below 50% from Churches of Christ.  Brand loyalty is much weaker among all students, so that being “from” Churches of Christ need not imply a commitment to stay in them.  This means that the practices that allowed us to form lay leaders for Churches of Christ must be rethought in depth, and that we must learn to take seriously the priesthood of all believers and the catholicity of the Church in new ways.  The gap between the theological assumptions of alumni and those of current students is wide and growing.  Professors increasingly assume a mediatorial role, whether out of conviction or out of necessity.  (And the motivation matters!)

For the formation of professional ministers, the changing climate creates new challenges as well.  We are presented with ecumenical realities in a much more direct way.  We face squarely the call of training ministers who will work in post-denominational congregations of varying forms and structures.   They will need to work hard to rethink long-held traditions in light of new realities, especially the new reality that Christians today are able to draw on the whole storehouse of Christian practices and ideas, not just those that constellated in particular denominations or traditions (including our own).

In short, the realities that those who created our schools of theology in the 1950s and 1960s could assume simply do not exist anymore.  This is the news I must tell you, and this is why I think our conversation today is vital.  The apparent solidarity of the 1950s and 1960s has vanished into the past.  It has been vanishing for a long time.

Now some people would see all this as bad news.  I disagree.  Quite to the contrary, I think it’s the best possible news.  It means that we are now – finally – poised to take seriously what our teachers taught us about a vision of a non-sectarian Christianity in which human beings reflect adequately the justice and mercy and goodness of God.  What must we do now?

To be continued….

Psalm 58 is one of those troublesome hymns that seems much too honest for our polite, bourgeois church language.  Other than the first couple of verses, it contains a string of invectives that seem to fantasize about a world in which evil people (“those with venom like the serpent”) get their due comeuppance.  From the comforts of our upper middle class suburban dens, it all seems much to hot, too harsh to be something in the Bible.  Except for the first two verses.

The first two verses, however, offer a different frame.  The first line (not counting the superscription, which tags the psalm as a hymn for the choirmaster, perhaps sung to the ancient tune “Do not destroy,” whatever that was) reads in Hebrew: ha’umnam ‘elem tsedeq tedabberun (“Is it really so that you speak justice, ‘-l-m”).  The three consonants aleph-lamedh-mem (the second word in Hebrew) can be read as an adjective meaning “silent” or an adverb meaning “silently” (Hebrew doesn’t really distinguish between adjectives and adverbs most of the time).  Most medieval Jewish commentators read it that way.   Thus Rashi, in the eleventh century, imagines that the psalm relates to the story of David entering Saul’s camp and sparing the king’s life.  The proper response to such an act of mercy would be to search for a new level of justice in their relationship, which was not forthcoming. People were wrongly silent about fairness and equity.

Modern scholars have tended to read aleph-lamedh-mem differently, as the word for “gods,” which would have the same consonants.  Thus the NRSV translates the opening line of the psalm as “do you indeed decree what is right, you gods?”  If that is the right translation, as I think it is, then the psalm calls into question a social order in which various deities sit atop a social structure marked by injustice and oppression.  Like Amos and Micah, and their much later descendant Marx, the psalmist thinks that religion can, under certain circumstances, go terribly awry and be used to support terrible injustice.  Certainly there’s a lot to back up that assertion, as we have seen in our times with priest abuse scandals, fraud among televangelists, and the political coverage that some ministers have given to political leaders pursuing unjust wars. Religion can at times be the opiate of the people, and like all opiates, it can kill.

But the psalmist is no agnostic.  He or she offers a religious alternative to religious corruption.  It is faith in a God who does command justice and carries it out, and who is skilled enough at judging human beings to discriminate accurately between the just and the unjust.  This God is not impressed by  political propaganda that defines evil as what our enemies do and goodness as what we do.  This God recognizes that torture is torture and humiliation of the vulnerable is always evil.  This God does not relish being used for the narrow purposes of human powermongers seeking to defer the day of their own reckoning or divert the attention of others from their evil deeds.  As the psalm ends, it imagines a state in which human beings can recognize that God brings about righteousness on earth.  Surely, as Jesus himself said in the Sermon on the Mount, such a realization is a major goal of the faith of Israel and all its heirs, including us.

This psalm comes to my own life at a time when I am asking if I am radical enough in my pursuit of justice, or whether I am not too often selling out.  There are many layers to that inquiry, and I will not bother you with them now.  But I would recommend a book that is helping me, Terry Eagleton’s 2009 volume “Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate” (Yale University Press).  He manages to take on critics of Christianity from his own perspective, which takes seriously Marxist insights into the corruptions of all political and social systems AND takes seriously the claims of Christianity.  It’s a fun read, and even you’re not a Marxist (which I am not), you find yourself wanting to read more.  Often you will disagree (why read a book you always agree with?  that’s a waste of time if ever there was one), but you will not be bored.  And your faith will be deepened.  I think our psalmist would’ve liked it too.  The banality of much of American culture, the secular indifference to the suffering of people, and the self-indulgence of so much of American Christianity all come under examination.  That’s healthy.  And I come under examination too.  More on that another time.

One of the recurring notions of the Bible that seems counter-intuitive to many of us is that God’s reputation among human beings matters and that we religious people have some bearing on it.  It’s not that the Bible thinks that God needs human beings to carry out a given plan (as in the Star Trek film “The Final Frontier,” in which Spock’s half-brother Sybok thinks he’s being called by God, but finds instead a somewhat psychotic being trapped on a planet far from earth — that’s not the biblical picture of Israel’s God!).  But since the plans about which we know — assuming that God is up to many things that do not concern us — involve us and our reformation, what we think about those plans seems to matter.

So what do we think?  Psalm 57 begins with a call for divine graciousness, “for my life has taken refuge in you, yes, I have hidden in your wings’ shadow.”  The psalmist expresses an ongoing state of trust in the Almighty, a bold confidence that all will be well, in spite of the ferocity of opponents (v. 4 [5 in Hebrew]).  The psalmist’s confidence in God’s trustworthiness outweighs his/her awareness of the reality of danger on every hand.  Without denying the reality of evil in the world, the psalmist believes that God’s goodness outweighs evil.

The psalm next turns to a cry for future continuation of God’s past work.  “Let it arise over the heavens, O God, your glory over all the earth.”  The refrain opens and closes a major unit of the psalm, giving a sense of the whole.  In the Hebrew text, the word for “your glory” comes at the very end of the sentence, as if our poet wishes to make us wait to wonder what he or she wishes to extend over the heavens and the earth.  God’s splendor, shown by the willingness to save vulnerable human beings, transcends everything else in the cosmos, making all else pale in importance by comparison.  A world in which a gracious God reigns is a world that human beings can safely inhabit.

If the cosmos somehow reflects God’s care for us, and if the psalm is an example of how human beings testify to that, and if that testimony matters because other human beings can learn from it, then what is the nature of the testimony?  Two things: human beings can join God in the struggle against evil, and this struggle takes place in the context of celebration.  Thus verse 8 (Hebrew 9) calls for a new level of enthusiasm: “rouse up O harp and lyre, rouse up my liver” [emending the text slightly; Israelites often spoke of the “liver” the way we speak of the heart or mind).  The redeemed person has every reason to celebrate because we participate in the overcoming of evil.

A final, perhaps random, thought.  Like many people, I find it pretty easy to get discouraged by events in the world.  Some things just bug me, and you can guess what they are.  Some things should irritate us, because there is such a thing as righteous indignation.  The key is to pick which things.  But, at the same time, there are many things that inspire confidence in the possibilities for goodness in my fellow human beings, and even in myself.  Sometimes, it’s okay to say so.  Someone has said that cynics are just disappointed idealists.  Can we hold onto our idealism just a little longer?  If we do, is there a chance that others might notice and wonder what we found that they can find too?  Psalm 57 thinks so.  Many days — not always — I do too.

Psalm 56 appears in a string of psalms that affirm trust in God.  This string begins in Psalm 53, or maybe even 51, and continues for awhile (where it stops is a bit unclear, or rather, is a subjective decision).  These psalms seem to belong together somehow, and even the ancient compilers of the Psalter thought so, because they added to many of them a superscription linking the sentiments of the poems to episodes in the life of David.  They thus sought to show how a given psalm could play a role in the spirituality of a real person under real duress.  That is, the superscriptions offer a window onto the oldest easily recoverable layer of interpretation of these psalms, according to which they were deeply personal pleas to God for help in times of trouble, as well as offers of thanksgiving to God for that help, once provided.

Psalm 56 seems to consist of four basic units: vv. 1-4 express deep trust in God; vv. 5-7 reflect on the lamentable conditions the psalmist has faced and may face again (because hymns of praise always have lament in their background, and vice versa); vv. 8-11 returns to praise to God, though with a bit of an edge (v. 8′s “You have kept track of my trouble; my tears you placed on your parchment” [not bottle, as in RSV and older translations] — God has remembered the psalmist’s difficulties, recorded them for future reference, and thus honored them as meaningful and real); and vv. 12-13 end as many hymns and laments do, with a promise to give to God some token of thankfulness.

I am especially interested in the statements of trust in God because such an attitude seems far harder than simply a straightforward acknowledgement of life’s difficulties would be.  We all know that life is full of uncertainties and outright evil.  Only people in breathtaking levels of denial could argue otherwise.  Is there hope?  Can we trust God?  That’s the question.

The psalmist thinks so, and says so, in a series of a affirmations beginning in 9b (Hebrew 10b):

This I know, that God is for me (or mine)/In God I will praise a word (or thing)/in Yhwh I will praise a word./In God I trust/I will not fear.

To live without fear and to believe that the infinite creator of the universe cares about me in my tininess and my radical individuality are astonishing commitments.  They are very difficult to pull off, made all the more so because everything in our existence seems calculated to inspire fear.  How many of us expect our employers to provide us meaning in life?  How many of us vote our fears and prejudices?  Most of us, and most of us most of the time.  That’s the tragedy.

Yet the psalmist, for a brief moment, imagines an alternative world without fear.  It is without fear because God has that person’s — and every person’s — best interests at heart.  (This is not the same as saying that God agrees with me, by the way!) 

What are the implications of such a belief?  For Israel, and thus for Jews and Christians, the implication has been that we can believe that life has meaning and purpose, if not in every little detail, then at least in its broad outlines.  We may not be superstitious enough to think that God has planned out every relationship and experience we have — that would be silly — but we do believe that God has in mind the ends of human existence and invites us to live into them.  We are not simply animals drifting from one experience to the next.  We are embodied souls, a little lower than angels, who have a greater destiny.  We do not need to live with the despair that seems to dominate our materialistic, power-hungry culture.  Nor do we need to escape the world through New Age puffery about how wonderful we already are (even when we know we’re not).  Both approaches are fear-driven fantasies.  No, we can live in ways that bit by bit remove fear as a motivator so that we can be truly free to live into the ends that God has foreseen for us.  This I know, that God is for me….