Wise As Doves

When I was a college freshman here at UT, they had a Freshman Convocation where many of the bigwigs on campus spoke to an auditorium full of us college greenhorns about the history, prestige, culture, and so on of this fine institution.

Afterwards, we were able to mingle with them on stage, visit, network, and the like. I took full advantage of it and chatted with several. When I met the President of the university, I had some nebulous notion of evangelical boldness and asked him something about whether or where he went to church on Sunday mornings.

He was noticeably taken aback and uncomfortable with this rather direct approach from a pipsqueak. He hemmed and hawed a moment before admitting that he probably played more golf than he should on Sunday morning.

What We Are Dealing With Here

"Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes that the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally impossible for us to figure what life would be if those teachings were removed. We would lose almost all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals; all the standards to which we, with more or less resolution, strive to raise ourselves”

- President Theodore Roosevelt

Ol’ Teddy got it half right. The only part he got wrong was the critical part, about it being literally impossible to figure it out. We didn’t have to figure it out, we just did it. Now there appears to be scholarly evidence of our success at doing the impossible. Here’s to us.

"If it Feels Right..." by David Brooks, NYTimes

For us as educators, it explains a lot about why things seem to be harder in the classroom. Our students today are just as smart as they used to be. They just don’t have the same moral compass previous classes had.

Just today there were two incidents that appear to lend agreement to this study.

Holiness versus Legalism

If you’ve been reading TSR for very long at all, one of the themes I often come to is that of God’s holiness, goodness, and righteousness, and how they are surprisingly dynamic, unpredictable and even in some ways, wild. I also explored the idea that God interacts with humanity as a single organism, growing to maturity as a race, not just with individuals. Under this paradigm, the Old Testament, with its Mosaic Law, is essentially God’s version of “don’t play in the street,” “don’t stick things in the electrical socket,” “clean your room,” “don’t color on the walls,” “eat your vegetables,” “mind your manners, please, thank you,” and so on.

I proposed that Christ’s incarnation and the birth of the church was in some ways, our bar mitzvah, or ‘coming of age.’ The rules are lessened and independence increased. This has lead to a wide range of approaches by Christians, from those that largely ignore the Old Testament and the Law to those who largely follow its dictates, well, ok, religiously.

I am currently following a reading plan that will allow me to read the entire Bible in a year. (I’ve done this sort of thing several times over the years, and this is the second year in a row in recent history.) It is good for me because I do get to read the whole thing, and it helps me be disciplined to do so daily. Currently, I am in Leviticus, the third book of the Mosaic Law, and where most of the minutiae are given. So it has been interesting to read it in light of the above perspectives.

Much of the Law we now know is for their protection—the dietary restrictions, the health and safety rules about various diseases and unhealthy situations, and so on. It led to the Jews being healthier, safer, and therefore easier to prosper. Other laws are moral, but even there, most are meant as protection from threats that would not be obvious to people back then. Then there are the ceremonial laws on how to do sacrifices, what the priests’ tasks were, and so on. I know that many of them functioned to keep them aware of their sin nature and the need for a redeemer. As such, they point to Christ’s coming and Redemption (one of the other major TSR themes). Fine.

But there are still some doozies. I know many of those are given with reasons along the lines of ‘because I am a holy God,’ so I conclude that they created a hyper awareness in some way that as God’s people, the Jews were to be different than the other nations, to be separate, called to something higher, even if they didn’t make much sense. There are other laws that I simply don’t get. Why is it that a woman is unclean for a week after giving birth to a boy, but two weeks after a girl?

The idea of uncleanness after birth makes some amount of sense—it gives the woman a chance to heal up before her husband has sex with her again—being told that he’ll be ceremonially unclean if he does, when you live in a deeply religious society like that, and that you’ll have to sacrifice the finest in your flock to atone for it, can be a good motivator to keep the hormones in check for a few days. I also suspect there is something deeper than merely giving the mother a break during a stressful and busy time, but I haven’t studied what that might be.

However, why the gender difference? Given that there are so many GOOD reasons for most of the other laws, leads me to conclude there must be one here too. I just don’t get it. Similarly, most sacrifices must be a male, but some are specified to be a female. Why? The males I interpret to point to Christ, so what about the females? Again, I am fully confident that it is far from arbitrary, and I look forward to learning someday. (Maybe you know and can educate us all—leave a comment!)

So, what? As Christians, we have been given freedom to live in a relationship with God in and through Christ. He calls us friends, and His bride. Yet, that is not done in a vacuum, but in the very context of the Law that Christ fulfilled on the cross. The purpose of the Law was to train us in God’s character, just as our parents raised us in a certain way as children, so that when we have the freedom to act, we do so within the context of our upbringing. If we individually are not taught those ways, then it is difficult to live in a manner consistent with God’s character.

Thus, learning and studying and understanding the Law is a healthy thing for those free from it by the blood of Christ. On the other hand, hopefully we have moved past the stage where we need to be reminded not to write on the walls or clean up our room, and we have the maturity and collective wisdom to apply those principles in a more sophisticated way to other problems and issues that arise in our new-found freedom.

But we cannot apply knowledge and wisdom we do not have.

SDG

The Race to Maturity

It is fascinating to read in Scripture how God views Himself in relation to us. The three main ones are as a Suitor, a Husband, and as a Father. While my comments apply in some ways to all three (and others), I will focus on the parent role.

{To address the ‘nasty patriarchal’ terminology, I believe when God refers to Himself in the masculine it is deliberate. Some support for this is that at times He does make more feminine references. He is genderless in His nature, being able to create the masculine and feminine because both are in His nature, but for various reasons predominantly chooses the masculine. I do not believe it is merely due to the early Semites being a patriarchal culture. My God is big enough to create the style of culture He wants in a people He calls His own. If He wanted to be referred to as a She, He would, and Moses, et al, would have had to jump to it. He’s God, they aren’t.}

What I find fascinating is how God views Himself as the Father to both individuals and the human race as a whole. He cares about individual behaviour very obviously, but He also sees humanity as an organism unto itself. If you read the whole of Scripture, you see Him concerned with nations, tribes and tongues corporately, and that He looks at the spiritual health of a corporate group of humans without neglecting the individual.

But what is most interesting to me is that in His Father role, He can be seen through Scripture raising humanity as a parent would a child, from infancy to toddlerhood, childhood, youth, and so on. In the beginning, He gives very simple instructions, things are given in black and white terms, and disobedience is addressed quickly. As time progresses, He lets Israel try walking on its own, warns when they are going to fall, but lets them, and when they have realized their mistake, picks them up and comforts them.

Eventually, Christ comes. In that moment we see a profound change that people often attribute to the Old Testament God being different than the New Testament God. It isn’t God that’s changed, but the maturity of the human race. In Jewish culture, the bar mitzvah, or coming of age ceremony occurs at age 13. Yet, the boy, barely a teenager, still has all of the teenage years and angst to go through. Yet, he is still, in Jewish Law, considered an adult in terms of responsibility for his own actions.

I propose that Christ’s incarnation was humanity’s bar mitzvah. We treat adults differently than children, so it should be of little surprise that God would treat humanity differently. Instead of prescriptive law dictating what the rules are, God through Christ enters into a different kind of relationship with us that is based on our growing maturity as a race. There is still a lot of immaturity, rebellion, and so on, but there is still a difference.

I realize this is vague. I am not a parent myself nor do I have training in child development. I would be thrilled to get feedback from someone with that background to look at both Scripture and history through this filter and offer insight.

Where are we as a race now? My best guess, looking at the last 150 years, is that we are taking drivers’ ed. Look out Creation!!

SDG

Avoiding TMI

Today, over the phone, a friend was telling me a story about her nephew. Seems the young boy asked his folks over dinner, “How does God make people?” As his parents looked at each other, trying to decide how to answer without overanswering, he continued, “I think he takes bones, covers them with juicy meat and wraps it all up in skin.” Breathing a sigh of relief, they affirmed that was a reasonable understanding.

It is amusing when these episodes arise. The child asks a reasonable question, but one which is beyond their maturity to understand or accept. Often, they are actually asking a different question than the one the adults are thinking has been asked, and so they risk answering the wrong question and making things more uncomfortable or confusing. Wise parents respond by asking what the child thinks the answer is, and by that gauge how much of what type of information the child is really seeking.

As my friend related the story, we laughed at how often we ask God questions that, well, are beyond our maturity to understand or accept, and that, perhaps, that is sometimes why He seems to be silent in answering our prayers. He’s not panicked like many parents; He just doesn’t waste our time with storks, birds, bees.

“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”                                     -Deuteronomy 29:29

SDG

Stiff Upper Lip (or Lack Thereof)

And now for something completely different…

I actually find many (though not all) of the GEICO commercials pretty clever. I think my favorite is the “Drill Sergeant Therapist.” It reflects what I often wish I could tell my students. Things like, “get over yourself,” and “suck it up” rattle around in my brain when someone comes in with the same lame excuse for why their performance is subpar and why I should give them a break anyway.

Don’t get me wrong—when there is a genuine issue, I’m the very picture of compassion and empathy. Jesus does not bruise the tender reed or quench the smoldering wick, and we are to do likewise. It is the 21 and 22 year olds with the maturity of a junior high student that make me long for the times when you could speak your mind. I have found ways to communicate with them at least some of their shortcomings. They don’t always like it, but usually by the time I’m finished with them, they at least acknowledge my point, and a few are actually grateful, which keeps the hope alive.

Still, extraditions from ‘MambyPambyLand” are all too few and too late these days.

SDG