While attending college at Oklahoma Baptist University in the mid-1970s, a lot of good things happened to me. I don’t remember them as good years in my life, but the Lord was at work, reshaping me.
One of the most formative moments came during one of our regular Wednesday Chapel/Assembly events. There were no classes on Wednesdays, just these events — sometimes worship, sometimes an academic speaker, and a few times we had bands, like the Imperials Quartet. One assembly featured a speaker I remember as Dr. Starkey. I’ve researched and can find no record of him, so I probably got his name wrong. He was supposed to be the pastor of some big church in Washington DC, and served as the team chaplain for the Washington Redskins football team at that time.
The one thing I do remember is something he said. It went like this: “The Bible is an eastern book. Jesus was an eastern man. Christianity is an eastern religion.” His point was that we should study to understand why that matters, instead of buying into the bulk of assumptions handed us from our Sunday School teachers. That’s much of what going to a Christian college is all about.
That statement haunted me over the years. I often sensed the need to reevaluate what “eastern” meant in that context. Some of my college professors did a decent job of helping us absorb some of the background behind that term. I never got to seminary; I could never pull together enough funding for any of the seminaries I felt led to attend. Also, I was married and needed to work for a living, but I didn’t just throw away my education. I kept going to libraries and bought a fair few books myself. I kept digging into the Bible.
It wasn’t until I had consistent access to the Internet, sometime around the turn of the Millennium, before I finally realized that ancient Hebrew intellectual culture was a very far different thing from Judaism. The critical key was reading The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah by Alfred Edersheim, a former rabbi who found Christ. He is widely hated among Jews today. It’s not that I agree with so much of what Edersheim taught, but that this particular book was rather like blowing the whistle on Judaism. He details how Hellenist intellectual assumptions were bought wholesale by Jewish rabbis, and how Pharisaical legalism came into being. In particular, he notes how it was a radical departure from the ancient Hebrew mystical intellectual traditions.
But Edersheim didn’t say much about that Hebrew mystical background, so I pursued that on my own. It meant digging into the entire Ancient Near East, because the Hebrew people were a part of that. It’s a task that no one can finish. Our civilization is so very far distant from the Bible narrative that I often wonder whether it’s even possible to make a meaningful move in the right direction. Still, I’m driven by the burning conviction that we can’t just ignore that call. We have to try.
Some of you have told me that my work has made a difference in your lives. I have no way of assessing whether it will ever reach any others someday. My convictions tell me that the coming cataclysm will see a significant increase in folks receptive to the message. How many will survive and carry that with them is impossible to guess. It’s not part of my mission; my calling is to make the message coherent and available.
It’s not a rejection of intellectual endeavor. Rather, it redirects that energy in a more useful direction. It first requires the intellect to bow the knee to the heart, for the heart is where God speaks through our convictions. We still need a very rigorous effort from the intellect to breathe life into those convictions, to organize and implement those convictions. You have to study and communicate. It’s not a free-for-all; we have to come together in covenant communities. That’s a critical part of what divine revelation is all about. We are commanded to find common ground with others who exhibit the same spiritual sensitivity. This is hard work. It’s not conforming people to some thing we can dream up, but finding sufficient common ground to work together.
If the Hebrew nation, with all its flaws and divisions, was able to generate a consistent documentation of imagery and events, all tied together in a consistent thread of moral awareness, then we can surely restore at least some of that. The results don’t have to please me or anyone else; it has to please God and gain His support. The issue is defining what it means to succeed at winning God’s favor, of claiming His shalom.
