Month: March 2010

The woman that you gave me

Posted by

3

In certain Christian circles there is a new buzz word, “intentional”, as in “intentional Christian community”, in which people live together and they hold things in common.  I once  lived in an intentional Christian community, before I got married.  Really, I’m a communist at heart, but my wife converted me to capitalism.  It’s all her fault.

The female of a given species is far more sinful in her orientation than the male.  I observe our two cats:  Both have had their sex organs permanently removed, but certain sexually specific characteristics remain.  Sam, our male cat is a good communist, owning nothing of his own, save the food he eats and the air he breathes.  Bailey, our female, is a rich capitalist pig-cat (no offense intended towards the animals called “pigs”).  The fact is I use the possessive pronoun in a very loose sense with our Bailey.  We don’t own her; she owns us would be closer to the truth; possessive is correct in the sense of our boss.  There is a saying, “Dogs have owners; cats have staff.”  With Bailey we are closer to the Greek douloi, “slaves”.  Bailey, the rich capitalist pig-cat, owns everything.  When we originally received Sam into the house we thought he would keep Bailey company — a kitten for her to play with and make her feel better about being kitten-less.  But she expressed her extreme displeasure at his presence; until one day she decided that she could use him as a punching bag.  I built a scratching post for her years ago. There is no question that that scratching post is Bailey’s.  She loves it and uses it daily.  So I built one for Sam, introduced him to it, but he seemed uninterested.  Then, he would use it always looking over his shoulder as though he were afraid of something–that something was Bailey.  Well it soon became clear that the second scratching post also belonged to our rich capitalist pig-cat, and she would whack Sam if she caught him using either of the scratching posts.  We notice also that Sam seems pretty nonchalant when it comes to kitty-cat visitors in our garden; he’s curious, he has a “I just want to get to know you” attitude.  Not Bailey–she gets her hackles up every time she detects a friendly visitor and will defend her capitalist empire with screeches, hisses and threats, with every ounce of her being.  “Give me liberty or give me death.”

When I was about to marry it soon became clear that we were not going to live out our days in our intentional Christian community because neither my fiancee nor any of the other fiancees, of the five of eight housemates who were engaged, wanted to live in intentional Christian community.  They all wanted a place of their own.  We tried to convince these women with every sort of persuasive argument that the intentional Christian community was more biblical and Christian, but the territorial instincts in the female of our own species are just too strong; it is comparable to the female of the cat species.  Our females don’t seem to like sharing:  the operative word is “my”, “mine”?  My house, my man, my car, my garden, my scratching post, mine!  That’s why they call it a “cat fight” when two females scuffle. The female has a strong nesting instinct and a need to carve out space, a place for raising babies, for which the man is a necessary evil.  So while we men would be happy to share everything we have, our food, our toys, our socks and underwear, women are utterly disgusted by such notions.  They want their own things.  The female doesn’t seem to want to share her space with anyone, especially with other females.  She wants a savings accounts too, from which she can draw unbiblical usury to provide security for her old age–I’m pretty sure that beer was invented by a man, and that the RRSP (registered retirement savings plan) was invented by a woman.   So it’s not my fault that I am a rich capitalist pig.  “The woman that you gave me” (Genesis 3.12), she made me do it.

Why communism doesn’t work

Posted by

1

We know that communism doesn’t really  work on the macro level because we’ve seen countless occasions that it has led to mass extermination and poverty, USSR, China, Viet Nam, North Korea, and Cuba.  Or how about the collective cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, some of the poorest countries in the world?  But perhaps, if enough really committed and redeemed people get together, just maybe it will work.  In an unguarded moment, PoserorProphet reminds us why communism doesn’t work in a micro community either:

Following Jesus is a demanding task and it is one of the reasons that community is so essential to our life as Christians.  It is impossible to follow Jesus on our own.  It is impossible to move into relationships of mutually liberating solidarity with people who have been abandoned, if you do so on your on.  You will burn out or blow up.

Again, I know this because I have experienced this.  When things started going wrong in our community in Vancouver’s downtown eastside and people started dropping out of participating in the work required to run the community, I decided to just take on more and more of that work myself.  That was unsustainable and my marriage still suffers from the consequences of that decision.

Actually, this is exactly why a lot of people, myself included, believe that communism fails every time it is tried. If you reward the unproductive people and punish the productive people, eventually no one will want to do anything anymore.  But I do have a couple of questions:  (1) Poser, don’t you think you should get this communism thing to work in a micro community before imposing it on the rest of the world?

At City of God, Andrew cites  a Ludwig von Misis Institute article defending private property from an a priori standpoint:

One of the points Hans-Hermann Hoppe makes is that the right to some private property is assumed by virtue of having a right to survive as an embodied individual. For example, surviving requires breathing, which requires an exclusive right to use the air surrounding one’s body. Similarly, surviving requires eating, which requires the right to be the exclusive consumer of some piece of food.

This leads to my second question for PoserorProphet. (2) When all private property has been taken away from people and all that is left is communal property, will we have to share underwear?  Isn’t that just a little unhygienic?  Or it will be like, “Ok, I’ll use it today, you use it tomorrow, but I want it back the next day.”

Are Christian Anarchists the new Zealots?

Posted by

8

Note:  This post has been edited to remove an error that the author acknowledges he made.

In my post Donate to Theological Education or Not:  The case of fighting anarchy, I wrote of my alarm that certain young Christians had begun to adopt socialism / communism.  As a donor to theological education, I’ve been asking myself whether if it is wise to give to schools like Regent College, of which I am an alumnist, that associate with professors like Dave Diewert who advocate such views. If these people succeed with their agenda, they will take away our ability to give to places like Regent.  One of Regent’s students, a self-acknowledged friend of Dave Diewert, has come out on his blog advocating violence and the abolition of private property:

However, as I have progressed down this road, I have become convicted that our efforts in this regard must be more intimately linked to solidarity with the abandoned, to the abolition of private property, to potentially more ‘violent’ means of resistance, and to the greater goal of building a social movement.

It had been suggested to me by one of Regent’s full-time Professors that the new left-wing Christians  were the New Pharisees; I’ve changed my mind about Christians like PoserorProphet who advocate violent resistance to the “economy of death”.  They are not the New Pharisees–they are the new Zealots.  Well, occasionally the two categories can overlap,  for Rabbi Akiba, a Pharisee, supported Bar Kochba, a zealot.  Poser has actually found inspiration in the actions of the Zealots:

Or, to pick a third example, we can find inspiration in the actions of the Jewish revolutionaries who immediately burned the records of debt after gaining control of the Jerusalem Temple in the first century (Josephus writes about this – although it probably reminds the modern reader of the conclusion to Fight Club!).

I wrote to Poser at City of God the following:

Now you advocate violent means of resistance and the elimination of private property. Just how much violence would you tolerate? You’re caught up in things that are way over your head, and you yourself could end up getting burned in the process. You mentioned favorably also the zealots who burned the papers of debt and murdered the priestly class. Did you know that all of those people ended up dead within four years? (Except through treachery, Josephus himself survived to tell the story). So you find inspiration in people who were exterminated by war, and those who survived the war only to be crucified and their women and children to be sold into slavery? They perished as Jesus predicted (cf. Matt 24-25); but he told his followers not to participate in the war but rather to flee (Matt 24.16-20). But of course you know better than Jesus–you’ve read more books than he did– and so you find inspiration in the actions of the people who perished in accordance to Jesus’ prophecy!

There was a time when the Republican party had to excommunicate from their ranks the John Birch Society because these people brought discredit to the party with their extreme conspiracy views.  I wonder if evangelical Christians, particularly those involved in theological education, need to clean things up a bit too, before they lose their credibility through their association with such people.  Or are they representative?  Do they actually speak what so many people want to say but are afraid to?

Crowded tenement building churches in Early Christianity, Part II: Philology

Posted by

0

The first part of this series was published in my personal blog.  There I react to a budding Master’s student at my alma mater, Regent College, dubbed “Poser or Prophet”, who had in response to the Brooks’ post, House Churches, written:

Also, the early church probably didn’t meet in houses. They probably met in what space they could find in crowded tenement buildings — although if the wealthier first floor resident(s) converted, they could meet there (because, you know, with the risk of buildings falling over or burning down — which tended to happen frequently — it was much better to live on the ground floor than in the penthouse!).

I mentioned that while I often disagree with Poser, this time I agreed, and I was able to find an extensive, though dated, bibliography supporting his view, including multiple examples of the term πολυοχλοικοδομη (poluochloikodome=“crowded tenement building”) in the Early Christian sources.  Text after text supported Poser’s position.

Now Poser has deigned to respond to little ol’ me as such:

Hi Peter,

Methinks you’re a little behind on the literature. For more on churches in tenement buildings, you could start with Jewett’s Romans commentary (it’s pretty much a must-read anyway) and you can follow the trail he provides.

I was deeply moved that Poser remembered my name.  But I felt even more deeply chastened for having not read what is obviously a seminal source, Jewett’s Hermeneia commentary.  Fortunately, being a rich capitalist pig, I own a copy of this book in my personal library.  I was able to read some of it and must say I’ve come to the position of disagreeing with Poser.  Jewett helped me to see that the Greek New Testament that I was using, the NTCB (The New Tenement Church Bible, Greek and English Interlinear ed., published by Zondoudhoorn’s Press, 2009), had fabricated the term πολυοχλοικοδομη / poluochloikodome.  Also I learned that the NIV, RSV and numerous other translations of the original Greek text, just had the term “house”, where I had found “crowded tenement building” in the NTCB!  Can you imagine my surprise?  Returning to my other Greek Bible (I own several of these), I found that the term οἶκος / oikos was used in many of these passages; maybe I should have paid attention when Doc Pecota suggested that we should put our vocabulary on 3×5 cards for the purpose of memorization.  Its been 28 years since I took first-year Greek, so I had to get out my Greek and English dictionary; fortunately, I have several of these because, as I explained, I am a rich capitalist pig.  Imagine my surprise when I learned that this term means “house”; I didn’t think Jesus let his followers own houses.  This term, I learned, is translated domus in the Vulgate of which I also own a copy, being a rich capitalist pig–the term domus comes into English as “dom-inant”, “dom-ination”, “dom-ineering”–this would almost even imply that the apostles, in defiance to the teaching of Jesus, tolerated the early Christian rich capitalists pigs, allowing them to have a dom-inant role in the church; in antiquity, evil householders and landowners were constantly exploiting and dom-inating everyone else.  Heavens.

I couldn’t find in the Vulgate the Latin term, insula (“crowded tenement building”).  So I asked a couple of scholars (who shall remain anonymous to protect the guilty) who are also rich capitalist pigs, having both had the privilege of studying up to the PhD level, to their shame:  one is an Oxford-trained Papyrologist and the other a Swiss national–probably descended from bankers–a professor of Historical Theology, and neither one knew the Greek term for insula.  So I concluded that the original New Testament was written by people who at very least tolerated rich capitalist pig householders; perhaps they even used these economic structures of death to promote the advancement of the Early Church.  Horror!

More to come.

Worship the invisible God or our modern idols: Which?

Posted by

2

Isaiah 55:1-9
Psalm 63:1-8
I Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

Guidance through the Wilderness

Emmanuel Anglican Church, Sunday March 7, 2010

A Warning against Idolatry

Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to a very young church that he himself had planted.  But the new Christians at Corinth were confused about what is ok for a Christian to do.  So throughout the letter Paul offers practical instructions about how they must behave as Christians.  In ch. 8, he begins to give instructions about idolatry, and how the Corinthian Christians must act.  In ch. 8, he gives specific instructions about idol meat:  it was a practice in ancient world to sacrifice an animal to idols and then cut it up and sell it in the market place.  This was a difficult dilemma for Christians since most of the meat that they could buy had been sacrificed.  Could they eat such meat?  Paul also instructs these new converts, men and women who used to be pagans, that they must shun idol worship.  This was a hard lesson for these early Christians, because so much of life in the ancient world revolved around religion; in some cases, in order to belong to a certain profession, you had to worship in a pagan temple.  Some of the Corinthians had a pretty lax attitude:  they believed that they could partake in the feasts in the pagan temples, visit the prostitutes there, and none of this would harm them.  They were fooling themselves saying something like, “Food is for the stomach, sex is for the body, but my knowledge of God remains intact.  The whole world belongs to God and I can go into the temple eat and visit prostitutes and it will not harm me.”  But Paul is horrified and warns them not to visit the temple:  Even though there were no other gods besides the One God, they would be eating at the table of demons.  Then he recalls what happened to the Israelites, who were brought out of the land of Egypt; While in the desert they feared that Moses would not return from the mountain. So they had his brother Aaron fashion a calf out of gold and Aaron said to them about this golden calf ,  “This is Yahweh, who brought you out of the land of Egypt”; they began a feast with dancing, and they began to commit sexual immorality too.

Why Idolatry?

After many long centuries of Christianity in Western culture, we no longer practice idolatry.  So it is nearly impossible for us to relate to these passages. What was the motivation of the Corinthians to return to the pagan temples?  Why did the Israelites have Aaron create an idol?  My African friends who are first or second generation Christian may understand better than us.  Dr. Abel Ndjerareou, who once preached here at Emmanuel, said that he practiced idolatry at his grandparents house before becoming a Christian.  They are much closer to idolatry than we are.  Perhaps, a little story can explain what motivates idolaters:

Barthelemy Kombo, a Bayaka pygmy of Central African Republic, was afraid to become a Christian because he did not know how he would hunt without practicing fetishism—certain pagan rituals must be done to placate the spirits and make it possible to have a successful hunt.  The evangelist told him however that, while he could no longer practice his pagan rites, he could pray to God.  So Barthelemy decided to become a Christian but he was still worried that without the fetishist practice which made him a powerful hunter, he would be unsuccessful.  Not only that, but all the other Bayaka believed that he would become an ineffective hunter and that his family would starve.

Continue reading →