The Internet Monk Archives

Richard

This is Middle America. This is the generation of “older people” that I grew up respecting, the people who ran or worked for local businesses, tended to their families, and were involved in their communities. This is the group of people who essentially built the world as I have known it. They fought in World War II, came home and went to school or work, marrying the sweethearts they met before or after going overseas. This is the Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, Crosby and Hope, Bogie and Bacall generation.

This is Richard.

I officiated Richard’s funeral this week, and it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. Sure, there were tears, but many of them were tears of gratitude. Richard had lived 92 good years, was married over 65 years, lived a simple, frugal life with five kids and a number of pets in a proud, well-kept neighborhood community in the city. A neighbor told me he used to have a good walk every morning and evening to and from the bus that took him to work downtown.

Richard was a codebreaker in Italy during World War II. He was proud of his military service and he maintained an interest in the era by building model WWII model airplanes and reading about it. A few years ago he had the privilege of going on an Honor Flight to Washington, D.C. and seeing the WWII Memorial honoring guys like him.

His wife died a few years ago and it was the one sadness in his life as far as I could determine. Oh yes, he did have one regret from earlier days. While serving in Italy, he came into possession of a beautiful dog to which he gave an Italian name. When it came time to return stateside, he was not allowed to bring the dog with him. The kids told me he talked about that dog for the rest of his life.

Richard loved animals. I’ve always considered that to be a telling feature of a person. If someone loves animals and treats them with kindness and loving care, it usually indicates goodness of character. His last pet was the most affectionate cat I have ever been around. When we met as a hospice team after Richard’s death, we talked a long time about what would happen to the cat; they were that close. Solution: one of the daughters will take her to her home, a continual reminder of her dad’s gentle and kind spirit.

Richard had an active mind right up to the end. Whenever I visited, he was working through a book, or several of them. When he could no longer read well enough, he listened to books on tape, and we would discuss what he was reading. He remained curious and interested in learning until his final days. I always found conversations with Richard stimulating, and I would try to get him to talk about his days in World War II. The one television show he would not miss was Jeopardy.

There came a time when Richard began seeing visions of people standing by his bed and having dreams of past events. We discussed those and he shared with me that he was more curious about them than frightened or concerned. Talking with the family after he died, it became clear to me that his mind was actively reviewing his life and processing his memories.

Here is the text I used for the message I gave at Richard’s service, from Genesis 25:

This is the length of Abraham’s life, one hundred seventy-five years. Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people. His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field…that Abraham purchased from the Hittites. There Abraham was buried, with his wife Sarah. After the death of Abraham God blessed his son Isaac.

Of all the hospice patients I’ve had the privilege of meeting, this passage perhaps fits Richard better than any of the others. He died in a good old age, an old man and “full of years” – a profound description that speaks not only of his life’s length but also of its quality.

Richard died a man who had lived a good, full life.

Now he lies next to his “Sarah,” gathered to his people.

And I love the way this text ends: “After the death of Abraham God blessed his son Isaac.”

When we lose good people like Richard from past generations we may feel unequipped to take their place. However, God is with us as he was with our fathers – God is our dwelling place in all generations – and his blessing carries on. It is as available to us as it was to Richard, and it may well be that someday a historian will look back and say, “After the death of Richard, God blessed his family and the people of their generation.”

Richard is not a hero in any spectacular, public sense. But to me, Richard represents the best of Middle America, the people who have been my common grace heroes, the “greatest generation” if you will.

These are the righteous, of whom the wisdom psalm says:

The meek shall inherit the land,
and delight themselves in abundant prosperity….
The LORD knows the days of the blameless,
and their heritage will abide forever. (Ps. 37:11, 18)

A Tale of Christian “Persecution” — One way or another

As Paul Harvey used to say, “Here’s a strange.”

Hard to know what to think about it. Is it a story of Christians being “persecuted” or of Christians doing the “persecuting”?

The Washington Post reports:

A Michigan dentist who streamed contemporary Christian music in her dental office and held prayer meetings for staff members is being sued by four former employees for religious discrimination.

The former employees of Tina Marshall in Lake Orion, Mich., allege they were either fired or reprimanded for objecting to the religious practices, according to a lawsuit filed in August 2015 in Oakland County.

…“We were all on edge. We were trying to be nice to the patients and do good dental work, but she kept forcing the music and her beliefs on us. Several patients questioned the music, and I turned it off and turned on the TV. So I was ‘disobedient,’” Nancy Kordus, a former dental assistant at Marshall’s office who is a plaintiff in the suit, told the Clarkston News about her former employer.

Kordus said Marshall wanted the music playing at all times in order to “ward off demons,” according to the complaint.

The suit also states that Marshall held morning prayer meetings with the staff, which began as optional gatherings but then became mandatory.

Kordus is among the four former employees, including Kimberly Hinson, Tammy Kulis and Sara Bambard, who are suing Marshall for what they say is her violation of Michigan’s Elliott Larsen Civil Rights Act.

Kordus claimed she submitted written requests to Marshall to stop pressuring staff members to conform to Marshall’s religious practices in 2014. Kordus was fired on Aug. 21, 2014.

Kulis, who worked at the front desk of the office, said she felt compelled to resign in October 2014 because of religious harassment and discriminatory practices.

Lawyers for Marshall filed a response to the lawsuit in November, denying claims she forced her religious practices on her staff.

“None of the Plaintiffs were forced to discuss or disclose any religious practices of preference as part of their employment,” the filing stated.

Marshall’s legal representatives have requested that the lawsuit be dismissed.

Her lawyer, Keith Jablonski, told The Washington Post this week his client is “being attacked in this lawsuit for her Christian beliefs, based solely on her desire to play religious music and radio stations in the dental office of the business that she owns.”

“We believe that when the facts, and not baseless allegations, are presented to a jury, we will establish that this group of former disgruntled employees are simply looking to profit off of their own prejudices towards Dr. Marshall and her Christian faith,” he said. “Dr. Marshall flatly denies engaging in any discriminatory employment practices.”

…Marshall purchased the dental practice in 2008 but her religious practices were only incorporated at the office as she became part of a local ministry run by Craig Stasio in 2013.

Stasio, who owns the Agape Massage Therapy & Chiropractic in addition to running his ministry, is also included in the lawsuit since Marshall hired Stasio to restructure her dental office in 2015.

Under his management, according to the lawsuit, “Stasio was enlisted to provide the ‘help’ Dr. Marshall needed in terminating the staff members that objected being exposed to the practices and beliefs of the ministry.”

Sarah Bambard, who was hired in 2011 to work at the front desk in Marshall’s office, says she was made office manager by Stasio on July 6, 2015, and instructed by him to only hire new employees that accepted Marshall’s religious practices. Stasio began participating in interviews conducted by Bambard, to assure applicants embraced Marshall’s faith, the lawsuit says.

Many of the new employees under Stasio were members of his religious group, the suit says.

Shortly after Stasio formalized his influence over Marshall’s office, Hinson, a dental hygienist, and Bambard were fired in late July 2015.

You can read the rest of the Post article or the piece from the local Clarkston News and learn about claims and counterclaims made by and about Stasio’s ministry, which some have called “cult-like.”

I hesitate to draw conclusions, and I won’t. However, I was struck by the thought that, in these days when so many American Christians are talking about protecting their religious liberty, that here we have such a stark account suggesting that some of them just might be denying others liberty in the name of Christ and causing them real harm in the name of their religion.

Perhaps this is not the case, and I am aware that situations like this are always much more complex than any outsider can discern.

Still, this is quite curious, huh?

“If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” (Rom 12:18)

That’s all I’m sayin’.

Trump at Liberty

As I said in comments last week, I’m not terribly interested in politics except as it intersects with the purposes of this blog. Since we like to keep our eye on what is happening in the world of U.S. evangelicalism, I think the following stories at Bloomberg and CNN about Trump speaking at Liberty University qualify as something for the iMonk community to discuss.

I’ve excerpted some of the pertinent points. Feel free to follow the links and read the entire articles.

Donald Trump Gets High Marks from Liberty President

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump won glowing praise from a Christian evangelical leader in one of the nation’s biggest battleground states on Monday.

Jerry Falwell Jr., head of the Virginia-based Liberty University, didn’t formally endorse the billionaire, who spoke at the school’s convocation, but his remarks went further than for any other candidate to speak there during this race.

“He cannot be bought. He’s not a puppet on a string like many other candidates,” said Falwell Jr., who said he met with three of Trump’s children this past week. “The American public is finally ready to elect a candidate who is not a career politician.”

Falwell Jr. even likened Trump to his father, the late Reverend Jerry Falwell, which the candidate called “an honor for me.”

…Falwell’s comments could help Trump win over evangelical voters, particularly in southern Virginia, where one in eight of the town’s residents attend services at the family’s church in Lynchburg, according to the organization. They could also help Trump in Iowa, which hosts the first nomination voting of the election on Feb. 1.

…Trump, a Presbyterian, largely shies away from discussing his faith on the campaign trail. But he did inject some religious sentiments in an apparent effort to cater to the audience. He said his best-selling book, The Art of the Deal, was “a deep second” to the Bible.

“The Bible blows it away. There’s nothing like it, the Bible,” he said.

He also vowed to defeat the Islamic State and win “the War on Christmas.” “If I’m president, you’re going to see ‘Merry Christmas’ in department stores, believe me,” he said.

Donald Trump takes Liberty, courts Christian crowd

Falwell lauded Trump in a lengthy introduction that he offered to neither Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential contender who recently spoke at the university, nor Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who announced his presidential bid here last spring.

Falwell glowingly compared Trump to his father due to their shared propensity for eschewing political correctness.

“Donald Trump is a breath of fresh air,” Falwell said, before saying he believed “the American public is finally ready to elect a candidate who is not a career politician but rather who has succeeded in real life.”

Mondays with Michael Spencer: January 18, 2016

For the next few weeks, I will run iMonk posts that Michael wrote back in 2006. His subject was “the sermon,” and the series was called “What’s Wrong with the Sermon?” Here is Michael’s explanation of the approach he took:

In this series of posts I will be examining the sermon as it is currently done in evangelicalism. My method will be a bit backwards. I am going to examine the most frequent criticisms of sermons- something I hear all the time from my peers and student listeners- and see if there is truth in the criticisms.

• • •

What’s wrong with the sermon?
(1) The sermon was too long

Well…you have to admit that you haven’t heard someone say the sermon was too short lately.

I discovered a long time ago that my audience at the OBI chapel is well aware of the tendency of preachers to go on and on and on. I appreciate the fact that, in 14+ years of preaching at our school, I have, with their help, honed my sermons down from the 40+ minutes that comes naturally to me to 20-25 minutes. I think it has made me a much better preacher.

But what about the criticism itself? How long should a sermon be?

Like most things related to preaching, scripture really doesn’t help us much. Paul preached at least one person to death, and it is hard to imagine that, if the Sermon on the Mount really was a sermon, Jesus could have done it in less than an hour. Other Biblical sermons seem very short. “Yet forty days, and Ninevah shall be destroyed.” Or “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Studies in communication remind us that the average person has an attention span well less than 20 minutes. My audience of students probably has half that, and considering a bunch of them have an ADD/ADHD diagnosis, I feel the pressure to say something before the ten minute bell. Plus, I’m the last thing before lunch. Sort of like giving a presentation to the bull just before the gate opens.

My Reformed friends tend to believe that the Puritans had the right idea, with sermons in the 1-2 hour range proving one has taken the inerrant Word of God seriously. Spurgeon’s sermons, unedited, are usually in the range of an hour. John Macarthur seems to handle his messages in just under an hour, and Mark Dever is the same.

Reformed preachers tend to be exegetical in the pulpit, with much attention paid to every word, phrase and grammatical turn. The Reformers are cited as the Fathers of this sort of preaching, and those who stand in their shadow are adamant that if you can’t tough it out for an hour, you may not really believe in the truthfulness and centrality of the Word.

Preachers who are more involved with the “spiritual birth” of the sermon in the pulpit than in the study, such as Baptist revivalists or Pentecostals, usually preach for 45 minutes to an hour plus. This is pragmatic, however, as it may take a while for the Spirit to really get moving. Invitationalists of every sort need a generous amount of time to persuade listeners to make some kind of public response. Questioning the length of these sermons is tantamount to saying God doesn’t know what he is doing.

Mainline Protestants vary more widely in the length of sermons. The more a church gives serious attention to liturgy and the Eucharist, the less time will typically be given to the sermon. There is clearly a sacramental aspect to the sermon in evangelicalism, and that sacramental sense is larger and more diffused in the “higher” forms of liturgy.

There is little exegesis in the pulpit of most mainline preachers, though many of these preachers are expert students of the Word. The emphasis is more on the practical application of the text, and generally much less is attempted in the way of building systematic theology from the text. The applications may sometimes, as a result, seem unhinged from the context and unnaturally “hinged” to the bumper of the latest political or social cause.

So one might find an evangelical Methodist preacher in a rural area preaching for 40 minutes, while a high church Methodist in an urban area would preach for 20. Lectionary preachers tend to be shorter, and expository, “series” preachers tend to be longer.

Does education affect sermon length? I am tempted to say that the uneducated mountain preachers around me preach very long sermons, but many educated preachers do as well. I would say that education has the potential to make a preacher more aware of what good communication should be, while a lack of education may leave a preacher with the unquestioned assumptions of his own context and tradition.

Has technology affected the length of sermons? I think so. The powerpoint/dvd using preachers that I am hearing are much more casual and conversational in presentation, and that makes for longer sermons. I contend that these tools have, on the whole, made preaching worse, even if they have made the presentations more “interesting” to audiences shaped by television. Add to this the tendency of contemporary preachers to use rambling personal anecdotes, object lessons and humorous “breaks” to prepare for serious applications, and you have the 45-minute sermon that really doesn’t say a lot once its done.

Obviously, the length of sermons is highly variable. There is no simple answer to the question, “How long should a sermon be?” Still, I do have some convictions.

23510229171_b724d311e0_z A. A sermon ought to move rapidly enough that one doesn’t need an hour to get around to saying something worthwhile. Gain a sense of the movement of a sermon in a short period of time. Be able to “feel” it. Become confident that you can “feel” five minutes passing. In the country, we call preachers with no sense of time “dawdlers.” A sermon that goes somewhere at a decent clip is almost always more interesting than a pointless ramble.

B. Exegesis is for the study, not for the pulpit. Do your work before you get there and make the results usable in the most efficient form. Don’t reteach New Testament Intro or Greek just because you are using a verse from First Corinthians. Many sermons exhaust the congregation before the preacher ever gets near the application or message. Start a class if you have the need to say more about background.

C. When time in the study makes a sermon longer, a preacher is still learning. When time in the study begins to make a sermon shorter, the preacher is gaining the skill of communicating. Editing is the mark of maturity. A preacher who knows his own tendencies can restrain them by careful preparation, right down to the length of the sermon.

D. There is a big difference between a well-placed illustration and an open-ended anecdotal story. Of course, some good sermons contain useful personal stories, but I believe a good preacher limits these to instances where the personal story- told in a compact way- is the best illustration. Preaching is not the soap opera of the preacher’s own life. It is the Good News of the Gospel. Excessive amounts of time should not be devoted to “cute” or humorous personal anecdotes, even if people enjoy hearing about the preacher’s personal life. Discipline yourself to talk about Jesus and the Gospel more than anything else.

E. Organizing a sermon tightly will make it more timely and more time conscious. Introduction, three to five major points, conclusion. This is and always will be a good method. At the most, this type of sermon should take 30 minutes. More than that and too much is being done. I have frequently planned one sermon, and turned it into three sermons of 20 minutes each. That’s far more merciful than the original message would have been if delivered. (I once heard a preacher do a sermon on John 9 that would have easily been redone as half a year of preaching.)

F. Twenty minutes is a long time to most people. If it insults our ego that people really don’t want to hear us talk for an hour, we should be more honest. Sometimes we are repeating ourselves, stalling and not getting to the point. No one is rude to tell us to get down to business and not waste their time….or our own, for that matter. We are the heralds of the King!

E. There are issues of ego in many lengthy sermons, but there are also issues of theology. Protestants have typically been critical of the briefer “homilies” in Catholic and mainline churches. But these traditions have worship services that “preach” in many diverse ways that are often not appreciated. Length is length. It isn’t scholarship or proof of intense devotion to inerrancy. And bulletin to many young preachers: your hero may be interesting for an hour- chances are you aren’t. Trim it.

F. Lectionary preachers are very often good models of shorter, better aimed sermons. Listen to some good lectionary preachers and see how they approach a text with the application up front, in mind, and ready for use from almost the beginning of the sermon. Lectionary texts often allow the preacher to be much more economical, and to reach the goal of putting a single scriptural insight into the minds of the hearer. Many evangelical sermons simply try to do to much.

G. Preaching is communication. Length often is an attempt to make up for effectiveness in other areas. The myth is that if I just say enough, I will get through. You don’t preach through walls. People hear, by the Spirit’s work, the walls fall or the listener walks around it. The truth is that if we haven’t said something worthwhile pretty soon, no one cares, and going on and on won’t help that.

Don’t get to the point that Tony Campolo said happened to him in one Black church. He was going on and on, and a large matron of the church stood, waved a handkerchief and began shouting “Help him, Jesus! Help him, Jesus!”

H. Be sure that a sermon isn’t just economical and on-target; be sure it is also relevant. Sermons answering every objection of Arminians are great….for someone…somewhere. The preacher is to serve the Word to the congregation, not force the congregation to swallow the preacher’s version of “the word.”

Bottom line: Say it in 20-25 minutes, and consider using a more pointed, compact and organized approach.

Epiphany II: Grief and Fear

Epiphany II
Grief and Fear

In the small country church where I am preaching this morning, I will face a congregation filled with grief. A young woman in the congregation died of cancer this week, leaving a husband and family behind. In addition, the pastor lost a relative this week and has been away tending to his own family.

The ministry of bereavement support that I normally practice with individuals will take a different form this week, as I seek to bring comfort to an entire congregation dealing with loss.

One providential factor that will be of help to me is that this church had to cancel services last Sunday because of snow and ice. With everything else that has happened, the pastor recommended that they use the bulletin and order of service from last Sunday so that it would free up volunteers and give them time to mourn. The OT reading for last Sunday is perfect for this week’s situation.

???? ISAIAH 43:1-7

¹But now thus says the Lord,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
³ For I am the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
I give Egypt as your ransom,
Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you.
⁴ Because you are precious in my sight,
and honored, and I love you,
I give people in return for you,
nations in exchange for your life.
⁵ Do not fear, for I am with you;
I will bring your offspring from the east,
and from the west I will gather you;
⁶ I will say to the north, “Give them up,”
and to the south, “Do not withhold;
bring my sons from far away
and my daughters from the end of the earth—
⁷ everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.”

C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

Lewis then writes about some specific situations in which he felt fear in his grief. He felt afraid to be alone — even though he had no interest in joining the conversations of others around him, he dreaded the times when they left and he was there all by himself.

However, he was also afraid to be out in public and greeted by other people. He knew they were uncomfortable knowing what to say to him, and he was uncomfortable, realizing how awkward the situation was.

C.S. Lewis also wrote that there was a suspenseful kind of fear he experienced: wondering and worrying about what would happen next and not feeling the strength to face whatever that might be.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” wrote C.S. Lewis.

In this Old Testament text, the prophet Isaiah was addressing the people of Israel in exile. They were grieving. They had lost their homes, their businesses, their Temple, their cities and towns, and had been carried off into exile in Babylon. They had lost almost everything and now they found themselves in a foreign land under the rule of their enemies. Worst of all, they felt abandoned by God himself; this was their deepest sadness.

In one of the verses right before this passage, Isaiah had written:

But this is a people robbed and plundered,
    all of them are trapped in holes
    and hidden in prisons;
they have become a prey with no one to rescue,
    a spoil with no one to say, “Restore!” (42:22)

The people of Israel had been through a time of death and devastation, now they found themselves in what seemed like a helpless and hopeless situation. They were grieving. And in their grief they felt afraid.

They felt afraid that God had rejected them, that he had withdrawn his presence and blessing from them, that they no longer belonged to him and that he would no longer come to help and rescue them. They feared that God must now have moved on to other people, as though God had divorced them and taken another nation as his wife.

They felt unloved, unwanted, no longer secure in knowing that God cared for them. They were afraid that their sins and the exile had separated from the love of God and they were afraid of the prospects of a life without God. They feared the future.

In an article in Psychology Today, Dr. Samantha Smithstein writes: “I’m beginning to understand that grief is not just loss. Grief is also about becoming untethered. It’s about losing an identity. [It’s like] losing a map and compass all at once – [losing the] way to orient our life. Our love.”

That was what the people of Israel were feeling. They felt untethered. Lost. Insecure and full of anxiety. Afraid.

In our passage, Isaiah speaks the word of God to these people who have lost so much and who are so filled with fear. And he speaks directly to their grief and fear.

In verse one, God says: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”
In verse five, God says: “Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you…”
And throughout this passage, God reinforces his relationship with the people of Israel and reiterates his promise to take care of them always. He reminds them that he created them, he formed them, he called them to himself. And he says, no matter what you go through, you will never suffer ultimate harm — for I will be with you. He calls himself their Lord, their Holy One, their Savior. He says, “you are precious in my sight, [you are] honored, and I love you…”

Isaiah’s words to Israel find their counterpart in Paul’s in the 8th chapter of Romans:

³⁵Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?…
³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
³⁸For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

In our grief and in our fear, these are words we need to hear, this is the assurance we need to feel.

No matter what we go through, no matter what losses we face, no matter how many enemies seem to be ruling over us and keeping us down, God loves us. God is with us. God will see to it that we never suffer ultimate harm. Just as he said to Israel, we are precious in God’s sight, honored and loved by God. God redeemed us, called us by name, and we belong to him.

Death cannot separate us from God’s love. The circumstances of life cannot separate us from God’s love. No power in heaven or on earth can separate us from God’s love. Nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Frederick Buechner once wrote these words to communicate how life is and to assure us of God’s present help. “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.”

I wish I could tell you that the world is a place where only beautiful things happen. We all know better. In this world both beautiful and terrible things happen. Our hope does not lie in escaping life’s hard things, as much as we wish we could. Our hope is that we are not alone. There is Someone with us to comfort us in our fear, Someone to reassure us that we are not alone, not without help, never in danger of ultimate harm.

Do not fear, says our God. I have redeemed you, I am with you, I will never let you go.

Saturday Ramblings: January 16, 2016

Ah, I would love to be going to the slopes with these folks in this stylish 1962 Rambler American 400 wagon. The measly amount of snow we received here in central Indiana last week just won’t do. And then the warm winds and rain came, and now we’re back to looking at grays and browns all day. So what do you say? Let’s take a ramble somewhere where the ground is white, the skies are blue, the powder is deep on the mountainsides, and the fire in the lodge is warm and inviting. Pack your skis and snowboards and sleds, and then let’s go ramblin’!

Continue reading “Saturday Ramblings: January 16, 2016”

John Barclay on “Dangerous Grace”

What is distinctive about Paul is his emphasis that grace is not just a gift given generously or in advance, but a gift given precisely without considering [the recipient’s] prior quality or worth.

• John Barclay

• • •

One book on my wish list and reading plan for this year is John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift. Barclay is Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University, UK, and is recognized by his peers as one of today’s most influential New Testament scholars. In anticipation of reading his massive work on Paul’s teaching about grace, I went to Christianity Today this month and eagerly absorbed their interview with him, called “What’s So Dangerous about Grace?” — as Spencerian a title as I can imagine.

I encourage you to go to CT and read the entire article.

Wesley Hill, the interviewer, summarizes John Barclay’s thesis like this: “[Barclay] proposes that Paul’s radicalism lies precisely in his view of God’s grace—and of its potential to transform both individuals and communities.”

It is “grace” that is at the center of Paul’s teaching. That’s clear enough, but one aspect of this interview that I found curious was the assertion that this emphasis has been lacking or underemphasized in NT studies since the advent of the so-called “New Perspective.” I am certainly not as conversant with Pauline studies as someone like Dr. Barclay, but I must say that I have never found this to be true about the NP scholars I’ve read. Take, for example, the following quote from N.T. Wright:

When St. Paul says that ‘if righteousness came by the Law, the Messiah died in vain” (Galatians 2.21), he was stating a foundational principle. Whatever language or terminology we use to talk about the great gift that the one true God has given to his people in and through Jesus Christ (“salvation,” “eternal life,” and so on), it remains precisely a gift. It is never something we can earn. We can never put God into our debt; we always remain in his. Everything I’m going to say about the moral life, about moral effort, about the conscious shaping of our patterns of behavior, takes place simply and solely within the framework of grace–the grace which was embodied in Jesus and his death and resurrection, the grace which is active in the Spirit-filled preaching of the gospel, the grace which continues to be active by the Spirit in the lives of believers. It is simply not the case that God does some of the work of our salvation and we have to do the rest. It is not the case that we begin by being justified by grace through faith and then have to go on to work all by ourselves to complete that job by struggling, unaided, to live a holy life.

…God loves us as we are, as he finds us, which is (more or less) messy, muddy, and singing out of tune. Even when we’ve tried to be good, we have often only made matters worse, adding (short-lived) pride to our other failures. And the never-ending wonder at the heart of genuine Christian living is that God has come to meet us right there, in our confusion of pride and fear, of mess and muddle and downright rebellion and sin.

• After You Believe, pp. 60, 62

Now, it is certainly true that NP scholars like Wright emphasize something different about grace than traditional Reformation-based teaching.

The common view that people like Krister Stendahl, E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, and Wright found deficient was that the Judaism of the NT era was a religion of works and not grace and that this was what Paul opposed. Their studies have shown us that Judaism was indeed a religion rooted in God’s grace and mercy, and that “works of the law” did not signify human attempts to earn God’s favor as “merit-amassing observances” (Dunn).

This was indeed the issue in Reformation times and the Reformers (I would say for the most part correctly) applied Pauline concepts of grace and faith to the situation of their day. But neither Jesus nor Paul were opposing indulgences and “works-righteousness” in those same terms. If I may put it simplistically, they were opposing Jewish teaching that the grace of God was limited to those within the covenant and to those who submitted to covenant requirements such as circumcision, Sabbath-keeping, and kosher food laws. They were opposing a religion that offered a limited grace, not a religion which demanded meritorious works.

From what I read in CT‘s interview with John Barclay, it is the unlimited nature of grace — that it is for everyone everywhere without consideration of their social status — that he stresses.

Yes, Paul was not the only Jew of his day who talked about God’s grace. We need to shy away from caricatures of [first-century] Judaism as a religion of works-righteousness or legalism that knew nothing about divine grace. Language of God’s mercy and grace was everywhere, but it was not everywhere the same. People understood God’s goodness, generosity, and mercy differently. Compared with his fellow Jews who also talked about divine grace, Paul emphasized grace given without regard to worth. This is the root of Paul’s radical social policy.

Paul’s theology of grace is not just about an individual’s self-understanding and status before God. It’s also about communities that crossed ethnic, social, and cultural boundaries. This is what made Paul so controversial in his day. His mission to the Gentiles involved telling them that they didn’t have to fit within the cultural boundaries of the Jewish tradition. In his letter to the Galatians, for instance, he strongly criticizes other Jewish Christians who say you have to fit in the Jewish cultural box in order to be Christian. Paul says no—God has not paid regard to that cultural box.

This sounds very “New Perspective” to me, compatible with what I view as appropriate clarifications to the dominant theology that grew out of the Reformation. In particular, it shows that Paul’s main concern was not about “getting individuals saved” but rather in building grace-based communities of faith, hope, and love that transcended both the covenantal restrictions of Jewish religion and the idolatrous, immoral ethos of the Empire. The goal of Paul’s instruction was “love” (1Tim 1:5) and a main priority was trying to help folks see that God’s grace obliterates the walls we erect between people based on our cultural norms, loyalties, and prejudices. “By grace, Jesus is Lord of all” was his message.

What we take for granted as having worth—our place in a hierarchy, our class, our wealth, our education, you name it—does not count for anything when we are encountered by Christ. In Paul’s day, the main forms of hierarchy were built around gender, ethnicity, and legal status. Men were considered more important than women, Jews were considered more valuable than non-Jews, and a free person was considered more valuable than a slave. Paul says that in God’s eyes, none of these social boundaries matter. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” (Gal. 3:28).

What I find so profound is the capacity of grace to dissolve our inherent and inherited systems—what we might call social capital. What counts before God is not what we pride ourselves on—or what we doubt ourselves on. What counts is simply that we are loved in Christ. This is massively liberating, not only to us as individuals but also to communities, because it gives them the capacity to reform and to be countercultural.

This is one of the primary reasons he finds grace “dangerous.” It threatens to overturn all the cultural norms we hold dear, which keep us from living fully in the love of Christ.

Another emphasis John Barclay makes is that grace leads to new life, in which trusting obedience is the norm.

Again, to my ears this is New Perspective music. It clarifies the “faith vs. works” debate that has plagued theological discussions since the Reformation. Noting how “Luther was anxious about any language of obligation or obedience if it implied trying to win favor with God,” Barclay observes that many Christians think grace means something like “God expects nothing in return.” But Paul teaches that God’s grace in Christ raises us up into a new life, and Paul expresses the expectation that we will “walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:1-4).

Even the Augsburg Confession has a section on “New Obedience,” which states that faith “is bound to bring forth good fruits, and that it is necessary to do good works….” This shows me that, in their hearts, Lutherans realize that the dualism of Law and Gospel is not adequate to convey the difference God’s grace in Jesus Christ has made for believers. Even at the heart of Reformation theology we find teaching of a “new obedience” rooted in grace that has nothing to do with earning God’s favor or accumulating merit.

The radical thing about grace is not that it delivers us from having to obey, but rather that it puts us in a position where we are free to obey.

This revelation of the gift (grace) of God in Jesus Christ is Paul’s central theme, says John Barclay.

I’m looking forward to diving deeper into this ocean by reading his book.

David Brooks on Ted Cruz and Christian Brutalism

Texas Senator Ted Cruz speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at National Harbor in Maryland February 26, 2015. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS) - RTR4RBXR — REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Ted Cruz is now running strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace.

• David Brooks

• • •

What is your idea of a “Christian” politician?

If a candidate for President of the U.S. claims to be a Christian, a Bible-believing Christian, and an evangelical Christian (one who believes in and promotes the good news of Jesus Christ), what characteristics do you expect that person to display?

Ted Cruz claims to be just such a Christian, and in David Brooks’s opinion, he fails to match his perception of what a Jesus-follower seeking public office should look like.

In an op-ed in the NY Times, “The Brutalism of Ted Cruz,” Brooks is as blunt and unsparing as I’ve ever heard him to be as he critiques Cruz for his “brutal, fear-driven, apocalypse-based approach,” which the columnist says is the antithesis of everything healthy conservatism (and Christian politics) should stand for.

He begins with an illustration. During Cruz’s tenure as solicitor general of Texas, a man was incorrectly sentenced to sixteen years in prison for stealing a calculator from a Walmart. When the error came to light, the prisoner tried to get it corrected and his sentence overturned. Cruz led an effort to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court to keep him in prison for the full original sentence. Brooks quotes one of the justices, who asked Cruz, “Is there some rule that you can’t confess error in your state?”

That is instructive, according to Brooks.

Cruz’s behavior in the Haley case is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy.

[However, see this clarifying response –it appears Brooks didn’t fully do his homework here.]

Brooks is no conservative basher. He praises other conservative Christian (and Republican) politicians in the past for their commitment to the less fortunate and those treated unjustly. However, Cruz doesn’t match the template.

…Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.

He describes Cruz as someone who trades in “apocalyptic fear,” who describes everything in terms of “maximum existential threat,” who “manufactures an atmosphere of menace.”

Cruz manufactures an atmosphere of menace in which there is no room for compassion, for moderation, for anything but dismantling and counterattack. And that is what he offers. Cruz’s programmatic agenda, to the extent that it exists in his speeches, is to destroy things: destroy the I.R.S., crush the “jackals” of the E.P.A., end funding for Planned Parenthood, reverse Obama’s executive orders, make the desert glow in Syria, destroy the Iran nuclear accord.

Some of these positions I agree with, but the lack of any positive emphasis, any hint of reform conservatism, any aid for the working class, or even any humane gesture toward cooperation is striking.

David Brooks is a conservative and a Republican, but he’s one of those moderates that seem to be in danger of extinction. The kind of conservatism and Christian faith he finds wanting in Ted Cruz is a “happy, hopeful” kind that emphasizes the dignity of all people and puts priority on public service, not incendiary rhetoric.

The best conservatism balances support for free markets with a Judeo-Christian spirit of charity, compassion and solidarity. Cruz replaces this spirit with Spartan belligerence. He sows bitterness, influences his followers to lose all sense of proportion and teaches them to answer hate with hate.

In a column where readers responded to this editorial, not everyone agreed with David Brooks.

One of them wrote:

Tell that [i.e. that Cruz is a stranger to Christian virtue] to the unborn children he is fighting for every day. I didn’t see Obama leave an empty seat for them during the State of the Union speech. Tell that to the nation of Israel, whose trust and relationship the current administration has thrown away.

But I think this reader misses the point, as do so many who are flocking to the Trumps and Cruzes of the world. David Brooks is arguing “Christian” politics should be defined as much by the way positions are advanced and fought for as by the positions themselves.

However, as another reader noted, this (at least so far) has been an election campaign “where angry sells,” and so, at this point, people like Cruz (and Trump) are getting a lot of attention.

Personally, I find myself agreeing with Brooks on this one. But I’m interested in hearing what you think.

Ark Prejudice or Valuation?

ark-stern — Ham’s folly: The ark, under construction in northern Kentucky

In a recent blog post, Ken Ham continues his ongoing project of trying to justify his new endeavor, the Ark Encounter theme park.

It seems like every time we post something on Facebook about the progress of the Ark Encounter in Northern Kentucky, someone will charge that we are wasting money—money that instead should go to the starving people around the world, they declare.

…So the question is: why is it that the Ark is being singled out for this criticism? (It was also made against the Creation Museum when we were building it.) It’s because of prejudice! The charge that money should go instead to the hungry comes from critics who don’t agree with our Christian message and don’t want us to build such a prominent facility to proclaim the truth of God’s Word and the gospel. Now while it is true that some Christians have made the same claim that our donors should be giving money to needy people and not the Ark, I find they are people who also don’t agree with our message—particularly our stand on a literal Genesis.

Yes, their prejudice against the Ark’s message really stands out. Actually it illustrates that these charges are a part of a larger spiritual battle. And in a sense it’s also about jealousy. I don’t usually hear the same accusations against churches that are building new auditoriums or other facilities, but, because the Ark is going to be so prominent in the world as it publicly proclaiming God’s Word and the gospel, it gets singled out by people who don’t like our message and are irritated by its prominence.

So when people make the statement that our supporters shouldn’t be spending money on the Ark project and that we should take those donations and give them to another non-profit, by and large they display their prejudice against AiG and our message! In our culture we are seeing more and more of this intolerance against biblical Christianity. But it also encourages me, because there wouldn’t such opposition if the Ark wasn’t going to be a force in the culture!

Ham should be running for president. His capacity for self-promotion and self-defense is impressive, and he just keeps staying on message. His ability to deflect criticism by changing the language of the debate is top notch. Never mind that his silly project is a sham and a blight on the name of the Christian faith he professes, he comes across as a true believer bravely defending God’s clear message against all attacks.

What a crock.

People are prejudiced against Answers in Genesis and its message? Is the issue really that we don’t like the message? Is this blatant “intolerance against Biblical Christianity”? Are people like me jealous of Ham?

Give me a break. He writes, “The charge that money should go instead to the hungry comes from critics who don’t agree with our Christian message and don’t want us to build such a prominent facility to proclaim the truth of God’s Word and the gospel.”

No, Ken. Critics like me don’t believe you actually have a legitimate message, and that this “prominent facility” will do nothing to advance the cause of the gospel but will more than likely bring ridicule upon it.

From the moment this project was announced, I have spoken against it and said what I think it represents: the “Disney-ization” of the faith. It turns our most beloved sacred stories into cartoonish spectacles. A project like this, in my view, accomplishes the exact opposite of what it is supposed to achieve. It doesn’t add any weight to the biblical story, it diminishes it.

Disney does not fool me into thinking what they do is great art containing profound insights into life and the human experience. I accept and enjoy them for what they are, no more. Their artists and animators are first class and what they do, they do well. But whether you are talking about their films, their theme parks, or their pervasive merchandise, the bottom line is that Disney is an animation corporation. They take stories that are classic because of their universal themes and dumb them down so that the kids can enjoy them with mom and dad. They remove all the messiness, complexity, nuance, and grit from these tales and sanitize them for a G or PG-rated modern entertainment audience. They are enjoyable, but as subtle as a punch in the face; as deep as the puddle in my driveway after a light rain.

Unfortunately, many American Christian leaders seem to think the Disney way is the way forward for the church. I could write a long book about all the examples of this across our land, from the many ways we market Jesus in books, music, and media, to the kistchy excess of the televangelists and the corporate “excellence” of the megachurches, to iconic monuments like the Crystal Cathedral. So much of it represents the “Magic Kingdom” mentality.

In the cartoon world of contemporary American evangelicalism, it’s all about bigger, better, and simpler. Help folks think their dreams can come true. Create “moments” for people in the congregation that they will never forget, that will “bless” families in safe and sanitized settings. Remove the messiness and reality of day to day life. Instead, put a sentimental, heart-tugging version of life up on the screen and make people feel it. Embrace the possibilities.

Evangelicalism has become “Disney-ized.”

…How can any thoughtful Christian support a project like this? I know some of you are going to write and complain that I’m being judgmental and why can’t God use this to bring others to Christ and teach people about the Bible? Please. I will respond as clearly and directly and forcefully as I can — this project has nothing to do with Biblical Christianity.

This is cartoon faith. It represents the “Disney-ization” of the Biblical story. I mean, seriously. Christian people are going to waste $125 million building this travesty, and then undiscerning American believers will spend countless millions more to be indoctrinated, wowed by spectacle and a thoroughly sanitized version of the Biblical story. Bus-loads of young people from entertainment-seeking youth groups will be “educated” in a “Biblical” interpretation of the Flood that had its “genesis” not in the Torah but in the visions of Ellen G. White, whose “inspired counsels from the Lord” guided the 19th century sectarian Adventist movement.

Those visions will come to life in true Disney-like fashion — with overwhelming kitsch, mawkish sentimentality, a thin veneer of credibility, and, most importantly, the absolute conviction of unwavering belief in spite of any contrary evidence or countering interpretations. This project is fundamentalism at its creative worst. It doesn’t lead us to the real Jesus, the Jesus of the Bible. It leads us to the cartoon Jesus, the Disney Jesus, the American sanitized version of Jesus, the Jesus who entertains us and keeps it all safe for the whole family to enjoy (at 50 bucks a pop). The Jesus they give us is Jesus the Hero who lived and died on the screen in all his glory, not the “Man of Sorrows” who suffered and died on the cross in shame. This Jesus has been drawn and brought to life for us by purveyors of spiritual technology, not shared with us as true apostles like Paul did — through a humble daily life of suffering and loving in Jesus’ name. There’s the Jesus way and there’s the Disney way, and the gap between them is vast.

I don’t know about you, but when it comes to the faith, I want the real thing, not a Disney caricature.

I’ll say it again. This project has nothing to do with Biblical, Jesus-shaped Christianity. It is promotion of an ideology, plain and simple. It is small-minded “wish upon a star” fundamentalism, exhibiting an approach to faith that allows for nothing subtle, nothing mysterious, nothing human. No doubts, only certainty. The kind of certainty that has enough chutzpah to ask people to pony up $125 million to build a pretentious propaganda park. At least Walt Disney had enough character to learn a trade, go to work, and build a business to fund his dreams.

• The Disney-ization of Faith

Folks, that’s not prejudice, that’s an honest valuation. This project is a huge waste of money that will only bring more derision upon genuine Christianity, and all because one huckster and his gullible followers imagine they are doing something great for the cause of godliness. It’s time for this circus act to fold up and move on.

The Ark Encounter will be a farce in culture, not a force. And that’s why we oppose it. We’ve looked at it honestly, and can’t believe that anyone thinks this is a good idea.

Fr. Stephen Freeman: An Important Conversation – How Should We Think About the Bible as History?

An Important Conversation – How Should We Think About the Bible as History?
by Fr. Stephen Freeman

Fr. Freeman blogs at Glory to God for All Things

• • •

A recent conversation on the blog seemed worth a full article. The question centered around the problem of the historical character of the Biblical record. I’ll let the question speak for itself:

I have a question to ask about the historicity of the New Testament, one that’s been gnawing at me for quite some time. Paul was wiling to interpret Scripture allegorically, as his treatment of Galatians makes clear. How, then, do we treat 1 Corinthians 10:1-11? As far as I can see, Paul considers the events of the Exodus as literal history, especially in verse 11: “Now these things [the events of the Exodus] happened to them as an example, and they were written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come” (NASV). Isn’t Paul implying there was a literal Israel, who literally left Egypt through a parted sea? And what if there was no Exodus, as some scholars maintain? Or even a period of bondage in Egypt? How would this affect the Christian faith?

This isn’t my field of expertise, but most scholars agree that Jewish writers constructed a ‘mythistory’ around the 6th century BC. Events were reconstructed or even invented to help the Jews understand their current plight. For instance, Shlomo Sand contends the united kingdom of David never existed, that it was a later invention by Jewish writers. Such a theory is is not a problem for me per se; Jewish writers in the 6th century were not doing Oxford history 101! However, Paul seems to believe they did. Do you see the bind I’m in?

Any advice would be appreciated.

St. Paul would have had no reason to question the historical character of an Old Testament story. Those who use such a fact to establish that he “thought” it was historical – and therefore it is historical – are making a primary mistake in logic. What counts as “historical” in the mind of the first century and what counts as “historical” in the mind of the 20th or 21st, are very different things. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the first century mind was not capable of conceiving what we think of as “historical.” And this is a extremely essential part of understanding the Scriptures, as well as acquiring an Orthodox mind.

I’ll expand on that.

We are secularists. We think things are just things and are nothing other than things. We conceive of the world as existing apart from God, even as self-existing. We thing that if things “mean” anything, it’s only because we “think” of them in a certain way, but that “truth” is only a flat, secular, historical thing. It’s “what happened” and nothing more. Protestant (and later modern) thought changes the nature of truth into this secularized notion. It is an objectification of reality, so that it would be independently and scientifically verifiable as true. Thus, when a modern says that something is “historical” he means what “objectively happened” in such a way that it could be proven were there enough evidence. It is true apart from God and is therefore just a “fact.” The truth is thus just a collection of facts. “History” is the collection of the “facts” of the past.

This notion of truth is no older than about the 17th century. It’s a modern version of truth. What this version of truth cannot understand is allegory. And allegory is essential to both the Scriptures (particularly the New Testament) as well as the Christian faith when it is rightly taught. St. Paul writes in Galatians:

But he who was of the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and he of the freewoman through promise, which things are an allegory. For these are the two covenants: the one from Mount Sinai which gives birth to bondage, which is Hagar– for this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children–but the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all. (Gal 4:23-26)

Modern readers do not grasp what St. Paul is actually saying. All we can hear in the assertion of allegory is that one thing “mentally symbolizes” something else. Because it is a mental symbol (and nothing more), it only exists in the mind of the reader. However, St. Paul actually means quite the opposite. He means that the truth and reality of Hagar is Mt. Sinai, etc. And he means this in a way that staggers the modern mind.

St. Paul (and all of the New Testament writers) does not think of any “historical” event as “historical” (in our modern way of thinking). Rather, he thinks everything actually is allegorical. And he thinks that this is the real truth of things. There is a sense in which the truth is dwelling within, beneath, and in history and that events, when they are properly discerned, reveal this greater, deeper truth. Again, this is no mere mental exercise. We might say that the allegorical view of reality is a sacramental view of reality.

Modern secular thought (and therefore modern Christian thought) is anxious to know about the “historical” character of a Biblical event, but only in the modern meaning of “historical.” It wants to know this because it thinks that’s how truth is known. Any assertion of something less than this secular, objectivity “facticity” creates doubts about the “truth” of the thing. But this is not how truth is known and never has been. If someone knows the “facticity” of something, they still do not know its truth.

The gospels, for example, make it clear that the disciples do not understand the ministry of Jesus, nor His resurrection (even though they are seeing it with their eyes) until the eyes of their understanding were opened. St. Paul is clear about this:

But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. (1Co 2:14)

Secular versions of knowledge hold that “objective” things are where truth resides and that they are “objectively” known, meaning anybody who looks at something in a disinterested manner can see its truth. But this is not the Scriptural witness.

What we have in the Scriptures, is a “Scriptural” account, rather than a “historical” account. Sometimes “Scriptural” and “historical” coincide, but not always. Frequently, the story has a theological shape in order to reveal its inner meaning (its <em>allegory</em>). The Exodus, as it is written, reveals Pascha (or Christ’s Pascha reveals the true meaning of the Scriptural Exodus). In point of fact, we cannot get behind the Scriptural account of the Exodus to know “exactly” that the modern “historical” events might have been. What we have is an account given us that we might know the truth.

This kind of thinking makes many people nervous. And that is because they have a modern consciousness. I get attacked, occasionally, by some well-meaning Orthodox who are, in fact, modernists, but don’t know it. They have a modern theory of meaning that they read back into Scripture and into the Fathers, but in doing so they make the Fathers say things they did not mean, nor could not have meant. The Fathers were not modernists and did not hold to a modern theory of meaning.

The word “literal” is an interesting example. We think “literal” is the same thing as “historical.” But, properly, “literal” means “according to the letter,” that is, “What does the text actually say.” A text, that is fully allegorical, always has a “literal” meaning as well. If the text says a “lampstand,” it means “lampstand,” even though the truth of the lampstand might very well be the Mother of God (for example). The relationship between the “letter” of a text and what a modern means by “historical” is often very questionable. Often, the only answer (that is honest) is “we don’t know.”

A primary case of correlation between allegorical, literal, and historical (in every sense), is the resurrection of Christ. St. Paul, in 1Cor. 15, recites a very “historical” account of the resurrection to which the gospels bear some resemblance. It is clearly a very primitive, creed-like recitation of the historical facts of Christ’s resurrection from the dead. The gospels, on the other hand, have a clear literary form with regard to these facts, and those literary forms have their given shape in order to reveal the truth of the resurrection. St. John says, “These things are written so that you might believe,” and he means something far greater than merely believing the “facts.”

God is a poet. The world is His poem. It often needs to be read poetically in order to be understood. Protestants and modernists want the world (and God) to be prose. It is not.

The life of an Orthodox believer includes struggling to acquire the mind of the fathers, which includes losing the mind of modernity. In that mind, I would generally say, the “historical” character of the Exodus (or other stories), in a precise, objective form just doesn’t matter, inasmuch as it’s the wrong question asked by a wrongly shaped mentality. That doesn’t mean nothing happened. The assertion that the Exodus is nothing more than pure fiction is both wrong and implausible.

We “believe” the account in Exodus as Scripture – it is the account as we need to know it, so that in the light of Pascha, we might know the truth. Everything(!) is about Christ’s Pascha. Everything is relative to Pascha. The whole universe, rightly understood, is “read” in the light of Christ’s Pascha. It is only in that manner that we know the truth of anything.