A Balanced Image of Christ

An interesting reminder from the blog Students of Jesus that Christ not only ate with sinners and chastised pharisees. He also ate with pharisees and healed their children. Here is a taste:

In modern society we love to point out that Jesus ate with tax collectors and prostitutes. He crossed social boundaries. He was the friend of sinners. Sometimes we fail to note there is another group with whom he regularly dined: pharisees. What if Jesus reclined with pharisees for the very same reason he ate with the outcasts? What if he had the same mission whether he ate with Zacchaeus the taxman or with Simon the Pharisee? What if he cared for both? Perhaps the Lord knew we were all sick, all in need of a doctor.

Reading our rebellious ways into the ministry of Jesus is one of the dangers of our present age. We might assume he converted every sinner and condemned every priest. We might assume he ditched the synagogue for a day at the lake, or went to the Temple only to turn the tables. We might be surprised to discover that he loved his Father’s house, or considered the Law as sweet as honey, or longed to hear the prophets read week after week.

The same man who welcomed Matthew the tax collector was also friends with Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. The same man who healed and returned lepers to the community of Israel also had mercy on the daughter of a synagogue leader. The shepherd of Israel cared for the whole flock and fed all the sheep. Later, he went so far as to chase down Saul, that murderous “pharisee of pharisees” and drafted him into the Kingdom cause.

If we choose to follow the Master we must be prepared to follow him into any house. In his day the disciples were shocked because he crossed the threshold of a sinner’s home. Perhaps today he shocks us by crossing the threshold of the church? Both houses stand in desperate need of his grace, and those who will carry such grace with them.

Check out the rest here.

Update from Rob Martin

An Interesting View for a Picnic

Yesterday I posted about an attempt from The Simple Way to speak to the injustice they see in Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s proposed ordinance basically abolishing feeding the homeless unless you have permits and do it at approved places. My friend Rob Martin decided to participate in this gathering, and wrote about the experience over at his blog (Abnormal Anabaptist). Here is a taste:

So, despite all my panic, it was a very subdued, low-key event of a bunch of folks just spending time together.  What did we accomplish?  Well, in the eyes of the world, worried about laws, regulations, and government agencies, not a whole lot.  We didn’t change the law.  We didn’t change any politicians minds.  To that extent, we failed.

To the man who stocked up on sandwiches for the week, it wasn’t a failure.

To the man who stood there while we loved on him with a sandwich, a cupcake, an apple, and a bottle of water, it wasn’t a failure.

To the young man who, strange though he was, found a bunch of folks that just accepted him no matter how outrageous he acted, it wasn’t a failure.

You see, we were with Jesus.  Two or more believers gathered, and Jesus was there.  We fellow-shipped with each other and with other people made in the image of God and Jesus was there.

This was the third way.  This was the way of Christ made flesh.  This proved that it was possible to act counter to justice in a way that did not sacrifice grace, mercy, compassion, and love, even for those with whom we disagree.  Instead of attacking the counsel, we fellow-shipped.  Instead of shouting angrily, we fed quietly.  Instead of chanting slogans, we laughed together.  We demonstrated to everyone who saw us that there was something different, something other going on.

This is what faith can do.  It can change the world.  It’s subversive.  It gets under the skin and transforms people without them even knowing it.

“We’re with Jesus”.

If we remember that, if we take that every where we go, imagine the possibilities.  Imagine what we can accomplish when we decide that, when we’re acting for Jesus, we are acting with him.

And it’s uncomfortable.  When we decide to spend time with Jesus, we’re going to be taken in some very strange places and directions, places that we would never decide on our own to do.  I hate meeting new people, I despise walking into a strange situation where I know no-one.  And yet, that is precisely what God required of me so I could spend time with Jesus.

You see, this is a radical faith we have.  Following Jesus is not safe, it’s not comfortable, it will take you out of your normal life and you will never be able to go back to it the same.  For me, I’m no longer satisfied with living a “normal” life.  I’ve encountered God and the experience has changed me forever.  For those Christians who only know a faith of “agreement” and don’t know that radical, gut-wrenching, whole-body, throw caution to the wind kind of faith, I feel sad.  I know many who don’t know that.  I know many who are satisfied with their life as it is.

“I don’t think I would change anything of my life, even if I wasn’t a Christian”.

Yes, I’ve heard that from some.  And it saddens me.  It tells me that, as much as they may “believe” something, they haven’t yet experienced that transformation that comes from diving in head-first into the terror of a faith lived on the edge.  And it is that experience that I find in Hebrews 11.

If you haven’t experienced that yet, I hope you will stop, think, and start to look around with a new set of radical eyes, seeking for where God is moving.  And if you have experienced it, well… you know EXACTLY what I’m feeling right now.

“We’re with Jesus”.

Picking on the Homeless

In recent weeks, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and the department of health in the city have been championing regulations that would prohibit outdoor distribution of food to the homeless. This seems like the worst of big government intervening with sweeping legislation to solve an occasional problem. I thought I would share the following thoughtful response from The Simple Way.

On March 14, 2012 Mayor Michael Nutter announced a plan to ban “outdoor feeding” in the City of Philadelphia. In effect this would make it illegal to share or distribute food in public places without a permit.

We understand that there are some concerns from the Board of Health regarding health and safety of the food that groups share with the homeless. We are glad to see energy devoted to classes that educate and equip groups in food preparation, storage, and distribution so they can more carefully feed folks who are hungry. We share the desire of the Mayor and Health Department that folks eat in dignified settings. We echo the Mayor’s dream that every person be able to have a nutritious meal sitting around a dinner table, and we look forward to the day when homelessness and poverty are history. But homelessness and poverty are not yet history. They are a reality facing many of our brothers and sisters and fellow Philadelphians.

It is certainly appropriate for the City to intervene when there are specific groups that are sharing food in a way that is unsafe, unsanitary, or irresponsible. However, a citywide ban on food sharing is neither a necessary nor a sensible response to these exceptional cases. We are deeply concerned that these new regulations and policies – and the Mayor’s ban on sharing food – do more harm than good. They create bureaucratic barriers to compassion.

The very name of our City comes from the Greek words “phileo”, meaning “I love”, and “adelphos”, meaning “brother” – hence the “City of Brotherly Love”. Phileo is one of the three Greek words for love, and it describes the kind of deep love that brothers and sisters have for each other.  We hope our City lives up to its name.  We are committed to making sure that it does.

The proposed regulations suggest the requirement of permits when providing food for more than three persons, and other unreasonable requirements, such as providing a menu of food to be served as far as a year in advance. Our fear is that these regulations specifically target and will be selectively enforced against some of our most vulnerable citizens. It is hard to imagine every barbeque cookout, religious service with a potluck dinner, family reunion, or block party being prohibited from sharing food. Of course, failure to equally enforce this type of legislation would be a clear civil rights violation as well as an act of discrimination. The parks and public spaces of our city should be enjoyed by all citizens, rich or poor.

Sharing food with those who are hungry is a fundamental act of human conscience. The thousands of people who share food in any way, both inside and outside, make the world a better place. The economic challenges facing our nation have awakened in us a sense of solidarity, knowing that there is a fine line between “us” and “them”. Additional cuts in City funding threaten to make such acts of generosity even more necessary. Philadelphia’s Deputy Mayor Schwarz has noted that most funds for the City’s human services come from the State, where a new budget threatens to cut $41 million in social service funding, representing a 20% cut, threatening even those services that currently exist – and do so much good.

For many of us, sharing food is not only a matter of conscience, but is also an act of faith, a spiritual practice, an exercise of religious freedom. There are many of us who believe that to be Christian means to be “born again” where we have a new definition of family that runs deeper than biology, making it just as essential to care for those we are biologically unrelated to as those we are. This new legislation potentially makes it illegal for a church youth group to take pizzas to homeless folks in a park, or a family to take the delicious leftovers from a Bar Mitzvah to folks sleeping under a bridge. It is unconscionable.

In the Bible, Jesus even goes so far as to say that when we feed the poor, the “least of these”, we are feeding Christ himself.  When Jesus speaks of the final judgment he says we will be asked by God, “When I was hungry did you feed me?” Can you imagine if our response was, “Sorry God, the city would not give us a permit?”

One of the stories of the Gospel involves Jesus doing a miracle where he takes a few fish and loaves and multiplies them, feeding hundreds of hungry folks.  Jesus didn’t have a health permit to do that outdoor feeding. In fact if Jesus had tried to perform that miracle feeding in Philadelphia under these proposed laws, he would have gotten into serious trouble. Jesus bids us come and follow – feed the poor, care for the hungry. We are not willing to allow unjust policies to be obstacles to love.

Our organization, The Simple Way, started nearly 20 years ago as college students shared food with folks on the street in downtown Philadelphia. Over the years our organization has grown and evolved, but sharing food and resources with those in need continues to be at the core of our mission, and of our faith. In fact, as long as folks are hungry we cannot NOT share.

At various intervals in our history we have faced obstacles to our work, like this current policy. We insist on humbly but persistently interrupting injustice.

Twelve years ago the City began passing anti-homeless regulations and policies very similar to the current food ordinances being enacted by Mayor Nutter and the Board of Health. Hundreds of us voiced our concern about the laws, and dozens of us were arrested for sharing food and sleeping in public. In the end, we won a major victory in court.  In fact, the Philadelphia Judge even declared that those of us who broke the law were not criminals but “freedom fighters”, citing the Boston Tea Party and the Civil Rights movement.

We cannot help but see this current struggle as a new chapter in the story of American activism, which has deep roots right here in Philadelphia.

One of the proverbs of the Civil Rights movement in America was: “Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good.” And it was St. Augustine who said, “An unjust law is no law at all.” This is an unjust law and we are obliged to not comply.

We deeply value dialogue and are convinced we can all do more together than we can on our own. As for this new government policy, we can do better – and we must.

Measuring Ministry Success without Worrying About Numbers

A nice piece on effective youth ministry from Kurt Willems today. (HT: Rob Martin) Willems talks about his experience early in his career as a youth pastor where he was basically told that the worth of his ministry was related to how many students showed up. Willems suggests a different economy:

Many people ask me what we should measure if it’s not numbers and attendance. I think I’ve finally begun to figure this out. I recently took a course on church planting. In this class, one of the things we talked about was the need to change the ministry scorecard (to borrow Reggie McNeil’s language). Instead of measuring success by numbers and quotas, what if we measure success by stories of how God is at work through various signs of the kingdom that we see in our context? In other words, in ministry and in any church function, what is our primary goal? Is it to meet quotas? Is it you rant and rave about how many showed up? Nope, it’s not all about the numbers! It’s all about the kingdom!

If we want to know if a particular ministry is being “successful” we should ask the following question: What signs of the kingdom have we seen or experienced during the past week? All other measurements of success fall subservient to that single question.

Check out the rest here. I think we do a pretty good job of that at McBIC, though I know the numbers have come along as well. Our focus is on what God is doing among the youth.

The History of Church vs. State in the U.S.

(Illustration by Jennifer Hewitson / For The LA Times)

John M. Barry offers a little historical perspective on the origins of the church/state relation debate. Not too surprisingly, the debate about the relationship between church and government in the US dates back to the earliest colonies. Barry looks specifically at the Massachusetts Bay Colony and more specifically the thoughts of Roger Williams. Here is a taste. (HT: John Fea)

The church-state conflict began when Puritans, envisioning a Christian nation, founded what John Winthrop called “a citty upon a hill” in Massachusetts, and Williams rejected that vision for another: freedom. He insisted that the state refrain from intervening in the relationship between humans and God, stating that even people advocating “the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships” be allowed to pray — or not pray — freely, and that “forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils.”

Yet Williams was no atheist. He was a devout Puritan minister who, like other Massachusetts Puritans, fled religious persecution in England. Upon his arrival in 1631 he was considered so godly that Boston Puritans had asked him to lead their church. He declined — because he considered their church insufficiently pure.

Reverence for both Scripture and freedom led Williams to his position. His mentor was Edward Coke, the great English jurist who ruled, “The house of every one is as his castle,” extending the liberties of great lords — and an inviolate refuge where one was free — to the lowest English commoners. Coke pioneered the use of habeas corpus to prevent arbitrary imprisonment. And when Chancellor of England Thomas Egerton said, “Rex est lex loquens; the king is the law speaking,” and agreed that the monarch could “suspend any particular law” for “reason of state,” Coke decreed instead that the law bound the king. Coke was imprisoned — without charge — for his view of liberty, but that same view ran in Williams’ veins.

Equally important to Williams was Scripture. Going beyond the “render unto Caesar” verse in the New Testament, he recognized the difficulty in reconciling contradictory scriptural passages as well as different Bible translations. He even had before him an example of a new translation that served a political purpose. King James had disliked the existing English Bible because in his view it insufficiently taught obedience to authority; the King James Bible would correct that.

Given these complexities, Williams judged it impossible for any human to interpret all Scripture without error. Therefore he considered it “monstrous” for one person to impose any religious belief on another. He also realized that any government-sponsored prayer required a public official to pass judgment on something to do with God, a sacrilegious presumption. He also knew that when one mixes religion and politics, one gets politics. So to protect the purity of the church, he demanded — 150 years before Jefferson — a “wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.”

Interesting side note in there about the history of the King James Bible. Funny that it is often seen as the epitome of the unbiased standard against which new version are compared for any attempt to change the language, while it is a biased translation to begin with!

Chris Smith on Why He Abstains from Voting

Chris Smith (photo from GoodReads)

I resonated with much of a piece from Chris Smith from Relevant Magazine. Relevant is currently in the process of offering a series of Christian perspectives on politics. (Previous posts come from a Christian Libertarian, Christian Republican and a Christian Democrat.) Chris is offering an explanation for his choice not to vote. I’ll give you a taste of his philosophy, and then offer some opinions.

“America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders, these half-brained nominees, the many ignorant ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers.”  —Walt Whitman

Whitman’s words ring as true today as they did when he penned them over a century ago. And although my rationale may differ from Whitman’s, I think these words get to the heart of why, for almost two decades, I have chosen not to vote.

Let me begin with the caveat that I don’t condemn people who vote. Rather, I simply believe voting is not the most important political practice of the Church—and I am part of a church community where a few of my brothers and sisters share this conviction.

My opposition to voting is rooted primarily in the narrative of Christ’s incarnation. Jesus was born and lived in a particular time and place; the kingdom He proclaimed did not seek to overthrow the Roman Empire and re-order society from the top down. Instead, He sought to reenergize the grassroots social order of YHWH begun in Ancient Israel, a locally embodied polis that functioned most healthfully without a king. Jesus called 12 disciples, a little community that recalled the 12 tribes of Israel, and they shared life together in a way that proclaimed God’s healing and abundance to the people they encountered.

After Jesus’ ascension, His disciples spread throughout the world planting little communities that embodied Jesus in their own particular places. These churches were, in a very real sense, the incarnation of Jesus in these places and the shape of their life together modeled a politics—a way of being together—that was not rooted in greed, power-grabbing or any form of self-interest. (If you want to know more about politics embodied in church communities, I suggest you read John Howard Yoder’s little book Body Politics.) This basic incarnational story of Christ and the Church is the one in which I and my brothers and sisters at Englewood Christian Church on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis find ourselves.

Our main political task, as a local church community, is to follow the mission of God in the church and thus to embody Jesus faithfully in our place and to work with our neighbors toward the health and flourishing of our neighborhood. Whitman’s assumption that there are more important political realities in our land than our elected officials rings true for me. According to theological narrative I have defined here, churches are the most important of these political realities, but also more important is the open dialogue and collaboration of neighbors as they seek to cultivate their places in such a way that they flourish and can be sustained. To invest ourselves in this political work is a viable alternative to voting, and perhaps more effective in shaping the future of our places.

Over the last decade, I have moved decidedly closer to this perspective, but I have not yet fully endorsed it. I have, however taken the attitude that I will not vote along strict party lines, and I will not vote in any election in which I do not feel that I know enough about the candidates to make an educated vote. This has resulted in skipping mid-term elections at times when I have to admit that I am uneducated. At other times, I have voted in some races, but left others blank. The situation continues to be exacerbated by my growing conviction that Chris is correct that local action and involvement in Christ’s movement through His Church is more essential than any election, local or national. If I have the choice between educating myself about the election or acting locally (even simply ministering to my family), I will always choose to act. This has lead to an increasing disconnect and lack of involvement in much of politics. You will likely find my posts here to be devoid of partisan politics unless my theology leads me to find fault or credit due to one side. I think that the world has seen enough of the Church getting distracted in search of earthly power rather than focusing on spreading the Kingdom in which we really claim our true citizenship.

Thanks, Chris, for you insightful piece, and for further stirring my wrestling with the Spirit as to the appropriate response. I look forward to finding time to talk in person some time when we are out in Indy or your family is back in PA!

Thoughts on Gender and Leadership

Thanks to my friend Rob Martin for pointing out an interesting post from J.R. Daniel Kirk at Storied Theology. Kirk is responding to some comments by John Piper in which Piper indicated that Christianity is a masculine religion. I admit that I am unfamiliar with the details of Piper’s description, but the fact that Christ talks about wanting to gather the people of Jerusalem under His wings like a mother hen would gather her chicks (Matt. 23.37, Luke 13.34) makes it seem hard to justify on the surface. This sounds much more like a feminine care and nurture than a masculine display of authority. Kirk looks at the book of Mark to trace how Mark retells the story of the disciples, a collection of males who seem to be the “insiders” in the story, and the women, who seem to reside mostly on the edges and come in and out of the picture, but are never trusted in the inner circle and never specifically empowered to go out and minister.

Kirk points out that it is always the disciples who are clueless as to the point of Jesus’ message. They don’t have enough faith to perform the miracles they are sent out to perform. They tell Jesus that He surely will not die. Peter is rebuked and called Satan! The women in Mark’s narrative fare much better. They are commended for their faith. The widow’s mite is worth more than the rich man’s overflow. The impression that the men are privileged in Scripture and the women are marginalized doesn’t really hold true when we consider the details. The men all run when the time of trial comes, it is the women who remain faithful and follow Him to the foot of the cross (though John’s version places him at the foot of the cross as well).

Here is a taste of the conclusion Kirk draws from the text:

In the story, the disciples do not understand what is entailed in leading the people of God. They think it is about greatness and power rather than service and death.

And so, we have the group represented by Peter. The rock. Is being “the rock” a good thing? In Mark, the rocky soil indicates plants that spring up well, but fall away when danger or persecution arise on account of the word. Mark repeats the language of “falling away” when the disciples scatter, leaving Jesus to die alone.

The Twelve were committed to Jesus, and happy with him–but only as one who came with power. They had no faith in their calling to participate in his way of death. They did not have eyes to see that the ministry of Jesus turned the economy of the world on its head.

Shall we return to the women now?

How are we to assess these women who, in the narrative world, are outsiders, on the margins?

Unlike the disciples who are rebuked for being of little faith, Jesus commends these women as having great faith: “Daughter, go in peace, your faith has made you well.”

Moreover, there is one episode where Jesus ties a human inseparably to the gospel story. It is the episode of the woman who pours out oil over Jesus’ head. This looks to be a royal anointing! But when Jesus defends her he says, “Leave her alone, she has prepared my body beforehand for burial.”

The act of anointing prepares Jesus for burial: Messiahship and death are held together, and here is the only person in the whole story to get it. This is why “wherever the gospel is preached what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”

What does it mean to live at the margins, to be unnamed? How does this compare with being the twelve, the dudes, the insiders?

According to the economy of the world, with its measures of greatness, to be the twelve is to be exemplary, in the place to lead, to exclude others from leadership, to stand close to Jesus and guard the gates of who else can draw near.

And to the extent that we look to Jesus’ selection of them, and the apparent marginalization of the women, as paradigmatic for male leadership in the church, we show ourselves to be people whose minds have not yet been transformed by the very story to which we are appealing.

It is only by agreeing with the disciples’ way of assessing the world that we can see their “insider status” as a true insider status, to be replicated by other men in church history.

Jesus offers another way: You guys don’t get it! It’s the rulers of the Gentiles who lord authority over people. It shall not be so among you.

There is another way. It is the way of the cross.

There is another way. It is the way of the “marginalized” in the worlds eyes lying closest to Jesus in faith and understanding.

Are we really supposed to hold up as our model the “Satan” who denied the gospel of the crucified Christ, and claim that Peter is paradigmatic of the place of men as insiders and faithful leaders in the church?

Or should we not seek out the one who did the good deed for Jesus, holding together Messiah and death from her place at the margins? Should we not seek out the one who sought out Jesus merely to touch the fringe of his garment and learn from her what it means to walk in faith?

The irony of appealing to the boys as insiders is that in so doing we show ourselves to be adopting the boys’ understanding of power, privilege, and leadership in the kingdom.

And this view is roundly rebuked by Jesus in words of dissuasion and the work of the cross.

The economy of the world is not the economy of the Kingdom. The world thrives on power hoarded and protected. The Kingdom is led by a King who serves and sacrifices so that His people may live. To look at Scripture and find justification for a continuance of a “masculine” religion is to fall into an old trap. Leadership in the Kingdom is not about the same things as leadership in the world. It is not about gaining power or privilege, or wielding control. Remember, Paul said that God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and the weak things to shame that which is strong (1 Cor 1.27). We would also do well to recall:

²⁷ For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸ There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; foryou are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3.27-28 NASB)

To claim that the Church is supposed to favor one gender ignores this fact. This is not to deny the reality of differences between the genders, but it is to say that these differences must not be used as grounds for subjugation. Verses about female submission only point out that women need to submit, but so do men! We are all to submit to one another in reverence for Christ. These fights for power do nothing to build up the Kingdom of God. Can we please agree to work together to advance the Kingdom, rather than fight for power and authority within the Body of Christ and act as un-Christ-like as many throughout Church history have managed to do?

How Your Church Can Transform Its Neighborhood

Public School #3 in Englewood

This is an insightful piece from Chris Smith, editor of The Englewood Review of Books. Chris is married to one of my high school friends and attends the same church as my wife’s brother and his family in Indianapolis. In this article, he details how their church went from a failed attempt at being a mega-church to having a huge impact on their down-trodden neighborhood in a poor area of the Near Eastside of Indy. Here’s a taste:

Englewood is a tiny postage stamp of a neighborhood on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis. In many ways it’s a stereotypical abandoned urban neighborhood. Located at the heart of the ZIP code with the highest rate of vacant housing in the state, our neighborhood continues to see occupancy rates plummet. But there are signs of hope.

On Rural Street, the century-old Indianapolis Public School #3 building (which has not functioned as a school since 1979) is being converted into 32 units of gorgeous, mixed-income housing. It will be the first development in the state to integrate market-rate and affordable housing with supportive housing for people coming directly out of homelessness or severe mental illness. Right behind the school, a vacant lot once covered with asphalt is now a community garden that has expanded every year for the past decade. And just south of the garden and school building, on the exterior of a commercial building on Washington Street that was once home to a seedy used appliance store, a local artist is painting historical scenes from Wonderland, the amusement park that graced our neighborhood a century ago.

In the midst of this surprising renewal is Englewood Christian Church, a failed megachurch that spiraled downward with the neighborhood. How is it that our congregation, now about 200, was able to help orchestrate these strains of change? The short answer: We learned to talk to each other.

To read what that listening lead to, check out the piece here. It is worth the read. I think many of us could learn from this example. Rather than attempting to tell our neighborhood how they can improve, let us listen to their dreams and goals, and figure out how to partner with them and show them the love of God as we work along side of them.

Herman Cain vs. John Wesley

Presidential Candidate Herman Cain

An interesting article on Tony Campolo’s Red Letter Christians blog. This piece was written by Morgan Guyton (who I’m not familiar with), but it is an interesting look at the tempting American perspective of personal responsibility. His piece is so good I’ll copy it here in its entirety. You can respond in the comments below or on the original post here.

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“If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” Thus says Herman Cain to the unemployed Wall Street protestors. I understand why he said it. He wants to live in a world where the American Dream works, where being optimistic and entrepreneurial and hard-working guarantees success. Cain wants for blame to be something that is distributed neatly and perfectly between individual people. This could be described as an ethic ofindividual responsibility.

In a different context, Cain credits God’s grace for his fortune: “As you get older, your faith gets stronger because of your own personal experiences where you know the only way you could have made it through some of those personal experiences was by the grace of God.” This way of understanding our dependence on God’s grace is often termed the doctrine ofdivine providence.

The question is whether these two belief systems are compatible. Can you say at the same time that people are individually responsible for their success or failure but then credit their success to the grace of God? I would argue that the humility of knowing your dependence on God’s grace ought to keep you from saying something like “If you’re not rich, blame yourself.” If you really believe that you stand on God’s grace, that means your work ethic, intelligence, and creativity are to God’s credit, not yours, which disqualifies using these qualities as a soapbox from which to judge other people. A lot of Christians want to get credit for the humility of believing in divine providence while retaining the right to judge others based on an ethic of individual responsibility.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, lived in a very different time than ours. He framed his entire theology around the concept of divine providence. His understanding of our dependence on God led him to believe that the rich were supposed to take care of the poor. Instead of saying, “If you’re not rich, blame yourself,” Wesley said, “If I die rich, blame me.” Here’s exactly how he put it in 18th century language: “If I leave behind me ten pounds [when I die]… you and all mankind bear witness against me, that I have lived and died a thief and a robber.” Wesley believed that there was nothing wrong with making money as long as you spent all of it helping the poor after “supplying thy own reasonable wants, together with those of thy family.”

In his sermon “The More Excellent Way,” Wesley explains that all wealth belongs to God and is given to those who have it for the purpose of taking care of others:

You may consider yourself as one in whose hands the Proprietor of heaven and earth and all things therein has lodged a part of his goods, to be disposed of according to his direction. And his direction is, that you should look upon yourself as one of a certain number of indigent persons who are to be provided for out of that portion of His goods wherewith you are entrusted.

Wesley assumed that being truly dependent on God’s grace meant seeing ourselves as “indigent persons” (poor). People who have money have the God-given responsibility to help those who don’t. If Christians lived according to Wesley’s vision, none of us would have financial security but it wouldn’t matter because everyone would trust God and lean on each other. When Wesley saw that members of his Methodist movement were adding small luxuries to their life as they increased their wealth, he ripped into them in his “Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity”:

But you say, you can ‘afford’ it! O be ashamed to take such miserable nonsense into your mouths…. Can any steward ‘afford’ to be an errant knave? To waste his Lord’s goods? Can any servant ‘afford’ to lay out his master’s money any other wise than his master appoints him?

Wesley was utterly scandalized that anyone could spend more money than necessary on themselves. He contradicts the views of people like Herman Cain most squarely when heblames the rich among his followers for the plight of their poor brethren:

Many of your brethren, beloved of God, have not food to eat; they have not raiment to put on; they have not a place where to lay their head. And why are they thus distressed? Because you impiously, unjustly, and cruelly detain from them what your Master lodges in your hands on purpose to supply their wants!

Whereas today wealth is supposedly the measure of hard work and diligence, in Wesley’s sermon “The Mystery of Iniquity,” he writes that poverty is the greatest virtue:

As long as the Christians in any place were poor they were devoted to God. While they had little of the world they did not love the world; but the more had of it the more they loved it. This constrained the Lover of their souls at various times to unchain their persecutors, who by reducing them to their former poverty reduced them to their former purity. But still remember: riches have in all ages been the bane of genuine Christianity.

I’m sure that somebody will say Wesley was just an oddball and he certainly was, but his views on wealth and poverty are far closer to the  norm of historical Christianity than our age’s view that wealth shows our virtue. For most of Christian history, poverty was idealized because it meant putting your full trust in God. Part of the difference between Wesley’s vantage point and ours is that he was writing in a time when the values of capitalism were only starting to replace the values of feudalism that had preceded them.

The glue that held the feudal order together was the doctrine of divine providence, the idea that everything in creation belonged to God and everyone had a place within this order. The king’s privilege and power were accompanied by an awesome responsibility for his subjects, each of whom had a certain acreage of land to tend for God and their king. If kings were not so easily corrupted by their power, then this order grounded in divine providence might have worked. Because divine providence was associated with the corruption of feudal Christendom, the presumptions that frame our secular society and free-market economy push in the entirely opposite direction.

The ethic of individual responsibility that people like Herman Cain are trying to make “Christian” is actually the core of the secular humanist response to feudal Christendom’s understanding of divine providence. It is secular to think of our wealth as something we’ve earned and can use how we please instead of seeing it as a gift from God to use for His purpose. It doesn’t mean anything to piously credit your fortune to “the grace of God” unless you really see it as an unmerited gift. So many Christians today want to talk one way when the topic is economics and another way when the topic is religion.

John Wesley really believed that God has given us everything we have to share with others. And while I don’t think we should return to feudalism, I do think that divine providence lays the foundation for a better world than the world of individual responsibility we have now. It’s also more honest. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 4:7, “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” Everything that we have ever accomplished is the result of skills and habits that were cultivated in us through the guidance of parents, teachers, and mentors over the course of our life. To falsely individualize our accomplishments is to mock all the people who have made us who we are and the God who has worked through all who helped us because He loves us. We are the product of a community investment in our success ordered by the “invisible hand” of divine providence.

In one sense, Herman Cain is right. As Christians, we shouldn’t blame anyone else if we’re not rich; we should instead thank God for sparing us the treacherous temptations of wealth. The richer we are, the more we should blame ourselves if people around us are suffering because we haven’t shared what God gave us to share with them. In truth though, “blame” shouldn’t be part of Christian vocabulary. Jesus took the blame on the cross so that we could simply be grateful as the foundation for everything we do with whatever God has given us to share.

Are Gender-Inclusive Bibles Bad for Women?

Mary Kassian certainly thinks so. (HT: Mark Hopkins) In a piece titled 10 Reasons Why the New NIV Is Bad for Women on her site “Girls Gone Wise”, Kassian explains why. Here is her introduction:

The new gender-inclusive NIV was published earlier this year. It contains thousands of changes to the Bible’s male-gendered language. Having a gender-inclusive Bible appears to be the latest trend amongst cutting-edge, cappuccino-slurping Christian hipsters. Don’t get me wrong. I like to be hip. And I enjoy cappuccino as much as the next person. But my biggest beef with gender-inclusive Bibles is that they lack doctrinal precision. If you mess with the words, you mess with the meaning. Respected Bible scholars have explained why inclusive translations such as the New International Version (NIV), New Revised Standard (NRSV), and Common English Bible (CEB) are deeply flawed. If you haven’t yet considered their arguments, you might want to check out these Gender Neutral Bible Articles.

Notwithstanding the doctrinal imprecision and blatant politically-correct translating agenda, there are additional reasons why I dislike gender inclusive Bibles. Undoubtedly the publishers had good intentions, and genuinely wanted to help women, but in my mind, a gender-inclusive Bible is BAD for women. Really, really bad for women! I react to people reading from the new, gender-inclusive NIV the way I react to nails scratching down a chalk board.  Here are ten reasons why:

Her ten reasons:

1. It obscures the profound symbolism of gender
2. It exalts gender above that to which it points
3. It diminishes the unique beauty of womanhood
4. It is less inclusive of women
5. It demeans women
6. It patronizes women
7. It calls God’s attitude toward women into question
8. It calls God’s wisdom into question
9. It encourages further changes to Scripture
10. It leads women away from truth

She then concludes:

I understand that language changes over time, and that translation is not always an easy task. But I am saddened that Christians seem so eager to jump on the cultural bandwagon to update God’s Holy Book with inclusive language. I don’t think they realize what is at stake. I have had students struggle with understanding concepts about God because their native language did not lend itself to translating/expressing the gendered concepts that exist in the original languages of the Bible. We will lose something very critical and essential if we lose the linguistic concepts afforded us by the gendered nature of English. Retaining gender distinctiveness in our language is a battle worth fighting. There is a great deal at stake.

So ladies, please don’t jump on the gender-inclusive Bible bandwagon. Be hip. Be courageous. Be politically incorrect. Insist on a Bible that acurately translates gender language– like the ESV, Holman Christian Standard, or  New America Standard.  Because in the end, inclusive language, and inclusive language Bibles, are bad for women.

Read the rest of her piece to see her reasoning. I’d love to hear what others think about this. My personal preference has long been the NASB, and I’ve generally felt that we simply need to disciple those bothered by the gender language to help them understand the intent of the original, not change the translation. At the same time, I do feel that we should not alienate people by keeping certain language if it is not needed for correct translation. Anyone more versed in Scriptural translation or the original languages have an opinion they would like to share?