“But what if some terrorist had your little daughter chained to a bomb…?”
“Yes, what if. What if you decided to trust God for things you can’t and shouldn’t control instead of trying to control things for which you refuse to trust God? You cannot justify claiming Christ as the Son of God and support torture on any terms.”
If you follow my teaching to any degree, your single biggest problem in social situations is cerebral evangelical Christians. They rely on reasoning about religion to justify decisions that make God puke (see God’s comments about the Church of Laodicea in Revelation, starting around 3:14). God’s harshest comments are for those who celebrate His Son as a great man and reject the Son’s teachings in substance. Evangelicals tend to do this on linguistic technicalities.
There was a famous debate involving Martin Luther about the sacraments. His opposition insisted that the bread and wine represent certain things, against which Luther pointed to three different sources saying “is, is, is!” In other words, he used the legalistic meaning of the textual sources to insist on treating communion as magic miracle, thus clinging to the Roman viewpoint (but only in his own fashion). In other words, there was simply no room in his highly educated head for the Hebrew approach and the inherent parabolic use of language. Luther was the quintessential expression of Germanic culture in this.
(No, I don’t hate Germans. I’d go back and live in Germany in a heartbeat, but that doesn’t mean I can ignore their horrific cultural contributions to Western Civilization. Need I mention Luther hated Jews? Yet he bought their claims to represent the best of Hebrew intellectual culture.)
Much of Western Christianity still clings to this literalism alien to Scripture. I can’t count how often preachers accused me of “spiritualizing the text” — a phrase that meant they insisted on the obvious literal meaning, and rejected the parabolic meaning. The practice of spiritualizing the text actually comes from the Apostles. If anyone set the pattern for our use of the Bible, it would be the guys who spent the most time with Jesus, wouldn’t you say?
I’m not the first guy to test this idea. Far better scholars have gone through the text of the New Testament, cataloging obvious and apparent quotes from the Old Testament. From this body of work, they and other scholars checked to see if those quotes “spiritualized” the text of Old Testament Scripture. Overwhelmingly, the answer is YES. More often than not, the New Testament authors would take a passage in directions evangelical scholars can hardly explain. So New Testament commentary is filled with warnings about, “Don’t try this at home.” They insist that only the Apostles had some secret knowledge that allowed them to get away with that, but you and I are forbidden to follow their example. Sweet elitism never dies. By giving the Apostles some exalted status as superhuman, they then subtly assert their own scholarly elitism in keeping you from following the teachings of Jesus’ own chosen friends.
Yes, of course, the Priesthood of the Believer in action.
In the process of reorganizing my life around a conviction that things are about to get very tough and that God intends to take me away from this life of leisure for some as-yet unrevealed mission, I was digging around in my old files stored hither and yon, trying to consolidate and organize work I still value. I’m making duplicate backups of the good stuff, of course, but it means reviewing collections of junk left on various recording media. Yesterday I ran across copies of my partial work in debunking that business of “spiritualizing the text” from a previous blog. I’ll go back and re-edit on the grounds of my own progress in understanding and post them, but the point is this: I can confirm independently that reading evangelical commentary requires a salt shaker at hand, and maybe a pepper grinder alongside.
It’s not that those evangelical scholars know nothing, but you can rely on them to be hypocritical about reverencing the Bible and struggling so hard to avoid embracing the intellectual culture behind it. Once you begin to absorb the Hebrew mystical approach, you can easily detect evangelical intellectual tap dancing all over the Bible.
This is why they can wave their Bibles and support torture.
