Jesus for President

Jesus for President-Shane Claiborne
Section III: When the Empire Got Baptized Part V

God Bless America (This ought to be fun since I work with a 501c3 non-profit church that has this painted on the side of their building)

Ched Myers does great work with the idea of “God Bless America” in his article “Mixed Blessing: A Theological Inquiry into a Patriotic Cant,…

In the Hebrew Bible, the imperative “Bless!” occurs only thirty out of the several hundred times the verb barak (”to kneel,” as before a king) appears. OF those thirty occurrences, the majority are liturgical exhortations to “bless the Lord,” mostly in the Psalter (e.g. Ps. 66:8; 96:2; 104:1). In other words, the act of blessing is most often directed toward heaven, not solicited from it! Only four times in the entire Hebrew scriptural tradition do we find requests in the imperative for divine blessing. Even more intersting (or troubling, from the point of view of the “patriots”) is the use of blessing in the New Testament. Of the forty-one appearances of the Greek verb eulogeoo (”speaking a good word”), only twice do we find it in the imperative mood. In neither case does it involve God. It does, however, involve us–and our enemies. In his famous sermon on the Plain, Jesus invites his disciples to “bless those who curse you”. These instructions are later echoed by the apostle Paul: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse”. The lesson is unmistakable: we would do much better to ask God’s blessing on the world, and to bless God by loving our enemies.p199

Quotable Quotes-Jesus for President

Jesus for President-Shane Claiborne
Section III When the Empire got Baptized part IV

What was so evil about Sodom? “now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy” (Ezek. 16:49). That’s not what we learned in Sunday school.p187

When we are talking about a baptized empire, one that has dazzled the church into fonformity, we are not just talking about the violent militarism of Rome or the United States or Iran or North Korea. We are also talking about a much more prevalent, subtle, and powerful empire that seeps into every home - our daily global lifestyle.188

Quotable Quotes-The Reason for God

The Reason for God-Tim Keller
Chapter 4: The Church is Responsible for So Much Injustice

There is the issue of Christians’ glaring character flaws. If Christianity is the truth, why are so many non-Christians living better lives than the Christians? Second, there is the issue of war and violence. If Christianity’s is the truth, why has the institutional church supported war, injustice, and violence over the years? Third, there is the issue of fanaticism. Even if Christian teaching has much to offer, why would we want to be together with so many smug, self-righteous, dangerous fanatics?p52

N.T. Wright on the Resurrection

http://blog.preachingtoday.com/2008/03/interview_with_n_t_wright.html

Hist book on the resurrection is seriously good.

Quotable Quotes-The Reason for God

The Reason for God-Tim Keller
Chapter 2: How Could a Good God Allow Suffering?

For many people it is not the exclusivity of Christianity that poses the biggest problem, it is the presence of evil and suffering in the world. Some find unjust suffering to be a philosophical problem, calling into question the very existence of God. For others it is an intensely personal issue.p22

In December 2004, a massive tsunami killed more than 250,000 people around the rim of the Indian Ocean…One reporter wrote: “If God is God, he’s not good. If God is good, he’s not God. You can’t have it both ways, especially after the Indian Ocean catastrophe.”

Many other philosophers have identified a major flaw in this reasoning. Tucked away within the assertion that the world is filled with pointless evil is a hidden premise, namely, that if evil appears pointless to me, then it must be pointless.p23

Quotable Quotes-Jesus for President

Jesus for President-Shane Claiborne
Section III: When the Empire Got Baptized pIII

To find Christianity at its best, and the church alive, we need only look to the areas where it is persecuted and peculiar. It’s hard to walk away with any other conclusion but that the best way to defeat the kingdom of God is to empower the church to rule the world with the sword, for then it becomes the beast it wishes to destroy.

“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.”-Ann Coulter

SIDE NOTE CHECK OUT BLOG BY GREG BOYD AND SEE SHANE CLAIBORNES THOUGHTS ON BOEHNHOFFER ATTEMPTING TO ASSASSINATE HITLER

“You’ve go to kill the terrorists before the killing stops. And I’m for the President to chase them all over the world. If it takes ten years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord.”-Jerry Falwell (side note: Falwell is now dead. Sad to say but this is probably a good thing for the church)

“The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the plante - it’s yours. That’s our job: drilling, mining, and stripping. Sweaters are the antibiblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars - that’s the biblical view.”-Ann Coulter

“You can no more have a Christian worldly government than you can have a Christian petunia or aardvark.”-Greg Boyd, Myth of a Christian Nation

“The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”-John Adams

Among the myriad critics of this global-dominance project was Martin Luther King Jr., who initially aimed at race and class issues but later voiced criticism of the US as an imperialistic “policeman of the whole world.”p179

The Stars and Stripes fly over more than seven hundred military stations in more than one hundred countries all around the globe…it participated in an escalated the most belligerent and out-of-control weapons race ever known to humanity: the stockpiling of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons…The US is arming over 75 percent of the world, while it tells folks to disarm, which is like handing out guns to kids in our neighborhood and telling them not to shoot each other.p179-180

“Einstein, who repented of making these weapons, said, “We scientist, whose tragic destiny it has been to help make the methods of annihilation ever more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used….What task could possibly be more important to us?”-Donald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times

Fortunately, more and more Bible literate Christians are deeply disturbed by the skewed theology of empire. It is becoming more and more clear that the Pax Americana is not helping the world get any closer to understanding the crucified Christ and his gospel of grace.”p182

Tacitus said that people “feared the peace of Rome”, because streams of blood and tears of unimaginable proportions followed in the “peace.”p183

“We are dying and killing for abstract nouns like freedom and democracy…but this is not the gospel of Jesus Christ.”-Letter from a US soldier in Iraq

“Over 50 percent of the Roman budget went towards the Roman military. Of each dollar paid in taxes, 36 cents goes toward the military of the united States.”-John Dominic Crosson

It was once said, if you want to know your idols, consider what you are willing to kill for.p185

“Hey, Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list,
And the Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist.
And the eagle will fly and it’s gonna be hell,
When you hear Mother Freedom start ringing her bell.”-Toby Keith, Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue”

Quotable Quotes-Jesus for President

Jesus for President-Shane Claiborne

Section III: When the Empire Got Baptized pII

On the Political Fringes of Empire p156

“Martyr means “witness.” Just as Christians wanted to live like Christ, they also wanted to die like Christ. This meant loving their enemies, even as their enemies fed them to beasts. There was no greater honor than to show the world what love looks like in the face of tremendous evil.”

“Wish yourself a martyr’s death. Blushing for shame you will be dragged before the public. That is good for you, for he who is not publicly exposed like this before people will be publicly exposed before God. Power streams forth when you are seen by men.”-Maximilla

Rome was not just an “evil empire.” It was dazzling, magical - the world stood in awe of her. Rome was known for her roads, progress, culture arc, architecture, and security. She was the best empire there ever was, some might say. Christians longing for the world to be God’s began to think maybe Rome’s hands would be the next best thing. There was no questions that there was a great splendor in Rome. The question was, what is the cost of that splendor? p158

An inscription in Halicarnassus, in Asia Minor, celebrates Augustus as “Savior of the whole human race.” “Land and sea have peace, the cities flourish under a good legal system, in harmony and with an abundance of food, there is an abundance of all good things, people are filed with happy hopes for the future and with delight at the present.” Jesus lived during the “golden age” of Rome. p159

“If anyone wants to see the beauty of the earth, he should travel the world or just come to Rome. For what grows and is produced among individual people is always here and here in abundance…Anything that you do not see here does not count among what exist or has existed.”-Aristides

Constantine and the “Fall” of the Church

[Constantine] emerged from the imperial tumult through several military conquests, the most popular of which was the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in the year 312. Before he entered into battle, so the legend goes, he saw a sign of the cross and heard a voice saying, “In this you will conquer.” Hmm…ironic, considering that for Jesus the cross meant refusal of worldly ways of conquering. Nevertheless, Constantine’s army won the battle, with crosses painted on their shields, securing Constantine’s power as the Western Roman emperor. With his gained appreciation for Jesus [or noticing that he must coopt Christianity because it was sweeping the empire] helping him with the war, he later passed the Edict of Milan, which granted tolerance to all relgiouns, especially Christianity.pp162-3

Theodosius proclaimed Christianity as the state religion of the empire, making it a crime not to be a Christian. That’s when things got even messier. The first recorded instance of Christians killings pagans occurred shortly after and before long, the militant church conquered lands and people throughout Europe, compelling them to be baptized or die.p163

The kingdom of God that had been known through a king who rules with a towel, a donkey, and a cross had become the empire of Christendom. In the name of the one who taught us to love our enemies, the church burned its enemies alive.p163

Imperial Christianity grew quickly from five million to twenty-five million people. Constantine flung open the doors of the church to the rich and powerful, but it was at a great cost. Repentance, rebirth, and conversion were exchanged for cheap grace, and the integrity of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus faded. People joined the church in droves, but Christain disciples were hard to come by. Christianity had an identity crises.p165

The history of the church has been largely a history of “believers” refusing to believe in the way of the crucified Nazarene and instead giving in to the very temptations he resisted - power, relevancy, spectacle…To say that we must kill our enemies and join the popular project to “rid the world of evil” is to call Jesus unrealistic. And this is possibly desirable for many; surely his ideas do not resonate with any common wisdom. But can you call Jesus the Son of God and also say, “He just doesn’t understand the world today”? p166

Another Exodus

“It is hard to imagine a gospel that is more of an antitheses of Jesus’ gospel and the Beatitudes than what we hear today in the church: “Blessed are the rich”; “Blessed are the troops”; “We will have no mercy on the evildoers.”

…about every five hundred years there has been another exodus. During the crisis of the Roman Empire’s crumbling, there were the desert fathers and mothers and the Benedictines. And during the difficulties of the Crusades and the split between East and West in the church, orders like the Franciscans, Poor Clares, and Dominicans were birthed. p169

Fast-forward from Constantine in the 300s to the Conquistadors invading (or settling, depending on your perspective) North American, circa 1600s…The Americas were soon violently swiped from the native inhabitants. This pillaging was powered largely by Christains, who often inerpreted their “success” as a reenactment of the Israelite conquest of Canaan.p171

The American project may have been a result not so much of malicious people as of bad theology - or wanting the right thing but pursuing it by the wrong ways.p173

So are we saying the United States of America is not a Christian nation? The United States is Christian inasmuch as it looks like Christ.p174

“Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference - so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. …I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, alaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”-Former slave, Frederick Douglass

Quotable Quotes-Jesus for President

Jesus for President-Shane Claiborne
Section III: When the Empire Got Baptized pI

The more the early Christians reflected on the life and message of their rabbi-messiah, and the more they tried to live the way of the gospel, the harder they collided with the state and its hopes and dreams, militaries and markets. In fact, Christians in those first few hundred years were called atheists because they no longer believed in the Roman gospel; they no longer had any faith in the state as savior of the world. p141

“We are charged with being irreligious people and, what is more, irreligious in respect to the emperors since we refuse to pay religious homage to their imperial majesties and to their genius and refuse to swear by them. High treason is a crime of offense against the Roman religion. It is a crime of open irreligion, a raising of the hand to injure the deity…Christians are considered to be enemies of the State…we do not celebrate the festivals of the Caesars. Guards and informers bring up accusations against the Christians…blasphemers and traitors…we are charged with sacrilege and high treason…we give testimony to the truth.”-Tertullian

“He called Abraham and commanded him to go out from the country where he was living. With this call (God) has roused us all, and now we have left the state. We have renounced all the things the world offers.”-Justin

[Origen, quoting Celsus:] “If everyone were to act the same as you Christians, the national government would soon be left utterly deserted and without any help, and affairs on earth would soon pass into the hands of the most savage and wretched barbarians.” [Origen:] Celsus exhorts us to help the Emperor and be his fellow soldiers. To this we reply, “You cannot demand military service of Christians any more than you can of priests.” We do not go forth as soldiers with the Emperor even if he demands this. [Origen goes on to say that if the Romans followed the teachings of Jesus, there would be no barbarians.]-Origen

“I do not wish to be a ruler. I do not strive for wealth. I refuse offices connected with military command. I despise death.”-Tatian

“We ourselves were well conversant with war, murder and everything evil, but all of us throughout the whole wide earth have traded in our weapons of war. We have exchanged our swords for plowshares, our spears for farm tools…now we cultivate the fear of God, justice, kindness, faith, and the expectation of the future given us through the crucified one…the more we are persecuted and martyred, the more do others in ever increasing numbers become believers.-Justin, martyred in 165 AD

“The professions and trades of those who are going to be accepted into the community must be examined. The nature and type of each must be established…brothel, sculptors of idols, charioteer, athlete, gladiator…give it up or be rejected. A military constable must be forbidden to kill, neither may he swear; if he is not willing to follow these instructions, he must be rejected. A proconsul or magistrate who wears the purple and governs by the sword shall give it up or be rejected. Anyone taking or already baptized who wants to become a soldier shall be sent away, for he has despised God.”-Hippolytus, 218 AD

For some early Christians, a true conversion meant that they became a new kind of tax collector or business person, and for others it meant that they would get fired. In the young Jesus movement, if you worked in the brothels and decided to give your life to Christ and his kingdom, then you needed to rethink you career. But it wasn’t only people in the brothels who needed to do this reevaluation; so did folks who worked in the imperial games, made idols, served in the military, or worked in the imperial courts, jails, and markets. And it was the responsibility of the Christian community to support these young converts as they rethought their lives outside the empire.p144

“You who are God’s servants are living in a foreign country, for your own city-state is far away from this city-state. Knowing which is yours, why do you acquire fields, costly furnishings, buildings, and frail dwellings here? Anyone who acquires things for himself in this city cannot expect to find the way home to his own City. Do you not realize that all these things here do not belong to you, that they are under a power alien to your nature? The ruler will say you do no obey my laws, either observe my laws or get out of my country. Take care lest it prove fatal to you to repudiate your own laws. Acquire no more here than what is absolutely necessary. Instead of fields, buy for yourselves people in distress in accordance with your means.”-Hermas, 140 AD

The globalizing economy in the first-century Roman Empire was exploitative and unsustainable. Some of the best anti-imperial and pro-kingdom images we have from the early church are from John’s book of Revelation…the careful scrutiny of those in power while he was in exile forced him to write using poetry, symbols, and images…John’s writing in Revelation is filled with bizarre beasts like those we read about in Daniel. But John offers another image of the global market and the kingdom of Caesar…”the great whore.”(cf. Rev 18:2-5, 11-14) p148

Claiborne prefers the term “whore” to “prostitute” because prostitute implies a context of poverty and male-domineering sexual exploitation, whereas whore implies seduction and adulterous licentiousness.

Babylon (Rome) was considered to be great. John’s point was to reveal as a fraud what was every day considered normal, insisting that normal is not the same as good. p151

The supermarket of the day was called the agora…to enter the agora, in order to buy and sell, one needed to pledge allegiance, so to speak, to the economy patronized by Caesar…After affirming the center of the imperial economy, the person visiting the market would receive a mark on their right hand, allowing them to enter and to buy or sell:
“[The Beast] forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave to receive a mark [charagma] on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.”-Rev 13: 16-17

“The mark [charagma] of ancient Rome was not some esoteric symbol but a stamp used to certify deeds of sale, and the impress of the emperor’s head on the coinage…John new that while the right hand was holding the Roman coin, empire would transfix the mind of the bearer.”-Wes Howard-Brook and Anthony Gwyther

[John] did not simply argue that various aspects of the market exploit this or that; rather he placed his concerns in light of a cosmological struggle between right and wrong…is is possible we can’t see the destructiveness of our economy not because we don’t know it’s terrible but because deep down, we feel that it’s necessary and that therefore it’s hopeless to criticize it?p153

Hundreds of years earlier, the prophet Daniel had seared into Israel’s consciousness the sense of empires as “beasts”. 1) John alludes to this, naming the beast 666, the number of the beast who began the long drama of killing the people of Jesus…the Antichrist isn’t who any of us grew up thinking it is. Just as the letter X in Roman numerology stands for ten and V stand for five, so too do Hebrew letters hold numerical calue, and the letters of Nero Caesar add up: nrwn qsr = 666. Of course, this took a bit of calculation to figure out, as John warned, but it would not have been too hard to see what he was alluding to….We might even say that, in some sense, John was rewriting history from the perpective of the Lamb of God - Rome is no longer the prestigious guarantor of freedom at the height of its prosperity (as historians might read the times of John’s writing) but is the power that conspires to slaughter God’s love in the world. p154

This just in…

I just got in Ben Witherington’s book on Revelation. If Left Behind novels make you cringe and Left Behind movies make you laugh then this is the book for you! Seriously, rapture theology (or should I say evacuation theology) is a relatively new phenomenon when it comes to the end times and a careful biblical examination of the book of Revelation won’t point you in the direction of asking when we are going to escape to heaven and get away from this bad earth but to ask the question of…well, you’ll have to read the book.

Book Review: How to be Evangelical p1

Ok, I’m trying to take my blogging to the next level by consistently blogging through books. Mostly, this is for my benefit so I can have a resource to go to when certain topics come up. The first book I am starting with is Roger Olson’s, “How to be Evangelical Without Being Conservative.” If you know who Scot McKnight is I find them very similar. They are both well rounded theologians who know how to not get trapped in a certain theological grid or tradition.

Chapter 1 is titled: Being Biblical without Orthodoxy

My first thought when I hear this is that I understand the word “orthodox” as believing rightly. Shouldn’t that be something that we seek? Absolutely. The problem is that most groups don’t stop at the pursuit of “orthodoxy” but declare themselves “Orthodox” with a capital “O”. The problem that Olson concludes is that:

“Every branch of Christianity thinks it is more orthodox than others; otherwise there would be little reason for existing as a separate denomination.”p30

“The first use (orthodox) is descriptive whereas the second one (Orthodox) is prescriptive.” p30 It reaches such a state that most denominations and traditions believe that these two are actually one and they have them both.

Olson then turns to Luther and the role of questioning “orthodoxy/Orthodoxy” and the birth of the reformation. He notes that Luthers “appealed to Scripture and reason against orthodoxy itself.”p31 Yet those who seem so aggravated and upset over others asking about what the bible teaches are the ones that agree with much of Luther’s teachings. You would think for a movement born out of feeling the freedom to question things that they in fact could allow others to have that grace as well.

Unfortunately, John Calvin a leading Reformer “of Switzerland and especially Geneva, the great organizer of Protestant thought, had “heretic” Michael Servetus burned at the stake for his refusal to accept orthodox doctrines…Protestants alike hunted down and killed Anabaptists because they wouldn’t conform to belief in infant baptism and insisted on baptizing adults only. They were killed for rejecting the orthodoxy of their day…”p32

He goes on gives a few more examples having to do with Jacob Arminius and John Calvin. I guess I would say to Olson that I already concede and believe that we separate and persecute on all kinds of things that should not separate us. But where is the dividing line. What is it we can use for a litmus test to know if our teachers trust the scriptures?

A case and point for many is the emerging church. Side note: Emerging church now stands for everything and everything. You will find all kinds of great things and all kinds of terrible things. Just like you will in any denomination. However, the reason it may stand out so much is because a common thread is to ask lots of questions as to what the church really is and what role the bible plays. Honest questions are great and will bring about change so I have no problem with the emerging church. The problem is that some will use this as a cloak “Not because they are daring to question but because they are abandoning the source and norm that makes Christians Christian - God’s Word. People are free to reject that Word, but then they abdicate the right to call themselves Christians.”p35

Some more observations from Olson:

“Conservative evangelicals tend to use some tradition such as Calvinism or Arminianism as the indispensable standard of correct interpretation of the Bible. Then those traditions become equal in authority with the Bible.”p35

“If I am right, then it is the most natural thing in the world for faithful Christians to question and challenge orthodoxy in light of Scripture.”p35

“Samuel Taylor Coleridge once remarked that ‘he that begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed to love his own sect or church better than Christianity and end by loving himself better than all.’” pp35-36

Olson then comes up with a great idea. He says, “I suggest every organization - religious or otherwise - that is concerned with truth appoint one person to be the pai asker of truth questions. Such a person would be like the court jester of medieval kings and queens, who could mock and ridicule the royal court without fear of punishment. He or she would be rewarded rather than punished for holding the organization accountable to truth. His or her constant question would be ‘But is this true.’”

But Olson gives a word of wisdom in saying that we are fine to question tradition but perhaps we could seek to find value in it as well. “It’s good to question authority in the sense of interrogate it in the light of Scripture, but it is another thing to execute it on the basis of culture and preference for the new and unusual.”p41
…”Why not embrace tradition while critically reflecting on it from within?”

Olson concludes the chapter with a couple suggestions for those involved in the questioning process:
1. Everyone should read a good book on church history that has a plain and straightforward account of the development of Christian teachings as possible. So for example, if you are going to express doubts about the Trinity you should have a clear understanding of what is meant by that.
2. Find out what answers have already been given to your questions. For instance, what might replace the Trinity? “My experience is that Christians who really study it (Trinity) come to believe in the classical doctrine of the Trinity more firmly than before.

So maybe to be Biblical rather than Orthodox we need “to be ‘reformed and always reforming’ in light of God’s Word.”