A Sudden Revelation!

Spock is an atheist but he's seen some pretty strange stuff.

Revelation is a puzzling book of the Bible for everyone. Its interpretory range is probably the most well-known and least understood in the Christian faith. Some people ignore it completely, and others take it way too seriously. For anyone desiring to just get the message and move on, however, Revelation reveals another, more ugly side; it's so hard to make sense of, nearly everyone who has studied it has differing views on it. In our American culture, the most commonplace and therefore the most 'conservative' view on the book is under the dispensational lens. Revelation's structure is considered an orderly, chronological foretelling of the 'end times,' the ordering of events in and around Christ's second coming. This is what I presumed to be true as a young lad, but, as always, I learn that no issue is as simple as Sunday-school instruction. A different view shifts the Revelation timetable back to the first century, interpreting the 'tribulation' mentioned in the first chapters as a rough timeline of events since Christ's big goodbye to his big hello, including our current era. This view plays around with the numerical values and lengths of time mentioned throughout the book, deriving symbolic meaning from them rather than a doomsday calender. Yet another view takes the traditional interpretation of Revelation being all-future and gets a little crazy with it, supposing that several different sections in the book are actually retellings of the same amount of time, different perspectives of a single event. If those aren't strange enough, just imagine when someone supposes that pieces of both views could be true, or draws a unique conclusion from a single passage in Revelation and frames a view of his own. Such is the book of Revelation.

My own views on Revelation are not exactly resolved by all this conjecture and interpretation; in fact, they're clouded by it. I am fascinated by the theory that some of Revelation's passages could refer to events long past, and I have no problem with stretching 1000 years over 2000 actual years or so (after all, Revelation is universally considered mostly figurative anyway.) To be quite honest, I am most disturbed by dispensationalism; it's a very recent interpretation that's backed only by a handful of unorthodox interpretations of Scripture and yet it's pervaded our culture. In that light I would be more likely to discard my childhood paradigm rather than strange, different views about Revelation. Those differing views have little effect on how I live my life; I only know that Jesus will return and I will live forever, and exactly how that happens couldn't be called clear in any view of Revelation. The fact that he will  return is what matters, not when. Insight how and when society 'gets better' or 'gets worse' shouldn't sway our mission for Christ; our job is to be Christ on earth whether everyone's saved or everyone's trying to kill us. I see a much deeper problem in apathetic people than a different view on the end times than me; developing a relationship with God brings about godly conduct, and if conduct is replaced by a 'life will get better anyway' or a 'Omigosh we're gonna die' attitude, then Christ is clearly not present. The real revelation of Revelation is that Christs's return is certain, and we've got to do everything in our power to get ready.

What is Love? (This is probably the title of a lot of these blogs. Baby don't hurt me!)

The English language, while we might call it the "modern language of the world," is in actuality the abused offspring's offspring's offspring of some other language's real beginnings. This is because nothing is consistent in it for very long. Single words become homonyms, long words get chopped up into slang, and we even used to use f's instead of s's. That'f juft nutf. Because of this, the word "love" has, as is pointed out in the blog topic, been stretched over pretty much the whole spectrum of positivity. Love, as a modern definition, literally has four or five definitions ranging from merely 'liking' something to 'romance.' Wikipedia makes amends for the common Christian phrase "Love is an action," and goes on, in strange detail, to analyze the various physiological characteristics of various forms of 'love.' So what is it in the Bible? Are we supposed to merely like  other people? Does God feel romantic  love for people? Lucky for us, The Greek language has four separate words for four different kinds of love, and the Greek format of the Bible makes use of all of them. Those words are 'storge,' for mere familiarity to something, 'philia' for friendship, 'eros' for romance, and 'agape' for "divine" love. All of these words find their place in Scripture, but one densely overpopulates the rest. Agape, which almost always is attributed to God himself, means more than just liking something or even the normal bounds of 'loving' something. It specifically refers to the act of self-sacrifice, or at least the willingness to do so. God certainly is capable of such a love; Jesus died for us, but what about in John's books when the famous analogy is made that "since God loves you, you gotta love him and other people too." Well, I'm sorry folks; it's agape-love. The text could literally say, "Since God was willing and did intentionally get murdered for you guys, you gotta turn around and be willing to do it back for God and for everyone else, too." God means business. The same  love he showed you should be redirected to everybody. That means giving up time to serve people, to talk to them, and even be willing to die for them. How can we be expected to do that? Well, it's actually not as bad as you might think. Our goal is to love that much, but truly the only way to get close is to rely on God for our capacity to love. You see - God not only loves us enough to die for us, but he helps us out from time to time, too. He's willing to work to change our lives around to better love others, all we have to do is start acting on the little impulses to do good. A common phrase spray-painted on walls and weird hipster blogs is "Where is the love?" Well, look out, because it's in us, the lovers of Christ.

OMG U DONT KNO WHO JESUS IS!?!??!

If I had a friend who didn't know who Jesus was, and he was actually curious about why I cared about this messiah so much, I'd try to structure my introduction a little like this...

I would start off by briefly explaining the concept of God (If he doesn't know a thing about Jesus, then we need to start at the beginning.) God existed before the universe, created it, created man, and has been working on our behalf ever since. Jesus is, or was, because he existed as and with God before, a replacement for an old covenant God established with us, a man created directly by the creator, who was himself fully God. That sounds crazy, so I'd seek to elaborate on Jesus' nature a little bit. Jesus was fully human, that is, with a physical body and a human soul, but yet he was made by God, and fully possessed his spirit, too. He dealt with and struggled against the same things we do, but he was directly in sync with his father, God, guided for our sake. Additionally, he had a two-pronged mission: firstly to show the world who and what he was. It's easy to find the concept of God a little out-of-touch. After all, it's asking someone to believe in some faraway, all-powerful something that cannot be seen, touched, or even imagined. Whether this something is benevolent or not, he seems far too distant to matter. That's why God put himself on our planet, to show in the most relateable form possible who he was and why he mattered. The key word is relateable; God could have revealed his true power and blinded us all into submission, but it was much more loving and significant to humble himself into one of us. Jesus was limited in the same ways we are, and yet carried in his blood the power of God. That's the key to the second part of God's mission: we as humans don't and can't live up to God's standards; we aren't perfect like he is. We needed, one way or another, to be atoned  for. While Jesus spent two years spreading the human image of God, it is the last two months or so of his life we remember most. The punishment for our imperfect lives is irretrievable death, so to prevent us from that fate, God himself died. Woah, that's a big deal. Jesus, being human and mortal, allowed himself to be tortured and killed, dying a criminal's death despite his innocence, so that we wouldn't have to. I really hope my friend is tracking with me, or else he'll miss the best part. It doesn't end there, because Jesus is alive with God today. How? Well, if Jesus had remained dead, there would be no victory over death; it won over Jesus. That's where the God-part of him comes in. Three days after he died, he came back to life: resurrected. Only Jesus was brought back from the dead by God's direct will, and his physical destiny was fulfilled for us all forever. Kind of a big deal.

I hope that at least establishes what's important and why it's important for my Jesus-less friend. For me, I think the most important part of Jesus' life is that God was trying to make a point: I care about you guys, enough to myself come down and hang out with you. That's why Jesus' humanity, his deity, and his power all matter; without any of those the story falls apart.

Christian Dietary Essentials

To be honest, I'd never really thought much of doctrinal differences in Christian denominations before, assuming they were all small details that in the end wouldn't matter. Many are  just that, but when I was forced to draw the line between essential and nonessential I didn't really know where to start. After all, I had never talked through doctrine with someone who disagreed with me; that just seems like a weird discussion. Thinking it through a little more through the Bible Class debates we've had, I did at least have some concept of my options in choosing the essentials of Christianity. There is only one truly honest and mostly non-biased account to consider in analyzing our faith: the Bible. First assuming the Bible is honest and authoritative (and that's assuming a lot for some people, yikes,) I already had one essential down. With the Bible's self-declaring authority lost, I believe the whole faith loses its credibility, so I hold first and foremost that Scripture is true, and (though there are many interpretations of passages within) it provides clear and relevant guidance in most cases that count as essential doctrine. (ie. The Trinity, Jesus' Ressurection, An Afterlife) In sorting this all out, I really like the method stated in the paper we looked through in class, proposing that recurring and clearly stated passages are essential truths, while interpretations of vague and singly stated passages are the nitty-gritty nonessentials. That might have an exception here and there (just saying; somebody's always  going to make a case against a universal statement,) but I think it's just a comforting bit of logic to help sort out the mess that is our faith. It does raise some crazy questions, however (essentially foreign to me until now:) "Is Hell really eternal?" "Is it okay to believe that Hell is not eternal?" and most infamously recently, "Exactly how and to what extent is homosexuality a sin?" All of these questions are cringeworthy to me, and to be frank I'd rather not debate them at all, but it's nonetheless mind-opening to get the chance to. As for how I'd deal with something I'd never heard before or disagree with, I'd probably use that method. Is the Bible clearly for or against this issue? If not, then it's really likely nonessential. To verify that, what passage is this view based on? Does that shed any light on the issue? etc. I really think this is the simplest (and in many cases the simplest method is the best) and most applicable method of interpreting unfamiliar ideas, because, as I would say any true Christian necessarily believes, the Bible is the authoritative word of God, and thus it stands as a foundation on which to build faith in Christ.

Why does no-one call it the book of Jim?

James, in its short and to-the-point delivery of important morals, has a very clear message on wealth. In its final chapter, James really lays it down hard on rich folks, forecasting misery and destruction ahead of them that oppress others with money. The general theme of the book is getting people on a common page: instructing the rich to respect and equate themselves to the poor, and for the proud to show humility, and this has large implications. The question of the week in our Bible class comes from this: Is the accumulation of wealth a sin in itself, and if not, how can we be sure we are in control of our money for God, not in it for ourselves? James tells us that money is something to be shared communally, not to be withheld and hoarded. If we are making money for ourselves, James states that its corruption will destroy us. I would say the rest of the Bible agrees. After Moses freed the Israelites from Egypt, and the group met at Sinai, God ordered everyone to pool their resources for the creation of the tabernacle and the ark of the covenant. Those that disobeyed and kept treasure for themselves were ruthlessly dealt with; in that case the accumulation of wealth brought about instant destruction. Some time later, in the famous instant that doomed Saul, king of Israel, to be replaced by David, Saul kept the spoils of battle instead of destroying them as the Lord commanded. After this, Saul fell out of favor with God, and eventually he too would pay harshly for his greed and disobedience. In the gospels, Jesus talked often of the danger of accumulation, shaming the rich young ruler for not being able to surrender his wealth to the poor, and essentially living without wealth of any kind during his own life. In all these examples, whether hoarding riches was disobedience to God or simply a distraction from him, the result is the same, that you will, as James puts it, "weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you." Money can easily become a lifelong obsession and distraction from God, and that makes it an idol to him, but there is an straightforward solution, provided by Jesus. In the form of an argument: why let the temptation of hoarding wealth be an issue in the first place; if you give away your extra to the poor, you won't have any riches left to hoard.

"...so that we can give it away to the poor!"

Church and Chicks (among other things...)

Church structure is a difficult thing to define. How one should operate is, to be truthful, a largely unanswered question, still after thousands of years of maintaining and creating churches around the world. To be sure, no two churches are alike; Christianity is, at least in trivial doctrinal matters, the most diversified religion one can belong to, and it shows. There is a vast spectrum of governmental systems in churches, ranging from heavily organized and collectively linked Catholic cathedrals to loosely defined and secretive house churches across dangerous parts of the globe. Why, then, are these diversities so extreme, and is a single one "more biblical" than the rest? To even attempt to answer that question, we've got to examine why government would be important in the first place - and that ties heavily into what the purpose of churches are to begin with. The Bible is at least perfectly clear on this - oh, it's put in different ways, but it's easy to draw a general mission statement from it: A church's goal is to prepare believers for evangelizing in its area, and perhaps more importantly sending new and existing believers out to new areas to, well, make more churches. Now, this presents, in any culture, a logistical dilemma, and logistics requires organization. The Bible agrees. In Paul's day, churches were lead by teams of "elders" - in most cases, people who had been in Christ for some time, and these councils of Christians would direct the inflow and outflow of converts and church planters, keeping doctrine in check through letters and sending out long-standing representatives, like Paul and Timothy. Since then, different levels of inner and outer organization have surfaced, birthing the spectrum and seemingly disjointed faith we have today. Fun stuff, huh?

My church, whom I have learned to respect deeply, has tried to reverse the explosion of variety and revert back to the basics, so to speak, of church management. Inside, we're simply lead by a group of elders, who, just as plainly as in Paul's experience, serve to invite new believers and send out existing ones. There is only the biblical distinction of teaching and serving pastors, nothing more specific or complex. Outside our building, we're also trying to follow the Bible. Our church relates to a simple grouping of other churches around the world, who share beliefs and statuses electronically, but also transfer representatives to check in and share among other churches, not as "guest speakers," but as relating elders bringing their guidance to the church they visit. Overall, I think it's a pretty noble goal, and I believe I agree with the whole thing.

Rats, now I have to talk about women. I really didn't structure my last bit to carry that...

In class, we've explored a couple different interpretations of the controversial passage in Paul's letters to Timothy concerning women. The first, the take-it-like-it-looks view, states that women, who are better suited to listen and not speak, shouldn't teach over a group of guys, because they are easily confused and wishy-washy in their morals, not to mention greedy, self-centered drama queens when given too much power. That is, of course, exaggerating, but it was my reaction to reading through the passage. The other possible interpretation, a little rough but immensely less rude, explains that, possibly due to a reigning she-cult in Ephesus, women should not always serve over men, but should be treated as equals, not given too much power and control, but, like the rest of Paul's teaching about women and marriage, should serve with their husbands as a single unit.

I am not sure which of these two views my church holds fast to, but I do know one thing: no-one there would regard a woman as less valuable than a man in any way. It is true that all of the elders at my church are men, but each, as Timothy dictates, is married, and relies heavily on his wife as a partner and adviser. I could see my church following either goal, because neither one says that a woman can't have a say in the course of evangelism, and both say that only a loyally married man can take part in leading the direction of his church. The more hotly debated question of whether a woman can't teach over men at all or whether she simply can't only teach over men is a harder issue, and one that does not seem completely outlined in my mind. I halfway hope that N. T. Wright is correct in his theory surrounding the passage, but I'm just not sure.

A dynamic threesome...

The three letters we read in class are certainly similar on the surface, but in order to understand the point of each of them, we've got to consider what each is saying on its own. Paul was writing to very different groups of people in each letter, and that of course affects the entire tone of his writing. For example, Paul is usually very praising of the Philippians, but makes a special point to them to avoid argument and strife among themselves, citing Christ as an example; that's really the only criticism he offers. In Ephesians, however, Paul broadly states a large list of basic dos and dont's, not really as a specific condemnation, but rather as a general statement of Christlike character. In Colossians, Paul draws up a similar list, but explicitly states that the church had previously practiced those bad things, and needed to renovate their thinking. The message of Christs' example is applicable in all three cases, evident based on its constant appearance throughout Paul's letters. It serves as a universal bridge to anyone who can endeavor to become more like Chirst, who, frankly, is everyone.

It can safely be stated that the three passages from Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians are really the same message, worded slightly differently for the purpose of reaching different audiences. The broad point over each of these passages is the call to change to be like Christ. In each, Christ's character is lined up against the sinful nature of the world's, and the benefits of life in Christ are laid out for the receiving. Paul also makes a point in each to emphasize Jesus' saving us from our sins; without that there's no point in striving to be like him. There is something deeper in each of these letters, however, that we outlined in class that most people glance over. Taking time to understand each brings out a fascinating point. Paul is not saying that we should seek to be like God - Philippians makes clear even Jesus didn't do that - we're to be like Christ . Why the distinction? Well, for one, Christ was human . A perfect human, but flesh and blood nonetheless. It's our job, therefore, not to seek out equality with God - that's impossible; God is sovereign - but to conform to Christ, who represents the blameless human life; and as Colossians puts it, who is  our life.