Sample Scriptural Manipulation by the Western Religious Right (I): Jeremiah 5.23-25 and Talking about the Weather

In the last blog, I talked about how the Western Religious Right’s claim to orthodoxy is dubious.  This blog starts on this series of sample misquotations of Scriptures in one particular evangelical theologian’s work that has plagued the wider Western church world (and even in Asia). The reason I use his work is because his works are widely used by evangelicals.   This blog is about understanding of the environmental issue. We shall see in this blog that the Bible does not answer some of the hard questions we face. We may choose to use common sense or our limited knowledge from other disciplines, but not so much the Bible. Especially important is the way I have seen this author uses one text below. In this blog, we will learn that the spiritual lesson for the church is not found in each word of the text, but the intended force of those words. The rhetoric assigns meaning to the message.

Here’s a great sample. Discussing the anxiety over environmental concerns and weather pattern, one author puts in bold letters, “People displease God when they fail to acknowledge his control of the weather.” Really? Displease? His citation is Jeremiah 5.23-25 as follows:

 

“But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart; they have turned aside and gone away. They do not say in their hearts, ‘Let us fear the Lord our God, who gives the rain in its season, the autumn rain and the spring rain, and keeps for us the weeks appointed for the harvest.’ Your iniquities have turned these away [that is, the rains and the harvest seasons], and your sins have kept god from you.”

 

I’m not an expert in weather or environment. This blog will not address this problem, but will address the way the problem is being addressed. The writer interprets the sin to be worries about the weather. The fact is, the weather is not the focus at all. Jeremiah wrote this book progressively all the way to the Babylonian exile. Judah was exiled because, according to Jeremiah, of idolatry. The entire context has nothing to do with environmental concerns.

 

The Meaning

The poetic section starts with Jer. 5.20 and runs all the way to 6.30. It is a series of parallelisms that have nothing to do with weather but almost everything to do with idolatry. Even the language God used to describe the blindness and deafness resemble the idols in Jer. 5.20. The people had essentially become like those idols they worshipped. It is part of God’s law suit (note the lawsuit language of 6.18) against Judah based on the covenant God had made with Israel long ago. The fact God used “Israel” instead of the expected “Judah” in some places (e.g. Jer. 5.9) points to the covenant nation of Israel before the kingdom had split into two. My point is, a careful reader will not find that passage to be mainly about weather. Why talk about weather then?

Weather is symbolic of the religions of the Near East. The worldview of Ancient Near Eastern (ANE henceforth) is that people worshipped the gods so that the gods would provide good weather for one thing and one thing only, good harvest. In other words, the patter situation there had to do with how people worshipped, and not environmental concern. The Lord is reminding Judah that the false worship had caused in this case weather problems. The very fact the Judeans worshipped the Canaanite gods is because, according to many ANE experts, the Canaanite gods promised good harvest. God was basically saying, “Look at how messed up your weather is. How is that working out for you wishful thinking idolaters?”

 

Consequences of Misreading

We no longer have that worldview today. I’m pretty sure God might speak to use in variety of ways in regard to why we sometimes suffer environmental damage. The ANE religious paradigm is not the ONLY way. It WAS for the Israelites because that’s their world. We’re now in our world. I don’t doubt that some of these disasters are man-made. I don’t doubt that some man-made disasters were indirectly punishment from God (well, at least I leave that possibility on the table). Jeremiah 5 does not concretize the author’s conclusion. I’ll let his words speak for themselves.

 

“This passage sounds remarkably similar to the proponents of dangerous global warming today – they fear a fragile, out-of-control climate pattern that will destroy the earth, but ‘do not say in their hearts,’ ‘Let us fear the Lord our God, who gives the rain in its season.’ This suggests that the underlying cause of fears of dangerous global warming might not be science but rejection of belief in God.

 

We learn from this rhetoric three fallacies: 1) Unbelief and not scientific ignorance is the root cause of all human problems. 2) Those who have environmental concern must not trust God. 3) Concern over environment shows a small belief in God. I certainly do not agree with any of these ideas. Besides their circular logic (i.e. if you think our environment has severe problem, you must not believe in God. Due to your unbelief, that’s why you have an environmental concern), the biggest problem is the lack of support from the main thrust of the biblical passage. One lesson we learn from the three fallacies is that we can’t MAKE the Bible say what it does not intend to say. If the interpretation does not deal with the main issue the author was trying to address, the interpretation is wrong. So is the application.

 

On one final word, if this author does not think we should worry about over the air and weather pattern, he may need to travel to China more and do some studies there. I’m sure in his revised version of this book, he’ll think differently.

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Western Evangelical Blind Spot While Judging China’s Theology

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Chinese theology

I read with interest the various reactions to China’s possible attempt to have its own theology. Of course, from the Western side of the faith, people are alarmed. I mean, how in the world can a Christian faith/theology be formed to support an oppressive government? Really, even words like “Constatinianism” comes up. Scot McKnight’s label in his blog surely brands the Chinese the apostates. Of course, it’s so easy to demonize “red” China. After all, aren’t they the bad guys who put Christians in jail and demolish churches, but is persecution the issue or is Constatinianism the issue?

This is where the West once again runs into its own blind spot, especially for evangelicals. The doctrines formulated and hardened by Western evangelicalism have long been just its own version of “Western” theology, from the rise of the Moral Majority to the Gospel Coalition. Furthermore, as I pointed out to my friend, the Religious Right (and sometimes the Left) has already repeated its attempt to occupy and influence the US government. Of course, no one from the Western side is willing to admit that their version of orthodox faith, especially the “biblical version”, is really the Western indigenized faith, but as Suey Park, Emily Rice, and Mihee Kim-Kort points out, the Western version is quite dominated by white supremacy. The only reason why they can consider it orthodox and feel outraged at OTHER kinds of theology being heterodox is because they have long occupied a powerful position in the faith, so powerful that one prominent Western church leader has pronounced recently that he has found the solution to the Middle East problem via Rwanda!  Before you laugh, my readers, I’m not joking.  The Western evangelical church seems to have ALL the solutions in God’s multicultural, multiracial and multinational kingdom for all the world’s problems.  Is Chinese theology any guiltier of Constantinianism than that of the Religious Right? Let’s go further to ask the question that if no one got imprisoned and persecuted, is the version from Western conservatives still the norm and everything else the deviance? Is Constantinianism the sole privilege of the West that the Religious Right is exempt from its own analysis of other kinds of Christianity? Does the Western Religious Right also make the Bible serve their own political agenda?

I will do a series of blogs in the next few weeks to examine one particular influential Religious Right theologian (whose name will be withheld) in how he uses the Bible to support his political agenda. In so doing, I hope to expose the political raping of the biblical text for political agenda that is already rampant and influential in the evangelical church.

In conclusion, I say this to evangelical critics. Physicians, heal thyself.

 

Evangelical Idolatry: the Offense of the Gospel to the Faith Commuity

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idolatry

“But Gideon told them, ‘I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you … I do have one request, that each of you give me an earring from your share of the plunder.’ …  Gideon made the gold into an ephod which he placed in Ophrah, his town. All Israel prostituted themselves by worshipping it there …”  (Judges 8.23-24, 27 NIV)

 

I’ve spoken in many settings all over the world and I’m beginning to notice that certain issues being used as illustrations tend to bring inevitable offense. These are also sacrosanct topics for blogging.  Here’re some of the issues I’ve encountered.

• Infallibility of one’s holy calling into full-time church service
• Infallibility of John Calvin/John Wesley/Westminster Confession/John Piper (fill in your favorite theologian) and their followers etc.
• Infallibility of one’s original faith when one’s converted
• Infallibility of mega church pastors
• Infallibility of popular evangelistic methods: mass evangelism, celebrity evangelism, personal evangelism through formulae
• Infallibility of local church growth by statistics

If I were to question any of the above, the reaction of people towards these issues often borders on fanaticism. It is as if I’m attacking the Trinity or the attributes of Jesus. Why are people so angry? Notice I just observe that people possess the same passion towards these issues as they would if someone attacks their God. The problem is simple. People worship these concepts as much as they worship the Bible or even God. It is hard for us to imagine that the gospel is offensive not only to those who do not believe, but also to those who believe for a good long while.  This failure to see our problem IS our problem.

While idolatry happens literally in many parts of the world still, in the developed world, the kind of idolatry is subtler. It is easy to point fingers at unbelievers and condemn them for idolatry. It is exceptionally difficult to see that we worship idols right within the faith community. All these idols have one thing in common: they put humans and tools at the center of worship. What do we feel passionate about? Whatever we feel passionate about may just be our idol, even if that idol has religious clothing.

How May I Help?

A while back in church on one Sunday morning, I walked in and saw one of our members in a wheelchair.  As I went around talking to a few people, I noticed everyone affectionately greeted this injured member.  People were giving hugs, saying cheerful hellos and expressing many other very warm gestures.

Then, something different happened.

Someone came up to her and said, “How may I help you?”  The injured person replied, “I’m actually trying to figure out how to go to the bathroom with this wheelchair.”  Now,  something quite profound just happened at that moment.

Quite often, we are so used to each that we greet each other with superficial affection without asking the important question, “HOW may I help?”  Taking the time to care is an art, but it is also common sense awareness of real needs around us.

When being called “Christian” is stinky: rereading conclusions from statistics

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs from people who quote Pew Research this and Barna Group that.  Quite frankly, people just quote these stats without even a second thought about the hermeneutics behind such “research.”  These thoughtless blogs are once again a proof of “lies, damn lies and statistics” being the trinity of modernistic deception.  This way of blogging has been so hip that it’s become pandemic.

The logic of such blogs usually goes one of the following two ways.  They could say, “Oh, based on these statistics, America has become less Christian.  Look how few people identify themselves as Christians.”  They could also say, “Based on these statistics, these many people who identify themselves as Christians also believe that ___ (fill in the blank: living together, being homosexual, drinking, premarital sex etc.) is okay.  Look how Christian value has eroded.”  There you have it.  The first basically says that the present statistics are accurate reflection of how many real Christians there are, and the number is declining.  It also assumes that previous statistics are quite reliable with the greater number of real Christians.  See? Assumption is everything.  The second basically assumes that whatever ethical value being put in the blank is the key issue that divides what is a true versus a false Christian.  Assumption again!

I wish to question all such assumption as being lacking in any sense in our everyday experience.  I’ll use my experience as an example.  Where I grew up in the Southern part of the US, you can’t kick a little pebble without hitting a baptist.  In fact, I bet the Muslims there are also baptist.  No, I’m kidding.  If you were to ask anyone around where I live with a simplistic statistical questionnaire whether that person is Christian, Catholic, Jew, or Muslim (I’m using their common categories of course), you would find that most would say they’re Christians and some would say that they’re Catholic.  In addition, aren’t Catholics also Christian?  Not according to the way these discussions are framed. I overheard one particular discussion that went something like this.  Person number 1 says, “Are you Christian?”  Person number 2 answers, “No, I’m Catholic.”  What the statistics in the past and often in the present do not tell us is that they frame such questions in such biased way that they would inevitably get a large percentage to be Christian. What being a “Christian” actually means does not matter.

For some, being Christian just means being white and middle class, while believing there’s a god.  I’m not joking. I’ve seen enough examples to tell you that this is true.  And being white and middle class while believing in God is the cool thing to do in the past because that’s the American way.  There’s no way to verify whether that person really is a Christian.  The paradigm begins to shift however.  Now, with the moral value of the society defining what is cool, being Christian may not be cool any longer.

Now, being a Christian could mean being a homophobe and a sexual prude.  That is NOT cool.  Since the Christians no longer project that cool value, less people now identify with being Christians than before.  This is natural.  To top off the problem is the Christian’s own hermeneutics on the Bible as to what consists of “Christian value.” This kind of value obviously shifts, from the prohibition of drinking to premarital sex to now homosexual lifestyle.  What we haven’t realized is that our main problem has not changed: our hermeneutics and ethics still suck.  Only because more people were in agreement that drinking and drugs are usually not good for you, we were able to become more of a moral majority (I mean that, of course, sarcastically) in the past.  Now, societal value can no longer accept “Christian value”, less are willing to be identified as Christians.  I suspect that the decline is over exaggerated.  I suggest though that we have proclaimed something that has repulsed society.  The real issue then is whether the repulsion we have caused is the right issue, the one that we’re willing to die for.   I mean, is not sleeping with your girlfriend before marriage really is the ethical defining line of Christianity?

You see?  The first and the second set of logic are actually related.  When the hermeneutics of scripture on which Christian value is based are framed a certain way, people either identify or not identify with it.  At that point, people’s identification with it shows whether that value is cool or not.  Nothing in such assumptions have to do with truth.  It is a popularity contest.  It is a publicity disaster.  When we use such assumptions, we only reinforce but not solve the problem.