Resistance.

The word “resistance” in the bible is so much more forceful than it is in English. This is interesting when Jesus uses it the gospels (“do not ‘resist’ an evil person…” Matt 5:38; is Jesus warning Israel not to resist Rome?), but it is particularly interesting in the context of our responsibility to resist sin. The fact is, the verb “to resist” (antistenai, antistenai) is almost a technical term for resistance of a military sort (N.T. Wright). When Josephus uses it (just 30 years after the life of Christ) he means “violent struggle” 15 out of 17 times (Wars of the Jews). So, at the very least the word implies a violent struggle rather than passive resistance. Consider James 4.7-10:

Submit yourselves then, to God.

Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded

I could write another entire article on the beautiful, essential Jewishness of this short passage, about the way James references the Psalms, Wisdom literature and the prophets all in the space of these few lines. These three verses are positively pregnant with meaning. The verb “resist” in vs. 7 is a conjugate of antistenai; James envisions the people he’s writing to as being engaged in a violent struggle with sin, which is actually comforting considering the mild chewing out he’s just given them in the first three chapters.

This is not supposed to be easy. Struggling with sin, violently resisting it, is not an indication that anything is wrong. On the contrary, the opposite is true: if you’re not struggling, it’s not because you’re better than those who are; it’s likely that you’ve given up.

In the Old Testament, Jacob wrestles with an angel, refusing to let go until the angel gives him a new name, which is another way of asking for a brand new start. Jacob needed that. We usually miss half the point of the story. Jacob walks away with a new name…and a limp. John Wimber, one of the founding Pastors of the Vineyard Family of Churches was thinking of this when he said, “Never trust a leader without a limp.”

Hell

For some reason or other I’ve had a lot of conversations about hell lately. I don’t know why. It seems to be one of those topics that spring up unexpectedly, like little conversational weeds growing out of the sidewalk. It’s one of those subjects that pastors dread, innocently positing as genuine curiosity what is really a Trojan horse of litmus test of orthodoxy. Worse yet, much of what is so confidently asserted from pulpits or axiomatically lobbed out in TV sound bites has only a passing relationship to what scripture has to say (which is admittedly very little) or what can be inferred rationally by reading between the lines.

Scripture is largely silent on the topic of hell, which seems strange from the standpoint of Christianity’s near-obsession with it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Christianity presented as little more than a much better alternative to eternal suffering. Love, justice, mercy, grace and free pardon all take a back seat to the necessity of avoiding damnation, which must be done no matter what else you do. When scripture talks about the concept we know as “hell”, it typically uses one of two words as a description:

Gehenna (Josh 15.8, 18.6, 2 Chron 28.3, Is 30.33 [by inference, “the burning place”], 66.24 [cited by Jesus in Mark], Matt 5.22, 5.29, 5.30, 10.28, 18.9, 23.15, 23.33, Mark 9.43, 9.45, 9.47, Luke 12.5, James 3.6) can be used to describe one of several things. As a physical location it refers the Valley of Hinnom (the literal meaning of the Hebrew Ge Hinom) south of Jerusalem, which was reputedly the place where pagans sacrificed their children to Moloch (or whatever other Canaanite god was in vogue at the time). Later the Valley of Hinnom purportedly became a gigantic, smoldering garbage heap. In addition to the ordinary refuse that would have been part and parcel of a 1^st century garbage dump, supposedly the unclean dead, those who didn’t warrant life in the “bosom of Abraham” were disposed of here. This would include those unfortunate Jews who died of certain diseases (especially those that resulted in skin disorders or obvious bleeding), execution for serious Torah violation or, heaven forbid, crucifixion by the Romans. You can imagine the horror of a place like this; the stench alone would make the area uninhabitable for miles around. Now imagine that you’re a Jew during that time period. It’s hard enough to maintain an adequate level of ritual purity under ordinary conditions; a Jew would not be permitted to touch even the dead who died pure. Gehenna would be the worst place you could possibly think of. The level of uncleanness would mean eternal separation from God, who could never have been imagined to inhabit a place like Gehenna. Those whose bodies were thrown onto the trash heap were an awful, visible reminder of the stakes of Torah observance. In other words, a person who was careless in terms of Torah might very well have been asked the question, “you don’t want to wind up in Gehenna do you?”

Sheol (Dt 32.22, Ps 86.13, Gen 37.35, 42.38, 44.29, 44.31, 1 Sam 2.6, 1 Kg 2.6) is a place of separation from YHWH. It is cold and distant, like the surface of the moon from which extraction is impossible. It is “outer darkness”. This word can also be translated “death” or “the grave”, roughly the equivalent of the Greek concept of Tartarus. No matter what way you translate the word, the strong inference is that Sheol is a place that was never meant for human beings to begin with. It’s a place for the dead, not for YHWH’s vindicated covenant people.

So, right off the bat I think we’re on firm ground both biblically and rationally to say the following:

1. Hell is a place of total separation from God, from each other and from God’s creation from which there is no escape. C.S. Lewis was right to say, “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked from the inside” (The Problem of Pain, my italics and emphasis).
2. Hell was never made for human beings to begin with. An individual who winds up there no longer reflects the image of God in any meaningful way.

The view of hell that is authoritatively asserted, that of a physical locale wherein the damned are tortured in flames, bears little resemblance to scripture’s image. The closest it comes is Gehenna, but one must realize that the point is not rigid literalism; the point is that Gehenna is the worst thing Jesus (or anyone else in 1^st Century Judaism) could imagine. If one could pick a place not to spend eternity, that would be it. One might press into service the lake of fire from Revelation 20.15, but that would force the literal interpretation of that one image from the midst what is, by all accounts, a highly figurative (and highly subversive) writing. Consequently the reader would be forced for the sake of consistency to adopt a similarly rigid literalism for the rest of Revelation, which lands you in all sorts of exegetical hot water. No – it’s quite simply the case that the bible doesn’t intend for us to understand hell that way.

The hell that most of us imagine is almost entirely a figment of the medieval cultural imagination, which was itself an outgrowth of the horrors of the Dark Ages, followed closely by the death of much of Europe by plague. Some of the oldest images of hell envision something like a torture chamber in middle of a beautiful castle, where the torments of the damned served as part of the reward for the redeemed. The first detailed literary picture of hell came from The Inferno by Dante Alighieri, written between 1308 and 1321AD. However, The Inferno was not then, and is not now, meant to be understood primarily as a detailed description of what hell might be like; The Inferno is a political diatribe, a polemical argument that took aim at the Italian monarchy, the corrupt church government and the legal system of the 14^th century. In terms of its take on punishment, the work is entirely a product of the medieval world-view, wherein when one insulted the honor of the king the consequences did not involve prison terms or community service. They involved horrific torture, then a slow, agonizing death by mutilation or burning in most cases. Furthermore, torture was not then what it is now. No one was tortured or mutilated in order to obtain information (though it was useful in obtaining confessions), nor was torture primarily used as a deterrent to other would-be brigands, rebels or what have you. Torture was a deeply symbolic activity in which the body of the victim was destroyed methodically as a means of robbing them of honor, which was symbolically then restored to the king. The body became so unrecognizable that it was no longer human; that is to say, no longer an object of compassion, and possibly not recognizable in the after life. To put it another way, one received on earth what one could expect in the hereafter. This is the image of hell that was overwhelmingly accepted at the time of the Reformation in 1517AD, and which was consequently received as doctrinal truth from that time forward. The important thing to note is that it is more a function of the culture of that day and age than it is an accurate description of the relevant scriptural and extra-biblical data.

If we take the scriptural data as a whole I think the most accurate description is the one N.T. Wright takes up in Surprised by Hope:

God is utterly committed to set the world right in the end. This doctrine, like that of the resurrection itself, is held firmly in place by the belief in God as creator, on the one side, and the belief in his goodness, on the other. And that setting right must necessarily involve the elimination of all that distorts God’s good and lovely creation and in particular of all that defaces his image-bearing human creatures.

(SbH, N.T. Wright, pg. 179)

When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. My suggestion is that it is possible for human beings to so continue down this road…that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, beings that once were human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all. With the death of that body in which they inhabited God’s good world, in which the flickering flame of goodness had not been completely snuffed out, they pass simultaneously not only beyond hope but also beyond pity. There is no concentration camp in the beautiful countryside, no torture chamber in the palace of delight. Those creatures that still exist in an ex-human state, no longer reflecting their maker in any meaningful sense, can no longer excite in themselves or others the nature sympathy some feel even for the hardened criminal.

(SbH, N.T. Wright, pg. 183)

I think that description does justice to the texts and preserves intact for all a strong understanding of God’s goodness, his justice and his mercy. In The Problem of Pain C.S. Lewis presents hell as an expression of God’s justice, which is in turn an expression of his love, but when confronted with the idea that God casts his sinful creatures into hell, Lewis reacts strongly. God doesn’t send anyone to hell. We do that all by ourselves, by worshiping what is not him and subsequently becoming like what we worship. In The Great Divorce Lewis says:

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.

(The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis)

Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell.

(The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis)

There is one last thing that, as a Pastor, bothers me more than anything else where this subject is concerned. Disturbingly, though the idea of hell should arouse horror in the heart of every Christian, who should desire most ardently of all people that hell were empty, I often notice in them a rather nasty sense of perverse glee when the topic comes up. The evil people, the ones who’ve always caused so much trouble and consternation, will receive their comeuppance. Finally, like schoolyard children we will witness the punishment of the bullies, reveling in their tears while our Father dries ours. The suffering of the damned will be the vindication of the blessed, to say it another way. One must be careful traveling down this road I think, as it is not properly Christian thought at all, but indulgent vindictiveness. If we find ourselves in this state, we must realize that it is not divine justice we seek, but vulgar, self-righteous vengeance. Our Lord impresses upon us the importance of forgiveness for this very reason: that we should not become as evil as those we condemn and so share in their fate, now or in the end.

The longer I'm a pastor, the more clearly I see that the Reformation is not over yet. The deep divisions between the One Holy Church and her rebellious offspring have never completely healed, and like all pain that is deferred it has become simmering resentment that is the black background to current doctrinal and theological debates, no one of which would normally cause such lingering vitriol. It's just like a bad marriage where every argument accesses a deep well of hot resentment, and subsequently escalates into World War III. Every hill worthy to die on; no issue is too small that there isn't space to plant a new flag.

So it is with the Church, and books of the bible like James show this more plainly than others. James is by all accounts a very challenging book; it leaves aside complex theology and engages the difficulties of Christian ethics, which formed very early in the history of God's people (within 15 years of the life of Christ). It brings up a topic which has been hotly contended since the Reformation: how does what we do figure into this thing? Before the Reformation works played prominently not just in our growth but in the fact of salvation itself. Certainly that latter theological/doctrinal move was not appropriate given the scriptural data we have available, but experience, tradition and reason seemed to deem it necessary. However, the Reformers' answer was to banish works to the barren wilderness of total irrelevance, resulting in doctrines which are a distortion of that same scriptural data (eternal security, for example).

Certainly that was, and is, an over reaction, a fact which the book of James makes very clear. What we do matters a great deal, not in terms of securing grace or even maintaining it (necessarily), but it terms of becoming the new human beings that God has intended since the Fall. God's grace is mediated to us by his love alone as an internal work, but the Kingdom of God is mediated to the world by virtue of what that grace impels us to do. In other words, though our eternal lives may not depend on what we do, the eternal lives of others certainly may.

Secondly, there have always been those religious people who carry all of the right identity markers; outwardly they clothe themselves lavishly in all the right values and when tested can articulate them all with ornate Christian vernacular. Outwardly they are pious and devout; inwardly they are a study in conflict, contradiction and competition that poison the headwaters of love and render useless whatever correct theology or doctrine they might engage.

These are the critical issues of the book of James, which challenges any attempt to detach belief from activity or vice verse. As our Lord makes clear in Matthew 22:37-40, each is evidence of the other. They are two sides of the same coin.

Enough.

There's been a lot of discussion about what's happening with the proposed mosque near ground zero in New York City. Actually, the word "discussion" is really a rather obvious euphemism for the low quality of discourse that's prevailed over the last several weeks, culminating in a proposed Koran burning in reprisal. This seemed like a good time, on the day before the 9th anniversary of 9/11, to write about this. First, a quick word about the invective, the vitriol and the thinly veiled bigotry I hear just about every day now:

ENOUGH.

Many of the people I hear engaging in this kind of nasty rhetoric are the same ones who would be first in line to chastise a fellow Christian for cursing by pressing into service Paul's injunction to the Ephesians: "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths." (Eph 4:29). You know what's really ironic? Paul wrote this letter to the church in Ephesus to address the problem of the widening racial/social gap between the Jewish Christians and the newer Gentile converts or those who were headed in that direction. The letter is all about erasing (or at least blurring) the ethnic lines that were dividing them because God's love is for EVERYONE who will avail him/herself of it. He says the same things in Galatians 3:28 and in Romans 10:12. In other words, it's not about swearing; it's about not doing exactly what many people are now doing: filling their speech and their interactions with what amounts to nothing more than racial or ethnic bigotry. The only thing the vast majority of Muslims in the world have in common with the attackers on 9/11 is their religious beliefs and ethnicity.

STOP.

First and foremost, as Christians, we are called to love without judgment. That includes the very men who flew the plans on 9/11. I realize that's a tall order for most people, including me, but we can start somewhere easier. How about our Muslim friends, neighbors, co-workers or acquaintances? Furthermore, as Christians we should know that we have an Enemy and it's not Islam. Our Enemy would like nothing better than to distract us from engaging others with God's love, splitting us up so as to make us easier targets. We are called to BE Jesus to Islam, not to judge it, find it wanting and pour out our hatred on it. The Christians who are doing that are committing an act that's at least as hostile as the men who planned and executed the attacks. If we fly the black flag of hatred over our lives then the Enemy has won. He's achieved exactly what he wanted to achieve. Don't be fooled; if you can hate this entire ethnic group, you can hate any of them. There will always be a reason because of the pervasively degenerative effects of sin. Besides, isn't Christianity supposed to be attractional? Isn't it God's kindness that leads to repentance? If God, who could do it any way he wanted, does it that way, do you think it's a good idea for us to behave differently? If the bible is clear on one aspect of Christian behavior it is that it should be characterized by love and by mercy, which are the fruit of the Tree of Life.

Even putting Christianity entirely aside, as a former soldier, I can tell you this with great assurance: burning Korans and spewing hate-speech is not going to help the men and women who are currently serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places. You're not being a patriot. You're making their jobs harder and more dangerous. You're deepening the nationalist resentment and prolonging and intensifying the violence. This is bad enough...please don't make it worse by intentionally escalating the tension. Also remember that the very liberty that guarantees Christian freedom also guarantees Muslim freedom. If we start digging away at the ground underneath Islam, we will certainly find that we have eroded the ground underneath Christianity. I know this is hard for some to hear, but this is not a Christian nation. This is a nation where religious pluralism is the rule and the law. That is the way the Founding Fathers set things up. The reasons were many and varied, but a quick survey of the last several thousand years of history will make this abundantly clear: you don't want a state-sponsored religion. In every nation where that has been the case the result has been persecution of one minority or another at best, and genocide at worst.

I was serving in the military on Tuesday, the 11th of September 2001. I served for two years after that, though my term of service should have ended in March of 2002. I know the idea of a mosque so close to ground zero seems like it's in poor taste because of the specific nature of the attacks. I understand the visceral reaction. However, the foundational tenet of Christian ethics is the idea that no feeling has a right to be indulged simply because it exists. We examine everything in the light of Jesus' finished work and the kingdom to come, and then choose our behavior accordingly. Jesus has called us to do lots of things that seem unnatural; loving those who seem to hate us is just one of them. The acquisition of any new habit or behavior takes an inordinate amount of energy and concentration. It will be difficult, but why not start here? We have to start somewhere.

"How can you speak good things when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." - Matthew 12:34

"As water reflects a face, so a man's heart reflects the man." - Proverbs 27:19

"Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear." - Ephesians 4:29

Like us in every way...

"...but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin."

- Hebrews 4:15

It's funny what we do with that word "tested". It comes from the Greek word periasmos (in the perfect tense in this particular case, pepeirasmenon), which can indeed mean "tested", but I think more properly means "tempted" in these kinds of contexts. So, a re-reading would be:

"...but we have one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin."

The word "sin" at the end is held in tension with the word "tempted", which makes much more sense than the word "tested". Jesus was tempted just like we are, but he didn't sin. That's exactly the point of the difficultly I think. We just can't quite bring ourselves to confess that Jesus was tempted in exactly the same way that we are because we can't get through it without sin. We can't imagine Jesus doing it either because that creates two more problems: on one hand, we want him to be exactly like us in essence, which creates skepticism about his sinlessness. On the other hand we want him to be more than we are (divine), which means that he's not really human. It's a knife that cuts both ways.

It's a false dilemma though. We do, in fact, confess that Jesus was "like us in every way except for sin" (Fourth Eucharistic Prayer), and that he was fully man and fully God "without confusion, without change, without division (and) without separation " (the Chalcedonian Creed). Theologically all we're really saying is that Jesus was perfect; in practical terms that simply means that he had a perfect will that could choose perfect obedience, even if that meant death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-11).

The important thing for us to realize is this: he was the first of a new humanity. Some day we will all be able to obey God perfectly because we will all be like Jesus, who was the firstborn of a new family (Romans 8:29). More to the point, the context of Hebrews 4 has to do with Jesus the new High Priest of an order older than that connected with the Exodus and the Law. He is our stand-in, the One who intercedes on our behalf precisely because he knows what we have to work with. He knows our temptation and so can sympathize, but his perfection allows his to do something about it. He is the man with one foot on the bank of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity; his sinlessness is what makes him useful to us, and in his humanity he assumes every part of us so that he can atone for it.

He is our final High Priest. He is our peace with God.

Suffer Well

"Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need." - Hebrews 4:16

"...faith knows that the mercy of God is given to those who seek Him in suffering, and that by his grace we can overcome evil with good." - Thomas Merton, "The Word of the Cross"

As a Pastor, I'm often the one a person calls when he/she needs to come to terms with pain. My experience has been that almost everyone can countenance the idea of suffering that has a clear goal; pain experienced while recovering from surgery, for instance. It's the body's way of healing itself; it is not an indication that anything is wrong. It's purposeless, random suffering that creates the most actual pain which leads to the theological dilemmas. Though we can talk about all the reasons why such suffering can and should exists while God is still omnipotent and good, that's not usually very helpful. There are many more times than not that there is no help for it. It's really going to hurt and probably for a while because pain is not a part of the problem; it is part of the solution.

It's at this point, that one reaches a fork in the road. Not all suffering is holy; as a matter of fact, nothing becomes unholy so easily as suffering. Merely accepted, suffering does nothing for our souls except, perhaps, to harden them. Edurance alone, as though Christianity were a cult of suffering, is no consecration. Suffering is consecrated by faith, not in suffering itself, but in God; in the end what we consecrate to God in suffering is not our pain but ourselves.

This is not to minimize the reality of evil or diminish the pain any one of us experiences in some patronizing way, as if "it's not really so bad" is God's answer to us when we cry out for relief. That is never the case. Suffering in and of itself is a product of the Fall and is of its own nature evil. God's desire is to ultimately end all suffering. Furthermore, there is no use in comparing our pain to another's pain, as though there were some formula with which it was possible all the suffering in the world to arrive at a "sum of all suffering" useful for the purpose of comparison. There is no "sum of all suffering" because there is no one who suffers it. Like the infinite, it is an idea, not a pragmatic reality.

This is the end-point I've reached after many years of wrestling with the hardest questions as a Pastor and as a fellow sufferer. It is not a pat answer, a fact that will be clear if you try to live as though you believe this. Ultimately, anything that causes us to seek God, and thus to find him (because he is found in the very act of seeking) is by definition "good". Suffering, then, becomes the good by accident, by the good that it enables us to receive more abundantly from the mercy of God. It does not make us good by itself, but it enables us to make ourselves better than we are.