Nonconformist Chronicles

Can We Take the Bible Literally?

Can a person, in all intellectual honesty, believe that the events of the Bible are literally true? Was the world created in six literal days, did the Red Sea literally turn to blood, and was Jesus bodily raised from the dead? Retired Bishop John Shelby Spong says "no" to all of the above. He cites the "intellectual revolution" from Copernicus to Einstein as having made it impossible for educated people to view the Bible as literally true.

Spong argues that the biblical miracles cannot be true since Newton showed that the universe operates according to fixed natural laws. Moreover, Darwin surely disproved that humans are a special creation made in God's image. According to Spong, "there has never been a human perfection from which we have fallen away. There has been rather only the evolution of higher consciousness..." (Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes ). Spong further maintains that Einstein has "demonstrated the relativity of all articulated truth." 

The biblical narratives, written within a pre-modern framework, can simply not be taken literally by the intellectually honest post-modern thinker. Yet Spong refers to himself as a Christian and to Jesus as his Lord. Spong hopes for a time in which the church will not consider literal understandings of Scripture to be the litmus test of orthodoxy. He envisions a church in which those who cannot intellectually force themselves to believe in a bodily resurrection of Jesus can still be embraced as Christians. He puts himself in this category, also rejecting such foundational doctrines as the virgin birth and the ascension.  

It sounds to me as if Spong is saying that we have simply outgrown a literal reading of the "myths and legends" of Scripture. We have become too sophisticated to believe all that and any thinking person who does has intellectually compromised. At least that's how I understand Spong. 

I have agreed with much of what Spong says in his book which has been the launching pad for my last several posts. He certainly caused me to think. I cannot overemphasize the book's significance for articulating the New Testament's use of the Old. I've been trying to communicate much of this to the church for years and I now have the means to do so even more adequately.  

But I disagree when Spong asserts that the Gospel authors did not intend their works to be taken literally. He surely overstates the case when he says that "Jewish people did not relate to sacred history as if it were an objective description of reality." Even if we grant that to be occasionally true, it seems that for Spong "Jewish" consistently equals "non-literal." I think it's a stretch to imply that Jewish authors of antiquity were never concerned about literal history or objective reality. 

Spong is correct in that reading the Scriptures through a Jewish lens will open up a whole new world for us. But I'm not convinced that reading the Bible through a Jewish lens will always imply a non-literal reading. Spong attempts to form too solid a link between the Jewishness of a work and its "supposed" non-literal intent.   

While I know that Spong is a champion of human rights and rails against Anti-Semitism, some of his arguments about what makes a book Jewish are almost reminiscent of some of the original motive behind the Documentary Hypothesis. German theologians dissected Jewish Scriptures, assigning the Pentateuch to various authors, believing the Semitic mind to be too irrational to recognize all the "contradictions." Spong, likewise, has not painted the Jews of antiquity in a very rational light. But in all fairness, I'm sure he meant to show that what a modern Westerner considers "rational" would not even occur to an ancient Jew. While this is true to an extent, I don't think it's true to the extent Spong believes.     

Spong believes that thinking Christians must work to deliver the gospel from "literal distortions" or else it will die. But does the gospel really need us to save it? And is there really a gospel if there is no bodily resurrection of Jesus? What does it mean to believe in the resurrection?

What if someone in our church family decides to stop taking the resurrection literally? Do we excommunicate them or do we say, "Well, that's okay. We admire your intellectual honesty. So just stay on board and help the rest of us make the world a better place"? What do you think?

More on the resurrection in my next post.              

The All-Important Question: What Does this Mean?

My previous post related John Shelby Spong's view that the all important question in biblical interpretation is not "Did this really happen?" but "What does this mean?" I agreed to the extent that we Westerners have indeed failed to discern truth in myth, legend, intuition, and poetry. We have rather tended to feel that only that which is literal and objective can be true. So we've spent inordinate amounts of time and spilled tons of ink trying to prove that the Bible is scientifically precise, historically literal, and nowhere contradictory. We have tried to force pre-modern works into a modern mold. 

In terms of the pre-modern and non-literal, some would argue that the creation narrative in Genesis is neither historically literal, nor scientifically plausible. It is rather a poetic prose, true in the sense that it affirms God as the source of all that is good. The description of humanity's failure is also theologically accurate. It's a situation which has consistently repeated itself down through the ages as human beings have sought complete autonomy for selfish ends, resulting in disastrous consequences. 

So perhaps the important question in the creation accounts is not so much whether everything came into being in six literal days, whether a snake really talked, or whether digesting forbidden fruit exposed nudity. But what the narrative means is the all important question. Will we seek to live autonomously with delusions of godhood or will we submit ourselves to living under God's Word which speaks new creation into existence--a Word that transforms chaos into order.

Some believe that the Book of Jonah is a parable as opposed to literal history. So the important question would not be whether Jonah was really swallowed by a fish. The important question is whether we will be a light to the nations, compassionate to everyone regardless of their ethnicity. Or will we allow prejudice, hatred, or vengeance to blind us?

Was the Samson story a Paul Bunyan type tale (as a friend once suggested to me)? Did he really tie three-hundred foxes tail-to-tail using their tails as torches to light the grain-fields? Is it important to believe this is literal history or is the all important moral to this story more about the danger of compromise? 

And did Jesus cast out literal demons? Or was the language of demon-possession the Gospel authors' accomodative language to a pre-modern world in reference to various diseases which at that time lacked scientific diagnoses?   

Moreover, the cosmology assumed in the Hebrew Scriptures is not a scientific description of the cosmos. It is certainly accomodative language as the authors communicate truth within the framework of a pre-modern package.

I'm not saying whether I agree with any or all of the above viewpoints. Let's just say that I'm sympathetic to them and I don't reject someone who holds to these conclusions. (Nor will I be posing these questions in Sunday morning sermons where the point of these texts will be "What do they mean for us?")  

But are there indeed parts of Scripture that simply must be understood as literally true and historically accurate before one is considered "orthodox?" Stay tuned.      

Are the Gospels Literal History?

I believe that the Gospels came about through both oral tradition and through literary dependence upon previous Gospel authors. I've agreed with John Shelby Spong, whose book, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes has shown the New Testament to be largely a midrash on the Hebrew Scriptures in which the stories of old are retold and heightened to describe the God-presence encountered in the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

Spong adds to this his comparison of the Gospels with the Jewish calendar, indicating that the Gospel pericopes were designed to expound upon Scripture readings in the synagogue. Spong even shows evidence of knowledge of the undisputed Paulines in the Gospels. The content and structure of the Gospels came about through an elaborate and intricate set of circumstances.  

Spong argues that the Gospels are a liturgical genre as opposed to a literary genre, which in his mind, would rule out the Gospels being literal history reported by eyewitnesses to capture objective reality (p. 93). Here is where I part company with Spong.

Now I do agree with his view that the uncanny similarities between some Gospel narratives and Old Testament narratives are not just mere foreshadowings of the life of Christ. I've argued that the Hebrew Scriptures traditionally viewed as "predictive" prophecy actually had a historical context all their own, typically describing events which happened in ancient Israel. These events were then repeated in some sense in the New Testament and perhaps specifically in the life of Jesus.

But Spong goes as far as to say that God did not plant these "clues" into the ancient text in anticipation of Christ. To do so would be for God to take an enormous literary risk that these texts would be accurately translated and preserved for hundreds of years. While I heartily admit to a very human element in the production and transmission of the Scriptures, I nevertheless feel that God has been behind the scenes providentially orchestrating key events in the history of the text. While I doubt that God micromanaged every detail of the process, mechanically dictating every word, I do believe that he is in some sense sovereign over the text. 

Spong, however, believes that the Jewish-Christian authors simply searched their Scriptures looking for clues about Jesus and then made all the midrashic applications on their own. So the Gospel authors were simply creative enough to find what they were looking for in order to employ their Scriptures to make sense of Jesus. Moreover, they manufactured stories about Jesus from their own imaginations. Spong says that Jesus' Journey to Jerusalem, in Luke 9:51-19:27, is basically a liturgical creation of Luke's that probably doesn't go back to the historical Jesus. 

Spong does not believe that the Gospel writers intended their works to be taken as literal history. But it wasn't until the church finally broke with the synagogue that the New Testament was taken captive by Gentiles who insisted that the Gospels were literal history as opposed to being mainly liturgical and theological. Unlike the Jewish mind, the Western mind---anchored in time, space, and objectivity has always had trouble embracing the truth found in myth, legend, intuition, and poetry. 

So, according to Spong, demanding literalness or historical accuracy from the Scriptures fails to recognize that the Bible is a Jewish book. Literalness read into John led to the Christological and Trinatarian controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries, leading to creeds and councils whose conclusions have become the definition of orthodoxy and thereby the dividing line between who is in or out of Christian circles. Spong sees this as unfortunate. 

Now I do believe that the Scriptures are primarily theological works as opposed to being books about history or science. I also believe that we Westerners have tended to literalize and objectify everything. We have indeed failed to discern truth in such genres as myth or poetry. And some Scriptures may call us to do exactly that. I agree that the Bible is not a science book, but was written from a pre-modern world view, from a time in which miracle and magic were considered very real. 

This all leads Spong to conclude that the pertinent question when reading a biblical narrative is not "Did this really happen?" But the all important question is "What does this mean?" To a large extent, I agree. We've spent too much time trying to harmonize Scripture with science or trying to harmonize the Gospels with one another. To be overly concerned with a harmonization of the Gospels is to miss one author's unique point because we don't allow him to speak without being qualified or restricted by another author. 

I think the all important question really is "What does this mean?" What is the theological point of a given passage? That is usually the most important question. But should this rule out the importance of ever asking "Did this really happen?" For this, we'll await my next post. But I am interested in any questions or comments in the meantime.  

Luke and the Torah

Some of my previous posts have hopefully shown that the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in the New Testament is rarely, if ever, in mere terms of predictions that came true. The Old Testament references and allusions recorded in the New Testament are more akin to "parallels" than they are to "predictions." Events in the New Testament are echoes or reiterations of events in the Old Testament. This includes events from every genre of Old Testament literature and not just the prophetic books.  

John Shelby Spong's book, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes is indispensablele for showing how the Gospels employ the Midrashic principle of offering rabbinic-style commentary on the Old Testament. Spong says that the Gospels are liturgical, written for use in early Jewish-Christian worship. In the assembly, the Gospels demonstrated how Jesus fulfills what was written in the Law as Gospel pericopes were paired with the weekly Torah readings. 

The Midrashic principle and the liturgical theory for Gospel origins lead Spong to rightly conclude that there is Jewish content in almost every verse of the New Testament. The Jewish content in the Gospels gives us a perspective for reading the entire New Testament through a Jewish lens. 

Following Goulder, Spong showed how the structure of Matthew's Gospel followed five major Jewish festivals. Moving to Luke, Spong shows how each section of Luke's Gospel follows the Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy). Jesus' Journey to Jerusalem in Luke 9:51-18:14, for example, is remarkably parallel to the Book of Deuteronomy. Some highlights:

• Whereas Moses sent out emissaries (Deut. chapter 1), Jesus sends out disciples (Luke 10:1ff)
• The contrast between living on bread alone as opposed to living by the Word of God (Deut. 8:1-3) is aptly parallel in the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42). Martha was making preparations while Mary was listening to Jesus.
• The year for canceling debts (Deut. 15:1-18) is echoed in the story of a woman released from eighteen years of crippling bondage (Luke 13:10-21).
• The rebellious son (Deut. 21:18-21) is somewhat parallel to the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).

While these allusions to the Old Testament texts aren't always made explicit by the New Testament authors, they are too uncanny to be coincidental. 

Midrashic elements abound throughout Luke even apart from his overall structure which parallels the Torah. The birth narratives in Luke 1 and 2, for example, bear striking resemblances (in some instances) to the birth narratives of Isaac and Jacob in Genesis. Spong further contends that Luke relied heavily on the story of Hannah and Samuel while composing the birth narratives of Jesus and John the Baptist. The parallels abound there as well (compare 1 Samuel 1-2 to Luke 1-2).

There are similarities between the Josephs of the Old and New Testaments. Also tantamount to Luke's Gospel is his representation of Jesus as both a prophet like Moses and an Elijah-type figure. Jesus' ministry included a miraculous feeding, raising a widow's son from the dead, and a miraculous ascension to heaven which paved the way for his spirit to indwell his followers.

Spong has shown how the Gospel authors made use of the Old Testament, other Gospel authors, and of the Jewish liturgy in their composition. And equally intriguing is Spong's insistence that Acts is a midrash on Luke as events in the early church are reflections of events in the ministry of Jesus.  

For all of these insights, I applaud Spong's contribution to New Testament scholarship. But I'll show where I part company with him in my next two posts as we ask some hard questions about the Gospels.        

Why were the Gospels Written?

The Gospels likely consist of stories and sayings of Jesus that were passed down orally through the decades. These oral traditions were then assembled in book form becoming the individual pericopes of the Gospels. Some pericopes appear in more than one Gospel and each author edited and arranged material according to the needs of his respective readership.

The church was at least thirty years old by the time the first Gospel was written. So each of the Gospels was written in the service of the church, for the congregations of each of the authors. It is doubtful that the church, which grew out of Judaism, had made a clean break with the synagogue by the time the synoptics were composed. So the earliest Christians, who were Jewish, likely continued to gather in synagogues for worship.

Synagogue worship included designated Scripture readings for each worship assembly. The Torah (the five books of Law--Genesis through Deuteronomy) was read through publicly in the course of a year, one passage at a time, one week at a time.  

Returning to Spong's book, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes, he contends that the purpose of the Gospels was theological as opposed to historical and liturgical as opposed to literal. What is meant by "liturgical" is that the Gospels were written for use in early Christian worship. Spong contends that each week a pericope about Jesus would be incorporated into synagogue worship which would serve as Christian exposition on the day's reading from the Torah.

So the early Jewish Christians were finding points of correspondence between their sacred Scriptures and what they had experienced in Jesus of Nazareth. Finding Jesus in their Scriptures was their attempt to make sense of the God presence they had discerned in this man. So each week, an episode or saying from the life of Jesus would correspond with, or elaborate on, a passage from the day's Scripture reading.

Building upon the work of Michael Goulder, Spong puts the Gospels beside the Jewish liturgical calendar and concludes that the structure of the Gospels follow the Jewish year. Goulder had argued that the five teaching blocks of Matthew correspond with five major Jewish festivals.

The Sermon on the Mount, for example, corresponds to the Feast of Pentecost which had evolved into a commemoration of the giving of the Law at Sinai. Now Jesus delivers instruction from a mountain, as did Moses.  The Jewish New Year corresponds to Matthew 11 which centers on John the Baptist who announced the New Year theme of the coming of the kingdom. The Feast of Tabernacles (or Harvests) corresponds to the agricultural parables in Matthew 13. The transfiguration text of Matthew 17 would land on the Feast of Dedication which dealt with God's glory. And of course, the sayings of Passion week would correspond to Passover.

Spong has obviously put tedious hours into his research even demonstrating that while Mark only covers six months of the Jewish year from Rosh Hashanah to Passover, Matthew was written to expand upon Mark and cover the entire Jewish year. 

The Passion narrative at the end of Mark's Gospel would obviously correspond to the Passover narrative in Exodus. Spong then goes backward from the Passion narrative counting the divisions of Mark imposed by Codex Alexandrinus (containing one of the earliest manuscripts of Mark to which we have access) and discovers that the teaching block found in Mark 9:14-11:11 would appropriately correspond to the weekly Torah readings from Deuteronomy. This is appropriate since Deuteronomy could be considered a catechism for those entering the Jewish community while these teachings in Mark seem to likewise be catechetical in tone. 

The reading from Genesis describing judgment in the days of Noah would correspond to Mark 13, an apocalyptic text dealing with judgment. And going backward to the beginning of Mark's Gospel, this section corresponds with the Jewish New Year at which the blowing of the shofar announced the coming reign of God. So the kingdom is Mark's concern as the book opens.

So Mark's Gospel seems to follow the Jewish year from Rosh Hashanah to Passover, with the various pericopes consisting of early Christian preaching on the Torah as it was read week to week in the synagogue. Spong continues to apply his liturgical scheme to Matthew and Luke, showing how they expanded upon Mark's liturgical intent.  Now if this seems rather complex, it's because it is. Perhaps Spong had to work too hard to achieve such an elaborate theory.

Whether or not one agrees with Spong's theory that the structure of the Gospels follow the Jewish liturgical year, his book is nevertheless invaluable for showing how the New Testament uses the Old. The life and teachings of Jesus are clearly recorded as Midrash (Rabbinic-style commentary) on the Hebrew Scriptures. Spong gives numerous examples of how New Testament texts retell and heighten the stories of Jewish Scripture. 

The Gospels are saturated with references and allusions to the Hebrew Scriptures, but not usually (if ever) in a prediction-fulfillment mode. But as I've said before, the life and teaching of Jesus recapitulates the sacred history of Israel. The Gospels serve in incorporating the stories and sayings of Jesus into the life and worship of the early church by connecting his story to the Jewish sacred text.

 (Photo courtesy Flickr)         

How We Got the Gospels

Sorry about the long hiatus. I'll explain it all later.

This post, while self-contained, builds upon my previous one and from here everything will start coming together.  

This post will deal primarily with the Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The term "synoptic" means "common-view" (according to Stuart and Fee's How to Read the Bible for all it's Worth). It comes from two Greek words which literally mean "seeing together." These Gospels are called synoptics due to their great similarities.  

The Gospels are not biographies. They obviously omit a good portion of the life of Jesus and they aren't always chronological. Nor are they simply collections of sayings (i.e., teachings) because they also include narratives. The Gospels are unique collections of sayings of Jesus and narratives about Jesus.

How can we explain the coming together of these stories and sayings in a way that recognizes the striking similarities and subtle (or not so subtle) differences among the three books? First, we consider similarities. The synoptics are similar in that they record many of the same stories and sayings. For example, common stories among the three include the temptations of Jesus (Mark 1:12-13; Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13), the feeding of the five thousand (Mark 6:30-44; Matt. 14:13-21; Luke 9:10-17), and the triumphal entry (Mark 11:1-11; Matt. 21:1-11; Luke 19:28-44). Common sayings among all three include the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-20; Matt. 13:1-23; Luke 8:1-15) and Jesus' Olivet Discourse (Mark 13; Matt. 24; Luke 21:5-38). This is not an exhaustive list. Other stories and sayings may only appear in one or two of the synoptics. Some of these are reworked either subtly or considerably from one Gospel account to another.

What explanation can account for both the similarities and differences among these Gospels, especially in light of the fact that the first one was probably not written until anywhere from 35 to 50 years after the crucifixion of Jesus? How were the stories and sayings preserved and why weren't they reported identically in the Gospels?

The most logical explanation of how the Gospels came to be, given the oral culture of learning in the first century, is that the stories and sayings were handed down verbally through the decades until they were finally written down. Each individual story or saying, like those cited above, is called a "per-i-co-pe" (a four-syllable word that does not rhyme with periscope, has a short "o" and a long "e" on the end). 

Each pericope, whether we're talking about the story of Jesus' temptations or a saying like the Parable of the Sower, likely circulated orally and independent of a particular context until the Gospel authors began to assemble these memories about Jesus into their respective books. Material is sometimes arranged chronologically, but other times it is arranged topically. The literary context of each Gospel is arranged with the needs of each Gospel's original readers in mind. This accounts for some of the differences in wording, ordering of pericopes, and emphases.

The similarities of the Gospels is likely the result of literary dependence among the authors. It's likely that Matthew had Mark in front of him when he wrote his Gospel and that Luke had access to both Matthew and Mark. Each subsequent author made additions and omissions that were pertinent to his particular readership. Each author shaped and arranged his material according to the particular needs of his readers. The author's individual writing style, personality, background, and education also comes to bear upon the differences among each Gospel. 

Some might argue that this is a very "earthy" way of explaining Gospel origins. Where does inspiration come in? I don't think this explanation rules out the notion that God was behind all of this every step of the way. But noting the differences among the Gospels it is highly unlikely that God mechanically dictated word-for-word what each author was to write. God's method of operation has always been to deliver the gospel through earthen vessels. The gospel is always heralded through personality and individuality. Why should we think that the written account of the gospel should be any different?       

Prophecy that isn't Predictive: Two Examples

There is more to prophecy than predictions that came true. In fact, most prophecy is not "predictive" in nature. Here are two examples.

After the death of Herod it was safe for Joseph, Mary, and Jesus to end their sojourn in Egypt and return to Israel. Matthew 2:15 states: 

And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I have called my son." 

This cites a prophecy from Hosea 11:1. But the Hosea passage, in its original context, was clearly not a prediction about Jesus coming out of Egypt. The Hosea passage reads: 

When Israel was a child I loved him, and out of Egypt I have called my son. 

The "son" in Hosea is the collective nation of Israel. So words referring to Israel being called out of Egypt are now applied to Jesus being called out of Egypt. It is the midrashic principle at work in which "stories about heroes and events of the past are heightened and retold about later heroes and events." So here is a case in which events in the life of Jesus are shown to parallel events in the sacred history of Israel. 

Likewise, Matthew 1:22-23 speaks of another prophetic fulfillment.

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel--which means "God with us."

Matthew applies these words to Mary, mother of Jesus. But the original context of Isaiah 7 clearly refers to a child born during the lifetime of King Ahaz, 700 years before Christ. The child serves as a sign to King Ahaz that before this child is old enough to know right from wrong, the two kingdoms to the north will be laid waste. So Ahaz needn't fear these enemies. He needn't make an alliance with Assyria for protection. Assyria cannot be trusted. But Ahaz should trust God. 

The Hebrew word almah in the original text of Isaiah 7:14 does not mean "virgin." It meant "young woman" as it is accurately translated in the New Revised Standard Version. In the days of Ahaz a young woman would bear a child who would be a sign to Ahaz. The child's name will be Immanuel as a reminder to Ahaz that God is with Israel.

When Isaiah was translated into Greek, some 200 years before Matthew, The word almah was translated parthenos, a word that could mean virgin or young maiden. Matthew, who likely had the Greek translation of Isaiah in front of him as he composed his Gospel, chose to render the term parthenos as "virgin" and apply the prophecy to Mary. 

So was Matthew dishonest in applying this passage to the mother of Jesus? The Western Gentile mind might assume that Matthew took Isaiah 7:14 out of context to make it fit what he wanted it to mean. But rather, he was showing how the life of Jesus recapitulates Israels's sacred history at practically every turn. 

So prophecy is most often "fulfilled" in New Testament literature not in terms of predictions that came true, but in terms of events in Israel's sacred history that parallel events in the life of Jesus. As John Shelby Spong asserts, the only way the Jewish Christians could make sense of the God presence they encountered in Jesus was to search their sacred Scriptures for texts that seemed to foreshadow this experience. 

This follow up to my previous post hopefully prepares us to further consider the midrashic principle at work in New Testament literature. We'll look at this and more implications of Spong's work in a near future post. 

(Photo courtesy Flickr)          

The New Testament through Jewish Eyes

The prophets were not fortune tellers. Prophecy is too often misunderstood as predictions that came true, possibly years after they were spoken. It is wrongly assumed that the Old Testament scriptures are chock full of Messianic predictions that came true. Christians wonder why Jewish Scripture students do not see how Jesus fulfills these predictions.

I would say that there is little "predictive" prophecy in Scripture. Prophecy is inspired preaching and is not always predictive. When a prophet does make a prediction he typically refers to events that will take place within his own lifetime, not hundreds or thousands of years later. 

Yet there are many New Testament passages that relate back to Old Testament passages. But this rarely, if ever, refers simply to a prediction that came true. In the words of John Shelby Spong "Jews filtered every new experience through the corporate remembered history of their people, as that history had been recorded in the Hebrew scriptures of their past." 

Since the earliest Christians were Jews, they filtered their experience of the God presence they encountered in Jesus of Nazareth through the lens of their Jewish sacred texts. To the Jewish-Christian mind, the life of Israel and its salvation history are recapitulated in the life of Jesus. 

In Spong's book, Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes, he insists that in order to understand the four Gospels (or, for that matter, any of the New Testament) we must learn to read the Gospels with Jewish eyes. Spong demonstrates how the Gospel authors employ Jewish Midrashic style in relating Jesus to their Hebrew Scriptures. Midrash is basically rabbinical commentary on the Hebrew texts in which "stories about heroes of the past are heightened and retold about later heroes."  I would add that stories about events of the past are also heightened and retold about later events 

I cannot overemphasize the importance of recognizing the Midrashic principle at work in the New Testament. It revolutionizes our understanding of how the New Testament uses the Old. In the near future I'll touch on some use of the Midrashic principle in the life of Jesus, showing how the Gospel narratives about him correspond to the Jewish corporate history. I'll also mention Spong's theory on the origin of the Gospels in addition to some of his conclusions which I do not believe are necessary. 

(photo courtesy Flickr).         

Coping with the Stress of Transition

Transitions in life can take you beyond your stress thresh-hold. In Roy Oswald's book New Beginnings: A Pastorate Start Up Workbook part of his advice to ministers in a new work regards coping with the stress of transition. While some of the advice may be unique to ministers, much of it can apply to anyone.

In addition to moving, injury, and changes in job, financial status, or living conditions, stress is also produced by changes in marital status, the death of a loved one, retirement, celebration of holidays, a new addition to the family, or even by an outstanding personal achievement. You might need some coping strategies if any of this has been among your recent experience.

So what follows are coping strategies from Oswald, embellished by Yours Truly, and in no particular order: 

1) Don't make more radical changes. Having just been through a major transition, this is not a good time to start a new diet, change your sleeping patterns, or enroll for a university course. Give yourself some recovery time before launching into anything new. 

2) Be good to yourself. Now there is a difference between being good to yourself and self-indulgence. The latter can destroy your health, while the former can preserve your sanity. So take in a movie, have a favorite desert, or read for recreation. 

3) Stabilize the Family Structure. Follow up a major transition by spending more and not less time with family. You will not not function well if they have difficulty adjusting. Family rituals are one way to help with stability. In our family, we observe a weekly "popcorn-and-a-movie" night. It's usually Friday, but is sometimes made up on Saturday. Each week we watch something "family friendly." It might be Don Knotts, Shirley Temple, Roy Rogers, or Jerry Lewis. But we do this religiously even if we're in a motel with a portable DVD player and microwave popcorn. 

4) Exercise. Having a foot in two towns I've fallen down on this one, but I've taken some small steps lately. I recently stopped by Wal-Mart and bought a basketball. While I could spend my work breaks indulging in more caffeine, I now go out to the church parking lot and take a "hoops break." It's a real stress reliever. A two mile walk in the evening doesn't hurt either. 

5) Have a Support System. Keep up with friends by e-mail or telephone. Find some members of the church family in whom you can confide. With ministers it is often safer if those support systems are out-of-town (at least at first). I once heard a wise man compare a preacher who expects his needs to be met by the congregation to a doctor who expects his needs to be met by his patients. While some mutual ministry will likely happen, a minister is not there so the church can minister to him. He is there to minister to the church.

6) Ease into things. As Oswald states, it is tempting to bust a gut in the first six months of ministry until you settle into a routine. Avoid this temptation. Your first order of business is to get to know the members of the congregation. Know their needs. Know where they live. Visit them on their own turf, invite people over, and have lunch with the heads of the households. If I had past ministries to do over, I would have done far more of this sooner as I am doing now.  

Oswald states that in the first few months you are little more than lover and historian. It is not the time to initiate new programs or make sweeping reforms. Get to know folks individually and learn how the congregation functions as a group. 

7) Spend your first Sunday in the pew as a visitor. My current position is the only church where I have been able to do that. It gave me an opportunity to view the congregation through the eyes of a visitor. And I'm glad I did since I heard a great sermon on Habakkuk and just what I needed at the time. 

8) If possible, take some time between transitions. It was healthy for me to take a vacation between my ministries in Illinois and Kansas. And it was healthy to have time off from the ministry before beginning my latest job. Preaching a farewell sermon one Sunday and a sermon at your new congregation the next does not allow any recovery time.      

So there you are. Preacher or not, I hope some of this is helpful.           

Transitions and Stress

Here I am, posting as infrequently as ever. But as always I'm asking that you not give up on me. There is a reason for the infrequency.

Our family has been in transition for over two years now. Having started a new work in January, I am currently re-reading Roy Oswald's New Beginnings: A Pastorate Start Up Workbook published by the Alban Institute (while I believe this book may be out of print, there are others like it if you do a search of Oswald's name on Amazon). The first few chapters offer advice for coping with transitions and the next several deal with starting well in a new ministry. 

In regard to transitions, Oswald says that we are only able to tolerate so much change in our lives. If too little is familiar or predictable we risk getting sick, or even dying. The book includes a stress inventory listing several events which are said to produce individual stress reactions. The reader is assigned a score for every event listed that has occurred in one's life over the past twelve months. Here is a very small sampling from the list:

• personal injury
• forced out of last church (I assume this means fired)
• job change
• change in financial state
• change in living conditions
• change in residence
• change in schools

Again, this is just a small sampling of the list and each of those items listed above is something that has affected our family over the last twelve months. So have many other things on the list. Oswald says that a score of over 200 means you might be dangerously close to your stress threshold level. My score was 560. 

If by the end of 2009, we manage to sell our house and buy a new one, then all of the following will have happened to us over a two-year time period.

• I was in chiropractic care for several months due to a rear-ending auto accident. Gretchen was just released from therapy after an ice skating accident in December.
• Over the last two years I have had four different jobs, in two fields, in four cities.
• By the end of this year we will probably have moved four times in two years and lived in three cities.

But here is the good part. I'm not under a great deal of stress right now (and I'm not in denial). The leadership of the church to where I'm transitioning has been very patient as we gradually move. It's a lot easier when your new job is within driving distance of your home and within the same state. 

The stress of moving over a thousand miles to another state and the adverse effect this can have on marriage and health is something only those who have done it can possibly imagine. And I'm not talking about a move to or from college which is in a whole different category. I'm talking about an established life that is uprooted and relocated. 

But the whole experience has just confirmed to me how uncertain life is and that nothing can be taken for granted. It has forced me to finally get to a place where I can trust God like I never have before. Does this mean I'm glad all this stuff happened or that I somehow see it as God's plan? Absolutely not! Much of what we've experienced should never have happened. Nor should Joseph have been sold into slavery by his brothers, but it all worked out for good as our situation has and will continue to do so.

In my next post I'll mention some coping strategies that have proved helpful to those undergoing life transitions. I would have done better to apply these strategies more in previous transitions, but this time I am and they are working for me.