The Story So Far

Posted in Life on August 29, 2008 by washedpig

Just shy of two weeks have passed since arriving here at Lee University. I almost can’t believe it. At this moment I’m sitting next to my Japanese roommate help a Nepalese guy get on Facebook. This transition is hard to explain, at times quite painful while others lush and full of life. Like trying to jump from the rocky shore onto a turbulent raft or attempting to overtake a horse running for its life, I’m picking up on how this all works. In an empty moment I find myself grasping for unknowns, “What am I supposed to do? What should I do? What am I made for?” All these fears churning underneath the flat out amazement of the scandalous love and grace that pours from my head, over my beard and on down to my feet. Why does God seem to love and give me all these things while others seem to be under a pile of shit? It’s funny when Biff from Back to the Future runs his truck into the manure, but not real people.

This Lord of the World, above all of the Caesars of the world, is here with me. I find Him wanting to spend all of this time with me, in such a deep way. I think that’s why I find it hard to come back to the “Christian Subculture” where most of Lee resides. So much of the words, rhetoric and attitudes that used to compose who I was are everywhere, it seems. I can’t help but view others that wear what looks like my old skin probably have the same thing going on under it. This is where I fight hard not to judge, but attempt to see as Jesus sees and not as Caesar himself. I feel for the atheists and the people struggling with the evil that is in the world and in the church. People announce things from the fabric on their chest like “God doesn’t believe in Atheists”. Are you fracking with me? Is that the message Jesus died on the cross for. Instead of speaking like a pimply kid in middle school trying to convince himself that what his Youth Pastor told him on Wednesday was true, let’s listen to man that is supposedly Lord of our hearts and “Love our neighbor as ourselves.” To paraphrase a quote from Arte on the Larry Sanders Show “When you sound like a jerk, people tend the think of you as a jerk.” God absolutely believes in atheists. Please, put your tongue back in your mouth.

But coming here has been great so far. I know God is preparing me here, much as he has over the last 2 years. But this is a new season, one where the leaves don’t seem to change as they always have. I don’t really believe the post-modern notion that time is circular. “All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.” No, God has irreversibly altered the cosmos. There is hope for new creation. God isn’t going to throw away what he’s made. Contrary to the hymn in Chapel this morning, this world will never pass away. He set up his tent 2,000 years ago and is here within everyone who allows him to embrace us in the midst of our shit.

To Quote Gob Bluth “Come On!”

Posted in Politics, Theology with tags , , , , , , on June 17, 2008 by washedpig

I decided to contribute to an ongoing political discussion about McCain & Taxes on Facebook & was encouraged to put my response on here.

I just think it’s really ridiculous how both the “left wing” media & the “right” have all of a sudden begun painting John McCain as this right-wing conservative, economically & socially. Whether McCain is “Bush II” or he’s the next Reagan, it just feels dishonest. I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh, McCain was never what he’s being made out to be today. Strictly speaking on taxes McCain may have decided that lowering them is a good thing (& by reading some statistics, he isn’t, he’s just for keeping them at their ridiculously high levels) but neither McCain nor Obama are going to be cutting government spending. While I’ve moved away from much of Ron Paul’s message, it’s true that we are, to use Tolkien’s language, like “butter spread across too much bread”. We simply can’t afford this mammoth beast known as the U.S. government, domestically or abroad.

We get served these silly false dichotomies by the news media & western pop culture in general. Liberals & Conservatives are really two sides of the same coin. I agree with Jim Wallis when he says that we need to rethink things outside of the political daimond of left & right. It’s more complex than that. But I guess what really annoys me the most is this notion that as Christians we should support the Republican party or the Democrat party.

Dating back to the Caesars of Rome, every leader makes the claim or promise that if you elect me or vote for this party that more or less utopia will come. That’s the promise of the Enlightenment, that if we can get universal suffrage we can finally be done with all that nonsense about Religion & through progress finally solve the world’s evils. Well, it hasn’t. When will we finally get it in America that it won’t. When Jesus claimed that he was Lord of the world, it was understood he was saying that Caesar was not.

In the Gospels, Jesus seems to be alot less interested in how leaders are put in power & more in how we treat them once they’re their. When Christians put their endorsement behind someone as Pat Robertson or John Hagee have, we loose the ability to hold the authorities to account. I don’t know who I’m going to vote for (and I really don’t) but let’s not pretend that whoever we do is going to inaugurate the Kingdom of God. Let’s not get duped into jumping on Obama’s or McCain’s bandwagon, neither of them are God’s anointed & voting for them won’t solve the shit that that is in America or in the world.

We talk about America being founded in “Judao-Christian” principles, but the truth is we’re a product of the Enlightenment. Our founding fathers were emersed in the Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson was a prime example. Let’s keep God separate from “public life”, religate him to your “private life” inside your heart. We don’t need the Church, religion, or God to solve the world’s problems, Man, progress, reason, freedom, that will eliminate evil. Yet we’re fools, how can we eliminate evil if we ourselves are.

The Enlightenment is dependent on the belief that we’re all really just good & equil people. Now in the generations after the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Hurricane Katrina & 9/11, we’re reminded what evil really is. Yet we still resist our own reflection, because if we see how screwed up we are that means we can’t really do anything & that’s my point. It all falls flat. Voteing in this man or that woman or group of people won’t solve anything of consequence.

I listened to a lecture online by N.T. Wright recently (in case you have yet to experience Bishop Wright, He’s my new favorite Christian author, next to C.S. Lewis) & he mention how in Britian more people vote for Big Brother than do in the elections. Because over there, as we’re begining to see here, that after all the debates & elections nobody can deliver what they promise. The Church & the World needs to realize that even if we get “God’s man” in the White House, like we’ve tryed, or someone like we have in Barack, it will be like running a Mac program on a PC, there’s two different systems going on here. You can’t separate God from public life. Again, I don’t know who to vote for & the lesser of the two evils thing is fine (whomever you decide is evil), but we Americans need to stop kidding ourselves. As Gob from Arrested Development would say “Come on!”

Redemption is Not Up There, But From Up There

Posted in Theology with tags , , , , on March 21, 2008 by washedpig

judas.jpg
I recently picked up a book by N.T. Wright Judas and the Gospel of Jesus to prepare for a paper for my New Testament class. I absolutly loved it. In this short offering, in what starts as a response  to what has been presented as a “new gospel”, the Gospel of Judas, suggested to shake the Christian world to its knees, Wright exposes the message of Gnosticism, challenging even what many of us in the West have let seep into our beliefs. Much of my paper is indebted to this book.
I’ve recomended books before, but for me this goes close to the top. I can’t wait to read more of his body of work. Below is the first and what turned out to be the final draft of my paper on Gnosticism. So, here it is. Enjoy.


As the first disciples of Jesus lived and prayed for the Kingdom of God to be done on earth as in heaven, another belief and prayer had “sparked” inside some in Roman Judea. While I don’t have the space or ability here to give an exhaustive account of the interaction between Gnosticism (or the many Gnosticisms alive in the first and second centuries) and the New Testament, I want to focus on a just a few aspects of their beliefs and how they sharply stand against everything the writers of the New Testament wrote. Before we can do that we must look at these beliefs ourselves and where they came from.
The Gnosticism I want to talk about and one that the New Testament writers and early Church Fathers fought against is actually a hybrid of sorts. Rather than Jewish, it comes from a Greek and specifically Platonic dualistic worldview of spirit and matter mixed and smuggled into the language of the ancient scriptures of the Jews. After the failed messiah in Simon Bar Kokhba and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Roman occupiers in 70 AD, it is not hard to see how some Jews would reject the promises found in the Torah and look elsewhere. To the Gnostics, the world of time, space and matter was an inherently bad and wicked place. Matter is evil thus men made of it and living in it are evil. Imprisoned within men, though, is something very different, not made of matter. In their writings, such as found in Nag Hammadi, the Gnostics portray the Jewish creator god as stupid and foolish, if not blatantly evil and malevolent. The god of creation is not the god of salvation. Another divinity, pure, wise, and good exists, detached and distant from this world. The main objective for any wise or knowledgeable person is to then escape from this wicked old world and be delivered from material human existence. Only then can one ascend to a higher plane, liberated from matter, space, and time, and enjoy the bliss of disembodied life somewhere in the heavens, inaccessible to those either clinging on to the physical world or mistakenly worshiping its creator. “Salvation” then comes from the revelation, by a “revealer”, of a special knowledge or “gnosis” of themselves as special “sparks of light”.

In many of the Epistles of the New Testament, John and Paul warn their readers against many of the different false teachers and new theologies entering the church. Multiple references in 1 John, for example, have been shown to be aimed directly against Gnostic or at least proto-Gnostic beliefs. From the Gnostic standpoint, creation was a mistake. There was nothing good about it to begin with, so the notion of a fall from perfection and goodness are completely absent. The world is evil but not because of our sin. One can almost hear them shouting out to their creator, “It’s not our fault, it’s yours. I’m done with it”. The Gnostics would either lean in two directions; they would become ascetics, looking with contempt at anything associated with the body, such as sex or food, or they would throw away all boundaries and restraint altogether because it didn’t matter. The body and world were irrelevant, for their “inner divinity” were going up to the clouds soon anyway. This is very important to understand in studying books like 1 John, as I have mentioned, where by the time it was penned Gnostic teachings were beginning to affect the church family he was addressing. John is condemning them when he says “Whoever says, ‘I have come to know him’, but does not obey his commandments, is a liar, and in such a person the truth does not exist; but whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has reached perfection. By this we may be sure that we are in him: whoever says, ‘I abide in him’, ought to walk just as he walked.” (1 John 2:4-6) Which some Gnostics would even contend that Jesus never really physically walked here in the first place, but I’ll come back to that. There is even a reference in the book of The Revelation in the Letter to Thyatira to a Gnostic teaching going even farther spurning those who had attained “gnosis” to not only know that which is in the “light”, but also which is in the “dark”. Because of their superior knowledge they should know the very depths of evil, giving them almost an obligation to sin. The resurrected Jesus condemns this teaching and the woman teaching it (in Rev. 2:20-24) referring to those who had known the “deep things of Satan”.

Paul, with early Gnostics in mind, says in 1 Corinthians 8:1-3 that “we know that ‘all of us possess knowledge.’ Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.” Paul moves the whole thing from intellectual gnosis, to a different kind of gnosis. It is worth mentioning that the Greek word ginoskein (though a synonym for gnosis), throughout the Septuagint, usually represents the Hebrew word yada, which is also used in Genesis when Adam “knew” his wife. Paul and the other apostles preach a relational knowledge of God for the present earth, which, as we’ll see, is impossible for Gnostics.

John again says in 1 John 4:2-3 “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.” One of the major heresies contended with later in the second century by the church fathers and here by John is the rejection of the Incarnation, Docetism, that Jesus only seemed human. Another related position was that of Cerinthus who was a known sworn enemy of John in particular, who taught that the Christ-spirit came on Jesus as he was baptized and left before his crucifixion (Gundry 493). Here Jesus has been split by the Gnostics into two separate entities: the spirit “revealer” Jesus and the worthless physical human Jesus. In one of the Gnostic scrolls found in Nag Hammadi known as the Apocalypse of Peter, perhaps written somewhere during the second century, tells a narrative of the “real Jesus” laughing at the crucifixion mocking the mere fleshly “Jesus” who is hung up on the cross. In another Gnostic text known as the Gospel of Judas, where Judas is actually the “beloved disciple” and hero of the story, Jesus approaches him saying “Truly I say to you, Judas, those who offer sacrifices to Saklas (the Gnostic name for the Jewish God meaning “foolish”)…everything that is evil. But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me” (Gospel of Judas 56). “The man that clothes me”, not only conflicts strongly with the canonical Gospels but is illustrative of the Gnostic’s view of Jesus, as well as that of themselves to a certain extent, that the only relative part of a person was his inner soul or “spark of divine light”. Countering this underlying Platonist view, St. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, would contend that “the state of the soul is more perfect embodied than disembodied” (Invitation to the Classic 94.) I think the writers of the New Testament would agree. But John continues still in 1 John 5:6 that “This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood” denouncing any notion that the divine Jesus was not the Jesus that suffered crucifixion. John even begins the epistle in 1 John declaring that that which was in the beginning, has been heard from his own hears, seen with his own eyes, and felt with his own hands.

Upon reflection of these Gnostics, their beliefs and later texts, who were busily trying to reform and assimilate these ideas into the church, a notable shift comes to light. An underlying feeling, coming from these false teachers and Gnostics, surfaces. In rejecting the Kingdom promises of the Jewish God to judge and restore, bringing the world to rights, they seem to give up. Compounding a little of bit of everything from Jewish tradition, oriental mythology, Iranian theology, and complicated astrology they, in Platonic terms and concepts, relinquish any hope for the redemption of the world and life here and now and look up for escape. In Paul’s Letter to the Philippians he says “But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” Which could sound very much like the escapism of the Gnostics but he doesn’t finish his thought with that. Paul continues “He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.” The Gospel of Jesus and that of Paul is not that redemption is “up there”, but that redemption comes from “up there”. The message of the New Testament then is this, YHWH, the Creator God of the Torah, who loved the world so much, calling the man and nation of Israel to bring restoration and salvation to the world, at the fullness of the times sent the Jewish Messiah to implement that purpose in his actions, teachings, and ultimate death and resurrection, the perfect love, that of a father for his only son, breaking his impending new creation into the present, here on earth as in heaven. The lie, I believe, that the Apostles in the New Testament fought so hard against, for their beloved churches, is that of the escapism of the Gnostics. To quote N.T. Wright, on this “good news” of the Gnostics, “Unlike the challenge of Jesus, this message doesn’t tell you to deny yourself and take up your cross, but to discover yourself and follow your star” (Wright 144). In light of all of this, an annoying and perhaps burning question comes out to us, a question that deserves a reflective response. To whose vision do we gravitate closer, that of the escapists Gnostics, or that of the returning Jesus?

First Entry

Posted in Uncategorized on March 18, 2008 by washedpig

There is a something deep within myself that so wants others to understand and validate that which is bubbling up under the surface. A strong desire to share what I have been shown and come to see. Perhaps out of self-indulgence or vanity, I’ve decided to start a blog. With pretensions hopefully pushed aside, I strongly wish that whoever stumbles here, while not necessarily finding anything original, can see a little of where I am as God’s light and rule breaks into my current state and begin this journey down a road that many have traveled before. So, enough of my heart, I would like to now close with a quote from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 2 v. 9 to 21 “And St.  Attila raised his hand grenade up on high saying

       “O Lord bless this thy hand grenade that with it thou mayest blow

       thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy. “and the Lord did grin and

       people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies

       and orang-utans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats.”

Amen and Cheers. (Yes I like adopting British colloquialisms into my lexicon.)