No longer Jew nor Greek

Most of the time, we tend to read Paul through a Lutheran lens. Luther, perhaps for his own polemical reasons, interpreted Paul as setting grace (good) against law (bad); the Jews emerge as the bad guys - let's face it, the Gospels do let the Romans off the hook for the Crucifixion and blame the Jews instead - and in Luther's view, Jesus replaces the impossible Law with the glorious light of grace. Unfortunately, this is a serious misreading of Paul.

Paul is, after all, a Jew, with impeccable credentials. He's a Benjaminite , a Pharisee, a Hebrew of the Hebrews (Philippians 3:5; I'm only citing Paul's testimony here, and ignoring Luke's portrayal of Paul in Acts). The Hebrews were the Palestinian, Aramaic-speaking Jews, which might perhaps contradict Luke's testimony that Paul was from Tarsus, but in any case, he comes of Jewish stock, and he's no mere convert. He's been been based at the Antioch church, which was, by all accounts, rather more liberal than the mother church in Jerusalem, but he's been sent by Jerusalem to go to the Gentiles (Galatians 2:9). Both Paul and Luke make it plain that, at this time, Jerusalem was where the decisions were made.

Paul has come to Galatia, whose people were Hellenised Celts, with the message of Jesus. He's established a community of people, now essentially Greeks, though still with the Celtic heritage, who followed a Jewish messiah, under Roman rule. We needn't be surprised that this multicultural mishmash led to a few tensions!

The Jews, of course, were a tolerated minority, granted protection within the Roman empire, and allowed to follow their own religion in peace, to the point where it was legal for a Roman citizen to be a Jew. At this time - Galatians was written sometime between AD 48 and the mid-50's - the Jews had lived peacefully within the Roman empire for generations, since Pompeius Magnus captured Jerusalem in 63 BC, and established a puppet kingdom there. They offered daily sacrifice for he Emperor in Jerusalem, and were not expected to sacrifice to him.

They were however, a minority, and as such may well have felt insecure within the Hellenistic world. In the 160's BC, there had been an attempt to integrate Jerusalem, with the establishment of a syncretistic cult which identified their God with Zeus Olympios. In 41 AD, Caligula, who had been brought up partly in the east, and took divine kingship extremely seriously, ordered that a gilded statue of himself be set up in the Temple, so that the Jews could sacrifice to him. The governor of Judea prevaricated, and Caligula was murdered before the order confirming the erection of the statue could arrive in Jerusalem. Lingering worries emerge in the Gospels, which refer to the Abomination of Desolation (Mark 13:14, Matthew 24:15; the term comes from 1 Maccabees 1:54). Evidently there was a feeling that, sooner or later, someone was going to put an idol in the Temple and make Jews worship it once again.

A diaspora community, in daily contact with their Greek neighbours, would have been doubly insecure. Then Paul came along and started a group of pseudo-Jews; they worshipped the Jewish god - perfectly legally, of course; it's not clear when the first anti-Christian legislation was passed, but it was long after this - but they did none of the things which marked Jews as Jews. They weren't circumcised, didn't keep Sabbath, and their meat probably wasn't kosher. In that case, as secular slaughter didn't exist, it would have been sacrificed at the local temple. They weren't following pagan cults, but they weren't Jews either. So what were they? It must have been a confusing situation.

Someone - either people sent by James, mentioned in Galatians 2:12, or the local synagogue - had a simple solution. They should convert, get themselves circumcised, and become proper Jews. If they did so, everyone would know where they were, any tensions would soon settle down, and in any case, there was an advantage to being a Jew. They'd be full citizens in the Kingdom when it arrived, rather than tolerated strangers and aliens, righteous before God, but, as it were, posessing permanent leave to remain, and nothing more. It was, after all, going to be a Jewish kingdom, under a Jewish God.

No ancient Jewish document claims that Gentiles can't be acceptable to God as Gentiles. It would be a little difficult for anyone to say that, considering the number of righteous Gentles in the Jewish scriptures. Rather, the Mishnah, from the end of the 2nd Century AD, takes the view that God gave seven basic Noahide Commandments to Noah, and through him to all humanity. Any Gentile keeping these would be righteous before God. The commandments of Moses, because these were only given to the Jews, so onlyJews had to keep them. Most likely, this was only a formalisation of an existing conclusion; the New Testament, written earlier, takes a similar view.

In Acts 15, Luke gives us an account of the Jerusalem Conference, where James, the top dog in the church there, has the last word:

"It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: ²⁹ that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well."

Luke wrote at the end of the First Century AD; Paul, writing earlier, never gave a formal list of requirements, but his advice to Gentile followers of Jesus is comparable. Galatians is his earliest response to the issues, and lacks the carefully thought-out arguments of Romans. Rather, Paul has reacted with a furious rant. At one point, he got so worked up, he wished the circumcisers would castrate themselves (5:12). There's an implied comparison here with the priests of the local Magna Mater cult, who were eunuchs; this could only have been seen as a terrible insult.

In  the crucial passage, though, he comes up with something which was, as far as I've been able to discover, new.

In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:26-29)

God is no longer a Jewish God; the Kingdom is no longer a Jewish kingdom. Rather, Jew and Gentile enter on an equal basis, via their defferent routes. Paul continues to develop this idea through his letters, most notably in Romans, and it's this that brings him into conflict with his fellow Jews. The familiar distinctions of the ancient world have been relativised; they can no longer be absolute, since before God, they are meaningless. Each, therefore, should remain as they were. The Jew should obey the commandments of the Law, since they are binding on them, and the Gentile should continue to ignore them, since they were never given to them. Their final status before God, which was Paul's main concern, would be the same.

Today, we often take this for granted. Our culture is far removed from those in which Paul moved; slavery is effectively invisible, though it still exists, and despite the continuing sexism of our culture, women can become Prime Ministers. Many Jews are so well integrated into the wider culture that they are almost invisible. We take it for granted that God makes no distinctions, and assume that this passage refers to social justice.

This isn't entirely wrong. If God, say, treats men and women the same, it would be wise for those who claim to be his worshippers to do likewise, and to do what they can to ensure that others do as well. If we don't, God may have something to say about it. In that case, to borrow one of Matthew's favourite themes, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. However, this is a secondary implication of the text, not what Paul is actually saying.

Obviously, the church didn't invent sexism. It has, hoever, often justified and maintained it, and developed its own version, creating religious barriers to women, who, in some churches, cannot serve as priests or ministers, and sometimes cannot even set foot in the sanctuary. Equally, we didn't invent racism; it grew out of the slave trade. We did allow the church to be used for some centuries, to legitimate it, and thus to allow it to continue its development.

Antisemitism, however, was the invention of the church. Paul tells us that there is now no barrier between Jew and Gentile; our response has been to pick up the way the Gospel authors, for their own political reasons, exonerate the Romans for the Crucifixion, and blame the Jews instead. We developed the nonsense that the Jews crucified Jesus, and in doing so, laid the foundation for the Holocaust, and all the other pogroms the Jews have suffered. We also, for that matter, laid the foundations for apartheid. Instead of demolishing the stupid barriers which divide humanity, we developed new ones.

God, however, only created one human race, and gave us only one world to live in. All the things which divide us, and justify one group of people in trampling on another, whether the victims are black people, Jews, Arabs, women, or whoever, are ultimately incompatible with our Chrisitian profession. If we're all equal before God, then we need to ensure, firstly, that everyone is equal within the church, which represents God on earth, and secondly, that we use whatever influence we have to oppose everything which makes people unequal out there in the world, and which leads to discrimination.
Acts 15:28-29

Another rapturous mess

James McGrath has some interesting comments here about the relationship between the Rapture - or people who believe in it anyway - and the present unhealthy state of things in Palestine: http://www.patheos.com/community/exploringourmatrix/2011/05/22/cleaning-up-another-apocalyptic-mess-israel-and-the-palestinians/ . It's going to take a lot more sorting out than the aftermath of Camping's nonsense.

Left behind?

Jason Staples has a good blog post here dealing with one of the passages used by people like Harold Camping to justify their nonsense about the 'Rapture': http://www.jasonstaples.com/blog/2011/two-will-be-taken-one-will-be-left-misinterpreted-bible-passages-8-2478? . He's perfectly correct; the sense of Matthew 24:40 is as though the police raid a building, arrest one person, and leave another. You definitely don't want to be taken! It never ceases to amaze me how the church (meaning the community, led by the nose in this case) sometimes manages to interpret the Bible as meaning the precise opposite of what it says! Of course, the traditional translation here isn't very helpful, but that's often the case, and we need to be aware that we're not reading the original text.

And here's a post from the Beaker Folk summing up what apocalyptic is really about: http://cyber-coenobites.blogspot.com/2011/05/riding-bow-wave-of-rapture.html .

CPD

We have a constitution in the Methodist Church which is (mostly) fairly reasonable, and which could often be used to our advantage. Trouble is, hardly anyone knows what's in it; it's just a big book which is toted around the place by ministers, and which most of them don't bother to read themselves. Fortunately, it's not hard to get hold of these days. The 2009 version of CPD (it doesn't change much from year to year, and if someone wants to claim it's changed, make them prove it by producing the updated text) can be downloaded from the Methodist Church website.

Vol 1 (Historic Documents) http://www.methodist.org.uk/downloads/CPD-volume-1-0709.pdf .

Vol 2 (The bit that matters, with all the rules) http://www.methodist.org.uk/downloads/CPD-volume-2-2009.pdf .

Ministerial appointments

Our Superintendent has asked for his initial five-year appointment to be extended for a couple of years. As it happens, I'm all in favour, but I've never been too happy with these situations. Until quite recently, the slightest criticism of any minister, no matter how dire, was always met with the most appalling patronising speeches from those in power about how wonderful and special ministers were. The sun shone from every ordained backside, God was in his heaven, all was right with the world, and if the churches were unhappy that was their problem. If you run a church that way, is it any wonder if members vote with their feet?

The result, of course, was that it was almost impossible to get rid of any minister wanting to stay. I remember one in the late 1980's, who people were seriously unhappy with. He asked for an extra two years, and the vote, by a show of hands, didn't go his way. The Circuit Stewards announced a miscount, asked us to raise our hands again, and a couple of the people who voted neutral changes to a yes vote. They repeated this charade three times, and eventually got the result they wanted. We then decided that future extensions were to be decided by a paper vote, which at least stopped that nonsense.

Then we had the practice of Circuit Stewards going round with a minister coming to look at the circuit, telling us not to ask them questions, and assuring us that if we said no, we'd be left without a minister. In fact, of course, the worst that could happen is that we might be short of a minister for a year, while the existing Circuit ministers covered the extra churches. The result of this approach was that we had a couple of ministers that the churches were extremely unhappy with. That's obviously not in anyone's interest.

We've currently got a situatiuon where there's a shortage of Superintendents. The District Chair thinks the answer to this is for Circuits to amalgamate, so fewer are needed. As far as I can see, that makes even more work for them, and makes the job even less attractive. You don't solve a recruitment problem by working the present incumbents to death! What we need to do, of course, is to look at the role, lighten the burden a bit, and try to make it more attractive.

The result has been that Circuits have come under pressure to amalgamate. A very large Circuit has been formed in Birmingham, next to us, and it has financial problems. Allegedly, some are blaming this on the fact that we, and once other Circuit, refused to join. Our current Super is being very supportive over this, and if he moves, we're likely to come under pressure again.

That's fair enough, but I've just had an argument with one person at the meeting, who claimed that if we didn't grant the extension, we'd be compelled to amalgamate. I felt it was another piece of manipulation, and made it clear that I didn't believe there was any mechanism for compelling us. In the end, the guy half admitted it. I checked Standing Orders as soon as I got home, and sure enough, there doesn't seem to be any such provision. I've got no issues with Paul's extension, but I have very considerable issues with the stuff that goes on; our only chance of avoiding any more dodgy minsters they try to send us is to have an honest discussion, air any concerns, and reach an unmanipulated decision.

Rejoicing at a Death

I never thought I'd be happy to hear about a death, but that day did come, once. It was a former neighbour, Solomon 'SAJ' Musa.

He had been Vice-President of Sierra Leone after the NPRC coup in 1992. As far as I can make out, there were two contenders for the top job; Musa and Julius Maada Bio. They settled on a compromise candidate, Valentine Strasser. 26 alleged coup plotters were executed not long afterwards, supposedly by Musa driving a lorry over them. All I can say is that the man was capable of such a thing. Before long, Musa and his wife were put on a plane at gunpoint, after a series of rows with Strasser. They surfaced in Birmingham, a few hundred yards from where we lived, with a council house, refugee status, and a UN grant to study at Birmingham University. It wasn't long before Musa picked a ferocious quarrel with us, probably because we're democrats.

At the beginning of May 1997, my wife ran into Tina Musa, who appeared to be rejoicing; they'd done some juju, and 'power was coming to return to them'. Three weeks later, on May 25th, soldiers loyal to Musa seized the parliament building and hung out banners calling for his return as President. Local people tried to dissuade him, warning him that it would lead to his death, but the two of them rushed off in a state of grate enthusiasm, and arrived in Freetown, after being delayed by a temporary arrest in Guinea, to find that someone else, Johnny Paul Koroma, had taken the top job. Musa became Vice-President again, and Minister of Mines.

We had just received clearance to bring the girls, then aged 11 and 5, to the UK, and the result was that the elder was caught up in fighting a week later. They arrived in the end, but she still suffers from nightmares. At one point I phoned a family friend, to find her in a state of terror as a gang of soldiers came down the street, looting and killing; I subsequently spoke to people who saw Musa directing these gangs personally. We were worried that Namissa's family was likely to be targeted because of our quarrel with Musa, who was known to be vindictive, but in the event he spent most of his time in the diamond areas, stealing the gems.

The regime lasted nine months, and collapsed; the leaders escaped from Freetown with their forces intact, and with no civilian casualties. I've never come across any details of what went on behind the scenes, but given that the head of the Nigerian-led peacekeeping force was known locally as 'Mr. Ten Million', since that was his annual take from the rebels to allow them to remain in business, I imagine that there was a fair amount of collusion involved.

Musa then established himself as the de facto leader of one of the rebel groups, based at Kabala (Namissa's home town) in the north of the country. It's subsequently emerged that he was behind most of the fighting in the latter stages of the civil war. He was killed in the early stages of a major rebel assault on the capital over New Year 1999. At the time it appeared that his death was due either to an accident or a booby-trap, but it now seems that he was probably shot by his own lieutenants, on the orders of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian dictator whose trial at the Hague ended recently.

God alone knows how many deaths this man was responsible for, and how many were saved by his death. There's no doubt that as long as he was alive, his attempts to steal the country and its mineral wealth would have continued. I don't consider Osama bin Laden to have been a monster on the same scale. His major crimes took place a decade ago, and he's been a declining influence for some years. It's interesting that he was betrayed just when the Arab revolutions had made him politically irrelevant. Apparently he made no attempt to defend himself, and he could presumably have been taken alive. A trial - preferably outside the United States - would have avoided making a martyr, and would have been far more fitting for a country which likes to portray itself as a leader of civilisation. An extra-judicial killing panders to the worst elements of a nation with an unfortunate tendency to confuse violence with justice.

Divine Grace

I've always admired John Wesley as a theologian. The upright Fellow of Lincoln 'submitted to beome more vile' as he put it, and went field preaching at the urging of his friend George Whitfield. Whitfield wasn't too much of a thinker, but he'd seen a need, and responded to it.

The 18th Century was a time of upheaval in England. Agricultural enclosure had been going on for a couple of centuries, but inventions such as Jethro Tull's seed drill (1701) needed larger fields to be fully effective. As enclosure proceeded, land was, in modern terminology, privatised, and mostly passed into the possession of the wealthier farmers. Many people were left landless, and either became agricultural labourers, joined the army or navy, or moved to where work could be found in the mines or the factories which were beginning to appear. In the process, a new underclass appeared.

The Anglican Church, organised on the parish system, was too inflexible to cope with population movements. People like the miners of Kingswood, near Bristol, where Wesley preached, were effectively beyond its reach. I used to live on the St Austell Moors in Cornwall, an area where there was almost no population until the china clay pits were opened in the second quarter of the 19th Century. There was no Anglican church until the last century. As new villages developed, the Methodists moved in, and as 19th Century Methodism was so strongly teetotal, there isn't a pub in the whole area.

This created a problem for the Calvinism of people like Whitfield. The western church had taken predestination for granted since Augustine in the 4th Century; grace was irresistible, and if you were saved, it was because God had you on his little list, drawn up before creation. If you weren't, it served you right anyway; you were a sinner. That worked in medieval times, and continued to do so as long as the church could reach the entire population. Wesley and his friends found themselves in a new situation.

People were still Christian; the Bible story - or at any rate the Bible as read by the church - was taken for granted as history. Accounts of people crying out in early Methodist meetings might suggest that some were going in real fear of death and hell. If so, it's not surprising. So crowds flocked to hear preachers when they came. We read accounts of people coming from miles around; in one case, a man was converted while leaning of his gatepost listening to George Whitfield preach a mile away. Representatives of the church were going out to where the people were, presenting the message in a new way, and faith came to life for many of those who heard. It's an inspiring story, but Wesley was more than an evangelist; he was a thinker.

In the previous century, Jacobus Arminius had come up with new ideas, challenging the view that salvation is fully determined by God, with no free contribution by ourselves. On the old Augustinian theory - Calvin and the other reformers we essentially reworking Augustine - salvation was an arbitrary matter of the divine will. Those outside the church, who Wesley now had to deal with, were likely to assume they were excluded from God's elect. Wesley's thought on the matter was eventually summarised in his 'alls', though I believe they were actually written by William Fitzgerald a century ago:

All men (taking men as inclusive of women; you could get away with it back then) need to be saved.

All men can be saved.

All men can know they are saved.

All men can be saved to the uttermost.

Salvation, then, was open to everyone. Wesley accepted the tradition of the Western church, which is extremely pessimistic about human nature, but nobody was so terrible that they were outside the possibility of God's grace. I'm not so keen on the third 'all'. Undoubtedly, many people in those meetings did have tremendous emotional experiences, but the end result has been a tendency in some traditions to believe not only that salvation is a single, forensic, event, in which God forgives us for our sins and redeems us, but that it has to be an emotional experience. I think that goes far too far.

Wesley, however, was surely correct in seeing that salvation is more than this; it's an ongoing process. To him, there was the possibility of 'Christian perfection'. These days, it's not a helpful expression. 'Perfection' has come to refer to something absolute, which can't be bettered. Once, however, it referred simply to maturity; a 'perfect insect' is the mature stage, the adult. Christian perfection was a state in which we don't knowingly commit sin. He encouraged others to claim it, but never did so himself.

However, from the perspective of our very different position today, I think there are problems. As long as everyone's a Christian - let's remember that Wesley's famous conversion was a theological one; he'd been a Christian long before - free choice works. But these days, a child of devout Christians is far more likely to have a meaningful opportunity to accept God's grace than someone born to militant atheists, and the child of devout Muslims, born in a village in Saudi Arabia has virtually none. The offer of salvation has become a lottery, at best.

Then we tend to assume that the birth of a child is down to God's will. So God wills that someone be born into a Muslim environment, then they go to hell for being a Muslim. If we're not careful, we drift into a slightly subtler version of predestination.

Then there's a weakness in traditional Arminianism, which becomes evident in the language some preachers use. God, it's said, 'can't' force us to accept salvation. How can we use language like that of an omnipotent being? If we're not careful, we end up proclaiming a pretty feeble deity.

At the same time, if God either can't or won't force us into heaven, death can, and does, force us into hell. Dying allegedly cuts us off permanently from the offer of salvation. Once again, of course, God had always been assumed to determine the time of our deaths. So, again, we're in danger of sliding into predestination. Even if we manage to avoid this somehow, we've still made death at least as strong as God, if not stronger. We like to claim that 'Christ has conquered death', but the Arminian Christ hasn't done a very good job of it.

Not only do we have problems with a God who, if he hasn't determined the time of our dying, is unable to reach us through it, but we have ethical difficulties as well. Why would a just God prescribe infinite punishment for finite sin? It's almost as bad as the Augustinian God throwing unbaptised babies into hell.

But how do we know that death is the end of hope for those outside the church? It's an assumption, larded out with selected Biblical snippets. But we can just as easily select other texts which point the other way. Jonah, for instance, is quite sure that God heard him from the fish's belly, treated as a metaphor for she'ol, or the grave. I don't like speculating about what happens after death. God knows; we don't. But I can't help wondering whether Origen was closer to the truth than orthodoxy, with his idea that all creation will be saved, with the Devil himself bringing up the rear. If death doesn't cut us off from God after all, then we may be free to reject God, but he has all eternity to work on us. Perhaps there are strange aeons when even death may finally die.

Evangelicalism

There's a pretty good summary here: http://religionatthemargins.com/2011/04/why-im-a-conservative/ . I abandoned them twenty years ago when I twigged that however much they banged on about the Bible, they were always going to interpret it in line with their theological traditions, whether it supports them or not.

The Bible's Buried Secrets

I haven't been posting much due to endless headaches, but I thought I'd post a link to this excellent series, for anyone who missed it.

http://documentarystorm.com/religion/bibles-buried-secrets/

Spot the logical flaw

I just spotted this. http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/death-anxiety-shapes-views-on-evolution-29580/ .

Someone's logic isn't working. OK, so the theory of evolution doesn't give us reassurance about the afterlife, but neither does heliocentrism or any other scientific theory. That's not what it's there for.

Religion does offer such reassurance, but there's no logical connection between 'I believe in God' and 'I don't believe in evolution', any more than there's a link with 'I believe the Earth goes round the sun' or any other piece of gobbledygook. The author needed to look a bit further.