Ezra & the Outsiders

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Richard Heyduck

The book of Ezra in the Old Testament shows conflicting attitudes toward outsiders.

Most famously, Ezra ends with the push for the Israelite men to get rid of their foreign wives and their children. These wives are leading the men astray, making Israel impure, and potentially bringing the judgment of God on the people. These ungodly women are a blight on the just-restored Israel.

Less famously, Ezra begins with the story of another foreigner, Cyrus, King of Persia (the messiah, according to Isa. 45). God has worked through this foreigner, perhaps without Cyrus’ awareness, to bring Israel home from captivity and begin the work of restoring the temple. This foreigner, this outsider, is a blessing to the people of God.

So which is it? Are foreigners a blight or a blessing?

God’s intention is to restore all of creation, including all nations and their inhabitants. Israel is God’s chosen vehicle for accomplishing that restoration. The election of Israel, therefore, is not merely for their own sake, as though God wanted to bless them to the exclusion of everyone else. Neither was it the case that God’s activity was limited to Israel and its people. Through Israel, God worked to benefit outsiders. Through outsiders, God worked to benefit Israel.

So what about those foreign wives and kids? What was the problem there? The aspect of their foreignness that was problematic was that they were leading Israel astray. Though married to Israelite men, they retained their primary allegiance to their home gods. They were winning over the Israelite men to the ways of the gods of the nations, rather than being won over to YHWH. Israel might in the land and home from exile, but they were losing their identity as Israel because they were straying from God.

The New Testament handles these questions differently. Yes, we still see God working through Israel – particularly through Israel’s true Messiah, Jesus – to rescue the nations. That’s why we see Jesus telling his followers to go and make disciples of “all nations.” God is still working through outsiders as well, though in their involvement in the crucifixion of Jesus the Romans play more the role of Nebuchadnezzar (who took Israel into exile) than that of Cyrus (who sent Israel home from exile). In his letters to the Corinthians, we see Paul handing marriage to outsiders differently as well. First, if one is married to a non-believer and that non-believer is willing to stay in the marriage, do it that way. That’s a major change from what we see in Ezra. Second, if you are unmarried, be sure and marry within the faith. This view is in continuity with the model in Ezra.

The key features I draw from these episodes are as follows:

Our identity as people of God is primary. The foreign wives in Ezra were challenging that identity. For Ezra, at least, identity as the people of God trumps family commitment. If we take Jesus’ teaching as normative, it looks like Jesus is on the side of Ezra. “Let the dead bury their dead, you come follow me.” “Who is my mother, brother, and sister? The one who believes in me and does the will of my father in heaven.” “Unless you hate your father and mother you are not worthy of me.” Strong words in a family-centric culture. Sometimes American Christians today, pushed by the perception of cultural forces inimical to the family, portray Christianity as all about family and “family values.” Well, that’s surely not the whole picture.

God can and does work through whom he likes. God seems to revel in working through those whom we least expect. We can keep our eyes open and watch for God at work, not just in Christian America, or in other Christian cultures, but even in places and in people we’d least expect.

We are part of God’s ongoing story. It’s worth our while, then, to pay attention to that story, to its plot line, its characters, and it’s setting. It’s also worth our while to take that story as the primary story in which we live.

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Paul & the Faithfulness of God

Posted on December 31, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

One of the Christmas presents my wife gave me was N.T. Wright’s latest big book (if you know his work you know what I mean by “big book.”), Paul and the Faithfulness of God. In Chapter 2 (which I just finished) Wright lays out his reconstruction of the worldview and theology of the Pharisees. Wright does this from the position that Paul’s previous life as a zealous Pharisee sheds light on his subsequent life as a zealous Christian.

In this very long chapter Wright does two things that build directly on claims he’s made previously, though never with the depth of analysis provided here.

First, Wright demonstrates the centrality of narrative in Jewish thought up through the Second Temple period. That narrative is essential to understanding and interpreting scripture and living under its authority, is an old claim of Wright’s. The earliest I’ve seen his explanation of the narratival authority of scripture is in his Laing Lecture of 1989, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?”  He later expanded his argument in the full length (though by Wright’s standards, fairly short) book, Scripture and the Authority of God. If you’re interested in the question of how a scripture text that is largely narrative in format can function as an authority, by all means check out these works. In Paul and the Authority of God Wright approaches the question from the backside, showing that his primary model for the narrative authority of scripture fits the actual use of scripture in this Second Temple era. He works from scripture itself (later scripture using earlier) and non-canonical writings to show that it was very common for Jewish writers to take themselves to be part of the same narrative depicted in scripture. Since they inhabit that same narrative, they can only learn what they ought to be doing now, by considering what has happened in the story up to this point. Wright’s coverage of this material is masterful.

Second, and relying on the same body of literature, Wright expands on his claim that many Jews of the era took themselves to be still waiting the end of exile. More than just the claim that they lived as individuals deeply aware of their personal sin and hungering to find a merciful God who would forgive them, they took themselves to be part of a people – the elect nation Israel – who were still ruled by the pagans, rather than by God. They hungered for deliverance, for an end to exile, for God to truly become King among them. When I first encountered this thesis in Wright over twenty years ago, I saw its obvious contrast with the entrenched individualist reading of the “plight” presumed in the New Testament. In arguing this way Wright has had to cut against the grain of centuries of Protestant theology, modern biblical studies, and a habitual de-Judaizing of the early Christian tradition.

Now on to chapter 3 and the background of the Greco-Roman part of Paul’s world!

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In or Out?

Posted on December 21, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

Living organisms and organizations have boundaries. There is always some sort of line demarcating X from not-X. Some of these markers are positive, some negative.

This is an unpopular reality for some. We shout “No boundaries!” as if everything flowed indistinguishably into everything else. We preach, “Don’t judge!” as advice against the identification of boundary markers or the transgression of boundaries markers.

Frank Schaeffer was just defrocked for his unrepentant stand against an official United Methodist stand. This looks like an instance of an organization (the Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference) policing a boundary. They are saying, in effect, “We need leaders who operate within the recognized and agreed upon boundaries of our organization. Since you reject those boundaries you cannot any longer be a leader here.”

Some United Methodists (majorities in some locales) think the official United Methodist stand is wrong. A bishop in one such locale (Southern California) is working to enact a different set of boundaries and is inviting Schaeffer to come serve in her conference. In addition to rejecting this particular boundary marker, she is also rejecting the process of boundary making in the United Methodist Church through General Conference action, describing it as “wrong in its incessant demand to determine through political processes.”

Another boundary transgressive event, rooted in the same cultural flashpoint, is also in the news. In the Duck Dynasty brouhaha, the boundaries are the opposite of those in the UMC. Where one judicatory in the UMC has performed an exclusionary act in line with the official United Methodist position on homosexuality, A & E has also performed an exclusionary act in line with its position on homosexuality. Both organizations have made judgments about what goods they will stand for and seek to propagate. Both organizations are being judged and misjudged for what they’ve done.

The first mistake is that the boundary policing events are seen as abridging rights. Freedom of speech is enshrined in the US Constitution, so these two Americans ought to be able to freely express themselves. Well sure. Both have freely expressed themselves. Neither is in any trouble at all with the government for what they’ve said. The first amendment has no bearing at all on speech acts within organizations. The United Methodist Church is free to specify both acts to be performed and acts to be refrained from. Television networks have the same freedom. If these organizations did not have these freedoms, the boundaries between the State and non-state would have failed.

Having a right to say or do something does not mean that saying and doing particular things does not result in consequences. In both of these cases consequences are perfectly predictable.

A second problem area that may be peculiar to the United Methodist incident, is that the identification of and action against a transgression of United Methodist boundaries is itself identified as a transgression of a more important boundary, that of grace, love, and inclusion. If, for example, “Open Minds, Open Hearts, Open Doors,” is our de facto doctrinal statement, then it can be argued that expulsion of a man who exhibited perfect conformity with those virtues is nonsensical, inconsistent with our deepest values, and ultimately blasphemous.

Some who complain about A & E’s action against Phil Robertson have reasoned similarly. A & E is staking out a liberal position, it is said. Liberalism is all about being open-minded and accepting. How come, it is then asked, open-mindedness only goes one direction? Aren’t they contradicting the very values they profess?

I’m not a member of the church of A & E. I’ve never seen the show in question. I don’t have a stake in adding to the publicity promoting all those multimillionaires. But I am a member of the United Methodist Church, so I’ll conclude by focusing solely on our own in-house issue.

I’ve never been a fan of taking our marketing slogan (“Open Open Open”) as a doctrinal statement. I’m not even in favor of it as a marketing slogan. On the one hand, the way it has been read is to be a total rejection (can I say “exclusion?”) of all exclusion. As I said above, it is impossible for an organization to refrain from acts of exclusion without ceasing to be an organization. Boundaries are ineliminable features of the existence of organizations.  As long as the United Methodist Church wants to exist as an organization, it has to have boundaries and it has to enforce those boundaries.

We have two challenges. Most obviously, our question is about this particular boundary marker. If our warrant for choosing our positions is something like “We will recognize whatever moral position our broader culture recognizes as definitive of justice and therefore our own official position,” then the outcome will be obvious. If, on the other hand, our preferred warrant is something like, “We will recognize whatever moral position has represented the plain reading of scripture in the past as definitive of justice and therefore our own official position,” then the outcome will probably also be obvious. But what if both warrants are overly simplistic and misguided when taken in isolation from other warrants and forms of reasoning?

That brings us to the second challenge. What are we to do in the interim, assuming we have no easy solutions ready to hand? The preferred option for both sides would be that the other would surrender. I don’t think that’s likely. Another option, talked about for years, is some sort of “amicable separation.” While some things could be divided amicably, I believe this solution is also overly simplistic. We’re a fragmented and broken church, full of fragmented broken people (and I’m not just talking about the people who disagree with me). Though “sexuality” is our current major fault line, it is not the only fault line or even the only significant one. It is also the case that people change their positions vis-a-vis “sexuality” over time. Suppose we amicably separate next year. Will the resulting institutions (and why think there will only be two?) be monolithic and stay monolithic for long? How long until we need another amicable separation?

Utility demands we resolve this issue sooner rather than later. People are suffering the consequences of exclusion. People are suffering from the consequences of including misguided leaders who lead them astray. We must stop the suffering. We must act now. But why does utility have to be our trump value? My preference is to wait – to integrate also the values of truth, goodness and beauty. The wait will not be easy. The work of discernment will be hard. It may take decades – even centuries.

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Forcing Children to go to Church?

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

Inspired by an assignment one of my students mentioned on Facebook, I wrote the following this morning. Thinking the question to be of possibly greater interest, I thought I’d post it here as well. Her assignment was to write about whether parents should force their children to go to church.

It depends on what you mean by “children” & “attend” & “force.” We take it as normal for parents to “force” their kids to do all kinds of things: brush teeth, eat healthy food, go to school, avoid violence, play in the yard rather than the interstate highway, etc. As a parent I am responsible to teach my children about what is good and how to achieve/experience that good. I do this with the implicit assumption that at some point they may choose to reject the good, but at that point it is their responsibility, not mine.

Part of my responsibility toward my children, and toward others generally (including students!), is to offer them the good more as an invitation than as a compulsion. If I offer the good merely hypocrtically, i.e., along the lines of “this is good for you, take my word for it, even though you see no evidence for my taking this good into my own life,” then I am doing them (and myself) a disservice. I want others to CHOOSE the good for themselves, not merely do it because I’m the parent (authority figure) and insist upon it.

As a follower of Jesus I am also bound by the Great Commission. Jesus didn’t say, “teach them – as long as they’re not your children – to obey everything I have commanded you.” I teach obedience by being obedient myself and including them in a community of obedience, that is, the church. This inclusion is much more than mere “attendance” on Sunday morning.

I take church, the community of those who are becoming participants in God’s ongoing history through their faith and the power of the Holy Spirit, to be an integral part of salvation. If I am going to love others as I love myself, I cannot help but want them to be included in the the fullness of the salvation offered by Jesus. I cannot force this salvation on anyone, and from what I see, God who could force salvation on people, generally chooses not to. The fact that we choose to vigorously invite others into this life with Christ is, according to the logic of that story, an act of love. If church is part of life, and I choose apathy – “Church is there if you, upon reaching an age where you can do so rationally, choose to go, you can go” – amounts to a “Your autonomous individuality is the most important defining characteristic you have, and in order to respect that, you can go to hell for all I care.” That sure doesn’t look like love to me.

Ah, but none of this addresses the practical problem of children who positively reject the idea of going to church. If they are of an age, and the church to which we’ve exposed them is nothing more than a Sunday morning event, then, alas, sometimes, depending on the age, we ought to acquiesce. Yet we do so with broken hearts (like God in Ezek. 33:11).

In the meantime, some of us have the opportunity to act as leaders in the church to make the life of the community so attractive and invitational that more are drawn in than are repulsed.

And we never give up.

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Divine Information

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

Yesterday I mused about some comments Al Mohler made during an ETS meeting about inerrancy. He said,

Would God give inaccurate information in a revelation to us? No. But in revelation he would give us information that we can see, can hear, and can know.

A few more questions have occurred to me, slow thinker that I am.

What kind of information would God give us? In this question I’m following Mohler in being vague about the referent of “us.” If the Bible is taken to be the locus of divine information giving, it becomes apparent that God thinks it is more important for us to have information about the ancient near eastern world and its cultures and history than of the cultures and history of our own times. It is also the case that the information God gives us in the Bible, unless we engage in something like bibliomancy or divination with the text, is more general than personal. The information content does not, for the most part, pertain to my life. I had to do a car repair recently. I was able to order the part without difficulty. I was also able to get the old, broken part off. But the new part had a feature that made it very difficult to install. Getting that new part on was a very practical need. I’ve read the Bible several times over the years, but I have yet to find the information I needed for something as simple as making that car repair.

Some may accuse me of mocking the Bible here. I have nothing of the sort in mind. If I’m mocking anything it’s the reduction of the Bible to a book that primarily exists to impart information. That said, I do take the Bible to be a book by which information is imparted, information that I need. I need to know what God has done in history, particularly through Jesus. I need to know how to respond to that action. I don’t particularly need to know how to put together a tabernacle, handle the sacrifice of a lamb, the names of Jesus’ disciples, or the sites of Paul’s missionary visits. When I abstract from the Bible the information I really need, a huge amount of text remains, apparently unneeded.

But maybe my problem is that I can’t adequately assess what information I truly need. Perhaps I really do need to know those details presented in the text. But then I would be going beyond the text, since the text doesn’t seem to present those details as essential information that I need to know if I want to be saved.

My thought is that salvation is much bigger than God flipping some sort of switch upon my responding to coming to faith in Jesus (or, if I were a Calvinist, my coming to faith in Jesus in response to some sort of switch God flipped from all eternity). What kind of information is Jesus imparting in the tale of the two sons? That there were two sons? That the father killed the fattened calf when the younger was restored to him? “No, the information is the principle in the story, the principle that God receives those who turn to him in humble faith.” That’s a good principle – I like it. I think it’s even biblical. But I also think it misses the point of Jesus’ story. Jesus didn’t tell that story to impart information – even accurate information – but to provoke his hearers to take up his mission to those who were lost. Just look at the framing verses at the beginning of the chapter.

Information – sure we need information! And accurate information is better than inaccurate information. But the impartation of information is secondary to the invitation and provocation to enter into God’s story, a story that climaxes in Jesus. As I experience the Bible today – whether through reading, praying, meditating, memorizing, preaching – God speaks and draws me into the story.

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Listening to Al

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

I see that in a recent ETS event Al Mohler said,

Would God give inaccurate information in a revelation to us? No. But in revelation he would give us information that we can see, can hear, and can know.

A few questions pop into my mind.

  1. Is revelation always and only about giving information? Is God’s act of revealing always and only about giving information?
  2. Can something have information content without being information?
  3. Who is us? If we take the Old Testament, for example, to be an instance (or a collection of many instances) of divine revelation to Israel, would they find the same information content in the text that we do? Is finding information in a text at all relative to the context/setting of the one reading the text? Is all information found in a text intended by the giver of the text? If the text we have can be taken as an instance of God’s revelation (and not just the “record of revelation” as some are prone to say), does the information content of God’s revelation always match entirely and totally with the information found there?
  4. Is it possible to find/detect information in a text that was not there originally, or is not part of what the originator intended?

That God does not intend to trick people, I do not doubt. Well, at least not usually, though those occasions in scripture seem to be instances of God assisting people in their self-delusion.

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Miserable Job

Posted on October 20, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

On page 53 of Bishop Will Willimon references Patrick Lencioni’s definition of makes a job miserable: “Lack of measurement. Lack of accountability. Anonymity.” I’ve read a few of Lencioni’s books, but not this one (Three Signs of a Miserable Job.) I suppose these features might characterize some miserable jobs. If I were asked the question, however, I’d put it differently.

1. A miserable job in which the things that you measure and count as important are not the same things the people you work with or those who have power over you count as important. The boss ruthlessly measures the bottom line: Where’s the money? You value the customers and their satisfaction. Both of these can be measured. They can even be compatible. But when expectations differ, misery abounds.

2. A miserable job is when you do what the boss or institution says is important, but discover that there are no positive consequences. Your work, apparently in line with what they desire, is unvalued. You might even discover that what is truly valued is something other than what they’ve told you to produce. That leads to a miserable job experience.

United Methodist pastors are, in at least some annual conferences, experiencing clearer articulation of which quantifiable goals they ought to be pursuing. They are being help more accountable for their productivity. Is this producing noticeably less misery?

How about you? Do you have any other things to add to tweak Willimon’s appropriation of Lencioni?

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Equivocating “Education”

Posted on October 20, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

It’s been a while since I’ve dialogued/argued with Will Willimon’s Bishop. Seems like a good time to pick it up again.

On page 42 he says,

“The United Methodist practice of itineracy is so deeply countercultural that we may be unable to sustain it into the future. As I’ve said, UM polity is against just about everything Americans believe, which has to be one of the reasons early Methodists put so much stress on education and formation – they knew that their version of church required constant indoctrination.”

Where to begin? Well, why not the very last word: “Indoctrination.” Americans don’t believe in indoctrination. Well, at least we say we don’t we believe in Everyone Thinking For Themselves. We believe it so much it’s practically become a counter gospel message. Every semester I hear student say this when confronted with any intimation there might be such a thing as truth: “Everyone has their own opinion.” I tell them this is either a truism or demonstrably false. If we take the claim to mean that the opinions a person has are her opinions, that’s a truism. If we take the claim to mean that each person’s opinions are only her own, unique to her, and arrived at by her own reasoning, the claim is demonstrably false. Many of our opinions are shared. We get them with our culture and social groups. Most we swallow and digest without the least bit of thought. Only the outliers get much thought at all.

So what are United Methodists? Are we thinking people, people who think for ourselves, or are we those who let others do our thinking for us, i.e., those who are indoctrinated? In identifying the unAmerican nature of Methodism Willimon has not just nailed it, he’s nailed it to our very flesh. Ouch!

Ok – the early Methodists loved education because we knew the Methodist way required indoctrination. We surely gave that up somewhere along the line. Oh, we didn’t give up our love of education: we just changed what we meant by the word. Modern education is built on the commitment to be uncommitted – to anything other than the search for truth. A prior commitment to Jesus – or to the Christian faith, once a cornerstone of education in the Christian-influenced part of the world, became anathema. The church says, “Education,” meaning by that, “Education that builds people into faith in Jesus and allegiance to his kingdom.” What was soon heard, however, was “Education that is respectable in terms of the canons of the emerging secularity of the Modern World.” Now what is heard is, “Education that gives our customers the competencies and knowledge to get ahead in the competitive world marketplace.” We’ve equivocated “education.”

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Devaluation

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

Reading this post from Tyler Cowen reminds me of one of my perceptions of our current economic crisis: Whether deflation is happening in the US or not, we are facing an major societal pressure toward devaluing.

1. We see increased saving, by individuals and corporations. After a long period of profligate spending, this makes sense.

2. Our economy was based on levels of spending that we are now fighting to avoid. Unless we (individuals, families, businesses) spend the money, the economy will not return to its former levels.

3. The former levels of spending were unsustainable. Individuals and families, to a large extent, got that message; government, not yet.

4. We’re afraid to spend money, not knowing what will come next. Increased taxes, regulations and costs from the government, surely. But if I take the plunge and buy a house will it at least retain its value? If I have to move or sell the house, will I be able to do so?

5. Our fear and uncertainty leads to a vicious cycle of nit-picking expenses and “accountability.” We worry, “ARE we getting the full bang for our buck? Surely our institutions ought to be doing more for less.”

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Why Teach?

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Richard Heyduck

Whatever the context of my teaching – school, church, home – my primary goal should be that my students learn something. Yes, I do have other goals. As a didaskophialic, teaching is often just plain fun; thus having fun is a goal of my teaching. But it’s not primary. As a professional teacher, one who makes my living by teaching, being paid for my teaching is a goal of teaching – otherwise how would I pay my bills? But being paid is not primary. Learning is primary.

What kind of learning? In school teaching learning is measured by particular student outputs: tests, papers, projects. All of these can demonstrate that the students have learned something. I would really like it if all my students aced all the assignments I gave them. That would mean that I was effective in my teaching (or that the assignments were too easy). Well, at least for the short-term. The classes I teach now are closely delimited. They begin at the start of the semester and conclude at the end of the semester. They are roughly 17 weeks in length. At the end of those 17 weeks, the students can demonstrate that they know more than they did at the beginning.

That’s not enough for me however. Our assessment tools measure student learning on the assumption that what they demonstrate knowing at the end of the semester constitutes learning. What if, by chance, all this demonstrated was adequate mastery of the form of assessment or temporary acquisition of knowledge? I expect my teaching to produce lasting knowledge, not just semester long knowledge.

When I teach majors in my department this lasting learning can be measured in the progressive nature of the curriculum: the classes they take later presuppose learning from earlier classes. If these presupposed knowledge points prove justified, then lasting learning (at least lasting within this time frame) has taken place. Lasting learning within the department can also be measured by exit assignments like senior exams or projects.

An essential component of lasting learning is missing in the analysis to this point. Learning that lasts has more than a noetic component: it’s about more than mere acquisition of knowledge. It also assumes a particular affective stance toward that knowledge. Students who want to retain knowledge are more likely to retain knowledge than those who do not. If the students merely wants to pass the class – or make some particular grade, that usually requires no personal attachment to the material. If the student values the material and wants to integrate it into a larger whole (life, an education), then a different kind of desire, a desire that goes beyond a mere grade (or other extrinsic evaluation) is required.

How do we do that – how do we inculcate the affective dimension? That, to me, is where the really hard work comes in. It will also be harder to measure, because desire/love is not as easily quantified and measured as are other forms of learning. Someone can ace every assignment in a subject she hates. Contrariwise, someone can perform less than perfectly on assignments in a subject she loves. How do we get at the love? How do we assess this affective dimension? From what I see of current academia, it seems that the affective dimension is mostly ignored if not wholly disdained. I think teachers and students would be much happier if we could develop ways to heighten its importance and explicitness.

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