The Kind of Life which is Lord over the Church…

[In the New Testament] the identity of this exalted Lord of the Church…[is] explored in terms of the human being he was, what kind of human life was lived in this man, what kind of life led to that kind of death. So that what is recognised as Lord in the Church is a life characterised in certain specific human ways. And that characterisation is what the Gospels try to deliver to us. It’s a life which is lived in reaching out to those who are on the edge of religious respectability, those who feel they have put themselves beyond the work of God and the mercy of God, those who don’t have access to the means of making themselves successful religious folk, who don’t have the means of making a success of their lives at all, the marginally poor, the socially marginal, like women and children, and the morally disgraceful and murky, the collaborators, the prostitutes.  The life which is exalted over the community, the life which has authority in the community, is a life which reaches out to and accepts those people who cannot make their own lives satisfactory and successful.  It’s a life, therefore, which in important ways challenges those kinds of human living which do suppose they can make a success of their circumstances and their biography, which do suppose it’s possible to get on top of the world and stay there.  It’s a life, in other words, which from first to last is a sign of hope, not merely in the resurrection, but throughout.  This is the kind of human life confessed by the community of belief as having authority, as being ultimate, as that to which we shall all answer.

–’A Basic Understanding of Christianity for Students’, a lecture given by the Reverend Professor Rowan Williams in Little St MAry’s Church on 19 November 1987 at a meeting of The Michael Ramsey Society.

‘Along the Way’: The Instruction of Children

The older my children get the more I worry about what they will know and understand and believe about the faith I hold so dear.  I know that probably the biggest influence on them is whatever model my wife and I exhibit, i.e. if we are angry, hateful people, they are much more likely to reject the faith and vice versa.  In addition to this, I think a lot about what kind of picture of the world they are getting from the instruction of the Bible and from the church.  (This latter concern is a major reason why I love the liturgy of the church–since it enacts the real vision of the world for us every week–and why I love a ‘big story’ approach to the Old Testament–since it takes the emphasis off being like all the characters of the Bible and places it on God’s own actions and faithfulness in history to bring us Christ.)

I’ve never been very faithful at daily devotions with the kids (although I will keep trying), and so I take comfort in the more moderate path outlined in Deuteronomy 6.6-9, just after Deut 6.4-5, ‘the greatest commandment’ (known in Hebrew as ‘the Shema’):

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.  You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.  You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.  You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on you gates.

Despite the comprehensive nature of this instruction (while doing everything–sitting/walking, lying/rising), there is an easiness to this way: Just do it all the time as part of your daily speech.  You don’t have to make it a ‘big to-do’.  When you add to this that the Old Testament envisions no weekly preaching in its community life and therefore no Sunday school, you realize that this warp-and-woof kind of biblical discussion with children is THE instruction that should (and will) last them for life.  Just keep talking.

This morning that looked like this in our house: The lunar eclipse.  There was a lunar eclipse this morning at 6:45-7:30 AM GMT.  The kids got up around 7:00 AM, and Amelia reminded me to have them take a look.  We’ve been talking a lot about the moon lately, and so by the time the shadow had passed over the whole face, I simply said:

Isn’t that amazing, that something which usually takes 2 weeks to happen happened in about 45 minutes?  The ancient people didn’t know what to think when they saw things like that and it scared them.

To which, Ewan (my oldest, age 7) responded:

They probably asked their demon-gods.

[We've been talking about how God is the only god and how other 'gods' are spiritual beings which the New Testament calls 'demons'.]

A conversation ensued about whether demon-gods would answer the ancients and whether these gods could know the real reason for the lunar eclipse.  Ewan seemed to think they could, but I wanted him to realize how deceitful the gods were and how difficult it was to please them.  I also wanted him to realize just how different God is from the gods.  [Aside: It is a really interesting point about the 'words' described in the Deut 6 quote above that they refer to the 10 Commandments, the first of which is to have 'no other gods before [the LORD]‘ while the greatest commandment (Deut 6.4) says the ‘LORD is one’ (i.e. that he is the only god).  So are there other gods or aren’t there?  Hint: See 1 Cor 8.4-6 for Paul’s take on it.]  So, I said:

Let’s see what the Bible says about other gods.

And I read this passage from Jeremiah 10.2b-10 (pasted below from the ESV, bold added); which, by the way, I found by the grace of God just poking around Isaiah and Jeremiah looking for something written about idols!  Apart from being quoted to me a LONG time ago as a rebuke of the tradition of a Christmas tree (see the part about a tree being cut down), I really can’t say I even remember reading this passage (and obviously it has more to do with the wise men looking at the stars–see below–and the wonder of them seeing something about the Christ than it is about Christmas trees!).  I certainly didn’t realize how appropriate it was to my conversation with my kids; that was sheer grace! (The kind of grace which just seems to come when you try to follow God’s way.)

Notice the first line about the ‘signs of the heavens’.  Also, the kids really liked the part about the ‘scarecrows in a cucumber field’.  They thought that was funny.  They thought the words ‘stupid and foolish’ were ‘good words’ to describe false gods.  (I’ve told them that ‘stupid’ is an ugly word and to not say it to one another, but that it’s ok if they want to say it to the devil.)

All in all it was an amazing conversation about God and gods and what others believe and what we believe.  All from just trying keep talking–day in and day out–about what the Bible says.

‘Learn not the way of the nations,/ nor be dismayed at the signs of the/ heavens because the nations are dismayed at them,// for the customs of the peoples are vanity.

A tree from the forest is cut down/ and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.

They decorate it with silver and gold;/ they fasten it with hammer and nails/ so that it cannot move.

Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field,/ and they cannot speak;// they have to be carried,/ for they cannot walk.

Do not be afraid of them,/ for they cannot do evil,/ neither is it in them to do good.’

There is none like you, O LORD;/ you are great, and your name is great in might.

Who would not fear you, O King of the nations?/ For this is your due;// for among all the wise ones of the nations/ and in all their kingdoms/ there is none like you.

They are both stupid and foolish;/ the instructions of idols is but wood!

Beaten silver is brought from Tarshish,/ and gold from Uphaz.

They are the work of the craftsman and/ of the hands of the goldsmith;/ their clothing is violet and purple;/ they are all the work of skilled men.

But the LORD is the true God;/ he is the living God and the everlasting King.

At his wrath the earth quakes,/ and the nations cannot endure his indignation.

Luke 12.14: Hebrew Background to the New Testament?

In some circles, there is a popular movement afoot to examine the New Testament for its Hebrew background.  This is part of a more general and welcomed approach to take seriously the Jewish nature of Jesus and the New Testament.

One of the branches of this movement seeks to try to reconceive the Gospels as if they had been written in Hebrew or Aramaic.  While I think this latter view is stretching the case (i.e. my sense from working so far in both Greek and Hebrew is that the Gospels were composed in Greek for the widely Greek-reading world of the day), I do think it is possible that the Gospel writers were bicultural/bilingual, perhaps drifting unintentionally between Greek and Palestinian idioms.  We know they at least inherited a tradition with origins in Palestine, even if they were not from Palestine themselves.

Having said all this, I do not wish to engage in this broader debate, but to offer one possible example in this discussion (which may very well be unfruitful but I offer it nonetheless): Luke 12:14.

Luke 12:13-15 (ESV) reads:

“Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” ¹⁴ But he said to him, “Man, who made me a judge or arbitrator over you?” ¹⁵ And he said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

In my research this morning, I came across the following Hebrew idiom (which may well have been carried over into the Aramaic speech of Jesus’ day): To say, “who makes me…?” or “who gives us…?” (or some other appropriate verb) can be an idiom for “O that I were made…!” or “O that we were given…!”

Some examples of this are in 2 Sam 15.4 and Num 11.4.  A good translation of 2 Sam 15.4 reads: “Oh that I were judge in this land!”  Or perhaps a little more literally, “Oh that I were made judge in this land!”  Num 11.4, in English reads: “Oh that we had meat to eat!”

Both of these expressions follow a different idiomatic pattern in the Hebrew.  They read: “Who makes me judge?” and “Who gives us meat?”, respectively.  (See Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, sect. 151.a.1, p.476.)

So, to state it clearly, the idiom, “Who makes me judge?” (2 Sam 15.4) in Hebrew, is rightly translated in English as, “Oh that I were made judge!”

It is this specific verse that made me think of Luke 12.14.  Is it possible that instead of reading, “Who made me judge or arbitrator over you?” that we should instead read, “Oh that I were made judge or arbitrator over you!”?

My question is this: Does this make better sense in the text?

I haven’t thought this over much, I merely ran across it and decided to throw it out there for debate.  A first thought is that it would certainly put a different spin on how we see Jesus there.  Jesus, who, especially in the Gospel of John, embraces his role as judge of the world, albeit coyly (cf. John 8.16), here seems strangely reticent, although perhaps he is just annoyed as in Luke 18.8.  I’ve always read it as an expression of frustration about the sin in Israel, but what if it is an expression of desire for the eschatological end to come now(!)?

I think it’s worth thinking about anyway.

One important, qualifying note about this question:  I did look back at the Septuagint (abbreviated as “LXX”; the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which tends to follow the Hebrew pretty woodenly and whose language impacted the Greek usage in the New Testament), and noticed that the Greek version of 2 Sam 15.4 and Luke 12.14 are almost identical but not quite.  (Side note: Would Jesus be likely to quote Absalom in favor of himself? Unlikely, but intriguing!)

Here they are for your persual (without accents):

τις με καταστησει κριτην – 2 Sam 14.5

τις με κατεστησεν κριτην – Luke 12.14

2 Sam 14.5 has the main verb in the future while Luke 12.14 has it in the aorist.  This means that the formula for the Hebrew idiom has been maintained in the LXX (reflecting the necessary “imperfect” verb in the Hebrew) while the Luke passage is rendered as a simple past and thus not reflecting the necessary tense for the Hebrew idiom.

This means that the only way my idea here works is if we consider the possibility of a scribal change (i.e., tiqqune sopherim) of the verb, i.e. the verb was changed to communicate a question to a later audience who might have missed the idiom of the original text as written by the Gospel writer.  This is possible since the change would make the face-value sentence make a little more sense, i.e. “Who made me judge?” makes more initial sense than the proposed “original”, Hebrew-idiomatic version, “Who will make me judge?”  HOWEVER, there is no extant manuscript that preserves such a reading (using the Greek future tense), so any argument for this reading is one from textual silence.  So, it would have to be a very tentative suggestion.

(Also, to complicate matters, there is a textual variation of–i.e. some manuscripts have–Luke 12.14 showing the possibility of a rendering this way: “Who made me teacher or arbitrator over you?”  This would make the connection to 2 Sam 14.5 even less direct, although not directly bearing on the form of the idiom.)

Nevertheless, I think the idea is worth considering, especially if it makes better sense in the light of the rest of the book of Luke or of this particular section (i.e. pericope).  But I’ll leave that up to others to decide or for another look on another day.

There are Two Choices on Israel’s History… Or are there?

Just a note on this post:  I may have not made it very clear, but one of the things this discussion made clear to me (I felt the ‘penny drop’ in seminar) is that either one chooses (1) Israel’s own history as presented at face-value in the text as theologically significant, or one chooses (2) to reconstruct Israel’s ‘real’ history from the text and look for theological insights (a) from this reconstruction (as you’ve determined it) or (b) apart from it (and in one’s own theological ideas already determined elsewhere).
I was pleasantly surprised to see the illustrious John W. Rogerson laying out nearly the same options in his recent book, A Theology of the Old Testament (see a quality review of it here).  On page 7, he describes this same dilemma in 19th century Old Testament scholarship:

‘…either one had to accept the Old Testament’s own view of the history of Israelite religion or one had to reject it and replace it with a version reconstructed by biblical scholarship.  There was no other possibility.’

I still think there is a third way:  Seeking to see the history of Israel as it is being portrayed, which I see as sometimes literal and sometimes quite figurative.  This is the nature of ancient histories.  The texts themselves should, I think, give us clues as to what it is trying to do, but the texts also expect a large amount of common worldview with its intentions, so this is a challenging exercise.  One example, is the text saying that when Moses got to Sinai, he thereafter established a full sacrificial system or is it saying that such legal, priestly texts developed over time (as seems obvious to us who read it now).  We can see the ‘layers’ in the text, but is that the same as the text intending us to take them into account?

That’s a tough one, but so far I would say that the ‘devil is in the details’–meaning, as I walk step-by-step through passages which have been presented as self-defeating to the coherent sense of the inductive meaning of the text, I find a way through it is always there.  There are so far always cues to the reader to help us see.  I will let you know, if my Third Way, runs into problems.  But so far, so good.

Thou Shalt Not Kill — A Linguistic-Theological Look

After my recent post, ‘An Update on Questioning the Exodus’, I got an interesting response from a friend who had some further thoughts which I thought I would discuss and answer here.

He says:  Yep. Read it. I like the bit about the chronology actually being written like a movie script where you cut in and out of various events. That’s immensely helpful in approaching the story. The only part of Exodus that really gives me trouble is the numbers – 600k versus 20k, etc. But after having seen many other botched translations from the … See Moreoriginal Hebrew at various points in the Bible (the most obvious being the mistranslation of “Lo Tirtsach” into “Thou Shalt Not Kill”), I’m willing to rest on that one also being another one of those lost-in-translation issues.

My reply:  Glad you enjoyed it. RE: לא תרצח (lo tirtsach) I’m not sure what you are getting at. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ looks to be an adequate translation to me.  (RE: the numbers. As I mentioned, I have more on this, but it will have to wait until later.)

His reply: Most of the sources I’ve found insist that “retsach” specifically refers to murder, as opposed to the general ending of a human life, which would be “nakah.” So the most accurate translation would be “thou shalt not murder.”
This also answers those who claim that God commanding the Israelites into war contradicts his own commandment to not kill… See More. If “Lo Tirtsach” means “thou shalt not murder” and “Lo Tinkah” means “thou shalt not kill” then there is no contradiction because killing in battle isn’t retsach, but rather nakah. Retsach falls into the category of nakah, but not all nakah is retsach.

Now for my answer, i.e. this post:

Ah!  If it were only this easy!  I think you’re partially right.  I think it’s pretty clear that the sixth commandment is about murder not about military operations or the ethics of soldiering.

 I think we should recognize that the problem of Israelite war, esp. in the Conquest (of the Promised Land under Joshua), is a problem of the Bible’s own making and not one that we can attribute very easily to the ‘grand’ conscience of the modern secular world.  What I mean is that Gen 9.6 introduces the problem of any shedding of blood as guilt-producing, and it is hard to imagine this idea in the Ancient Near East apart from the Bible.  I know only some about Ancient Near Eastern texts on ethics, but I would be very surprised to find any texts that explicitly rendered an accounting (i.e. payback) for all bloodshed as stated in Gen 9.5b-6, which reads as follows:

From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.

Therefore, I think it is quite likely that (1) it is quite likely that secular, ethical objections to the Conquest come from the influence of the church on secular society, i.e. originally from the Bible itself, and (2) that this means we probably should not try to answer this objection based on a linguistic argument from the sixth commandment.  (Instead, it needs us to see what difference the command of God–and his reasons for the Conquest, cf. Gen 15.16–makes on ethical behavior versus our own determination to shed blood.  Also, see 1 Chr 28.3 for an interesting example of how Gen 9.6 and war might be seen as not necessarily completely at odds.)

All that being said, you’re right that tirtsach תרצח (root rtsch רצח) means ‘murder’.  Specifically, though it means the slaying of a countryman (or so says HALOT, the most comprehensive and up-to-date scholarly lexicon).  So, this means that war would be excluded on lexical grounds.

I said that ‘Thou shalt not kill’ might be an adeuqate translation because tirtsach can also cover unintentional killing, what we might today term as ‘manslaughter,’ cf. Num 35.6-12.  I think the point of the commandment then is not simply ‘Do not murder’ but also ‘do not take a life of a countryman in anyway.’  Obviously, you can’t effectively command someone not to do something that they didn’t intend to do in the first place.  But the law can still place that behavior as unlawful, and the Bible handles that complexity in a really interesting way in its ‘cities of refuge.’  Thus, there is a command ‘to take care for life’–’be careful so that no one dies as a result of your actions.’

Also, the breadth of this word allows us to prosecute people like David, who although didn’t technically ‘murder’ Uriah, he certainly could be brought up on charges of ‘slaying his fellow countryman’ by not taking care of his actions to protect life.

(By the way, if it meant to say that it would probably use the word harag הרג not nakah as you suggest, since harag means ‘to kill’ where nakah means ‘to strike’–often with a plague or just wounding someone, not always unto death.  Also, see מות (in the hifil) and קתל for a more complete picture of the different kinds of words for slaying someone.)

A word study in the different words for slaying, killing, and bringing death, sounds morbid at first, but thanks for this question because it helped me look more into the inner logic of the Old Testament and how it sees this extremely important area of ethics.

Take care!

A Brief Word on Women’s Ordination

On the occasion of the ordination to the priesthood of my friend and colleague at Christ Church Plano, Susan Freeman, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on women’s ordination at this time in Anglicanism in America.

(I say, a ‘few’ words because to really tackle this issue rightly I would need spend a lot more time on: (1) what Christian corporate discernment looks like, i.e. it looks nothing like an issue so hot that only hotheads seem to handle it in a kind of blogosphere battle royale as currently seems to be the case far too often; (2) what actually is ordination, i.e. what office(s)/role(s) of the Old Testament are being fulfilled in the New and in the church today–which I find curiously absent from most discussions on women’s ordination.)

I had a wonderful chat not long ago with a dear friend and colleague who is a priest in the Anglican Communion of North America (ACNA) but who sees the question of women’s ordination slightly differently than me.  It was a wonderful conversation in many ways because even though we disagreed on a few points, we were able to identify some real areas of agreement, and I felt like it was a fruitful conversation worth reflecting on.  In it, I felt a way forward from the violent words often spoken on this issue (from both sides).

First, my friend and I agreed that for us as low-church, evangelical Anglicans the question of women’s ordination was not related to questions about the elements.  There is a real division here even within ACNA about what is happening in communion with the elements and therefore what role the priest plays in presiding over the altar/table.

My sense is that, for ACNA, there should be grace in this area.  One of Anglicanism’s strengths is our diversity within the bounds of orthodoxy.  For me, orthodoxy does not demand such a low-church view of the Lord’s Supper that every Anglican who partakes of it should have no concern for the gender of the priest.  I can understand why some with more high church leanings feel the necessity of a man as priest in some of their liturgical rites (for various reasons).  I don’t hold that view and niether does my friend, but I can understand and respect it.  (I saw this kind of respect demonstrated beautifully for me at Trinity School for Ministry where students and professors disagreed but where you would see quiet absentions from women-led Eucharists or careful, loving theological conversations as opposed to showy protests or biting tongues.)

For me, that means that when we gather as a broader community, we, out of love and deference for one another, have only men celebrate the Eucharist.  But back home, in our own parishes, we should be allowed to celebrate with female priests, if allowed by our bishops.  (On whether women should be allowed to be bishops, I have not decided what I think.)

2.  My friend and I agreed that a woman’s ordination to the priesthood does not depend on Scriptures about teaching.  Many non-liturgical Protestants draw the line here since there is such a singular emphasis on the preaching of the word as the only sacrament delivered by the pastor (although they’d probably cringe at the word ‘sacrament’–I know I did!).

For me, the passages which seem to preclude women from teaching (e.g. 1 Cor 13.33-35; 2 Tim 2.12) are off-set by so many other passages where women are teaching or are prophecying (1 Cor 11.5ff; Acts 18.26; Rom 16.7) which in all likelihood held more authority than mere teaching (see Craig Keener for more on this) that I cannot see a strict prohibition against women teaching.  (There are many more points to be made as each passage is exegeted, but I will leave well enough alone for now.)

Likewise, we agreed that many women seem to be gifted in teaching (e.g. Anne Graham Lotz’s preaching has caused not a few to re-think their theology about men being the only ones allowed to preach!) and that consistency in this theology might require women to be precluded from teaching boys during that most formative teaching period of a person’s theological life–childhood!  (Almost noone can bear to be consistent about this, because, for one, they would have to withdraw women from teaching their boys about God in the home.)  Would it also keep women from evangelizing their own husbands?  To avoid these difficulties, one has to show that ‘men’ in Scripture does not include ‘boys’ or ‘unconverted men’ or that ‘teaching’ is different from ‘evangelizing’.  Such arguments can be made defensibly, but to me, not persuasively.  I have learned (and continue to learn!) too much about the Lord from the women in my life to call it all disobedience to God.

3.  Then, where my friend and I differed is on the question of ‘headship’ (and probably ‘eldership’ although this word never made it into our conversation, per se).

I am inclined to see male headship as a dynamic within marriages that I can’t fully express (I don’t see it as an ethic, but a way we look like Christ, which calls women to not overpower men and men to give themselves for women); whereas my friend sees male headship as ’the protection and provision of men over their wives and families (cf. Eph 5.29).’  This view he extends to churches because ‘churches work like families and in some way model the way families should function, especially in this world where gender-relationships are so confused.’  Therefore, for him, women should not be excluded from ordination to the priesthood but should not be heads of congregations, female priests should only function under a head male priests.  (By the way, in this position, my friend joins our illustrious elder-statesman of Anglicanism, John Stott, in his Commentary on 1 Timothy.)

I agree with him (a) that our world is full of confused (and stife-ridden!) gender relationships (more on this later), (b) that one of the basic biblical models for a church is a family (which necessarily means that while pictures of families affect churches, the opposite is also true), and (c) that there is a such thing as biblical masculinity and that ‘provide and protect’ are very good contenders for such a definition (I also like ‘gentle and strong’).  Where I struggle is with ‘headship’.

This has always been a tough one for me.  Scripture is clear: ‘the head of a wife is her husband’ (1 Cor 11.3); ‘For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.’ (Eph 5.23).

Where I have struggled is: ‘What does this headship mean?’ and ‘What, if anything, does it have to do with the church (as opposed to just the family unit)?’  I have wondered, ‘Are you saying every man is the head of every woman?  But the Bible doesn’t say that, and I can’t imagine any other guy telling my wife what to do, when I’m not around as a demonstration of his headship!‘

I have been taught (by egalitarian professors) that it never meant ‘leader’, it meant ‘source’ as in ‘headwaters’.  While I agree that there are multiple indications where the idea of source is in view for Paul (e.g. 1 Cor 11.8; 1 Tim 2.13), it seems absent in the Ephesians reference, and even more difficult for me is the use of kephale (Greek for ‘head’) in the translation of the Old Testament into Greek.  Along with the idea of ‘first, beginning’ (e.g. Ezek 40.1; Num 10.10), rosh (Hebrew for ‘head’ which translated as kephale in Greek) has definite titular and authoritative connotations (e.g. Num 1.4; Deut. 33.5).  The latter seems more applicable to families while the former is related to calendars and objects.

It is hard for me to imagine a Greek and Hebrew-speaking rabbi like Paul using the word kephale to describe source when he would have been so enmeshed in kephale as the patriarchal ‘head’ of a family.  If he had wanted to only describe ‘source’ he could have used something like aitios (Heb 5.9).  I can only conclude that something of traditional familial headship is in mind for Paul even if he grounds it in an ethical framework that equalizes gender relationships by reminding them of their interdependency (cf. 1 Cor 11.11-12, see below) or even if he sees the Gospel radically re-orienting what those traditional relationships might look like.  (I see Eph 5.21-33 in this light.  There is of course a lot more that could be said and should be said about the patriarchy of the Old Testament–how much of it is perceived, real, and/or intended by God.) So, perhaps men, by their nature are the unifying, ‘public’ face of their families.  (Does this work in the analogy to Christ and the church? I think, yes.)

This idea of interdependency is something my friend, and I landed on pretty strongly.  We both agreed that this world desperately needs a witness to gender strife where men and women live lovingly and in mutual submission out of response to their need for one another and their *created* interdependence.  Consider this quote:

1 Corinthians 11:11-12   Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God. 

There are several things I disagree with complementarian theologians on, but I have to say that when all is said and done, many of the practitioners of this model are trying to empower women (and not keep them underfoot as they are accused of by secularists).  They are trying to give a solid definition to what it means to be female in the eyes of God and to call women into that life.  I affirm that.

I disagree with them when they say that that means the man should ‘make the decisions’ or be the ‘spiritual leader of his house’.  (Mini-soapbox: My wife, by nature of her deep involvement in raising our kids as a homemake–by the way, that’s her choice, not mine for her–spiritual educates and leads our children all the time!  And not just by reading them Bible stories, but by helping them with conflict and showing them loving discipline.  These are theological events!)  But, egalitarians must try to say something stronger about what it means to be ‘female’ than merely ‘anything a man can do’.  God did not make us exactly similar–for a reason.  It was to humble us all and make us need each other (e.g. as expressed so in reproduction–this is often difficult to see in given our current fascination with the power of biotechnology).

As with ‘masculinity’, I don’t want to define ‘femininity’ too myopically, i.e. is if only our day or our culture determines the options for femininity, but I do think there is something to be said about a universality of woman-ness, inasmuch as we are ‘created male and female’.  (I like ‘celebrated and nuturing’ as descriptor, so far; remembering these are not exclusive categories which exclude men from sharing some of these characteristics or vice versa.)

All that is to say, interdependency is a biblical landing place where many sides can come together and say ‘yes’.  We may define the specifics differently, but when we get there, the ethics will be cruciform, self-sacrificing, and yet self-affirming, and that’s what we’re shooting for.

So when my friend preserves a place for men as ‘head’ priests, he does so because he wants to see a life-affirming order and blessing given to women.  For him, women need men to be heads, men need women to be the something like ‘necks’ (supportive and, although not seen, integral).

Likewise, when I support women as priests it is in part because I see women and men celebrating at the table together as a sign of our mutuality and our bi-gendered reflection of the image of God (cf. Gen. 1.27).

I think he, and I are very close on this issue.  Whether women are ‘head’ priests or not, is a minimal shift from allowing them to serve and lead in Christ’s church.  I lean toward women serving as priests because our radical interdependency is expressed in Gen 1.17-28 and because it best reflects the equality of genders expressed in the New Testament (Gal 3.26-29).  Although passages like 1 Cor 11.10 indicate that women should dress differently when they minister in church, the way that dress would be reflected today is less than clear, and more to the point, women are specifically affirmed as those who prophecy, publicly, in church (1 Cor 11.5).  (I have been recently interested in the way ‘prophets’ operate relative to the office of elders in Num 11.24-25, 29 and relative to the Eucharist in the Didache.  More on this later, I hope.)  The male-headship model over fellow priests is a position I don’t agree with, but I can see it and I can respect it.  What will help us is, I think, to agree on the key questions and passages and work together from there.

Here are some of my further questions and positions (which may or may not differ from my friend):

While men are typically heads of families in the Bible (and this has deep anthropological reasons which would be hard to detail now, but suffice it to say that male lineage makes it possible to keep fathers in the picture where otherwise they would become merely ‘seed-donors’–since the progenation of mother to child could almost never be questioned in ancient times), women as heads of households are not absent.  Lydia (Acts 16.14-15) seems like a very possible and prominant example, and there are probably others.  It seems hard for me to draw a hard line about male headship in a church, when if we really wanted to be sticklers about modeling a positive family model we might have to consider what is now very popular in Pentecostal churches, the husband-and-wife team lead the church.

I think the real  question is about elders.  ‘Priest’ is not a Greek word and probably comes to us in English from the Old English, ‘preost’, which stemmed from the Old Frisian, ‘prestere’, which stemmed from the Vulgar Latin, ‘prester’, which came from the Latin Language, ‘presbyter’, which is just a transliteration of the Greek, presbyter, meaning ‘elder’.  So, even though we never use it this way now, ‘priest’ has its etymological origins in the concept of ‘elder.’  Is there a way in which the priest of the church today stands in line with the ‘priests’ of the Old Testament?  Maybe, but the connection is unlikely.  The connection to the elders of Israel is much closer.

Here is where I am tempted to say a lot about the nature of ordination right when I should be wrapping up.  So, let me just ask what change does the New Covenant bring to elders.  Is it possible that women could be elders in the church?  Women were not elders in previous generations, I think, at least in part, because they did not have the proper education to lead and teach (although I’d love to see some studies on this).  Is there something about women as a gender that keeps them from being elders when they are clearly allowed to be prophets?

I ask this because I am working in Numbers 11, where the elders are first called together and there the sign of their eldership is prophecying (Num 11.24-30).  If prophecying has not been kept from the women of our churches (cf. Acts 21.9), can eldership?  We know that eldership is not simply about age, but about a gift from God; otherwise only the oldest ones among us would be elder.  Is there a verse in the Bible that says women can’t be elders?  1 Tim 3.2 says overseers should be ‘the husband of but one wife’, but is this meant as an exclusion of women or based on the reality of the context that at that time only men or mostly men were overseers/elders.  It still remains that there is no direct prohibition against women as elders even as there is no direct evidence that we ever had one.

Sidebar: Probably the single most important reason not to have women ordained is out of deference to tradition.  So far as we can tell (and I welcome anyone out there who is a better church historian than me to show me wrong), no woman was ever ordained priest in the churches of God until 25 January 1944 when Florence Li Tim-Oi was ordained by Bp. Hall in order to properly care for the Anglican population in China during the war.  But this does not mean that God didn’t allow it.  Certainly we are not talking about eternal truths about God, but about the good ordering of his church.  Still, we need to be careful with one another and with God’s broader church.  This is my concern about women as bishops, not their qualifications but how we exhibit our unified life as a worldwide community of Christians.

To my mind, in Scripture, there is no clear prohibition against women’s ordination and no clear permission for it, and since the Lord knows we need men and women serving his church, i.e. we need more workers not fewer, and since we are sure of that in Christ there is no division between male and female, no superiority of one over the other. (I am well aware that no good complementarian ever claims men are better than women just living in different roles, but are they overly-dividing the church and inordinately keeping power in the hands of men against the radical equality of the foot of the cross?)  Since there has been this radical in-breaking of Christ’s life on earth where women exhibit the ministry of Jesus in all sorts of ways, I can see no compelling reason against women as priests, even head priests, and many reasons for it.  (i.e. I have a hard time understanding evangelism and missions powerfully going forward by God through women and then pulling women back and saying, ‘No, you have brought Christ to these people, but you may not now lead this congregation because now it is a family.’  Was it not a family before then? When did it make the transition?)

Advocating for women as priests disturbs many in other denominations and many provinces in our own communion.  I, for one, welcome our current state of ‘reception’ for women in the priesthood and want to continue to discern together what God’s will is.  I hope to participate in many careful and considerate conversations on this for years to come.  And in the meantime, I look forward to being a deacon to my friend, Susan, and together modeling a new picture of male and female–creatures of God’s making and in his image, both of us–all gathered at His table, where He is the center of our worship and attention.

I hope the reflections here will help us as we continue our conversation together.

An update on ‘Questioning the Exodus’

Since my last post on ‘Questioning the Exodus’, I’ve had numerous helpful conversations, not the least of which from our Old Testament Seminar this week, where the Durham University academic staff (aka faculty) and postgraduates (aka graduate students) meet bi-weekly to discuss various issues or hear papers from visiting or residential scholars.  This week, we met to discuss the first section of Bp. Colenso’s work, hence my exposure to it in the first place.

It was interesting to see how almost no one in the room (Jewish or Christian; liberal or conservative) was bothered by Bp. Colenso’s accusations about the historical impossibility of the Exodus (or many other sections of the Pentateuch).  Everyone takes the text very seriously but views it for what it is: an ancient text, not a modern history.  The more we discussed the work, the more it became evident that although Colenso tried very hard to take seriously the gap between his world and the text, he simply failed to bridge it.  He kept importing his own modernist assumptions about how a text like this should work and then demanding certain results from it that it could not produce.

One example of this was pointed out by our visiting professor in Jewish Studies, who talked about how the rabbis of yester-year were not bothered by seeming incongruities in the biblical story.  ‘There is no before or after in Torah,’ he quoted.  There is more behind this saying than just this instance, but certainly one implication of it is in the case of Judah’s life. 

In his work on the Pentateuch, Colenso claims that Judah could not have been the age the text says he was when he arrived in Egypt and still done all the things the text says he did.  (I will spare you the details.)  Our visiting Jewish professor said, ‘The rabbis weren’t bothered by the stuff.  They knew that the biblical stories often work like our movies today:  They tell the story of a particular character and then stop, and then pick up with another character and carry on chronologically past the point dropped off with the other character, only to resume the previous story ‘back’ where it left off. ’  Basically, anyone can do the math and see that it doesn’t add up.  That’s obviously not the concern of the story.  It’s trying to lay out a faithful history but in a narrative way, not in a wooden time line.  I found this very helpful as a way of putting words to my sense that Colenso was asking the wrong questions of the text.

Another point during the seminar came from my supervisor as he pointed out Colenso’s lack of attention to the genre of the history he was dealing with, i.e. Colenso didn’t know enough about the Ancient Near Eastern histories with which the Pentateuch was trying to speak in conversation with and speak toward. 

An example of this would be reading Noah’s Ark (a real stumbling block for Colenso) as if it were a common story of the Ancient Near Eastern world but put to ‘different music’ (as it were) in the Bible.  Since the story cannot (on multiple levels) function as a true history of an event, we should wonder whether it ever was meant to.  I do not rule out the possibility that Noah’s Ark happened as depicted in the Bible, but in order for it to have happened that way, God would have to have performed so many miracles in the geology and biology and physics that his revelation to me in heaven of its reality would produce in me the response, ’Good one, Lord!’  I do not reject stories of Scripture based on the supernatural.  I see the supernatural all the time.  In my mind, in this case, it’s just more likely that something like the Deluge occurred, but it’s and old story and what we have in the Bible isn’t a written record of the ‘event’ as much as a story about God and his relationship to humanity.  The task of the reader is to see the cues in the Bible as to which texts are records of events and which texts are more like parables.

A modern, American example might be telling the story of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree but having him lie and then only later after a conversation with a neighboring Native American come back and tell the truth.  We wouldn’t read the story and wonder which Native American and how George Washington knew the language; instead, we’d be aware of the variation on the story from that which we had heard before.  Given the prevalence of the ‘flood stories’ in the Ancient Near East, it’s more likely that this is the way Noah’s Ark was meant to sound, not like a play-by-play.

I’ve gone on way too long about all this, but the point is that Colenso misses this dynamic (and that might not be so much a fault of his intellect as his placement in history).  Many of the early church fathers knew this dynamic (as someone else in our seminar pointed out), but somehow along the way that kind of knowledge about how to interpret the Bible got lost, and we got very scientific and wooden about it.

Colenso sees the problems with this wooden interpretation but can’t seem to get out of it.  He keeps arguing from the same rationale that he is trying to fight, and all the while, as one of my colleagues pointed out, offering nothing constructive to take it’s place.  He has (at least in Part 1 of his work) no positive account for what the Pentateuch is trying to say about God’s activity in events in history.  No wonder he can’t believe in the Exodus.

Of course, all this still raises questions for me about what the history of Israel actually is.  If it’s not as it appears first off, then how can we tell what’s metaphorical, parabolic, or literal?  Given this challenge, it’s no wonder that many just stick to the literal and don’t bother asking tougher questions of the text.  I don’t begrudge this way at all, except that for some, it will not be a sure enough foundation.  Their consciences (like Colenso’s) will nag, and it seems to me, some positive account of the history of Israel is required.

Certainly, much has been archaeologically established since the time of Colenso that gives severe weight to much of the apparent facts of the texts.  Works by Wm. Albright and G. E. Wright of the earlier part of the twentieth century meet more modern writers like Hoffmeier (whose works on the Exodus and Wilderness I intend to peruse at some point) and Kitchen to give us a strong picture of the historical accuracy of the Bible.  But the image is always a little ’off’ and produces still more questions. 

I think this is simply do to the fact that the text of the Old Testament may act as a historical source document, but it is not intended (as a whole) to be one.

At the end of our session, I felt two main conclusions:

1.  I still think there is something going on with these numbers, especially the number of the 600,000 fighting men.  When I brought it up to the group, it was clearly an open puzzle.  No one had a good answer, even if it didn’t bother them that they didn’t.  I have looked into it some this week (as it comes up in the passage I am working on for my MA dissertation and proposed PhD thesis), and I will write about it when it’s ready.  In quick summary, I don’t think the text of the OT is actually telling us that there were 2-2.5 million Israelites.  I think it is telling us there were just over 600,000.  This may still cause some historical problems for a reconstruction of the camp but far fewer.  (If reconstruction is indeed we are supposed to do with number in the first place.)

2.  For me, I am not going to take historical conundrums and documentary hypotheses and reconstruct the whole history of Israel based on complex theories of my own making.  There are too many pitfalls of self-fulfilling what I already want to believe for that to be the best way to understand the history presented in the text.  To me, the text is meaningful because it has a referent.  It is speaking about a real people who experienced God.  To re-draw the history presented in the text as almost all metaphorical, to me, does injustice to the text.  Niether can I blindly try to make the text say things it isn’t trying to say by forcing my historiographic assumptions on it.

In between these two options, I prefer to look for clues in the text about what a passage means and is trying to say.  From there I should be able to say what is and is not meant to be history.  Obviously, this depends a lot on my skill as an interpreter, but I don’t think the skills are that far out of reach and that once done rightly, even the simple-hearted will say, ‘Right, that makes more sense,’ without undermining the Scripture as Scripture.

Perhaps this all only makes sense to me, but that’s all right for now.  I am sharing this journey with you because it helps me clear my head and helps me find my way.  Thanks for reading it and joining me in it.