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Easter 2020. The churches are empty, and the shadow of death hangs over our land. Have we, as a society, lost something that we’ll never recover?















Listen or Read. Your Choice.















Easter

2020. The churches are empty, and the shadow of death hangs over our land. As

Joni Mitchell sang, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve

got till it’s gone….” Have we, as a society, lost something that we’ll never recover?

I hope not, but trauma changes people. None of us will emerge from this

experience the same. It’s my prayer that this enforced time apart makes everyone

realize the value of time spent together. Our God brings life from death. Evil

shall not have the last word. So, for Easter 2020, I offer a selection from my forthcoming

e-book, The Anointed. This episode merges the resurrection narratives from all

four gospels into one story. I pray that Christ, the risen Lord, might breath

his Spirit onto this valley of dry bones and grant us revival. Amen.















Chapter 31







The Death of Death







As

dawn broke on the first day of the week, an angel of the Lord appeared at the

tomb. The ground shook as violently as the guards themselves, and the angel

rolled away the stone and sat upon it. His face was radiant like lightning, and

his clothes were white like snow. The guards, for their part, were so paralyzed

by fear that they appeared to be dead.







About

this time, the Galilean women – Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James,

Salome, and Joanna – had set off for the tomb with the spices they had prepared

for anointing the body of Jesus. As they neared the spot, they began to wonder

aloud, “Who will move the stone for us?” Although the sun had crept above the

horizon, the hillside tomb was enveloped in shadowy gloom when they saw that

the stone already had been moved, although it was extremely large. They stepped

inside and saw that the body of the Lord Jesus was gone.[i]







Mary

Magdalene ran to find Simon Peter and John. “They’ve taken the Lord out of the

tomb,” she reported to them breathlessly, “and we don’t know where they’ve laid

him.”[ii]







While

the other women waited in confusion, suddenly two young men appeared in clothes

that gleamed like lightning! The women were terrified and bowed down to the

ground in awe.







“Don’t

be afraid,” one of the angels said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene,

who has been crucified. Why do you seek the Living One among the dead? Remember

what he told you while he was still in Galilee? He said the Son of Man must be

handed over to sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.

He isn’t here. He has risen just as he said. Look! Here’s the place where they

laid him.”







While Jesus’ words flooded back to

the women, the angel continued, “Go quickly and tell his

disciples and Peter: ‘He has risen from the dead, and he will precede you into

Galilee and see you there, just as he said to you.’ Observe what I have told

you.”







The

women practically fled from the scene, trembling in astonishment and joy. Yet

they were gripped by fear, as well, and said nothing to anyone because of it.[iii]







After

receiving Mary Magdalene’s report, Peter and John rushed to investigate. The

two ran together, but John was faster and arrived first.

Like any human enterprise, culture can serve as a vehicle for good or evil. What of our culture? The values modeled by those in power give us a clue.... In Part 3 of Adam’s Evolutionary Journey, I said, “Human beings are indoctrinated into sin at the same time and in the same way that we learn language … and music, and art, and conformity to social norms, all of which are aspects of human culture. Mimesis and enculturation explain how ‘original sin’ arose and continues to be propagated.”

Culture, in my view, serves as the vehicle for sin, but that doesn’t mean culture is sinful and nothing but sinful. Like any human enterprise, culture can be good or evil. Literature, music, and art aren’t evil, but people can use them to propagate evil.

Was Adam directly created from dust and placed in a sinless, deathless paradise? If so, how does he represent me before God? What does a perfect man in a perfect environment have in common with anyone?







Listen or Read. Your Choice.















Our focus in this

episode is original sin and the Fall, which we’ll view through the eyes of an

often-neglected source, Soren Kierkegaard.







Kierkegaard is

most famous for his concept of the “leap of faith.” The phrase is often taken

to mean that Christians believe in God without evidence, but that’s a

misunderstanding. In Kierkegaard’s thought, “the leap is the category of decision.”

Faith, for Kierkegaard, is much more than intellectual agreement with Christian

doctrine. He regards faith as a passionate commitment to follow Christ, despite

the paradox of the incarnation and the affront of the crucifixion. Only from

that lived experience do we discover true knowledge of God. In the language of

common sense, the proof is in the pudding.







What’s less well

known about Kierkegaard is that he also viewed original sin as a “leap,” for it

too belongs to the category of decision. In The Concept of Anxiety, he

explored the question of whether original sin is identical to “the first sin,

Adam’s sin, the Fall.” [1]

His interest was not the bare fact that “sin came into existence, but how

it can come into existence.” In other words, why would Adam and Eve sin?

What could possibly motivate them to transgress?







A friend recently related a story about reading a picture Bible to his 6-year-old daughter, and after Adam and Eve were thrown out of the garden for eating the fruit, she blurted out, “I just wish Adam and Eve hadn’t done that.” Kierkegaard refused to accept her verdict. It minimizes our own guilt, and it divorces Adam and Eve from the rest of humanity.







In the first paragraph of his treatise, Kierkegaard complains that traditional conceptions of original sin introduce “a fantastic assumption, a state which by its loss involved the Fall.” What was that state? Most of us have heard it from childhood: Adam and Eve were created perfect and lived in a sinless, deathless paradise. Everyone agrees that such a situation doesn’t exist today, but as Kierkegaard pointed out, the theologians “forgot that the doubt was a different one, namely, whether it ever had existed — and that was pretty clearly necessary if one were to lose it. The history of humanity acquired a fantastic beginning. Adam was fantastically put outside. Pious sentiment and fantasy got what it desired — a godly prelude — but thought got nothing.”







The history of humanity acquired a fantastic beginning. Adam was fantastically put outside. Pious sentiment and fantasy got what it desired — a godly prelude — but thought got nothing. Soren Kierkegaard







Consider the fantastic

ways literal Adam has been portrayed. The prominent Young-Earth Creationist Ken

Ham says the garden was perfect, without thorns or thistles, and Adam’s work

there was “pure joy.” Moreover, Adam didn’t have to learn to speak, and he had

no trouble remembering all the names he gave the animals, since he was “much more

intelligent than we are.” Ham claims Adam possessed every talent possible

rolled into one person. Adam was a brilliant artist, a musical prodigy, and a mathematical

genius with a photographic memory. [2]







From the other end

of the spectrum, Catholic theologians have heaped even greater superlatives on

Adam’s head. Writing on the a href="http://www.thomisticevolution.

Are there any parallels between the political context 2,000 years ago and our own sad situation today?















Listen or Read. Your Choice.















Since everyone is

obsessed with politics this week, the time seemed right for another episode of

Becoming Christ. As I mentioned in the first episode, to understand Jesus, we must enter his

story and view him through the eyes of his first-century audience. Seeing Jesus

as they saw him requires historical context – the political, economic, social,

and cultural factors that shaped Christ’s world. Today, I’ll examine the

political context.







Under normal

circumstances, I would follow this essay with a bit of commentary on how it

affects our understanding of the life of Christ. But the times aren’t normal,

are they? So, instead, I’ll reverse the order and note a few parallels between

the political climate 2,000 years ago and our present sad situation.







First, Israel was firmly in the grip

of messianic fever in the first century. Popular beliefs about the Messiah ran

the gamut, but they primarily centered on earthly and political hopes for a

king who would defeat Israel’s enemies and rule the world. When Pilate asked

Jesus if he was king of the Jews, Jesus replied that his kingdom was not of

this world (John 18:33-36). Christ rejected the people’s desire for political,

earthly power, and the false messiahs who promised those things ultimately led

their followers to death and destruction.







Christian, where do you place your hope? Is it an earthly, political deliverance you seek?







Second, notice how often the “divine

king” threatens the existence of God’s people, from Antiochus Epiphanes to

Caesar Augustus to Nero. The gospels present the “good news” of Jesus Christ,

the Son of God, as an alternative to the cult of emperor worship. The charge

above the cross was “King of the Jews,” and the crowd taunted Jesus to “come

down from there, if you’re the Son of God.” Two of Christ’s temptations in the

desert were earthly power and the abuse of his authority as God’s Son.







Christian, which king do you worship?







Finally, pay attention to the severe

factionalism between the Pharisees and Sadducees. More than once, their

political rivalry and theological disagreements resulted in bloodshed and civil

war. The Zealots appeared in the first century, preaching that paying taxes to

the emperor was a form of slavery. Tax collectors stood at the opposite end of

the social and political spectrum. They were collaborators with Rome, and their

regular contact with Gentiles made them “untouchable” for observant Jews. A

regular charge against Jesus was that he was a “friend of tax collectors and

sinners.” The fact that Jesus names Simon the Zealot and Matthew the tax

collector among his apostles negates politics.







Christian, your primary allegiance is

not to faction or nation, but to Christ and his kingdom. Never let yourself

become confused on that question.















By

the time of Jesus’ birth, his homeland of Palestine had been bandied about for

eight centuries by successive empires: Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia

(Alexander the Great), and Rome.







Assyria

wiped the northern kingdom of Israel off the map in 722 BC, as Babylon did to

the southern kingdom of Judah almost 150 years later.

Where is God in the evolutionary process? Did he just start the universe with the Big Bang and then step back?















Listen or Read. Your Choice.















Before my unexpected “vacation” due to flu, one of my podcast listeners had asked for clarity on my series, Adam’s Evolutionary Journey. “After listening to Episode 3,” she wrote, “I was left feeling a little empty. Where is God in the evolutionary process? Did he just start the universe with the Big Bang and then step back?”







Good question! My short answer is that God guided evolution

at every step along the way. Now for the long answer …















A couple of years ago, the Discovery Institute mined its

scholarly depths to put together a 1,000-page book called Theistic Evolution.

For those of you who may be new to the origins discussion, Discovery is the

self-described hub of the Intelligent Design movement, and Theistic Evolution is

the belief that God used the process of evolution to create all living things, including

us. These days, most who hold that belief prefer the term “Evolutionary Creation,”

which Denis Lamoureux coined in his 2008 book of the same name. According to Lamoureux,

the noun “creation” should receive more emphasis than the adjective

“evolutionary,” and I agree. Unlike Theistic Evolution, the emphasis in

Evolutionary Creation is upon the Creator, not upon the process.







I also prefer Evolutionary Creation for another reason – one

that comes out clearly in the Discovery Institute book. Like any general term, Theistic

Evolution has been used to describe a range of positions, but in Discovery’s

book Wayne Grudem gives it a definition that few Christians would accept.

Namely, he says,







“God created matter and after that

did not guide or intervene or act directly to cause any empirically detectable

change in the natural behavior of matter until all living things had evolved by

purely natural processes” (Grudem, 67).







Strictly speaking, this “hands-off” description of God has

more in common with 17th-18th century deism than with Christianity.

A deist would agree that a supreme being exists, but after setting everything

in motion, the creator then allowed the universe to run its course without

interference. God is a disinterested observer, in other words. Creation thus

becomes an infinitely complex course of dominoes that God set up “in the

beginning,” and once he tipped over the first, nothing else was necessary to

achieve his ultimate end. To be fair, a few Christians do believe that God “front-loaded”

everything into his initial act of creation, and afterward didn’t need to be

involved. But in my experience, I’ve found them so few and far between as to be

negligible. Grudem’s “hands-off” definition of Theistic Evolution certainly

doesn’t describe the vast majority of Evolutionary Creationists. And since the

rest of Theistic Evolution bases its critique on Grudem’s flawed

foundation, the result is a 1000-page doorstop.







God could have pressed an infinite number of levers to influence the direction of evolution, and almost all of them would be indiscernible or unprovable.







The Discovery Institute’s main problem is that its pet

theory – Intelligent Design – attempts to prove that evolution exhibits signs

of design, which implies a designer. Of course, all thinking Christians agree

that God had a plan and purpose for creating, but can that fact be proven? To

do so, one would have to find evidence of God’s intervention, which explains

Listen or Read. Your Choice.















Last week, I introduced the Becoming Christ aspect of the

website, which draws from my forthcoming e-book The Anointed. In this episode, the time seemed right to share a bit

of my personal journey. I hope it will shed some light on the book and the

direction I’m headed. Since this essay is mostly personal, I’ll forego the

usual footnotes and references.















My formative years were spent in ultra-conservative

Amarillo, Texas, during the 1970s. My family faithfully attended a Methodist

church down the street from our house, and this being the ’70s, we piled into

the car and drove to the end of the block to get there, rain or shine.







I had a children’s storybook Bible as a child, but my

interest was confined to the pictures. Even then, I couldn’t wrap my mind

around the story of Noah. I’d been to the San Diego Zoo and watched nature

shows on PBS. How did Noah get elephants, lions, rhinos, and giraffes onto the

Ark? It made no sense to me, so I mentally checked out whenever the subject of

the flood came up in Sunday School.







Around the age of 12, I was snooping in my parents’ bedroom

and discovered a book in my dad’s nightstand – Good News for Modern Man. This was one of the first “everyday

English” translations of the Bible, and at that time it was New Testament only.

I snuck the book out every morning and put it back every afternoon until I’d

read the entire thing on the sly. Afterward, to the shock of everyone in our small

congregation (including my parents), I grabbed my little sister’s hand at the

end of a service and said, “Let’s get baptized.”







My baptismal picture with my little sister, LeeAnn, in 1974. Wide white belt and big cuffs. ’70s rule, baby!







The next book I stole from my dad set the tone for my teens

and twenties. The Late, Great Planet

Earth was published in 1970 and went on to become “the No. 1 non-fiction

bestseller of the decade,” according to The

New York Times. I found it in ’74 or

so and was immediately “caught up” (forgive the pun) in its vision of rapture,

tribulation, Armageddon, and Christ’s return to a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem.

It took years for me to outgrow this warped take on the “end times,” but one principle

from the book stuck with me: Interpret

literally unless you’re forced to interpret symbolically.







Armed with that litmus test, the now-disgraced duo of Paige Patterson and Judge Paul Pressler launched their conservative takeover of Southern Baptist seminaries.







Soon, another book cemented that same thought in the

evangelical consciousness. In 1976 the editor of Christianity Today, Harold Lindsell, authored his infamous Battle for the Bible. Lindsell claimed

liberal theology was undermining the Scripture and would destroy the church.

While inerrancy had previously been a matter of opinion rather than a doctrine,

even among evangelicals, Lindsell argued that the Bible “does not contain error

of any kind,” even (or especially!) in its references to history, cosmology, and

science. Furthermore, any Christian who didn’t agree with this fundamentalist

definition of inerrancy was not a “true Christian.”







Lindsell named names and took no prisoners in his crusade to

expose “liberal theology” in evangelical seminaries and denominations. The next

year, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy was formed, and in 1978

it brought together 200 evangelical scholars, theologians, and pastors to draft