Saturday, 27 July 2019

Old Covenant >>> New Covenant - Postscript

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.

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