My daughter recently made the observation that popular Christian authors have a theme they consistently return to in their writings. She was able to spout off what Tim Keller and John Piper feel is their unique contribution to the Christian agenda, based on having read a number of their works. “What’s your theme, Dad?” Although both insufficient and misleading, I immediately replied, “God is Jewish.” Let me explain.
The first thing to point out is what I do NOT mean. I do not mean that God cares one whit about the fate of racial and political Israel, any more than cares about his lost children wherever they are found. Of all the great foreign policy blunders of the 20th century, I am persuaded that failing to listen to T.E. Lawrence and giving the Middle East away to European powers at Versailles ranks first. A close second would be Great Britain giving Palestine to the U.N. to turn over to Jews to found a new, theocratic state. Quick reference to Leviticus 26 can explain the fate of the Jewish race from the time of Christ, if, of course, you understand their rejection of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah as having any meaning at all. As far as I can ascertain, all references to Israel in the Bible after the coming of the Messiah refer to the Church, which is Jewish in its roots but ecumenical in its final flowering. Paul goes to great lengths to portray the breaking down of the racial barrier between Jew and Gentile as the mystery of God, for which all creation has been waiting. To this day, Jews remain hostile to the Christian Gospel, and formally reject it as a perversion of the revelation over which they claim sole custody. So I am no Zionist, and contend that crimes committed in the name of God are even more onerous than those committed for more base reasons.
What I do mean by saying God is Jewish, is that the Bible, in both testaments, is a document that is singularly Jewish in terms of its authorship, its intended audience, its literary style and its philosophy. This means the Western or Greek reader must take this Eastern background into account when reading the Scriptures or he’s simply not going to understand what he’s reading. First of all, he is going to come to wrong conclusions. He’s going to think it’s saying things that it is not. Secondly, he is going to miss things that he should be getting, points that the author thought he had presented clearly. Further, I submit that this East/West mismatch has led to the major theological fights in the Christian Church, both Catholic and Reformed, to date. Until this ingrained bias is recognized and taken into account, Christian thought will be paralyzed and the mission of the Church enervated.
First, the wrong conclusions. Christian thought was dominated by pagan and Roman Catholic distortions for over 1,000 years. With the adoption of Christianity as the state religion by Constantine, the old pagan pantheon was replaced by a Christian cast, but the script was not fundamentally altered. The result was that the Jewish concept of monotheism was completely lost in the translation. The subsequent hash was then systematized, to the extent that it could be, by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. After having experienced a personal revelation in 1273, Aquinas admitted that “all I have written now appears to be of little value.” He died before he was able to set matters straight, and the unexpurgated Summa Theologica has become the unquestioned source for all Roman “theology” since. Because the Roman church was dominated by political and philosophical forces from the start, it’s no wonder that the basic message of a loving triune God was immediately lost.
What’s more surprising, however, is that Protestant theology is just as prone to distortions due to this Eastern or Jewish presentation as Roman theology. The reformers attempted to sweep away the human accretions of those thousand plus years and get back to Scripture and the original message of the early Church. Their rallying cry was Sola Scriptura, Scripture Only, and they said that if it couldn’t be found in the Bible, it couldn’t be required of a man. Just what was the Bible saying, though? In their zeal to refute Rome and the counterreformation some of the reformers, notably John Calvin, overstated their case. Will Durant, author of The Story of Civilization, says of Calvin, “…we shall always find it hard to love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense.” What would lead Durant, probably the most circumspect man ever who ever lived, to make this statement? No doubt Calvin’s theory of what has become known as double predestination. Let’s take a look at what this term refers to.
The concepts of election and predestination are Biblical. The words elect and election are not found in the NIV in the Old Testament, nor is predestination in any of its forms. In the New, elect appears six times in the Gospels, always appearing as the words of Jesus, and five times in the Epistles, used four times by Paul and once by Peter. Election appears three times, used twice by Paul and once by Peter. Predestination in its various forms appears four times in epistles, always used by Paul. On the basis of these 18 occurrences, Calvin refuted the Roman doctrine of merited grace and consequent salvation. What was in question was what I call the agency of salvation; that is, who saves whom? For Rome, we save ourselves, with the help of the Church, of course, by putting God into our debt by works or merit and supererogation. The notion that anybody could force God to do anything, and by ascribing debt, no less, was anathema to the reformers. They, one and all, pointed out that God is sovereign, and man can do nothing to force God’s hand. Further, no good thing resides in us, as Paul so eloquently put it, and we can do nothing to earn our salvation. While all this is true, Calvin and his followers went further and said that God simply chooses some for salvation, to show his mercy, and some to damnation, to show his justice. We are elected to salvation or perdition by God’s fiat, and that is that. The fate of the individual is beyond their control, as man is powerless to resist God’s will.
Not all Protestant reformers bought into double predestination. Jacobus Arminius, for example, went to great lengths to point out that for God to elect some to sin and damnation, he would have to be the author of sin. Calvin’s followers took care of this valid objection, however, by making sure that the Arminians were excluded and the Calvinist faction prevailed at the Synod of Dort in 1618-9. Since the closing of that ecumenical synod, Christian thought has stagnated into a pattern of sniping between Roman and reformed, and has never been able to come up with anything suggesting a synthetic solution to the problem of what these 18 Biblical references actually mean. Could it be that the Church has painted itself into a theological corner simply by the way it has read these few passages? I think so.
First of all, who is being elected or predestined here? Calvin assumed that it was individuals who were chosen for heaven or hell. A casual reading of the Bible will show that in the beginning, God’s preferred unit of address is not the individual, but the family, the tribe, the nation, or the even the civilization. When Achan, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram were punished, their whole families were collected and suffered the same fate as those who actually sinned. This is no doubt because none of us acts in a vacuum, and what we say and do is both cause and consequence of our communal life. Although this policy was eventually rolled back and tempered by first Moses and then Ezekiel, the Bible stresses that sin and virtue are corporate qualities that for the most part persist from generation to generation. God says he will punish “the children for the sin of their fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” To say that God does not take our upbringing into account when judging us, for good or ill, is to impugn his integrity. This was Arminius’ argument. God ultimately judges the individual, but he also has strong opinions about culture and ideology that aid and abet the individual in behaving the way they do. So to say that God picks and chooses individuals is only correct when you realize that those individuals are members of a larger group or type. It appears to me that this assumption of individual address is an interpolation due to Greek or Western philosophy, and is contrary to the intent of the Jewish authors of the Scriptures.
This leads to a second question, and that is, how does God decide what group you are in? Although a crude reading of the Scriptures will say that it’s all based on genealogy, which is its own version of fiat, as the Biblical narrative progresses it becomes clear that blood is quickly superseded by behavior. This can explain why references to predestination and election are restricted to the New Testament, are so few in number, and appear only when speaking to or about non-Jews. The letters to the Romans and Ephesians were written to non-Jews, and the pastoral epistles of Paul were addressed to Timothy and Titus, both of whom were involved in ministries to the Gentiles. Timothy was half Greek himself, being from Lystra in Asia Minor. Peter, too, wrote to those scattered throughout the Gentile world, not to the Jews of Judea. Thus, it makes sense that this concept of preordained election was meant to assure Gentile Christians that from before time and forever, God would know of their need for a Savior, and they would be included in his plan to unite Jew and Gentile in one man, Paul’s fundamental mystery of God. When Jesus refers to the elect, he too is implying that those chosen for salvation are a subset of his hearers, whether Jew or Gentile. Viewed this way, election and predestination are not threats to winnow individuals arbitrarily, but rather promises that at no time did God intend salvation to continue on a racial or political basis.
How did a promise get turned into a threat that would be used to browbeat reformed Christians to the extent that they were no more assured of pardon than their Roman brethren? By imposing a Western, individualistic reading on an Eastern, tribal concept. That’s how.
Another major problem that has stymied Biblical scholarship and ministry since the Reformation has been the tendency to read the Bible in a literalistic manner. Archbishop Ussher of Ireland was the first to formally suggest that the world was between four and five thousand years old according to the various genealogies mentioned in the Scriptures. The world, he said, was created in six twenty four hour days, literally. The only problem with this approach is that it doesn’t take into account the Jewish tendency to write not for analytical purposes, but for synthetic. Put another way, science may be the fruit of Western thought, but philosophy is the Eastern root. I quote Will Durant again:
“Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are…But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact: he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken apart…Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.”
It’s not as though Greeks and Jews have a different view of truth, but they do have a different view of what’s important. Take the creation narrative of Genesis. To the Greek it gives a faulty account of the construction of our planet because it says it took place quickly. Therefore, the entire account is dismissed as so much superstition and nonsense. Not so fast, says the Jew. The account tells you about agency, order, priority, purpose and man’s place in the cosmos, if you will enrich your understanding of language. The Hebrew word for day, yom, is translated in the NIV Bible using over forty different words, only one of which is day. It can mean period, phase, duration, many different things, but all pertaining to the passage of a finite period of time. Think of all the ink, to say nothing of blood, spilled because of this misunderstanding not so much of language, but of thought.
In addition to causing trouble when reading how things got started, a literal gestalt will wreck havoc when reading about how things will end. The nonsense of John Darby and his Dispensationalism comes from a desire to read an Eastern eschatology with a Western bent. Whenever the Bible touches on what’s happening in the future or in heaven, concrete concepts fail, and literary liberties must be taken. When Matthew, Mark, and Luke speak of the heavenly bodies being shaken at the coming of the Son of Man, does this mean a literal falling of the planets? I assume it means that those things of which we are most sure, the rising and setting of the sun, for one, might as well be suspended, for all will be lost. This squares with the fact that this figure of speech was used many times in the Bible for other nations and tribes that were being written off by God. By its very nature, the Bible has become a medium of communication across time and cultures, and as such is subject to eisegesis, where foreign meanings can be injected into it if so desired. This puts an added burden on the Bible interpreter, that he be aware of the peculiarities of the time and place of its composition as well as those of his own audience.
In addition to the danger of misunderstanding what is there, there is the danger of missing what the author was actually trying to convey. Perhaps the most distinctive literary device of the Jew is the use of repetition. Hebrew poetry is characterized not by rhyme, but by repetition or parallelism. This is useful, as it translates, while rhyme does not. Further, it conveys something about God and his mode of communicating with us that we miss if we think it’s just a poetic device. Might not a loving God, like a concerned parent, deign to say things twice, whether warning or promise? In his interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream, Joseph said that the fact that the dream was presented twice showed that God was resolved to bring this thing to pass and quickly. Indeed, just about every event of consequence in the Scriptures can be found twice, once performed in history, imperfectly, and perhaps temporarily, and then again spiritually, perfectly, and permanently. For each event there is a counterpart, that is either prediction, promise, or warning on the one hand, or realization, fulfillment, and final installation on the other. You’ve got the Old Testament, then the New. The Law, then the Gospel. Moses, then Jesus. The Red Sea, then baptism. Passover, then the Cross. Genesis 15, then the Lord’s Supper. The list goes on and on. Indeed, the number two can be said to be the numerical concept around which the whole revelation of God revolves.
Western New Testament scholars, however, are slow to appreciate this state of affairs. Paul makes a distinction between justification and salvation. To the western scholar, this is just parallelism, or poetry. To the Jew, however, such a distinction deserves our attention. What Paul is saying, is that man has two problems, guilt and powerlessness. God has two solutions, the death of Jesus and the life of Jesus. The Church has two sacraments, baptism and communion. One, like the death of Christ is unique, the other is repeated, like the continuous drawing we must do from the life of the risen Lord. Failure to make this distinction has lead to much suffering, as disputes arise about the importance of behavior and the role man may or may not have in his own redemption. Until you understand the mechanism of salvation, you don’t really know where you stand in the process, or how to help others who come under conviction. All this imprecision in our thinking and trouble in our mission is due to cultural bias in our reading.
I could go on. Arminius never said what Pelagius did, that we’re to draw good from within ourselves to merit salvation. What he did say, and what I believe the Bible says, is that we’re to stop doing something, that is, protesting our innocence and trying to do things ourselves. The ultimate test of honesty is to say that we are in fact guilty before a holy God. The ultimate test of humility is to admit we can do nothing about it, and ask Jesus to do it in us. All of this requires a change of heart, which implies the exercise of the will. Why did Jesus speak in parables? Why was he indirect in his explanations? To the Greek, this is not only confusing, it is somewhat offensive. Why doesn’t he just come out and say it? We can assume that Jesus did everything for a reason. If God were interested in dispensing information alone, he would have been more straightforward in his manner. Yet God, in keeping with his Jewish nature, wanted to do more. He wanted to engage the will of his hearer, knowing that the propositions being shared carried with them a challenge to personal independence and authority. In order to have the desired effect, all communication had to engage the will, so that the hearer would be invested in true understanding. Again, God is a God of import, not of facts alone. Eastern, not Greek.
This also explains why God did not see fit to leave us a historical record of his self-revelation that is punctilious and comprehensive. The Scriptures, as it says in the 39 Articles of the Church of England, contain everything necessary to salvation. They do not contain everything that can be known, and certainly don’t contain everything about God himself. They do, however, contain enough to persuade the reader of life and death and purpose, if the reader is so disposed. Those who ask for impeccability or undue comprehensiveness in the divine record are revealing that they are not interested in meeting God, they are interested only in explaining and controlling God’s chosen means of self-disclosure. God doesn’t dance to our piping because it would be casting pearls before swine and would change nothing for the hard-hearted.
When I took my first Old Testament class in seminary, the professor opened with a correction. He said, “There’s a vicious rumor circulating that I believe you have to speak Hebrew to go to heaven. This is not true. You don’t have to speak Hebrew to go to heaven, but if, once you get there, you want to know what’s going on, I believe you have to speak Hebrew.” Perhaps this is an overstatement, as good translations from the Hebrew abound. What we should strive for, however, is an understanding the mindset that goes with the language, which couldn’t be more different that that of the Greek or western mindset most of us have grown up with. God had a choice when deciding where Jesus would be born. He could have been born in Macedonia, or anywhere in the western world. He did not go that route. Instead he chose the backwater province of Judea, because it had the culture, philosophy and literary tradition that best coincided with a message of ultimate value that requires the participation of the entire hearer, his heart as well as his mind.
So Martha, my contribution is that God is Jewish. It’s ironic that this should be the case, because many Jews today have become Westernized in their thinking, and have used that thinking to dismiss the claims of Christ. Better we should all, Jew and Gentile alike, start looking not for reasons to not believe, but for excuses to believe, that we might one and all be delivered from the hell of solitude that a critical, analytic spirit inevitably leads us to.
