I’m afraid I have to call for a moratorium on the use of the word “awesome” by Christians. Let me explain.
It’s not that I don’t think the word a good one. I do. It’s just that sometimes good words can take up bad company and start hanging out with all sorts of other words that cheapen them and give them a bad reputation.
Take “awesome” for example. It means “full of awe.” The problem is: Christians no longer understand what the biblical meaning of “awe” is. It means fear, pure and simple – “fear,” as in “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7). Get it?
But in contemporary Christian usage, I fear, “awesome” is far more influenced by praise choruses than Scripture, and, alas, far too many praise choruses are influenced more by popular culture than biblical faith. The current preoccupation with “awesome ad nauseam,” to the point of mantra almost, seems to have derived from a 1980’s praise chorus by the late Rich Mullins, “Our God is an Awesome God.” Mullins said the chorus was inspired by Nehemiah 1:5 (which he apparently read in the NIV), “O LORD, God of heaven, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and obey his commands….” I wish he had read it in the original Hebrew, or at least consulted someone who had. If so, he would have known that the word the NIV renders “awesome” is actually “fear” (ha nora’). Nehemiah, who knew something of Israel’s God, said of Him: “O YHWH, God of the Heavens, God great and fearful….” Anybody who claims to have been in the presence of this God and chatters away about Him with a glib little “awesome” is not talking about Nehemiah's God. Nehemiah's God will cause your knees to buckle, your mouth to dry, and your palms to sweat; He sends you reaching for the Maalox.
And so, if what we mean when we say “God is awesome” is little more than “God is cool,” then we’re not talking about the Bible’s God. The first thing the Bible’s God does to you is scare the…well, you know.
That’s what the writer of Hebrews was getting at in his fifth and final warning to Christians (one largely unheeded by contemporary Christians). In Hebrews 12:14ff., the burden of his argument is: “If you think Moses’ God scared you to death, wait ‘til you see this one!”
For you have not approached the touchable, (you’ve come to) a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a storm…indeed, so terrifying was the very sight of it that Moses said, “I am full of fear and I quiver and quake. …Therefore let us be grateful for receiving an unshakable kingdom through which we offer pleasing worship to God with reverence and fear; for our God is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:18-21; 29, writer’s translation).
So let’s be clear: When the Bible says that God is “awesome,” this is what it means. Pass the Maalox.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Legacy
People who travel with me to the Holy Land are on pilgrimage. It’s not a vacation; they’re not .jpg)
tourists. It’s a journey of faith, a “touching the wound” experience. Of course, that experience is different for different people. For some, the pilgrimage is not complete until they’ve been to the place where Jesus was born, knelt down, and touched the star that marks the spot (The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem). For others, it’s Golgotha and the Garden Tomb. They want to see the Skull and enter the Tomb to make sure it’s really empty. I understand that.
But what constitutes pilgrimage for me? I’ve been there so many times that there’s nothing new anymore. How do I avoid the “Been there; done that” mentality? Part of it lies in the joy I get from experiencing the power of place all over again for the very first time in the eyes of those whom I take with me. I take them to places of faith, read the Scriptures about what happened there, reflect theologically on it with them, and then sing a song of faith and hope with them. I’m already thinking about how I’ll get my little troupe to the next holy site when I turn and see them wasted, undone by the power of the place. I’d been there so many times doing my thing that I forget how powerful it is.
But this time I went to one place that was pilgrimage for me. It was St. Catherine’s in Sinai. The Greek Orthodox monastery was the site, famous to textual critics, where Karl von Tischendorf discovered the fourth century Greek manuscript that has come to be known as Codex Sinaiticus. The story is well-known among Greek scholars. Tischendorf, on mission from the Russian Czar to find holy relics, visited the monastery at St. Catherine’s. The story is that the monks, originally hermetic scholars who copied the Scriptures for centuries before the invention of the printing press, through centuries of isolation had become illiterate. Unaware of what they had, they were warming themselves against the desert chill by tossing manuscripts into the fire. Tischendorf asked to see one of the manuscripts and was stunned to find himself looking at a Greek manuscript of the New Testament older by centuries than anything he’d ever seen before – Codex Sinaiticus. He “borrowed” it and took it to Russia. It was later purchased by the British Museum where it remains to this day (It should be returned to St. Catherine’s!).
As a young textual critic back in the late 70’s, my late teacher, Dr. George Balentine, told me that story and helped me to understand the importance of that find. Codex Sinaiticus, along with Codex Vaticanus, became the core of what would be the basis of a complete reevaluation of the Greek manuscript tradition underlying the English Bible. All modern translations of the Bible are today based on the Greek text preserved in the manuscript tradition of Codex Sinaiticus. For me, going to St. Catherine’s was a “touching the wound” experience.
I stood at St. Catherine’s looking into the ossuary where the scholars’ skulls were lined up like a “great cloud of witnesses” and whispered a prayer of gratitude for those holy hermits who faithfully copied and preserved the Scriptures out in the desert for all those lonely centuries. You should too. Had they not done so, you would not now have a Bible to read. It’s their legacy to you. Something to think about.
.jpg)
tourists. It’s a journey of faith, a “touching the wound” experience. Of course, that experience is different for different people. For some, the pilgrimage is not complete until they’ve been to the place where Jesus was born, knelt down, and touched the star that marks the spot (The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem). For others, it’s Golgotha and the Garden Tomb. They want to see the Skull and enter the Tomb to make sure it’s really empty. I understand that.But what constitutes pilgrimage for me? I’ve been there so many times that there’s nothing new anymore. How do I avoid the “Been there; done that” mentality? Part of it lies in the joy I get from experiencing the power of place all over again for the very first time in the eyes of those whom I take with me. I take them to places of faith, read the Scriptures about what happened there, reflect theologically on it with them, and then sing a song of faith and hope with them. I’m already thinking about how I’ll get my little troupe to the next holy site when I turn and see them wasted, undone by the power of the place. I’d been there so many times doing my thing that I forget how powerful it is.
But this time I went to one place that was pilgrimage for me. It was St. Catherine’s in Sinai. The Greek Orthodox monastery was the site, famous to textual critics, where Karl von Tischendorf discovered the fourth century Greek manuscript that has come to be known as Codex Sinaiticus. The story is well-known among Greek scholars. Tischendorf, on mission from the Russian Czar to find holy relics, visited the monastery at St. Catherine’s. The story is that the monks, originally hermetic scholars who copied the Scriptures for centuries before the invention of the printing press, through centuries of isolation had become illiterate. Unaware of what they had, they were warming themselves against the desert chill by tossing manuscripts into the fire. Tischendorf asked to see one of the manuscripts and was stunned to find himself looking at a Greek manuscript of the New Testament older by centuries than anything he’d ever seen before – Codex Sinaiticus. He “borrowed” it and took it to Russia. It was later purchased by the British Museum where it remains to this day (It should be returned to St. Catherine’s!).
As a young textual critic back in the late 70’s, my late teacher, Dr. George Balentine, told me that story and helped me to understand the importance of that find. Codex Sinaiticus, along with Codex Vaticanus, became the core of what would be the basis of a complete reevaluation of the Greek manuscript tradition underlying the English Bible. All modern translations of the Bible are today based on the Greek text preserved in the manuscript tradition of Codex Sinaiticus. For me, going to St. Catherine’s was a “touching the wound” experience.
I stood at St. Catherine’s looking into the ossuary where the scholars’ skulls were lined up like a “great cloud of witnesses” and whispered a prayer of gratitude for those holy hermits who faithfully copied and preserved the Scriptures out in the desert for all those lonely centuries. You should too. Had they not done so, you would not now have a Bible to read. It’s their legacy to you. Something to think about.
Monday, May 19, 2008
The Place
I just returned from two weeks in Israel and Egypt on my annual trek to the Holy Land. Travel fatigue; sleep deprivation; information overload. It’s not a vacation; it’s a pilgrimage of faith. People go to the Holy Land with me for all kinds of reasons, but mostly they go to “touch the wound.” There are just some things about Jesus that I can only teach you there.Early mornings, long days, lots of walking does nothing to diminish the power of place one feels. We stand in the places where the Word became flesh, read the stories, reflect on their significance and meaning for Jesus’ disciples both then and now, and sing watery-eyed songs of faith and hope and resolve. To stand on the Lithostrotos
(the Stone Pavement where Jesus was scourged before his crucifixion; see John 19:13) and sing “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back” can drive you to your knees.Lots of impressions this time. It was Israel’s 60th anniversary celebration and the tourists were everywhere. In over 20 years of leading groups to the Holy Land, I have never seen crowds like this. President Bush was there. No offense, but I’m glad we missed him; he would have ruined our itinerary had we tried to visit the same sites that were on his schedule. But what stunned me were all the pilgrims from Russia and Eastern Europe. They were everywhere. Ironic, isn’t it. All those years of the former Soviet Union we were told that the USSR was officially atheistic. And yet all the while apparently Russian Christians (Russian Orthodox) were secretly praying and reading their Bibles and worshiping. Now that they can travel freely
and go anywhere they choose, they choose to go to the Holy Land...on pilgrimage...in droves. Amazing.Of course, there were fun times too. It was not all serious business. It never is. But I never cease to be amazed at the hold this Land has on people. In all the din and noise and smells and hawkers and ubiquitous cameras and buses and all the rest, in places you’d never expect it, in ways you could never have predicted, it slips in and slips up and undoes you.
Of course, of course, God is not limited to or bound by place, any place. But that said, we are incarnational creatures, you and I. Faith can’t just float in a fog of vacuous vagaries and touch us, move us, change us; faith has to have a place for it to take root and take hold and take charge of our lives. That’s why I tell pilgrims, “You’ll never read the Bible the same way again.” I guess that’s why…I guess that’s why, among the names the Jews have held out for God (preferring not to say “God” lest their saying His name defile it), one of their favorite names for God was ha Maqom – The Place.
PS: If you’re interested in making the next Holy Land pilgrimage with me, drop me an email and I’ll send you a brochure.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
I'm Back
Haven't posted in a while. In Israel/Egypt for two weeks guiding another group to the Holy Land. Great trip. Good to be home. Jet lag. Catching up. More later. rws
Saturday, May 3, 2008
The Politics of Division
Like most of you, we’re in the middle of an election cycle here in North Carolina, and that means political campaigns, lots of them. And, unfortunately, that also means lots of television commercials for candidates – another good reason to turn off the TV!
I’ve seen a lot of campaign commercials over my 57 plus years, and I don’t mean to suggest that the so-called “negative ads” are anything new; they’re not. But something new has been dropped into the mix this year that I find troubling. It is the use of the “politics of division” to attempt to set one group of Americans over against another. There is a well-rehearsed litany of liabilities currently facing our country – the woeful economic picture, the credit and housing crises, the war in Iraq, the price of gas at the pump, the price of food at the grocery, the escalating costs of health care – and then the candidate comes on promising in vague and vacuous language that if s/he is elected, they will “fix” all this because they will be your (president, governor, senator, congressman, etc.) not theirs. And there it is: the politics of division. Note: you’re never told who “they” are, just that you’re not “them.” And, of course, the subtle and implicit subtext of these ads is that “they” have “yours,” and that if you elect me I’ll get “yours” back from “them” and give it to you so that it won’t be “theirs” anymore. Another example of the same thing is the candidate’s adoption of the political holy grail of the “middle class.” Every candidate, it seems, sees himself/herself as the champion of the ‘middle class” even though no one seems to know what it is or how to define it. But that doesn’t matter to the politics of division; matter of fact, it works to its advantage. You see, because everybody thinks s/he is “middle class,” it makes it easier for a candidate to set one group against another (“us” against “them”) so as to form a voter block.
Even more disturbing is that the primary tool for the politics of division is our growing ethnic diversity in this country – multiculturalism. I think it was the early 90’s that I first heard the term “multiculturalism,” and it made me uneasy then, though I wasn’t quite sure why. I wrote a “pastor’s article” for a church newsletter and titled it “Adjectival Americanism.” I made the point that the demise of the old Soviet Union (which had taken place just a year or so earlier) should have taught us some lessons. Turns out the Soviet Union was not really a “union” at all. It was a brutal, oppressive sham of a “union” in which very different and diverse ethnic peoples were compelled to form a “union” by means of Soviet muscle and missiles. But when the missiles were removed the “union” evaporated because it never existed to begin with. I went on to point out, conversely, that this was the genius of the “American Experiment.” Variously described as a “melting pot” or “mosaic,” the idea is that nobody cares where you came from before you got here; once you’re here, you’re an “American.” That’s why I’ve never liked what I call “Adjectival Americanism” – putting an adjective (or hyphen) in front of the noun “American” (African-American, Hispanic-American, Arab-American, Jewish-American, Japanese-American, etc.). I find this disturbing and divisive in that rather than emphasizing what unites us, it emphasizes what divides us. Well, that was the warning I sounded back in the early 90’s. It was not well-received then; it probably won’t be now.
Let me make clear that I have no disagreement or reservation about anyone taking appropriate pride in his/her ethnic heritage. If I’m anywhere near your town when it celebrates its Greek heritage with a “Greek festival,” I’ll be there, and I’m not even Greek! But as a Christian, all kinds of things about this phenomenon trouble me. For example, Paul’s whole point about the unity of the Body of Christ in 1 Corinthians turns on the fact that our diversity is always to be understood as functional not formal. Shift diversity from functional to formal and unity evaporates and diversity gets divisive.
I am also troubled, as it relates to the church, by the deeper, underlying principle at work in this kind of “politics of division.” Even in congregations where there is ethnic homogeneity, the politics of division is too often still at work in the form of “special interest groups.” Rather than looking to the unity of the Body of Christ and the total mission and agenda of the church, increasingly the church devolves into a collection of special interest groups only interested in what they’re interested in and not interested in what you’re interested in – music special interest groups; youth special interest groups; senior adult special interest groups; and a whole array of “spiritual elitist special interest groups” who think that if you’re not “into” what they’re “into,” you’re just not “spiritual.” Politics of division. Somebody read 1 Corinthians; for God's sake, somebody read 1 Corinthians!
What we need in the church is not a “politics of division” but a “theology of unity.” The pattern is already there in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Christians are not tri-theists. We don’t believe in three gods. We’re Trinitarians. We believe in the oneness of a God Who is nonetheless so mysteriously diverse and wondrously singular that the deeper you move into His reality the more complex He becomes: Father, Son, Spirit – Trinity. This is the diversity to which the church aspires. And in Jesus’ final prayer for the disciples, then and now, he prayed that we might embrace it and live in it: “That (they) all might be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also might be in us, that the world might believe that you sent me. And the glory which you gave me I have given them, that they might be one even as we are one; I in them and You in me, that they might attain the oneness, so that the world might know that you have sent me and have loved them just as you loved me” (John 17:21-23, my translation).
I’ve seen a lot of campaign commercials over my 57 plus years, and I don’t mean to suggest that the so-called “negative ads” are anything new; they’re not. But something new has been dropped into the mix this year that I find troubling. It is the use of the “politics of division” to attempt to set one group of Americans over against another. There is a well-rehearsed litany of liabilities currently facing our country – the woeful economic picture, the credit and housing crises, the war in Iraq, the price of gas at the pump, the price of food at the grocery, the escalating costs of health care – and then the candidate comes on promising in vague and vacuous language that if s/he is elected, they will “fix” all this because they will be your (president, governor, senator, congressman, etc.) not theirs. And there it is: the politics of division. Note: you’re never told who “they” are, just that you’re not “them.” And, of course, the subtle and implicit subtext of these ads is that “they” have “yours,” and that if you elect me I’ll get “yours” back from “them” and give it to you so that it won’t be “theirs” anymore. Another example of the same thing is the candidate’s adoption of the political holy grail of the “middle class.” Every candidate, it seems, sees himself/herself as the champion of the ‘middle class” even though no one seems to know what it is or how to define it. But that doesn’t matter to the politics of division; matter of fact, it works to its advantage. You see, because everybody thinks s/he is “middle class,” it makes it easier for a candidate to set one group against another (“us” against “them”) so as to form a voter block.
Even more disturbing is that the primary tool for the politics of division is our growing ethnic diversity in this country – multiculturalism. I think it was the early 90’s that I first heard the term “multiculturalism,” and it made me uneasy then, though I wasn’t quite sure why. I wrote a “pastor’s article” for a church newsletter and titled it “Adjectival Americanism.” I made the point that the demise of the old Soviet Union (which had taken place just a year or so earlier) should have taught us some lessons. Turns out the Soviet Union was not really a “union” at all. It was a brutal, oppressive sham of a “union” in which very different and diverse ethnic peoples were compelled to form a “union” by means of Soviet muscle and missiles. But when the missiles were removed the “union” evaporated because it never existed to begin with. I went on to point out, conversely, that this was the genius of the “American Experiment.” Variously described as a “melting pot” or “mosaic,” the idea is that nobody cares where you came from before you got here; once you’re here, you’re an “American.” That’s why I’ve never liked what I call “Adjectival Americanism” – putting an adjective (or hyphen) in front of the noun “American” (African-American, Hispanic-American, Arab-American, Jewish-American, Japanese-American, etc.). I find this disturbing and divisive in that rather than emphasizing what unites us, it emphasizes what divides us. Well, that was the warning I sounded back in the early 90’s. It was not well-received then; it probably won’t be now.
Let me make clear that I have no disagreement or reservation about anyone taking appropriate pride in his/her ethnic heritage. If I’m anywhere near your town when it celebrates its Greek heritage with a “Greek festival,” I’ll be there, and I’m not even Greek! But as a Christian, all kinds of things about this phenomenon trouble me. For example, Paul’s whole point about the unity of the Body of Christ in 1 Corinthians turns on the fact that our diversity is always to be understood as functional not formal. Shift diversity from functional to formal and unity evaporates and diversity gets divisive.
I am also troubled, as it relates to the church, by the deeper, underlying principle at work in this kind of “politics of division.” Even in congregations where there is ethnic homogeneity, the politics of division is too often still at work in the form of “special interest groups.” Rather than looking to the unity of the Body of Christ and the total mission and agenda of the church, increasingly the church devolves into a collection of special interest groups only interested in what they’re interested in and not interested in what you’re interested in – music special interest groups; youth special interest groups; senior adult special interest groups; and a whole array of “spiritual elitist special interest groups” who think that if you’re not “into” what they’re “into,” you’re just not “spiritual.” Politics of division. Somebody read 1 Corinthians; for God's sake, somebody read 1 Corinthians!
What we need in the church is not a “politics of division” but a “theology of unity.” The pattern is already there in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Christians are not tri-theists. We don’t believe in three gods. We’re Trinitarians. We believe in the oneness of a God Who is nonetheless so mysteriously diverse and wondrously singular that the deeper you move into His reality the more complex He becomes: Father, Son, Spirit – Trinity. This is the diversity to which the church aspires. And in Jesus’ final prayer for the disciples, then and now, he prayed that we might embrace it and live in it: “That (they) all might be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also might be in us, that the world might believe that you sent me. And the glory which you gave me I have given them, that they might be one even as we are one; I in them and You in me, that they might attain the oneness, so that the world might know that you have sent me and have loved them just as you loved me” (John 17:21-23, my translation).
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