As believers these sort of stories should serve to remind us of the burden we bear. We know we’re far from perfect. We know we’ll do things that offend others, sometimes egregiously, and even sometimes intentionally. There’s always that possibility; it comes from being human. And the burden is that when we do so, the world around us will blame our church, our faith, our Lord, rather than put the blame where it belongs — on us.

It’s the fallen nature of humanity that wants to do this. We know that, but there’s no easy way past the world’s refusal to accept this. Instead the world rejoices in the knowledge that we’re no better than everyone else. Missing the point, of course, that the entire premise of Christianity is, in fact, that Christians aren’t any better than anyone else.

And we know we aren’t. The sad truth is that, since we aren’t, some of us also behave contrary to this realization. Just as others, some of us act as if our religion has somehow elevated us, the admonitions of Paul to the contrary, making us better than the rest. And why? Simply because we’ve been forgiven?

We have to realize that just as glory may come to Jesus through our actions, so may opprobrium. The door we open with one hand may get slammed shut by the other. While we pray to bring glory through our actions, we often omit to pray that our actions also not bring shame to our Leader. For, in the last analysis, the Jesus the world sees is the Jesus we put on display in our lives. That is our responsibility and our privilege. Please God, let us not abuse it.

There is also the conundrum on the other side of this. How does the non-Christian separate the actions of the follower from the leader? It’s not logical to blame Jesus, or Christianity, for the actions of those who claim to follow, but the urge is strong. Why should they resist? After all, to do so is to give themselves permission to follow their fallen nature, rather than struggle against it.

Aye, there’s the rub. I can’t really fault them for their choice, wrong though it may be, because I know from my own experience that to act any other way is difficult, and I couldn’t do it on my own, without divine intervention.

Mr Johnson claims to have made his “peace with the Prince of it.” It’s obvious from the note he hasn’t; he’s simply decided to accept his own decision to reject that Prince based solely on the actions of some of the followers. It’s tragic but as I said, understandable. And the sad truth about those burned in this way is they become even harder to reach a second time.

The lesson Mr Johnson intends to teach is valuable. Forgiveness is indeed essential to life. Ever tried to walk a straight line forward while looking backwards? It can’t be done. Holding on to grudges and past wrongs, imaginary or real, only impedes progress. It is essential for us to forgive. But that’s only half the story. It’s equally essential for us to be forgiven.

And the lesson Mr Johnson didn’t intend to teach us is just as important. We stand in the place of our King, representing Him to the world. Our actions bring not only praise and blame to ourselves, but they also reflect on Him. This is a fact of life, however unfair we may consider it, and we have to behave accordingly.

It’s our responsibility to minimize the “collateral damage” done by our own actions to the cause of our King. In these two named, and countless other unnamed, we have failed. We need to learn those lessons well, lest these tradegies proliferate.

Ben Witherington, author of the Gospel Code, which I wrote about earlier has located a stellar example in the events in Amish schoolhouse.

We can learn much from the example of the Fishers, mother and daughter. Both of them stood up, at a time when the rest of us would have excused them from the duty, for what they knew to be Right, to be Good.

If it is true that Evil is analogous to a SuperBall, bouncing around this planet at high speed, knocking over breakables and creatng havoc, then there are really two responses that have any efficacy. One is to harden everything, so the ball will not break it (or us).

The cost of that option is that the ball will then bounce off the hardened surfaces at high speed, rebounding in another direction where it will inevitably find something (or someone) else less hardened, where it can create destruction and agony. For that is the ultimate purpose of the ball, to bounce off everything and everyone in its path.

The second response open to us is to absorb the impact ourselves. While a Superball will bounce quickly and crazily off the hard but irregular surface of a brick wall, when it encounters a cushion, it will not bounce at all.

When we stand up, as the Fishers did, we say in effect to the Evil “this far and no farther.” The ball that is Evil then may break us, as when the invader shot Marian, but in doing so it loses momentum. And when her mother, surrounded by friends and neighbors, stood up and extended the hands of freindship and forgiveness, the ball’s momentum was completely extinguished.

I recently passed through a similar (in kind, but nowhere near similar in severity) trial. Would that I could have passed the test as well as the Fishers. God give me strength to do so the next time.

The major difference between Witherington’s work and the rest is that he limits himself to pointing out just seven major errors, occupying less than the first third of his book. The rest of his book is spent in analysing the deeper errors, made by some more renowned scholars, which tend to feed into books like The DVC.

Witherington spends most of the book challenging the revisionists, those attempting to rewrite church history, exposing just how little they actually know about the subject and how biased their aproaches are. He points out that such revisions are possible only if one succumbs to “historical amnesia.”

Along with pointing out errors of history, Witherington spends a lot of time describing the major players and the questions confronting the church councils of the fourth and fifth century (along the way pointing out that the canon was pretty well established centuries before the council proclaimed it, with only a few books questioned and a few more proposed — BTW, none of them were gnostic, the favored son of the revisionists). He also suggests that we should by all means examine the gnostic texts, but in doing so we should be sure to subject them to the same rigors of criticism we subject the “orthodox” texts to (and when we do so, none of them survive the scrutiny).

One of the good things about this book is the amount of “positive knowledge” to be gained from it. Most books from this category are flooded with “negative knowledge,” that is to say, they give you a long laundry list of things Brown asserts that aren’t true. Here we are treated to a fairly well-done overview of what actually happened; the book spends more time teaching you what actually occurred than it spends on what didn’t occur.

He travels through the early history of Christianity, showing us how most of the cannon was settled in the second century, before any of the gnostic literature even appears on the scene. Even if you haven’t read DVC (or, like me, aren’t interested in debunking badly-written fiction) the book is a worthwhile read, as it’s one of the better overviews of early church history I’ve run across.

But I’ve saved the best for last. Witherington doesn’t just drop these things on us and say “trust me, I’m a scholar” as all too many do. Here’s one of my favorite quotes:

This book has in some respects been hard-hitting, but I don’t want it to impede the search for truth about Jesus and early Christianity. All leads should be followed and all evidence evaluated (and not ignored, much less destroyed) — the same critical scrutiny that is applied to sources like the Gnostic Gospels should be applied to the canonical material as well. Fair is fair. But when we examine all of the evidence and clues, we find that our oldest sources are still the best sources on Jesus and the history of early Christianity.

It’s rooted in a principle I’ve always held dear: the Truth is never afraid of questions. In any fair comparison, the Truth will emerge victorious.

The Gospel Code. Highly recommended. And I’ve added another author to my “watch for” list.

I’m not sure when it started, but here in the US we’ve fallen hook, line and sinker for the old utilitarian definition of value. Your worth is what you do. A person’s value is directly related to what they do and have done.

Don’t believe me? Try this sinmple test: Ask anyone what they do (ask yourself, even). It’s nearly certain the response will be phrased “I *am* a(n) blank” with the blank replaced by the name of an occupation. In other words, they are defining themselves by their occupation.

That’s the trap we’ve all fallen into. It’s not scriptural, it’s not Christian. In fact it’s as far away from the Christian point of view on the subject as one can get. But it’s still a prevalent thought pattern. One that we need to break.

I am *not* a web developer, I *do* web development. I am *not* a writer, I write. The man who makes shoes for a living is *not* a shoemaker. He makes shoes. Shoemaking is what he *does*, not what he *is*.

As long as we continue to see each other in these utilitarian terms, however, we’re prevented from seeing each other as God wants us to, as unique creations with intrinsic value. As long as we see ourselves in this distorted mirror we can never become what it is God wants us to become.

I *am* a unique creation of the all-powerful creator of the known and unknown universe. So are you. We are both here because that all-powerful creator wanted us to be here. He (I’m using the traditional gender pronoun, but God is so far beyond any petty definition of gender that the term is really used only because that’s the metaphor He chose to relate to us through, and we should not be confused enough to apply limitations from the pronoun to the Person Himself) had a reason, known to Himself,for our existence. We are valued by Him enough for Him to cause us to be, so we really should respect that decision, and God Himself, enough to extend courtesy and respect to each other by default, not as some supposedly precious gift that only should be bestowed rarely, but as the natural right belonging to every unique creation of the Creator.

We’ve lost our way, and we need to find it again. We need to realize that simply by existing we are valuable. That person you disagree with so vehemently is still a person, and hence valuable. They are not obstacles to be overcome or tools to be used; they are people. The convict, the preacher, the flim-flam man, the congressman, the carpenter, the shoemaker, the vagrant; all are unique creations and therefore valuable in and of themselves.

This is a view at once inconvenient and necessary. Inconvenient because it reminds us directly that we ourselves are not the center of the universe, that there are other people who are affected by our actions and therefore who need to be considered before we take action. Necessary, because only when we truly accept this can we ever sit down and deal with others with courtesy and respect. And it’s only through courtesy and respect that we can reach the accomodations we must make with each other in order to keep this world from becoming the land of the eyeless and toothless. We have to get along while we’re down here on the planet, and that’s the only way we can acheve that.

I know I’m guilty of failing to do this. I know I have work to do. Join me?

It makes some very good and very interesting points. Frankie isn’t the thinker his father is, but who is? His main point is that Christians are ghetto-izing (that neologism is mine, so don’t blame him) themselves in the arts. Christians are creating subgenres of almost every art form by prepending the word “Christian” to it. And the entries in these subgenres aren’t very good. “Christian movies” (a subgenre close to his heart, as he is a movie maker himself) for example, have lower production values and the acting is worse than in their mainstream counterparts. And worse, the writing and plotting are stale.

Can his premises be argued with?

About the only market right now where I think he may be demonstrably wrong is in Christian music, which seems to me to be as rich and vibrant an area as mainstream music, though not a few artists have found it confining, even so. Christian movies and Christian fiction (with the possible exception of Frank Paretti in the last category) all are, let’s face facts, rather hackneyed and cliched. Several other words come to mind, but none of them are “creative”.

What’s the cause? We’ve recently (say in the last century or two) acquired a dichotomy between the secular and the spiritual that shouldn’t exist. It seems to me to border on the old Gnostic heresy that, despite the efforts of the apostle John in his Gospel, has hung on through the years and has even been picking up steam as of late. Schaeffer’s point is that we’ve divorced sprirtuality from “real life.” Being spiritual became something we did in addition to, but separate from, our daily life. God, Christianity, and religion had no real bearing on our lives outside of their compartment.

At the same time as this was developing, a utilitarian view of the arts and even each other began to appear, which Schaeffer credits to the advance of Darwinism.

The result of the first was that God, Who should be seen as the creator of the whole person and Christ as the Redeemer of the whole person, became limited to just the spirit portion. (This is what I said harkens back to the old Gnostic heresies which maintained that Christ could not have actually been human, because all material things are evil, and only non-substantial things could be good. John effectively demolished this rather absurd view in his Gospel, but no one has paid much attention ot him, it appears.)

The result of the second is that a tree, for example, ceases to be valued as what God created it to be, i.e., a tree, but instead becomes valued only for what it can do for us, from supply shade to building materials. The value of a person wasn’t intrinsic to the person, as God’s unique creation, but rather the value was derived from the works of the person, what they contributed.

Both of these attitudes are unscriptural. God looked at all he had created and pronounced it Good. No mention of any sort of utilitarian riders or codicils. Not conditional upon the measure of productivity. No strings attached. Nothing held back.

Christianity, if practiced the way the Bible clearly shows it should be practiced, isn’t tucked away in a corner of your life. Christ was buried with criminals and after being raised from the dead he ate breakfast. We are full beings, and Christianity is for the complete person, not just for a a part of us.

This is the way God designed the world to work. There is no such thing as a religious truth. Either truth is, or it isn’t. And if it is, it affects life on every level, not just a part of it. We all hope to do something worthwhile in our lives, but whether we manage to succeed in that or not, our worth is securely founded on the fact we are each a unique creation of God, made in His image. That’s not conditional.

Schaeffer points to the absurdity of phrases such as “full-time Christian service.” Every Christian, no matter what they are doing, from sweeping floors to programming computers, to preaching in the sanctuary to serving food in a soup kitchen, is involved in full-time Christian service. Every creative work of beauty glorifies God and celebrates His gift to the artist.

In the physical world the absurdity is obvious. If the man who repaired your car or built your house did a bad job, but offered lots of Christian platitudes, you’d still not employ him again. (I can speak personally to that point, because there is a roofing company in town who wears Christ on their sleeve, yet I had to call them out twice and even after the second trip they still did not perform the job I was paying them to do. I haven’t, and won’t, call them again to a job. It’s not that I don’t think they believe in God, or that they really aren’t Chrisitans. It’s just they don’t do the job, and at the end of the day that’s what they should be doing.)

But we are inundated with mediocrity in the arts, and the justification is that “someone might be saved” by encountering it. Someone might be saved after contemplating the fate of a frozen homeless person as well; does that mean we should actively create more homeless pepople so more can freeze to death on our streets? Of course not. But people accept excuses for the arts they would never in a million years accept in other areas. The fact that God can bring good out of evil does not mean we should not oppose evil. It only means God is powerful.

We need to remember that God is glorified by quality, not quantity. If 100 formula-written books come out, how does that glorify God. Can we really believe that a mountain of medocrity means anything special to God? Martin Luther observed that a cobbler glorifies God when he makes a good pair of shoes.

When you do what you do with excellence, with all your skill, when you bring to bear all of your God-given talents to produce something, it glorifies God. “Whatever you do, do as if you do it for Christ, not man.”

There are, of course limits to this idea. An artistic murder is still a murder. But when we create, we have a duty to God to create excellence, not mediocrity. We are showing God to the world. When the world sees us, the reaction should always be “I want what he has,” and never, “If being a Christian means I have to settle for writing what he’s writing, I don’t want to be one.”

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised by this attitude; in a way it’s simply a religion-specific example of a more general attitude of shirking responsibility among the public. Whatever goes wrong is always the fault of an outside force; it’s never the repsonsibility of, or even within the control of, the person it afflicts.

Are you overweight? It’s not your fault, it’s the fault of McDonald’s for having things on their menu that make you fat. Can’t get a job? You’re being discriminated against, either because of gender, color, ethnic group, or whatever. Sure, sometimes the issues you’re struggling with aren’t your fault. There certainly do exist outside forces which impact all our lives from time to time. Just not every minute of every day.

I can see the attraction of this position. If you’re just a helpless pawn, you absolutely can’t fail. Nothing that goes wrong can or should be held against you. It’s OK if you just sit there and don’t do anything about your troubles; it wouldn’t matter if you tried, anyway, so why waste the energy?

But Christians in particular lack this convenient excuse. A belief in the existence of the devil is a necessary part of Christianity, true. But the belief that he is somehow the active force behind every bad thing that happens not only is not necessary, it runs counter to the witness of Scripture itself. Yes, Jesus cured some people by casting out demons. But he also just simply cured people. The blind, the lame, the leprous, and many more, were cured by Jesus without any reference at all to the affliction being demonic in origin.

We do wrong, to others and to ourselves, all the time, without the active assitance of the devil. Paul, writing in Romans (chapter 7 verse 15) said: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Paul’s point is that the fallen nature of humanity itself drives us to do evil; it’s a natural habit that we must unlearn as we walk with God; and He will help us to break free of it, which we cannot do on our own.

Note Paul does not say “what I hate, the devil makes me do.” He admits, as should we all, that we do it freely, of our own will, such as it is. Someone I know has been doing a lot of research in various sources, including occult, trying to rid herself of an “unwanted psychologocal influence” that exhibits itself in almost exactly Paul’s words, as written above. I wish her luck on her search, but I know she won’t find it where she’s looking. I’ve pointed that out, politley, but to no avail. Some people just don’t want to listen to the idea that it really is themselves, and not some evil external force, that is causing their problems.

We too often give the devil credit for what we ourselves do. I think it’s past time we stood up and took the credit, and the blame, for our own deeds. The devil works enough evil on his own, he doesn’t need to add our own deeds to his resume.

He spoke of a thing he calls Relationship Apologetics, the main idea of which is that it’s the relationship you build that lets you get listened to. It goes deeper, but that’s the surface view.

If you get the chance to hear him in person, do it. He’s a very entertaining speaker, and if you’re not careful, he just might slip enough meat into the soup that you actually learn something as well.

“xxx (name your favorite idea) was dropped from the Bible because the church leaders were hostile to it.”

Let’s talk about the editing practice that went in to the current books in the Bible. We’ll leave out the Apochypha, because the original council didn’t grant them full scriptural status; that didn’t happen until the brew-up with Martin Luther about a millenium later.

Since Erasmus compiled the Textus Receptus (all six different editions of it) we’ve uncovered a boatload of manuscripts from all over the region, giving us looks at the 66 books at various stages going back, in the opinion of one scholar, 1900 years, and in the opinion of a majority of scholars, going back 17-1800 years. Is there even one documented case in the manuscript record of something substantial being dropped?

Not that I’m aware of. (I’m sure those of you with contrary opinions will weigh in on this, and I’m willing to look at the evidence. But don’t expect me to accept just because you say it happened. I want the evidence; I don’t want justifications for assumptions of facts not in evidence.)

There’s the case of Long Mark/Short Mark. But that fails on two counts:

1) The extra bits in Long Mark are in concord with material already in other Gospels, so its disappearance doesn’t cause anything to actually be lost.

2) Current thinking is Short Mark came first, so far from being an example of material being excised, it’s an example of material being added.

And that’s the crux. There is documentary evidence to support additions, but not subtractions to the text. And the documentary evidence suggests that even those changes are not significant in nature. They contain nothing new, but rather seem to indicate that a copyist has become accustomed to writing a specific text pattern, and when the pattern is missing or incomplete, either intentionally or unconsciously adds the complete pattern to the work currently being copied.

So when someone tells you thus-and-so was removed from scripture because the church leaders found it offensive, your first question should be to ask for any evidence of it happening. I’m betting the response you’re going to get will be “there isn’t any; they suppressed/destroyed it all.”

And that will be your cue to toss the idea into history’s dustbin. The idea is nothing more than a pleasant speculation. Right now there is in vogue in places a theory of history put forth by a couple of Russian mathematicians called The New Chronology, the bald formulation of it being that everything you think you know about history is wrong, and has been rewritten recently. There’s list of reasons, but the basic tenet is all history is unreliable. If you accept an idea in the complete absence of evidence, you may as well go whole hog and accept that every event you didn’t personally witness didn’t happen the way you were told it happened. That’s where that viewpoint leads. Problem being, of course, is that it also means that your own pet idea, the one you so desperately wanted to believe was once in the Bible but isn’t anymore, has an equal probability to have not happened either, because those voicing support of it are no more reliable than those voicing opposition.

So when you try and kick the legs out from under the Bible, you kick your own out as well. To believe that something significant has been intentionally dropped from the Bible, you have to ignore more documentary evidence to the contrary than you can possibly amass in support of it. There’s a word for that in biblical scholarship: eisegesis. It means reading into a text something that isn’t there, something that you, as the interpreter of the text, bring to the text from outside. Lots of people do that with scripture, I can’t deny that. Lots of people are wrong. Eisegesis can be fun and entertaining, it isn’t good scholarship.

The Bible can show a long chain of documentary evidence displaying how little it has changed in two millenia. At this point, to suspect otherwise is akin to suspecting that this time, when I jump up high, I’ll not come down.

A big problem, as evidenced by the comment thread, is that both sides never tire of turning the opposition into a straw man, and both keep trying to win the argument by definition. A good case in point is the description of the “anthropomorphic all-God” in the comments. It’s a misstatement of Christian positions to say God is “man-like.” Man is, in fact, God-like. (“Let us make man in our image” — KJV) Is “theomorphic” a word? The point is God is the original, man the derivative being. Characterizing God as “anthropomorphic” is a good way to antagonize your respondent.

What’s my position?

1) I find many of the suppositions made following the theory to be suspicious, to say the least. They may be true, but they don’t make sense to me, and there really isn’t way to test them. They are assertions, which make a sincere (at least most of them do) attempt to cover/explain the currently known facts. But several explanations can manage that, so without being able to test the theories, I don’t see a compelling reason to select one over another.

2) Just because I find it unlikely, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t believe it (there’s another problem in terminology — one doesn’t believe in evolution, one believes evolution; there’s no person there to believe in, after all) and forbid you telling other people about it. This attitude, alas, sets off the howler monkeys on both sides of the question.

3) Also, simply because I don’t see it as true doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. I’ve learned long ago not to limit God’s behavior by my own understanding. I don’t have His brainpower; when I know more, I’ll understand more.

Just to explain more about my point #1 above: Let’s say you know nothing at all about the world. You see a video which shows someone entering rooms in a house and turning on lights. Without being able to set up an experiment to test, you can theorize:

1) There is pressure plate under the floor which turns on the light.
2) There is a motion sensor which turns on the light.
3) The house demands you scratch it on a sensitive area and the light is its pleasure response.
4) The beings in the house have an abundance of energy and they power the lights by touching a contact plate.

(I’m sure there are other theories possible, but that’s enough, I think, to make the point.)

There isn’t an experiment we can perform that will *prove* that life on this planet emerged and developed according to the current theories (I use the plural, because there’s not complete agreement among those who accept evolution — nor is there agreement among those who do not, for that matter) this side of time travel. At best we could demonstrate that it could have happened that way, but even that hasn’t been done, yet.

We look at old bones, and we build fleshy creatures that may only vaguely resemble the actual being in question. You would, for example, have a hard time reconstructing my fleshly body from just my bones. I’ve had the same bones all my adult life, yet my height varies by 5% or more routinely, and occasionally by more. My weight has varied by 60% and more. Now imagine you’ve never seen a human and explain where they carry their body fat. They’re just guesses. Do they hold tegether, yes (for the most part) they do, but so does the future histoy of Miles Vorkosigan, does that mean he’s real? Or the Tharks? How about the Puppeteers and the Kzinti?

You see what I mean? Evolutionary theory is largely guesswork and suppositions, unproven and unprovable. (I once ran in to someone who claimed a computer simulation could prove it. Try as I might, I couldn’t get him to see it was tautaulogical: You build a simulation that runs according to the rules of evolutionary theory and behold, the result supports evolutionary theory! Yah think? Computer simulations are useful tools when we understand the problem domain; we don’t know enough about this one. The problem is when you build the solution into the test, you never can learn anything.) It’s just a case of choosing the set you find yourself comfortable living with.

Anyway, the usual tactic I’ve run into is to assert they say things which they don’t, or to make other, similarly unsupported, speculations about the community of Essenes (for example, I’ve run into folks who proudly assert the Essenes were Christians, or were a sect which followed “True Christianity” — the intent of the last assertion is, of course, to support a claim that all current Christian sects are therefore false). Those who make arguments based upon these assertions manage to shut up their targets, not through the force of Truth, but in the main because the average Christian is notoriously uninformed about Christian history, often accepting rather bizarre revisions of history as fact simply through ignorance. (My daughter’s Advanced Placement European History teacher once stated baldly that the major difference of opinion between Martin Luther and John Calvin was that Martin Luther believed in free will while Calvin didn’t. We went out and bought my daughter an independent study guide for the AP European History exam, so the teacher’s ignorance didn’t hurt her. We’d both learned quite a bit earlier that pointing out errors to this teacher led only to reprisals, not truth, so there was no point in trying to educate the teacher.)

This is a rather long way round to introducing one of my current study topics, the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book is The Meaning Of The Dead Sea Scrolls by James Vanderkam and Peter Flint. It’s an excellent introduction to the scrolls themselves (the current “official” translation of the scrolls runs to 39 volumes; the nasty part of me thinks this is why they’re such fertile ground for fabrication — it’s not likely anyone you’re talking to has read them all). But more importantly, from my standpoint, is they tell the history of the project to translate the scrolls, and debunk a lot of the myths that have arisen around them.

The myths grew in part because of the speed (lack thereof) of publication. Many things slowed the pace of the scholarship, but to speculators outside the only real reason was that there must be something in the scrolls that would completely destroy the orthodoxy of the day, either Christian or Jewish (speculation on the latter rose sharply when Israel wrested control of the scrolls from Jordan after the Six-Day War). I mean it’s obvious that must be the reason for the delay — it can’t be because the work is difficult, or because there are so many things exploding around the scholars that it’s hard to remain there on the job, or any one of a hundred other, more innocuous reasons. It’s human nature to leap to the most malignant reason behind someone’s behavior.

This is a highly recommended read for anyone wanting to know something more (or just something, even) about the discoveries in Qumran. The authors have written a very approachable introduction to a very complex and important subject.