Category: Theology

Reflecting on Justice

A few years ago I had the privilege of reading Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. To say that the book was challenging is to put the matter mildly. I felt as though I had been wrecked theologically, emotionally, and behaviorally in only the first third of the book.

For the purposes of this blog, I wanted to focus on a section from Chapter 3 of The Crucifixion, “The Question of Justice.”

The reign of Sin and Death over the kosmos is inseparable from the question we are asking in this book: Why did God in three persons agree on such a peculiarly gruesome manner of death for the second person? What does the method itself tell us about the meaning of the death? There is no quick and easy answer to that question. The biblical account offers hints and suggestions rather than worked-out solutions.

Pushing this train of thought to its most radical application, however, we arrive at a point that is all too rarely acknowledged. In the final analysis, the crucifixion of Christ for the sin of the world reveals that it is not only the victims of oppression and injustice who are in need of God’s deliverance, but also the victimizers. Each of us is capable, under certain circumstances, of being a victimizer. Václav Havel, president first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic, was imprisoned several times for his dissident activities under the Communist regime, the longest stretch being from 1979 to 1983. He wrote extensively about life in the Stalinist galaxy. Here is one of his reflections: “The line [between good and evil] did not run clearly between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ but through each person. No one was simply a victim; everyone was in some measure co-responsible. . . .Many people were on both sides.”

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

This is a challenging passage, and it is situated in a context in which Rutledge is contending for the idea that the cross is about more than forgiveness. For Rutledge the cross is also about justice, and it is a justice for and against all of us.

Recent events in our culture have reminded me again how easy it is to draw our enemies very flatly. As a Christian, I find the convictions of those who believe that one race or another is superior to any other to be a flat out rejection of the Gospel of Jesus. In the context of the Scriptures, the specially chosen people group were the Hebrew descendants of Abraham, and their election, as Romans 9 makes fairly clear, had nothing to do with them and everything to do with God’s purpose in election—that is, the deliverance of all nations of the earth from the tyranny of Sin and Death. For this reason, it is easy for me to paint those who judge others by superficialities like skin color as an uncomplicated and thoroughly corrupted enemy.

However, what Havel has suggested to the world is that at the root of the gravest of deceptions and at the foundation of the worst horrors of humanity’s cultural history is the conviction that some of us are thoroughly on the side of the angels, while others are entirely demonic. This de-humanizing of our adversaries and even our enemies is a useful tool of hate and of war because it paints those with whom we disagree as somehow non-human, as somehow less deserving of basic human considerations.

This very human tendency toward de-humanization was manipulated to devastating effect by the Nazi leadership in World War II Germany. In that context the Jewish people were cast as sub-human demons, devoid of any human complication. And ironically, in many of the responses to the systemic evils within our own culture we are witnessing, even among our own Christian brothers and sisters who rightly recognize the abominableness of the principalities and powers that permeate the world, the rush to flatten, to demonize, and to dehumanize those with whom we disagree seems at times as pernicious as the propagandizing of World War II Germany.

The line [between good and evil] did not run clearly between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ but through each person. No one was simply a victim; everyone was in some measure co-responsible. . . .Many were on both sides.

Václav Havel

Perhaps these sorts of realizations lie at the heart of Jesus’ instructions to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.” Of course we must speak and stand against evil, and our outrage against tyranny and poverty and racial superiority and corruption is godly and Christlike, in my view. But, evil is never as simple as the totality of an individual. Evil is a power in which each of us participates and which runs through the heart of each of us. Our moral outrage can become as much a tool of the tyrannical powers of Sin and Death as our hate and self-centeredness. In fact, there may be no more infectious type of evil than the evil done in the name of justice.

However criminals are prosecuted and unholy philosophies and ideas are countered and adjudicated, we must never lose sight of the fact that the knowledge of good and evil runs through every human heart, and our enemies are never any less human or deserving of human dignity than our friends and loved ones. Perhaps this is the hardest of the teachings of Jesus and His Apostles to accept. It is easier to oppose people than to oppose Sin and Death as powers that run through the middle of all of us. Individual people can be tortured, defamed, humiliated, and killed. But Sin and Death survive every human life, and continue to hold even those who oppose them in sway long after human justice is done.

For Rutledge, and increasingly for me, this is part of why Jesus not only died, but was crucified. In His manner of death He exposes what lies within even the righteous justice of humanity. Jesus was condemned by the religious leaders of His culture for blasphemy, and it was in how we executed this one blasphemer that who we really are has been revealed. Jesus on the cross is an indictment not only of human sin, but of the corrupting influence of justice; of the fear that causes us to torture and dehumanize those deemed too evil to be treated as human, as beings made in the image of God. The best of intentions crucified Jesus, and the deepest of zeal for right and rightness played out on His flesh and Person. Truly the line between good and evil does not run between us and them, but through each of us.

Let the people of God beware.

~ J. Thomas

Reflecting on the Voice of God

~ J. Thomas Johnson ~

I am an academically-minded person who has been raised in a pietistic tradition. Oftentimes I have found these two aspects of my religious identity to be mutually complementary. However, at other times they have caused some conflict for me. Perhaps nowhere is this conflict more apparent than in my longing to hear God’s voice in my own life and experience.

Most of my training in exegesis and hermeneutics–that is, the tools, assumptions, and methods of biblical investigation and interpretation–came from two schools rooted firmly in what is often called the ‘theologically conservative evangelical tradition’—Gordon College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. In those contexts I came to appreciate the distinction traditional Christianity has drawn between the way God spoke to and through the prophets and apostles who wrote and edited the canonical Christian Scriptures and the ways in which God speaks to us today. In these contexts, at least as I experienced them, it is deemed most appropriate to seek to hear God’s voice by a living engagement with Christian Scripture. In many ways I have found these exhortations persuasive.

However, my primary experience of Christian formation and community has been in the more pietistic tradition of the Church of the Nazarene, which has been shaped in fundamental ways by the American Holiness Movement of the 19th century. Whereas my formal education encouraged me to seek God’s voice through a disciplined study of the canonical Christian Scriptures, my pietistic upbringing also encouraged me to be suspicious of the sterilizing of God and His contemporary accessibility and activity that I was warned often occurred in the ivory towers of academia. As a pietist, I am convinced that God still speaks, and I long to hear God’s personal voice speaking personally to me in the intimacy of a growing relationship with the Creator of all things. As I have come to understand my own upbringing, the pietist in me is inclined to believe that the canonical Scriptures create space for God to speak, but the voice of God is more immediate, more immanent, and more personal than the voices preserved in the written Word of God. In many ways I have found these commendations to be persuasive, as well.

So, I find myself bearing the strange, and sometimes lonely, conviction that the Scriptures are inerrant (without error) in all that the writers of Scripture intended to contend for or against while at the same time being convinced that God did not stop interacting personally with His people after the death of the last of the Apostolic witnesses–that is, the writers of the New Testament. Consequently, and perhaps paradoxically, I remain convinced that God speaks to us, and yet, I am also convinced that the only place we can be certain we have heard God’s voice is in living engagement with the canonical Christian Scriptures. These are the tensions out of which I read Scripture, and before I proceed to reflect on the ‘voice of God’ today, I thought it best to place these assumptions on the table, so to speak.

So with these preliminaries before us, I want to begin to reflect on a story preserved in chapter 13 of the First Testament book of 1 Kings that has long perplexed me. After the death of King Solomon, his son Rehoboam became king over Israel. However, because of Solomon’s idolatry in the latter years of his life, God had covenanted to take the larger part of the tribes of Israel and give them to another, hence dividing the one nation of Israel into two. The man God chose to govern the northern kingdom of Israel was Jeroboam, son of Nabat.

Upon his coronation, Jeroboam began to move away from the instructions of the Law of Moses (Torah) almost immediately, and his motivations seem to have been primarily political. Rehoboam had retained kingship over the tribe of Judah, and it was in the tribe of Judah that the Temple of the Lord was located. Therefore, every time Jeroboam’s subjects were to celebrate the most important festivals of the yearly calendar, every time they were to make sacrifices for sin, every time they were to gather together to praise and worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as a community, they would have had to enter into the jurisdiction of Rehoboam.

Jeroboam was a wise ruler. He realized that this reality could eventually destabilize his rule. So, his solution was to create alternative worship centers within his own borders. He placed one in the far south of his territory, in Bethel, and one in the far north, in Dan. He then instructed his subjects to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in these locations in place of Jerusalem.

Jeroboam faced another dilemma. The only family authorized to serve as priests were the descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron, and the only tribe authorized to serve at the temple was the tribe of Levi. It would seem that Levi was remaining faithful to the Law of Moses and serving in the temple in Jerusalem (or, at least, Jeroboam believed they would remain faithful). So, Jeroboam moved even further from the Torah of Moses by ‘ordaining’ folks to be priests in his new worship centers who were neither Levites nor descendants of the Levitical family of Aaron.

In response to these quite politically pragmatic decisions, which went on to plague the northern kingdom of Israel throughout its ensuing history, the Lord sent a prophet from the tribe of Judah to prophesy against the worship center in Bethel. 1 Kings 13 preserves his encounter with Jeroboam.

While Jeroboam was standing by the altar to offer incense, a man of God came out of Judah by the word of the Lord to Bethel 2 and proclaimed against the altar by the word of the Lord, and said, “O altar, altar, thus says the Lord: ‘A son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name; and he shall sacrifice on you the priests of the high places who offer incense on you, and human bones shall be burned on you.’ ” 3 He gave a sign the same day, saying, “This is the sign that the Lord has spoken: ‘The altar shall be torn down, and the ashes that are on it shall be poured out.’ ” 4 When the king heard what the man of God cried out against the altar at Bethel, Jeroboam stretched out his hand from the altar, saying, “Seize him!” But the hand that he stretched out against him withered so that he could not draw it back to himself. 5 The altar also was torn down, and the ashes poured out from the altar, according to the sign that the man of God had given by the word of the Lord.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), 1 Ki 13:1–5.

In response to this, Jeroboam entreated the prophet to pray for his healing, which the prophet proceeded to do. And, after being healed, Jeroboam asked the prophet to stay and eat with him. Then the prophet revealed another message he had received from the Lord:

8 But the man of God said to the king, “If you give me half your kingdom, I will not go in with you; nor will I eat food or drink water in this place. 9 For thus I was commanded by the word of the Lord: You shall not eat food, or drink water, or return by the way that you came.”

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), 1 Ki 13:8–9.

Then the prophet began his journey home, and this is where the story has gotten perplexing for me. On his way home, the prophet ran into what the text calls ‘an old prophet’, who would prove to be a false prophet. He told the prophet from Judah that he received a word from the Lord instructing them to eat together. The prophet from Judah believed him, ate with him, and, as a consequence of his disobedience to the actual word of the Lord, got mauled and killed by a lion. Yeah, that’s right.

At least three questions arise from this narrative for me: (1) How did the prophet from Judah receive the word of the Lord that led him to Bethel? (2) How was the prophet from Judah so easily deceived by a false prophet? (3) Why was the consequence for his gullibility so severe? I’m sure there are more questions that might be asked, but I want to think a bit about these three queries in the context of what it meant then and what it means now to hear the voice of the Lord.

I listened to a message this week by Nazarene evangelist Dan Bohi entitled “The Voice of the Lord.” Bohi addressed this passage specifically, and one of the things he seems to have assumed is that the prophet from Judah discerned the voice of the Lord in roughly the same way any of us would, perhaps as a sense or a feeling or a voice or an impression that comes to us personally in some way.

However, I think the details of the text suggest that prophets in these days might have been receiving a more direct kind of communication. When the false prophet reported the means by which he received his message from God, he claimed in 13:18 that an angel spoke to him. Angels (or messengers) from God are commonly referenced in the First Testament, and in every instance of direct communication with humans of which I am aware, the messenger always appeared to be a person and spoke real words into the real world. This experience is so common in the First Testament that both the writer of Hebrews (Heb. 2:2) and the Apostle Paul could maintain that the old covenant was given by angels.

19 Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring would come to whom the promise had been made; and it was ordained through angels by a mediator.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Ga 3:19.

In fact, in every instance of the First Testament that I can recall, when God spoke to a person, He spoke either through a real, tangible messenger, by direct encounter with God, or by a repeated dream confirmed by a specified, alternate interpreter. What I’m saying essentially is that the First Testament seems to assume that the voice of the Lord was not a deeply subjective type of communication that was to be personally and individually discerned.

And it would seem that this is what tripped up the prophet from Judah in this story. The older prophet claimed to have had such an encounter, and the text implies, to my reading, that his son served as witness. Two witnesses were sufficient under the Law of Moses to verify such a claim, and so, the prophet from Judah assumed God had changed His mind. What he did not realize is that the older prophet was a false prophet intent on deceiving him. Was there any way he might have known to be wary?

The young prophet from Judah seemed quite clear on what God wanted him to declare in his confrontation with Jeroboam, which was confirmed by two signs (as required by the Law of the Moses)—the splitting of the altar and the shriveling of Jeroboam’s hand. He should have trusted the word entrusted to him. However, he did not allow God’s certain word to help him to discern the false word of the older prophet. He allowed the two claims to compete, and he paid the penalty for his gullibility. In fact, in Deuteronomy 13:1-4 the Law of Moses had already prepared him for this sort of a dilemma.

13 If prophets or those who divine by dreams appear among you and promise you omens or portents, 2 and the omens or the portents declared by them take place, and they say, “Let us follow other gods” (whom you have not known) “and let us serve them,” 3 you must not heed the words of those prophets or those who divine by dreams; for the Lord your God is testing you, to know whether you indeed love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul. 4 The Lord your God you shall follow, him alone you shall fear, his commandments you shall keep, his voice you shall obey, him you shall serve, and to him you shall hold fast.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Dt 13.

The Torah had warned that God would allow false prophets to live and to thrive among the people of Israel as a means of testing the faithfulness of the Israelites. No matter how persuasive a speech, how miraculous a demonstration of power, or how truthful a teaching might appear to be, there was a sure test of its truthfulness built into the Torah. If the prophet who performed the miracle or spoke the word encouraged disobedience to the instructions of God, that alone was proof of falseness. The prophet of Judah might have known that the second instruction to disregard the first could not have been from God. Perhaps the consequence was so dire because the stakes of failing to discern are so very high for the people of God.

Jesus, too, it would appear was cognizant of this teaching of Torah. He affirmed as much in Matthew 5:17-19:

17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.[5]

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Mt 5:17–19.

Jesus, too, insisted that however His teachings might be interpreted, they should not be understood as nullifying the Torah given to Israel. Paul’s use of Torah to mediate ethical disputes in the early church seems to flow out of this assumption, as well, as do the ethical instructions of the rest of the New Testament. Even the book that draws the sharpest distinction between the Old and New Covenants, the book of Hebrews, still exhorts believers to submit to the moral and ethical requirements of Sinai. For the writer of Hebrews, only those requirements of the Law completed by the ministry of Jesus both as sacrifice and as High Priest—sacrifices, purification rituals, separation rituals, etc.—need not be repeated any longer. My inclination is to believe that Jesus intended to clarify and perhaps even to expand Torah, but not to alter or diminish what had already been given.

False teachers and prophets proved to be as much of a challenge in the New Testament writings as they had been throughout the history of Israel to that point, and I suspect that their presence will remain with us as long as the Lord tarries. Further, my inclination is to be believe that the criteria by which falseness might be discerned today remains much the same as it was for Israel. To quote the Apostle Paul in Galatians 1, speaking on behalf, I believe, of the prophets of Israel and the Apostles of Jesus:

8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! 9 As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), Ga 1:8–9.

Does God still speak today? I think He does. Will He speak a word today that invalidates the words He has delivered to us through the prophets of Israel and the Apostles of Jesus? I think the answer is no. May those who have ears to hear, listen.