12 baskets?

Don't know where this (minor) doubt came from, but I was listening to someone talking about the miracle of the feeding of the 5000 yesterday and it occurred to me just how fictional the story sounds.

Leaving aside the central miracle, the other details just don't ring true.

Matthew 14:

15 As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.”

16 Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”

17 “We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they answered.

18 “Bring them here to me,” he said. 19 And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. 20 They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. 21 The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children.

The disciples and crowds didn't have any food with them but they did have 12 baskets? That sounds a bit funny. Beyond that, in a remote place, having distributed food to 5000 people, the disciples felt the need to collect the rubbish from the ground? It was just bread and bits of fish - the birds would have dealt with all that soon enough, and its not as if they needed it, they've just seen Jesus multiply food.

So even allowing the miracle as a possibility, it still seems pretty unlikely. More like a 'just so' story than a recollection of a real event.

Weaker Brother

I came across this the other day. I might get one and wear it to church for a laugh...

I believe in the Holy Spirit

I believe in the Holy Spirit.

"Good" I hear some of you cry. "Finally, after all that doubting, a sound post with a positive declaration of faith..."

Erm, well, sorry to disappoint you, but this isn't that post.

I'm wrestling with the whole area of faith vs experience at the moment. I'm working on a longer blog post on faith, which I'll post eventually, but I just realised this morning what it all boils down to. And that is this:

All my Christian experience leads me to believe, or rather to know that the Holy Spirit is an ever-present reality. (Hallelujah!)

I've seen the presence of the Spirit in my life and in the lives of others, I've experienced the promptings of the Spirit in my experience and I've even seen (minor) miracles and healings done in his name. Of course, I have heard tale of greater things than those, but I'm a skeptical sort, so I'll stick with "That which ... we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched" (1 John 1v1) rather than second or third hand reports.

The problem, or the doubt, is this:

While I know the existence of the Spirit, I don't (and can't) have equivalent experience of God the Father or of God the Son. Both of them are purely taken on faith. And that faith is built on things that were written thousands of years ago, by people possibly unknown to us. It takes a lot of faith to believe the words of that book. And when you doubt some of it (as I do, and have) you soon find that quite a lot of it unravels and falls apart.

Faith in the bible is (almost) an all or nothing stance. You can't have your cake and eat it. Life would be so easy if I could believe that the Bible was completely inspired and therefore infallible. But I've scratched at too many flaky bits to believe that anymore. But if bits of it are not infallible, or if bits of it are not inspired, then how can you decide which is which? And beyond that, how can you know if any of it is inspired, or indeed, if there was an inspirer?

The thing is, if you start with that which you can see and experience and go from there, I don't think you can ever get to the edifice of faith that is biblical Christian belief. Christian belief is a mixture of the experiential and the unverifiable written stuff. Most of which is just unquestioningly taken on board.

But if you start from the experiential and don't take on board the unverifiable, you end up in a radically different place to most Christians. Indeed, you end up closer to Pagans than Christians.

Confused? Yes I am! But still looking for the light.

Paul

No, not the movie about the alien.

I've been wondering lately about the Apostle Paul. What's all that about?

Jesus had 12 disciples, 11 of whom became apostles, and they picked a 12th to replace Judas. These guys had seen Jesus, been with Jesus, learned (eventually) from Jesus, witnessed miracles, witnessed him in the flesh after his resurrection, and so on.

Basically, these guys were the best people to take the message to the world.

So why the need for Paul?

He hadn't seen Jesus, been with Jesus, learned from him, witnessed any miracles, or even seen him in the flesh (a blinding flash from heaven hardly counts, impressive though it must have been).

I think the conventional line of reasoning says that the disciples were just ordinary blokes, without a theological training, not really capable of writing epistles like those of Paul's, and also they were Jewish Jews, not really best suited for taking the Gospel out into the Greek speaking world.

The problem with this kind of reasoning is that it implies that Jesus was either not capable of getting one disciple suitable for the task, or he did not have the foresight to recruit such a disciple. Neither option is very good.

If Jesus was God incarnate, with the most amazing teaching ever heard, then recruiting intelligent and erudite disciples would hardly be a problem.

And even if Jesus 'emptied himself' of his divine foresight, surely God the Father could have manipulated the situation such that Jesus had at least one disciple up to the task of taking the message to the world.

Paul, the very late recruited apostle, seems very much like a 'plan B' to me.

Or, in my more skeptical moments, the theory that Paul and 'the twelve' come from two rival strands of belief that were merged together into 'catholic' Christianity in the 2nd century, begins to seem pretty compelling.

The book "The First Edition of the New Testament" by David Trobisch is fairly high on my 'to read' list. In it, the author presents his thesis that the compilation of the 27 books we have as the New Testament was a deliberate attempt to fuse rival factions into one unified religion. Further, he proposes that the compiler was Polycarp of Smyrna who, in addition to compiling the books, edited several of them to harmonise them and also invented (yes, invented) the book of Acts in order to put the heroes of the rival factions (on one side Paul, on another Peter) on an equal footing and to appear to be working together for the sake of the Gospel.

I will certainly blog about that when I read it!

But for now, here is a link to Trobisch's paper summarising the book: "Who Published the New Testament" from Free Inquiry magazine Vol 28, No 1, Jan 2008.

Where does it say...? #3

This one is a bit philosophical.

I've heard a number of Christian apologists and philosophers on a number of debates (mostly on podcasts) recently stating or implying that God is outside of time. That is, that time is part of creation and God is beyond that.

Where does it say that in the bible?

Furthermore, I have a philosophical problem with the idea of God being outside of time. Basically, I think that belief in a God outside of time is incompatible with belief in a good or loving God. Goodness and love both require action. Action can only occur within time. Thus, if God is in any way good, then he (or that part of him which is good) must be within time, not transcending it.

Take a trivial example. Suppose it is bad to break something and good to fix something. Viewed from our point of view within time, breaking something is bad. But reverse the flow of time and the same action (now in reverse) appears to fix the object, which is good. If God is outside of time then he perceives both the bad breaking and the good fixing equally, and thus the moralities cancel each other out. An agent outside of time must be morally neutral.

Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead?

Luke 11v11-13 says this:

“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Numbers 21v4-6 says this:

The Israelites had to go around the territory of Edom, so when they left Mount Hor, they headed south toward the Red Sea. But along the way, the people became so impatient that they complained against God and said to Moses, " Did you bring us out of Egypt, just to let us die in the desert? There's no water out here, and we can't stand this awful food!" Then the LORD sent poisonous snakes that bit and killed many of them.

Erm, is it just me or is there a hint in the gospel passage to the Numbers one?

The Israelites asked for food and got snakes.

There was a faction in the early church which believed that the 'Father' Jesus spoke about and the 'LORD' in the OT were two different characters. Is this gospel passage Marcionite?

Across the Spectrum: Chapter 9 - The Salvation Debate

Previous posts have commented on:
Chapter 1 - The Inspiration Debate
Chapter 2 - The Providence Debate
Chapter 3 - The Foreknowledge Debate
Chapter 4 - The Genesis Debate
Chapter 5 - The Divine Image Debate
Chapter 6 - The Human Constitution Debate
Chapter 7 - The Christology Debate
Chapter 8 - The Atonement Debate

Chapter 9: The Salvation Debate
Position 1: TULIP (Calvinist)
Position 2: God wants all to be saved (Arminian)

So here we have another Calvinist vs. Arminian debate. As I said before, I was - more or less - raised a Clavinist and my beliefs have shifted very much towards Arminianism as time has gone on. Much of the material in this chapter parallels previous ones on the Calvinist/Arminian debate. Basically, the Calvinist position is that God chooses the 'elect', all of the elect will be saved, none of the non-elect will be saved, and nothing we humans can do will change that. If God elected you to be saved, you're going to heaven whatever you do, if God did not choose you, you're damned, even if you live a blameless life and seek to follow God's ways. The Arminian position is the flip side of this and claims that people are - in part - responsible for making the choices which determine if they will ultimately be saved or not.

I don't have much to offer on this topic that I haven't said in previous posts. As far as I am concerned, Calvinistic reasoning relies on a few concepts which simply make no sense. The one which makes me most annoyed is the idea that God decides who will be sin, and yet the sinners are held morally responsible for the sins that God decided they would do, so he damns them (eternally) for it. There is no justice or morality in that belief and I must reject it.

The only option that makes rational sense to me here is that people are responsible (at least in part) for their own choices. The way of salvation must be open to all, even if the majority reject it or do not find the path.

Across the Spectrum: Chapter 8 - The Atonement Debate

Previous posts have commented on:
Chapter 1 - The Inspiration Debate
Chapter 2 - The Providence Debate
Chapter 3 - The Foreknowledge Debate
Chapter 4 - The Genesis Debate
Chapter 5 - The Divine Image Debate
Chapter 6 - The Human Constitution Debate
Chapter 7 - The Christology Debate

Chapter 8: The Atonement Debate
Position 1: Christ died in our place (Penal Substitution)
Position 2: Christ destroyed Satan and his works (Christus Victor)
Position 3: Christ displayed God's wrath against sin (Moral Government)

This is an interesting one. There are aspects of all three positions that appeal to me, and other aspects of all three positions which I can't agree with. I was surprised to learn that Position 1 (which is the dominant view in the Evangelical world these days) was, essentially, an invention of the Reformation and was not how the church viewed the atonement for the first 1500 years of its existence. When you come across statements like that you have to sit back and think (although, to be fair, the introduction to the chapter was written by someone who holds to Position 2, so maybe a bias crept in).

The Penal Substitution view holds that we all need to die to pay for our sins against God. "The wages of sin is death". What I've noticed for a long time is that we all do die eventually, so we all get those wages! Maybe we all deserve a horrible death to atone for our sins, and Jesus did this in our place so that some of us can die peacefully in our sleep, but I don't think that's what's going on here. Somehow, the death of a perfect sacrifice is required to pay for our sins. That it is the one who has been wronged (God) who pays the debt (to himself) makes no sense. I'm sorry, it just makes no sense. However you phrase it, there is always an element of non-sense in there. Once again, I've got to the point of rejecting the beliefs I was raised with.

At the core of the Penal Substitution view is the understanding that we are fallen and so our understanding of the atonement is fallen - it seems unjust to us and yet, in reality, it was perfect and just from God's point of view. So we have a theory that believes itself to be corrupted and flawed, and yet this is the theory we are asked to believe. In our fallen-ness, we cannot understand it, so we are asked to just believe? Sorry. I can't go for that. If you want me to believe something it has to at least be internally consistent, and preferably consistent with my perception of reality too. This view isn't.

But the Christus Victor view doesn't cut it for me either. The main thing Jesus apparently did on the cross was destroy the works of Satan. Now I've been through this before. Satan in the old testament is not a fallen angel, he is 'the adversary', the accuser who works for God but tests God's people, on behalf of God. This continues into the gospels - when Jesus says to Peter 'get behind me Satan', he is saying 'stop playing the role of the accuser, I'm not going to give in to this temptation'. So there is no demonic Satan to be defeated on the cross! The NT understanding of 'the Devil' is a melding of Satan, Baal-zebub (God of the Philistines) and Ahriman (the evil God of Zoroastrianism), and we only view it all through the lens of the superstition of the middle-ages. Now I am not saying that there are no demons (more on that in a future post), but I am disputing the very existence of the 'Prince' of demons. But if you take him out of the picture, the whole concept of Christus Victor falls apart. What remains is quite a vague 'Christ destroyed the works of evil' concept, that I actually quite like, but the theory that goes with it is far from compelling.

Finally we get the Moral Government view - that Christ's death was to 'show righteousness'. Of the three positions, I find this the most compelling in all aspects apart from the central one. How does Jesus's death show God's righteousness? How is God's righteousness demonstrated by the death of a sinless man? It is certainly not demonstrated if you hold that God required the death of Jesus, that only seems to show injustice. Maybe (though this is not explained in the book) the point is that it shows the depravity of humanity, through the way humanity deals with the only truly righteous man - by killing him in a terrible way? Maybe I need to read that explanation again...

So what did Jesus achieve by dying on the cross? That is still unclear to me, but none of the proposed answers is fully compelling.

Across the Spectrum: Chapter 7 - The Christology Debate

Continuing the thread started in this post and continued in this post, this post and this one.

Chapter 7: The Christology Debate
Position 1: The unavoidable paradox of the God-man
Position 2: Christ relinquished his divine prerogatives

This is an interesting one, and again I am not completely convinced by either side in the debate. If you hold the God-man position firmly, it leads on to a number of other beliefs that are apparently contrary to scripture - such as the ability of Jesus's disciples to do 'greater things' than he did. If his power was his divine power, then nobody who followed after could do things like he did, let alone transcend them. This leads to a cessasionist stance, which we will come to in a future post. It also makes it impossible for us to follow his example. WWJD? Use his divine power to resolve a situation... Not very useful as a guide to living.

Also, this leads to a very complicated 'two minds' belief in which Jesus had two distinct minds (personalities?) in his make-up, and the divine one wouldn't let the other know certain things. Eh? This just leads to inconsistencies.

But, the other position ('Kenotic') leads to the problem of what happened after the ascension (as I blogged about a few months back) - if Christ had to 'empty himself' of his divinity to become human, then either he still is a limited human (which nobody seems to believe) or he ceased to be human after the ascension (which nobody seems to believe either). So some serious 'explaining away' has to be done.

For what its worth, I find the Kenotic view more compelling, even if it raises as many issues as it solves. Once again, I find an agnostic position ('I don't know') is the best stance to take.

The more I work through these issues, the more compelled I am to talk in terms of 'hope' rather than certainty and the happier I am to say 'I don't know' on the big issues. We don't always need to hold on tightly to certainty in the face of limited (and sometimes conflicting) information.

Across the Spectrum: Chapters 5 and 6 - Divine Image and Human Constitution

Continuing the thread started in this post and continued in this post and this one.

Chapter 5: The Divine Image Debate
Position 1: The image of God is the soul
Position 2: The image of God is our God-given authority
Position 3: The image of God is our rationality

The odd thing about this chapter is that it completely side-steps the issue of what did the original author mean? The simplest reading of the Genesis text suggests that the original author of those words thought that God was bipedal, humanoid and created mankind in his physical image - to look like him. But of course, we don't view God in those terms today, so can't possibly read the bible as meaning that. (Although, see the book I recently commented upon regarding the role of the Great Angel in creation...)

So what is it about us that bears the 'image' of God? I don't know, and none of the three options presented here is entirely compelling. Is it that we have a soul? Well, that belief is largely based on Hellenistic thinking and was bolted onto Jewish/Christian thinking, rather than coming out of it.Or is it that we have the dominance of the planet? Surely that is our status, not our image? Or is it that we are rational? Well that seemed the most compelling to me until I actually read the supporting arguments, which quickly got bogged down in arguments about the Trinity.

Does it actually matter anyway? Whichever option you choose, how does it influence the way you live?

Chapter 6: The Human Constitution Debate
Position 1: The twofold self (body & soul)
Position 2: The threefold self (body, soul & spirit)
Position 3: The unitary self

This is something that I'd never really thought about before reading this book, and it certainly isn't a major issue. Indeed, the Kindle edition of this book (which I'm reading) is the 1st Edition of it, and the 2nd Edition of the print book doesn't feature this chapter at all. Its not really an issue.

The question is whether or not we are divisible into parts. If my body dies but something lives on, is that thing that lives on 'me' in any way, or is my identity reliant on having a body? Also, the bible occasionally makes distinction between the spirit and the soul, but are these two discrete parts of me?

For me, I'm happy to understand things in terms of computer science - the body is hardware, the 'spirit' or 'soul' is software, which needs the hardware to run on. Maybe at the point of death God will do a 'backup' of my software and will then be able to download it into a new piece of hardware, but if not, I cannot see how the software can continue to run without hardware. I am a composite being and need both components. But this isn't an issue I stay awake at night pondering...