Sunday, July 19, 2015

Last Moments in Grants Pass

Well, not exactly last. But we are aware of all sorts of little 'last' events. Today I went with J on what was probably our last hike at Cathedral Hills. So great to have such a beautiful place within the city.






 So many new flora from this region we will remember.


Manzanita

Madrone

Last weekend we visited the first local Vineyard since being here. For my pocketbook's sake, I'm glad I waited until now!


And we cannot post enough pictures of the view from our house. It may become redundant to you, but it's because we're always unsuccessfully attempting to capture the majesty of the view we have.





Heavenly Journey

This is a response to a comment made by a friend on FB (an actual friend, not just a FB "friend"). I wanted to post this publicly for various reasons (it's not worth getting in to at the moment). This is a story of my journey on some ideas/thoughts and does not necessarily reflect my wife's position or her personal journey. I also want to make it clear that because I am settled on this subject for the moment in no way suggests this is what I will think ten years hence. I also want to say that this is not a treatise on the topic, but merely an outline of how my thinking has developed. Comments are welcome, but I expect everyone to practice appropriate decorum; uncivil or denigrating comments will be deleted.

My friend made the comment: "I literally can't remember the last time I heard one [gospel presentation] that referred to heaven and hell." The context was a discussion about his concern that 'the church' has been negatively influenced by certain selfish elements of current secular culture. I could respond along various threads from an observation on how woefully the church has bought into various cultural component throughout all of  her history to a treatise on how negative vestiges in the church negatively affect culture (throughout history).  But I won't; my goal is not to make a response. My goal is to discuss my own journey a bit, specifically with regards to Heaven and Hell, to use this as an opportunity to articulate where I am. This post will deal with Heaven, and the fact that I don't believe in it, at least not the way Christianity presents it. The point of discussing my journey is to iterate that it isn't secular culture that has led me to this point (not directly, at least), and to suggest that perhaps (although I cannot speak for all the other 'gospel presentations' my friend has heard recently) the reason many are not talking about Heaven and Hell is a theological development apart from cultural influence (at least in some of the thinking circles in which I run).

So, my response to my friend's comment: That may be because heaven and hell have nothing to do with the gospel.

I know that turns most Christians' worldview on its head. I understand. This conclusion for me has been ten years in development and was entirely unexpected and undesired. Nobody likes to have his or her major assumptions about reality, purpose, existence called into question and upturned. So I don't hope to convince anyone. That's not my goal. I hope to show that seeking truth and arriving at unexpected answers is not the same as cultural assimilation.

It has been about 13 years since I first read N. T. Wright. The first book I read by him was kind of lost on me and I didn't read anything else by him for at least another year. A little while after that, I began frequenting an online forum (Open Source Theology, link no longer available) whose moderator would later become extremely influential for me. There was a lot of dialogue on that site about Scripture, interpretation, cultural assumptions, historical Christianity, etc. The discussions were initially intriguing, but somewhat opaque to me. Andrew's perspective seemed so foreign. But what I did get was a re-introduction to N. T. Wright through a series of lectures he had given for that group (Christian Associates? I can't recall).

Through N. T. Wright I was introduced to an approach to reading Scripture that took what pastors are taught should be important for exegesis (grammatical-historical context) and applied it with a level of rigor and integrity I had not experienced, but craved (for the epistemological reasons for which he developed it he dubbed it critical realism). I wanted truth, no matter what that meant about how I might have to change my own assumptions, beliefs, doctrines, politics, etc.

One night, while arguing (on the forum described above) for a traditional protestant position—that 'preaching the gospel' obviously entailed an explanation substitutionary atonement—I took the evening to re-read Acts and try to summarize all the 'announcement' or 'preaching' events; it was an attempt to get at what Luke considered important to convey about 'the gospel'—what was important to preach. The results shook my world and began an uncomfortable unwinding. I had been wrong about a pretty major issue my whole life. Briefly, a summary of the proclamation events is that when Paul (or Peter or whoever) was speaking to Jews he warned them of a soon coming judgment to be meted out by the one they had crucified but who has now been vindicated as the true king (messiah) in his resurrection, and when he spoke to Gentiles or Greeks the announcement was that the one true God had made himself known through a Jewish King who had been crucified as a pretender but had subsequently been raised from the dead this—King was now Lord (contra Augustus; you had all better side with this God before it's too late). So the earliest and most complete record of sermons we have from the early Christians NEVER contains anything like a 'sinner's prayer,' the 'four spiritual laws,' accepting Jesus as Savior in some privately pietistic way. There was no discussion of "Jesus died for your sins so you can go to Heaven when you die." In fact, a post-mortem Heaven is strangely absent. That seemed pretty significant to me. For something that carries so much existential weight in Christian thought and practice, why was it so hard to find in the New Testament? That would become a recurring theme for other doctrines/dogma in the years to come. (I will be the first to admit I have oversimplified Acts and I didn't recognize then nuances I would recognize now, but this is how the journey was traveled.)

So I reworked for myself (aided by Wright's prolificness) what the gospel is in the NT. What were Jesus' listeners hearing when he announced the gospel of the Kingdom? What were Paul's listeners hearing when he announced the gospel of God in Jesus? Two main streams of thought seem to converge here. 1) Jewish expectations were that at least one chosen figure (messiah means anointed and refers to the designation and approval of a king or priest) would arrive to deliver Israel from the Roman oppressors, set up a kingdom that would conquer the world, rebuild the Temple (or cleanse the one built by Herod, who was building the Temple to build his own legitimacy), etc. Isaiah said this was the gospel—the good news: the announcement that Israel's long suffering and expulsion from the land was coming to an end. 2) The greco-roman understanding of the word was the announcement of the ascension to the throne of a new ruler, or of his birthday. So the gospel, while nuanced in each context, was first the announcement by Jesus that YHWH was about to judge Israel and become King again in the sense of #1 above, and later the announcement by those who came after Jesus that Jesus had been made King over Israel and Lord over the empire. The gospel is not (however true these things may be), for the second Temple audience (leave John out of it for the time being; I'm talking about the early generation of Jesus followers and not the later developed theologies), the announcement that all have sinned and deserve death (i.e., eternal punishment in Hell), that Jesus took each sinners place in his crucifixion and now, for those who accept him as their personal Lord and Savior, can have eternal life.

So I began asking how these stories we tell ourselves came to be. The answer I found, briefly, was that the hellenization of the church happened rapidly. Talk about negative effects of the culture on church thought, a formerly holistic and very jewish frame of reference was quickly replaced by a dualistic greek/platonic one. There is an immortal soul in each individual that needs to escape this sinful, dirty world and live in perfection in . . . Heaven, where God is. The problem is, that's not what first century Judaism(s) offered and it is not what the NT says (except by extracting a few verses entirely out of context and starting with the assumption that the platonic frame of reference is true). One has to believe it already in order to find it there, and that seems unlikely to be a solid rational basis for something that is so popular in contemporary preaching (although largely absent in the last decade, according to my friend, to whom I defer on this point). You may be able to find a proof-text, but it's simply not the story being told.

What is being told is a story about a faithless covenant people who had calculated Daniel's predictions to realize the time was ripe for God's promises about land habitation and a renewed covenant with YHWH to come to pass. Many claimed to be the messiah through which this would happen by leading the revolts. They all ended the same. A man named Jesus made the same claim but said the path through to that new day was not by revolt or by ritual purity and withdrawing from the community but through faithfulness to the most important matters of the covenant document (mercy, love, etc.) which can only happen through radical engagement with the community and the powers in a display of apparent weakness and the narrow path of martyrdom. He took Israel's judgment on himself and bought a generation's worth of time for repentance. He was raised from the dead as vindication and confirmation that he is, indeed, the messiah (despite apparent failure of crucifixion). But other messiahs came and led more revolts. Judgment came and the Temple was destroyed, ushering in the new age. God created both light and dark, and they are both good, but the night is ending and the day is dawning. Israel's Messiah will also be the Empire's Lord, so everyone everywhere needs to turn from idols and worship the one true God who has put an end to sacrifice.

So, the absence of hell and heaven preaching is not necessarily due to compromise with the culture. It might also be the result of an open-hearted/minded investigation into biblical narrative. (Perhaps another post should discuss how the current personal Savior for sinners narrative is a result of cultural forces.)

Addendum
I knew I forgot something. I entirely left out the VERY IMPORTANT moments where I realized resurrection, and not disembodied bliss in heaven, is the hope put forward in the NT, and how that impacts the above journey. Sorry. I have to go to bed.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

Caves and Volcanoes

Some pictures from more of our summer adventures. Good times and good stories, but because I didn't post this soon enough, most of them are forgotten.

In June we took a trip to the Oregon Caves. Very cool. Nice formations. The kids had a blast. We had the tour guide to ourself and he loved how interactive our children are.










Taking exam for their Junior Ranger certificate
Jr. Rangers


In early July, we re-visited Crater Lake.

We found some beautiful falls along the way.





It's actually a caldera, not a crater.



Wizard Island


We have been trying to squeeze in all the adventures we want to have here in the West before our move.

Some fun times with cousins

We sure will miss some of the beautiful geographical features of this region. We are in the final countdown now. The day after my last day of work we will head to San Francisco (where, Eliyah informs us, she plans to live when she grows up. She has never seen it and doesn't understand how crazy expensive that is, yet!).