I really liked this comment by Bob MacDonald on Christian marriage.

The wife and the husband have gifts for each other that no one else can – and not even God – will supply.

The blog post commented upon is about whether the Apostle Paul knew the first thing about marriage and whether we should trust his opinions when he writes about it in the Bible. The article itself was interesting — tho not wholly convincing to me — and set the stage perfectly for someone like MacDonald to come along and distill the modern Christian understanding of marriage into the quote above.

Thom Stark in an interview about polytheism in the Old Testament. I like his articulation of the idea that ultimate meanings, not material details, are what we build our faith upon.

Truthful God-talk is poetry, not science—evocative, not descriptive. “Faith” is what we have when we live our lives as if they were meaningful…

He says this in the context of finding polytheism in the old-old-testament that is then reinterpreted to monotheism in the newer-old-testament. To put the quote in proper context I’ll provide the rest of it here.

…and Christianity offers us one language that helps us do that. Like any language, of course, there are different dialects, accents, and vocabularies. Just as with English speakers, some Christians get irony, metaphor, and humor, and others don’t. Moreover, just as languages evolve to adapt to new realities and new knowledge, religions do the same, and rightly so, whether practitioners acknowledge it or not.

Some timely Bible application from James McGrath given the number of stories about bullying and suicide in the news lately. He started by quoting Jesus about how Christians are to treat different groups of people: friends, family, strangers, enemies, and everyone really. Then he writes this:

The heart of the matter is this: Jesus didn’t say “Bully people until they commit suicide.” And so those who engage in such bullying, and those who bring up their children in such a way that they can feel justified in doing such things, are not practicing Christianity nor bringing up their children in a Christian way. We have no record of anti-gay speech from Jesus. We do have a story about him responding to his own rejection, and the suggestion of his disciples that fire be called down from heaven upon those who didn’t welcome him, with a rebuke (Luke 9:53-56). If you don’t get this, then you don’t get Christianity – that’s all there is to it. If you are a Christian that consider homosexuals and “gay activists” your enemies, then you have two options: love them, or stop pretending you’re a Christian. I don’t see that you’re left with a third option.

From an article at Experimental Theology discussing the Christian Church’s problems with gay marriage and gentiles.

A key notion in Rogers’ book is that the vast majority of Christians need to recover their identity as Gentiles. This is important for a few different reasons. First, this recovery highlights the fact that we are not “by nature” children of God. We’ve been chosen and adopted. In the language of Paul we’ve been “grafted into” the tree of Israel. Second, this action of God, grafting in the Gentiles, highlights how the grace and election of God determines the people of God. We are not God’s children because of nature. We are God’s children because of election. This places election at the center of Christian notions of marriage (and celibacy) rather than a Darwinian focus on procreation. Marriage is grace, not biology. Finally, a recovery of our identity as Gentiles helps us understand why God’s actions toward the Gentiles was such a shock and offense to the Jews (both Christian and non-Christian). Importantly, this shock was very much focused on issues of holiness and morality.

Jo Hilder has written a piece called Protecting God’s Reputation When Shit Happens. It’s about the Christian preoccupation with finding heavenly meaning in our mundane suffering, and about expecting every Christian to suffer their torments with the otherworldly aplomb of a bible character.

Jack was in the bed opposite me when I was about to have chemotherapy for the first time. One morning, the nurses came to give Jack his medicine, and he said no. He didn’t want to be kept alive any longer. The doctors came and counselled him, but his mind was made up. Jack was ready to die.

I was horrified. Because Jack was going to die? No – I was horrified because I thought God wanted me to get up out of bed, go over there and tell Jack about Jesus, and I’d better hurry up about it – I might never have another chance like this, and clearly Jack was not going to be around much longer. And I couldn’t do it.

I made myself literally sick worrying about this. I went and hid in the shower and tried to think of some other way I could make sense of my having cancer. Was this His purpose for it all? In the end, I simply crawled back into my own hospital bed, curled up into a ball and desperately hoped God would find someone else to save Jack’s mortal soul because I was just too preoccupied with being a very sick person. What kind of a Christian was I? Surely the most selfish Christian ever; the biggest waste-of-time that ever walked the face of the earth.

When we believe that God has a plan for absolutely everything that happens, and especially for our own misfortunes, we might start to see ourselves as simply a chess piece in a larger game that God is playing, rather than primarily as one of His children. Our focus then becomes figuring out what God wants us to do in this situation. Our illness isn’t the problem, but rather a stage on which God wants us to speak our next Salvation Soliloquy.

We think God puts us in these situations merely to have us prove His existence and demonstrate His great power to the world. But at what point do we actually allow ourselves just to be a passive recipient of His wonderful attributes, like His goodness, His kindness and His mercy? Why does cancer have to be like a Bible college exam we have to attain a high distinction in – or else?

I’m not saying every Christian who gets cancer thinks they have something to prove, but I just don’t understand why we put ourselves under this kind of pressure. I mean, what the hell was I thinking about with Jack? Sure, I was right to be concerned with Jack’s eternal soul, but would God really place complete responsibility for his eternal destiny onto me at a time like that – when I was dying of cancer myself? What kind of an insecure, sadistic monster is this God?

The line of reasoning Ms. Hilder is following — ending with the question about God as a sadistic monster — is reasoning that I’m prone to myself. Instead of taking stock of my bad situation and solving it, I try to find God’s hidden meaning in my suffering, and it’s a short walk from there to wondering why one being would willfully cause another being to suffer anyway? Is He a big meanie?

Ms. Hilder ends well though, by dialing the purpose and meaning back a notch. Our sufferings are sometimes just that: our sufferings. They’re not meant to end up as glossy photos in God’s travel brochure. We can lean on God to get us through the hard times and then testify to His goodness later. We don’t have to compose an extemporaneous sermon in real time based on the anecdote we’re living now.

We don’t always get what we want or hope for, but we are always loved as only God can love us. And it’s okay to be simply incapable of putting out good publicity for God sometimes. It’s a blessing to spend time merely languishing in receipt of His qualities, not always slaving away in marketing, particularly when things aren’t so good.

When shit happens, there’s really only two things that count: 1) God. 2) Is Good – and in that order. And when it does happen, and it will regardless of the fact you or I may be a Christian, I just hope God isn’t counting on my ability to keep up His reputation as much as I am counting on Him to live up to it.

A tweet by AlmightyGod at Twitter this week. I guess this piqued my interest because I’ve spent the same week reading about Biblical textual criticism.

To most Christians, the Bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.”

A quote about doubt by Winn Collier:

What I discovered in Scripture, particularly the Psalms, was instruction in how to speak to God, language for Divine conversation. What I found most striking was the Psalms’ brutal honesty. Whatever one felt toward God, they spoke (actually, prayed): anger, joy, ambivalence, fear, delight. And doubt.

The Psalms suggest that dishonesty may be the only thing that isn’t prayer. If we are filled with doubt, the Bible suggests we doubt out loud. Doubt to God. Don’t hold back. Don’t try to slash a smiley face across it. Let it loose. Doubt louder. Doubt better.

From The Supernatural is Unnatural by Michael Dowd. I don’t track with the apparent pantheism presented elsewhere on his website, but his juxtaposing the supernatural and the unnatural does seem to nail this age’s distaste for that “old time religion.”

As we have learned more and more about the natural, the so-called supernatural has become less and less attractive. After all, supernatural and unnatural are synonyms. Anything supposedly supernatural is, by definition, unnatural. And most people find unnatural relatively uninspiring when they really stop and think about it. I mean, does this sound like “good news” to you?…

An unnatural king who occasionally engages in unnatural acts sends his unnatural son to Earth in an unnatural way. He’s born an unnatural birth, lives an unnatural life, performs unnatural deeds, and is killed and unnaturally rises from the dead in order to redeem humanity from an unnatural curse brought about by an unnaturally talking snake. After 40 days of unnatural appearances he unnaturally zooms off to heaven to return to his unnatural father, sit on an unnatural throne, and unnaturally judge the living and the dead. If you profess to believe in all this unnatural activity, you and your fellow believers get to spend an unnaturally long time in an unnaturally boring paradise while everyone else suffers an unnatural, torturous hell forever.

If this is supposedly “the gospel”, God’s great news for humanity, [is] it any wonder that young people are turning their backs on religion…?

Some quotes from the article Biblical Christianity is Bankrupt by Michael Dowd.

In the words of Philip K. Dick, “Reality is that which when you stop believing in it doesn’t go away.”

Believing in a personal God—giving mental assent to the existence of a supernatural being with a personality—may or may not make a difference in the life of the believer. When belief does not richly transform one’s experience, however, such belief becomes a booby prize.

The primary cause of the Church’s decline in size and influence in Europe, Canada, Australia, and now in America is its failure to grasp that science reveals God’s nature, God’s ways, and God’s guidance far more accurately than the biblical writers could have understood or transmitted.

The elephant in the sanctuary is this: Nothing is driving young people away from God and Christianity more quickly and surely than the Bible interpreted literally. (This is why some of the New Atheists are promoting Bible study so vigorously.)

The main way Reality is communicating to humanity today is through evidence. To use religious language: God is still speaking, and facts are God’s native tongue—not Hebrew or Greek or King James English. The Church will continue its slide into irrelevance or extinction so long as it equates “scripture” with old legends rather than accumulated evidence. Historical, scientific, and cross-cultural evidence is the main way God is addressing humanity today. To celebrate evidence is to honor “the authority of scripture.”

Ancient, unchanged scriptural stories and doctrinal declarations are inadequate guidance for meeting modern challenges. To restrict the real-world relevance of our religious traditions to what could be known and communicated millennia ago makes no more sense than to consult a first-century text on dental care when you need a root canal.

There were, after all, no such things as distilled alcohol, cocaine, addictive painkillers, television, or Internet porn back when Moses was leading his people or when Jesus was urging that compassion trump scriptural law. If sin was tempting back then, it is even more tempting now. We live in an era of “supernormal stimuli.” …

Consider, too, that the consequences of routine interpersonal conflict were not inflated in biblical times by hair-trigger weapons stored in a pocket, under a car seat, or in a bedside table. These weapons can maim or kill, moreover, with no preliminary hand-to-hand combat.

The slide into sin dangerous to self and others is far more potent today than when Martin Luther was famously struggling with his own sinful nature nearly five centuries ago. Fortunately, scientific discoveries now help us understand the magnitude of this evolutionary “mismatch” of inherited instincts with the conditions we now have to function in.

Imagining that our (and our loved ones’) temptations and struggles owe to our great, great, great…grandmother eating an apple isn’t particularly helpful or believable today. Moreover, such thinking perpetuates dysfunctional patterns—no matter how much we may pray for relief.

A traditional view of heaven is far from appealing to most Westerners under forty. I have never met a Christian of any age who can look me in the eye and honestly say that an eternity with no challenges or difficulties yet with conscious awareness of the everlasting torment of others, including some they knew and loved, would be heavenly. We all know that would be hell.

RJS at Jesus Creed reminds us that studying the Bible as literature is an attempt to fully understand what it says, not an attempt to prove that some parts of it are false.

When we look at Genesis 1-11 there is no sifting and searching for bits and pieces of truth amidst “error,” interpretation, or myth – we take the whole as given. But reading the text literally with literary intelligence sees forms of truth-telling that are different in genre, form, and purpose. We misunderstand scripture when we look for correspondence between modern science and the cosmology of the Ancient Near East. We misunderstand the nature of scripture when we equate ANE cosmology with error. We also misread Genesis if we don’t recognize that the form of historical truth-telling in Genesis 1-11 is different from the historical truth-telling in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. The historical truth-telling in Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles is, in turn, different from the form of historical truth-telling we expect in historical monograph today.