Watch out for things that are getting legs around presbytery!

Hello again,

“Destroy, O Lord, divide their tongues; for I see violence and strife in the city. Day and night they go around it on its walls, and iniquity and trouble are within it; ruin is in its midst; oppression and fraud do not depart from its marketplace.” – Psalm 55:9-11

Immediately before this, David exclaims, “And I say, ‘Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest; yes I would wander far away; I would lodge in the wilderness…'” Psalm 55:6

So what we see are two things:

David wants to be like a dove and flee and find rest. The dove brings a Noahic image of the dove released from the ark to see if the waters had receded so it was safe to disembark onto the new creation. Also, the concept/word “rest” carries Noahic overtures, as it is the word from which “Noah” is derived in Hebrew.

Of course, this Psalm goes on to speak of the fact that his enemies “in the city” (v.9) are not enemies out there, but rather are his former friends. He also is declaring that the city they have made has become a Babel of sort. David wants God to judge them by “dividing their tongues” (v.9) which is the same judgment as at Babel (as is nowhere else in the Bible except Pentecost (next post!). I think this Psalm tells us something about Babel, also, because this judgment seems to be tied with the sort of sins being perpetrated in the “city”. Genesis doesn’t give us much information on the sins of Babel, but I think it is safe to assume that these sorts of evils were present in that corrupt enterprise.

What I am seeing here, by way of allusion, in summary is:

David is speaking of the ark/city that is the capital of Israel (most likely Jerusalem, but possibly Saul’s court at Gibeah, depending on the timeline). And how he used to be friendly with these current enemies. They were his counselors and friends, members of God’s people (v.12-15). Yet they have turned that ark/city into another Babel. Within the Ark, in Noah’s day, there lay the seeds of Babelic tyranny in his son Ham, but no information is given to us regarding it. The Ark was still the safe place. But as soon as they disembarked into the new creation, the Babel project began. David sees another Ark, the people of God surrounding the Lord’s Anointed, and they have turned that Ark into another Babel. David wants to be the dove released into the wilderness (v.7) (perhaps the wilderness of the sea?) so that rest is gained. This is a shadow of Jesus’ great replay of this narrative in the Gospels and Acts and throughout Church history.

The theological implications are pretty clear: There is a way of understanding the Exile as God’s “dividing of tongues” at the Babel of Jerusalem. Combined with Cyril’s edict that every nation have its own tongue, and the “Jerusalem without walls” of Zechariah, we have a pretty solid case for God’s diverse politeuma within the world that is the normal post-exilic state of affairs for the people of God. When the Jews went back to Jerusalem and then started acting as they did in Jesus’ day, you can see how another Babel was forming/had already formed with a Nimrod (Herod the Great) building another Temple to the Heavens by human hands. And Pentecost and the events of A.D. 70, the destruction of that Temple, were instrumental in God’s hands for the final and complete spiritual reversal of the Babel project within the historia salutis.

“Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to please the one who enlisted him. An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops. Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.”

– 2 Timothy 2:3-7

To be a good soldier is to suffer with others. Getting “entangled in civilian pursuits” is to avoid suffering with others. Paul languishes in prison (2:9) and is persecuted by mobs in various cities (3:11), and those he should be able to trust to be by him leave him behind (4:10)  and he is deserted when facing civil judgment (4:16). Paul is telling Timothy to be a good soldier by not seeking the city’s approval in city pursuits, but by suffering with Paul the city’s reproach.

The crown is reserved for those who have finished the race (4:6-8) and Paul is noting that the crown goes to those who play by God’s rules. We think sometimes that “running so as to win” is referring to some “spiritual discipline”. I don’t think that is terribly wrong, but the specific point that Paul is making here is that of suffering with him. To play by God’s rules is to be suffering for His Kingdom. Christ suffered and was then crowned with glory and honor and immortality, so we must suffer with Him if we are to be so crowned. The race we run is the via dolorosa. The rules are God’s, and He has ordained that it was “fitting that He, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.”

The hard-working, long-suffering farmer receives the first of the crop. Paul and Timothy’s generation were God’s first-fruits of the harvest. The worker of God’s field should suffer for the sake of that field that he might share in the first of his harvest. If he pours himself out for the sake of the crop then he should reap what he sowed in God’s world. This is the same Paul that is getting “poured out as a drink offering”, “filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ for the sake of the body”. He is saying that Timothy (and through Timothy, all believers in their various ministries in the church) should himself share in these sufferings if he desires the fruits of God’s harvest.

What does this mean to you and me?

When people suffer around you, especially persecution, do not let yourself get entangled with your reputation, but suffer with them. To suffer in this sense might be to “bear reproach” with them. We should be encouraged, quite literally be courageous, when a brother is brought under some form of shame. Sometimes this could be to share a meal with a tax collector, befriend the (deserved or not) unfriendly, or publicly share someone else’s public ridicule or shame. If you think such opportunities are rare, then you aren’t any different from me, but I challenge you to think on that more and consider the various opportunities in one day where your fear of being “misunderstood” outmaneuvers your soldierly attitude for the Kingdom. We fight this fight by God’s rules or there is no progress. You aren’t growing in your faith because you are “practicing the spiritual disciplines”. You grow when God tests you and you persevere. Paul is teaching us here that the test doesn’t have to be our own, and therefore our growth is not limited to our personal experience, as you can suffer with others. Not only can your solidarity with your brothers and sisters in Christ help you grow, but it is the task of suffering with others that is the sum of what it means to be a good soldier of Christ. The creational and redemptive grain of the universe is such that perfection is through suffering for or with others is the means by which God crowns us with His favor. The farmer relies on God’s faithfulness to the hard-working when he pours himself out for his crops and we should be encouraged that the effort that we exert in the flesh to die to ourselves for others’ sake will be ultimately beneficial, as we will taste the fruits of our labors in the Spirit, if they by for the sake of His body.

Here is a quote for The Sickness Unto Death:

Addendum

That the definition of sin includes the possibility of offence: a general observation about offence

The sin/faith opposition is the Christian one which transforms all ethical concepts in a Christian way and distils one more decoction from them. At the root of the opposition lies the crucial Christian specification: before God; and tat in turn has the crucial Christian characteristic: the absurd, the paradox, the possibility of offence. And it is of the utmost importance that this is demonstrated in every specification of the Christian, since offence is the Christian protection against all speculative philosophy.  In what, then, do we find the possibility of offence here? In the fact that a person should have the reality of his being, as a particular human being, directly before God, and accordingly, again, and by the same token, that man’s sin should be of concern to God. This notion of the single human being before God never occurs to speculative thought; it only universalizes particular humans phantastically into the human race. It was exactly for this reason that a disbelieving Christianity came up with the idea that sin is sin, that it is neither here nor there whether it is before God. In other words, it wanted to get rid of the specification ‘before God’, and to that end invented a new wisdom, which nevertheless, curiously enough, was neither more nor less than what the higher wisdom generally is – the old paganism.

One hears so much nowadays about people being offended by Christianity because it is so dark and dismal, being offended by its severity, etc. The best advised course would be simply to tell them that the real reason why people are offended by Christianity is that it is too elevated, that its standard of measurement is not the human standard, that it wants to make man into something so extraordinary that he cannot grasp the thought of it. A quite elementary psychological account of the nature of offence will make this clear, and also show how infinitely silly is the behaviour of those who have defended Christianity by removing the offence; how stupidly or shamelessly people have ignored Christ’s own directions, which often and so anxiously warn against offence, that is, which point out that its possibility is there and is meant to be there. For if it were not, then it would not be an eternally essential component in Christianity, which would mean it was human nonsense of Christ, instead of removing it, to go about anxiously warning us against it.

If I were to imagine a poor day-labourer and the mightiest emperor who ever lived, and this mightiest emperor took it into his head to send for the day-labourer – who never had dreamed, and ‘neither had it entered into his heart’, that the emperor knew of his existence, and who would therefore count himself indescribably happy just to be allowed to see the emperor, something he could recount to his children and grandchildren as the most important event in his life – if the emperor were to send for him and tell him that he wanted to have him as his son-in-law, what then? Then, humanly, the day-labourer would be somewhat, or very much, at a loss, shame-faced and embarrassed; humanly it would strike him (and this is the human aspect) as something exceedingly odd, something insane about which he least of all would dare say anything to any other person, since in his own mind he himself was already inclined to the explanation that the emperor wanted to make a fool of him – something his neighbours near and far would very soon be much occupied with, so that the day-labourer would be a laughing-stock for the whole city, with his picture in the paper, the story of his betrothal to the emperor’s daughter sold by the ballad-wives. Yet, being the emperor’s son-in-law, that could well soon be a public fact, so that the day-labourer would have the evidence of his own senses to confirm whether the emperor was serious or whether he wanted merely to make fun of the poor fellow, make him unhappy for rest of his life, and help him on the way to a mad-house. For here we have the quid nimis [excess] which can so infinitely easily turn into its opposite. Just a small kindness; that would make sense to the day-labourer, that would be understood in the market-town by its highly respected cultured public, by all the ballad wives, in short by the five times one hundred thousand people who lived in that market-town, which in pure numbers, to be sure, was even a large city, while in regard to its grasp of and feeling for the extraordinary was a very small market-town – but this, becoming a son-in-law, that was much too much. And suppose now that it was not a question of public fact, but a private one, so that its facticity could not help the day-labourer to be sure, but faith was the only facticity, and everything therefore entrusted to faith; a question of whether he had humble courage enough to dare to believe it (for brazen courage cannot help one believe). How many day-labourers do you think would then have the courage? But the person who lacked that courage would be offended; for him the extraordinary would almost sound as though it were a mockery of him. He might perhaps honestly and openly admit: ‘This sort of thing is too exalted for me. I can’t make sense of it; to put it bluntly, it strikes me as foolishness.’

And now Christianity! Christianity teaches that this single human being, and so every single human being, whether husband, wife, servant girl, cabinet minister, merchant, barber, student, etc., this single human being is before God – this single human being, who might be proud to have spoken once in his life with the king, this human being who hasn’t the least illusion of being on an intimate footing with this or that person, this human being is before God, can talk with God any time he wants, certain of being heard; in short this human being has an invitation to live on the most intimate footing with God! Furthermore, for this person’s sake, for the sake of this very person too, God comes to the world, lets himself be born, suffers, dies; and this suffering God, he well-nigh begs and implores this human being to accept the help offered to him! Truly, if there is anything one should lose one’s mind over, this is it! Every person who does not have the humble courage to dare to believe it is offended. But why is he offended? Because it is too exalted for him, because he cannot make sense of it, because he cannot be open and frank in the face of it, and therefore must have it removed, made into nothing, into madness and nonsense, for it is as if it were about to choke him.

For what is offence? Offence is unhappy admiration. It is therefore related to envy, but is an envy turned towards oneself, in an even stricter sense worst when it is turned towards itself. The natural man’s narrow-mindedness cannot bring itself to accept the extraordinary that God has intended for him, and so the natural man is offended.

The degree of offence then depends on how much passion a person has in his admiration. More prosaic people who lack imagination and passion, who are thus not properly fitted to admire, they too are offended, but they confine themselves to saying: ‘I can’t makes sense of such a thing; I leave it be.’ These are the sceptics. But the more passion and imagination a person has, the nearer he is in a certain sense, that is to say in terms of possibility, to being able to be a believer, nota bene, to humbling himself in adoration under extraordinary, and the more passionate the offence, which in the end can be satisfied with nothing less than getting this exterminated, annihilated, trampled in the dust.

If you want to learn to understand offence, then study human envy, a study I offer as an extra course, and fancy myself to have a studied thoroughly. Envy is concealed admiration. A man who admires something but feels he cannot be happy surrendering himself to it, that man chooses to be envious of what he admires. He then speaks another language. In this language of his the thing he admires is said to be nothing, something stupid and humiliating and peculiar and exaggerated. Admiration is happy self-surrender, envy is unhappy self-assertion.

So too with offence: that which in an interpersonal relationship is admiration/envy, in the relation between God and man is adoration/offence. The summa summarum [sum total]  of all human wisdom is this ‘golden’, or perhaps rather plated, ne quid nimis [nothing to excess], too much or too little spoils everything. This is bandied about as wisdom, rewarded by admiration; its rate of exchange never fluctuates, the whole of mankind guarantees its worth. Then if once in a while there lives a genius who goes just a little beyond, he is declared insane, by the wise. But Christianity  goes a huge gigantic stride beyond this ne quid nimis, into the absurd: that is where Christianity begins – and offence.

One can see now how extraordinarily (supposing any extraordinariness remains) – how extraordinarily stupid it is to defend Christianity, how little knowledge of humanity it betrays, how it connives if only unconsciously with offence by making Christianity out to be some miserable object that in the end must be rescued by a defence. It is therefore certain and true that the person who first thought of defending Christianity in Christendom is de facto a Judas No. 2; he too betrays with a kiss, except his treason is that of stupidity. To defend something is always to discredit it. Let a man have a warehouse full of gold, let him be willing to give away a ducat to every one of the poor – but let him also be stupid enough to begin this charitable undertaking of his with a defence in which he offers three good reasons in justification; and it will almost come to the point of people finding it doubtful whether indeed he is doing something good. But now for Christianity. Yes, the person who defends that has never believed in it. If he does believe, then the enthusiasm of faith is not a defence, no, it is the assault and the victory; a believer is a victor.

This is how it is with the Christian and offence. That its possibility is present in the Christian definition of sin is quite right. It is: before God. A pagan, natural man, is very willing to admit that there is sin, but this ‘before God’, which is really what makes it sin, that for him is much too much. It seems to him (though in another way than that shown here) to make much too much out of being a human being. Just a little less and he is willing to go along with it – but ‘too much is too much’.

I was going to posit a bunch of stuff about how Kierkegaard is basically right (with correctives needed here and there) if we pay close attention to his own qualifiers and our observations are bounded by his personal context.

RATHER! I submit this extended quote to the readers of the blog for a thoroughgoing critique/analysis. Comment on Facebook or here. Either way…

I hope you enjoyed this extended quote from The Sickness Unto Death.

P.S. Quote derived from Kierkegaard, Soren. Translated by Alastair Hannay. Penguin Books Great Ideas Edition. 1989.

P.P.S. That is, admittedly, not scholarly citing procedure.

When I consider “Reading Narratives,” I tend to think in terms of “what should I, the reader, do when reading a story?” or “how ought I to read a story?” Though that is something I have thought about way too much (and I am not really the more informed for it!) I am willing to throw in my two cents.

So I am more concerned, at the present, with how we ought to read a story. More from the reader’s point of view, of course, as a very large can of worms is opened up when you introduce the role of the author of a narrative. So, wishing to not complicate matters, I think that a thesis statement is in order…

We ought to read stories as Christians in the world.

“We”

Not just the blogalectic peeps, but all Christians everywhere.

“ought to read stories”

Because the Bible is predominantly a Story, the Christian must not despise stories. A story serves many purposes (as I am sure later posts will affirm) but not a small purpose is to help us to see the Story that we all inhabit; both the big metanarrative (yeah, I went there…) and our little narratives. It is not ethically necessary to read stories (outside the Bible) but I contend that it is secondarily necessary because reading the little stories well will help us to understand God and His Story better. Since this is a “good” that we must seek if we are to be “good”, then we ought to seek all of the means by which we can become better in that life-long journey. Thus: we ought to read stories.

But the point is to read stories in a specific way…

“as Christians”

Before I get into “as Christians”, Vicki brought up a legitimate point about the presence of evil and sinful stuff in stories that are fundamentally dark and unbelieving. I would disagree about the whole “can’t use the Philippians test” idea because I think that the ethical realm is firmly seated (if the author is not considered!) in the reader, not in the text itself. I am not advocating an entirely subjective reading ethic, though, as I would say that we can still test a text by the Philippians standard within the context of the personal. The text has no ethical frame of reference without either the author or the reader. The words are not timeless Platonic forms of meaning, but rather are dependent on human (or greater) interaction to have their meaning. You have to just trust that i am not advocating subjectivism, as I know it sounds a whole lot like that (and I do wax postmodern at times!). It might have been sinful for the author to write something lusty and messed up because he was not considering the “excellent” or “praiseworthy” while writing it. And the reader that is having lust issues that reads such a text is made to stumble, and it is entirely the fault of him who chooses to read something (if false advertising is employed the question gets more difficult) that would cause him to stumble. Okay… this could go on forever, so I will stop. So I will conclude that by saying that the Philippians standard applies to the entire process and context of reading in terms of content, but to the text itself in terms of form. I know that is a large statement, but forgive me, I won’t defend it here… Comment or write your own post about the relation of form and content in relation to objective standards of the good, the true, and the beautiful!

We should read a text “as Christians” because of obvious Biblical reasons, not the least of which is that all things should be done for the glory of God. Sometimes it seems that with that we have to say that you should only read devotional books, theology books and the Bible… But that is not the case because of…

“in the world.”

We don’t exist in a little Christian bubble (unless you attend Biola haha) and so we ought to read with the understanding that “the glory of God” is achieved when we grow in our knowledge of others made in His image. We can see brokenness and fundamentally dark books as glorifying God, because there was no light at the crucifixion, and God was most glorified at that moment. Of course that is only glorious because  of the Resurrection, but a resurrection need not be spelled out in every narrative. There were two thieves next to Jesus at the darkest moment of human history. It is helpful to know about both the one who ended up “with Him in Paradise” and the one who hurled taunts and abuses at the Lord of glory and died in dishonor, hopelessly clinging to his sin all the way to Hell. If we are gonna be like Jesus we have to live in the same world He entered and He loved and He saved. We have to learn every lesson we can about the scoffing thief that we never be like him.