Elliot Ritzema

Category: Theology

  • August 2009: Books Read

    1. Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving From Affluence to Generosity by Ronald J. Sider. This book came out in 1977, and is regarded by many as a “classic.” The version I read was the fifth edition, updated in (I think) 2004.

    The book comes in four parts: the first part depicts the state of the world today, in which there are billions of poor people and millions of affluent people who could help. The second part shares a biblical perspective on poverty and possessions. The third attempts to answer the question, “What causes poverty?” And the fourth shares practical steps that Christians in rich countries can follow to both simplify their own lives and make wise contributions to making the world a more just and fair place.

    This was a challenging book for me. Although I don’t think of myself as affluent, I certainly live in an affluent part of the world and enjoy many more conveniences than those people who have to live on a few dollars a day. The main things that I got out of this book were 1) practical tips on living more simply, while simultaneously fostering community, and 2) a greater understanding of the economics of poverty. Lack of understanding the latter, I think, is a major obstacle that keeps Christians from helping the poor. We think that the foreign aid rich countries give to poor countries is a lot, but most actually give less than 1 percent of their GNP in foreign aid – and much of this aid is tied to their own foreign policy interests. We think that this aid is more than enough to make up for inequalities caused by things like tariffs and the abusive practices of some multi-national corporations, but it is not. This is definitely a book that all Christians in wealthy nations should read. Even if not everyone agrees with Sider’s practical proposals, the problem of poverty is something that all Christians – if they are reading their Bibles and are genuinely seeking to be more like Jesus – are called to address.

    2. Praying With the Church: Following Jesus Daily, Hourly, Today by Scot McKnight. McKnight was raised in a Christian tradition that had no use for daily set prayers, but as an adult he has come to appreciate and even love them. Like McKnight, I was raised in a Christian tradition that did not have set prayers (though we did recite the Lord’s Prayer and the “Gloria Patri” every week in church). As an adult, I have been more and more interested in the practice of daily prayer times as I have come to understand how deep they go in the Christian tradition.

    McKnight’s book is a quick read and it comes in two parts: the first deals with Jesus’ own use of set prayers (Jews of his time recited prayers daily, and what we call the “Lord’s Prayer” is Jesus teaching his disciples something to pray every day). The second part serves as an introduction to four prayer books: the Orthodox Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers, the Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and Phyllis Tickle’s modern ecumenical Divine Hours. I would recommend this book to anyone who, like me, wants to have a richer prayer life and who is less familiar with the tradition of set prayers and how to use a prayer book.

    3. The Ascent of a Leader: How Ordinary Relationships Develop Extraordinary Character and Influence by Bill Thrall, Bruce McNichol and Ken McElrath. Throughout my time in graduate school, I felt that it was more important to spend my time reading deep theology books than leadership books. But as I grow closer to (hopefully) taking on more leadership in a church setting, and as I become more aware that it is rarely bad theology that gets pastors kicked out of churches, I’ve become more interested in leadership literature. Earlier this year I read Now, Discover Your Strengths, and I’ve just recently completed The Ascent of a Leader.

    The “ascent” the authors talk about is climbing the “character ladder” rather than the “capacity ladder.” The capacity ladder is what leaders are able to do on their own, and it comes with four rungs: discover what I can do, develop my capacities, acquire a title or position and attain individual potential. Climbing up just this kind of ladder can lead to loneliness and failure. Rather, spurred on by environments and relationships of grace, leaders should climb the character ladder: trust God and others, choose vulnerability, align with truth, pay the price and discover destiny. Once you start to climb the character ladder, you can integrate it with the capacity ladder, “leveraging our capacities far beyond what we could have accomplished without character” (143). I found this book to be a good reminder of how important character is in everyday life.

    4. The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible by Scot McKnight. I’d heard a lot about this little book in recent months, and when I was at the Covenant’s annual meeting in Portland this summer, I was able to pick it up. The title comes from a time when McKnight was sitting in his backyard and saw a strange blue bird that he had never seen before. Turns out it was a parakeet that had escaped from someone’s cage. The “blue parakeets” of the title are “oddities in the Bible that we prefer to cage and silence rather than to permit into our sacred mental gardens” (208). Issues like Sabbath, foot washing, tithing and women in ministry are blue parakeets that many of us don’t quite know what to do with: do we try to retrieve all practices from biblical times? Do we try to retrieve only what we can salvage for our day and our culture? Do we read through tradition? Or do we read in dialogue with tradition? McKnight counsels us to read the Bible as a Story. We should read this Story in order to get to know the God behind it. And we should discern through God’s Spirit and in the context of our community how to continue living that Story in our own day. McKnight provides an example of discernment in the issue of women in ministry.

    This is a wonderful book, and I hope it finds its way into the hands of lots of people. All Christians interpret the Bible in some way, but there are so few books for a popular audience on how to best interpret it. As a result, many are left thinking that the way their pastor or their immediate community interprets the Bible is self-evidently the only way. This is unfortunate.

    This isn’t a perfect book, by any means. Since it is short, and meant for a popular audience, McKnight ends up dealing with some complicated issues very briefly. As a result, I doubt whether he will convince many people who, for example, are thoroughly antagonistic to women’s ordination. But since the book is for a popular audience, and no popular book can deal with these issues in great detail, I still highly recommend it.

    5. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I have never seen the movie version of this book, and I was surprised on reading it to find that Scarlett O’Hara is one of the more malevolent and despicable literary protagonists I have ever read about – and I have read Anna Karenina. Like Anna Karenina, the real hero of this book is someone besides the main character: in Anna Karenina it is Levin (who, I’ve heard, Tolstoy modeled after himself), and in Gone With the Wind, it seems to me that the heroine is really Melanie Wilkes. But in both books, the intended hero is far overshadowed by protagonists who are such finely written, true-to-life characters that, despite their badness, they steal the show. It’s a great credit to Margaret Mitchell that she could create such a believable character as Scarlett – even if she is so believable that I genuinely didn’t like her.

    6. The Theology of the Book of Revelation by Richard Bauckham. We have been reading through the book of Revelation in our Bible study, and I have taken it on myself to do background reading and lead the discussion. Part of that background reading has been this fantastic little book (it’s only 169 pages). Bauckham, who retired a couple of years ago from being Professor of New Testament at St. Andrews, digs into the theological content of Revelation and finds that it has perhaps the most developed trinitarian theology in the New Testament. He doesn’t spend a lot of time criticizing various interpretations of the book, but it’s clear that he doesn’t think futurist or historicist interpretations do a very good job of making sense of the imagery in the book. This is a dense little book, and it doesn’t move chronologically through the text. For those who want to read it, I’d recommend reading Revelation first to get a sense of it, then read this book, and then go back and read Revelation again with new eyes.

  • Truth Project 8: Unio Mystica (Am I Alone?)

    In the eighth tour of the Truth Project, Del (the presenter) looks at the mystical union between God and humans. He begins by talking about mysteries, saying how much he loved Hardy Boys books when he was a kid, and referring to Ephesians 5:31-32, which says that the mystery of marriage “is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” God, Del says, have given us a mystery and has also written the end of that mystery.

    Much of the early part of this tour consists of laying a biblical foundation for the doctrine of the mystical union between God and humans. Del cites Colossians 1:27, John 15:5, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Galatians 2:20, and John 14:16-17, all in the interest of showing that “the God of the universe dwelling inside us is the greatest mystery.” God has invited us into the Godhead.

    Another aspect of this mystery is that the church is the body of Christ, and God is interested on oneness in that body (1 Corinthians 12:27, Romans 12:4-5, 1 Corinthians 10:17). There is another aspect, which Del calls the “Mystery of Christ.” Citing Romans 16:25-26, Ephesians 1:9-10, 3:6 and especially Galatians 3:28-29, Del says that this mystery is that there are no racial barriers in Christ, no economic or class barriers, and no gender barriers. God wants his church to be united in him and with one another (John 17:20-23). This, Del says, is why you see so many “one another” commands in the New Testament (e.g. 1 Peter 1:22, Galatians 6:2, James 5:16), especially “Love one another” (John 13:34-35).

    After setting forth what our relationship with Christ and one another ought to be, Del looks at the pathologies that keep us from intimacy, fellowship and unity. The major pathology that Del mentions is our hunger for significance, for people to notice us. God has given us this hunger, but it needs to be satisfied within the covenant relationships God gives. Del gives a few biblical examples of how this hunger can become a pathology, like Saul’s jealousy of David and Jesus warning people to not do their “acts of righteousness” to be praised by others (Matthew 6:1-4). What keeps us from intimacy, Del says, is that we abandon God and prostitute ourselves. Our greatest desire should be for God (Psalm 42:1-2).

    Overall, I liked this tour. There was a lot of scripture quoted in it, which for a Christian worldview curriculum like the Truth Project is very good. I had never seen the various mysteries mentioned in the New Testament rolled up into one the way Del did it. This is not necessarily a bad thing; I had just never seen it before.

    Even though the title of the tour could appear individualistic (“I” rather than “we”), I found that the tour itself was not particularly individualistic.

    I also liked that Del, in addition to telling about what God wants for us, talked about those pathologies that keep us from being what God wants us to be. If he had ended after the first part of the tour, viewers would have been left with the issue of how the church all too often doesn’t look how it is meant to look. As it is, we can see that God intends for his people to be united to him, but we fail to be what we are meant to be. The fault lies with us and our pathologies, rather than with God.

    This was one of my favorite tours of the Truth Project. It lacked some of the things that have caused me to have a mixed reaction to several other tours. For one thing, it was saturated with scripture, and Del did not go farther than scripture warranted. It also did not include negative comments about people with differing worldviews, or who have other opinions. All in all, a very good tour.

  • 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.

  • Archiving Bonhoeffer

    I read this brief but interesting article on FaithWorld today, about how the German government wants to put archived materials relating to theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer online:

    Germany is launching an appeal to save thousands of valuable letters and manuscripts which had belonged to Protestant theologian and Nazi resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer by digitalising them.

    The Berlin state library says it needs 40,000 euros to save the documents which it counts as one of its most prized collections. It wants to put about 6,200 pages of his work on the Internet to make them more widely available.

    The papers include the farewell letter Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents before his execution in a concentration camp in 1945, just days before the end of World War Two, for opposing Hitler. He was 39.

    Last summer, the library put the originals in non-corroding folders as the paper was in danger of falling apart and had been damaged by rusting paper clips. The collection also includes draft papers, sermons he held in Barcelona and New York as well as fragments from his book Ethics.

  • 1509-2009

    John Calvin, the famous French theologian and Genevan reformer, was born on July 10, 1509, which makes 2009 the 500th anniversary of his birth year. Princeton Seminary is celebrating this anniversary by, among other things, encouraging people to read his monumental work The Institutes of the Christian Religion throughout this year. I’ve only read sections of the Institutes, and I have often wanted to read the whole thing, so now seems like as good a time as any to pull down my copy from the shelf and open it up.

    If you visit the Princeton Seminary Web site, you can look at the reading schedule for the year. You can also subscribe to the podcast, which features various people reading the section for the day.

  • Laing Lectures 2008: Walter Brueggemann (1 of 3)

    Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann came to Regent College to give the Laing Lectures on October 8 and 9. I graduated from Regent in the spring, but currently I don’t live too far away, so I decided to hoof it up to Vancouver to see friends and listen to some good lectures.

    The lecture series was titled, “The Church in Joyous Obedience: Biblical Expositions.” Brueggemann lectured for about 50 minutes each time. Then he was responded to by Phil Long, who teaches Old Testament at Regent, and by Paul Williams, who teaches Marketplace Theology at Regent and is trained as an economist.

    The first lecture was titled “From Exodus to Sinai: The Journey to the Common Good.” I’m going to summarize the lecture here, but be warned: I’m working from my notes rather than a transcript, so I may not present Brueggemann’s, Long’s, or Williams’ ideas quite the way they would. But I’ll do my best. Update: The audio of all three lectures is available for purchase from Regent Audio here.

    Brueggemann began by saying that the great crisis among us is the crisis of the common good. The journey that we must make is the journey out of our selfishness to the common good. He then proceeded, in the first part of his lecture, to look at one impediment to the common good in the Old Testament: Pharaoh’s Egypt.

    Pharaoh’s Egypt, Brueggemann says, is the paradigmatic example of a threat to the common good. He begins looking at Egypt in the latter portion of Genesis, when Pharaoh has a nightmare about a coming famine (chapter 41). Joseph then interprets the dream and becomes Pharaoh’s second-in-command. He proceeds to create a food monopoly that makes Pharaoh wealthy and, by Gen. 47:25, creates a nation of slaves who are grateful to be slaves. We know of Exodus deliverance, but we don’t acknowledge that slavery to begin with was a result of manipulation in the interest of power. By the beginning of Exodus, everyone is anxious: the slaves, who have submitted themselves to the state monopoly, and Pharaoh, who is scared to death of his own workforce. This anxiety, Brueggemann says, produces insanity in policy. The anxiety system of Pharaoh precluded the common good.

    But then, he goes on, suffering comes to speech. There is a cry, a prayer, declaring publicly that the social system has failed. This cry reaches the ears of YHWH, whose ears are a magnet for the cries of the abused. YHWH then sends Moses, a human agent who can dream outside the imperial reality. There is a juxtaposition between Pharaoh’s nightmare of scarcity and Moses’ dream of liberation.

    The second part of the lecture has to do with God’s abundant provision. The plagues come, the Israelites are freed, but by Exodus 16 they want to go back. They are still living under Pharaoh’s terms of anxiety. God provides them with quail and manna, and in Brueggemann’s words, “they wondered what it was, and it turned out this wonderbread did not fit their categories.” Manna, Brueggemann says, “is a show of YHWH’s inestimable generosity that stands in contrast to Pharaoh’s nightmare of anxiety about scarcity.” In fact, bread is a recurring sign in the Old Testament of divine generosity: 2 Kings 4:42-44, Isaiah 55.

    All empires, says Brueggemann, act according to the principle of scarcity. All are anxious and think they need more, whether it be manpower, bread, oil, land, etc. But the quotas of the empire can never be met. So he asks, “Why do you bust your ass to serve the empire?” Why are baptized people in the rat race? The text issues a summons away from the ideology of scarcity.

    The third part of the lecture deals with God’s act of generosity breaking the anxiety of scarcity. The 10 Commandments, Brueggemann maintains, are about an alternative grounded in generosity. Commandments 5-9, for example, tell us that all kinds of neighbors are not to be exploited as they are in Egypt. Commandment 10 condemns predatory practices that make the little guy vulnerable to the big guy. This Brueggemann related directly to the recent economic collapse. Commandment 4 encourages the Israelites to undertake community enhancement and activities that have no production value.

    Brueggemann concluded his lecture with a few points of instruction: first, people who live in anxiety and fear have no time or energy for the common good. Second, it takes an immense act of generosity to break the grip of anxiety. Third, those who receive generosity can care about their neighbors. You can’t just preach to those wrapped up in the ideology of anxiety; they must be able to receive generosity.

    He also pointed out some applications: First, Pharaoh’s kingdom of anxiety is alive and well today. Second, there is an alternative to the kingdom of scarcity. Theological education is learning the act of departure from this kingdom. Third, the journey from scarcity to abundance to neighborliness is a journey that all must take. Fourth, this journey is entrusted to the church and its allies. Brueggemann referred here to the New Testament feedings of the 5000 and 4000. With these signs, Jesus says that wherever he is, the world of scarcity is transformed into the world of overwhelming abundance. In Mark 8:14-21, the disciples didn’t understand because their hearts were hardened – just like Pharaoh. But those who receive the bread of abundance, Brueggemann says, have energy beyond themselves for the sake of the world.

    After the lecture, Phil Long was given the chance to respond. Here are just a couple of things he pointed out, or asked questions about: first, was Pharaoh’s dream just a nightmare, or was it also a providential dream? Second, how do we understand the phrase “common good”? Even the builders of the Tower of Babel were working for their understanding of the common good. Third, how do we understand “abundance”? Is it to be seen in socioeconomic terms? Long hinted that he thought a good understanding of abundance is connected to the word “Shalom” in the Old Testament. This is deeper, and can exist even in socioeconomic adversity.

    Paul Williams had more things to say, but as with Long, I wasn’t able to write them down quickly. He asked whether it was the case that the crisis we’re in is that we’ve reached an ideological dead end, with multiple competing definitions of what the common good is. We should not just appeal to a vague common good, but to a particular good, and a particular God. Williams commended Brueggemann for using the phrase “consumer militarism,” rather than “consumer sovereignty.” Brueggemann responded that he came up with the phrase because of his observation that, in the United States, you can’t maintain our level of consumption without a strong military that wrests resources away from others. Finally, Williams also expressed surprise that Brueggemann had not mentioned the notion of Jubilee from the Old Testament as a way of further defining what the “common good” was.

  • Book Review: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

    Last week I finished reading a novel by Michael Chabon called The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I’d never read anything by him before, but I remember my old roommate Neal recommending his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay when I lived in Hungary. I first was drawn to this book last year when I saw its brightly colored jacket and read about its intriguing premise in an airport bookstore. Since the author was recommended by a friend with good taste, and it is set in southeast Alaska, where I have spent some time, I decided to give it a try.

    The southeast Alaska of this book is nothing like the southeast Alaska I know, however. Chabon’s is a completely fictional world in which the state of Israel never got off the ground in 1948, and Jews were settled in the District of Sitka with a 60-year lease from the United States. The novel is set just a few months before Reversion, when the lease will be up and the Jews of Sitka will be wanderers once more. It is also a detective novel strongly influenced by noir – an appropriate choice since it is so dark during the Alaskan winter. This book is Raymond Chandler meets Chaim Potok meets James Michener’s Alaska. Some of the best books I have read mash up aspects of the world in creative and unexpected ways, and so I was looking forward to this one.

    What I liked about the book is that Chabon certainly does have a way with words, but in a way that doesn’t necessarily scream, “I’m a literary novelist!” It’s a tough thing to write creative prose and not call attention to the fact that you are writing creative prose. Chabon showed more restraint than many other writers of so-called literary fiction I have read, and I appreciated that. I also appreciated that the book had more of a plot than much literary fiction, which often seems to coast along for pages on turns of phrase alone. Chabon was not above writing a detective novel with an interesting plot. And while the plot was not as fast-paced as your typical popular paperback mystery, it was much better written, which ought to count for something.

    In the end, though, the plot was where I found fault with the novel (and if you’re planning on reading it, don’t read any further, because I’m going to disclose some things). It starts out with a body found in a hotel, with detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, trying to find out whodunit against the wishes of their superiors. The story leads into the depths of Hasidic organized crime, and the identity of the corpse is revealed as a chess-playing, heroin-addicted man who was once hailed as a potential Messiah, but who faded into the shadows because he couldn’t handle the pressure. He was later found by a group who wanted to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and who needed him to lead them. This group was in cahoots with the U.S. government, which is run by Christian dispensational premillennialists who think it is necessary for the Temple to be rebuilt so Jesus will return.

    I won’t get into how the man died, because that is less important to me than who the “bad guys” are revealed to be. First, I found this coalition of Orthodox Jews and Left Behind -reading Christians a little too far-fetched to be true. It’s not that there aren’t such Christians out there; there are lots of Christians, particularly in North America, who have that kind of eschatology. You could even say (and you would probably be right) that dispensationalists have had an influence on U.S. foreign policy. However, those who would seriously espouse violence to bring about a supposed Second Coming have never been more than a lunatic fringe. The idea that, even in an alternative universe, they would control the government and destroy the Dome of the Rock lacks plausibility. It also comes across to me as a thinly veiled satirical snipe at said Christians.

    But more than that, this plot twist reveals that we Christians in the United States have a PR problem. If we are known more for theories about the End Times than for, say, love for one another, then it seems we’re not getting the right message across. Michael Chabon may be just one person, but he had to get his ideas from somewhere, and he certainly has a lot of influence through his books. I’m not mad that he turns wacky Christians into a contrived plot device; I’m just sad that enough Christians have that wacky theology to give Chabon a target. I would recommend this book for its fine writing and better-than-average plot. However, even in a richly textured and plausible alternative world, the deus ex machina of Christians who run the government and use explosives to hasten Jesus’ return was a little too unbelievable.

  • Reinhold Niebuhr. Again.

    When I started this blog back in September, I didn’t think that I would write two posts on Reinhold Niebuhr in the first five months. I have never even read an entire book by him (though I have read articles). And yet, here is number two (Here is number one):

    Over the break, one of the books that I read was a biography of Reinhold Niebuhr by Richard Fox. I got this book for free last year from a pastor in Burnaby, BC who was retiring and giving away much of his library. I read it now because I have heard a lot about Niebuhr in my time as a theology student, but I was still a little foggy about how to classify him. Or even whether or not I agreed with him.

    The book, I must say, was a great help. It dealt with the development of his ideas and his actions based on those ideas in a very helpful way, and I’d recommend it to anyone who is interested in “Reinie” (as his friends called him) and is a little bewildered by the sheer amount of what he wrote over his long public career. It only makes sense that people should be bewildered; after all, he did write some seemingly contradictory things. Here is a quote from the epilogue:

    In retrospect his centrifugal career tends to fragment into its component parts. Latter-day disciples seize upon the particular Niebuhr they prefer. Neoconservatives flock to the Niebuhr of the late 1940s and 1950s: the vehement opponent of Soviet communism, the persistent adversary of left utopianism. Liberals and left-liberals take heart from the Niebuhr of the 1920s and 1930s: the zealous antagonist of business hegemony, the angry critic of the consumer culture. Theological scholars meanwhile debate his religious works, cut off from the historians and social scientists who analyze his political thought. In life Niebuhr always confounded those who stressed one side of his career or one segment of his standpoint at the expense of another. He confused his comrades as often as his detractors.

    – p. 294

    In the end, although he did have interesting perspectives as an ethicist, as an evangelical Christian I was taken aback by his theological liberalism (and, though he did criticize liberals a lot over the course of his career, he remained liberal himself throughout his life). Here are a couple of quotes from the book:

    …for all its attention to Christ crucified and risen, the book [The Nature and Destiny of Man] offerend only a very abstract Incarnation and scant assurance of the eternal life most believers yearned for. Niebuhr did not want to give ‘comfort to literalists,’ as he wrote to Norman Kemp-Smith. . . . ‘I have not the slightest interest in the empty tomb or physical resurrection.’

    – p. 215

    For him religion was not doing good, feeling holy, or experiencing the transcendent; it was grasping the evil in one’s efforts to do good, recognizing one’s finitude, realizing that the transcendent was unattainable. . . . His religion, for all of its Biblical allusions and ethical drive – was more like a philosophy of life than a mystical encounter.

    – p. 172

    I must say that recognizing one’s finitude is a good thing. But in the end, I’ve got deep reservations about Niebuhr because his God simply doesn’t act in history. His God is not the God who revealed himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and revealed himself in Jesus of Nazareth. If his ethics has this belief in the background, I’ve got to take whatever he says with a huge grain of salt. Niebuhr had conflicts with his brother Richard over this very point during the course of their lives, and I think Richard is the more orthodox of the two.

  • Bad Theology is Bad for Your Health

    “Man Sees ‘Mark of the Beast’; Cuts off, Microwaves Hand”

    This might be funny if it weren’t so sad. 

    (I should note that there wasn’t just bad theology involved; probably mental health was a big factor)

  • Christian Science Monitor on Pentecostalism

    The Christian Science Monitor published a three-part series on Pentecostalism in Central and South America earlier this month.

    I read the first in the series, on “Health and Wealth” theology in Guatemala. Unsurprisingly, it causes the same controversy there that it causes in the United States. Some criticize Health and Wealth churches for being manipulative and individualistic, and those who are part of the churches think they can do no wrong because they help their members to become entrepreneurs and escape poverty.

    I am no fan of the prosperity gospel, since I don’t think it is what Jesus (or Paul, or anyone else in the Bible) meant by “gospel.” I can’t recall them ever saying that if you give money to God, he will bless you financially. But I think that it is difficult to argue with prosperity gospellers when they’re getting results: they’re leaving poverty behind, they’re increasing in self-esteem, etc. Still I wonder: when people let faith affect their life, don’t good things generally happen? Here is a quote from the first article:

    Still, in many ways, elements of their faith lead to economic betterment, say scholars. Their strict moral code alone – which includes no drinking, gambling, or promiscuity – leads to behavior changes that play important roles in family economics. “If a group of people change their behavior, work harder, save money, don’t drink, show interest in education – all of which Pentecostalism encourages – from one generation to the next, the consequences are very simple: social mobility,” says Peter Berger, a noted sociologist and theologian at Boston University. “You begin to have a Protestant middle class.”

    Although I have not studied this movement in depth, I think that it is at least possible that prosperity gospellers have simply stumbled upon a way to improve your lot in life, whether you happen to be religious or not. If you have a strict moral code, and if you’re part of a community that gives you needed encouragement and opportunities, you’re likely to gain more social mobility.

    That’s not to say, of course, that people are wrong to give to the church. They’re just giving for the wrong reason: to get “blessed” financially. Rather, I think that Christians ought to give to the church because God a) cares about us (“Consider the lilies. . .”), b) wants to keep us from idols (I seem to remember something in the Bible about money and the root of all kinds of evil), and c) can take care of money better than we can.

    Anyway, these articles are informative and interesting, and I recommend reading them. For those interested in a critique of the exegetical foundations of the prosperity gospel, check out Gordon Fee’s booklet, The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospels.