Jesus Was Born, Infanticide Followed. Did That Inspire How He Loved Children?

 

Christ Blessing the Children
source: https://orthodoxgifts.com/christ-blessing-the-children-icon/


TW/CW: murder / infant death / child abuse


There is a Bible verse that always stops me in my tracks:

Herod was furious when he realized that the wise men had outwitted him. He sent soldiers to kill all the boys in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under, based on the wise men’s report of the star’s first appearance.

—Matthew 2:16 (New Living Translation)

This is some of the most heinous evil the Bible reports. Can you imagine?

Herod couldn’t find Jesus, but he knew Jesus was in Bethlehem or nearby, and he knew Jesus was two years old or under. So Herod just took that whole group of people and had them killed. It’s an egregious abuse of power.

The Gospels record attempts on Jesus’s life once he is active in ministry, but it’s a miracle that Jesus even made it to adulthood. He emerged from an entire generation of babies that Herod ordered murdered.

The story of those babies and their families doesn’t stop with their murder. The parents had to live with the death of their children for the rest of their lives. All the birthdays, yearly feasts, and celebrations: gone. Two high school graduations—class of ’13 and class of ’14—cancelled, because no one was there to graduate. A murderous, abusive, vindictive tyrant stole those kids from their parents.

Jesus’s birth was surrounded by child abuse.

“O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie”? Nope. At least not for long. Herod was making that little town a cesspool of death and trauma. There’s no stillness in what Matthew goes on to describe, quoting the prophet Jeremiah:

“A cry was heard in Ramah—
weeping and great mourning.
Rachel weeps for her children,
refusing to be comforted,
for they are dead.”

Did Mary and Joseph and Jesus have survivor’s guilt? How awful must Mary and Joseph have felt about all this? And what was Jesus’s reaction when he realized the circumstances surrounding his birth? Surely this did not look like the salvation the angel had promised Jesus would bring—maybe even its opposite.

I’ve started wondering: all this killing of little babies… did this shape Jesus’s passion for ministering to children? Was it a deeply formative experience for how Jesus would live in the world?

More specifically, did the abuse and trauma Jesus learned about inspire him to especially love the abused and traumatized? Did the erasure of children and complete destruction of their rights lead him to become a champion of children?

Reading against such a backdrop, these words of Jesus strike me as even more poignant—and powerful:

“Let the little children come, and do not forbid them, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

“Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.

And this powerful moment:

And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

I have to think Jesus carried all the death and grief and trauma that others experienced, not just at the cross, but from the very time he was born. When he looked at the children coming to him, did he remember all the children that would never have a chance to approach him? When he blessed the children, was it a deliberate undoing of the curse Herod had pronounced?

Miraculously, Jesus survived citywide infanticide. He lived through that systemic abuse. Now he would prioritize the well-being of children. He would make sure they could truly live.

Yet Another Beautiful Hebrew-English Bible

Someone at Koren Publishers invited me to review their new Hebrew-English Tanakh (The Magerman Edition). After taking one look at a picture of the book, I was convinced. (Thanks to Koren for the review copy, which did not consciously affect the objectivity of this review.)

Check it out:

 

 

Yes, I judged this book by its cover, but the judgment was proven right by its insides.

The edition above has both the Hebrew text (beautifully typeset) with a new English translation that I’ve found to be significantly more readable than the previous one Koren published.

For example, there is more gender accurate (i.e., “gender inclusive”) language where it did not exist in the previous edition, although I thought this translation didn’t go as far in the direction of gender accuracy as it could have.

The transliteration decisions are more fluid. This English reader still stumbled over, for example, Yeḥezkel for Ezekiel, but this was a conscious decision on the translation’s part to “convey the authenticity of the Hebrew original.” I respect that.

Not only is this Bible beautiful, but the binding is sewn. It will last a long time.

Here is the lovely Hebrew typography:

 

 

Especially awesome is that the shewa appears differently in the text whether it is silent or vocalized. I have repeatedly found that helpful as I’ve tried to read the text aloud:

 

 

There are ribbon markers:

 

 

There are colorful charts and tables and diagrams and timelines throughout. Not so many that this already heavy Bible gets heavier, but not so few that the reader needs an additional study Bible for background overviews.

 

 

 

 

Here is a bit more from the publisher:

The Hebrew-English Koren Tanakh respects the classical Jewish interpretive tradition, while being cognizant of contemporary scholarship. It includes simple notes to aid comprehension of words and names, and features extensive, full-color reference material including genealogies, timelines, maps, charts, archaeological artifacts, and more. Proper names have been transliterated (Yaakov, not Jacob; Moshe, not Moses) to convey the authenticity of the Hebrew original. This edition also includes a thumb tab index to aid in finding sources and references, making the Tanakh easily accessible for its readers.

You can find The Magerman Edition of the Hebrew-English Koren Tanakh here, with more available here.

Jesus Sleeps through a Storm While the Disciples are Dying

 

I’ve been enjoying teaching through the Gospel of Mark in an ongoing Webinar series called “Translation Notes.” We focus especially on the words and grammar of the Greek text, trying to answer questions that arise when translating to English.

A few weeks ago I taught a session on Mark 4:35-41, where Jesus exercises authority over the elements by calming a storm that had the disciples fearing for their lives—and already starting to drown.

Paying attention to Mark’s Greek helped me see two important parts of the narrative that could be easy to miss.

First, in Mark 4:37, when the “furious squall” (NIV) comes up, the waves are breaking into the boat where Jesus and his disciples are. Mark says, “the boat was already (ἤδη) filling up.”

This is an important detail, especially with ἤδη = already. The point at which the disciples call out to Jesus is not when they see storm clouds, or when they’re worried a storm might come, or even when they’re sure it is coming. The storm is already there, the waves are already breaking, and the boat is already getting swamped (so NRSV). Not just wet—drenched.

This means the disciples must have felt like they were seconds away from drowning. This isn’t a cute story or an object lesson for them: “Teacher, doesn’t it matter to you that we’re dying?”

Translations that give “we are about to die” or “don’t you care if we drown?” or “we’re going to drown” seem to soften the force of the present indicative verb Mark uses: we are dying. And don’t you care, Jesus?

I think this makes the story all the more relatable. We can cry out to Jesus not just in moments of feeling like we’re about to die, but in moments of actual dying.

A second important point in the narrative: before the disciples can utter this desperate prayer to Jesus, they find him sleeping. Mark narrates it like this:

καὶ αὐτὸς ἦν ἐν τῇ πρύμνῃ ἐπὶ τὸ προσκεφάλαιον καθεύδων.

= And he was in the stern, on a pillow, sleeping!

Major translations tend to change the Greek word order in translation, so that it reads, “But he was in the stern, sleeping on a pillow.”

But I think the word order as Mark has it is worth preserving in English, because Mark is heightening the drama:

And he… (okay, phew, Jesus is at least around!)

…was in the stern… (wait, what’s he doing in the back of the boat?)

…on a pillow… (at a time like this? He’d better not be sleeping!)

…sleeping (!!!)

I struggled to find any English translation that translated it this way, but Eugene Peterson’s Message (supposedly a paraphrase—certainly more thought-for-thought than word-for-word) gives us, “Jesus was in the stern, head on a pillow, sleeping!”

It’s a short sentence, but I think Mark’s word order is deliberate—it’s like a slow-motion nightmare where the already-dying disciples find the worst possible outcome: the one who can save them is asleep.

Those two moments in the story—of actually beginning to die and of terror at Jesus’s being asleep—are worth inhabiting as readers today. Or maybe a better way to say it is that we already feel like we inhabit those moments, and we need to acknowledge it. Mark reminds us that we’re in good company: the company of the dying and terrified. And he invites us to cry out to Jesus, even in our dying, even when it looks like Jesus is fast asleep.

Review: Running While Black

If anyone wonders why a book called Running While Black is necessary, author Alison Mariella Désir answers with an 8-page spread before the book even begins: “Timeline: Freedom of Movement.” One column of the timeline is “U.S. Running History”; the other is “Black People’s Reality.”

For example, in 1896 in U.S. Running History, “The first modern Olympic Games and the first running of the marathon are held.” “Black people’s reality” that year: “In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court (all white men) rules that racial segregation laws do not violate the constitution, a doctrine that came to be known as ‘separate but equal.’”

Another example: as the 1960s and 1970s jogging boom hit the U.S., Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated: “We were being killed in the streets while white people were taking to the streets to run.” (!!!)

The two timelines are emblematic of one of the key points Désir makes: especially with distance running, “Running’s whiteness… (has) permeated the sport.” She notes that Coach Bill Bowerman started running programming in Eugene, Oregon in 1963, but Oregon’s history of Black exclusion and segregation meant that Bowerman was starting a de facto running club for white people.

Yet despite how whiteness and white supremacy have infiltrated running culture—and this is another of Désir’s key points—Black people have been integral to the history and growth of distance running. In 1936 three Black men started the New York Pioneer Club, “a running and civil rights group.” Ted Corbitt was the first Black man to run the marathon for the U.S. in the Olympics in 1952. Désir herself has had major impact on the sport, not least through her founding of Harlem Run, whose history she details in her book.

Désir’s goal in Running While Black—and in her life’s work—is doing what the book’s subtitle says: “Finding Freedom in a Sport That Wasn’t Built for Us.” She writes:

My goal and hope is that we can reimagine running as a sport for everyone, making freedom of movement possible for Black people at all times, in all spaces, where Blackness is seen not as a threat or even a statement, but commonplace and normal. Where Black runners feel welcomed and safe at every race. Where our stories and voices are part of history, part of the universal story of what it means to run. Where we feel like we belong. Only then will the sport live up to what it aspires to be—open to all.


As a white person and as a man (and a big and tall one, at that), I feel like I can pretty safely run just about anywhere and everywhere. At night. On city streets. In neighborhoods with “Police Lives Matter” and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. This has not been Désir’s experience, though, and she heartbreakingly begins the book by describing a pre-run decision to wear a “bright, long-sleeved shirt with reflective beads, a shirt that screams, ‘I’m running! Don’t shot!’” She says, “When I go for a run, I’m not just going for a run. I am stepping outside as a Black body in a white world. …I would prefer to just be me, but my country has not given me this choice.”

I expected Désir to talk about Ahmaud Arbery (whom she describes with a deserved gut-punch as “a man who committed the crime of jogging while Black”), and she does, at length. But what surprised me about Running While Black was just how extensively Désir unpacks her line: “I would prefer to just be me, but my country has not given me this choice.”

Early in the book she talks a lot about “just… me,” her family upbringing, her experience running track as a kid, caring for an aging parent, struggling with depression, training in mental health, and overcoming struggles in the early days of starting Harlem Run. It’s an enthralling narrative.

And woven throughout the book is a history a country that has “not given (her) this choice” to be just herself: through both the whiteness of running, and the persistence of white supremacy in U.S. history. Phrases like “best places to live if you’re a runner,” for example, have racial histories (segregation, redlining, exclusionary real estate policies):

My immediate reaction (to this article) was to think this didn’t happen by accident. Racism created the “good” parts of town (read: white) and the “bad” parts of town (read: Black). White people didn’t just happen to live in the places that were conducive to running, and Black people didn’t choose the “other” areas.

Désir’s book aims to be history, memoir, sociology, cultural study, and it all works somehow. She’s a great writer.

My only critique is of Désir’s criticism of the Boston Marathon, how it is “elitist rather than democratic” because—unlike other marathons with a lottery-based entry system—it is a time-qualified race. I’ve got no pushback on her detailing Boston’s racist history, and how the marathon skips Dorchester and Roxbury and “travels through predominantly white suburbs and finishes in a predominantly white part of the city.”1 And of course she’s right that “exclusion” is a tool of white supremacy. But I wish she had said more about how she sees the Boston’s exclusion as racialized. It surely is! But more than any other marathons? Aren’t marathons, because of their physical and time and financial demands, exclusive across the board anyway? Maybe I’m just being sensitive in defending my hometown, which is (sadly) PLENTY racist, both institutionally and among individuals. But Désir’s writing on the Boston Marathon left me wanting more.

Overall I really appreciated this book and sort of devoured it. For all runners and readers, Désir’s deep dive into Black distance running history is an especially valuable use of time. I learned so much that I had not seen detailed anywhere else, either in writing about running or in Black studies. Running While Black is a powerful book that will inspire and challenge readers who are willing to listen.

Désir’s popular article for Outside magazine offers a conclusion similar to what her full book asks:

If you found yourself uncomfortable reading this, please know that my discomfort writing this far exceeds yours. To what extent am I now a target for speaking truth to power? I don’t know how my words will be picked apart and shredded, and which doors may close as a result of writing this. What I do know is that I am speaking passionately from the heart about difficult things. And I don’t have all the answers but I am willing to do the work. Are you?

You can find Running While Black here.

 


Thanks to Portfolio & Sentinel for sending the review copy, which did not (at least not consciously) affect how I reviewed the book.

Footnotes:

  1. But weren’t Dorchester and Roxbury “white” when the marathon started, as well as when Hopkinton became the starting point? So is her challenge that they should change the route now so it’s not so “white?” If so, I agree. ↩

Review of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People)

The pandemic has afforded many of us an extended opportunity to think and re-think our jobs: Am I in the right one? Can I live out my values at work? Am I doing what I’m good at? Is my work environment a healthy one? How can I best contribute to the world?

We don’t answer these questions in isolation—even those of us who are solo staff or who work remotely. Work is inevitably work with others. So what to do when those others are hard to work with?

Last fall Harvard Business Review Press published Amy Gallo’s Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People). It offers strategies for how we work with challenging others. And it looks at how interpersonal stressors can affect one’s own mental health. Gallo suggests numerous practical ways for us workers to care well for ourselves in tough settings.

Gallo wrote the book “to provide a more nuanced, practical, evidence-based approach, one that acknowledges the complexity of unhealthy relationships at work and the immense discomfort they can create“ (7). She wants to help readers develop “interpersonal resilience” (9). She makes a big promise, on which she delivers:

With the advice in this book, you’ll be able to put work conflict in its place, freeing up valuable time and mental capacity for the things that really matter to you. (9)

Gallo lists “eight archetypes,” eight categories of difficult people we might expect to face in the workplace:

  • the insecure boss
  • the pessimist
  • the victim
  • the passive-aggressive peer
  • the know-it-all
  • the tormentor
  • the biased coworker
  • the political operator

Each of these archetypes gets a chapter, with Gallo admitting there can be overlap between archetypes. She gives background to each archetype, names some “costs” to working with such a person, lists “questions to ask yourself” (this inward turn is hard but needed), and ends with “tactics to try.” For those working with “the pessimist,” for example, she suggests you “reframe cynicism as a gift” (77) and “give them a role to play” (78), but that you also “help them understand when their pessimism helps and when it hurts” (80). Toward the end of each chapter Gallo gives a list of “phrases to use,” which I think was one of the best parts of the book.

As practical as Gallo is, I benefited from the time she spent in the first two chapters laying the groundwork for navigating difficult relationships. I agree it is true, after all, that “you’re better off trying to create a workable situation with your colleague now than hoping things will improve if they leave” (238). So how to make it workable? Why bother? Gallo’s early chapters talk not only about why work relationships are worth investing in; she also suggests the idea of actually making friends with your co-workers! And she details how relational stress impacts the brain in a way that really motivated me to keep reading.

The final chapters are great, too. Having run through the archetypes, there are still lingering questions. Gallo addresses them all, and well: Should I just quit? How can I stay in a sustainable way? Is there someone I can escalate this to? How do I take care of myself? Gallo suggests these two powerful mantras: “It’s OK to feel hurt” and, “Who I am is not shaped by this person’s beliefs” (247). I found the last one especially affirming.

I really appreciated this book. It comes at a great time for a lot of us, and Gallo’s years of experience and passion show. Getting Along is accessible and practical, as well as backed up by research and lots of interpersonal interactions across industries.

I also thought Gallo does a good job of thinking inclusively. Early on she notes, “Not everyone experiences the workplace in the same way—and particular groups are often the targets of incivility to a disproportionate degree” (8). Throughout the archetypes she uses lenses of racism and sexism and other -isms to analyze difficult interactions. It feels like this level of analysis is often missing in self-help or workplace productivity books.

If I have a critique or two of this book, it’s that—based on the title and book description—I expected to see more writing on how to address a co-worker who has a distinct mental health issue. This would probably make the book much longer, but what if your boss actually is a narcissist? Gallo jumps right in on this possibility in the “know-it-all” chapter (starting on p. 118), but I worry she might have too quickly dismissed a reality some folks face, even if she’s right that we shouldn’t be armchair psychologists and even if “pathological narcissism” is rare. Or, to take another archetype, what if your “pessimistic” co-worker is (also) clinically depressed or has an anxiety disorder? Should that shape how you interact with them? If so, how? Are you on the hook to try to get them help? Do you need to be more careful about how you word things? Or not?

Finally, I wonder if readers who are in a persistently (or even occasionally) abusive work environment might need to look elsewhere for help on how to navigate their toxic environment. Gallo does much to help readers work toward health, and I think (I hope!) what she offers will cover the vast majority of workplace personality difficulties. But I can call to mind settings where something like a more trauma-based lens might be needed to help the worker navigate their setting. How to respond, in other words, when you believe you are being abused at work—physically, emotionally, sexually, or psychologically? To be fair, Gallo’s chapter on “the biased co-worker” offers an in-depth response to discrimination and microaggressions in the workplace, although I think the chapter on “the tormentor” could have covered abuse dynamics more fully.

I don’t mean these final comments to take away from how truly affirming, helpful, and empowering Getting Along is. I appreciate how an author of a book like this may be putting themselves out there. And it seemed clear to me that Gallo has heard about, coached people through, and lived through more than a fair share of workplace conflict and difficulty. That she shares her hard-earned wisdom in such an engaging book is a gift to anyone who would read it.

You can find Amy Gallo’s Getting Along here. Her own Website is here (where I have just signed up for her monthly newsletter).

Thanks to Harvard Business Review Press for sending the review copy, which did not (at least not consciously) affect how I reviewed the book.

Why Didn’t Paul Use Parables?

As much as I have sought to meditate on the words of Jesus and the apostle Paul, one significant thought had never occurred to me:

“Interestingly, Jesus’s mode of parabolic discourse was generally not emulated in the early Christian tradition.”

That’s from Richard Hays, George Washington Ivey Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Duke Divinity School. It comes from an essay in his remarkable book Reading with the Grain of Scripture.

In other words, why didn’t Paul and James and Peter and John and Jude and Priscilla/Barnabas/Luke/Clement use parables?

Intent as they all were on imitating Jesus and carrying on his teaching, why did they not also imitate Jesus by carrying on his teaching method of using parables?

(As I’ve begun to reflect on this, I think James may come the closest to using parable-like discourse.)

As best as I can tell, it might just come down to this: the rest of the New Testament writers seemed to understand their calling and giftedness as teachers/writers differently.

Still, even if they’re not going to use parables themselves, why don’t Paul and the others at least reflect more on the parables of Jesus?

The Autobiography of Omar

The first time I saw Michael K. Williams’s memoir in the bookstore, I devoured the main chapter on his character Omar from The Wire. I thought that was most of what I’d want to read.

But then I started reading from the beginning. And kept reading. And reading.

Mike tells his powerful story in a compelling, humbling, and vulnerable way. From childhood to adulthood, he wrestles in view of the reader with his family, identity, joys, insecurities, ambition, addiction, and what it means to come back home and give back to one’s community.

There are gems throughout the book. For example:

What most people don’t realize about addiction is that it is in you before the drug even shows up. That’s because the drug itself is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem. The drug is the culmination, the final step—not the first.

And:

If you push something down, it’ll find its way out. You can’t run from it. Jay-Z says we can’t heal what we never reveal. And it’s true. You can’t heal what you never reveal.

In talking about a powerful encounter with Reverend Ron, who showed him God’s love:

It didn’t happen right away, took years in fact, but Reverend Ron was the beginning. I started to see myself as worthy of his love, of that congregation’s love, of God’s love. It all started there in that New Jersey church.

But:

It’s not like boom I was saved and clean all at once. There’s not an addict on the planet who it’s like that for. Being an addict means forward and back constantly. It means saying no again and again. That’s why someone who is clean for thirty years can still call himself an addict. They’re always one choice away.

Especially poignant is Mike’s description of the ebbs and flows of his addiction throughout the five seasons of The Wire, including his emotional response to the show’s conclusion:

It was like in Forrest Gump when he decides to stop running across the country and everyone following him just kind of stops too and wanders away. I felt like one of those people. Like, What do I do now? It wasn’t even about the next job. It was Where do I get this feeling again? How am I going to reach in and get that feeling? That drug, that Omar drug, that shit was powerful, and I didn’t have any legs to stand on. I didn’t know who I was because I had stopped doing work on myself.

The reader does see how much progress Mike made in his life in loving himself and loving others. His self-love is an amazing counterpoint to this truth he articulates: “Every addict, every alcoholic has a self-loathing; we bathe ourselves in that.”

Having learned to love himself—even in a society that in many ways still does not love young black males well—Mike gave back to overlooked communities.

We have to get back to the idea of the village, figure out how to mend our struggling families in the community. Give them culture, respect, connection, the experience of dreaming and hoping. The permission to dream is so important. The permission to love yourself is so important. You don’t have to get scarred up in your face and go through endless rehabs and almost die and overdose to finally understand that you’re worth something.

Scenes from My Life is a heartbreaking and inspiring read. Rest in peace, Mike.

 

 

Thanks to Crown Publicity for the review copy, given with no expectation as to the content of my review.

Book Note: Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power

I learned from Scot McKnight’s Substack about a new book, the Introduction to which is riveting. It’s called Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power, by Lisa Weaver Swartz, a sociologist at Asbury University in Kentucky.

In it she profiles two seminary communities in Kentucky: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Asbury Theological Seminary. Southern has a “complementarian insistence on male headship,” whereas Asbury “rejects overtly gendered hierarchies.” This comparative study already piques my interest. I expected it to be a takedown of Southern that held Asbury up as a shining example of how to “do gender and practice power.” Indeed, McKnight writes here about Weaver Swartz and “Southern Seminary’s ‘Godly’ Man.” McKnight calls it “faux masculinity” where “the power dynamic becomes asymmetrical, which itself is fertile ground for abuse.”

But Weaver Swartz notes in the introduction, “Asbury, however, has struggled to achieve the demographic equity it prescribes.” Even this seminary with a so-called egalitarian theology has a narrative that “limits women much more subtly.” There is at Asbury Seminary an “individualistic genderblindness” that “limits gender equity.” And so, “Combining theology, culture, rhetoric, and embodied practice, both seminaries narrate powerful institutional stories that center men and limit women’s agency.”

Phew! That’s all from the first few pages. And the title, Stained Glass Ceilings, is really clever. Not to mention a beautifully designed cover.

Check out the book here at the publisher’s site. I’m eager to read it.

What Does It Mean to Call the Bible “Inspired”?

“St. Paul Writing His Epistles,” by Valentin de Boulogne (17th Cent.)

 

I preach from the Bible whenever I preach. God spoke through and to humanity by the Word. My primary goal as a preacher is to create a space where we can hear God speaking to us today again through that Scripture that is “living and active.” And that we would respond faithfully.

Rare, however, is the full sermon I preach about the Bible: what it is, how we got it, what it does, and how we can respond. I had that privilege this last Sunday, as I preached on the first of five parts of our church’s vision: Scripture guides us. To say Scripture guides us invites reflection on at least two questions: (1) what is Scripture and (2) why should that be what guides us? (Not to mention: how would we know, months and years from now, if Scripture actually were guiding us?)

Despite 40+ years of my life steeped in the Bible, despite memorizing whole books of the New Testament as a kid, despite reading the Bible through multiple times, and despite reading it in Hebrew and Greek… I found it surprisingly challenging to concisely share about, “What is the Bible?” and the follow-on question: “So what?”

In the end I broke it down broadly into two -ations: Revelation and Invitation. God’s Word is revelation. God’s word is an invitation.

To call the Bible revelation means that it is a received word. It is a given word. It is not something we went looking for and figured out by pure reason or emotion or will—in contrast to starting points in other disciplines, like philosophy. All the world’s Pulitzer Prize winners combined couldn’t conjure up God’s Word if they tried. Scripture is God’s self-revelation, and we have it, available to us. Deuteronomy 30:11-14 says:

This command I am giving you today is not too difficult for you, and it is not beyond your reach. It is not kept in heaven, so distant that you must ask, ‘Who will go up to heaven and bring it down so we can hear it and obey?’ It is not kept beyond the sea, so far away that you must ask, ‘Who will cross the sea to bring it to us so we can hear it and obey?’ No, the message is very close at hand; it is on your lips and in your heart so that you can obey it.

Notice who is doing the work, so to speak, in finding “the message”—not you! Not me! God says the people of Israel already have it—on their lips and in their heart. Not because they set it there, but because God put it there. In the 21st century, we might add that we have God’s Word at our very fingertips—just a search string and a click away.

The more specific word Scripture uses for revelation is inspiration. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

Maybe a better English word (or at least a more literal one) for “God-breathed” would be theo-spired. God breathed his words into the Bible. Just as he breathed life into Adam and Eve and created them in his image, he breathed himself into Scripture, showing us even more of his image. Scripture is not just humans guessing at who God is; it’s God himself telling us who he is.

Millard Erickson, in his wonderful Christian Theology, puts it this way:

By inspiration of Scripture we mean that supernatural influence of the Holy Spirit on the Scripture writers that rendered their writings an accurate record of the revelation or that resulted in what they wrote actually being the Word of God.

Just how does inspiration work? If the Bible was both written by God and written by humans, what percentage of each author is at play in each passage, or across the whole Bible? Or is that the wrong way to think about it? Is it more like the incarnation: fully divine, fully human, both at once?

I think the best answer to this question is: we just don’t know. Erickson says it more articulately:

It is our contention here that inspiration involved God’s directing the thoughts of the writers, so that those thoughts were precisely the ones that he wished expressed. At times these thoughts were very specific; at other times they were more general. When they were more general, God wanted that particular degree of specificity recorded, and no more.

I suppose Erickson’s claim could be seen as a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc , where someone infers causation (or intent) just because one thing chronologically follows the other. In other words, “We have it how we have it, so God must have wanted it that way.” But I believe he’s right, and so do millennia of interpreters.

Speaking of philosophy, Erickson tells this story about Edmund Husserl:

Edmund Husserl, the phenomenologist, had a devoted disciple and assistant, Eugen Fink. Fink wrote an interpretation of Husserl’s philosophy upon which the master placed his approval. It is reported that when Husserl read Fink’s article, he exclaimed, “It is as if I had written it myself!””

So, too, God’s relationship to Scripture.

That’s all revelation. But this revelation of God calls for a response: it’s also an invitation. I’ll write more about this in a future post.

Learning to Love God’s Wrath?

“But when we continued to sin against your ways, you were angry. How then can we be saved?” — Isaiah 64:5

Passages about God’s anger might not be the best worn pages in our Bibles. Our great and merciful God, a God of wrath also?

A few months into the pandemic I read an excellent book called, But What About God’s Wrath?: The Compelling Love Story of Divine Anger, by Kevin Kinghorn, with Stephen Travis. The sub-title drew me right in: “The Compelling Love Story of Divine Anger.” Love story? It might be enough for me to make peace with God’s wrath. Or be saved from it somehow! But could I learn to love God’s wrath, too?

For Kinghorn, God’s wrath is “God pressing the truth on us.” We need the truth, but sometimes we’re more motivated to hide than seek it. As Scott Sunquist says, “It’s not loving to hide the truth, and the truth is we’re not healthy…; we need to be restored, even revived.” Or if you prefer Jay-Z, by way of Omar: “You cannot heal what you don’t reveal.”

God’s wrath, then, illuminates the truth, even “pressing” it “on us.” In his wrath, God is restoring us, reviving us, and seeking to free us from the deceptions we too often tolerate or wink at or—worse—embrace.

Isaiah 64, cited at the top of this post, goes on:

All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us and made us waste away because of our sins.

Isaiah remembers how “all of us” have failed to call on God’s name; we have not strived to lay hold of God. So God in his loving wrath has given over his people to the consequences of their sins. At times we see these just as natural consequences, but ones that are imbued with the intended goal of restoration, of returning to the Lord.

In this way Kinghorn successfully makes the point that God’s wrath does not stand in contrast to God’s love; rather, God’s wrath is perfect and in fact is “entirely an expression of God’s love, in specific contexts.” Everything God does is motivated by love and is loving, because God is love.

This is not just a neat apologetic trick to avoid some kind of epic, Star Wars-like Wrath vs. Love saga. Kinghorn makes the compelling case from Scripture that “the starting point” is God’s love, and that wrath is a sub-trait of God’s love. Is it loving, after all, to simply leave someone to their own folly, without at least first attempting to press the truth upon them? “If there is one kind of truth that we humans are adept at avoiding, it is the thought that we have been acting in a morally defective way,” writes Kinghorn. Chapter 6 (“Truth as God’s Response to Sin and Self-Deception”) is especially powerful in developing these thoughts. We need God’s wrath, because it saves us from ourselves.

The Psalms, especially the Psalms of vengeance, virtually require God’s wrath for God to be just, loving, faithful to his promises. Will this God right wrongs, or won’t he? Kinghorn puts it like this:

God is not like a judge in a courthouse, suspending his personal feelings in order to act objectively. He is more like a partner who feels affronted when her daughter is bullied in school and who takes steps to confront the offender.

This confrontation, by the way, is a kindness to both offended and offender. This is true even when the offender and offended are the same person, as in the case of “self-destructive behavior.” Hurting oneself angers God, too. Kinghorn cites Jeremiah 7:18-19:

“They pour out drink offerings to other gods to arouse my anger. But am I the one they are provoking?” declares the LORD. “Are they not rather harming themselves, to their own shame?”

“A God who cares about us would naturally be troubled,” Kinghorn concludes, “for our sake, at our sins against him.”

God’s wrath is “more than an emotion,” though. It seeks to lead people to repentance, which leads to fullness of life.

In the end, there’s a sense in which “wrath” is in the eye of the beholder: “Whether we experience God pressing the truth as God’s wrath or as God’s faithful care is, in the end, up to us.” How will we respond to God’s overtures, even when they are uncomfortable?

When I read the book two years ago, it profoundly affected me. It encouraged and strengthened me in my ministry practice. The blend of philosophy and biblical studies (assisting author Stephen Travis) is like enjoying delicious, freshly baked tortilla chips, only to have homemade guac come out a minute later to dip the chips in.

It’s no exaggeration to say I loved this book. It both fired up my theological/philosophical synapses and ministered to me, heart and soul. Never would I have expected that about a book on God’s wrath! But that may just speak to how anemic my understanding of God can be. Kinghorn and Travis will help any willing reader grow in their understanding (and love) of God.

I highly recommend the book. Check it out here.

 

Thanks to IVP Academic for sending the review copy, which did not (at least not consciously) affect how I reviewed the book.