Loving religious spoof — especially when it’s sort of “in-group.” I’m close enough to these folks to catch some of the allusive (and maybe some elusive) humor!
Category Archives: Religion
Leichty: “We have forty thousand of these things here”
The Agade list reports the passing Monday night of Dr. Erle Verdun Leichty (1933-2016), Emeritus Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Assyriology) at the University of Pennsylvania.
The announcement says,
In 2006, a number of colleagues and students banded together to produce “If a Man Builds a Joyful House. Assyriological Studies in Honor of Erle Verdun Leichty” (Brill). This volume is available for download at < http://tinyurl.com/zgdf9pb>. In it, his Penn colleague Barry Eichler tells about “Cuneiform Studies at Penn: From Hilprecht to Leichty,” where can also be found details on Leichty’s fine career and contributions.
I did not know Dr. Leichty, but did have a chance meeting with him at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 2004. I was looking for a particular ancient document and inquired of the staff. They could not provide the answer but said that Dr. Leichty might be…
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Footnote 34 – John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: The Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 2013), p. 213.
Lincoln on Emancipation, the Bible, and God’s Will
Lincoln gave voice to his thinking on the subject in September [1862] when a church delegation from Chicago came to the White House to present a memorial endorsing emancipation… He told the delegates that religious men regularly approached him with advice. They were invariably “certain that they represent the divine will.” But they came with radically opposing views (“the most opposite opinions and advice”), and not all of them could be right. It might even be that all of them were wrong.
And there was the nub of the problem. How could one learn God’s will, and if one could not, how could one make the grave decision…? “If I can learn what it is I will do it!” Lincoln said. But God’s justice was inscrutable. “These are not,” he reminded his memorialists, “the days of miracles.” There would be no “direct revelation.” …Confederate troops were no doubt “expecting God to favor their side” just as Union men thought that God would favor theirs….
But the Chicago Christians replied with a much older idea…Unbeknownst to them, their reply followed the course Lincoln’s own thinking had been taking over the previous weeks. Moral uncertainty, they observed, could not excuse paralysis. “Good men,” they conceded, “differed in their opinions.” But “the truth was somewhere,” and men could not merely set one opinion against another and throw up their hands. The moral leader had to act, had to bring “facts, principles, and arguments” to bear and come to a conclusion as to what justice required
…[W]hen the interview closed, it was clear that Lincoln and his Chicago petitioners were not so far apart after all. “Do not misunderstand me because I have mentioned these objections,” Lincoln told them. “Whatever shall appear to be God’s will I will do.”
34 John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York: The Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 2013), p. 213.
Roman Crucifixion
The week leading to the crucifixion & resurrection
The Week Leading to Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection
If we consider the Gospel of John a sort of “Day Planner” for Jesus, we have nearly complete activity recorded for two weeks of the earthly ministry of Jesus. The first is in John 1:19—2:11 where activity for six of the seven days is recorded. I think the omitted day is the Sabbath.
View of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. Imagine the city as it would have appeared to Jesus when he reached the top of the Mount of Olives. Photo by Ferrell Jenkins.
The next nearly complete week is the last week, leading up to the resurrection. John gives more attention to the last week than any other Gospel. Even here we have activities for only six of eight days. This section begins in John 12:1 and continues into John 20. Here is the way I have reconstructed it. Where John does not record the activity I have…
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Footnote 33 – Robert H. Gundry, Jesus The Word According to John the Sectarian: A Paleofundamentalist Manifesto (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 73–74.
“[T]he sense of embattlement with the world is rapidly evaporating among many evangelicals, especially evangelical elites, among them those who belong to the “knowledge industry.” In the last half century they have enjoyed increasing success in the world of biblical and theological scholarship. They reacted against the separatism of the fundamentalist forebears, who precisely in their separation from the world knew they had a sure word from God for the world.… with the consequent whetting of our appetite for academic, political, and broadly cultural power and influence are coming the dangers of accommodation, of dulling the sharp edges of the gospel, of blurring the distinction between believers and the world, of softening—or not issuing at all—the warning that God’s wrath abides on unbelievers (John 3:36), in short, of only whispering the word instead of shouting him, speaking him boldly, as the Word himself did.”
Robert H. Gundry, Jesus The Word According to John the Sectarian: A Paleofundamentalist Manifesto for Contemporary Evangelicalism, Especially its Elites, in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), pp. 73–74; cited in Steve Wolfgang, “Good News of Victory,” in The Gospel in the Old Testament, Ed. Daniel W. Petty (Temple Terrace, FL: Florida College Press, 2003), p.202, LOGOS edition.
The Annual Meetings # 1
Ferrell Jenkins reports on several professional meetings, which met recently in Atlanta. It was good to see Ferrell again, as well as David McClister, Jared Saltz, Matt Harber, Leon Mauldin, and others at these meetings.
Each year in November professional meetings pertaining to the field of biblical studies are held in a major U.S. city. The largest meeting is the SBL/AAR meeting. That is the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion. Together these organizations attract maybe eight thousand persons who are involved in teaching and researching in the fields of Biblical Studies and Religious Studies.
ASOR, the American Schools of Oriental Research, meets separately a few days ahead of the other meeting. This organization attracts those who are teaching and active in the field of Near Eastern archaeology.
The Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) currently meets at the same time as ASOR. I think in some recent years as many as 2000 members attend ETS. This organization attracts scholars who are admittedly conservative in their approach toward the Scriptures. Most of them teach in seminaries or religious schools.
Some international scholars attend…
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Why Are Our Camp Songs Older Than the Campers?
by Matt Bassford — Wednesday, October 28, 2015
A couple of weeks ago, the Joliet church held our annual youth day. We invited young people from across Chicagoland to come to Joliet for a Saturday to participate in Bible classes intended for their age group, sing, and hang out at the homes of various members. As we typically do, Josh Collier and I divided up the songleading between us, and we solicited hymn requests from those in attendance. Here are some of the requests I remember:
· We Bow Down
· Here I Am to Worship
· As the Deer
· We Will Glorify
· You Are My All in All
· How Deep the Father’s Love
· Glorify Your Name
On a surface level, these hymn requests appear to justify a point that is often made during discussions of contemporary hymns. Even in cases where the content of a contemporary hymn is lacking, brethren often defend its use in worship because “It’s what Our Young People like to sing.” Clearly, that’s the case. All of the hymns on the list above (some good, some not-so-good) come from a contemporary/camp strain of hymnody.
However, that answer merely invites another question. If Our Young People like to sing those hymns, why do they like to sing them? It could be that this is an example of popular, contemporary Christian music forcing its way into the kingdom. You have Christian teenagers who encounter these songs online or at a friend’s house and demand that they be introduced into a camp setting.
I think there’s some value in that, provided that it isn’t carried too far (I don’t think you want the least spiritually mature members of the congregation setting the worship agenda), but it doesn’t appear to be what’s actually happening. The praise songs in question are too old.
“We Bow Down” was written in 1984. “Here I Am to Worship”, in 2000. “As the Deer”, in 1984. “We Will Glorify” has a copyright date of 1982. “You Are My All in All” was copyrighted in 1991. “How Deep the Father’s Love”, in 1995. “Glorify Your Name”, written in 1976, is older than I am.
The most recent song on that list, “Here I Am to Worship”, is 15 years old. I remember when I first started getting interested in pop music, back in 1989. A lot of the music I started exploring came from my brother, who is 13 years older than I am. Even with his help, though, the very oldest bands and albums I started listening to came from no further back than 1980, about 10 years in the past. Anything older than that, I would have identified as “oldies”, coming from a musical era different than my own.
This suggests to me that whoever is pushing the body of contemporary hymns and praise songs (and I think somebody is), it isn’t Our Young People. I think it’s their parents. A few months ago, when various Joliet kids returned from summer camp, “Sanctuary” (copyright 1982) made a couple of Sunday-morning appearances, which thankfully have not been repeated. Afterward, I overheard one of the brethren in my age cohort talking about how “Sanctuary” was to him one of those core Bible-camp experiences.
Here’s how this works. 40-year-old camp counselor is preparing an evening devotional. He thinks back to the time when he was a teenager at camp, and he remembers the praise songs he loved to sing then. He introduces them into a spiritually and emotionally charged setting. Forever after, the campers associate those praise songs with the spiritual high they felt that evening, so they ask for them to be led (or lead them) whenever the opportunity arises. Other Christians observe this pattern, conclude that Our Young People really like contemporary hymns, and push for their inclusion everywhere.
In reality, the driving force here is not progress, but nostalgia. Contemporary praise songs are benefiting not from their innate appeal to Our Young People, but from the camp devotional experience. I suspect that any hymn introduced into such a setting will quickly become a camper favorite, even if it’s 300 years old.
Counselors, then, have a golden opportunity to spiritually shape their young charges. There are good, emotionally powerful hymns from every era of English hymnody. Introduce those. Don’t lean on the mixed body of contemporary hymns, just because they’re contemporary. Singing a spiritually pointless praise song from the early ‘80s is a waste. Admittedly, it does reflect a certain set of preferences, but those preferences don’t belong to the campers. They belong to those who are supposed to be instructing them.
http://hisexcellentword.blogspot.com/2015/10/why-are-our-camp-songs-older-than.html
Pharaoh’s chariot wheels and other things that won’t float — Examining the claims of the late Ron Wyatt
Forgiven Sinners
Despite the Reformation/Lutheran bent, I found this blog post, via my friend and high school classmate Dan Moriarity, thought-provoking and, well … provocative generally. While it caricatures the Pharisees (as “grace preaching” too often does) as the worst of the worst (so that we feel better about not being “them”?) much of it has the ring of truth. It seems to give short shrift to the simple, sobering fact that what got us in trouble in the first place, the root of our “rejecting forgiveness,” is our refusal to listen to what Jesus says and accept the “light burden and the easy yoke” while we continue to scoff at whatever of his words we don’t like and often just ignore the rest, persisting in our own self-destructive stubborn stupidity. Wherever one comes down in the great “New Perspectives on Paul” debates, and even if one reads the NT through Reformation-colored goggles, the central issue isn’t really what 2nd-Temple/1st-century Judaism generally (or sectarian Pharisaism specifically) thought about the renegade rabbi’s theology. It’s about how I/you read what the Spirit says about grace, forgiveness, God’s steadfast love, and related concepts. As this blog clearly demonstrates, mis-perceptions about such concepts are by no means limited to one particular religious communion — as some high-minded folk who don’t seem to have had much exposure to the wider religious world seem to think. A dead give-away to such thinking is often when someone begins a blog with (or includes the line) about “what I heard growing up” and then generalizes from their anecdotal experiences and memories (accurate or not) to universalized conclusions about everyone else, as if others were made in their image. One wonders if such folk begin their prayers, “Lord, I thank Thee that I am not like others, especially those Pharisees…”
For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance. (Matthew 9:13)
In the Name + of Jesus. AMEN. Matthew is thrilled, of course, but the Pharisees are horrified. Jesus calls this tax farmer to be his disciple; this crook, this mafia style enforcer for the Roman government. Then, as if that wasn’t enough to spin up the local gossip mill, other tax collectors and sinners who’ve heard the astonishing news that Matthew went and got religion – they crash the dinner party Jesus is at! … How could the religious leaders not be appalled at Jesus’ behavior?
You see, what the Pharisees are blind to is that the only way you can get yourself in permanent trouble with God is to refuse forgiveness. That’s hell. What Jesus reveals to us in the calling of Matthew is that the old baloney about heaven being for good guys and hell for bad guys is dead wrong. Heaven is populated entirely by forgiven sinners, not spiritual and moral supermen. And hell is populated entirely by forgiven sinners too. The only difference is that those in heaven accept God’s grace of forgiveness in Christ Jesus and those in hell reject it. Which is why heaven is a wedding party – the endless reception of the Lamb and his bride – and hell is nothing but the dreariest bar in town.
Jesus shows us that grace is wildly irreligious stuff, vulgar even. It’s more than enough to get God kicked out of the God union that the Pharisees have formed to keep him on his divine toes so he won’t let the riffraff off scot-free… But if all we can think of is God as the Eternal Bookkeeper, the Almighty Tax Collector in the Sky, putting down black marks against sinners, keeping exact amounts and accounts of who owes what to him – or God as the Celestial Mother-in-Law giving a crystal vase as a present and then inspecting it for chips every time she comes for a visit… well then, any serious teaching about grace is going to scare the rockers right off our little religious hobbyhorses.
Jesus did not come to teach the teachable, reform the reformable, perfect the perfectible, or improve the improvable. He came to save tax collectors and sinners. He came to save the least, the last, the little and the lost. He came to raise the dead. But it hurts our pride to admit our helplessness. It pains us to agree that our own death is the one thing needed for salvation. Surely, we think, there must be something we can do to earn God’s approval.
Even if we are not convinced that God can be conned into being favorable to us by way of our pious show of religious devotion, or chicken sacrifices, or the gritting of our moral teeth, we still have a hard time shaking the belief that stepping over sidewalk cracks, or hanging up the bath towel so the label won’t show, will somehow render the Almighty Maker of heaven and earth kindhearted, softheaded, or both.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ, however, proclaims that the entire religion shop has been closed, boarded up, and forgotten. Christ’s Church is not in the religion business. She never has been and she never will be, in spite of all the pew-perching turkeys through two thousand years who have acted as if religious devotion was their stock in trade… Christianity is not a religion. It is the announcement of the end of all our spiritual bookkeeping.
This bothers us of course, because we are positively addicted to keeping records and remembering scores… [but] if God has announced anything in Jesus, it is that He, for one, has pensioned off the bookkeeping department permanently… as he shows us by calling Matthew away from his bookkeeping.
Jesus comes to the world’s sins with no lists to check, no tests to grade, no debts to collect, no scores to settle. He wipes away the handwriting that is against us and nails it to his cross (Colossians 2:14). He saves, not some miniscule group of good little boys and girls with religious money in their piggy banks, but all the stone-broke, deadbeat, overextended children of this world whom he sets free in the liberation of his death…
At the end of the sermon, I sometimes see smiles. I see faces light up – faces which, in spite of a lifetime’s exposure to our church’s teaching about grace, seem for the first time to dare to hope that maybe there isn’t a catch to it after all, that even out of the midst of your worst shipwrecks you are still going home free for the pure and simple reason that Jesus calls you. I see barely restrained hilarity at the sudden recognition that he really means it when he says his yoke is easy and his burden light.
But after the sermon, after the service in the time it takes some of you to get to the coffee, the smiles have been replaced by frowns, mumbles, and gossip. Your fear that there must be some kind of catch has caught up with you again, and you surround the messenger of hope and accuse me of making the world unsafe for your religious devotions and morality… “Be careful how you preach grace,” you complain, “some people might think you’re saying that the more we sin the more God loves us.”
Martin Luther once said a preacher is not truly proclaiming grace until he is suspected of promoting sin. A preacher of Christ crucified FOR YOU relishes this risk for the opportunity to shake you out of self-justifying scorekeeping. To show you that no matter how well you think you’re doing as a Christian, you resent salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
Take for example, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The tax collector returns to the temple the next week. Don’t we all expect a little reform to show he’d deserved God’s mercy last week. No whoring this week maybe, or drinking cheaper whiskey and giving the difference to the American Cancer Society? We are hellbent on destroying Jesus’ parable by sending the tax collector back for his second visit to the temple with the Pharisee’s speech in his pocket.
This is why you listen politely to the pastor go on about grace in his sermon then pray on your way out of the service, or in your car during the drive home, “Lord, please restore to me the comfort of merit and demerit. Show me that there is at least something I can do. Tell me that at the end of the day there will at least be one redeeming card of my very own. Lord, if it is not too much to ask, send me to bed with a few shreds of self-respect upon which I can congratulate myself. But whatever you do, do not preach grace. Give me something to do, anything; but spare me the indignity of this indiscriminate grace and acceptance.”
But, Jesus’ life and death and resurrection is a witness to God’s wildly irreligious, vulgar grace. A grace that amazes us even as it offends us. A grace that pays the eager beaver who works all day long the same wages as the grinning drunk who shows up at ten till eleven on Sunday morning. A grace that hikes up his robe and runs breakneck toward the prodigal son who reeks of sin and wraps him up and decides to throw a party… no ifs, ands, or buts. A grace that raises bloodshot eyes to a dying thief’s request –”Please, remember me”– and promises him, “You bet I will!” A grace that is the pleasure of the Father, fleshed out in the Carpenter-Messiah, Jesus the Christ, who left His Father’s side not for heaven’s sake but FOR YOUR SAKE.
God’s wildly irreligious, vulgar grace is indiscriminate kindness. It works without asking anything of you. This grace is not cheap though. It’s free, and as such will always be a banana peel for the Pharisaical foot and a fairy tale for our grown-up sensibility that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The grace of Jesus Christ is enough even though we huff and puff with all our strength to try to find something or someone grace cannot cover. Grace is enough. He is enough. Jesus is enough. AMEN.
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