Apologies for the lack of digestion here as of late. Unfortunately, there will be an even greater silence. I will be in Ireland shortly and not return until the middle of next month. But no worries, the spam filter will certainly be working overtime. While in Ireland, I will be visiting many places from the old and ancient world…places which rang with the worship of mystic gods and where the name of Yeshua overthrew dark magic. This once-in-a-lifetime experience will include a trip to the Cliffs of Insanity from The Princess Bride as well as several nights in a restored 15th Century castle. Perhaps I will bring back pictures of Celtic crosses and Druidic standing stones for your pleasure.
No sheep were straddled in the posting of this digest.
Whenever the subjects of Free Will and Predestination come up, the subject-matter seems to be discussed and argued almost exclusively from a Greek philosophical perspective without reference to or reliance upon the Judaic perspective. It inevitably becomes to me an exercise in building castles in the air. Like the proponents of the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus, I continually come back to the same pivotal question, What’s Jewish about that?
Fortunately, through critical-historical study, I am rediscovering the lost foundation…as slow a going as it may be. In this post, I want to lay out some observations.
When Josephus introduced the three primary, elite Jewish factions to his clueless Roman readers, he composed his message in such as way that would communicate Jewish concepts to a Greek mind and culture. Greek thought was structured around philosophic schools, so Josephus spoke of the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes, (eventually the Zealots) as philosophic schools. He specifically uses the terms free will
and predestination
in reference to them since these were familiar and definitive terms of several Greek, philosophic schools. Josephus describes the Sadducees as if they were Epicureans (libertarian free will) and Essenes as if they were Pythagoreans (absolute sovereignty/predestination), with the Pharisees being the wise keepers of balance between the two. Of course, the Sadducees, Essenes, or Pharisees would have described themselves quite different than Josephus does (as many scholars have noted).
So we see that these Greek philosophical concepts (free will
and predestination
) can be utilized as extensions of the Judaic perspective. Though ancillary in nature, they should not be written off as intrusions into the discussion.
I don’t happen to hold to Philo’s high view of the translation to a Greek perspective. I could not, for instance, pick up the Septuagint and consider it as equally inspired in its re-invention of Yahweh’s Word as the Hebrew/Aramaic texts (although the value I place in the translation of perspective continues to grow exponentially and the Septuagint is becoming more and more of a necessity to me). Because of that, I see any discussion of free will and predestination as secondary to and reliant upon the understanding native to the Jewish perspective.
So the question then becomes what is the other side of this discussion? What terms would a Sadducee, Essene, or Pharisee use? How would they think about these things? It appears to me that absolute sovereignty, predestination, and free will are Greek ways of talking about transcendence and immanence.
In all Judaic literature, when someone wanted to speak of the god of Israel as being in control of things and of being separate from his creation, a specific divine name was used to communicate his transcendental nature: Elohim. When wanting to speak of the god of Israel in a more personal capacity, acting and reacting in history and creation, a different divine name was used to communicate his immanent nature: Yahweh. Various other names served to play with the tension between the god of Israel’s immanence and transcendence. The combined name, Yahweh Elohim (Lord God), served to unify these distinctions. So we have both Elohim (the transcendent god) and Yahweh (the immanent god) and these are echad—a singular unity. The god of Israel both causes man to be saved and reacts to him alone with salvation. He both calls man of man’s own volition and power to follow him and be blameless and influences him to do and be so quite apart from his own volition and power. He both rules in the kingdoms of men and knows many kingdoms that have ruled against his will and way. He both establishes his will in the lives of men despite their will or mind and declares that men have done or said things which never entered his will or mind.
These are just hints at an answer to the question… But I believe that with diligence, we can come to the Judaic foundation on which later Greek philosophy was laid and perhaps know better how to avoid the pitfalls of each philosophic school
.
In the previous post, Causing Offense or Your Brother to Stumble, I mentioned the Apostolic Decree of Acts 15. The Jerusalem Church asked gentile believers to refrain from certain things that could result in unpleasant consequences among their Torah observant brothers and sisters. Those things were idol sacrifices, blood, strangled animals, and fornication.
Looking at the list, we might wonder why fornication was included. What, after all, does fornication have to do with eating idol sacrifices and strangled animals or drinking blood? While we might find connections between these things among gentile religious practices, this does not necessarily explain the connection from a Judaic point of view.
What is intriguing is that the leaders of the Qumran sect were in agreement with the Apostles. In a halakhic letter labeled Miqsat Ma’ase Ha-Torah, written against corruption and defilement of the Temple priesthood, the sectarians make a startling and direct connection:
And concerning the sacrifice of the gentiles…[we consider that] they {sacrifice} to [an idol and] that is [like] a woman fornicating with him.
So there is an explicit extra-biblical link which verifies the chosen categories of the Acts 15 Apostolic Decree. Gentiles who eat meat sacrificed to idols are one and the same as gentiles who fornicate with women. And this is why the Apostles felt obligated to include the one beside the other.
But what is it that makes these two things so interchangeable? Perhaps sacrifices to idols (whether eaten or not) and sexual misconduct are two of the primary characteristics of one who forsakes the God who created flesh for the flesh that was created (the first, animal; the second, human). In Torah, creation is shown to have an order that begins and is defined by Yahweh. Appropriate relations between human and beast or human and human are therefore defined and directed by the relation between the Creator and the creation. If the first is defiled, it will be reciprocated into the second.
The law against these secondary relations are therefore concrete examples that serve to direct us to the fulfillment of the primary relation. But unlike the Qumran sectarians who looked for the fulfillment of that primary relation between Creator and creation in a coming end of days, the Apostles saw our union with Yeshua and with his flesh, which is called the church, as the appropriate characteristic of that fulfillment. How, therefore, if we eat the flesh of Christ
can we also eat the flesh of Baal? How, therefore, if we are one with the flesh of Christ can we give our flesh to whoredom? One need not follow Torah to see that these same characteristics (idol sacrifices and sexual misconduct) serve also as indicators of defilement among those who would follow Yeshua.
I’ve known for quite a while now that there was a major problem with mainstream Christianity’s interpretation of Paul’s words about being without offense and not causing your weaker brother to stumble. I could tell that the universalized morality message was not the intent of Paul’s letters, but was unable to fully clarify the situation. Now, having done the necessary critical-historical study, I am able.
Much of what Paul says in Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans comes directly from what was passed on to him by the Jewish community headed by James and the other apostles in Jerusalem. Paul along with other Jewish believers like Barnabas and Silas, took these things to the Jews and Jewish Gentiles of the Diaspora. In the zeal of his letters, Paul elaborated on and added to the things entrusted to him. Therefore, the interpretation of much of his messages is controlled by knowledge of the actual things handed down to him. One of these is called the apostolic decree
. It occurs in Acts 15. But before we get there, let me briefly explain the historical circumstances.
In the early days of the Christian community, believers and followers of Yeshua were strictly Jewish. They were either full-blooded Jews or they were converts who were circumsized and followed Torah. It was their common cultural belief that the gentiles would be saved not because the gospel would go out to the gentiles as they were, but because the gentiles would BECOME JEWS. It was such a strange concept for them to think that a gentile could be part of the followers of Yeshua apart from Torah, that it took a direct revelation of Yahweh to several influential people like Peter himself (Acts 10-11) in order to change their minds. And even then, it was still a great point of contention. When Yahweh began working to save gentiles through Peter and through Jews from Cyprus and Cyrene in Antioch, this caused a big commotion among the Jewish believers. Many of them wanted the gentiles to become Jewish by following Torah and being circumsized before they could be considered followers of Yeshua. Paul wrote several times of going to Jerusalem and defending the truth of gentiles’ conversion despite lack of Torah observance (such as Galatians 2:1, 3)—events which are also found in Acts. The problem was two-fold. 1. The Jews were judging the gentiles as being outside of Yahweh’s will because they didn’t submit themselves to Torah observance and 2. because the Jews still believed in and followed Torah, for them to do some things that Christ himself asked them to do would force them to break Torah and therefore cause them to offend the Law/stumble in observance. (One of the practices of Yeshua which his followers mimicked was table fellowship and communion…a potentially disastrous situation for a Jew as it will be explained momentarily).
In Acts 15, the apostolic council decided in favor of both parties so that both Jew and Gentile might be honored and peace would be established among them. They decided for the benefit of the gentiles that the Jews should no longer judge them as inadequate, inferior, or outside the faith because they didn’t follow Torah—neither would they coerce them to follow their own regulations. And they decided for the benefit of the Jews that the gentiles should chose to refrain from certain activities or practices—not because of any limitation on themselves, but because of the limitation that Jews had on themselves according to their observance of Torah. These are the words of that agreement:
For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us (the Jewish believers in Jerusalem) to put not one greater burden on you (the gentiles who believed in Yeshua) than these necessary things: To hold back from idol sacrifices, and blood, and that strangled, and from fornication.
Acts 15:27b-28a
The reason these things were chosen to ask of the gentiles was because in the Levitical code, Yahweh told the Jews that in order to follow Torah, they could not have fellowship with or unite themselves with gentiles who ate sacrifices to idols, committed various acts of sexual misconduct, or drank blood (see Leviticus 17:10; 18:26; 20:2). If gentiles came into their midst who did these things, it would force a Jew to commit an offense before Torah and stumble in their observance of its commands. Therefore, since the Apostles asked the Jews not to judge gentiles as being unclean (because of lack of Torah observance), they therefore also asked the gentiles to not purposely put their Jewish brothers in a position which would make them unclean (by eating idol sacrifices with a Jewish brother who could not be pure in such a situation).
And so we find in Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans the exact same things he was personally told to tell the Jews and Gentiles among the nations in Acts 15. The following are examples drawn from the decree about eating food sacrificed to idols.
Paul tells the Jewish believers in 1 Corinthians 10:27 that if they go to eat at a gentile’s table, not to ask if the food was sacrificed to idols, but if they are told that it was, not to eat it (otherwise they would condemn themselves under Torah). This mimics exactly the message Paul received from the apostles and Jewish brothers in Jerusalem—both that the Jew should be upheld in his observance and that the gentile should not be made to feel or believe that his table is unclean.
In Romans 14:15, Paul speaks to the gentile believers, asking them not to eat sacrifices to idols among Jewish believers, otherwise the gentiles would destroy their Jewish brother’s purity before Torah. Why would you make your Jewish brother believe he has soiled himself before God? Uphold him, do not strike him down! And yet in Romans 14, Paul also upholds the faith of the gentile believers, telling them not to think that they are less than their Jewish brothers or that they are defiling themselves if they eat what they have always eaten. Because they do not follow Torah, it is nothing for them to eat food from idol sacrifices.
And again, in Galatians 2:11-16, Paul writes about confronting Peter. When Peter and Barnabas had gone with Paul to Antioch, they had eaten freely with the gentiles—fulfilling this very decree that they (as Jews) should not consider the table of the gentile believers to be unclean. But when certain Jews from Jerusalem joined them, Peter, Barnabas, and the other Jewish believers separated themselves. Paul rebukes Peter for separating from the gentile believers. Had the grace of God to gentiles changed between the absence and appearance of the other Torah obedient Jews? Are the gentiles sinners because they don’t keep Torah? It is faith in Yeshua—whether you also follow Torah or not—which has changed you from one whom God has rejected to one whom God has accepted. Therefore why do you suddenly not accept those whom God has accepted? Paul goes on in Galatians 3 to ask the same question to the Jews in Galatia—why then if the gentiles have been accepted apart from Torah do you now reject them like Peter did when I confronted him?
Jewish and gentile relations going back to Acts 15:27b-28a is what offense and stumbling-block and weakness is all about. It has nothing to do with a gentile Christian ceasing some activity because some other gentile Christian has a problem with it. That would be akin to elevating someone’s personal feelings or thoughts to the status of a command from the lips of a prophet speaking in Yahweh’s own name—making a Christian’s personal beliefs into Torah. It would be deifying personal thoughts or words of men instead of recognizing what was and has been for thousands of years the word of God as witnessed and accompanied by signs and wonders to validate it. Even the appeal to avoid an “appearance of evil” is not a sudden universalized morality that could sidestep this situation–it is fundamentally tied to Jewish/Gentile relations and directly concerns the one thing which Paul himself says made sin or evil appear or be known–the Law (or Torah).
It is common to find in Christianity the mentality that Paul, being the Apostle to the Gentiles, wrote the majority of his letters for and to be understood by a non-Jewish, Hellenistic/Greek audience. But the more I study, the more it seems to be that Paul actually authored his letters (if not for Jews who believed in Yeshua) specifically for Gentiles who had embraced Judaism either fully as proselytes/converts or partially as Judaizers
, Sympathizers
, or God-fearers
. An evidence of this is the use of culturally-specific terminology in his epistles. Take, for instance, Romans 3:22-25, where Paul describes Yeshua’s death in very specific Jewish terms, referring directly to the judgment seat on the ark of the covenant, to the actions of the priests with the blood of a sacrifice, and to the meaning and context evoked by that situation (atonement for sin).
So what, you ask? Well, Rome is quite far removed from Jerusalem in many ways. A non-Jewish, Greek/Hellenistic audience would be familiar with the Jews and certain definitive aspects of their barbarian
ways (like circumcision, dietary laws, and Sabbath), but he/she certainly wouldn’t have any concept of a judgment seat or the ark of the covenant on which it rested. Neither would they be privy to what that had to do with priests and blood. And he/she definitely wouldn’t conceive of a sacrifice atoning for someone’s sin. Sacrifices in the ancient world were given to the gods not to cleanse a person or people group of sin/wickedness or to be considered holy, but to do things such as propitiate a god for his/her favor, feed a god, initiate an act or oath of devotion, as part and parcel of an agreement/promise between parties, or to symbolize/evoke one’s acceptance of a political entity.
Like any other intelligent or even educated person, Paul must have known something about the audience he was writing to and tailored his letters to be understood by them. If the people in Rome he was writing to were not in some sense Jewish, the whole description of Yeshua’s death and blood being an atoning sacrifice would be incomprehensible to them (see the non-Jewish, Gentile’s response to Paul preaching in the synagogue as a babbler and a speaker of strange/new words in Acts 17:18, 20). They would have a concept of a person (and maybe even a god) giving his/her life for another, but that is a far cry from what Paul is trying to communicate in his epistle. If it had been the case that Paul was writing to non-Jewish Greeks, we would have expected him to describe Yeshua’s sacrificial death in terms of the Pagan temples instead of the Jewish one since we know that he was quite familiar with culture, philosophy, and religion outside Israel and used that familiarity to his advantage among them.
I received the following pseudepigraphic folklore in my email. Apparently it has been going around for some time and undergone many changes. This is one of its latest incarnations with my comments interspersed among it.
Paul Harvey and Prayer Paul Harvey says: I don’t believe in Santa Claus, but I’m not going to sue somebody for singing a Ho-Ho-Ho song in December. I don’t agree with Darwin, but I didn’t go out and hire a lawyer when my high school teacher taught his Theory of Evolution. Life, liberty or your pursuit of happiness will not be endangered because someone says a 30-second prayer before a football game. So what’s the big deal? It’s not like somebody is up there reading the entire book of Acts. They’re just talking to a God they believe in and asking him to grant safety to the players on the field and the fans going home from the game. But it’s a Christian prayer, some will argue. Yes, and this is the United States of America, a country founded on Christian principles. According to our very own phone book, Christian churches outnumber all others better than 200-to-1. So what would you expect — somebody chanting Hare Krishna? If I went to a football game in Jerusalem, I would expect to hear a Jewish prayer. If I went to a soccer game in Baghdad, I would expect to hear a Muslim prayer. If I went to a ping pong match in China, I would expect to hear someone pray to Buddha. And I wouldn’t be offended. It wouldn’t bother me one bit. When in Rome … But what about the atheists? is another argument. What about them? Nobody is asking them to be baptized. We’re not going to pass the collection plate. Just humor us for 30 seconds. If that’s asking too much, bring a Walkman or a pair of ear plugs. Go to the bathroom. Visit the concession stand. Call your lawyer! Unfortunately, one or two will make that call. One or two will tell thousands what they can and cannot do. I don’t think a short prayer at a football game is going to shake the world’s foundations.
Throughout the history of the world, religions have been defined by geography, race or ethnicity, and ruling power. In most places and most times you were part of a religion because your father and grandfather and grandfather’s father were part of that religion, because you were in a land and culture defined by that religion, and because your rulers and authorities enforced that religion. Globalization and freedom of religion have enabled many parts of the world to break free from these controlling factors, which is glorious news to some, but dire news to others (like China or Baghdad).
This is a very new situation. The United States has not been around long (it still might be called a young nation) and it was the very first nation in history to purposely pursue the release from these controlling religious factors and do it with a large measure of success. In this kind of new secular environment which aims to give the most freedom to the most people without preference, the prayer at a football game
situation, which is inherently a public situation and not a private one, can proceed only in two directions without plunging us back into the religion-contained environment: 1. disallow any kind of prayer or 2. allow almost every kind of prayer. Those who do not see 2 taking place will inevitably go for 1. And since we hold a precarious position in history, this is, indeed, a foundation-shaking situation.
Christians are just sick and tired of turning the other cheek while our courts strip us of all our rights.
Speaking as a Christian, I have to say that the sentence above was so badly worded that it smacks of an anti-Christian attitude, not a Christian one. It was Christ himself who told us to turn the other cheek. If people are not interested in following him, then they have no place arguing for prayers to him at football games.
Our parents and grandparents taught us to pray before eating; to pray before we go to sleep. Our Bible tells us to pray without ceasing. Now a handful of people and their lawyers are telling us to cease praying.
I don’t think this is true in the slightest. No one has outlawed private prayer anywhere in this nation. I’ve never had anyone sue me or accuse me of praying before meals or at bedtime.
God, help us. And if that last sentence offends you, well . .. just sue me. The silent majority has been silent too long.. It’s time we let that one or two who scream loud enough to be heard that the vast majority don’t care what they want. It is time the majority rules!
I’m not sure what century or nation the author is living in…but in this century and in this nation (the U.S. in the 21st Century), the majority is not Christian.
It’s time we tell them, you don’t have to pray; you don’t have to say the pledge of allegiance; you don’t have to believe in God or attend services that honor Him. That is your right, and we will honor your right … But by golly, you are no longer going to take our rights away. We are fighting back … and we WILL WIN! God bless us one and all … especially those who denounce Him , God bless America, despite all her faults. She is still the greatest nation of all. God bless our service men who are fighting to protect our right to pray and worship God. May 2007 be the year the silent majority is heard and we put God back as the foundation of our families and institutions. Keep looking up. If you agree with this, please pass it on. If not delete it. AND THAT’S THE REST OF THE STORY
BC
Definitely stand up for what you believe and fight for your rights. But don’t do it under the mistaken pretense that you are part of the majority or that your rights supersede or have pre-eminence over someone else’s. If you really want to have prayer at football, there is nothing stopping you from doing so. The question is whether you will participate in this new secular environment or help push us back into the historical mold.
