Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 30:25 - 31:55

This time around we find some rather odd labor negotiations, we see Jacob up to his old tricks again using sympathetic magic to make himself rich (or maybe not), we have some fun at the expense of two thousand years worth of Bible commentators, and finally we witness a treaty that stood meaningless for a millennium.

Like, We Are Never Getting Back Together. Like, Ever.

Photo credit: Clarence Ji / Foter CC BY

Who knew one could so readily find inspiration for a blog post about apostasy in the lyrics of a Taylor Swift breakup song? If the oft-repeated marketing slogan of "Christianity is a relationship" has any truth to it, then apostasy is a lot like a breakup. Maybe that's why I often find myself relating to the sentiment of breakup songs. Lines like "since you been gone, I can breathe for the first time," or "so often times it happens that we live our lives in chains and we never even know we have the key" resonate with my experience. I find this to be the case with the aforementioned T-Swizzle ditty.

Let me clarify a bit before I confuse the reader. See, on my end I hold open the possibility that some form of Christianity may indeed one day somehow seduce me to return. I admit that it seems highly unlikely, but I'm not ready to say "never." The brain is a very curious and often fickle organ, susceptible to all kinds of things. Injury, delusion, hallucination, chemical imbalance, narcotics, or any number of things can completely alter cognitive processes. Not to mention the growing list of cognitive errors everyone remains susceptible to. And who knows? Maybe some form of Christianity has it right and I will discover this and become convinced of its truth. Maybe I'll reach a point where it just doesn't matter to me whether or not it's true and I embrace some iteration of it. I consider all of those things possible. I'm talking about what the Bible says, and the Bible agrees with the sentiment expressed by Miss Swift.

The Convenience and Self-flattery of Apostasy

I suspect that the very existence of apostates might be a bit of an inconvenience for Christians. Not all apostates obviously. Many fit the preferred narrative quite well. These are the folks raised in the church who "go astray" some time around adolescence. It's easy to pick on these folks because their departure often coincides with a time in their lives when they begin questioning the legitimacy of the authority figures around them and rebelling. This also happens to be a time when their hormones begin strongly leading them to engage in thoughts and behaviors that are deemed "immoral" by most Christians. They make easy targets for dismissal.

I'm sure many of these teens really do just want to cast off the shackles of moral standards and do as they please. But there are doubtless others that sincerely wrestle with and reject the faith they were raised in because they realize how intellectually untenable it is. Once their access to things like the Internet become unfettered and they begin having contact with divergent views, this process is likely accelerated. For many their rejection of Christianity is a combination of factors and not merely a simplistic desire to "fornicate with impunity."

Complaining about the Exodus Movie

My series on the Pentateuch is plodding along rather slowly and I've still got about another twenty chapters to go before I even finish Genesis, but I'm going to take a break here and attempt a timely discussion of the first part of the book that follows it, Exodus.

You may have heard there's a film coming out this week that uses the early narrative portions of Exodus as its source material. Given the widespread promotion of the film across every platform known to man, you'd have to be living under a rock not to be aware of it. I've never been a fan of these biblical epics, with perhaps the exception of Ben Hur (1959), a film which only briefly intersects the biblical narrative.

When I was a Christian I would usually lament the lack of fidelity to the source material. Now that I'm not one, I'm mainly not a fan of the genre because the films tend to be either hugely slanted toward religious audiences or stand in some kind of half-way point of being critical while still conforming to the expectations of those same religious audiences because money. I suspect Ridley Scott's film will sit solidly in the latter category, though I'm willing to be proven wrong. I'd like to be able to enjoy these films the way I enjoy films like Clash of the Titans (the Ray Harryhausen version, of course), but until such time as the culture I live in can view Yahweh, Moses and Samson the same way they currently view Zeus, Odysseus and Heracles, I don't think I'm going to be able to truly enjoy a film adaptation of a biblical narrative. That's just me. Your mileage my vary.

The Ridley Scott film has already been criticized for its portrayal of events involving specific ethnic groups without casting people in the principal roles that even remotely resemble folks from those ethnic groups. That will not be what many Christians will criticize, however. I'm going to go ahead and address some criticisms from some in the Christian community. The first is the standard complaint that the film is not faithful to "biblical history." The second is how many will be quite put off by the way the deity is portrayed in the film. Some of the early reviews I've read have mentioned that Yahweh is represented by an eleven-year-old boy and that the decisions and actions of the deity are similarly immature and, to borrow Christian Bale's term, "mercurial."

The Boxers of Christianity

Deanna, a guest poster over at Neil’s Godless in Dixie blog, has an excellent post up about the narcissism of preaching. She paints an all-too-common portrait of members of the clergy. I have trouble finding fault with it. My only counterpoint would be to suggest something I’m sure she’d have no problem admitting. That is that not all preachers completely fit that mold. Certainly some folks will be able to think of exceptions to many of the otherwise spot-on characterizations she puts forward. The take-away for me is that this particular career path undeniably shapes and attracts certain people that find great success, acclaim, honor and monetary gain as a reward for traits like narcissism and megalomania. Of course there are exceptions. There are probably some decent people in politics too. How does the system treat them, though? Who fares better?

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 29:1-30:24

In this installment Jacob goes about acquiring a family while in the service of his uncle Laban. Herein we find an incredible feat of strength, more baffling gullibility, another warning about those tricky neighbors to the north, a curiously silent yet quite active deity, a sibling rivalry involving a uterine arms race with a couple of slave girls caught in the crossfire, the silliest excuses for names you ever did see, and we read between the lines a bit to see how good biblical writers copy, but great biblical writers steal.

Survey Says…

Ligonier Ministries recently teamed up with LifeWay to conduct a survey about the theological views of Americans with a particular focus on evangelicals. I have a few thoughts on both the survey itself and its results.

The partnership between a Reformed para-church publisher and the retail arm of the Southern Baptist Convention probably suggests something about the inroads neo-Calvinists have made within that denomination. This is no surprise, of course. Al Mohler has been in charge of the SBC’s flagship seminary (SBTS) for quite some time. Additionally, Calvinistic Baptists seem to be the only ones within that denomination who are consistently serious about theology. I might be inclined to argue that when Christian fundamentalism intersects with middle class pseudo-intellectualism, Calvinism is the meme most fit to rise to the top. It's difficult not to agree with my friend Neil who observes that it is largely just “gentrified religious extremism.”

Presuppositional Atheism?

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a Presuppositionalist. I've discussed this briefly before, but having grown wary and suspect of the weaknesses of apologetic methods like Thomistic arguments and evidentialism, I turned to the seemingly-unassailable circularity offered by this “epistemology.” I just used scare quotes there because Presuppositionalism probably isn’t as much of an epistemology as it is an apologetic method (if it’s even that). The basic claim of Presuppositionalism is that the Christian understanding of reality is the only internally consistent worldview and that the propositions contained in the Protestant Bible, and implicitly the Westminsterian interpretation of those propositions, are to be taken axiomatically. All other worldviews will fail the internal scrutiny of a reductio ad absurdum.

Mistakes of Moses Expanded Universe: Genesis 28:10-22

In this installment Jacob uses a magic rock to have an encounter with the deity, he has a curious response to Yahweh's promises while setting up a worship center in the wrong place, and we attempt to peel back the curtain a bit and show what source-critical scholars have been aware of for a while now.

Elijah and the Apologist of Baal

I Kings 18:17-40
And Ahab went to meet Elijah. And it came to pass, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto him, “Art thou he that troubleth Israel?”

And he answered, “I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father's house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of Jehovah, and thou hast followed Baalim. Now therefore send, and gather to me all Israel unto mount Carmel, and the prophets of Baal four hundred and fifty, and the prophets of the groves four hundred, which eat at Jezebel's table.” So Ahab sent unto all the children of Israel, and gathered the prophets together unto mount Carmel. For even though this was a ridiculous request, Elijah was some kind of svengali.