Palm Sunday: Why Is It Called That?

Posted on March 16, 2024 by salooper57

This is the time of the year that churches celebrate Palm Sunday and commemorate what is popularly known as the “Triumphal Entry.” What is the origin of Palm Sunday, and why is it significant?

The original Palm Sunday took place a few decades into the current era in Jerusalem. It was just days before one of Israel’s most important holidays. The nation was about to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, starting with Passover, which commemorated Israel’s independence from Egypt.

At the time of the first Palm Sunday, Israel was again under foreign occupation. The celebration of Israel’s erstwhile independence, and the national fervor it engendered, increased the possibility of revolt. Thousands of Roman troops were transferred to Jerusalem for the duration of the festival, and the head of the occupational government himself, the procurator Pontius Pilate, would come to provide the military with immediate oversight.

All this explains why, in St. Mark’s Gospel we read, “They were on their way up to Jerusalem, with Jesus leading the way, and the disciples were astonished, while those who followed were afraid.” Entering Jerusalem during the Festival, with crowds of people hailing Jesus as king, was incredibly risky. That is why, in St. Luke’s account, we read that some people in the crowd begged Jesus to make his followers be quiet. That kind of talk could get them all killed.

Tens of thousands of festivalgoers began arriving in Jerusalem earlier in the week. When they heard that Jesus was on his way, many of them went out of the city to greet him. John’s Gospel tells us that “They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’ ‘Blessed is the King of Israel!’”

The imagery here is familiar. When a king, long out of the country (usually because he was engaged in some kind of military campaign) returned, word would spread through the cities and the countryside. People would gather gifts and flowers – in this case, palm branches – and line the sides of the road, chanting praises and singing hymns. At the king’s appearance, they would shout and cheer. When the king passed, they would join his company and follow him back into the city.

It is likely Jesus entered Jerusalem through the Eastern Gate. Interestingly, on this same day across the city, thousands of lambs were being brought through the Sheep Gate to be tested for purity and then offered as sacrifices to God in the Passover. It may be that the lambs of God and the one John the Baptist called the Lamb of God entered the city simultaneously.

Before he began his descent into the city, Jesus found a young donkey to ride. He was intentionally fulfilling the role of the Messiah King, of whom the prophet Zechariah had written, “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentleand riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” The Roman soldiers who patrolled the area would miss the significance of the donkey; some of the Jewish festivalgoers would not.

The fact that he chose a donkey – and a colt, at that – meant that he was not coming to make war; he was coming to bring peace. Had he ridden into Jerusalem on a white charger, the implication would have been entirely different.

St. John writes that the disciples did not understand the significance of what was happening or of their role in it. They were at the very hinge of history and didn’t know it. That sounds a lot like us. We never fully understand the things that happen to us or our role in them.

What this means is that we cannot even gauge our own successes and failures accurately. Sometimes when we think we’ve failed, God totally disagrees. Sometimes he disagrees when we think we’ve succeeded.

The triumphal entry was not a triumph because it led to power, but because it fulfilled God’s will. Though it did not bring about dominance, it set the stage for forgiveness and prepared the way for the resurrection. That is reason enough to call it a triumph.

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Old Dogs and Old Tricks

Posted on March 15, 2024 by salooper57

My wife and I finished up at our beloved church at the end of October, then spent two months in Texas to be near our son and his family. It was a good time. We got to see our 2-year-old granddaughter nearly every day. I was able to do some writing – a novel I have been thinking about for the last few years.

When we left our church, where I have served for 35 years, I was congratulated on my retirement hundreds of times. Again and again and again, I told people, “We are not retiring. We’re just seeing what God has for us next.” Karen and I were completely happy with the idea of being part of a church and helping out in whatever ways we could, though if God directed us into something else, we would be happy about that, too.

While we were in Texas, a denominational official reached out to me to see if I might be interested in being the lead pastor at his home church. I told him that Karen and I would be happy to explore the idea and learn if God might be leading in this direction. We met with a search committee by Zoom and then, when we returned north, met with them in person. We have since met with the board, members of the finance committee, etc.

This weekend, we will meet the church family in a get-to-know-you affair, and on Sunday, I will preach. Afterward, the church family will decide whether or not to call us. If they do, we will be returning to pastoral ministry.

Things have changed since I first started pastoring in the early 1980s. I’m an old dog, and I’m not sure I can learn new tricks. Throw me a bone and I will still chase it. Command me to shake hands, and I’ll lift my paw. But don’t expect me to stand on my back legs and beg.

Karen and I have visited many churches over the past few months: Mennonite, Baptist, Christian Church, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, and more. Since it did not look like we would be in a full-time ministry setting, we thought we would spend some time with our extended Christian family before settling down and finding our niche.

During that time, I’ve seen more than one cool pastor. They dress cool. Their vocabulary is cool. They are not preachers anymore but communicators. But I am a preacher, an expositor. I still wear a blazer on Sundays and parse Greek verbs. I’ve only just learned to use a cell phone, for crying out loud. Will I be able to adapt?

I don’t expect to experience an Eliza Doolittle transformation or want one – at least, not in terms of ministry style. But I want to adapt where adaptation benefits the church and the honor of Christ. To recognize when that is the case requires wisdom, for which I ask God.

If you wouldn’t mind, would you ask God for me as I begin this next adventure? I will be profoundly grateful.

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Whether Science or Theology, the Proof Is in the Pudding

Posted on March 9, 2024 by salooper57

Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, two of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, engaged in a decades-long disagreement over the nature of physical reality, and particularly over quantum mechanics. Einstein rejected Bohr’s idea of quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.”

Quantum entanglement is hard for us to understand or even talk intelligently about. The idea is that the state of one particle in an entangled pair – an electron, for example – continues to correlate with the other particle even after the physical connection between them has been severed.

Physicists still debate the cause of this strange connection, but recent technological advances have proved that it exists. Change the “spin” of an electron that is part of an entangled pair, and the spin of its partner is modified, regardless of the distance between the two particles.

The debate that Einstein and Bohr began still continues. Whenever I read about it, I cannot help but think about a different kind of “entanglement”: that of Jesus and his people. We find evidence of this mysterious connection in the Gospels, in Acts, and in the Epistles.

The idea of a bond between Jesus and his people goes back to Jesus’s own words. A well-known example comes from teaching Jesus gave shortly before his crucifixion. Regarding future judgment, Jesus said “the king” would separate individuals into two groups, one blessed and the other cursed.

The king tells the blessed that they fed him when he was hungry, clothed him when he was naked, and visited him when he was sick. He tells the cursed that they ignored him when he was hungry, naked, and sick. People in both groups claim that they never saw the king hungry, naked, or sick, so how could they have done, or failed to do, these things for him?

Jesus’s answer was, “Whatever you have done” – or not done – “for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you have done” – or not done – “for me.” Apparently, Jesus and his people are “entangled.”

This receives further confirmation from an event in St. Paul’s life. He had violently persecuted Jesus’s followers and was on his way to arrest and imprison even more of them. That is when Jesus appeared to Paul and demanded to know why he was persecuting him. Even though Jesus was in heaven, Paul’s violence against his people was equivalent to persecuting Jesus himself.

The Apostle Paul takes this much further. He claims that Christ’s death affected his people’s death too. When he rose from the dead, his people also rose. When he appears in the last days, “we also will appear with him.” Paul sees an inviolable connection between Jesus and his people.

This means for Paul, as it meant for Jesus, that doing something for or to a Christ-follower has a corresponding effect on Jesus himself. So, in his first letter to the Church at Corinth, he argues that “when you sin against your brothers and sisters … you sin against Christ.” This claim echoes Jesus’s own words, “Whatever you have done for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you have done for me.”

Paul parses this out in his theological teaching. “…we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.” It was with this idea of connection in mind that Paul wrote, “the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men,” and “through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.”

Theologians are as divided about how this connection works as physicists are divided over the principles that govern quantum entanglement. What the world needs is experimental proof. Technology has provided such proof when it comes to quantum entanglement; Christians need to do the same thing when it comes to demonstrating the Christ connection.

Conviction of the reality of quantum entanglement did not come from Niels Bohr’s arguments but from John Bell’s experiments, and later by those performed by the 2022 Nobel Laureates. The proof was in the quantum pudding. Likewise, the reality of the Christ connection will be proved by people who live the life rather than just talk about it.

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Judas and the Roots of Betrayal

Posted on March 2, 2024 by salooper57

People have wondered what motivated Judas to betray Jesus for almost two millennium. There has been much speculation, from scholars and lay people alike, but it has been just that: speculation. However, we do know of two things in Judas’s life that must have played a role in what he later became.

St. John wrote that Judas, who was the apostolic band’s chief financial officer, used to help himself to what was in the treasury. I doubt that Judas thought of himself as stealing. He probably told himself that it was just for a day or so but, somehow, he never managed to pay back the money.  Perhaps the first time he helped himself to the petty cash he was in a tight spot; he owed taxes, or something of the sort. He took a little money, meaning to pay it back in a day or two. He wasn’t trying to be secretive, at least that is what he told himself; it was just too small a thing to mention. 

But, of course, something happened, he wasn’t able to pay back the money, and he felt uncomfortable mentioning it to the Lord. The next time was a little easier. Still, he intended to pay it back—all of it.  He wasn’t stealing; it wasn’t like that.  But he never did get around to paying back the account and, after a while, it became clear that he never would.

He must have trembled when he heard Jesus tell a story, which St. Luke informs us he told his disciples rather than the crowds, about a manager who misused his Master’s money. One can almost see Judas turn pale as he listened to the story. Did Jesus know? Was he going to audit the funds and uncover Judas’ crime?

That was the first thing: taking money without asking. The second was the increasing ease with which Judas played the hypocrite. Surely, he had kissed Jesus – the customary greeting in that culture – and called him “Rabbi” many times prior to the night of his betrayal. How long ago, one must wonder, had his love for Jesus grown cold?

A short time before the betrayal, a woman spent an entire and very expensive bottle of ointment in anointing Jesus. The gospels tell us that a number of the disciples complained that it was wasteful. The ointment should have been sold and the money spent on the poor, they argued. St. John tells us that it was Judas who started that kind of talk, and not because he cared about the poor, but because he had been taking money out of the treasury. It was after Jesus rebuked him that he made the choice to betray Jesus.

The combination of a wrong hidden and repeated, and a hypocrisy growing ever larger, placed Judas on the evil path that brought him to betray his friend and leader. His sin – it needn’t have been stealing; it could have been adultery or lying or any one of a thousand other wrongs – and especially his dishonesty, prepared him to do the unthinkable.

Should we feel sorry for Judas?  Perhaps, but there are other lessons for us here. Bury a sin in your heart, hide it from the sight of others, add rationalizations to fertilize it, then irrigate it with the sweet water of blaming others, and it will sprout up like Jack’s beanstalk; only rather than growing up to the heavens it will grow down into hell.

Among the long list of traitors the world has seen, Judas ranks first. The acts of treachery by Alcibiades, Brutus, Cassius, Benedict Arnold, Alger Hiss, the Rosenburgs, and Aldrich Ames all pale in comparison to what Judas did. Yet God took this most monstrous act of betrayal and used it to bring about the greatest good humanity has ever known.

People sometimes say that Judas had to betray Jesus; it was predestined. That is the wrong way to look at it. What Judas did was Judas’s doing, not God’s. But what God did turned history’s most appalling betrayal on its head, transforming it into humanity’s most glorious blessing. That is how good he is at being God.

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Faith, Politics, and the Problem of Selective Sight

Posted on February 24, 2024 by salooper57

Another election year, and it’s going to get ugly. As the citizen of a liberal democracy, I know we must have elections, but as the pastor of a church I came to dread them. People I have known to be kind and polite undergo a metamorphosis. They criticize, rant, and make snide remarks about politicians and all those foolish enough to vote for them.

During general election years, it seems as if people develop vision problems: one eye goes blind and the other develops X-ray vision. With their X-ray vision eye, they can see right through people, especially those who hold political views that differ from their own. They see right down to their opponent’s evil motives.

At the same time, they are blind to the failures of their political favorites. Does this candidate lie? Well, everyone lies; that’s just politics. Are their morals suspect? Well, no one is perfect. Do they use foul language, level threats, and act out of anger? Well, we need someone who is strong to fight for us.

Perhaps it is going too far to call them blind. It is not exactly that they cannot see these things; they choose not to look at them. They remove the things that make them uncomfortable from sight. They know they are there, but as long as they do not have to see them, they can ignore them.

I write as if this condition were true of other people but that I have somehow transcended it. I have not, and I doubt that anyone else has either. For me, this intellectual double vision does not manifest itself in the political realm as much as in other areas. For example, someone else’s character flaws might be crystal clear to me. My own, which are so clear to others, can escape my notice.

This troubling condition extends beyond politics and character flaws. It also affects people in their religious and spiritual lives. I’ve seen this in people who call themselves Buddhist. They have an image of the Buddha somewhere in their home and practice a couple of minutes of meditation when it is convenient. But the disciplines and attitudes that characterize serious Buddhists – the practices of the eight-fold path – are missing.

I am sure this kind of thing is true in all religions, but because I am a Christian, I have seen it most often among my own people and most troublingly in my own life. Jesus was aware of this all too human tendency and addressed it on numerous occasions.

In the Gospel of Mark, some religious leaders initiate a conflict with Jesus by caviling about his disciples’ behavior. He responds by pointing out something they were blind to: their habit of setting aside biblical instruction when it proved inconvenient. He said to them, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!”

Setting aside what is inconvenient. Not exactly denying it, but putting it on the shelf, removing it from sight. If it is on the shelf, we can say that we own it, have benefitted from it and value it, but we do not need to be bothered by it.

Jesus went even further when he spoke to the crowds at one of Judaism’s greatest religious festivals: the Passover. In this context, he did not speak of setting aside God’s commands but of setting aside God’s own Son. He warned, “There is a judge for the one who rejects me.”

That is the way the majority of modern Bible versions translate it, but the verb is identical to the one Jesus used when he accused the religious leaders of “setting aside” the commands of God. Most people, even those who have rejected institutional Christianity, would not say they have rejected Jesus. But what about setting him aside, putting him on the shelf, where he is not in the way?

Putting Jesus on the shelf manifests itself in many ways, including political hysteria, moral failure, and ordinary fears. It is the opposite of what it means to “confess Jesus Lord,” and it always leads to trouble in the lives of those who claim to be his followers.

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How to Tell People That a Friend Has Died

Posted on February 17, 2024 by salooper57
Photo by SHVETS production on Pexels.com

What is the appropriate way of letting people know that an acquaintance or friend has died? This can be a real problem. As a pastor for many years, it was too often my duty to announce to the congregation the death of one of our members and friends. It seemed abrupt and unmannerly to say to worshipers, “Our friend John died last night.”

Some people use metaphors to avoid being indecorous or indelicate. They think that “passed away,” “gone to her reward,” and “shuffled off this mortal coil” – whatever that means – softens the blow.

I understand the desire to spare people pain. When I was in sixth grade, my brother died, and I carried his death inside of me, a sword that had pierced my own soul. Life went on, but the sword remained. I never wanted to think about my brother’s death, and I hated to hear other people speak about it. When my best friend’s younger brother said to me, “Your brother died!” it felt as if he had twisted the blade that was lodged in my soul.

Because of that experience, I have tried to be tactful, delicate even, when speaking of someone’s death. But I have also been dissatisfied with euphemisms like, “he passed away,” or workarounds like, “he’s gone to heaven.”

What is wrong with saying that someone “passed away,” or as some people say, with even greater economy, “he passed”? There is nothing wrong with it, but it is imprecise. They passed? Passed what? Were they driving a car? Passed where? I would understand, “They passed this way,” but not “they passed away” – away to where?

“Passed away” is not only imprecise; it has negative overtones in the Bible. St. Paul, for example, says that the world in its present form is passing away. The Apostle John claims that the darkness is passing away, as well as the “world and its lusts.” Their future is inconsequential. They are passing away never to return. Should we really use the same term to speak of friends and family members we hope to see again?

The biblical understanding of the fate of those who die in Christ is entirely in the other direction. They do not pass away, as if they slowly receded from sight and from importance. They do not become phantoms or shadows, the mere echoes of a life once possessed. That idea belongs to paganism, to Homer and the ancient Greeks, not to Jews and Christians in the biblical tradition.

The Bible teaches that God’s people, those who have received the life of the age to come through faith in Jesus, become more consequential – one could almost say, “more real.” They are said to “appear” when Christ appears. It is their “coming out” party, their debut, when they are finally revealed for who they really are.  

There are biblically appropriate ways for saying that someone has died. We can say that they have “gone to be with Jesus.” This has the advantage of reflecting biblical usage, for “to depart and be with Christ… is better by far.” We can also say that “they are with the Lord,” and so echo the Apostle Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5.

What underlies our fear of indelicacy and tactlessness is a profound fear of death. We would prefer not to talk about it at all. Our culture hides death behind hospital and nursing home doors. More and more people are foregoing funeral services, choosing instead to have a “gathering of remembrance” – or no gathering at all. We, like the people of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke, “have entered a covenant with death.” We’ll avoid it and hope it avoids us. We won’t even mention it. We’ll use euphemisms instead.

It is better, at least when speaking of someone who died with faith in God, to say forthrightly, “He died.” We can skip the euphemisms. We need not fear being indelicate because we need not fear death, which was “abolished” when Christ brought “life and immortality to light.”

In the biblical view, it is death that passes away; it is not the people who belong to God. They “go from strength to strength, till each appears before God.”

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Should This Story Be in the Bible?

Posted on February 10, 2024 by salooper57

Why is it that some Bibles, including most modern translations, leave out John 7:53-8:11, the story of the woman caught in the act of adultery? If the events in this story did not actually take place, why did the King James Version, the Douay-Rheims, and other older translations include it? But if the story is true, if the events it narrates really happened, why do newer versions exclude it?

The explanation is that newer translations of the Bible make use of older – closer to the time of Christ – manuscripts than previous translators had available to them. The earlier manuscripts had not yet been discovered when St. Jerome translated the New Testament into Latin, or when the so-called “Received Text” was published in 1633.

The story of Jesus’s forgiveness of the adulterous woman does not appear in many of those earliest texts. We do not find a Greek manuscript that includes it until the 5th century. The story does not appear in the earliest Papyri or in other important early texts.

In later texts that do include it, one sometimes finds asterisks or other indicators that denote a section of text was missing from earlier manuscripts. These marks suggest that even the ancient scholars who included the text knew there was a lack of manuscript evidence for it.

Besides this, there is evidence in the story itself that it comes from a different author. There are many words used in this short text that John never uses elsewhere. One out of every thirteen words in this text is never otherwise used by John, which makes it extraordinarily unlikely that he would have written it.  

Furthermore, the story itself seems out of place. It interrupts the flow of the narrative between John 7:52 and 8:12. It looks as if it were inserted after the fact by some well-meaning scribe, who thought the story too important to pass up.

It seems impossible to me that John could have written this story, but that does not mean that the events in it did not take place. There are good reasons to believe that they did. For one thing, even before this story shows up in biblical manuscripts, church fathers like Jerome, Ambrose, and Ambrosiaster refer to it.

Another reason to accept the authenticity of the story, though not its authorship, can be found within the story itself. As C. S. Lewis pointed out, either the story of Jesus “doodling with his finger in the dust … is reportage … or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative.”

Ancient writers simply did not include seemingly irrelevant details in a story without explaining them. That style of writing would not be popularized for more than a millennium. It is far more likely that someone saw Jesus using his finger to write on the ground and reported what he saw.

Nerds like me can get so caught up in the arguments for and against the authenticity of the text that we miss the truth it contains. This picture of Jesus is consistent with the other Gospels’ portrayals of him as the “friend of sinners.” He did not, according to his own statement, come “into the world to condemn the world but to save it.”

The Jesus who says, “Neither do I condemn you,” reveals the character of the God “who is not willing that any should perish.” This theme is so much a part of John’s Gospel, it is easy to see how a scribe might attribute it to that apostle. Later in this same Gospel, John records Jesus as saying, “I did not come to judge the world, but to save it.”

Not only is the Jesus of this story consistent with his portrayals in other Gospels, but he also models the kind of response that he required from his own followers. He taught them not to judge. He also taught them to forgive. He further taught them that sin – adultery is one example – is a terrible thing that should be avoided at all costs. Each of these elements of Jesus’s instruction finds expression in this gem of a story.

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The Roots of Christian Differences on Moral Issues

Posted on February 4, 2024 by salooper57

A wide variety of stances exists among self-professed Christians regarding the ethical and moral issues of our time, even though most of them Christians would agree that the Bible is an authoritative source for instruction on the virtuous life. How people who claim to base their beliefs and behaviors on the same source can differ so dramatically is part of a long and complicated story.

That story may go back to the first centuries after Christ, but for brevity’s sake, we will pick it up with the early 19th century biblical critic, philosopher, and theologian F.C. Baur. Immersed in the philosophical thought of G.W.F. Hegel, he looked at the Bible through a dialectical lens which sharply divided the theology of the Apostle Paul from the teaching of Jesus.

Fast-forward to another German theologian who was born almost a century later: Martin Dibelius. While Baur believed that Jesus’s views differed radically from the Apostle Paul’s and later Christianity’s, Dibelius believed that Jesus’s views cannot even be ascertained with any certainty.

This idea that a breach occurred between Jesus and the next generation of Christians, particularly in Pauline churches, has gripped biblical interpretation for generations. Jesus, as seen by Protestants who followed Baur and Dibelius, was a revolutionary who never intended to instruct his followers on how to live in society. Why bother? He thought society was about to be overthrown by the establishment of God’s kingdom.

Furthermore, this radical Jesus taught his followers to expect his return within their own lifetimes. So, the kinds of ethical instruction he gave – turn the other cheek, love your enemy, give sacrificially – were only intended for use within the Christian community, and that for a brief time. When Jesus did not return as expected, the church was forced to turn to other sources for ethical instruction for living in the wider world.

To support this view, Dibelius points to the various “household codes” in the New Testament, found in Ephesians, Colossians, 1st Peter and elsewhere. These bear a resemblance to household codes that were part of the Greco-Roman world of the time, and particularly to those of the Stoics. According to Dibelius, Jesus’s “Christianity was unprepared for meeting [the needs] of Family and Fatherland” and was forced to borrow ethical instruction from non-Christian sources.

If he was right, if as early as the Apostle Paul, Christians were looking to secular society for their ethical instruction, then Christians are free to do the same today. They can, for example, look to the American Academy of Pediatrics for ethical instruction relating to children with gender dysphoria. Similar sources might be sought for instruction regarding same-sex relationships, abortion, immigration, and all the other hot-button topics of the day.

F. C. Baur’s views have largely been discarded, shipwrecked on the shores of later biblical scholarship. Dibelius’ contention that the Bible’s household codes were borrowed from the Stoics has been effectively challenged by John Howard Yoder, J.N. Sevenster, Rachel Held Evans, and many others. The content of the biblical household codes differs significantly from Greco-Roman codes and has its roots in Judaism and Jesus rather than in Stoicism.

This brief, historical survey of Christian ethical thought is obviously incomplete, but it makes an important point and raises a serious question. The point is that ideas are powerful and make a difference in the real world. How many people, even in the contemporary church, know who F. C. Baur and Martin Dibelius were? But their ideas have had lasting impact on how Christians approach today’s most vexing moral issues.

The question that is raised is this: If Baur and Dibelius were wrong to posit the existence of a theological chasm between Jesus and the Apostle Paul, if the apostolic writings are faithful to Jesus’s position on real world issues, does it not seem unwise to give contemporary moralists more weight than we afford the Bible?

We are at sea, sailing through the rocky shoals of contemporary morality, always in danger of shipwreck. Because the needle on the compass of today’s moralists never stops spinning, I choose to be guided by the wisdom of Jesus and his apostles.

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From Caricatures to Hope: The Doctrine of Judgment

Posted on January 27, 2024 by salooper57

Judgment is the missing doctrine of the twenty-first century church. In the 1960s, TV shows and comedy skits would sometimes portray a deranged man with a long beard and a white robe declaring “The End Is Near,” or some other threat of judgment. It was not uncommon in those days to see road signs and billboards warning people: “Prepare to meet your God.”

On Saturday morning cartoons, Elmer Fudd or Bugs Bunny or Wiley Coyote would die from a misfired gun, exploding bomb, or a fall from a cliff, then ascend to heaven to be judged. Religious tracts – one thinks of the ubiquitous Chick pamphlets from the 1960s – warned the unrepentant sinner of a sulfur and brimstone future.

But things have changed. We might be glad that these theological caricatures are not so common anymore, but it is not only the caricatures that have disappeared. So has nearly all mention of the doctrine of judgment. This is not a good thing, for one cannot discard the doctrine of judgment and remain a biblically faithful believer.

The noun “judgment” and its verbal cognate “to judge” appear over 150 times in the New Testament, and more than 500 times in the Old. The testimony of the Scriptures is that God will judge the world. The proclamation of the church, recited weekly by millions of Christians in the creed, is that Christ “will come again to judge the living and the dead.”

One cannot ignore the doctrine of judgment, but how can one live with it? For isn’t the doctrine of judgment about an angry God who exacts revenge on people just because they don’t believe in him? How can the infinite punishment of those who have committed finite sins possibly be fair?

That raises a second issue about judgment. It is not only the missing doctrine of our time; it is the misunderstood doctrine of our time. What we think we know about judgment is more firmly rooted in cultural sources than biblical ones. Dante’s Inferno and Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgment play a bigger rolethan the psalms and the prophets. For that matter, many people’s understanding of judgment has more to do with Elmer Fudd than with the apostles. Ours is a generation of Looney Tunes theologians.

These cultural tropes have led us to think of judgment as a fearful, one might say, “God-awful,” thing. No biblically informed reader would deny that Judgment Day bodes poorly for those who reject God, but a careful student of the Bible would emphasize that is only part – and not even the most important part – of the picture.

The doctrine of judgment is only secondarily about what happens to those who reject God. At its heart, the doctrine of judgment is about God making right everything that has gone wrong, including people. The doctrine of judgment abounds with hope. The earth, long tortured by abuse and misuse, will be restored to its Edenic origins. And people, tortured by injustice and their own sins and failures, will be made new.

Because we have so badly misunderstood judgment, the psalmist’s euphoria at the thought of it is baffling: “…shout for joy before the Lord, the King. Let the sea resound, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy; let them sing before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth.”

In the incredibly rich eighth chapter of Romans, St. Paul envision humans and all creation groaning in eager expectation of God making everything right. In Jewish thought, this meant that creation is longing for judgment. No wonder Paul included the doctrine of the judgment in his “gospel,” his announcement of good news.

N. T. Wright has written that “in a world of systematic injustice, bullying, violence, arrogance and oppression, the thought that there might be a coming day when the wicked are firmly put in their place and the poor and weak are given their due is the best news there can be … a good God must be a God of judgment.”

It is time to recover – or, perhaps, to uncover – the hope-filled doctrine of judgment.

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The Love of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Love

Posted on January 13, 2024 by salooper57

In one of his best known passages, the Apostle Paul wrote, “For now we know in part.” Human knowledge is always partial. The greatest theologian has only partial knowledge, as does the greatest scientist and the greatest philosopher. Of course, the great theologians, scientists and philosophers understand that. It is the lesser theologians and scientists who don’t know that they don’t know.

Earlier in that same passage, Paul, himself a great theologian, says, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror.” His choice of metaphors comes directly out of the setting in which he writes. He is sending this letter to a church congregation in first century Corinth, a large city and one of the ancient world’s leading centers of commerce. Corinth was famous for, among other things, its quality bronze mirrors.

Silvered glass mirrors, such as are used today, had not yet been invented. Though Corinth made some of the world’s finest mirrors, polished bronze produced a very imperfect reflection. Like the knowledge gained by looking into a bronze mirror, our current knowledge is always incomplete.

I suspect that in heaven, everyone will walk around with a red mark on his or her forehead. This has nothing to do with the mysterious “mark of the beast” mentioned seven times in the biblical Book of Revelation. No, this mark will come from flabbergasted saints hitting their own foreheads with the palms of their hands and saying, “Duh! How could I have missed that?”

In that day, all those arguments in which we were certain we were right – theological, political, social – will seem silly to us. When we were most right, there was still something wrong. We never did more than see, to borrow King James English, “through a glass darkly.”

Though we know only in part now, the apostle states plainly that “then I shall know fully.” Why will we know so much more then than we do now? Will we be smarter? Probably. Will we have access to more information? I expect so. Will we know more because we are no longer exposed to deception? Certainly. But there is another, more fundamental reason. We will know more because we will love more.

This passage, 1 Corinthians 13, is sometimes called a “Paeon to Love.” In it, St. Paul emphasizes the supreme importance of love in human life. Among the many ways that love transforms a human life is this: it brings with it knowledge.

People say that love is blind, but nothing could be further from the truth. Infatuation is short-sighted. Lust is blind. But love has 20/20 vision. Love knows. Aldous Huxley said we can only love what we know, but I think the opposite is true: We can only know – really know – what we love.

For example, people will only know God to the degree that they love Him. They can study the Bible, go to seminary, and earn a Master of Divinity degree, but unless they love God, they will never really know Him. Factual knowledge is important, but it is not a replacement for the knowledge of love. Without love, knowledge produces a dead and bloated dogmatism that drives people away from the faith rather than drawing them to it.

Not only can we not know God apart from love, neither can we know our kids, our parents, or our friends apart from love. The ancient Chinese sage Sun Tzu said, “Know your enemy.” But, ironically, the only way to know your enemy is to love him, at which time it is possible he will cease to be your enemy. When Jesus directed us to love our enemies, he opened the door for us to understand them. Love enables knowledge.

In the age to come we will know even as we are known because we will love even as we are loved. And isn’t that what the Teacher told us: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Love, which is how God’s life in us relates to others and to everything, is the catalyst for true knowledge. Love is a way – it is the way – of knowing.

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