I picked up a copy of Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches: Five Perspectives at the library recently. It’s one of those point/counterpoint books, in which five church leaders (Mark Driscoll, John Burke, Dan Kimball, Doug Pagitt, and Karen Ward) each write a chapter on what they believe about the church’s role, and the other four authors all make a short response/rebuttal.

The first chapter, called “The Emerging Church and Biblicist Theology”, is by Seattle’s own Mark Driscoll - pastor of the Calvinist hipster megachurch Mars Hill Church, blogger at TheResurgence, and all-around bad-boy of the conservative evangelical subculture (Donald Miller’s famously referred to him in Blue Like Jazz as “Mark the cussing pastor”). Mark’s main objective in his chapter, as evidenced by the 700 (!) Scripture verses he references in the endnotes, is “to defend the traditional Protestant doctrines of scriptural authority, the Trinitarian nature of God, and the substitutionary atonement” (p.16, from the introduction by Robert Webber).

Mark represents a passionate adherence to the particulars of a Reformed evangelical theology, and in that sense, is not typically emerging. He is a theological traditionalist leading a cutting-edge church that ministers primarily to the new emerging generation. (ibid.)

I think that his perspective is valid, and I understand the concern of [some] theological “conservatives” that some doctrinal essentials are being overlooked or ignored [by some] in the “emerging conversation”. With that said, however, I think that Mark setting himself up as the arbiter of truth is a bit disingenuous. “This chapter is my attempt to address three of the hottest theological issues in our day and to correct emerging error with biblical orthodoxy” (p.21). I get the impression that he thinks that he’s the only one that does theology; that if everyone else would just read the Bible and take it seriously, they would come to the same conclusions that he has.

The following lengthy quote is from pages 34-35. It’s the climax of his chapter, in which he defines and defends his position on hell:

The following Old Testament truths about hell are worthy of note:

• Hell is unending, conscious, loathsome torment.¹⁵⁹
• Heaven and hell will have people in them forever.¹⁶⁰

Also, Jesus had much to say about hell, including the following:

• The pain in hell will be excruciating, causing “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”¹⁶¹
• The torture in hell comes from Jesus.¹⁶²
• Jesus is coming to throw people into the fiery furnace of hell.¹⁶³
• The physical pain of hell is like being burned in a fire.¹⁶⁴
• Unrepentant sinners will be thrown into a fiery hell.¹⁶⁵
• Hypocrites will be butchered and spend eternity in pain.¹⁶⁶
• God will send unbelievers to the same fate as Satan and demons.¹⁶⁷
• Jesus said the eternal torment of Isaiah 66:22-24 is literally coming.¹⁶⁸
• The punishment of hell is like a painful beating.¹⁶⁹
• Hell is a place of unending torment.¹⁷⁰

Lastly, the apostles also speak of hell in the following terms:

• Jesus will repay unrepentant sinners with everlasting destruction.¹⁷¹
• Jesus today holds the unrighteous in punishment.¹⁷²
• Jesus will rule over hell as well as heaven.¹⁷³
• Hell is like spending eternity in a fiery lake of burning sulfur.¹⁷⁴

---

Footnotes:
¹⁵⁹ Is 66.22-24
¹⁶⁰ Dn 12.1-2
¹⁶¹ Mt 8.11-12; 13.40-42, 49-50; 22.13; 24.50-51; 25.30; Lk 13.27-28
¹⁶² Mt 8.29; Mk 1.24; 5.7
¹⁶³ Mt 13.40-42, 49-50; 22.13; 25.30
¹⁶⁴ Mt 13.49-50; 18.8-9; 25.41; Mk 9.43-48; Lk 16.19-31
¹⁶⁵ Mt 18.8-9; Mk 9.43-48
¹⁶⁶ Mt 24.50-51
¹⁶⁷ Mt 25.41
¹⁶⁸ Mk 9.43-48
¹⁶⁹ Lk 12.46-48
¹⁷⁰ Lk 16.19-31
¹⁷¹ 2Th 1.6-9
¹⁷² 2Pt 2.9
¹⁷³ Rv 14.9-11
¹⁷⁴ Rv 19.20; 20.10-15; 21.8

Honestly, this section has me fuming. To my reading, Mark’s tone seems to be giddy to “correct [this] emerging error”. I can understand and respect that people hold to the traditional doctrine of hell as “eternal, conscious torment”, but I just can’t deal with the smugness, superiority and presumption that he exudes here.

Additionally, I think that his over-eagerness to stand up for orthodoxy causes him to overstate his arguments. I didn’t have the time or energy to investigate all the verses he cited, but two of the claims struck me as preposterous, if not disgusting - and here I find his exegesis dubious at best:

• The torture in hell comes from Jesus
  Mt 8.29 - “What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”
  Mk 1.24 - “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”
  Mk 5.7 - He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!”
  So, some demons ask Jesus not to torture them, and Mark sees this as saying that Jesus does torture? That’s just wrong - not to mention that even if it were a valid argument, the passages in question are about demons, not people.
• Jesus is coming to throw people into the fiery furnace of hell
  Mt 13.40-42, 49-50; 22.13; 25.30 - all variations on The angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
  Quite simply, these verses do not say what Driscoll says they say.

I’m done. If anyone wants to evaluate the rest of his claims, that’s fine; I think I’m going to wash my hands of this whole thing. It’s neither useful nor helpful in living an authentic, spiritual life - rather, it seems to be only concerned with defining the boundary markers of acceptable belief, in order to decide who’s in and who’s out. I’m tired of it.

I got invited to take a survey about eBible. The site has added a ton of great social bookmarking and other features. I’m not sure how much I’ll use it, but you can sign up to be my friend so we can share [Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles voice] bible bookmarks!

Here’s what I suggested:

Add NIV and NRSV, the two translations I use the most. I will not use eBible consistently until these translations are available. I’d be willing to pay a few dollars as a license fee if that’s why they’re not available.

Eliminate the automatic highlighting of verses with commentary - it should be possible to turn this off if desired. It’s very distracting. I did notice that it’s possible to turn off highlighting by opening a new translation column, then closing the first one.

Let the text column width be either adjustable or fill the width of the screen - awkward to have forced line breaks, and have the right 60% of my screen empty. By industry standards for typography, either the linespacing (leading) should be decreased, or the column width should be increased slightly. I’d prefer to be able to control this as well as the font face and style, as reading long texts onscreen is difficult, so being able to customize it helps.

I don’t really like the mouseover-scroll buttons. I’d much rather have something I can click and drag. I know a normal textbox scrollbar wouldn’t work because you can scroll all the way from beginning to end of the bible, which is too much for one scrollbar. Maybe something like a jog wheel, which lets you control the speed at which you’re scrolling.

Two suggestions for the additional translation columns:
-Make it possible to view different passages in each column (not just one passage in different translations). This would involve unlocking the scroll feature, so each column scrolled independently (though I’d also want to be able to scroll them all together when reading one text in multiple versions)
-

Bookmarking:

• The “create new bookmark” popup should be movable, in case it’s blocking the text and you want to refer to it while creating your bookmark.
• If you select (highlight) a word before right-clicking to add a bookmark, the selected word should automatically be added as a topic
• The ESC key should close the bookmark popup

The social features should be more intuitive. It takes way too much digging into the settings pages to find out that you can add friends with whom you can share bookmarks. There should be a link on every page to this feature. Also, it’s not clear what this sharing will look like, so it’s hard to see the benefit (though I do understand it).

“Use” and “Share”, rather than being on separate pages, should be side by side in columns or panes of some type. It’s too much trouble to switch back and forth between them, yet that’s how you’d use the share feature - when reading the text. And when you see something someone else has shared, you naturally want to read the text. They should go together. Also, it’s unclear that there are all these great social features when you’re on the read screen, which is where most people will look first (since that’s all a paper bible has, you wouldn’t think to look for anything else at first).

Top 3 suggestions:

• Add NIV and NRSV, free or for purchase
• Turn off highlighting of verses with commentary
• Make it possible to “use” and “share” on the same screen (e.g. read text and browse bookmarks/tags)

Great platform! Keep up the good work and improvements.

Who were the Pharisees, that often-maligned, ultra-strict sect that kept missing the point about Jesus? Deep into a chapter in The New Testament and the People of God on the various movements and divisions within first-century Judaism, N.T. Wright tackles this question.

Surprisingly, the Pharisees were a lot like us (even though we try not to be like them). Caught between a sincere concern for faithfulness and the daily reality of Roman overlordship, the Pharisees, like other groups within Judaism at the time, were looking for a way to survive, a way to maintain their identity as God’s people, and a way to see God’s will done.

Wright says:

The Pharisees sought to bring moral pressure to bear upon those who had actual power; to influence the masses; and to maintain their own purity as best they could. Their aim, so far as we can tell, was never simply that of private piety for its own sake. Nor (one need scarcely add) was it the system of self-salvation so anachronistically ascribed to them by the Christians who knew little about the first century but a lot about the Pelagian controversy. Their goals were the honour of Israel’s god, the following of his covenant charter, and the pursuit of the full promised redemption of Israel. p. 189

That doesn’t sound so bad. So why were the Pharisees so obsessed with purity, and so enraged by Jesus’ challenges to their overly scrupulous rules?

Wright suggests that the Pharisees came to see their focus on purity as a replacement for the lost purity of the temple. While they and others were successful at various times at purifying and restoring the temple, it was ultimately destroyed in AD 70, and the Pharisees’ theology was ready to handle this catastrophy - by replacing temple with Torah:

Increasingly, like other Jewish sects of the period (including the Essenes and the early Christians) they regarded themselves and their own groups as in some sense or other the replacements or the equivalents of the Temple. They also appear to have regarded themselves in some sense as prophets, whose traditional role always included speaking out on ‘political’ issues. p. 190

This explains why the Pharisees wanted every Jew to follow a standard of purity not demanded by the Torah:

…they tried to maintain purity at a degree higher than that prescribed in the Hebrew Bible for ordinary Jews under ordinary conditions… And it seems most likely that, whether in great detail or in symbolic gestures, their purity codes bore some familial relationship t the purity codes required for priests when on duty in the Temple. As we shall see later, the Temple functioned as the controlling symbol for the Pharisees no less than for other Jews; and the purity codes functioned as a key means of granting to ordinary domestic life, and in particular the private study of Torah, the status that would normally only accrue to those who were serving in the presence of Israel’s god within his temple. p. 195

This is not a foreign concept to Christians. Paul says:

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

And Peter goes even further:

As you come to him, the living Stone - rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him - you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For in Scripture it says:

“See, I lay a stone in Zion,
a chosen and precious cornerstone,
and the one who trusts in him
will never be put to shame.”

Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe,

“The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone,” and,
“A stone that causes men to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall.”

They stumble because they disobey the message - which is also what they were destined for.

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. 1 Peter 2:4-11

Peter, like Paul, like the Pharisees, is suggesting a shift away from Temple-centered spirituality, and priest-mediated relationship with God. So maybe we are Pharisees.

The PodBible project is an effort by a New Zealand church to record the whole bible in MP3 format and offer it for free download. Quite a bit of the bible is available on their site currently.

If you’ve seen Whale Rider, the NZ accent will sound familiar. Subscribe to this podcast URL to have iTunes grab the new chapters automatically.

The version is CEV, licensed by the Bible Society in NZ. It may not be quite as cool as hearing Johnny Cash read the New Testament, but it’s free and a great example of participatory culture - ordinary church members contributed to a project that will benefit people around the world.

Finishing up chapter 1 of Tom Wright’s New Testament and the People of God for the reading group (italics in original; bold added for emphasis):

Two ways of making [New Testament theology] viable which have been explored turn out upon examination to be ultimately unsatisfactory. The first, which brings together thinkers from Lessing in the eighteenth century to Bultmann in the twentieth, follows the line indicated above, of doing the historical work in order to move beyond it to an ultimate truth which is beond space and time, outside history altogether.

What then emerges is a timeless message, a timeless truth, or a timeless call to decision. This is the thing we can use today. Such a ‘timeless theology’ is then the real object of the historical quest. If and when we discover what the beliefs of the New Testament writers were, we can, like theological archaeologists, unearth the essential subscructure of Christianity in order to carry it off and display it elsewhere, making it available for all generations in some kind of museum.

‘Theology’ then becomes the ‘real’ thing that the New Testament is ‘about,’ the real fruit that emerges when the outer skin of historical circumstance is peeled away. This is often stated in terms of some aspects being ‘timelessly true’ and others being ‘culturally conditioned.’

The problem with this programme is that the skin does not peel away so cleanly. It is very difficult to produce a ‘theology’ from the New Testament that is couched in ‘timeless’ categories, and if we succeed in doing so we may justifiably suspect that quite a lot of fruit has been thrown away, still sticking to the discarded skin. All of the New Testament is ‘culturally conditioned’: if that were to disqualify an idea or a theme from attaining ‘relevance’ to other periods or cultures, the New Testament as a whole is disqualified. p. 20

On the difficulty of finding Jesus in the New Testament:

The largest problem faced by the “New Testament Theology’ project, particularly within the Bultmannian paradigm and its variations, is what to do with Jesus. ‘New Testament theology,’ strictly speaking, does not include the teaching (or the facts of the life, death, and resurrection) of Jesus, but merely the beliefs of the New Testament writers about Jesus, or perhaps those beliefs expressed mythologically in terms of Jesus-stories. It is the odd nemesis of the Protestant principle of sola scriptura that one of the basic models to which it has given rise has little place within its hermeneutical structure or authority system for Jesus himself, since he was the author of no New Testament book. From this point of view, Bultmann was perfectly correct in the famous opening sentence of his New Testament Theology: ‘The message of Jesus is a presupposition for the theology of the New Testament rather than a part of that theology itself.’ …once we grasp the pro me of the gospel, the idea that God is ‘being gracious to me‘, we no longer need Jesus to be too firmly rooted in history. p. 22

To further this complication:

Within any traditional Christian scheme…all authority belongs ultimately to the creator god; and if (as traditional Christianity has gone on to say) this god is made known supremely in Jesus, then Jesus, too, holds an authority that is superior to all writing about him. Many, of course, will suppose this to be a false antithesis, since what we know about Jesus we know precisely in these writings. But this will scarcely hold within mainline ‘New Testament theology’, in which, as we have seen, it is axiomatic that the gospels do not give us direct access to Jesus, but only to the theology of the evangelists and their predecessors. If all authority belongs to the creator god, it is a matter of some delicacy to describe how such ‘authority’ comes to be vested in the New Testament, and what the limits of this might be. p. 24

Thus, the first major section of the book is devoted to these questions of historical and literary criticism of the New Testament. While this can fairly be considered a boring topic, distant from the “application” we constantly seek, it will be necessary for Wright’s later rigor in describing the New Testament in its historical and literary context.

I am working on some, er, postmodern spirituality stuff with Luke over at UrbanMonastery. Yes, I know that’s vague, but check out chapter 1, and contribute a page if you are interested. It’s pretty freeform, so anything goes.

[If I had the photoshop skills, a monk would be pointing at you Uncle Sam-style now, but alas, this alt text will have to suffice. Image courtesy of Jeremy R. Thanks!]

I have been making some gradual improvements over at UrbanMonastery.com, the site dedicated to Christian spiritual formation, reflection, and action. There used to be a wiki (powered by MediaWiki, which is what they run at Wikipedia), but it was getting spammed constantly (i.e. 20-30 times a day). MediaWiki has very poor anti-spam measures, and it’s a bear to customize, so I dropped it in favor of Drupal, which I was already running on the main site. No spam, and easy, WordPress-like templates.

I’ve added a few new features, and hope to continue doing so. Drupal supports PHP embedded in posts, so it’s pretty flexible. I realized today that my spiritually formative activities are a mixture of scripture reading, prayer, blogging, and sheer geekery, so I might as well accept that and spend the time constructively at UrbanMonastery rather than starting a bunch of new websites (I’m sure I have over 30 now, mostly inactive).

Some features, new and old:

• RSVP - Rapid Serial Visual Presentation speed-reading applet - great for reading scripture fast, and with remarkably high comprehension
• Talk to God - simpler than you might think. Prayer, plus Ajax. Sweet.
• Several nascent books (semi-wikis), to which you can add pages. There’s an edit feature in there somewhere, but I haven’t figured out how to make it available to everyone. For now, if you want to rewrite something, make it a child page of the original.
• Our documentary on prayer

I would love to have more available, both in the “hey, that’s cool” category and the deeper spiritual reflection and prayer writing. Aaron once talked about a prayer request application, too, so that’s a possibility for the future.

If you would like to contribute, head over to UrbanMonastery.com.

According to this incredible NYTimes article (link will be dead soon - cache it now), the pseudepigraphal Gospel of Judas has been discovered in a 66-page codex from Egypt:

The entire 66-page codex also contains a text titled James (also known as First Apocalypse of James), a letter by Peter and a text of what scholars are provisionally calling Book of Allogenes.

Discovered in the 1970’s in a cavern near El Minya, Egypt, the document circulated for years among antiquities dealers in Egypt, then Europe and finally in the United States. It moldered in a safe-deposit box at a bank in Hicksville, N. Y., for 16 years before being bought in 2000 by a Zurich dealer, Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos. The manuscript was given the name Codex Tchacos.

Now that it has been examined by scholars and found to be authentic, the Times has a thoughtful and balanced analysis of the text’s implications for Christianity.

The Gospel of Judas is only one of many texts discovered in the last 65 years, including the gospels of Thomas, Mary Magdalene and Philip, believed to be written by Gnostics.

The Gnostics’ beliefs were often viewed by bishops and early church leaders as unorthodox, and they were frequently denounced as heretics. The discoveries of Gnostic texts have shaken up Biblical scholarship by revealing the diversity of beliefs and practices among early followers of Jesus.

As the findings have trickled down to churches and universities, they have produced a new generation of Christians who now regard the Bible not as the literal word of God, but as a product of historical and political forces that determined which texts should be included in the canon, and which edited out.

For that reason, the discoveries have proved deeply troubling for many believers. The Gospel of Judas portrays Judas Iscariot not as a betrayer of Jesus, but as his most favored disciple and willing collaborator.

Scholars say that they have long been on the lookout for the Gospel of Judas because of a reference to what was probably an early version of it in a text called Against Heresies, written by Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, about the year 180.

Irenaeus was a hunter of heretics, and no friend of the Gnostics. He wrote, “They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.”

While providing a contrasting perspective to the canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Judas is not very “da Vinci Code,” which is a good thing:

“Correctly understood, there’s nothing undermining about the Gospel of Judas,” Mr. Robinson said in a telephone interview. He said that the New Testament gospels of John and Mark both contain passages that suggest that Jesus not only picked Judas to betray him, but actually encouraged Judas to hand him over to those he knew would crucify him.

The reconstruction of the manuscript was funded largely by Ted Waitt, founder of Gateway computers. Via OST

So much to discuss. I’m interested in the statement about the historical and political forces that shaped the canon, and how our knowledge of this process may have undermined a higher view of scripture. What do you think?