Elliot Ritzema

Category: Church

  • Truth Project 7: Sociology (The Divine Imprint)

    The beginning of the seventh tour of the Truth Project sounded like we were revisiting the topic of the fifth tour: science. Del began by quoting Psalm 19, about the heavens declaring the glory of God, and talked to his audience about the design of a chicken egg. The chicken egg, he said, poses a problem: the problem of order. What we have is an orderly cosmos, and “God is not a God of disorder” (1 Cor. 14:33). Del doesn’t just say that God is a God of order, but also says (quoting James 3:16) that disorder is a vice.

    Here is where he makes the transition to the current topic. God is “displayed in great glory through the physical creation, but even more so in the order that He has created in the social realm.” God’s social system, Del says, is where “the real battleground lies.” Since God is triune, he is social by nature. And the way that he has ordered society is bound up in his Trinitarian nature. Del quotes the Westminster Confession:

    In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost; the Father is of none neither begotten, nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.

    Del then looks at how this Trinitarian nature of God plays out in social systems, beginning with the family. In the family, the husband and wife are one in the same way that the Father and Son are one. The wife submits to the husband in the same way that the Son submits to the Father. Authority, submission, oneness and unity are shared by the Trinity and the family.

    Then he turns to look at the church as social institution, comparing it to the Trinity and to the family. Christ he puts at the top (where the Father and the husband are in the other spheres), then he puts the leaders (in the place of the Son and the wife, respectively), and then he puts the flock (in the place of the Holy Spirit and the children). The flock is supposed to honor elders the way children honor their parents (1 Timothy 5:17).

    Relationships are important, Del says, but at the Fall, relationships were severed: God and Man, Man to Man, Man and Creation, and Man internally. Social order is bound up in the nature of God because he created social institutions with the divine imprint of who he is.

    Then Del argues that our culture attacks the sphere of family. Divorce is commonplace, though God says “I hate divorce” (Malachi 2:16). Husbands are inconsiderate of their wives, though Peter says that their prayers will be hindered if they do that (1 Peter 3:7). The family, Del concludes, is serious business.

    The way that Del draws parallels between God’s Trinitarian nature and various social systems is, I think, problematic. When he diagrams the Trinity, he draws a triangle within a circle with the Father at the top, the Son below that and to the right, and the Holy Spirit at the bottom. He draws the same diagram when he describes social institutions. The problem with this is that he gives the impression that, simply because the Son submitted to the Father in his earthly life, there is inequality within the Trinity. When he says that the Son submits to the Father the same way that wives submits to husbands, and the same way that elders in a church submit to Christ, he is coming dangerously close to the heresy of subordinationism. I say “coming dangerously close” because Del may not believe that the Son is eternally unequal with the Father. But what he says does give that impression.

    I admire Del’s effort to show that God’s concern for order proceeds from his nature, but I think that he went about it in entirely the wrong way. When you see Trinitarian relationships in anything but the Trinity itself, I think that you are treading on very dangerous ground, because you are making a parallel that the Bible itself does not make. The Trinity is mysterious, so comparing it to things that we know more about can be helpful at times. But comparisons are only just that: comparisons. When we really start to think of the relationships within the Trinity in terms of relationships within the family, we have diminished the Trinity. I know that Del is only trying to show his audience that God is a God of order, but I’m afraid he does more harm than good here.

  • Truth Project 4: Theology (Who is God?)

    In this fourth Truth Project tour, Del shares that this is his favorite, and that he wishes he could do it first. The reason for doing it fourth is that in our culture, we need to take care of other things first. The only way that we can begin to answer the question, “Who is God?” is that he has revealed himself to us through his word.

    In addition to “Who is God?”, Del looks at another question: “What is eternal life?” This he answers from John 17:1-3, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” This is not just knowledge of God, but relationship with God.

    Del then talks about his own journey of increasing knowledge of God through study of God’s various names. One example that he gives is El Qanna, the Hebrew word for “a jealous God.” God’s jealousy is not the same as our jealousy, however; God’s jealousy is zeal that arises when sin threatens a relationship. Names mean something, says Del. And this is what transforms us, so “should we be surprised that it is here we find the focus of the attack?” That is, God’s nature is being attacked in our culture, as well as God’s Word (i.e., the Bible). Del takes the rest of the tour to address attacks on the latter. He lists various people who have attacked the Bible, including Voltaire, Robert Ingersoll and the Jesus Seminar – which concluded that 82% of the words attributed to Jesus in the Bible were not really spoken by him.

    Del’s final segment for this tour was relating a personal crisis that he had in relation to the trustworthiness of the Bible. He was looking at the dates that the kings of Israel and Judah ruled, and saw an apparent contradiction between 2 Kings 8:16 and 2 Kings 1:17. It looked like the Bible contradicted itself when it talked about the beginnings of the reigns of Joram and Jehoram. After reading a book by Edwin Thiele called The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, he concluded that the apparent contradiction was only apparent because Judah and Israel used different dating systems. He challenges his listeners to really believe that the Bible is God’s Word.

    I admire Del’s willingness to tackle such a large subject in such a short amount of time. I agree with him that the only reason we can begin to know who God is is that he has chosen to reveal himself. I agree that knowledge of God is not just about intellectual knowledge, but it is about an intimate relationship. I agree with him that names mean something. I agree that God’s character and the Bible are being attacked in our culture, and that this has been going on for a long time. I liked his example of Joram and Jehoram, and I think it’s neat that studying the text in context takes away the seeming contradiction.

    I was uneasy, however, at the end of this example of Joram and Jehoram, when Del concluded, “Hallelujah, you can trust the Bible.” It’s not that I don’t think the Bible can be trusted, but I worry whether, based on Del’s example, people will trust in the Bible based on their own ability to explain it. I wish that Del had used as another example a passage that Christians disagree on or are unsure about. This, it seems to me, would be an equally good teaching moment. It would show the audience that we can still trust God’s ability to speak through the Bible even if we can’t always trust our own ability to explain it precisely.

    Also, I hate to bring this up again, but I chafed at the word “objective” when it was mentioned during this tour. This time, Del described relationship with God as objective. How, I wondered, could a relationship be objective? It seems that Del is trying to use “objective” as a synonym for “real,” which is confusing – and not the case.

  • Truth Project 3: Anthropology (Who is Man?)

    This week, Del looks at the question of who man is, and weighs the answer Christians give against the answer secularists give. The answers given to this question directly affect the question of why there is evil. Del claims that Christians have a lot of answers to this question whereas the world does not.

    First Del looks at the biblical view of man (meaning both men and women), saying that it teaches man is both body and spirit, created in the image of God. The Bible also says that man has fallen from his original state by rebelling against God. There is a “cosmic battle” within man, between who we were meant to be and who we are. What man needs, then, is divine grace and redemption. God must save us.

    By contrast, our culture assumes that man is purely physical, is the product of impersonal forces, and is basically good. His need is not for redemption (since he is good, there is no need to be redeemed), but self-actualization.

    Del examines the implications of this philosophy, and concludes that since it is dependent on impersonal physical forces alone, it leads to a lack of free will and a lack of ultimate meaning in life. It also leads to a lack of differentiation between humans and animals. He quotes Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) as saying, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”

    These differences play out in how people on each side view evil. For the person with a biblical worldview, evil comes from man’s fallen nature. For the secularist, evil does not come from human nature but from society and culture. According to Del, the question must then be asked, “Who makes society? Isn’t it human beings?” In the end, if man is basically good, there is no way to explain why evil exists. Then the question to the secularist can be pressed even further: “Why does evil bother you?” “Why do you feel bad about evil?” “Isn’t evil, as you describe it, simply the natural outworking of the evolutionary process?”

    Del closes with an interview with Theodore Dalrymple, who wrote a book called Life at the Bottom which chronicles the sad results of lives oriented around fulfilling our desires and putting ourselves at the center of our existence. Dalrymple states, “You don’t need to find yourself; you need to lose yourself.”

    In my view, this is the strongest “tour” so far. Del makes some very good points about the logical conclusions of a secular or naturalist view of humans, and illustrates a good evangelistic technique in pressing the secularist to come to terms with the deterministic, and frankly hopeless, conclusions of his or her philosophy. For the Christians in the audience, it represents a challenge to orient our lives with God at the center rather than our own selves and desires.

  • Truth Project 2: Philosophy and Ethics (Says Who?)

    The second tour in the Truth Project examines Philosophy and Ethics. Del (in my review of the first tour, I called the presenter by his last name, Tackett, but I’m thinking that is a tad impersonal) starts out with a couple of Bible verses, one of them being Colossians 2:8: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy.” One example of a hollow and deceptive philosophy, says Del, is Carl Sagan’s popular Cosmos series. In it, Sagan says that “The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” This statement assumes there is nothing outside the physical universe – what Del calls the “Cosmic Cube,” or “the box.”

    Del argues that modern philosophy has taken God out of the equation in its search for reality, and is therefore bound to fail. The philosophical “holy grail,” says Del, is the Universals, but all that we can directly observe are particulars. Del says that in secular philosophy, there is a gap between the tradition of Plato (which focuses on ideals, or universals) and the tradition of Aristotle (which focuses on particulars). Secular philosophy begins with particulars and tries to move to universals, which is not possible when you only look inside the box. God’s approach, according to Del, is to begin with universals (accessible through revelation) and move to particulars.

    The implications of naturalistic philosophy, because of its limitation, are that there can be no gods or purposive forces, no ultimate foundation for ethics, no free will, no life after death, and no ultimate meaning in life. The problem with Christians in America, says Del, is that we have been taken captive by this philosophy and don’t have a biblical worldview. The solution is that, according to Romans 12:2, we should be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

    Overall, I liked this tour. It set forth the issues clearly and simply and issued a clarion call for Christians to not be deceived by hollow and deceptive philosophy but be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Also, I think that it gives us a great starting place when dialoguing with people who have a naturalistic worldview. If secular philosophy leads inevitably to a loss of meaning and an inability to have an ultimate foundation for ethics, then a good place to start dialogue would be to push philosophical naturalists to accept the implications of naturalism. All too often, philosophical naturalists “cheat” in order to give their lives meaning. That is, they borrow ideas from Christianity that are not consistent with their stated worldview.

    I think, however, that Del misses an opportunity in this tour to show his audience how to interact with a secular philosopher. He tells the story of a freshman philosophy class that he was in at Kansas State where the professor told him, “You don’t have any way of knowing that the chair you’re sitting on is really real.” Instead of telling his audience how to start a conversation with someone like that, Del dismisses that statement by merely saying, “How foolish!” Instead of being dismissive, he would have served his audience (and any non-Christians they come in contact with) better by speaking with them about how to open a dialogue about the important things of life with someone who has been influenced by deceptive philosophy.

  • St. Patrick’s Breastplate

    The Chicago River
    The Chicago River

    Long before St. Patrick’s Day was an excuse to drink a lot and dye things green, it was a feast day celebrating the patron saint of Ireland, (Okay, maybe even then it was an excuse for some people to drink a lot). In honor of Patrick, here is a poem attributed to him, “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate.” When I was at Regent, we used to sing part of this (the part that is in bold below) in chapel from time to time.

    I bind unto myself today
    The strong name of the Trinity,
    By invocation of the same,
    The Three in One and One in Three.

    I bind this day to me for ever,
    By power of faith, Christ’s Incarnation;
    His baptism in the Jordan River;
    His death on cross for my salvation;
    His bursting from the spicèd tomb;
    His riding up the heavenly way;
    His coming at the day of doom;
    I bind unto myself today.

    I bind unto myself the power
    Of the great love of the Cherubim;
    The sweet ‘Well done’ in judgment hour;
    The service of the Seraphim,
    Confessors’ faith, Apostles’ word,
    The Patriarchs’ prayers, the Prophets’ scrolls,
    All good deeds done unto the Lord,
    And purity of virgin souls.

    I bind unto myself today
    The virtues of the starlit heaven,
    The glorious sun’s life-giving ray,
    The whiteness of the moon at even,
    The flashing of the lightning free,
    The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
    The stable earth, the deep salt sea,
    Around the old eternal rocks.

    I bind unto myself today
    The power of God to hold and lead,
    His eye to watch, His might to stay,
    His ear to hearken to my need.
    The wisdom of my God to teach,
    His hand to guide, his shield to ward,
    The word of God to give me speech,
    His heavenly host to be my guard.

    Against the demon snares of sin,
    The vice that gives temptation force,
    The natural lusts that war within,
    The hostile men that mar my course;
    Or few or many, far or nigh,
    In every place and in all hours
    Against their fierce hostility,
    I bind to me these holy powers.

    Against all Satan’s spells and wiles,
    Against false words of heresy,
    Against the knowledge that defiles,
    Against the heart’s idolatry,
    Against the wizard’s evil craft,
    Against the death-wound and the burning
    The choking wave and the poisoned shaft,
    Protect me, Christ, till thy returning.

    Christ be with me, Christ within me,
    Christ behind me, Christ before me,
    Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
    Christ to comfort and restore me,
    Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
    Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
    Christ in hearts of all that love me,
    Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

    I bind unto myself the name,
    The strong name of the Trinity;
    By invocation of the same.
    The Three in One, and One in Three,
    Of whom all nature hath creation,
    Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
    Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
    salvation is of Christ the Lord.

  • Truth Project 1: Veritology (What is Truth?)

    There has been an unusually slow trickle of posts lately, for which I do not apologize. Real-life obligations trump blogligations for me, and there has been a lot going on in real life lately. But that said, let me try to catch up on this Truth Project review thing.

    On March 4 we watched the first Truth Project DVD at our church, and then split up into small groups to discuss it. My group was one of the smaller ones, with about eight people in it, with two more to join us when they return from out of town.

    The first DVD is called “Veritology: What is Truth?” Veritology is not a word that can be found in the dictionary; it’s a combination of the Latin word for truth, “veritas,” and the suffix “-ology” The viewer is introduced to Del Tackett, the presenter, who delivers the lesson in a lecture-style format in front of a group of students.

    The point of this “tour,” as Tackett calls it – the whole series – is to “gaze upon the face of God.” Tackett is not interested in the participant filling up his or her notebook with useful stuff, but wants total transformation for the viewer. He wants us to see Christianity as an all-encompassing worldview – a way of seeing all of life.

    After giving a brief introduction, Tackett asks his students why Jesus came into the world. After answering “no” to several suggestions (“to redeem us,” “to fulfill prophecies,” “to save the world,” etc.), he refers us to John 18:37, where Jesus says to Pontius Pilate, “For this reason I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.” Tackett then proceeds to show how important truth is to Jesus and to the biblical writers by pointing out several verses in which “truth” is mentioned. A few examples are John 1:17 (“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”), John 14:6 (“Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”) and I Timothy 2:3-4 (“This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”).

    Tackett then asks how people react to the truth, and the answer is that often they “turn aside to myths,” (2 Tim. 4:4), “suppress the truth” (Rom. 1:18), “distort the truth” (Acts 20:30) and “exchange the truth of God for a lie” (Rom. 1:25). Jesus said that he came to testify to the truth when he was on trial. The real trial, Tackett says, is truth vs. lie. There is a “cosmic battle” between truth and reality, on the one side, and lies and illusions on the other. Sin is deceitful (Rom. 7:11; 2 Thess. 2:10; Eph. 4:22; Heb. 3:13) and takes people captive (2 Tim. 2:24-26). There is a battle between truth and lies, and Tackett calls this a “battle of worldviews.” Today’s world is still struggling to answer Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” – and this question, according to Tackett, could well be the most important question that we and our culture must answer.

    Tackett then enlists the help of Ravi Zacharias, Os Guinness and R.C. Sproul to define truth. He also enlists the help of the 1828 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which defines truth as “conformity to fact or reality.” He alters this slightly to say that truth IS reality. By contrast, insanity is losing touch with reality and believing that lies are real. We all suffer, Tackett says, from common insanity: losing touch with reality. Our actions, Tackett says, reflect what we believe to be really real, and often we don’t act on what we profess to be real. The question Tackett leaves us with is, “Do you believe that what you believe is really real?”

    Positively, I thought that first, the DVD is extraordinarily well-presented. Focus on the Family has done a great job in packaging this product. Tackett is a winsome, likable presenter, and you get the sense in this first tour that he deeply cares for people, both Christians and non-Christians.

    Second, I think that Tackett presents his case very well. He relies heavily on Scripture for his discussion of truth, which is important when dealing with Christians, the intended audience. He frames the conflict that we face in our own lives, of truth vs. lie and reality vs. illusion, in a compelling way. Most of what Tackett says I don’t have any problem with at all.

    However, there are a few things about the first tour that rubbed me the wrong way. First, one of the earliest slides that Tackett presents is a compass. On the four ends of the compass are: Truth to the north, God to the east, Social Order to the south, and Man to the west. I found myself chafing against the idea that Truth is due north – it’s what we use to orient ourselves – and God is at another point of the compass.

    Second, I wasn’t sure I liked how Tackett responded to the suggestions of his students on why Jesus came into the world. I don’t think he was trying to be mean or dismissive, but nevertheless it came across that way. Perhaps, I thought when I watched it, this is because it is not really a classroom. Or rather, it is and it isn’t. It is a classroom, but it is also a recorded DVD lesson, and I’m sure Tackett had to move along with the lesson in order to keep it snappy and interesting. I’d like to think that if it really were a classroom, he would have come off as being less dismissive.

    Third, Tackett says that

    the truth claims of God are consistent and logical. They make sense. They work. And even in a fallen world, when we follow them, they lead to peace and prosperity and happiness.

    I think that following Jesus is the best thing we humans can do, but I would question whether this inevitably leads to “peace and prosperity and happiness.” It doesn’t seem to me that Jesus promised peace and prosperity and happiness in this world. If anything, he promised persecution to his followers (John 15:20, 16:33).

    Fourth, he states in the course of his lecture, “We think that postmodernism is so new. It’s not new at all! It’s the same old lie!” The problem that I have with this is that he has not given any indication of what he means when he says “postmodernism.” Making statements like this one, without defining terms, is bound to generate misunderstanding. I suspect that when Tackett says “postmodernism,” he means “relativism.” There are problems with equating postmodernism with relativism, but it would be helpful if he would at least make clear what he means.

    Finally, I agree with Tackett that truth is important, and I know that Jesus said he came into the world to testify to the truth, but I think that Tackett’s definition of truth has some problems. For one thing, the word “objective” kept creeping into his presentation. This threw up a red flag because I think the notion of objective access to truth and knowledge is a distinctively modern approach that is no more compatible with Christianity than its opposite: total subjectivity. Of course, when he uses the word “objective,” it is possible that he simply means “independent of the knower.” I would agree with this definition, though I think it would be best to leave out the word “objective” altogether. Overall, he is not clear what he means when he uses the word “objective,” and so I must caution against the idea of an objective knower. Tackett seems to be saying that there are only two choices when it comes to epistemology: objectivity or subjectivity. Instead, I would have appreciated it if Tackett had explored the third way of critical realism, which is a much more promising view of epistemology.

    Ravi Zacharias, in the course of the tour, defined truth as “that which affirms propositionally the nature of reality as it is.” This definition has problems both because truth is not exclusively propositional (I would say that the Bible is true, but it only partially consists of propositional statements), and humans should be humble about our access to reality as it is. Sin, after all, has affected our rational faculties and darkened our understanding. God says in Isaiah 55:9 that “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Truth may well be conformity to fact or reality (or, as Tackett re-words the definition, simply “reality”), but then the question must be asked: which one of us has objective, exhaustive access to reality? I think that while Christians can have confidence that the Christian story is true, and that what God has told us about himself is true, grasping after the ideal of knowing objectively, of having a “God’s eye view,” will lead us right back into the dead end of modernity. It looks to me like Tackett is dealing with the problems he sees with postmodernity by trying to lead his audience back into modernity, which has its own problems.

    Even though Jesus said that he came into the world to testify to the truth, he also said that HE was the truth (Jn 14:6). Instead of focusing on exclusively propositional truth, I think it is time we stopped overlooking the personal dimension: Jesus himself is the truth.

  • The Truth Project: Coming Later Than Expected

    Last Wednesday, everything was set up and ready to go at church for the kickoff of the Truth Project. The meal had been made, the tables had been set up, and the discussion leaders had all gotten there. The problem was, it had started snowing at around noon that day, and at 6 p.m. it showed no signs of stopping. I had driven to the church on Hannegan Road, and someone who got to the church 15 minutes after I did said there were now two cars in the ditch and traffic was backed up.

    Only about half of the people signed up came, so it was decided that dinner would be served, but the showing of the first DVD would be postponed until next week. So, while I expected to be writing my thoughts on the first lesson this week, it won’t happen until next week.

  • The Truth Project Review


    Beginning later this month, my church will be going through a 12-lesson DVD curriculum put out by Focus on the Family called The Truth Project. During the first six weeks (those that take place during Lent), we will gather on Wednesdays to have dinner together, watch one of the lessons, and then discuss it afterwards in small groups. After a two-week break around Holy Week and Easter, we’ll pick back up again, except some of the small groups will move to homes instead of everyone getting together at the church.

    I’m very excited about this. I have not gone through the curriculum with a group, but I have watched all of the DVDs and think that overall it is a very well-done curriculum. It is designed to help Christians have a Christian worldview, to transform them into people who follow Christ in all of life, and I hope that this will be the effect in our church.

    While this is going on at church, I’m going to be reviewing each lesson on this blog. I looked around the Internet and couldn’t find a good review of the whole curriculum, so I hope to provide that here. Overall, as I said, I think it is very well done, but I don’t agree with everything in it, and I plan on making note of those things that I think could have been done better or those things that I think could cause problems in the long run. I don’t want to do this in order to gripe at Focus on the Family or the people behind the Truth Project, because as I mentioned, I think this is a very good curriculum overall. I just hope to provide some good critical reflection on it. After all, this series seems designed to help Christians think critically, and so I will approach it with a critical eye – not to tear down, but in hopes of building up.

    Update: I’m going to put links here to my reviews of each individual lesson.

    1: Veritology (What is Truth?)

    2: Philosophy and Ethics (Says Who?)

    3: Anthropology (Who is Man?)

    4: Theology (Who is God?)

    5: Science (What is True?)

    6: History (Whose Story?)

    7: Sociology (The Divine Imprint)

    8: Unio Mystica (Am I Alone?)

    9: The State (Whose Law?)

    10: The American Experiment (Stepping Stones) – Summary

    10: The American Experiment (Stepping Stones) – My Thoughts

    11: Labor (Created to Create)

    12: Community (God Cares, Do I?)

  • Communion as Worship (I Corinthians 11:17-34)

    This is the sermon I gave last Sunday, February 1, at my church. The audio can be found at the church’s Web site, http://www.bellinghamcovenantchurch.org.

    This is the fourth sermon in a series on worship, and one very important thing that the church does when it gathers together to worship is eat the Lord’s Supper together. It is a mysterious thing, and different Christians have tried to express that mystery through the many names that are used to call it: the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Table.

    Many of us only have a vague idea of what we’re doing when we take the Lord’s Supper. When I was 15, I was part of a Roman Catholic choir that sang in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. We sang at a Mass one morning, and after singing we all got in line and the priest gave us the “host” – a wafer. I grew up in a Baptist church, and I was used to eating cubes of white bread at communion. I had no idea what to do with this thing that had all these elaborate designs on it, so I put it in my pocket. It wasn’t until I got back to my seat that I looked around and saw everyone else eating theirs, so I took it out of my pocket and ate it without anyone looking. Turns out I probably should have left it in my pocket, because one of the Catholics in the choir scolded me later because only Catholics are supposed to take Mass in a Catholic church.

    This passage helps us to know more clearly what we are doing when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper together. It also helps us to understand good ways and bad ways to celebrate the Lord’s Supper by showing us the bad example of the Corinthian church. The passage comes in three sections. The first one has to do with what is wrong in Corinth. The second has to do with what the Lord’s Supper is supposed to be, and the third has to do with how to celebrate it.

    One: The nature of the problems in Corinth, and of this particular problem (17-22).

    Corinth was an old Greek city that fought hard against the expansion of the Romans. It was destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC, and then was re-founded by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. It is located at a strategic place in Greece, where the mainland meets the large southern peninsula called the Pelepponesus. It became a major trading center because of this location. It was one of the largest cities in the Empire, and it was one of the most influential because of its imperial backing. Status – what class or social group you belonged to – was very important in Corinth, and as a result many of the problems the church in Corinth had were because of their cultural preoccupation with status.

    This problem that Paul starts to deal with in verse 17 is one of those problems. The church in Corinth was a house church, or a series of house churches, like most early churches were. They would celebrate the Lord’s Supper every week, but they would conduct it like every other meal in their culture – that is, they would divide everyone up by status. The rich people were in a special room, and the poor people were out in the atrium. Even at one table, people were served different food based on their status. If you were rich and had high status, you’d get the lobster. If you had low status, you’d get a burger from McDonald’s. This is what was happening in Corinth. The rich, high-status people were getting together beforehand, gorging themselves and getting drunk, and the poor people would show up later and everyone would be laying around the table, belching.

    In verse 20, Paul says that because of this, they weren’t even really eating the Lord’s Supper. It was meant to be a common meal that was shared by everyone in the church, and the Corinthians made a travesty out of it by treating it like any other meal. They divided people up by class and they humiliated poor people.

    Today, it would be like saying, “We’re going to celebrate the Lord’s Supper today, and if your income is over $100,000, you can come first and have the biggest piece of bread.” And status doesn’t just have to do with money: it can be dividing people up by race, or by education, or how many children a person has, or whether people have tattoos, or whether people have children who are Christians – any difference has at least the potential to be divisive. If we divide over those things, we’re not really eating the Lord’s Supper either.

    Two: The nature of the Lord’s Supper (23-26).

    Paul decides that he’s got to remind the Corinthians of the basics. They have forgotten what the Lord’s Supper is all about, and so he takes them back to the Last Supper, the meal that Jesus ate with his disciples on the night before he was crucified. We could say a lot about what Paul says, because it’s packed with meaning. But for today, I’m going to point out four things that the Lord’s Supper is.

    First, It’s a memorial.

    “This is my body” and “Do this in remembrance of me.” Some of you may have come from a Catholic background, or you may just know that Catholics think the bread and wine actually turn into Jesus’ body and blood. There is a big theological word for this, called “transubstantiation.” They say that Jesus said, “This is my body,” and they say that he meant it was literally his body. But we don’t believe that, and here is an analogy that explains why. When Jesus said, “This is my body,” he was talking about the bread in the same way that we talk about photographs. I can show you a picture of myself and say, “This is me,” and you won’t be confused whether Elliot is the person speaking or the person in the photograph. In the same way, the bread does not literally and magically turn into Jesus’ body. Jesus’ disciples weren’t confused when he said “This is my body.” They didn’t ask, “Well, if that’s your body, then who are you?” They knew that when he said “This is my body,” he was talking about the bread as a symbol of his body.

    But some Protestant churches go all the way in the other direction, saying that the bread is only something we use to remind us of Jesus. Some churches don’t like to use the word “sacrament,” and call it an “ordinance” instead. They say that there’s nothing important or symbolic about the bread and wine, we just do it to remember.

    But we don’t go to that extreme either. We use the word “sacrament,” which just means “a symbol that has religious or spiritual significance for a community of faith.” Taking the Lord’s Supper isn’t just something we do to remember Jesus. It’s a symbol – like a flag, which represents the identity and aspirations of a nation, or a wedding ring, which represents the covenant commitment you have made to your husband or wife. Symbols are never just symbols. So the Lord’s Supper is “just bread and grape juice” in that they don’t magically turn into Jesus’ body and blood, but it is also not “just bread and grape juice” because it is a symbol. Paul himself says in chapter 10 of 1 Corinthians, The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?”

    If this is a little confusing to you, you’re not alone. I’ve been trying to explain symbols, but symbols can’t ever be fully explained. That’s why we use them – to signify something that we can’t fully put into words. There will always be some mystery when symbols are involved.

    To sum up this first point: We do this in remembrance of Jesus’ death and resurrection. It is a memorial, but it is not just a cerebral action. It’s not just something that happens in our mind. Eating and drinking turn it into something that we do with our whole being. As Gordon Smith says in his book, A Holy Meal, on the Lord’s Supper, “We need to come to the table regularly, when we feel like it and when we don’t, for the great danger is that we would forget. We can so easily forget. I do not mean that we no longer recall or believe that something happened. Rather, our forgetting is one of no longer living aligned with the reality and wonder of Christ’s death and resurrection. We fail to live in the light of this ancient event. So easily through neglect the cross and the resurrection no longer penetrate our present, enabling us to live in the light of the gospel.” (42-3)

    Second, the Lord’s Supper is fellowship (communion).

    In the church where I grew up, there were some impressive stained glass windows. There was one on the left of Jesus carrying a lamb, there was one on the right of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion, and there was one on the back wall of Jesus ascending up into heaven. At the bottom of all the windows, there was a little sign that said, “Given in memory of so-and-so.” At the front of the sanctuary there was a table, and on the table was written the words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” As a little kid, I thought that this was just a table given in honor of some person who had died, and I thought it strange that there was no name on it.

    But my little kid thoughts were not right. Jesus isn’t just a dear friend who has died, and who we remember by eating bread and drinking wine or grape juice. He’s alive, and he is here with us when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. That’s why we sometimes hear this supper called “Communion,” or fellowship. We are in communion with one another, and we are in communion with him. That’s what the big problem was in the Corinthian church: they weren’t celebrating the Lord’s Supper in the right way because they weren’t in communion with one another. They didn’t look at each other and say, “We are one. Jesus has made us one.”
    Even though it’s a little out of place, I’d like to mention what Paul says in verse 29 about “discerning the body.” The “body” that he is talking about is probably not the bread, or Jesus’ literal body. Paul is talking about divisions in the church, and so the “body” he is talking about is the body of Christ, the church.

    So the practical effect of the Lord’s Supper being communion is that we should not come to communion when we are not at peace with one another. If we are refusing to talk to someone, or holding a grudge against them, we should not be participating in communion. In the Lord’s Prayer we repeat the words that Jesus taught us to pray: “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” We need to be at peace before we participate in communion. If we want to be at peace with God, then we have to be at peace with other people.

    Of course, sometimes these things are out of our control. Here is where Paul’s words in Romans 12:18 are helpful: he says that we should be at peace with everyone, “insofar as it depends on us.” We should do everything in our power to be at peace with people before participating in communion. But if we have tried to be reconciled with another person – if we have written a letter and they don’t respond, or we’ve called them and they’ve hung up on us, or we’ve tried to talk to them and they’ve ignored us, then we’ve done all we can do.

    Third, the Lord’s Supper is a covenant renewal ceremony.

    “This cup is a new covenant in my blood.” Jesus is saying that his blood, his sacrifice, replaces the old covenant, or agreement between God and people, written about in Exodus 24:3-8. This is the new covenant that Jeremiah wrote about in Jeremiah 31:31-34, when God said that he would write the law on our hearts.

    All covenants are represented and remembered through symbolic acts. In the Old Testament, it usually involved animal sacrifice. An animal would be cut up into a few pieces. Part of the animal would be sacrificed – burnt up on an altar – and part of it would be eaten in a covenant meal.

    In the new covenant, Jesus is both the sacrifice and the one we are in covenant with. Earlier in 1 Corinthians (5:7), Paul called Jesus the Passover Lamb who has been sacrificed. In the church, those symbolic acts that we use to remember the covenant are baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Whenever we take the Lord’s Supper, we remember the covenant we made with God when we were baptized.

    So the Lord’s Supper is a covenant renewal ceremony. We come to the table to receive mercy and forgiveness for all the ways we have not lived up to who we should be, and to declare our intention to renew the covenant.

    Fourth, the Lord’s Supper is a declaration of thanksgiving and hope.

    “Eucharist” is one of the fancy words that is used to describe the Lord’s Supper, and it comes from the Greek word for thanksgiving, used here in verse 24. That’s all it means: thanksgiving. When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, it really is a celebration. Jesus gave thanks, so we should too. We give thanks to God the Father for creating the world and us, we give thanks to Jesus for saving us by sacrificing himself on the cross, and we give thanks for the gift of the Holy Spirit to live in us and comfort us.

    The Lord’s Supper is often linked with the Passover, and it should be: the Last Supper was probably a Passover meal, and Jesus is referred to in the Bible as the Passover lamb. But the Lord’s Supper was also associated in the early church with the peace offering of Leviticus 7:11-18. It is a way to give thanks and celebrate.

    “as often as you eat this break and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” This meal that we share together doesn’t just look back at the Last Supper that Jesus shared with his disciples. It looks forward to another meal that Jesus will eat with us when he returns. This meal is called the Marriage Supper of the Lamb in Revelation 19. We look backward in thankfulness, and forward in hope.
    The Lord’s Supper should remind us that, even though things may be bad in the world now, that’s not the way things are always going to be. We don’t have to ignore the bad things in the world, and we don’t have to be fearmongers. We can look at the world realistically and say that things are going to be well in the end.

    This also encourages us in mission. We know that all will be well in the end, and this should encourage us to share this hope with our friends and neighbors.

    Three: How to celebrate the Lord’s Supper (27-34).

    Moving on to the last part of the passage, I’m going to talk a bit about how to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. I’m not going to talk about whether you should pass the plates or have little glasses or whether you should celebrate once a month or every week or four times a year. I’m going to talk about what should be going on in our hearts when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

    There are a few words here that have been misunderstood over the years in a lot of churches. They are found in verse 27: “in an unworthy manner.” These words have been used to encourage people to think that just because they are sinful, they can’t take the Lord’s Supper because that would mean they are taking the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner. But looking at the context, that isn’t what Paul means at all. When he warns the Corinthians against taking the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner, he telling them that they shouldn’t abuse it. They shouldn’t make the Lord’s Supper about status.

    In verse 28, “Examine yourselves” doesn’t mean “make sure you don’t have any sin.” We come to the Lord’s Table to receive mercy, and if we waited until we were all without sin, no one would be able to come. Jesus is our host at this table, and Jesus ate with sinners! Jesus welcomes us at this table the same way he welcomed and forgave Peter after he denied him.

    “Examine yourselves” does not mean “make sure you don’t have any sin.” Rather, it means, “Repent of your sins so that you can come to the table with thanksgiving, knowing that your sins are forgiven.”

    “Discern the body” is talking about the Body of Christ, the church. The Lord’s Supper is a table of mercy where you can receive forgiveness, but is not just about you. It is not even just about you and Jesus. It is also about the Body of Christ, the church, coming together to celebrate Jesus’ death and resurrection. The Lord’s Supper is not just any meal; it is THE meal at which the church declares that we are ONE in Christ. The church is not a club of like-minded people getting together because we like the socializing. We are, or ought to be, a diverse group gathered around Jesus Christ. There should be no divisions at the Lord’s Table. If we divide ourselves, if we start to think that some are better than others, Paul says that it is possible that God will judge us.

    Jesus is the only thing that can keep us together. I read an article in the Washington Post recently called: “Why the Ideological Melting Pot is Getting So Lumpy.” Here is an excerpt:

    “About two in three Americans say they prefer to live around people belonging to different races, religions and income groups. In reality, however, survey research shows that people are increasingly clustering together among those who are just like themselves, especially on the one attribute that ties the others together — political affiliation.

    Nearly half of all Americans live in “landslide counties” where Democrats or Republicans regularly win in a rout. In the 2008 election, 48 percent of the votes for president were cast in counties where President-elect Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) won by more than 20 percentage points, according to the Pew Research Center.

    The clustering of Democrats in Democratic areas and Republicans in Republican areas has been intensifying for at least three decades: In 1976, only about a quarter of all Americans lived in landslide counties. In 1992, a little more than a third of America was landslide country.

    A third of both Obama’s and McCain’s supporters have said they “detest” the other guy.

    A consequence of such polarization is that large numbers of Americans no longer have much contact with people belonging to the other party. Many feel the views of their political opponents are not just wrong but incomprehensible.”

    This is the way the world is: people congregate with other people who are the same race, the same income, the same political affiliation. The Bible tells us that the church should not be like this. We are called to love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us. We are called to preach the gospel to the whole world; not only to people who are just like us. The Lord’s Supper tells us that we are one in Christ, and we should always be reminded to draw others into that fellowship. This is what the world needs.

    Finally, I’d like to reiterate that the Lord’s Supper is a time of hope. We don’t just look back during the Lord’s Supper; we look forward.
    If you don’t like getting together with the Body of Christ and celebrating the Lord’s Supper together, you probably won’t like the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. If it is all about you and Jesus, and you don’t think you need to be a part of a community of believers, then you’re going to hate what will happen when Jesus comes back. Because it’s not going to be just you and Jesus; there are going to be a LOT of people there. There are no lone ranger Christians. There are no Christians who can have a good relationship with Jesus without having good relationships with his church. Some of you may have had bad experiences, or been parts of dysfunctional churches, and I wish that had not been the case. But past experiences are no reason to give up on trying to be the community that Jesus wants us to be.

  • How We Got the Bible: Textual Criticism

    I. What is textual criticism?

    “Textual criticism is the science and art that seeks to determine the most reliable wording of a text.” – Paul Wegner, A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible, 24

    We have many manuscripts (mss) of biblical books, and no two manuscripts are exactly the same. They contain variants, or differences in wording.

    II. How much of the Bible contains variant readings?

    OT – one current critical edition has one textual note for each 10 words – meaning that 90% is without significant variation.

    NT – one current critical edition has notes on 7% of the words.

    III. How many manuscripts are there?

    We have over 5,700 mss from the Greek New Testament (only 60 are of the entire NT, but the vast majority are of complete books). The earliest one is a fragment of the Gospel of John from the early second century.

    We have another 10,000 copies in Latin

    We have between 10,000 and 15,000 copies in other languages

    We have more than one million quotations of NT writings from the church fathers

    By comparison:

    Thucydides’ History of the Pelopponesian War: 8 mss, the oldest dated to 900 AD. Also, a few fragments from 1st century AD

    Livy, Annals of the Roman People: 142 volumes, but only 35 survive. We have 20 mss, the oldest from 4th century AD

    Julius Caesar, Gallic War: only 9 or 10 mss of good quality; the earliest from 900 years after Caesar

    IV. What kinds of variants are there?

    A. Unintentional

    1. Mistaken Letters – confusion of similar letters, as in I Tim. 3:16, where the Greek for “the one who is” was sometimes confused with “God.”

    2. Homophones – substitution of similar sounding words. In Rom. 5:1, the Greek for “we have” and “we shall have” sound similar (there is only one letter difference, and those two letters are sometimes indistinguishable).

    3. Haplography – the omission of a letter or word, as in Judges 20:13. 9 out of 10 times in the OT, people from the tribe of Benjamin are called “sons of Benjamin,” but here they are just called “Benjamin.” Probably some scribe skipped the word for “sons,” because it looks very similar to the beginning of “Benjamin.”

    4. Dittography – writing a letter or word twice instead of once. Mark 3:16 contains the words “he appointed the twelve,” which may just be a repetition of the same phrase from verse 14.

    5. Metathesis – a reversal in order of two letters or words. Most manuscripts of Deut. 31:1 read “and Moses went,” but one reads “and Moses finished.” The difference between the two in Hebrew is that two letters have switched places.

    6. Fusion – two words that have incorrectly been joined together. Some manuscripts of Mark 10:40 read “but for whom,” and others read “for others.” The first variant is two words in Greek, and the second is those two words joined together.

    7. Fission – one word that has incorrectly been split apart. A few manuscripts of Rom. 7:14 have “on the one hand I know”(oida men) instead of “we know” (oidamen).

    8. Parablepsis – an omission caused by two words or phrases that begin or end similarly. In I Jn. 2:23 the phrase “has the father” appears twice. Some mss don’t have the words between the two, which means the scribe accidentally skipped from the first one to the second one.

    9. Other omissions or additions – sometimes a word or phrase is left out or added and we can’t tell why. For example, some mss lack the words “in Ephesus” in Eph. 1:1.

    B. Intentional

    1. Spelling or grammar changes – in Matt. 1:7-8, the name “Asaph” was changed by some scribes to “Asa,” because Asa was a well-known king of Judah from the OT (I Kings 15:9-24)

    2. Clearing up difficulties – In Mark 1:2-3, there is a combined quote from Malachi and Isaiah. Most early mss attribute it to Isaiah alone, but later scribes tried to clear this up by saying “in the prophets.”

    3. Harmonization (commonly between the gospels) – the phrase “it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, in Greek” was added to mss of Luke 23:38, probably to make it sound like John 19:20.

    4. Euphemisms – the substitution of a milder term for an unpleasant or more offensive one. In the OT, some writers did not want to write down the name of the god Baal, writing “shame” instead (2 Sam. 4:4).

    5. Theological changes – in Luke 2:41, 43, some scribes changed the words “his parents” to “Joseph and Mary” or “Joseph and his mother.” Apparently this was to protect the doctrine of the virgin birth.

    6. Additions – some mss of Luke 24:53 add the word “amen,” possibly because some scribes thought a gospel should end this way.

    Bart Ehrman claims that there are between 200,000 and 400,000 variants in NT manuscripts, which is more than the 138,162 words in the NT. That is a startling figure. But what does it mean?

    According to text critic Daniel Wallace, 70-80% of these variants are spelling differences that can’t even be translated into English and have no impact on meaning. For example, sometimes the Greek word for “John” is spelled with two n’s, and sometimes with one.

    Some of the variants are differences in word order. But Greek is different from English, in that word order doesn’t matter. There are many ways to say the exact same thing, but all differences in word order are counted as variants.

    “Only about one percent of variants are both meaningful, which means they affect the meaning of the text to some degree, and viable, which means they have a decent chance of going back to the original text.” – Daniel B. Wallace

    In spite of what some say, not a single essential Christian doctrine is refuted by a plausible textual variant. Not one.

    V. Examples of controversial text critical issues in the New Testament:

    A. John 7:53-8:11 – The Woman Caught in Adultery

    Most scholars believe that it was not originally in John, because it is not in the earliest and best mss, its writing style and vocabulary are different from the rest of the book.

    What difference does it make?

    B. Long Ending of Mark (16:9-20)

    Most scholars believe that it was not originally in Mark, because it does not appear in the earliest and best mss, and also has a different writing style from the rest of the book.

    What difference does it make?

    C. 1 John 5:7-8 – the “Johannine Comma”

    according to Daniel Wallace, it came from an 8th-century sermon. There are only four manuscripts that have it, and all are from the 16th-17th centuries. It is almost certainly not authentic; it is an intentional theological change.

    However, the doctrine of the Trinity did not come from this verse. The Councils of Constantinople (381) and Chalcedon (451) affirmed this doctrine long before, and the NT is clear that the Father is God, Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and these three are one. See Matt. 28:18-20, Titus 3:4-6, 1 Peter 1:2, etc.

    D. I Timothy 3:16

    The best mss read “He was revealed in flesh,” but some others read “God was revealed in flesh.” The first one is probably correct. Ehrman argues that this undermines Christian belief in Jesus as God.

    However, this is not the only place in the NT where Jesus is explicitly referred to as God. See John 1:1, John 20:28, and Hebrews 1:8, as well as other verses where it is not as explicit.

    Recommended Reading:

    Lee Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus.
    Paul Wegner, A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible.