Brass Tacks

In the earliest days of this blog, I explained how hesitant I am to enter into these debates, (see http://tyrannysucks.blogspot.com/2005/07/ive-made-decision.html) because I know that my theological ideas - and particularly the reasons for them - are extremely challenging for a lot of people. I am very, very concerned with the possibility that I might become a stumbling block for someone else's faith, and that's the absolute last thing that I want to happen. In spite of this concern, however, I am not ashamed of my understanding of God even though (as has been demonstrated over the past couple of days) some will be extremely uncomfortable with that understanding.

In light of my comments on this blog, one of y'all has asked me to explain why I am a Christian. There seems to be an assumption implicit in her question: it makes sense (to her) for someone to be a Christian as long as they subscribe to the traditional set of beliefs and ideas about how the Bible should be read and understood, but it doesn't make sense (to her) for someone to consider themselves a Christian if they don't necessarily share those traditional beliefs and ideas. I'll try to address her question in as thorough a manner as possible. While I would normally skirt around some of the issues and ideas that are thus raised, I think this requires me to meet them head-on in order to explain why I am not the same flavor of Christian that many of you are familiar with.

I was given a traditional Church of Christ upbringing, raised to believe that the Bible had been handed down to us with every word just as if God had spoken it himself. It was supposed to be a coherent whole, factually and theologically consistent, complete and unimprovable in any way. It was unacceptable to think of the Bible as having any inconsistency, and any perceived internal conflicts were the result of our limited understanding, rather than differences of opinion among the Bible's authors. Additionally, I was taught that what you believed was a matter of eternal consequence. You could live a near-faultless life, sincerely dedicated to the pursuit and worship of God, but if you had an incorrect understanding of certain points of theology you were in serious danger of going to Hell. For example, if you held all the correct beliefs about the reasons for being baptized, but were sprinkled instead of immersed, the baptism might well not have been effective and you would be condemned. On the other hand, if you were fully immersed with the intention of dedicating the rest of your life to Christ, but didn't have the proper beliefs about God or the correct understandings about the reasons for baptism, you might well be condemned. There was right and there was wrong, and even while God was proclaimed to be good, gracious, loving, and merciful, there were no real in-betweens. When I was young, I never thought to challenge these ideas - they were just the Truth.

My transformation started in middle school. By sixth grade, I believed everything I was supposed to believe, and I wanted to be a Christian and avoid going to Hell, so I was baptized. I thought that even though nothing of my thoughts or opinions had changed between the moment before I went under the water and the moment afterwards, I had been doomed to Hell before and was unquestionably saved afterwards. As Peter said in I Peter 3, it is the water of baptism, made effective though the resurrection of Jesus, that saves us, right? Over the next couple of years, I continued to hold all the right beliefs - and to proclaim them pretty loudly, in certain contexts - while being a hateful little cretin to everyone around me.

For various reasons, in about eighth grade (mostly because I was a teenager - y'all know how it is) I started questioning the point of being a Christian. It just seemed so arbitrary that our purpose in life was to develop a certain set of beliefs and to try to get other people to share those beliefs. My thinking on this idea led me to re-read much of the Bible, critically, and with as fresh a set of eyes as I could muster. As I was studying through my high school years, I found myself struck in a completely unexpected way. I had been raised in church learning lists and hearing stories about events in the lives of Biblical characters, such as the miracle stories and parables. But as I read through the Gospels and the Prophets, I was profoundly impacted by the ethical messages about how God's people were supposed to relate to each other with respect and selflessness. I was also amazed at how Jesus was so willing to disregard "the rules" in favor of a new paradigm whose ultimate concern was how to treat others lovingly - and in adherence to that paradigm he broke the Sabbath, ignored purity rituals, defied social conventions, and openly challenged those who tried to moderate his behavior. I was inspired by his description of the Kingdom of God, in which no one would be looked down upon for being poor, where all - and especially the outcasts - were made worthy of joining in the King's celebration, and where God's radical, all-consuming love offered everyone hope for salvation. And above all, I was moved by Jesus's demonstrated compassion for people. His tenderness with the woman caught in adultery, his tears over the death of Lazarus, his willingness to touch lepers, make time for children, and dine with whores and tax collectors. In seeing Jesus afresh, I grew to love him in a way that wasn't ever possible before.

With that love and appreciation as the new foundation for my Christianity, I went off to Abilene Christian University, where I majored in Bible and Political Science. While studying in the Bible department, I was first confronted with the idea of scholarly Biblical criticism. I learned that biblical books were not always written by those to whom they are attributed. I began to understand how a biblical author's particular and peculiar worldview significantly impacts the way he understands and explains God through his writing. I realized that you can see within the biblical texts the evolution of almost every theological idea - that even within the Judeo-Christian tradition we have been in a constant process of adapting our ideas about God to mesh with our knowledge of the world and our philosophical understandings. I recognized the presence of apparent differences of opinion among a number of early Christian authors and thinkers. (Check out The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament, by Bart Ehrman) I learned how some of those disagreements shaped the canonization of both the Old and New Testaments (read The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance, by Bruce Metzger), read some of the books that were not included in the canon (read Lost Scriptures: Books That did not Make it into the New Testament, by Bart Ehrman), and began to ponder the possibility that the men responsible for writing, assembling, translating, and interpreting the Bible were not so very different from myself and my classmates. And as I thought about that, I came to the opinion that we are far more than just recipients of a static theological knowledge; we are active participants in the continuing revelation of God to humanity.

Now, naturally, a lot of these ideas were challenging. After all, if most (or all) of the Bible's authors sometimes lacked a firm grasp on how God should be understood, how would we ever know when they were right and when they were wrong? How can you be expected to live a life pleasing to God if you can't even be certain what God asks of us? This thought was accompanied by one much more daunting - if we can't be certain that the Bible's authors always had a complete knowledge of God, how can we claim that our religion is any more correct or authoritative than any other religion? Without question, other religions make truth claims for their beliefs and they argue for the authority of their own scriptures. How can we accept the truth claims of Christianity, yet reject those of other religions?

At this time, I was deeply engaged in the study of other world religions and I found myself amazed to see in them (behind the metaphysical differences) an elemental similarity: an ideal of selflessness. You see it to varying extents and phrased in different language within the texts of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and many pagan faiths. So, about the middle of my collegiate career, I began to seriously consider that God has actually been communicating the same central message to all peoples, all over the world, and that the differences that we see among religions is not the result of different sources of inspiration, but rather the telling indication of humanity's limited ability to fully comprehend and communicate God's message. Human error has resulted in a vast departure from the single divine ideal that is summed up best in Jesus's own formulation of the Greatest Commands: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength... Love your neighbor as yourself." In all of this, I was continually impressed that no other religious thinker - including Paul - seemed to grasp this all-important simplicity as thoroughly as did Jesus himself. Because I continued to believe that Jesus was obviously God's perfect messenger to humanity, and because I was certain that his sacrificial death was an absolute requirement for any of us to be made pure in the sight of God, I had no problem whatsoever considering myself a Christian even while acknowledging a certian basic level of Truth could be found in other religious traditions.

Grad school presented an entirely new set of ideas to grapple with, because at Vanderbilt we were forced to re-think all of our assumptions about the truth claims traditionally made in the Bible, particularly those about who Jesus was as a historical figure. (If you have time, read all three volumes of A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, by John Meier, as well as N.T. Wright's fantastic series on Christian Origins and the Question of God - if you don't have much time, I recommend Wright's The Original Jesus) We studied the way in which the early church developed its ideas about Jesus and looked carefully at the influences that helped to shape those ideas. We learned that many of the ideas we had assumed were exclusive to the Christian tradition - virgin birth, claimed messiahship, claimed divinity, resurrection - all had parallels in other, earlier settings (for a very challenging look at this, read Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, by John Dominic Crossan), and might well have been attributed to Jesus after his life, more as a symbolic way to recognize the unprecedented role he played in the world than as a literal historical account of events surrounding his life. There continues to be constant debate about who Jesus really was (for a good snapshot of this debate, I recommend The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, co-authored by Wright and Marcus Borg) upshot of it all is that most (though far from all) contemporary Jesus scholars discount some of the more fantastic claims that the gospels make about Jesus's life, focusing instead on the radical teachings that he brought about the Kingdom of God and how each of us could play a role in it.

Having at that point spent years contemplating the idea that Jesus's primary importance was as God's ultimate - but not exclusive - revelation to humanity, and that what Jesus taught us about how to understand God was far more important than questions about whether he was virgin-born or bodily resurrected (read Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith), my conviction about the importance of living as a Christian was not shaken in the slightest by these studies. But I watched, heartbroken, as several of my classmates - including a previously-unwavering Church of Christ graduate of David Lipscomb University - abandoned their faith entirely. I was very, very disappointed to find out that this is not at all uncommon among seminary students (whom you would assume to be among the strongest of the faithful) when they are confronted with some of these challenging ideas, and it reinforced my commitment to avoid being the cause of someone else's stumbling. I do not - and cannot - demand that other people share my faith to the detriment of their own. But at the same time, I wish they could understand the blessing of my own faith, and I will steadfastly make the effort to open their minds to my way of thinking. Because I have tremendous comfort in accepting that God doesn't require an infallible scripture to remain Lord of all, that Jesus didn't have to work miracles to be God's chosen Son who reveals God's unlimited love for humanity, and that we are called to live in love for God and for our fellow humans, thereby to be adopted as God's children and participants in the Kingdom that Jesus announced. [Note: I want to be absolutely clear, as I have been in earlier posts, that I am not denying anything about Christianity's traditional claims about Jesus's life. I do accept that the traditional truth claims could be historically accurate. My fundamental point is that I cannot believe that our salvation hinges on our understanding of history. In other words, I cannot believe that a God of love and justice will consign people to eternal damnation simply because they hold the wrong opinion about events that happened two millenia ago. There will, without question, be those who will disagree with me on that point. I respect your disagreement and I am open to hearing what you have to say on the matter, but I can think of nothing that will persuade me otherwise.]

So as for the reader's primary question about why I am a Christian, I respond by saying "How could I not be?" As I stated in one of the recent entries, I believe that Jesus brought the Kingdom of God into the world through his presence, words, and actions. Jesus was unique in his teachings and in his status as the chosen Son of God. When I read Jesus's teachings, I hear God speaking, and when I read stories about how he interacted with others, I see God in action within our world. I don't have to think of Jesus as having done better miracles than other religious figures or making extraordinary claims about who he was in order to affirm that his message was God's message. The path to which he called us is God's will for how we should pursue our lives. Because I recognize these things, I have no choice but to be a Christian.

Inspiration and Scripture, or, "This Calls For An Entirely New Post"

The book of First Kings (19:11-15) records an extraordinary scene in which God reveals himself to a despairing Elijah. The prophet is sent to stand on the mountain so that God may come near. When God arrives a violent wind rips at the mountain, followed by an earthquake and a raging fire; but the writer tells us that God was not in the wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire. After these phenomena had passed, there came to Elijah what the text ironically describes as the sound of an absolute silence, through which the prophet encountered God. In the absence of any audible sound, Elijah clearly heard the voice of God.

In addressing the question of what revelation means, I think it necessary to ask in what way Elijah “heard” God speak on the mountain. As it is recorded in the biblical text, Elijah’s experience did not come from reading a scroll, nor did it result from a physical sound such as a human voice coming into Elijah’s ears. Indeed, it seems that God did not use any physical or quantifiable means to impart his message to the prophet. Instead, Elijah experienced God’s presence internally, as if God communicated directly to the prophet’s soul.
I contend that this sort of peculiar and immeasurable experience is the way that God communicates to each and every one of us. Rather than using actual words, God reveals Godself to humanity by acting within us through our emotions, in visions, and by way of intellectual inspiration. In turn, as we have experienced God’s presence it becomes the task of the individual to understand and communicate the meaning of their unique divine experience. Because each of us are human and fallible, however, individuals confronted with such an experience (or the description and interpretation of another’s experience) cannot simply assume that any human interpretation can fully and/or accurately reflect the essence of God’s communication.

Because the divine message cannot help but to have a human filter if it is to be communicated to the rest of the community, theologians must carefully scrutinize any verbal or written account that purports to carry such a message for the tell-tale failings of that filter. This means that even the texts that have come to be accepted as being the authoritative “Word of God” must be subject to reevaluation in the light of our developing knowledge about the Universe and God’s continuing interaction with humanity. The only way to resolve the resulting uncertainties as to what should be considered authoritative is to compare our own experiences with the experiences that others have shared, and to look for commonalities that will trace our understandings and experiences to the same divine source. The similarities that we find in the religious experiences of other individuals and faith traditions can only strengthen our assurance of God’s message along those lines, and even the differences that we find among our various experiences and traditions may help to broaden our conception of God’s nature and will.

So to put all that more concisely, the Bible was not dictated by angels sitting on the shoulders of its authors. The collected writings that eventually came to be accepted as the Hebrew and Christian scriptures were the work of many people from different eras and locations, each of whom shared the same limitations of perspective and understanding that any of us experience. Many of the authors do demonstrate exceptional insight into God’s nature and will, and some (like the prophets) were likely able to receive messages directly from God. But despite their unusual spiritual awareness, these authors’ understandings of the world – and, I believe, of God – were frequently defined and limited by their historical setting, and therefore were not always complete. I have previously described the difficulties of this situation as follows:

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As children, many of us played the “Telephone Game”, in which one person starts a message through a chain of communicants and the last person in the chain attempts to recreate the original message for all to hear. But, of course, the words employed by the last person in the chain never precisely duplicate the first speaker’s words, and frequently the content of the message is lost or twisted as it gets passed from one person to the next. When the last player gives their version of the message that was passed on to them the results are frequently amusing, because the message may be radically different at the end of the line than it was at the beginning.

The reason that the game works is that whenever any human experiences communication from an external source, they interpret those sensations in accordance with a unique perspective that is defined by the listener’s particular circumstances or their life experience. Many factors could contribute to the garbling of the message. The listener could be distracted by something else going on, so that they just aren’t paying attention. The room could be too loud for the listener to hear clearly, or they could have internal hearing problems that prevent them from accurately receiving the communication. Or the listener could have certain pre-established sensitivities that inspire them to remember or perceive a slightly different message than the one they originally received. Regardless of the particular reason, the result is the same. The message changes in a very real way from the way it was communicated to the original listener to the way that it will later be communicated to others.

Religion, understood as the various systems of belief and morality that have been discerned from humanity’s experience with God, is the history of a message that has been passed from person to person and generation to generation. Every time the ideas, beliefs, and doctrines of a particular faith are passed on to a new listener, the message encounters a unique human filter. That filter may entail certain philosophical notions, social norms, personal predispositions, or any other of a variety of potential influences on how the message will be understood by the hearers. Even where the individual who has had a religious experience has been able to make a written record of their interpretation of that experience, there is no certainty that they will have recorded it in such a way that others who encounter it later will come away with the message that the writer intended, much less a full rendering of the writer’s experience with God. This is evident in the way that religious groups have splintered time and time again over differing interpretations of scripture.

My goal, at present, is not to trace the historical path of Christian doctrines and beliefs. But I believe it is of paramount importance to acknowledge that those doctrines and beliefs, as we have come to know them, have not (and do not) pass unmediated from God’s mouth to our ears. They have been altered somewhat in the transmission. And if we, as Christians, are to take seriously the task of discerning God’s will for our lives, we must necessarily determine why these changes have taken place and what we are to do with them.

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So that leads to the differences of opinion that many have about the historical precision of the Gospel accounts, the importance of sacrifice under the Mosaic law as opposed to Jesus's own sacrifice, and about Paul's authority to say that the Christian faith is worthless (i.e., Jesus's sacrifice was ineffectual) if Jesus's physical body was not revived after the crucifixion. I'll try to take these one at a time.

As for the Gospels, it is highly unlikely that any of them were authored by people closely associated with Jesus during his ministry. Mark is almost universally regarded as being the earliest of the Gospels that were included in the New Testament, probably written by a member of Peter's community twenty to thirty years after Jesus's death. Luke is likely the second-oldest of the New Testament Gospels, written sometime before A.D. 60 by someone who had spoken extensively with Jesus's disciples, but who had not known Jesus personally. Matthew was probably written at about the same time as Luke by a member of the same community - which is evidenced by the fact that they each draw heavily from the same source materials. Many (though far from all) contemporary Historical Jesus scholars believe that there was another written document (called the Q document) that Matthew and Luke relied on because the two gospels share significant similarities, not only in the stories related about Jesus, but in the structure and phrasing of those stories. It is highly unlikely that the author of Matthew is actually Matthew the disciple, for two primary reasons: 1) a man who had actually been one of Jesus's companions would have had no need to look to the Gospel of Mark (or whatever source the author shared with Luke) for stories about Jesus; and 2) the average lifespan for people in that day and age was very short, and if we assume that Matthew was about Jesus's age during his ministry that would put him at 55-65 years old when the book was written. Of course, these facts don't preclude the possibility that Matthew the disciple authored the book that bears his name, but it does call it into serious question.

The uncertainty about the authorship of Biblical writings, combined with the regular concerns that I have about the historical limitations of the authors' understandings and the way that humans filter their experiences, profoundly affects the way that I read the Bible. In my mind, these considerations do absolutely nothing to detract from the central importance of Jesus's unique relationship with God, his revelation of the Kingdom of God, or his eventual sacrificial death - but they do require me to think carefully about the way that various authors have interpreted Jesus's presence, teaching, and death. The difficulty that I find (and I hear it in questions raised by several of you in responding to the previous post) is that some will demand that only their understanding of Jesus can be correct or acceptable. While I appreciate the reasons that some of you may feel that way, I cannot share those feelings and I think that they warrant reconsideration. So I hope that answers that question.

Now, I briefly and specifically want to address Margie's concern about differentiating Christianity from any other religious tradition. Yes, it is entirely possible that God brought Jesus back from the grave as a concrete demonstration that Jesus was superior to all others who have claimed to be God's messenger/Messiah. But are you really suggesting that Jesus needs this sort of one-upmanship to justify our devotion? Jesus was unique in his teachings and in his status as the chosen Son of God. A physical resurrection would not change that, even if it would be a convincing demonstration. If someone dedicates their life to Christ simply because he was raised from the dead, I think that they've missed the point entirely. Again, in no way am I saying it didn't happen. I'm just saying that it's kind of beside the point. I am a Christian because I believe that Jesus brought the Kingdom of God into the world through his presence, words, and actions. I don't need any further proof, and I would hope that no one else would, either.

JR, to the extent that you question why Jesus would have even come to us if not for sacrifice, I would say something very similar. It is very possible that God does, in fact require blood in order to forgive sin. It may well be that Jesus had to die for our redemption. But even if God didn't require his death, Jesus came to perfect God's message to humanity, to correct the errors that had built up under the Mosaic law, to demonstrate with his life God's love for humanity and God's calling for each of us. That is, I believe, a perfectly valid alternative understanding of Jesus's mission, even if some will find it unsatisfactory.


Sacrifice and Resurrection

I'll start here with resurrection. Hannah raised the question about whether Christ needed to be resurrected to "defeat death." No, I don't think so at all. I think that we very frequently get distressingly and unnecessarily distracted about what God needs in order to be able to forgive. Let's not forget that God is God. God granted salvation (eternal spiritual life) and raised people from the dead (extended physical life) long, long before Jesus was with us. Death was already absolutely subject to God's desires. If God wanted to "defeat" death, it certainly wouldn't require God to come to earth in person, die, and come back to life. Christian theologians (perhaps even Peter - although I think it's not at all clear that this was what he was getting at in the passage you cited) seized upon the idea of Jesus's resurrection and attributed to it this additional layer of meaning - not only was this a concrete sign of Jesus's unique relationship with God, not only was his revival important to reassure the disciples that he really was the Messiah and that the Kingdom of God would continue beyond his death, but Jesus actually broke down the gates of Hell so that death no longer had any power! Well... no. Death has continued to function, in the wake of the resurrection, precisely as it has always functioned. Likewise, and to the best of my understanding, our redemption post-crucifixion is not at all qualitatively different from what God has always offered to those who chose to serve him.

This leads us to JR's quotations from the book of Hebrews, which (in turn) was quoting from the book of Jeremiah. JR, you seem to have quoted these passages to support the idea that Jesus's sacrificial death was different in effect from the ritual sacrifices offered throughout Jewish history. It's clear that the author of Hebrews, whoever he was, thought so. He purports to be quoting Jesus, though I don't know where (if anywhere) in the Gospels the quotes can be found, to the effect that Jesus recognized that the traditional sacrifices just weren't cutting it (the author of Hebrews says that they could "never take away sins") and needed to be replaced with one perfect, once-and-for-all sacrifice. But the author shows flawed logic. In Hebrews 7, he infers that the sacrifices of old were ineffectual because Jesus became a new and perfect sacrifice. ("If perfection could have been attained through the Levitical priesthood (for on the basis of it the law was given to the people), why was there still need for another priest to come—one in the order of Melchizedek, not in the order of Aaron? For when there is a change of the priesthood, there must also be a change of the law." - Hebrews 7:11-12)

[This is all I could write while I'm in Philadelphia today. I'll finish up my thoughts in the next day or so.]

The Resurrection and Salvation

In my Constructive Theology class in Divinity School, we were challenged to think and write about a number of controversial ideas. One of those assignments required us to write about how we think Jesus's death and resurrection define the question of salvation and the Kingdom of God. We were also expected to discuss a couple of theologians' competing ideas about whether Jesus's resurrection was a physical event or whether it was merely spiritual. Most of what follows was written in response to that assignment.

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Jesus was a human and lived a human life. During that life, he articulated the magnificent dream that he called the Kingdom of God. It described a divine reign that had long been anticipated in the Jewish community, though the Kingdom that Jesus described ended up bearing little similarity to the messianic dominion that had been widely envisioned. Jesus envisioned a spiritual Kingdom that would be visible in the lives of God’s followers as they devoted to God their hearts, souls, minds, and strength, and as they loved their neighbors as themselves. Those who were a part of the Kingdom would never have to worry because God would provide them everything they needed, and they would learn to be content with their earthly status because God had assured them of an eventual reward that would far surpass anything possible in this life.

But even as Jesus was preaching this vision of the Kingdom something happened that his disciples never anticipated, though they would later claim that Jesus himself saw it coming. Jesus died. He was killed by Judea’s Roman procurator, just before the Jewish holiday of Passover, crucified in the outskirts of Jerusalem. As the man they called the messiah hung on the cross, his disciples either stood silently among the mob that attended his execution, fled for safety, or actively denied knowing him. In the end, Jesus’ last breath escaped in the form of a heartbroken cry to the God that he felt had abandoned him. Most people would assume that the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached had died along with him.

Jurgen Moltmann is only one of the more recent in a two-thousand year history of Christian theologians who will argue that Jesus’ death was not, in fact, the end of anything at all. Instead, it represented a new beginning. Shortly after the crucifixion, Jesus’ disciples began to claim that their messiah was once again alive, and in the assurance of his continuing life the world could still take part in the enduring Kingdom of God.

One of the important tasks (Moltmann calls it the “central problem”) set for Christian theologians is to explain this apparent resurrection in terms of how it will be understood to have happened. Moltmann and many others have argued that the resurrection, laden as it is with metaphysical and soteriological significance, must have been a resuscitation of both body and spirit. He notes Ernst Troeltsch’s argument that it is futile to think of the resurrection in historical terms because the event transcends any historical analogy that would allow those bound to such understandings to participate in the belief that Jesus did come back from the dead. As an alternative to historical knowledge, Moltmann suggests that the importance of believing in the fact of the resurrection lies in the hope that it engenders that God is in the process of resurrecting the entire world, and us within it. In this sense, the resurrected Jesus whose life continues even now can be envisioned as the “Cosmic Christ” that exists and moves within the natural world.

I agree with Moltmann's assertion that the crucifixion cannot be seen in any way as an ending of the world's encounter with Jesus. My question, however, is whether discussions about the historicity of a physical resurrection are at all necessary or useful. Paul asserted in I Corinthians that Christianity was futile if Jesus was not, in fact, raised from the dead. But why should this be the case? Is Paul correct in suggesting that Jesus's life and sacrificial death would lose importance without a physical resurrection?

On a purely philosophical level, the content of Jesus’ teachings (including his description of the Kingdom of God) does not depend on his bodily resurrection, and there is no reason why they would carry any less importance if his crucified body never regained life. As far as the way that the crucifixion and resurrection tie into the idea of salvation, I'm not at all certain that theologians (including Paul) fully grasp or account for the breadth of God's grace when they insist that all would be lost in the absence of a physical revival of Jesus's body. God has always been able to dispense forgiveness to God’s people, and I think that sacrifice was more peripheral an element in that forgiveness than most people believe. While one must acknowledge that animal and grain sacrifices were a fundamental element of the Jewish faith for a long, long time, even at that time the psalmists and prophets long understood and announced that God truly desired a “broken and contrite heart.” Repentance appears to have been much more important for forgiveness than ritual, vicarious death. Even if we are to assume that God will not/cannot grant forgiveness of sins in the absence of physical sacrifice, why would Jesus's sacrificial death be any less significant if he was not physically raised from the dead? As I read the Bible, I can’t locate one other instance in which the efficacy of a sacrifice depended on the sacrificial object’s return to vitality. In light of this, I can't really agree with Paul that Christianity is deprived of all value if there was no physical resurrection. [To be absolutely clear: I'm not denying the historicity of the resurrection, I'm simply arguing that the effectiveness of Jesus's sacrificial death does not depend on it.]

What is truly theologically important, so far as I'm concerned, is that in the days, years, and centuries following Jesus’ death on the cross, people of faith had assurance that his death did not signal an end. They were comforted because they experienced a continuing divine presence, which they understood to be a physical return of their messiah. Whether or not, historically, the body that hung on the cross was reanimated and walked again among the disciples is almost beside the point. God’s spirit gave them hope that the Kingdom Jesus preached was still alive, and that they could continue to play a role in its flourishing. For as long as the message endures that Jesus passed along to the world, and for as long as we, his followers, experience his presence in our lives, Jesus can be said to live on in the world and the Kingdom of God can be said to be at hand.

*Contented Sigh*

Today was an amazing day, and it tops off an incredible week.

First off, allow me to welcome the newest addition to the Roland family - Isaac Levi Parlier, an 8 lb., 7 oz. little boy born to my sister, Bethany, on Monday evening. We're very excited to have him safely with us! We're also eagerly awaiting the arrival of yet another addition, a daughter that we expect to be born tomorrow to my little sister, Anna Caroline. So far we're just referring to her as "Squirt," though I imagine AC and Len have a more distinguished name that they're waiting to reveal. [UPDATE: Abigail Marie Causey was born at about 9:30 EST on Sunday night. She weighed 8 lbs., 8 oz., was 20 1/2 inches long, and already has more hair on her head than I do.]

Secondly, I'm very glad to announce that I have some room to breathe again at work. For the last six weeks or so, I've been pretty well dominated by my efforts to shepherd ten amicus ("friend of the court") briefs to completion in support of a set of our clients. On Wednesday we got all ten filed on time with the Ohio Supreme Court, and I am very, very pleased with the quality of the submissions. As a fun by-product of my efforts in this regard, I now have on the calendar my first official speaking engagement for IJ! On December 13th I'll be the featured speaker for a meeting the National Federation of Independent Businesses' Legal Strategy group, discussing "Successful Amicus Strategies: What Works and What Doesn't".

Today, however, was amazing for an entirely different reason. Let's call her... Tiger. [For reasons that I'll explain on an individual basis if you'd like to know, I've decided not to use her name in my blog.] If you've spoken to me in the past four weeks the odds are good that you've already heard a little something about her. If not - we really need to catch up!

I woke up this morning, just genuinely excited that I'd get to spend time with her today. For our original plan, I had convinced her (not that she needed much convincing) to take me shopping for some new clothes. Instead, we ended up spending much of the morning just hanging out at her apartment, enjoying each others' company and talking. As the temperatures climbed into the low-70s and the day was proving too unbelievably spectacular to be avoided, we went and had a fantastic, leisurely lunch out in the sun at Lauriol Plaza, a restaurant near Dupont Circle. We finally did get around to doing a little shopping, but we only ended up buying one shirt. Still, she's committed (perhaps from no small degree of self-interest...) to helping me reform my wardrobe, so if I'm wearing something that you don't like next time you see me, you'll have to direct your gripes to her. Hopefully, she'll be right there by my side so that she can offer a ready response.

So, to summarize this post... new babies in the family, new opportunities at the office, new lady in the life. I'm a blessed man.

Rumors Of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated...

My apologies to anyone who might have been concerned about my well-being due to my lack of blogitude. I'm skipping lunch so that I can remedy the situation. Hope you're happy. ;-)

Weblog of Love goes to... Jacque Holton! Jacque was a beloved fixture at Fairfax before she answered the calling to go teach in Abilene Christian University's study abroad program at Oxford. I first met Jacque when I was working as a youth ministry intern at Fairfax while she was still in high school. Luckily, she chose to come out to Abilene Christian University and i was able to keep up with her on-and-off over the years until she moved back up to the DC area after finishing her Masters program. She's a truly amazing person. Smart, pretty, and an engaging conversationalist, Jacque is also a wonderful example of how God can use Christians to bless and encourage others. She has a wonderful heart for other people, but also has a secret mischevious aspect to her personality that I never would have expected! Jacque, we miss you much and we hope that you won't stay in England forever - even though we greatly enjoy reading the accounts of your adventures that you post on englishhistory.blogspot.com!

I also have to follow up the kind words that Shayna (Carl also gets vicarious credit) and Odgie have offered. You guys are such incredible friends! You can't know how blessed I feel that God has brought you into my life. Every week I get excited to spend time with you at small group. Each of you have made such a tremendous impact on my life and on the lives of all of us privileged to count you as friends. I can't say enough how much I appreciate you and what your friendship and encouragement means to me. I love you guys!

Two more things to note briefly. I will be posting my thoughts on the previous blog sometime soon. You guys had some great things to say and I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation. Second, I'd like to point folks to my friend Sweetbaby James's blog, ilovesickpeople.blogspot.com, where he's opening a conversation about the Trinity. Dive in!