The Questioning Christian

When Jesus called Peter the rock upon which he would build his church – or was it pebble? - he might have had in mind the parable of the mustard seed

In chapter 16 of the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew, Jesus tells Peter: "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church."  The Roman Catholic Church has used this verse as support for its claim of papal supremacy. Protestants dispute the claim, in part on grounds that the word translated as “rock” might actually have meant “pebble”:

… In the original Greek the word translated as "Peter" is Πέτρος (Petros) and that translated as "rock" is πέτρα (petra), two words that, while not identical, give an impression of one of many times when Jesus used a play on words. … The traditional Catholic interpretation has therefore been that Jesus told Peter (Rock) that he would build his Church on this Peter (Rock).

… Some Protestant scholars disagree with this interpretation on the basis of the difference between the Greek words. In classical Attic Greek petros generally meant "pebble," while petra meant "boulder" or "cliff." Accordingly, taking Peter's name to mean "pebble," they argue that the "rock" in question cannot have been Peter, but something else, either Jesus himself, or the faith in Jesus that Peter had just professed. …

Wikipedia, Saint Peter (accessed Mar. 25, 2009; emphasis added). 

Suppose that the author of the Greek text fully intended to use the term pebble and not rock. That would have Jesus saying, “upon this pebble I will build my church.”

When I read this, it immediately brought to mind the parable of the mustard seed in Matt. 13.31-32: "Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree ...."  And then in Matt. 17.20, Jesus tells his disciples, “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

So maybe Jesus fully intended to call Peter a pebble, not a rock, and to declare that just as a tiny mustard seed grows into a tree, on such a pebble would his church be built.

Mars Hill’s approach to ministry: Taking the priesthood of all believers seriously

The Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan must be doing something right, drawing some 11,000 worshipers each Sunday. One factor seems to be getting congregants to become intensely committed to particular ministries — including some traditionally-clerical ones such as weddings — explicitly labeling these congregants as priests, seemingly in the servant-of-God sense of Exodus 19.6, "you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation," and 1 Peter 2.9-10, “… you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, …. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God ….”

Here’s an excerpt from Gen-Next preacher - Chatting with Rob Bell, The Christian Century, March 24, 2009, p. 23, at 24 [emphasis is mine]:

… We believe that every person is a priest with a particular ministry. One family in our church that lives in an underresourced neighborhood started an after-school tutoring program for kids who are struggling. A 70-year-old nurse in our church who's tutoring realized that many people in her neighborhood have never had any basic health care testing. She began doing it for free. She's one of our priests. …

The job of one woman on our staff is to connect people with priests. She has a team of people in the congregation who are wired for mercy and eager to visit the sick. Other people love the whole wedding thing—premarriage counseling and so on—so we have licensed people to do weddings. We assume that the body will take care of itself and that the staff's job is to enlist and empower and encourage.

In the same issue, see also Bell's appeal - Ministry to young adults, p. 22, and the Wikipedia article on Priesthood of all believers.

Five physicists on God

At the BBC Magazine Web site, Mark Vernon asks five renowned physicists for their takes on ‘God.’  The physicists include Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg; the Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees; Cambridge physicist Roger Penrose; the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne; and cosmologist Brian Swimme. 

It’s definitely worth a read — and don't miss the comments.

(Hat tip: the Rev. Nick Knisely, dean of the cathedral in Phoenix and himself an astrophysicist.)

Scholar Claims Dead Sea Scrolls 'Authors' Never Existed

From the We'll-Likely-Never-Know Department:  "[A] prominent Israeli scholar, Rachel Elior, disputes that the Essenes ever existed at all - a claim that has shaken the bedrock of biblical scholarship. Elior, who teaches Jewish mysticism at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, claims that the Essenes were a fabrication by the 1st century A.D. Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus and that his faulty reporting was passed on as fact throughout the centuries. [¶ ¶]  Elior claims says these ancient historians, namely Philo and Pliny the Elder, either borrowed from each other or retailed second-hand stories as fact."

From Tim McGirk, Scholar Claims Dead Sea Scrolls 'Authors' Never Existed, TIME.com, March 16, 2009.

Today's collect seems clearly wrong: We do indeed have power in ourselves to help ourselves - just not enough

The collect for today (third Sunday in Lent) reads: 

Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves
to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and
inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all
adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil
thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus
Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy
Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.  (Book of Common Prayer at p. 218, emphasis added)

Huh?  This is a pretty strongly Reformed statement (HT: Ross); I'm guessing it's a leftover from the 1928 BCP.  The bold-faced portion, about our having "no power in ourselves to help ourselves," seems grossly mistaken in a literal sense, flying in the face of millennia of human experience.

For the sake of argument, we should probably assume that the collect authors intended to say that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves achieve 'salvation.'  Even with that limitation, I don't see how exactly the authors of the collect can claim to know that the statement is true.

For this assertion in today's collect to make any sense, it would have to be rewritten to indicate that we have the power to help ourselves, and that our own power is necessary but not sufficient for salvation. 

I like the way Ross TenEyck put it in a similar discussion thread at TitusOneNine:

... as the article you link to quotes (and vehemently disagrees with):  “If God takes a thousand steps to reach out to you for your redemption, still in the final analysis, you must take the decisive step to be saved.”

Call it semi-Pelagian if you like, but I think that if you throw out the necessity for that one step on our part, you render Christianity pointless.

The pragmatic value of virtue is a possible indication of divine design - Robert Wright in The Atlantic

"The Hebrew Bible, considered a holy text by all three Abrahamic faiths, sees the pragmatic value of virtue as itself part of divine design. ... [¶] Of course, the fact that ancient scripture sees the link between prudence and virtue as a reflection of divine purpose doesn’t make it so. But if, as a matter of fact, the prudent pursuit of self-interest has over time led humanity closer to a moral truth—namely, that people of all ethnicities and faiths deserve respect—that lends at least some heft to the argument that there is a larger purpose in human affairs."

- Robert Wright in One World, Under God, The Atlantic, April 2009, p. 38, at 53 (bold-faced emphasis added, italics in original).  This article is excerpted from Wright's forthcoming book The Evolution of God. 

Wright is one of my favorite authors. I was powerfully influenced by his earlier book Non-Zero, a sophisticated, entertaining, and readable work about evolution, game theory, and social science. In the book, he sticks to the facts, but concludes that the evolution of the human race is due in no small part to our capacity for love and reciprocal altruism. He conjectures that the increasing orderliness in our corner of the universe (sometimes referred to as "the optimistic arrow of time") may point to the existence of a God and perhaps even a divine plan.

Reading Wright's Non-Zero was a milestone event in my faith journey; I look forward to getting his The Evolution of God.

Poor, bewildered Paul blames Canada, er, sin, for his shortcomings

Sadly, the church pretends to know why people do the bad things they do, fixating on Paul's "blame sin!" trope in today's Epistle reading from Romans 7.  Paul manifests a certain bewilderment about his own failings, and seizes on 'sin' as the explanation:

¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ... ¹⁸I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.^[c] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.

¹⁹For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

²⁰Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

²¹So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²²For in my inner being I delight in God's law; ²³but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. ²⁴What a wretched man I am!  (Emphasis added.)

Paul's inclination to blame sin for his shortcomings is neither shameful nor surprising. Even today we know little enough today about the human mind and its motivations. In Paul's day, Jesus' own disciples blamed sin as the cause of a man's blindness from birth (Jn 9.1-3); their contemporaries and Jesus himself assumed that demons and spirits were the causes of mental illness (Mt 8.28-29) and epilepsy (Mk 9.14-32).

Hey, that was the best they could do back then with the limited information they had. Sure, we moderns know a bit more about brain chemistry and psychology; as a result, we've had some limited successes in treating disorders of the kind referred to in the Gospel accounts. But it's not as if we've progressed all that much further ourselves.

What is unfortunate is that the church refuses to admit that Paul didn't know what he was talking about. Contrast that with Jesus, whose (reported) attitude seems to have been, face the facts, and acknowledge the limits of your information (e.g., Mt 11.2-5; Mt 16.1-2; Mk 13.28-35).

Instead, the church continues to canonize Paul's uninformed guesswork about 'sin' — commendable though his efforts were — as Holy Writ.

Somehow, I doubt that's what Jesus would have done.

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Related posts: 

• Sin: We've Got a Long Way to Go in Understanding It, Let Alone in 'Treating' It

• Good News, Bad News: Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect?

• The Sin Model's Weakness

• Sin as Failure to Live in Relationship with God: How Can We Know?

• See also the Sin category of postings.

The decline of Protestantism: You can't end a drought with renewed dedication to the old rain dances

It continually amazes me how conservative Christians bury their heads in the sand about the gradual decline of Protestant Christianity. These folks refuse even to consider, let alone acknowledge, an obvious possibility:  That the tenets of ‘orthodox’ Christianity are failing to persuade increasing numbers of people, at least in the so-called first world, because those tenets just don't fit with everything else humanity knows about the Creation.

(FOOTNOTE: I suspect that much of the growth that we see in the prosperity-gospel megachurches is due to entertainment value, and that the growth in some of the evangelical- and Pentecostal churches arises in part from crowd-pleasing factors such as fervor, certitude, and exclusivism.)

The topic came into focus this week with a recent survey indicating that "none" is the only religious category that appears to be growing in every state of the Union.  The survey's press release quotes one observer as saying:

"It looks like the two-party system of American Protestantism—mainline versus evangelical—is collapsing," said Mark Silk, director of the Public Values Program. "A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United States." [Emphasis added.]

So mainline Protestantism is dying (it's thought), and evangelical Michael Spencer predicts, in the Christian Science Monitor, that evangelicalism will soon follow:

We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Some of my traditionalist friends at TitusOneNine offer their usual rejoinder: This decline could be reversed if the church would just get back to right thinking and -preaching. In his CSM comment, Michael Spencer argues that:

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. ... Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures. [¶]

4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself. [¶]

6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.

[Emphasis added]

These folks are like the Indian, er, Native American, rain dancers who insisted that the relentless drought was due to their failure to perform their rain dances properly, and not to any inefficacy on the part of rain dancing itself.

Or in business terms:  Consider what happens when a sales force consistently fails to make its numbers, quarter after quarter, even after the sales VP and many managers are replaced. Almost invariably, the product designers will still claim that the problem just has to be with the incompetence of the sales people. In the designers' minds, it simply isn’t possible that people are not buying their product because they can’t tell whether the product actually does anything for them. 

It’s sad that Jesus’ example is in danger of being increasingly forgotten or ignored, thanks to his ancient- and modern successors who mulishly insist on preaching their dogmas, instead of his simple restatement of the Summary of the Law and his New Commandment.

Repentance and self-flagellation are not the same thing

(From Kimberlee Conway Ireton, Season of darkness [Why Lent?], The Christian Century, March 10, 2009, at 10-11:)

Unfortunately, the word repentance often leaves a bad taste in people's mouths and conjures up images of self-flagellation, both literal and figurative. I used to think of repentance this way.

As an adolescent, I thought it meant reciting unhealthy mantras to convince myself of my own unworthiness (as if I needed to be convinced).  As a young adult, I rejected repentance altogether, thinking it damaging to my fragile sense of self-worth.

And then, the summer I turned 30, I had my first experience of true repentance.

Every day for an entire month, as I journaled, prayed and read the lectionary, God peeled away layers of myself. For the first time, I saw envy, despair and self-pity not as personality quirks, but as sins.

I knew, more deeply than I'd ever known, that I had failed — failed to love my friends, my husband, my son, myself; failed to pray when I had said I would; failed to notice the good gift that was my life. Instead, I had complained and whined and been ungrateful and ungracious. I felt deeply convicted of my sin.

But I did not feel despair. In fact, I felt freedom — and joy. I cried a lot, but they were tears of sorrow and gratitude. ...

(Paragraphing edited, emphasis in original.)

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Related post:

• Repentance Without Guilt?

Norman Mailer: God as artist, not lawgiver

From John M. Buchanan, Writers and words, The Christian Century, March 10, 2009, at 3:

Not long before he died [, author Norman Mailer] granted a series of interviews, which are published in the book On God. Mailer said that he was an atheist for 30 years before coming to acknowledge that he did believe in God.

He tried reading theology and was repelled. Theologians, Mailer concluded, "were undernourished in their appetite for inquiry." I wish he could have had a conversation with the theologian Joseph Sittler, for one.

Mailer came to believe in God, he said, because of his intense lifelong "exploration of human reality."

He envisioned God as "an artist, not a lawgiver, a mighty source of creative energy," and human beings as God's "most developed artwork."

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

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Related post:

• The Continuing Creation: Not Carpentry, But Bonsai