How trying to achieve new covenant ends by old covenant means makes life rather complicated and topsy-turvy.
Postscript 1:
Being a skilled and famous rugby player does not
make a person a sage when it comes to matters of spiritual life. The Church’s standard line on heaven and
hell is old covenant.
The very idea of religion
as we know it is old covenant. The
notion that we humans have some need to determine that another person is going
to hell, or to heaven, is old covenant.
The felt need to ‘preach’
that notion is playing to old covenant fetishes.
The church’s “gospel” is not the new covenant
good news of Jesus but the old covenant bad news of judgement and
hubris. The church’s bible takes the old
covenant documents of Israel and makes them a rule book for the new covenant
era. And it takes the new covenant
documents and turns them into an extension of the old covenant up to the
present. Jesus is read as if he preached
a new religion that is an extension of Israel’s covenant.
I remember in my mid-to-late teens being baptised by the
elders in our local church and then finding this thing happened a bit like Luke’s
gospel describes concerning Jesus: after he was baptised by John, Jesus returned
to his home region “in the power of the Spirit”. News about him spread and he attended the
synagogue where he was teaching and being “praised by all”. Smiles all round; this ‘son’ of theirs was
not rebelling – he was baptised; he was attending synagogue; he was
demonstrating a good knowledge of the scriptures; and he was taking early steps
as a leader in the congregation. The
mums and dads and the synagogue leaders would be pleased indeed.
Luke notes that “all were speaking well of Him, and
wondering at the gracious words which were falling from His lips; and they were
saying, ‘Is this not Joseph’s son?’” I
remember being Cliff and Em’s son and being watched and followed by admiring
eyes and words of praise. But it only
lasts until you say something their ears don’t want to hear. One Sabbath, he turns up at the synagogue,
reads some scripture and makes some comments – with the result that “...all the
people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; and
they got up and drove Him out of the city, and led Him to the brow of the hill
on which their city had been built, in order to throw Him down the cliff.”
We love being ‘praised by all’ in church; but it usually
ends badly. Young upstarts find ‘all’
turn on them if they stray outside expected norms, boundaries and expectations.
This is all the stuff of what apostle Paul fought against
in his travels and troubles. He was continually harassed by old covenant
stalwarts until they succeeded in having him killed. He won the skirmish
in Acts 15 but, overall, lost the war: old covenant rules the Church.
A certain rugby player needs to stop listening to the
pharisees who are teaching him how to be a good pharisee, and try going ‘into
the wilderness’ for a while, alone with God, to be taught what the new covenant
is and what it means. That would be a good time to rip the bible into its
two parts, leave the first part behind, and start reading the second part –
without the alleged help of historic religion and relying entirely upon God to be instructor and
teacher.
A good place to start would be Paul writing to his disciple
Timothy whom he commissioned to go to Ephesus and build up the congregation
there:
... remain
on at Ephesus so that you may instruct certain men [rugby player maybe] not to
teach strange doctrines, not to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies,
which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the administration
of God which is by faith. [But the goal of our instruction is love from a
pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.] For some men,
straying from these things, have turned aside to fruitless discussion though
they want to be teachers of the Law, even though they do not understand either
what they are saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions.
Beware of being instructed by such men! If Paul could
be in the same space as these men today, he would, if he were true to what we
know of him in the new testament, be challenging them with the same force and
heat as he challenged the pharisees of his day. Likewise, if Aquila and
Priscilla were in that space, they would be taking them aside as they did for
Apollos (Acts 18) and “explained to him the way of God more accurately.”
Believing something is by no means the same thing as
preaching it – or feeling the need to preach it. They are two separate
issues. And this is especially important when what you believe is not
simply incomplete but off track and counter-productive. Luke who wrote
Acts recounts Saul (who later became Paul) breathing hellfire and brimstone
throughout the region until Jesus himself (post-resurrection) dealt him a
severe blow, knocked him off his horse, and fully turned him around 180
degrees. Paul himself recounts this experience when called before the
authorities.
Here we are in 2019 and still fumbling around trying to
deal with “freedom of religion” issues; and legal experts have weighed into the
debate. A few days after writing this
section, ABC News ran a piece by their national sport editor David Mark in
which he cites a number of legal eagles proposing what might come next in the
Israel Folau saga. One expert is
well-known employment lawyer Josh Bornstein of Maurice Blackburn. Bornstein is quoted as saying,
Folau
will say 'the Act protects me from sacking because of my religion and that protection should extend to expressing my
religious beliefs', notwithstanding anything in any contract or any
disciplinary process or any social media policy that Rugby Australia or any
other employer has. [My bolding added]
It will be most interesting to see how this plays out. As a
theologian and not a lawyer, I don’t accept that premise and I don’t think it
is either sensible or reasonable. But is
the law capable or competent to rule against someone being in-sensible and un-reasonable? If it were, the U.S. President would be in
real strife.
However, as a supposed ‘bible-believing’ Christian, Folau
ought to be able to self-discipline his tongue based on clear instructions from
Jesus and new testament writers Paul, James, Peter and John. Pet doctrines are not to be used as canonical
precepts to be forced on people as means of social control. Just because any of the new testament writers
said something and it’s recorded for posterity, that doesn’t make it a subject
for random, judgemental preaching.
Neither Jesus nor the first apostles acted that way. We act as if God is incompetent and needs us to do His work for Him.
In essence, theologically speaking, believing something
controversial does not convey or transmit the right to express it for the
purpose of bringing other humans into conformity to it. Furthermore, the concepts of heaven and hell
as we know them are glaring travesties; and anyone not factoring in that
travesty is being very disingenuous – not to mention being jingoistic and
somewhat dangerous.
Like Apollos, if you keep preaching a deformed and
incomplete message, that is the message your ‘disciples’ will, without fail,
repeat. God is the God of the new covenant. If you want people to
be reconciled to God, you'll be feeding them the new covenant not old covenant BS.
And I’m not the only one who has plenty of resources available online to
counter the mountains of Church BS that is lying around. See Mosaic and God Without Religion.
I urge people to stop using fame to pedal a cheap and nasty
message of old covenant law that is – and has been for 2000 years – blocking
and resisting the distribution of the good news of the new covenant kingdom of
God in Jesus Christ. The message of sin and hell evokes entirely the
wrong response from hearers; one does not evoke adoration and worship from a
message of fear and loathing, but of freedom and redemption.
The heaven and hell being preached in so many places is
just a dodgy backyard version of the truth, and doesn’t carry much weight with
God. Invoking God and calling him
to judge by our systems and standards is putting ourselves as much in line for
judgement as those we preach at.
No comments:
Post a Comment