Indecision

False Teaching and Conspiracy Theories – The Perfect Bedfellows

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Many have died, and until a solution is found on a global scale to deal with this pandemic, many more deaths are bound to be recorded. There is uncertainty. Jobs have been lost; incomes devastated; money is harder to come by. Families are going hungry, and a passenger sitting next to you in trotro who dares to cough receives a very suspicious glare. These are the days of Covid-19. The question on almost everybody’s mind is “why Covid-19”? Why now? Why this generation? Maybe even “why me?”, as you ponder it’s impact on you personally and/or your family. It is only human to seek answers, to seek for explanations and most importantly, to feel in control of your own destiny in times of uncertainty.

Therefore, it is only human to seek to tap into these fears to portray oneself as the one with answers, the one who knows the secrets of the times. And no such people are experts at this than religious folks. Which is why our so-called “prophets”, “men of God”, “bishops” and “archbishops” are falling over each other to promote one theory or the other about the Covid-19 pandemic and what is driving it. Not only does this posturing betray their ignorance of history of the world in general and that of the faith they claim to be representatives of, but it exposes them for who they are – men deluded by their desire for power and control than by anything else. And so, we will look at some of the typical tactics adopted by power-hungry religious leaders as compared to leaders seeking to be faithful to Jesus Christ.

But before we talk about these tactics, let’s discern the 1 motivation behind these tactics.

Preachers of Comfort, Not Suffering

Throughout the history of Christianity, one of the hallmarks of false teaching has been the tendency to preach messages that make Christians seem invincible to suffering, especially if they exhibit the right levels of something religious – be it “faith” or “confession”, repentance, church attendance, giving, prayer etc. Their focus is on the individual’s own self-preservation and advancement, instead of what Jesus clearly laid down for us with his own life – suffering for one another’s advancement.

 

Instead of what Peter said – “because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps.” (1 Peter 2:21), their preaching can be summed up as “Christ suffered for you, so that if you exercise the right level of religiosity, you will not suffer”.

 

However if Jesus left us example that we should “follow in his steps”, then caring for one another – enduring some suffering for the sake of not just a fellow Christian but all of humanity – just as God cared for and therefore died for us is at the center of what it means to be a Christian.

 

This denial of suffering (not just any kind of suffering but self-sacrifice for one another) is at the heart of almost every form of heresy that the church has known for its 2000-year history. This motivation is what then informs the following tactics deployed by such confused leaders.

Make Their Members Believe this is Unprecedented

The first thing such confused leaders engage in is to make Christians believe that such epidemics and pandemics have never happened before. They do this by pretending that Christianity only began when they (or their favorite past Christian leader) began practicing Christianity. This is easy for them to do, because 99% of the time even before this pandemic, they never preached about church history and the fact that Christianity is 2000 years old, blissfully ignoring the fact their church today is just a blip on the map of the Christian spectrum.

 

But if they were not so ignorant of history, they would know that the early Church faced its fair share of pandemics, most popular of which was named after a leader of the church in the 3rd century – Cyprian of Carthage. No, Cyprian didn’t cause the pandemic, neither did he curse the Roman empire with it. The Plague of Cyprian is named after him because he lived through it and documented it. But more significantly, his leadership during this period when the Roman empire was crumbling makes naming it after him even more appropriate. To that leadership, we will return later.

 

Many more epidemics and pandemics have followed the church beyond Cyprian’s plague, such as the Bubonic Plague of the 16th century, right in the middle of the Protestant Reformation, and yet the church continues to this day.

 

But if that pandemic was too far in history for today’s “men of God” to be aware of, I would have at least expected them to be aware and learn from the most recent one in world history – the Spanish Flu of 1918. But alas, if Christianity began with the founding of the churches of these “bishops” and “men of God”, perhaps their ignorance can be excused.

Divert Attention from their Failed Teaching

Having preached comfort for so long, any self-aware follower of such preachers would immediately ask questions about what these preachers have been preaching. Why has the “devourer” devoured my job, when I expected God to protect my job because I have been paying my tithes religiously? Why has my father (or another beloved family member) died from Covid-19 or it’s complications, when I exercised faith and prayed profusely for healing? Doesn’t God “know his own” anymore? Why has God allowed this Covid-19 to bring my business to its knees, such that I can’t even feed my family 3 square meals a day?

 

In difficult times like these, preachers of comfort need a means to divert the attention of their followers from these questions, and so are quick to fall for the next most comforting thing – conspiracy theories and “end of days” prophecies. Cue the likes of Chris Oyakhilome and his love affair with 5G conspiracy theories or American evangelicals and their beloved “rapture” teachings fused with biblical misinterpretations around “666 and the mark of the beast” as exemplified by people like John Hagee.

 

Such preachers make you think that Christians have always been waiting for some beast to dish out some form of “666” mark, ignoring to tell their followers that this teaching misreading of the book of Revelation only began with the Plymouth Brethren in the 19th century, especially during World War I. Please note, for 1800 years of Christianity, most Christians didn’t give a hoot about an “Antichrist” or “the beast” or 666 and a coming end of age. Most Christians awaited Jesus’ second coming, and that was the end of the matter.

 

But when comfort Christianity fails, diversions are needed to keep church members from devouring their leadership, and so a new (or old) enemy will always be found. And most of the gullible flock are ever desirous to believe, instead of asking deep questions. After all, asking questions is equal to not having faith in these circles of Christianity.

 

Preserve the System, at the Cost of the People

And so, we come to one of the most glaring aspects of false teaching – a need to “keep the system going”, instead of pausing for reflection about the effects the pandemic is having on people. Such preachers care more about the opening of church for “normal service” than they care about the lives of people. They will present themselves as the people with “faith” who are not allowing a pandemic to tell them how to “worship their God”, and will label the wisdom of scientists as evil, in so far as it prevents their “system” from going on as usual.

 

And it is here that we look to the leadership of Cyprian of Carthage. When the Plague of Cyprian hit the Roman empires, the rich were abandoning the cities in their droves to their comfortable country homes, leaving the poor to suffer. And yet Cyprian the bishop encouraged Christians to stand their ground and rather care for the sick and dying. Whiles some of the Christians inevitably succumbed to the disease and died in the process, some also survived and became important in the care for the poor and sick in this pandemic. By this single act of leadership alone, Christianity grew massively after the pandemic subsided simply because the church, led by Cyprian and other such leaders, focused on meeting the actual needs of those affected by the pandemic, not blame games and diversionary tactics.

 

It is this kind of leadership that is required of our teachers in these times. Yes, today we have science, showing us how to avoid the coronavirus as well as ways to stop it’s spread, and we should heed that advice. But beyond that, livelihoods have been destroyed, businesses have collapsed, children are going hungry, and poverty is on the rise as a result of Covid-19. And this is happening to both churchgoers and non-churchgoers alike. We know better not to be in close contact with people without the proper precautions, but there’s so much more that can be done to help whiles the medical people do their bit.

What we Don’t Need

What we don’t need are sermons castigating people for lower church attendance and giving.

What we don’t need are 5G lies and deceit, or nonsense about “mark of the beast via vaccines”.

What we don’t need are pontifications about a coming “New World Order” or a coming “rapture”.

What we need are leaders who will remind us of that is important – what historic, faithful, and true Christianity has always focused on – the simple commands of Jesus Christ, especially his command to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt 22:37-20). We need leaders who will rally us around working to mitigate the impact of this pandemic on the lives of actual church members, and then beyond that, our neighbors in the public square.

In Ghana, the Covid-19 Private Sector Fund has been able to put together money to build an infectious diseases center. That is worth commending, but those are the kinds of initiatives that I can expect of private sector businessmen. Given the amounts of money that sit in the bank accounts of some of our church denominations, Ghanaian churches could easily have done this and more, especially if they put their heads together.

But I’m less worried about what we do at the national scale than I am what we do at the local church communities.

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’” (Matt 25:35-36).

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels refuse to feed people because they didn’t “go to the synagogue or temple to worship on a Sabbath”?

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels say, “you are poor because you refused to pay tithes”?

How many times did Jesus in the Gospels say, “you lost your job because you didn’t have faith”?

Can our church leaders spend less time guilting us on coming to church and spend more time being obedient to Jesus – caring for actual real needs? Can we create structures that enable us to easily detect when people are “suffering in silence” in this pandemic?

Let us remember that we are not going to be judged by how well we knew 666, or how we quickly deciphered a New World Order via so called 5G or when “rapture” and “tribulation”. We will be judged by our deeds of love for fellow human beings, and that is the end of the matter.

The Gospel: How Vocation Follows Redemption

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Over a number of posts, I will be exploring the wider dimensions of the Gospel as articulated by the New Testament, helping us fill in gaps that Ghanaian Christianity tends to ignore, so we can work towards better discipleship. This is part 1. Stick around.

And they sang a new song, saying: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals because you were slain, and with your blood, you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth.” (Rev 5:9-10 NIV)

If you have been around Ghanaian Christianity for any length of time, you are bound to have heard “the Gospel” expressed in various ways, but mostly summarized as follows.

“God loves you. But you are a sinner and cut off from God (and at risk of hellfire). God has sent Jesus to come and die for your sins. If you accept Jesus, all your sins will be forgiven, and you will have a place in heaven”.

Again, these may not be the exact words, and some details may be more emphasized than others or phrased differently. But if you are honest, you can identify this message in many evangelistic tracts, sermons, “crusades” and the like on the Ghanaian Christian landscape.

But over the years, as I have compared popular renditions of “the Gospel” with the version summarized by Rev 5:9-10 quoted above, I notice a wide gap between what the New Testament says the Gospel is, versus what tends to pertain in Ghanaian Christianity. And in these series of posts, I will explore certain dimensions that I feel this passage brings to light that is usually ignored by much the Christianity that dominates Ghanaian circles. The key to the discomfort lies in v 10.

They Will Reign On Earth?

Permit me to deal with the end of that verse before we get to the beginning. Isn’t it weird that, contrary to popular opinions, v 10 says that the people from different tribes and nations purchased by the Lamb are made to “reign on earth”, and not in heaven?

I mean I was born and bred a Pentecostal, and the idea that the goal of my life was to “make it to heaven” was pretty well drummed into my head. I remember the many revivals where I was warned to look into my heart and be sure whether my final destination would be heaven or hell assuming Jesus’ second coming was to be in a few minutes. Basically, I had to be “rapture-ready”, as Jesus could come at any moment. So, what does it mean when those purchased by the Lamb are destined not for rule in heaven, but for a “reign on earth”?  Were my well-beloved elders, deacons, and pastors selling me snake oil? Perhaps the answer may be closer than we think if we dig a little deeper.

A Kingdom and Priests

So, apparently this purchased group of diverse individuals are then made into a “kingdom and priests to serve our God”. What does that also mean? Perhaps the earliest usage of that phrase may give us some clues. 

When God called Israel out of Egypt, he required them to keep his covenant, and if they did so, then he would make them his treasured possession and they will be for him “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”. (Ex 19:5-6).

This would suggest that the goals that God had for choosing Israel (descendants of only 1 nation), are the same goals that he had for choosing this diverse group from many nations, languages, and cultures by virtue of the shedding of the lamb’s blood. So, if the goal was the same whether with ancient Israel or with the church after Jesus, then why the language of “kingdom of/and priests” to serve him?

The Imago Dei

An important point to remember is John H. Walton’s dictum – the bible was not written to us, but it was written for us. So, to understand biblical language, we need to immerse ourselves in the world of the people to whom the text was first written, and not look to our modern interpretations of what words mean.

In the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) world of ancient Israel, it was the kings and their priests who were the intermediaries between the gods and ordinary people, much like we have in our Ghanaian cultural settings today. In this regard, our Nananom and our Wulomei were not very different from the culture that existed in ancient Israel, Babylon, Egypt or Canaan at the time of the Old Testament. In the ANE world, everybody was a slave of the gods, and only the kings and priests were “made in the image” of the gods. Hence the absolute power and almost “godlike” status afforded kings and their priests not only in the ANE world but even here and now, in Ghanaian traditional culture. It was and is a class system, pure and simple.

However, right from the beginning when the Creator God of Israel chooses to create, he breaks the chain of class systems by making all human beings “in his image”.

“So, God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (Gen 1:27 NIV)

Which raises a question. If God made all humans in his image, then why would he choose a certain subset of those humans (Israel) and give them the task to be “kings and priests” aka be image-bearers again? Isn’t he going against his own classless ideal?

Well, if there is one thing that has been established about human beings is that we are mimetic – we learn best from one another. And the 2nd thing that one can establish about human beings is that the way we treat each other and the world around us is very dependent on the mental pictures of god/gods (conception) that we have acquired throughout our lives. To address this 2 fold behavior of human beings, God’ choice of the people of Israel (and by extension, the diverse people called the church paid for by the blood of the lamb) is so that he will reveal himself to these people (changing their conception of God), and through them (applying mimesis), open the eyes of the rest of the world as to their real identity – people made in the image of a particular type of god.

In this respect, the choosing of the people of God is not so they feel privileged, singing “I’m walking in power, I’m walking in miracles”, but so they serve God by serving the world. 

Wrapping up

All of this is work that is to be done not in heaven, but here on earth, extending into a “new heaven and a new earth”. To be a “kingdom and priests to serve our God and to rule on the earth” is to be a people who serve God by showing who God is to the rest of the world, both by deed and action, and not just in the spiritual sense, but in every sphere of life. It is in that way that we are truly “ruling on the earth”.

But since Ghanaian Christianity has largely sold itself a Gospel that is more about preparing us to go to heaven, we have lost a sense of vocation. We pile up the pews with more people waiting to go to heaven and make them of no earthly use. 

What if we developed a different imagination for what the purpose of being saved was for? Then maybe, the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus might help us understand the particular kind of God we are dealing with, a subject we will broach in the next post.

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In Defense of Modern Translations (or Why the NIV Hating is Getting Old)

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We live in an age of a deluge of information. Blogs, news sites, propaganda outlets, and internet professors abound in the billions. Social media now enables the spread of information at a speed previously unimaginable, and the ability to sift falsehood from truth has become critical now more than ever. This was brought home to me this Sunday morning, when I received a message on WhatsApp from some friends concerning the NIV translation.

The message began by linking the publishers of the NIV, Zondervan, to Harper Collins as publishers of “The Joy of Gay Sex” and “The Satanic Bible”. This then, is an attempt to already prejudice the mind of the reader about a supposedly evil agenda of the NIV. It then goes on to list the removal of many words (Jehovah, Calvary, Holy Ghost et al) and then the disappearance of 45 verses from the NIV. All of this is juxtaposed against the KJV as a standard of judgement.

This tactic is not new at all. In the earlier days of Christianity, the only version of the Old Testament used by the church was the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament done around the time of the Babylonian exile). Along came Jerome, who translated into Latin from some manuscripts of Hebrew, a new version of the Old Testament called the Latin Vulgate. You should have seen the consternation it caused, even causing St Augustine to warn Jerome about it in no uncertain terms. Of course, the Latin Vulgate prevailed, and become the standard text of the church for a long time, and is still the standard for the Roman Catholic church today.

The Process of Bible Translations

Firstly, the English bibles we have today are obtained by a process of translating from collections of Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic manuscripts. This is normally done by scholars who have in-depth knowledge of these languages. Christians therefore have to first get used to the idea that God didn’t speak to his people in English. A set of human beings always have to do the work of translation.

Secondly, the only way one could have copies of these manuscripts before the invention of the printing press in the 16th century was to manually copy them. This always had a tendency to introduce errors, whether intentional or not. In addition, some of the copyists made decisions to include passages which didn’t previously exist in the manuscript they were copying, and the resultant copy then had words that didn’t exist in its older source manuscript. The reason for these additional inserts is cause for another blog post in its own right. Suffice to say that, as a result of these 2 problems (copyist errors and intentional insertions), it only makes senses that the older a manuscript is, the “cleaner” it will be. This is not rocket science, it’s simple logic.

Based on this logic, it shouldn’t surprise us that modern translations like the NIV, NRSV, ESV etc are different from the venerated KJV. The KJV was translated in 1611, at the time of which the scholars only had access to manuscripts dated back to the 10th century. Since those days we now have manuscripts dating all the way back to the 2nd century at the least, and a comparison of those manuscripts to the ones used for the KJV shows clearly where mistakes have been made and where additional texts have been inserted. Therefore, the modern scholars are bound by the requirements of their own craft to revise and remove what is obviously an insertion, hence the missing passages in these versions. At least they make the effort to put footnotes on these passages so that one can see that these have been removed for good reason.

Thirdly, as scholars learn more about the history and background of the people about whom a book of the bible is written and/or the audience to whom it is written, they gain more information as to what the Hebrew or Greek words meant in their historical context and therefore how they should be translated into English (or any other language). This then causes revisions to change how certain verses were translated, much to the chagrin of some Biblicists.

Examples of Revisions In Translation

Here is an example from the NIV of changes resulting from this third class of revisions.

“The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me” (Ps 138:8 NIV 1984)

“The Lord will vindicate me” (Ps 138:8, NIV 2011)

Just reading the whole Psalm in context, it is very obvious that the second one is the more appropriate one. Since the Psalmist seems to be relying on God against the anger of his enemies in the previous verse, vindication is obviously what the Psalmist will expect. But since this translation choice might not be comfortable with some (especially the name-it-claim-it individualists), this change will not go down well with that crowd.

Another example is the oft repeated 2 Cor 5:17. My ears have grown tired of hearing it being bandied about during sermons, in crusades and bible tracts.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor 5:17 NIV 1984)

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”(2 Cor 5:17 NIV 2011)

Of course a footnote shows the old alternate translation, but there must be good reason why this one is preferred by the translators now. Might it be that the focus of the text is not on the individual who receives Christ? Could it be that Paul in context is talking of God’s cosmic work of reconciliation of the world to himself through the process of launching a new reality – a new people of God (in Christ) determined by faith in Christ – and that this work he has entrusted to his apostles like Paul to execute?

It might seem that words never stand alone. They mean what they mean from the surrounding background of sentences and words, but even more importantly from the life and experience of the one speaking it, and digging deep into that is a process that Christians cannot ignore if we are to be people who take the bible seriously.

Conclusion

There are 2 classes of people who tend to be caught off guard by such attempts to denigrate modern bibles. The first class is many innocent Christians who are not familiar with how the bible is translated into modern languages, and why the process of bible translation will continue to be an evolving process till kingdom comes. To those I say, don’t let such propaganda frighten you off modern bible translations. No bible is perfect, not even the modern ones like NIV or NRSV. But no matter what,  you are safer with MOST (emphasis) modern translations like these than staying at the KJV.

The second class of people are those who either intentionally have beef with anything that doesn’t sound like Victorian English (because they actually pray in “thous” and “thees”) , or whose churches have actually invested themselves in the KJV so much that they find the need to validate their usage of it by denigrating modern bibles. Some such churches have gone so far as to print their own bibles, which have their own commentaries alongside each page, mostly based on the KJV.

To this second class of people, I’ll encourage that they not get caught up in such propaganda out of ignorance. But if they still swear by their KJVs, then please be graceful to the rest of us who don’t understand Victorian English and let’s learn to live in peace.

Because in so far as the process of receiving the text of God involved human beings (including human beings during the KJV translation as well), we must acknowledge the finiteness of human efforts, come at the bible with a bit more humility and place the emphasis where it should be – following Jesus.

 

 

 

Touch not my anointed

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One of the typically abused texts that Ghanaian Christians are quick to quote when their favourite pastor/prophet/bishop etc is under criticism is Ps 105:15

“Do not touch my anointed ones, do my prophets no harm” (Ps 105:15).

But are we sure we understand this verse?

What Ghanaian Christianity Means By This Phrase

This has become a blanket statement to prevent any form of questioning of the teaching or practice of church leaders. Its usage is particularly very dominant in certain circles of Christianity, who limit all their experience and knowledge of Christianity through the lens of their beloved preachers. Any criticism of such preachers therefore elicits not a welcome ear to listen and think through the accusation/critique, but a knee-jerk reaction to defend such beloved preachers/prophets, even to possibly naming the critique as a “heretic” or “unspiritual person”. And this is further worsened by such preachers also intentionally exploiting the above verse as a means to defend themselves, leading their followers to assume that that is the proper way to understand this verse.

What The Phrase Means in Context

This is probably the easiest abuse of the bible to detect; yet the dominance of this abuse simply amazes me. This is because one can see what the author of the Psalm is talking about by simply reading the whole Psalm 105 from beginning. The Psalm begins by calling Israel to give thanks to God for what he has done for them.

“Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name, make known among the nations what he has done” (v 1)

The author then proceeds to state the exact things that Yahweh has actually done for them.

“Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he pronounced, you his servants, the descendants of Abraham, his chosen ones, the children of Jacob … He remembers his covenant forever, the promise he made, for a thousand generations, the covenant he made with Abraham, ‘To you I will give the land of Canaan as the portion you will inherit’ … When they were but few in number, few indeed, and strangers in it … He allowed no one to oppress them; for their sake he rebuked kings; ‘Do not touch my anointed ones, do my prophets no harm’ ”(v5-15).

It is obvious from the above (paying attention to the portions I’ve emphasized in bold) that the Psalmist is talking about how Yahweh protected HIS CHOSEN PEOPLE from harm while they travelled from Egypt to Canaan, so that they may obtain God’s promise of ENTERING THE LAND OF CANAAN. In the process, God actually defeats both Og, king of Bashan and Sihon, king of the Amorites just to get his way. These are the “kings” he rebuked (as well as Pharaoh of course). The theme of Yahweh defeating Og king of Bashan and Sihon king of the Amorites is repeated in many Psalms (Ps 139;135;68) as well as the rest of the Old Testament, and is told to remind the people of ancient Israel how God had led them to “the land”. Even before the reading of the Ten Commandments to the people in Deuteronomy, it is preceded with reminding the people of God how he took them from Egypt, defeated Sihon king of the Amorites, Og king of Bashan before bringing them to conquer Canaan (Deut 2,3).

Therefore the reference to “anointed one” and “prophets” here is but a reference to the nation Israel.

So What?

Obviously the above cannot be used to defend only certain preachers, simply because it doesn’t even refer to them. But as usual, many Christians like to mine the Old Testament to justify what they are bent on doing without first understanding the Old Testament on its own terms as a document that records the history and stories of God’s relationship with his chosen people. And when the OT is read only for its “mining” or allegorical value, these are the kinds of results we get (an example is the “seven to one” misinterpretation that occurred recently from one of the leading Ghanaian preachers). So having done the correct thing above, let us then indulge the “miners” of the OT and apply the text properly.

If the church is Israel expanded then this passage is specifically talking about us all as God’s anointed and God’s prophets. None of us is more anointed than the other. The only anointed one is Jesus Christ (which is what Christ means i.e. the anointed one), and we are all anointed because we are a part of his body. In the same way the passage is talking about the nation Israel, let’s be minded to speak of the church as God’s anointed and prophets, and let’s stop giving our favourite preachers/prophets/bishops the free pass to move from being people who are tasked with preparing us for works of service to people who are performing a show for us which we have to accept whether we like it or yes because “they are the anointed” and we are the mere mortals.

If we truly are serious about doing this, we can start the process by simply refusing to refer to such men as “anointed”. How hard can that be? Will a few sacred cows be lost by doing so?

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Faith and Reason: Friends or Enemies?

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Does having faith in God mean you cannot or should not use your head properly any longer? If we would be honest with ourselves, this is one of the nagging questions that come to mind when we take a cursory look at the current Christian landscape in Ghana. It is as if one must throw away his mind in order to be able to believe in God. It seems that strong faith is equal to bad reasoning or less thinking. I have actually heard one of the well-known preachers on radio say that the Word of God (i.e. the Bible) is not for the mind but for the spirit. This is a false division and a very tragic one indeed, for it is wrongly assumed that the mind has no place in spiritual life. It is statements of this sort that make non-religious folks get confirmed in their belief that every religion is devoid of reason.

Yet Christ never called for undiscerning minds. He called for thinking people! It seems some Christians today, however, are afraid that scrutinizing the teachings of the Christian faith might lead them to lose their faith. [Perhaps, this may be due to stories they have heard from people who claim that their rigorous research led them to disbelieve in God.] But this fear is unwarranted. “You will seek me and find me when you seek with all your heart,” is what the God of the Bible promised the Jews once (Jer. 29:13). Also, Jesus said to his disciples, “… seek and you will find …” (Matt. 7:7). An honest hunger for truth is the prerequisite for proper reasoning. The Christian faith is not a blind faith; you do not need to abandon your mind and jump into a fairy tale world as some believers today are making it seem. Instead, it is the proper response of trust to the God who is there and who has proven, through countless marvellous deeds (seen and unseen), that he is worthy of our trust. Oxford mathematics Professor, John Lennox, is credited with the following statement:

“Fictional gods may well be enemies of reason: the God of the Bible certainly is not. The very first of the biblical Ten Commandments contains the instruction to ‘love the Lord your God with all your mind’. This should be enough to tell us that God is not to be regarded as an enemy of reason. After all, as Creator he is responsible for the very existence of the human mind; the biblical view is that human beings are the pinnacle of creation. They alone are created as rational beings in the image of God, capable of a relationship with God and given by him the capacity to understand the universe in which they live.”

Professor Lennox is spot on. The God of Bible is the reality of the really real, so to speak, and does not oppose proper reasoning. In fact, he is a reasoning God. Jesus asks people to count the cost before becoming his followers. He wants people to deliberately think things through before making a commitment to him. He says he is the Truth. It is therefore not surprising that he is not worried in the least by a person’s honest examination of his life and teachings. In fact Jesus is convinced that any genuine truth lover or seeker will find him too attractive to resist, for he says, “… Whoever belongs to the truth listens to me” John 18:37 GNB. I am convinced that anyone who is honest in the heart will be forced to use his head correctly. Dishonest hearts hate proper thinking. This is the bane of the current popular Christianity which is spewing out false teachings and practices at dizzying speed. Anytime Christians stop thinking properly, a false spirituality follows.

Jesus often used parables to force his listeners to think. The gospels contain a number of questions, a lot of which are asked by Jesus himself. One of the trademarks of Jesus is that he often answered questions with questions to compel people to come clean in their assumptions: “Should we pay taxes to Caesar?,” some people asked him; “Whose image is on the coin?,” answered Jesus. “Good teacher what must I do to be saved?,” asked one person; “Why do you call me good?,” replied Jesus. “What must I do to receive eternal life,” one teacher asked; “What do the Scriptures say? How do you interpret them?” Jesus asked (Lk 10:25,26).

I am inclined to think that some Christians today have a struggle with morality because they think it is some people at the top in the Church who have agreed and made such laws to restrict people’s freedom. Yes, I agree that in some churches this might be the case. But Biblical Christian morality is nothing about oppressive and antiquated laws that we cannot understand nor see why they should exist. When the Christian has thought deeply and carefully about God’s nature, he recognizes why he ought to live the way that the Bible prescribes because God’s love and holiness naturally draw boundaries for righteous living. Loving the Lord with the mind means thinking after God’s thoughts as expressed in the Bible, wrestling with them, asking questions, probing and searching and researching to find answers that fit the facts in there. The early church fathers were thinkers who thought long and hard through the Christian teachings and also engaged head-on with the prevailing philosophies in their day. These include men like St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Origen, Iraneaus. In later centuries, we find Christian men like Martin Luther, Blaise Pascal, John Wesley, and C. S. Lewis thinking deep on the Christian faith. Further, critical thinking about the universe as a creation of God led men like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler (just to name a few) to make wonderful contributions to the field of scientific enquiry. By thinking, probing, and wrestling with the teachings of the faith and the happenings in reality, these men were able to understand God and the gospel of Christ and even our universe better and explain them to others.

Is this the same attitude we have among Ghanaian Christians today? No, we dare not think critically, ask questions or search the scriptures to verify the Man of God’s interpretation of the scriptures, since it is a direct “revelation.” If we do so, we would be challenging God, so the thinking goes. And which faithful believer wants to be God’s challenger? We would rather settle for misinterpreted Bible verses and building our faith on erroneous teachings. The reluctance to engage in proper reasoning when it comes to Christian doctrines is a great threat to Christianity. Interestingly, when the great Apostle Paul went to preach the good news in Berea, the historian, Luke, with a sense of commendation said, “The people there were more open-minded than the people in Thessalonica. They listened to the message with great eagerness and every day they studied the Scriptures to see if what Paul said was really true.” Acts 17:11 GNB.

How many preachers today would be comfortable knowing that they are being scrutinized by an open-minded congregation every time they preached? Yet such an attitude in a congregation would force the preacher to be on his toes and not compromise the Bible’s teachings, or even preach cheap, un-researched sermons. I am not at all calling for Christians to become disrespectful or unduly critical of their pastors and elders. I am calling on Christians to halt the unbalanced worship which involves only the heart and spirit without the mind and where we do not have any respect for what is true. Once a certain teaching sounds like what we want for the moment, we do not care for its truthfulness or falsehood. And yet Jesus says that not only must worshipers of God worship in Spirit but they must also worship him in truth; and the mind is what serves as a filter where truth is concerned. Without truth as a guide, Christianity becomes exactly the kind that we have in this country today – limitless superstition, fear of the intellect, oppression and abuse. Jesus wants his followers to have alert intellects – wise as serpents, as he put it – along with childlike (rather than childish) faith; one that is simple, single-minded and teachable.

The Christian faith is healthy enough to contain and satisfy logical thinking and honest questions and curiosity. Jesus says he is the truth, and we know that truth corresponds with reality. This means that sound logic (a feature of reality) should characterize Christian teaching and practice. Since God, through his Son, created all things including our minds, he wants us to think and think properly after his thoughts and his marvellous work in creation, to understand them as much as our minds can take and to be able to worship him with a deeper understanding and devotion.

What is so sacred about sex? – Part 2

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This continues from part 1…..

In part one of this article, we discussed the sexual mood of our present culture and whether or not as human beings, we are the owners of our own bodies and minds. We ended on the note that if it is the case that we have been made or created by someone else for his own purposes, then surely we would have a lot more obligations than we would have if we only belonged to ourselves. But we also noted that, this is a big “IF” because some people do not believe (or at least they live as if they don’t believe) that there is any Being higher than ourselves, to whom we must be responsible. Is it reasonable to believe that an actual Being exists who is responsible for our existence and to whom we might be accountable to, regarding our sexual lives? If there is the possibility for such a Being to exist, why would he be interested in what we do with our bodies sexually?

For starters, let us be brutally honest with ourselves: everything in this world – from ourselves to the flowers to the stars to sea to animals etc – points to the fact that some sort of careful designing has gone into the creation of our world and of ourselves, doesn’t it? We often take it for granted that this physical world of ours is structured the way it is. But mathematically speaking, the probability of this world happening by a mindless random or unordered process is incredibly small. According to Astrophysicist Hugh Ross’ conservative calculation, the chance of a planet like ours existing in the universe is about 1 in a trillion billion billion (i.e. 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1 in 10 raised to the power 30).

 Scientists are discovering that had even a single feature of our universe been just a little bit different, the stars, galaxies and human life would not exist. Let us briefly look at a few amazing scientific discoveries before we go on. The distance from the earth to the sun is just right. Why? Even a small change of around 2% and all life would cease. If the earth was too near the sun, water would evaporate. If it was too far from the sun, its coldness level would not support life. In fact, even the rotation speed of the earth is just right; if it was too slow, the temperature differences between day and night would be too extreme, and if it was too fast the wind speeds would be catastrophic. Furthermore, if the ratio of the electromagnetic and gravitational forces had differed by about one part in ten thousand billion billion billion billion (i.e. 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000), then stars such as the Sun, which are capable of supporting life, could not exist. Do you see any picture emerging?

The delicate balance of the elements in our universe, to use the illustration of the theoretical physicist Paul Davies, is like the accuracy level that a marksman needs in order to hit a coin twenty billion light years away on the other side of the observable universe. [A light year is the speed travelled by light in one year. And light, by the way, has the fastest travelling speed in our universe]. In fact it has been noted by some researchers that the earth is placed precisely in a part of the universe that is congenial to scientific studies in cosmology, galactic astronomy, stellar astrophysics and geophysics. That is, if our earth had been positioned in a part of the universe with too much starlight, we could not have been able to see into deep space. There are more than 3000 galaxies in the observable universe, each containing millions to trillions of stars – many being bigger than the earth.

Further, Oxford mathematician John Lennox in his book, ‘God’s undertaker: has Science buried God?’, notes that the distinguished mathematician and astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, admitted that his atheism was shaken profoundly when he discovered the degree of fine-tuning needed between the nuclear ground state energy levels in order for carbon to be formed either by a combination of three helium nuclei, or by a combination of nuclei of helium and beryllium. (And for the record, life cannot exist on earth without an abundant supply of carbon). Sir Hoyle’s discovery, according to Lennox, led him to remark that, “a superintellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology,” and that “there are no blind forces in nature worth talking about.” Interesting isn’t it? And let us not forget the issue of the human DNA – the molecule containing coded instructions for the cells in the body. A group of scientists have recently estimated that the adult body contains about 37.2 trillion cells, each containing DNA. Each person’s complete DNA is unique; the exception being identical twins. The instructions are in what is called Genetic language and they are detailed, complex and specific. These instructions include for example, which cells should grow and when, which cells should die and when, which cells should make hair and what colour it should be.  If all this sounds too technical, then let me make it simple: the scientific discoveries are pointing in the direction where it is highly unlikely that an intelligent Being did not plan and execute the creation of this whole skilfully crafted universe, including human beings like us.

What is my point with all this information? It is this: if conditions in this universe, and the nature of our human bodies, are the way they are – so delicately precision-tuned – and if human beings like us posses the kind of intelligence we posses, even to study them, then it is very reasonable to (and unreasonable not to) suppose that a more intelligent Being, (1) is out there, (2) is the cause of our beings and (3) is interested in our lives. Now if we relate this thought to Mr. Lewis’ thoughts about moral duties (discussed in part one of this article), we can say with a fair degree of confidence that the whole of mankind must have a Landlord. Our bodies, strictly speaking, are not ours. Our Landlord is this Intelligent Being who created this world and everything in it. Religious folks simply call him, God. Since this God is the cause of our intricately designed bodies and existence, it is not mind-boggling that any “Dos and Don’ts” on how we use our bodies should come from him.

 

A Curious Worldview

 In his speech to the members of the city council of Athens, Paul the apostle of Christ tried to give them a new view of God, saying, “God, who made the world and everything in it, is Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made by human hands.” (Acts 17:24 GNB) In a city so used to building alters and shrines for every imaginable god, this news was however unimaginable. But to the people in the city of Corinth (a city well-known for its immorality), who became believers in Jesus Christ, Paul wrote them a letter in which he explained to them the sacredness of their bodies: “…the body is not to be used for sexual immorality, but to serve the Lord, and the Lord provides for the body. God raised the Lord [i.e. Jesus] from death and will also raise us by his power. … Don’t you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and who was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourselves but to God; he bought you for a price. So use your bodies for God’s glory.” (1 Cor. 6: 13,14, 19,20 GNB). Dr Ravi Zacharias, a Christian philosopher, appropriately explains that, “the Christian walks with God, not to God. We no longer go to the temple to worship. Rather we go with our temples to worship.” The body of a believer in Christ, rather than a church building, is the holy dwelling place of God and must be treated as “holy grounds.” Thus what this person wears, or touches, or says, or looks at or reads or listens to must uphold God’s holiness.

So much for the Christian “bodies”! What bearing does this worldview have on those who do not subscribe to it? The non-Christian is a prospective temple of God. God wants to live in this person. The Christian explanation for human existence in general is that God made us and not only that, but also that he made us all for himself (Col. 1:16) and he made us in such a way that only in union with him can our greatest good be had (John 10:10). Sin does not allow this to happen. But God became man in Jesus Christ, lived uprightly among us, identified with our human weaknesses, paid for our sins in his death and rose up and wants to live in us to empower us to live as we ought to. Like C. S. Lewis once observed, God invented us in a certain sense like how a man invents an engine. And when a car is made to run of gasoline, it would not run properly on anything else. In this same sense God made the “human machine,” as Lewis puts it, to run on himself.

The fuel we need in order to function the way he designed us is God himself and the food we need to keep our souls spiritually alive is God himself. We cannot expect to function properly on our own terms. Sexual fulfillment (a major hunger of our generation) with its proper joy, peace and security does not come through the pulling down of God’s boundaries. Without God at the centre of a sexual relationship, our much desired real and secure intimacy which we often believe can be found in sexual intercourse will prove elusive. Any person, Christian or not, who tries to outsmart God on this front will soon find that the last laugh is always God’s, not ours; restlessness, emptiness, meaninglessness, broken trust, guilt and shame will ultimately come resting at our door steps. There is definitely pleasure in sin but it is fleeting. Kenyan Christian Apologist, John Njoroge, insightfully says that, “Trying to meet our real needs without God is like trying to satisfy our thirst with salty water: the more we drink, the thirstier we become.  This is a sure path to various sorts of addictions.”

Even in our limited wisdom, we realize that playing our cherished game of football without any rules does not make it really enjoyable. So we have created rules, in all their imperfections. Even with the rules in place, some people hurt others and get hurt themselves; they offend and get offended during the course of the game. Can you imagine the unbridled chaos that would exist if there were no clear rules? In the same way, we are living in an increasing sexually chaotic culture today because we are desperately throwing off God’s moral restraints: husbands and wives are sleeping with people other than their spouses, young unmarried boys and girls are “training” themselves in the act of sex yet ironically the idea of marriage is appearing uncomfortable to them because of its widely acknowledged moral limitations. God has provided a framework within which sex can be properly enjoyed physically, emotionally and spiritually, and it is not outside marriage.

 In God’s scheme of things, according to Christian teachings, you do not need to be experienced in sex before marriage. This is because you have the whole of your married life to get to know your spouse’s body (God’s gift to you) as your bodies lock and your spirits mesh in sexual intercourse before God. With each encounter you get to know the body of your spouse even better to the glory of God. And here is the rich wisdom of the Christian faith (which may seem foolish on the face of it): Any person who genuinely relies on Jesus Christ before his marriage and also during his marriage will be given the grace and spiritual strength to stay the course of marriage should he find out that he has ended up with a sexually defective spouse. Tough to take in, I know, but I cannot make this truth any more appealing than it sounds right now in a time like ours. Marriage is not a selfish enterprise, where if you are not having a sexually exciting life everything else must come crushing down for everyone in it. Rather it is essentially a self-giving worship of God as you commit yourself exclusively to that one person, to love, to cherish and to seek the good of this person always.

 The Christian scriptures teach that all who trust in God will not be disappointed, ultimately. But break God’s precepts on sex (or on any other issue of life) and you can be sure that you will not only separate yourself from God and into a dark loneliness of the soul but you will also hurt yourself and others. Let us be clear: the idea that God is an unloving and unfeeling Judge up there who is simply watching down to see who has gone even slightly wrong so that he may swiftly punish him, is wrong. God wants to reconcile us back to himself. This is the Christian message to the world. God’s precepts in the Bible are intended to facilitate our happiness and not to stifle it. A parent sternly warns her child to steer clear of fire not because she wants to make the child miserable but because she wants to prevent the child from getting hurt or even dying. How can a child enjoy life when he is hurt or dead? If we separate ourselves spiritually from God (a spiritual death), through sin, how can we expect to receive God’s best? God knows the limits within which our best can be had. Stolen waters are not as sweet as we want to believe. Many people may look happy on the outside but on the inside they may be empty, restless, bitter and troubled because they have violated God in this area of sex.

Conclusion

We were made for God and if we spend ourselves in illegitimate pleasures, we will only come away broken and impoverished in our souls (and perhaps with physical scars too). No one enriches his soul by being sexually immoral. Rather we bankrupt ourselves spiritually; we feel the emptiness, restlessness of the soul, the guilt and shame of sin because we have divorced ourselves from God, who is our ultimate good. A more serious side to sexual immorality is that in the end, we must give account of our lives to the God. Some people realize this quicker than others but the important thing is that we are willing to take the necessary steps back to God through the path he has provided – faith in his Son, Jesus Christ. And to be clear, faith in Jesus Christ is not mere intellectual belief in Jesus as Lord but includes a willful commitment to live the whole of one’s life in reverence of him and his teachings. Christ offers forgiveness and rebirth even to the one who has wrecked himself or herself sexually yet is willing to repent. Are you a mess, sexually? Jesus gives hope and strength to those seeking to please God in their sexual lives.

The will of God. Credit: http://holyspiritrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/The-Will-Of-God.jpg

Finding the will of God

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If there is one thing that a lot Christians seem to be confused about, it is the question “what is the will of God?”. As a reflection of the times in which we live, this has been further honed into the individualized form “what is the will of God for me”, leading to variations such as “God will fulfill his purpose for my life” and so on and so forth. All of these then presuppose that there is a will of God for each person, and that if one lives one’s life according to God’s plan, then they will somehow discover this “will”. In fact the word “destiny” has now taken on a life of its own in some circles of Christianity to denote this concept, and pastors spend enormous amounts of preaching time trying to distill how to achieve this in their sermons.

However, we may need to pause and reflect deeper on what the New Testament actually says about the will of God before we run ahead of ourselves. This must be done in keeping with the important rule that Jesus must be the key to understanding God’s revelation of himself in scripture, it is important to first look at what Jesus himself had to say on the subject of “the will of God”.

Jesus

When Jesus came to the world, there was one thing he kept announcing – the Kingdom of God. Within the Gospels alone, there are 50 occurrences of the kingdom of God/Heaven metaphor, with Jesus continuously stressing that this kingdom that the 1st century Jews had been waiting for had somehow come through him. And so he set out what many scholars have called his “manifesto” in the Sermon on the Mount as recorded in Matt 5:1-8:1, and in Luke 6. It is important to note that Matthew’s record links everything that Jesus said from Matt 5:1 all the way to 8:1 as part of that one sermon, and any serious student of the Bible needs to pay attention to this particularity. Although our modern bibles have nice chapter and verse divisions and sometimes headings for different “sections” of this sermon, Matthew says all this was said by Jesus at one sitting.

That being the case, it is important to note the following points

  1. Jesus seemed to be behaving like Moses, receiving a new Torah on the mountain and delivering it to his people.
  2. Jesus actually changed some of the provisions in the Torah, laying out a new way for those who will follow him. Compare what Jesus said in Mt 5:38-42 with what Moses wrote in Deut 19:21.
  3. Jesus was touching on 2 very important things in 1st century Judaism – election (who are the people of God, or the “blessed”) and Torah (what should be the way of life of these people). You will find all over the psalms who the people of ancient Israel called “blessed”(e.g. Ps 1, 16,32,112,119,128). Essentially this was anyone who was a descendant of Abraham or non-descendant who worships Yahweh, and who in addition followed Yahweh’s Torah given to Moses. Jesus turned this election around and said the poor, the peacemakers, the humble, those persecuted for his sake etc. who actually follow him are the “blessed” people, and gave his own Torah as to how they must live if they want to be part of his elect people.

In concluding his speech, Jesus ends with warnings related to all the things he had said. He warned about false prophets turning them away from what he has laid out, then warned that those who “do the will of God”, which he has laid down in this discourse, are those fit for the kingdom. He finally ended by saying those who take his words seriously are those who build on the rock, while those who don’t are those who build on the sand. Not only did he undermine the sacred Torah, he elevated his own words above it by using the formula “you have heard/Moses said” and “I say”.

It is no wonder then that when he finished this sermon of his, “the crowds were amazed at his teaching (Mt 7:28)”. Unlike the Pharisees and Scribes of their time, or pastors and teachers of our time, Jesus didn’t expound the Torah. Jesus actually created new laws and invalidated old ones, behaving more like Moses or like Yahweh himself.

All of this put together should lead us to realize that those who were listening to Jesus at the time would have gotten the following picture, which many rejected because it was contrary to what they knew about Yahweh:

  1. Jesus was not just behaving like a prophet, he was also behaving like God.
  2. Jesus was changing the rules as to who was in and who was out. Being a Jew by birth (or proselyte) and following the Torah was no longer enough.
  3. The will of God was to follow this messiah called Jesus, and not to just call him “Lord, Lord”.
  4. Following this will of God was going to lead to even more suffering than they were already under, and yet that was the way that this messiah required.
  5. This will of God required them to love their enemies even to the cost of our own lives, to care for the poor, sick and disadvantaged, to seek justice for the weak and be filled with mercy, to be faithful to their spouses till death or be celibate, to speak truth without abundance of swearing, to let their prayers be not long and flowery but to the point, to do their deeds of love without public display, to put away anger against their brethren and so on. To sum all this up, this will of God simply required them to follow this messiah’s words and ways, and to make him alone receive all the glory of everything they did in their lives.

The Epistles

This will is what Paul expounds in Col 1:15-23 in such terms of cosmic glory. God’s will was that “he [Jesus] is before all things, and in him all things hold together … so that in everything he will have the supremacy … For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him” (v 17-19 NIV). And so Paul says that Jesus will present his followers holy and blameless in his sight, if they “continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard”(v 23 NRSV. The NIV says “continue in YOUR faith”, which falls too close to the trap of individualism for me. Conversely, as pointed out by Ben Witherington, the NRSV also gets Heb 12:2 wrong with “perfector of our faith”, whiles the 2011 NIV gets it right with “perfector of faith”. Sigh …). Here Paul sounds the same warning as Jesus – don’t call him “Lord, Lord” and yet not follow him, but continue to be faithful to him.

We see Paul again reminding the Ephesians that they were saved, so they can serve.

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—  not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Eph 2:8-10)

Every other place where the Epistles refer to the will of God is to be understood and framed in what Jesus himself has laid down as “the will of God” – following Jesus, and serving others even at the peril of our own lives.

Conclusion

The will of God is that his followers reject the ways of this world and the world’s unwillingness to submit to Jesus in obedience. The will of God is that his kingdom of justice, peace, mercy and compassion, love and care for one another will be made known to the world through the church, Jesus’ community of followers (Eph 3:10-11). The will of God is that men may see that there is a different way that society can exist, and that to find that way is to find the Anointed One who showed that way by giving himself up for us, and to join the people who are living life that way.

There is no separate “will of God” specially created for you different from what God has already defined “before the foundation of the earth” (Eph 1:4;2 Tim 1:9;1 Pe 1:20). God has no special “purpose for your life” other than that you follow Jesus. There is no “divine destiny” for you other than following the messiah, and working for his kingdom and with his manifesto.

If Christians thought this way, they would not be so easily swayed by all the winds of deception and confusion blowing about. They would not need the multitude of conferences and “divine encounters” that are being sold to them everyday. They won’t be worried about consulting “prophets” about whether to marry Kofi or Kwame, or the other important decisions we make in life. We won’t be worried about whether a decision about our lives is “in the will of God”, simply because it will all be reduced to a simple matter of whether it will enable one to continue to be faithful in following Jesus with one’s brethren or not.

If Christians thought this way, they will be less worried about themselves, and more worried about their neighbour. Because the kingdom of God is about what you are doing for others as Jesus did, not how you are grabbing for yourself. And what was it that Jesus said about neighbours?

What is so sacred about sex? – Part 1  

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In the Saturday, May 6, 2006 edition of ‘The Mirror,’ columnist Dr. Clayton Clay wrote an attention-grabbing article titled, “Pornography and a young mind.” In the article he recounted a problem a single mother told him she was facing concerning her five-year old son.  The young boy got an erection whenever his mother touched him to either give him a bath or dress him up. Initially doctors had told the woman that it was normal for boys his age to wake up in the morning with an erection. But apparently this boy’s case was more than that. Anytime he saw what he thought was sexually exciting, he got aroused like nobody’s business, and this included his mother’s touch.

 

The woman said that on one occasion she saw her son pick up a pillow and simulate sex in reaction to a love scene on, Promise, a soap opera on TV. She said she gave him a good beating for this behaviour which she considered immoral. Sometime later the woman received a report from the boy’s Day Care centre that he was caught inserting his fingers into the genitals of a girl in his class. The mystery of this boy’s puzzling behaviour was unravelled for the mother when she took the boy to his father’s house, where he often spent his holidays. The mother discovered a pile of pornographic videos and magazines in the bedroom of her estranged husband. Apparently, these materials were what  had so decimated the innocence of this young mind that he now could not help but associate the female body, even his mother’s, with the delights of sex.

 

In a subsequent article in the May 13, 2006 edition of ‘The Mirror,’ Dr. Clay reprinted a letter from a 51 year old man who confessed that, “I am always thinking about sex.” The man stated that he had two wives and also two sex mates. “I call them two sex mates because that really is what they are. I am more than able to satisfy all four women. As if that is not enough, I visit prostitutes as well.” he wrote. The details were simply stunning, for he seemed to be pushing the meaning of the word “Addiction” to new heights. He confessed, “I admire women with broad hips and big buttocks and I carry with me memories of such women anytime I see them into the secrecy of the toilet, bathroom or bedroom, work myself into imagination and enjoy myself.” He had been in the habit for 36 years. “… I cannot imagine masturbating at the age of 80. But in all probability that is what is going to happen,” he said helplessly. He also confessed that he had tried to stop this habit through repeated New Year’s resolutions but all had failed.

 

Further, somewhere in 2011, I listened to a woman being interviewed on one of our local radio stations about her sexual life. She was a well-to-do widow who was in a primarily sexual relationship with a far younger man who provided her with what she needed sexually. She in turn took very good care of this young man’s financial needs. Asked whether she feared if the young man would one day leave her when he found a younger woman around his age, the woman said she was aware of that prospect but in the mean time the young man was providing her with what she wanted.  She sounded very casual about the whole story.

 A panoramic view

The above stories may seem strange to some, but the signals from some research studies seem to suggest that we are either on the verge of or already in a sexual revolution. A study published in the International Family Planning Perspectives Journal, in 2003 on ‘Reproductive Health Risk and Protective Factors Among Unmarried Youth in Ghana,’ which used a nationally representative sample of 3,739 unmarried 12–24-year-olds, found  41% of female and 36% of male youth reporting that they had sexual experience. Four percent of these females and 11% of the males had had more than one sexual partner in the three months before the survey. In another study published in the same journal that year on ‘Sexual Health Experiences of Adolescents’ in Takoradi, Sunyani and Tamale involving 704 never-married youth aged 12-24, it was found that 52% of the respondents had had sexual intercourse.  Further, the 2008 Ghana Demographic Health Survey (which interviewed 11,778 households) reported that 8% of young women and 4% of young men had their first sexual intercourse before the age of 15, while 44% of young women and 28% of young men had first sexual intercourse by age 18. Thirty-four percent of all never-married women aged 15-24 and 30% of never-married men aged 15- 24 had sexual intercourse in the 12 months preceding the survey.

 

In addition, just recently it was reported in the news that 15 school girls in the Akuapem South District of the Eastern Region, aged between 14 and 16 years underwent Jadelle method of family planning to protect them from unwanted pregnancies because they had made it clear that they could not abstain from pre-marital sex.

 

Our generation is one in which sex and sensuality are not big deals. Why wait till marriage when the movies, soap operas and the reality shows say it is alright to start now? We cannot imagine a pre-marital love relationship without sex. “Eeish, is such a thing even possible?” we wonder. Married folks seem to find it necessary to get someone to satisfy them sexually when their spouses are not within reach. Even the average joke today must have some allusions to sex. Sex is like a free drug to be dispensed to anyone ready for it, (and sometimes even to people who are not ready for it – the cases of abused women and children). Our culture’s sexual temperature is heading towards fever level. In his satirical poem on the modern western mindset, Steve Turner, wrote, “We believe in sex, before, during and after marriage.” This is much like the emerging popular culture in Ghana. We do not believe there should be any set limits on sex except those we impose on ourselves as individuals; we want to have sex, we want to watch others having sex, and we want to dress in sexually attractive ways in public. In public discourses we may affirm that such things as adultery, fornication and pornography are wrong but in private life we deny them.

 

Here is the simple truth: When our minds are not convinced about certain beliefs or values that we advocate, our lives would eventually reject them, and this is precisely what is happening in Ghana today. We are outgrowing the “taboo days”; we need reasonable and convincing reasons why we ought not to have sex with anyone, anywhere and at any time we want.

 

Many of us today live quietly with the belief that everything is alright so long as you do not hurt anyone, to the best of your definition of hurt.  This belief is rapidly working itself out in our lives – for both non-religious and religious folks.  Today we have an expression like “two consenting adults” as if to suggest that so long as there is agreement about the sexual act among two adults, there can be nothing morally wrong with it. We have no moral right to describe a particular sexual act as immoral since the definition now rests with the “two consenting adults.” We play with words now. The weight of words like “adultery” and “fornication,” for instance, have been reduced to mere “cheating.” Thus in an “open relationship” it cannot be said that you have cheated when you have slept with another person. The moral rightness or wrongness of the sexual act is no longer defined in the act itself but rather by the agreement or absence of agreement between any two people – married or not. Everyone else must mind their own business.

 Putting things into perspective

 While a case against such subjective attitude to sexual morality can be made from a social point of view, I think it ultimately cannot hold without a stronger foundation for our sexual moral obligations.  Consider the following thought which I borrow from the former Cambridge University professor and also Atheist-turned-Christian, C. S. Lewis: Let us picture a man on a ship among a convoy of ships on the sea. Now, if this man thinks or says about something he wants to do with his ship, “it is not wrong because it doesn’t hurt anyone else”, he understands well enough that he must not damage the other ships in the convoy, yet he honestly believes that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But does it not make a world of difference whether this man’s ship is actually his own property or not? Does it not make a great difference whether we are indeed the owners or the landlords of our minds and bodies or simply tenants who are responsible to the real landlord? This question is intended to force us to make absolutely sure that our bodies have not been “given” to us by someone else, before we start living to please ourselves. If it is the case that someone else made us for his own purposes, then it is quite certain that we would have a number of duties, which we should otherwise not have if we only belonged to ourselves. But of course, for some, this is a big “IF” because they do not believe (or at least they live as if they do not believe) that there is any higher Being than ourselves, to whom we must be responsible.

….Part 2

Is The Bible A Reliable Historical Document?

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People who dismiss the Bible as unreliable and unworthy of attention often challenge its historical credibility. The average Christian usually does not know how to adequately respond to the sophisticated form of this challenge. For instance a critic might submit as a historical fact, an issue like the council of Nicaea during the fourth century to say that this was the point at which Christians met to change things in the Bible to suit their erroneous teachings. For the skeptic this is a good strategy because if you can prove the historical unreliability of the Bible, then Christianity, which is perhaps the world’s most spiritually and morally disturbing faith (i.e. its teachings hunts the human conscience with the issue of sin in the heart), becomes minced meat. Truth be told, most Ghanaian Christians do not know much about Christian Church history; they hardly look beyond their denominations. Skeptics often argue against the Bible’s reliability with reasons ranging from the Bible being a myth to having contradictions and also to being textually unreliable. Of course, the implication of Christians hinging their beliefs and way of life on a historically unreliable document is very serious; the oft-repeated charge that Christianity goes against reason or intellect will become valid if this is the case.

In fact, there is a growing number of Christian youngsters in Ghana today who are questioning their beliefs about the Bible in the face of some scientific theories, challenges from the popular New Atheists in the West and sadly the irrational behaviour and practices of the present popular Christianity in the country. Christianity in Ghana, in the past, has not faced much intellectual attacks and as a result most present day Ghanaian Christians honestly do not know how to deal with challenges to the credibility of the Bible as a reliable historical document. This is understandable. But Ghanaian Christians need to understand that the times have changed. An increasing number of young people who were brought up on Christian teachings are now rejecting the faith because they are not getting reasonable or intellectually satisfying answers to their nagging questions. Their present number may be relatively small in Ghana, since we have historically not been a very questioning culture. But with more Ghanaians being educated to higher levels, and having easy access to information around the globe, the questions that their curious minds are raising should not be ignored. They must be addressed head-on.

I am aware that there are huge volumes of books that have responded to claims of the Bible’s unreliability so I will not pretend that this short article will exhaustively address the challenges mentioned above. What I want to do here is to whet the appetite of honest skeptics, critics and seekers for embarking on an honest investigation of the Bible’s reliability as a historical document. I use the word ‘honest’ because there are those who, in their rhetoric, give the impression that they are intellectually honest in their search for answers yet who have actually already made up their minds not to seriously consider any evidence or argument that will go in favour of the Bible or Christianity. Such people are not my target readership because I am convinced of the words of the sage who once observed that, “To give truth to him who loves it not is but to give him plentiful material for misinterpretation.” And let me also clarify that when I use the word “Bible,” I am limiting it to the mainstream translations in the public domain which have not been customized for the theologies of any particular church or fringe group. Also this article defends only the historical reliability of the Bible and not the truthfulness of its doctrines, which is a subject for another article.

 

Myth or History

Christianity would not be so disturbing had it not been for its claim that Jesus is the Son of God and that he is the only way to God and also that these claims are recorded in the Bible. For some these claims are uncomfortably exclusive and they find it easier to believe the hypothesis that Christians in later generations actually invented these ideas which the early disciples of Jesus (if there ever were any) never thought of. But the fact is that this is simply not true! If Jesus’ divinity and claim of exclusivity are myths invented by later generations then there must have been at least two or three generations between the original eyewitnesses of the historical Jesus and the universal belief in the mythic, divinized and exclusive Jesus. Why? In the absence of this condition, the myth could not have been believed as fact since it would have been refuted by eyewitnesses of the real historical Jesus. Both his disciples and his enemies would have had reasons to oppose this new myth. Incidentally, we find no such evidence at all of anyone ever opposing the so-called myth of the divine Jesus in the name of an earlier merely human Jesus. The New testament manuscripts from first century show that this idea of a divine Jesus originated from the very disciples and followers of Christ right in the first century and no competent scholar today denies the first-century dating of virtually all of the New Testament.

Further, the claim of Jesus to be God makes sense of his trial and the Jewish leaders’ desire for his crucifixion. You see, the Jewish sensitivity to blasphemy was a unique thing in the Roman world. No sympathizers of any of the pagan religions at that time would have so fanatically insisted on the death penalty as punishment for claiming divinity because the prevailing attitude in the Roman world toward the gods was “the more, the merrier.” For instance, a city like Athens had many altars for the several gods yet just to make sure that they had not missed any god, they made an altar “to an Unknown God” (Acts 17:23). Now if we still want to maintain that the divine Jesus of the Gospels is a myth, then the question begging to be answered is: who invented it? Whether it was Jesus’ first disciples or some later generation, no credible motive can account for this invention. Why do I say this? Until the Edict of Milan in AD 313, Christians were subject to serious persecution. They were often tortured and killed, and hated and oppressed for their beliefs. No one, especially a skeptical first century Jew, would invent an elaborate practical joke in order to be crucified, stoned or beheaded for it!

Textual Reliability

While some people who may have done some research on the Bible love to point out what they believe to be inaccuracies in modern Bibles as compared to earlier manuscripts, others who have done no study on the subject will often use such purported inaccuracies as valid reasons for not having anything to do with the teachings of the book. Can we trust the Bible as we have it today?

When you take the story about Jesus for instance, we have four Gospels rather than one. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written by four different writers, at four different times, and with four somewhat different purposes and emphasis. This makes cross-checking possible. Through a textual comparison, we can fix the facts with far greater assurance here than with any other ancient series of events about a historical figure. Like some historians have observed, “The only inconsistencies are in chronology (only Luke’s Gospel claims to be in exact order) and accidentals like numbers (e.g. did the women see one angel or two at the empty tomb?)” Further, Historians evaluate the textual reliability of ancient literature according to two standards: (1) What he time interval is between the original and the earliest copy available and (2) how many manuscripts are available.

Knowledge of Julius Caesar’s exploits in the Gallic Wars are available today because of ten manuscript copies, the earliest of which dates to within 1,000 years of the time it was written by Caesar, somewhere 100-44 BC. Plato’s writings took place around 400 BC and there are seven manuscripts available today, the earliest of which dates to within 1,300 years after Plato’s death. Homer’s ‘Iliad’ is much more reliable in terms of time gap because the time gap between the date of its composition and the date of the earliest copies available to us for examination today is 400 years. It was composed in 800 BC and the earliest manuscript copy dates around 400 BC. It is worthy to note that all we know about Socrates today is known through his student Plato’s writings yet nobody doubts that Socrates ever existed. Isn’t it interesting then to see people expressing unease or trying to discredit the Gospels just because the disciples of Jesus wrote them?

When we use these same standards above which historians typically use, the New Testament stands impressively tall and without equal when compared to other ancient documents. There are nearly 25,000 manuscript copies of the New Testament books available in Libraries and universities around the world today. John’s gospel has the earliest manuscript copies available to us today in the form of fragments (located in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, England) dating to within 50 years from when the apostle John authored the original between AD 50-100. Which ancient document comes close to this? Further, the earliest Greek manuscript copies available today of the Complete New Testament dates to 225 years from the original writing. This is about half the time gap for manuscript copies of Homer’s Iliad, which is the most historically reliable ancient secular document. This is simply impressive. People who accuse Christians of adulterating and falsifying the current Bible need only to go to the Libraries to do the comparisons. But of course it is easier to claim intellectual honesty while making sweeping statements, perpetuating myths and accusing Christians of rejecting their intellect since most unsophisticated Christians will not be able to put up any formidable defence, isn’t it? Even more interesting is that those who accuse Christians of doctoring the current Bible are hard-pressed to produce any originals with which to compare. In essence, the critic is really saying, “I don’t have any evidence but just take my word for it, your Bible has been corrupted.” Quite sad!

 

As far as the Old Testament (The Jewish Scriptures) is concerned, the standards for making copies were incredibly strict. The Jewish scribes saw the discipline as a high spiritual calling. And the accuracy of their copying has been confirmed by the discovery of the ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ in 1947. Prior to 1947 the oldest complete Hebrew manuscript dated to AD 900. With the discovery of 223 manuscripts in caves on the west side of the Dead Sea, we now have Old Testament manuscripts that palaeographers have dated around 125 BC. These are 1000 years older than the previously known manuscripts. After the translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it has been discovered that the text of the modern version of the Hebrew Bible is 95% identical, with the 5% variation consisting mainly of spelling variations. This is nothing short of impressive. And religiously speaking, this remarkably shows how the Sovereign and All-powerful God, even while working with and through fallible men, has preserved his teachings throughout the ages for the World so that we may all get to know him as he is.

 

Contradictions

Contradiction is a serious thing anytime truth is in question and since Christians claim that Christianity is a religion based on truth, it is crucial that the charges of contradictions in the Bible be looked at carefully. I am sure the critics have a tall list of what is believed to be contradictions that are enough to bury the Bible. But like I indicated in the beginning, this article is meant to whet the appetite of the honest skeptics for investigating the historical reliability of the Bible. For this article I have chosen to look at just a few regarding the story of Jesus Christ in the gospels, in particular, the resurrection of Jesus Christ which is the linchpin on which all of Christianity hangs. Christianity stands or falls on the truthfulness of this story, and thus if the eyewitness accounts are essentially contradictory, then there is a big problem – their story cannot be relied upon. One critic has complained that:

 

“In Matthew, when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary arrived toward dawn at the tomb there is a rock in front of it, there is a violent earthquake, and an angel descends and rolls back the stone. In Mark, the women arrive at the tomb at sunrise and the stone had been rolled back. In Luke, when the women arrive at early dawn they find the stone had already been rolled back. In Matthew, an angel is sitting on the rock outside the tomb and in Mark a youth is inside the tomb. In Luke, two men are inside. In Matthew, the women present at the tomb are Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. In Mark, the women present at the tomb are the two Marys and Salome. In Luke, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, and the other women are present at the tomb.”

 

On the surface, this seems like a combination of hopeless contradictions which should severely damage the narrative about Jesus’ empty tomb. But hold on a moment! Take a closer look at the each of the narratives in the gospels and you will realize that the differences are in the secondary details. There is actually a historical core to the story that can be relied upon – that Jesus’ body was placed in a tomb and sealed with a rock, the tomb was visited by a small group of women followers of Jesus early on Sunday morning and they found it empty but they saw a vision of angel(s) saying that Jesus had risen from the dead. The differences in the names of the women, their number, the exact time of the morning etc do not disturb the core of the story. Besides the differences in the empty tomb narratives actually informs us that we have multiple independent confirmation of the story. Indeed if all four gospels were identical in the smallest details, it would raise suspicion of plagiarism.

 

We must also note how history was recorded back then and how different it is from our ‘journalist reports’ today. The oral transmission of history focused on the major issues of the hero’s life, not the excruciating details of our 21st century style of reportage. Historical documents of that age typically followed this principle and it is not unique to the Bible. “We have two narratives of Hannibal crossing the Alps to attack Rome, and they’re incompatible and irreconcilable. Yet no classical historian doubts the fact that Hannibal did mount such a campaign. That’s a non-biblical illustration of discrepancies in secondary details failing to undermine the historical core of a historical story,” quipped Dr. Lane Craig, a Christian Historian and Philosopher, in an interview with former investigative journalist (also an Atheist-turned-Christian) Lee Strobel. Most of what seem like contradictions in the Bible could actually be resolved easily with some background knowledge and an open-minded reading of the text. It is fascinating to watch people who usually would boast of open-mindedness suddenly switching to closed-mindedness mode when it comes to the Bible.

 

Conclusion

Those who reject the Bible on the grounds of historical unreliability do so not because of the absence of evidence but because of the suppression of evidence or unwillingness to pursue the evidence wherever it may lead. Like I have indicated twice already, my hope is that this piece whets the appetite of honest skeptics who probably thought the Bible was not historically reliable, to embark on an investigative adventure. I also hope that young Christians who may be doubting the historical reliability of the Bible will find some confidence to keep studying about the Bible and come to the point of wanting to study the Bible’s contents and rightly applying them to their lives. The beauty about the Bible is that it stands up to scrutiny. Many have tried to argue against it, destroy it, bury it, and falsify its contents by claiming things it never claimed but the authentic Word of God continues to live on long after its opponents are dead. If God is indeed sovereign and all-powerful God (which he is) then this is exactly what we should expect – he keeps his Word from being lost, adulterated or destroyed. I have little doubt that skeptics who will take my challenge to do an honest investigation of the Bible’s credibility will find that not only is the Bible historically reliable, but its ultimate Author – God – is very trustworthy also.

Is it really seven to one?

/in /by

You know, I had decided to sit my somewhere and think about myself (that’s “Ghanaianese”for minding one’s business) over the recent brouhaha generated by Duncan Williams’ preaching on marriage and women until I read someone justifying his use of Isaiah 4 in his preaching. Then I lost my cool, realizing how Ghanaian Christian leaders need to pay better attention to equipping the saints with the right tools of discernment when it comes to the use of the bible so we don’t waste our energy fighting straw men but focus on Jesus and his kingdom.

BIBLE INTERPRETATION METHODS

Contrary to what most Christians think, especially those of the Protestant lineage, that only 2 things are essential to our understanding of the bible 1) an the ability to read it in plain English and 2) the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Bible is a document that can yield multiple interpretations even with these tools in hand because we all come to it with our own filters, intentional or acquired. It is important then for us to realize that one’s interpretative methods colour how one receives and interprets scripture, and the situation above is a clear case of an acquired interpretive problem of “symbolizing” real historical events in the Old Testament so they can be applied at will elsewhere.

Howard Snyder, Professor of History and Theology of Missions, in his book “Salvation Means Creation Healed”, paints the picture of how Bible study in the Middle Ages adopted an attitude towards the Old Testament that has stuck with popular Christianity till date, despite modern scholarship seriously debunking this attitude. It was basically the tendency to read the Old Testament as symbols and mysteries of a “spiritual” reality. Hear him:

“The fundamental mistake here was to see the Old testament as allegory rather than real salvation history – an error still found in popular Christianity today. The Hebrew Scriptures became the mystical typological background of the gospel, not the necessary historical context within which the gospel can  only properly be understood. Allegorizing the Bible is, above all, a way to get around the embarrassing materiality, physicality, passions, and historicity of the Old Testament… The earthiness of the Old Testament is an embarassment to Neo-Platonic thought”. (Howard Snyder, Salvation Means Creation Healed, pp 22)

It is this approach to the text which allows a picture painted of events that were about to happen (and did happen) in the immediate history of the prophet Isaiah to be taken as “symbol” of how the “end times” in which we supposedly are today would be, even though all the historical evidence points to its fulfillment thousands of years ago. So let’s look at the original passage from which the seven to 1 ratio may have come from, namely Isaiah 4.

ISAIAH 4

Verse 1 reads as follows

“In that day seven women will take hold of one man and say, “We will eat our own food and provide our own clothes; only let us be called by your name. Take away our disgrace!” (Is 4:1 NIV)

It is this passage that is used by Duncan Williams to say that “It’s a privilege in the time we live in when it’s seven [women] to one man”. Let us find out both biblically and logically if we are indeed in such times.

BETTER ATTENTION TO THE TEXT

One of the important principles of bible study is not to read one verse alone as a means of making an argument. Second is to realize that the verse and chapter divisions in the bible are artificial and not inspired by God. With those 2 caveats in mind, it is very easy to step back into chapter 3 and realize what Isaiah had been talking about all along – that Jerusalem will be destroyed for its disobedience to Yahweh.

“See now, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, is about to take from Jerusalem and Judah both supply and support: all supplies of food and all supplies of water,” (Is 3:1 NIV).

The direness of the situation will be such that a person who can afford a cloak is considered better off than others and therefore worthy of taking up leadership.

“A man will seize one of his brothers in his father’s house, and say, ‘You have a cloak, you be our leader; take charge of this heap of ruins!’”(Is 3:6 NIV)

Now the real key to all this is situated here

“Your men will fall by the sword, your warriors in battle” (Is 3:25 NIV)

Isaiah chapter 3 and 4 clearly describe the effects that war creates in any environment, and is exactly what happened during the days of Isaiah. Previously the northern kingdom of Israel had been besieged and exiled by the Assyrian army, now the southern kingdom of Judah was going to face (and did face) being besieged by the Babylonian army in both 598 BC and final destruction in 588 BC. The same things happened again after Jesus predicted the Jewish wars of AD 67-70, leading to the last and final destruction of the Jerusalem temple to date.

CONSEQUENCES OF WAR

Because in most ancient societies, only men went to war, the logical consequence is that the number of men will be reduced as compared to the number of women. The longer the war, the worse this effect is. And in ancient societies where women’s rights were restricted and in which women could only function properly by being under the “name” of a man (either their father or their husband), it was only logical that one man may take on oversight responsibility for more than one woman by marrying them. This is actually one of the main reasons why polygamy was not spoken against but rather regulated by the Torah (and is neither explicitly condemned by the New Testament).

So when Isaiah says that “In that day seven women will take hold of one man …” he isn’t saying anything that takes rocket science to figure out. He’s simply stating what always happens in war and is about to happen to Judah for it’s unfaithfulness to Yahweh.

This state of shortage of men after war is not new in history, but is a recorded observation even in modern history. Following World War II German women’s attitudes towards sex changed due to the shortage of “marriagable”men. Having lost their husbands and other eligible men to war and finding themselves unable to find suitable long term partners, it is reported that they resorted to having sex outside of wedlock in order to be able to also enjoy sexual satisfaction even if they were not married. In the state of Bavaria alone (whose capital is Munich, Adolf Hitler’s former “headquarters”), the ratio fell to 6 men to 10 women, causing a change from 10% of children born out of wedlock to 22% at the end of the war.

THE INTERPRETIVE MISTAKE

The interpretive mistake by Duncan Williams however is to read Isaiah as if he had nothing to say to his immediate culture and therefore everything he said needed to be “spiritualized”to meet the concerns of people who will come 3000 years after him. This is typically achieved by reading everything “Israel” and “Jerusalem” and “Judah” to mean the modern church, and “end times”, “last days” etc in typically a pre-tribulational rapture framework.

Unfortunately for this interpretive method, scholarship and study of both Old and New Testament history shows that biblical prophecy was largely meant to be a commentary on what Yahweh thinks of the state of faithfulness of his people in the time it was delivered, and to summon them back to faithfulness if they have departed from it, or receive Yahweh’s wrath. It may contain some elements that will be fulfilled in the future beyond the prophet’s generation or two, but no right thinking Jew would call Isaiah a prophet and preserve his words for us today if he had nothing to say to his immediate generations. Modern Christians must realize therefore that allegorizing without first historicizing is simply a recipe for error and this Medieval era interpretive tradition needs to be used with a pinch of salt.

In a sermon that I listened to a few days ago, Bruxy Cavey teaching pastor of an Anabaptist church (TheMeetingHouse) quoted another person (whose name has disappeared in my foggy brain somewhere) as follows.

“There are 2 kinds of Christians. NOT those who are influenced by tradition and those who are not, BUT those who are aware of this influence and those who are not”.

This interpretative tradition of reading the Old Testament in only symbolic terms is so 10th century, so let’s move on already.

Rest assured that in the time we live in, there really ISN’T any such ratio of seven women to one man, so let’s have a more constructive discussion about marriage, gender and so on without resorting to these means.