In my last post, I spoke briefly about All-Saints Day by way of claiming Hallowe’en as a legitimate Christian celebration.  As a celebration of all the saints who lack a feast of their own, All-Saints was declared an official holy day of the church by Pope Gregory IV in 837.  The feast was later moved to November 1 in response to the European (specifically Celtic) holiday of Samhain on October 31, which thus became for Christians All-Hallows Eve, or Hallowe’en.

All Saints Day was John Wesley’s favorite Christian celebration.  Joe Iovino writes:

John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, enjoyed and celebrated All Saints Day. In a journal entry from November 1, 1767, Wesley calls it “a festival I truly love.” On the same day in 1788, he writes, “I always find this a comfortable day.” The following year he calls it “a day that I peculiarly love.”

Like Wesley, I have long loved All-Saints Day, regarding it as a fitting celebration and memorial of all the faithful dead.  This is my favorite All-Saint’s Day hymn, composed by William Walsham How, Bishop of Wakefield, and usually sung, with a crashing opening chord, to Ralph Vaughn Williams’ stirring tune!

I must confess, though, that I long thought that All Souls Day was just another name for All-Saints, and that Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) was likewise the same day, in Spanish.  I have learned, though, that these are actually three different, although related, festivals.

All Souls Day is a separate, specifically Roman Catholic celebration on November 2.  Odilo, abbot of Cluny (who died in 1048) thought it fitting that, having honored all the saints in heaven on All-Saints Day, we spend the following day remembering all the other faithful dead, praying for their release from purgatory.  This picture from Encyclopedia Britannica (© kristo74/Fotolia) shows candlelit graves in a Catholic cemetery–the candles left as a sign of the prayers going up for each departed soul.

As a rule, Protestants aren’t much on purgatory–after all, didn’t Jesus tell the bandit crucified with him, “I assure you that today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43)?  But the Christian hope has not been, traditionally, that our disembodied souls will be absorbed into the changeless, timeless eternity of the Godhead.  In Scripture and in the tradition, the hope for a life beyond this life has been joined to our personality continuing, in an embodied existence: everlasting, then, rather than timelessly eternal.

The earliest explicit statement about a life beyond death in the Bible is Daniel 12:2, a text that in its final form dates to the second century BCE: “Many of those who sleep in the dusty land will wake up—some to eternal life, others to shame and eternal disgrace.”  Notice that this passage is not about the assured immortality of the soul, but rather about the hoped-for future resurrection of the body.    Indeed, the resurrection of the body at the end of the age is the teaching of the rabbis in the Mishnah, and is assumed throughout the Christian New Testament (for example, Luke 14:14; John 5:29; 11:24; 1 Corinthians 15:20-28).  The creeds of Christianity, too, confess the resurrection of the body, not the immortality of the soul.

Most importantly, the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection everywhere emphasize the empty tomb (Matthew 28:11-15; Mark 16:6) and the physical, tangible nature of the risen Jesus, who displays in his body the wounds of crucifixion, invites his friends to touch him, and even shares a meal with them (for example, Luke 24:36-43; John 20:26-29). The risen Jesus is not Jesus’ ghost, but Jesus himself: the same Jesus who was crucified.

So–what does all this mean?  What do I believe happens when we die?  When I was a young Christian, I could have told you, with all the confidence of youthful arrogance.  But now, I am an old Christian, and no longer quite so glib or blithe.  I believe in the resurrection of the dead, friends.  And that means, first of all, that I believe that the dead really do die.  One day soon (although I hope, not too soon), I too will really die.  But I am also certain that the last word belongs to the Lord of life.  The God who raised Jesus can, and will, raise us up at the end of the age, in the world to come.

Christian theologian Jurgen Moltmann put it this way: “The immortality of the soul is an opinion – the resurrection of the dead is a hope.”  Christian hope is not Pollyanna optimism–a saccharine denial of the hard realities of life, and of death.  It is rather the confidence that we may place ourselves, our world, our future, and even our mourned and beloved dead into the hands of God, trusting that the power at the heart of all things is indeed just and loving and kind, and that nothing beautiful will be lost.

Anglican priest, physicist, and theologian John Polkinghorne described the soul as “what expresses and carries the continuity of living personhood,” not only beyond this life, but within it, from the past to the present and into the future (The God of Hope and the End of the World [New Haven: Yale University, 2002], 105). Drawing on information theory, he proposed that “the carrier of continuity is the immensely complex ‘information-bearing pattern’ in which that matter is organized” (Polkinghorne 2002 105–6). That pattern, preserved as a “disembodied existence” in the mind of God after death, will ensure continuity of the self into the world to come, when God reembodies us in the new creation (Polkinghorne 2002, 107).

What will that waiting-time be like, I wonder?  Will I sleep, as Luther believed?  Will there be, as Catholic dogma holds, the opportunity to strive further toward perfection–something like purgatory?  And what will happen once we are resurrected?  Frankly, I do not know.  But like Paul, I believe that nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38), and so when I leave this life, I will be with him (Philippians 1:23).  Whatever else Jesus’ words to the thief on the cross may mean, they surely mean that we may trust him not to let us go.

Which bring us to Dia de los Muertos: the Day of the Dead. In its origins, this festival is neither European nor Middle Eastern but, as the Disney film Coco jubilantly recognizes, Mexican.  While it shows some influence from Celtic Spain (Samhain is called Samaín in Galicia), and from the Christian All Saints and All Souls Days, the pre-Christian roots of Dia de los Muertos go back to indigenous Meso-American cultures such as the Aztecs.  Significantly, while (much like Samhain) Dia de los Muertos involves belief in the dead crossing over to the world of the living, those dead are not feared: their families remember, celebrate, and welcome them.

According to tradition, the gates of heaven are opened at midnight on October 31 and the spirits of children can rejoin their families for 24 hours. The spirits of adults can do the same on November 2.

Latin Christians, not just south of the border but everywhere, rightly find in these days a celebration of new life in Christ defeating death.

Happy Hallowe’en, friends!  A joyous All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and Dia de los Muertos to you all.

The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.

This saying of Christian Reformer Martin Luther was used as the epigraph to C. S. Lewis’ famous Christian satire The Screwtape Letters: Letters From a Senior to a Junior Devil–letters of advice from the demon Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, on how Wormwood could tempt his “patient” into hell: an appropriately “Halloweeny” read, to be sure!  

The Screwtape Letters was published in book form in 1943, but began as a wartime serial in The Guardian between May and November of 1941–just after the Blitz, a terrible period during which England was under almost continual attack from Nazi Germany.   Indeed (spoiler alert!), Wormwood’s attempts to seduce his “patient” away from his faith fail decidedly when the man is killed by a German bomb, and taken into heaven:

One moment it seemed to be all our world; the scream of bombs, the fall of houses, the stink and taste of high explosive on the lips and in the lungs, the feet burning with weariness, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling, the legs aching; next moment all this was gone, gone like a bad dream. . . Did you mark how naturally–as if he’d been born for it–the earth-born vermin entered the new life? (The Screwtape Letters, letter 31).

I commend this book wholeheartedly, friends.  It is full of wisdom, and wit.  For example, Screwtape advises Wormwood to prevent his patient from attending worship by disillusioning him:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.        . . . When he gets to his pew and looks around him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like “the body of Christ” and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous (The Screwtape Letters, letter 2).

The Screwtape Letters is dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien, the Roman Catholic friend who led Lewis into the Christian faith. That connection is particularly interesting, as some of the same Christians who condemn Hallowe’en as a pagan holiday also mistrust the fantasies of both Lewis and Tolkien, fearful of their alleged “occult” influences–despite the explicitly Christian worldview evident in both the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings.

Those well-meaning Christians are of course correct about Hallowe’en’s pagan origins.  The night before November 1 was once called Samhain, an old Celtic festival of the quarter-year (falling between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice). In Celtic culture, it was believed to be a night when the borders between this world and the next became particularly thin, so that the unquiet dead could cross over into this world and molest the living. Food offerings, lamps, and even the severed heads of enemies (grimly recalled, perhaps, by Jack o’lanterns) could be set out to appease or turn aside the ghosts.

We call October 31 not Samhain, but Hallowe’en (that is, “Hallow Even”), because October 31 is of course the night before November 1, All-Hallows Day–hence, All-Hallows Eve.  All-Hallows, or All-Saints, Day began in the days of Pope Boniface IV as a feast day for all martyrs, and was first celebrated on May 13, 609.  Pope Gregory III (731-741) shifted the focus from the martyrs to the celebration of all the saints who lack a feast of their own (and by extension, of all who have died in the Lord), and as such All-Saints was declared an official holy day of the church by Pope Gregory IV in 837.  The feast was shifted from May to November 1 in response to the European (specifically Celtic) holiday of Samhain.

When the Celts became Christians, this night was transformed by the realization that Jesus Christ had triumphed over death, hell, and the grave. Death, and the dead, no longer needed to be feared.  Those Celtic Christians now knew, as Ephesians 2:4-7 affirms,

God is rich in mercy. He brought us to life with Christ while we were dead as a result of those things that we did wrong. He did this because of the great love that he has for us. You are saved by God’s grace!  And God raised us up and seated us in the heavens with Christ Jesus.  God did this to show future generations the greatness of his grace by the goodness that God has shown us in Christ Jesus.

The association with All-Hallows Day made this a night of rejoicing! Hallowe’en, friends, is a celebration of life, and of Christ’s victory over death and the fear of death.  I think it is fitting that this night, which used to be a grim and grisly night of fear, has become a night of laughter and joy, when it is little children who come to our doors to receive our offerings of food.  Surely, as Luther and Lewis alike understood, there is no better medicine against fear and despair than joy and laughter!

These waning days of October prompt anticipation, not only of Hallowe’en, but also of Election Day on November 4.  In addition, October 18 saw “No Kings” rallies, held across the country, draw nearly seven million people (this picture is from Pittsburgh).  In response to Hallowe’en, the forthcoming election, and to these protests of injustice and inequality, the following item, allegedly from The Screwtape Letters, is once more making the rounds on social media:

The claim is clear: caring about politics, trying to fix a “broken system,” and particularly participating in protests like No Kings are demonic distractions from Christian faith and spiritual growth.  However, this is NOT a quote from The Screwtape Letters, or indeed from anything else by C. S. Lewis.  Further, it makes claims with which Lewis himself would have surely disagreed.

To be sure, in The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape does advise Wormwood to get his client thinking obsessively about politics–whether conservative or liberal (“Patriotism or Pacifism”, in Lewis’ World War II English context) doesn’t matter:

Let him begin by treating Patriotism or Pacifism as a part of his religion.  Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part,  Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which religion becomes merely part of the “cause” (The Screwtape Letters, letter 7).

However, this does not mean that Lewis believed we should be concerned simply for the salvation of our own souls.  First, while Lewis would certainly agree that sin and salvation are personal, he would certainly not agree that either sin or salvation is private. Second, Lewis would certainly not agree either that concern for a “broken system” is misplaced, or that trying to fix what is wrong in our world is futile.

Remember that The Screwtape Letters was born in the Nazi Blitz!  Lewis was well aware of the dangers posed by systemic, political evil, and of the responsibility owed by citizens to work for the common good.  Our Christian faith does not call us to quietism–indeed, loving what God loves will engage us positively and passionately with what God is doing in the world.

If you believe that your involvement cannot make a difference in the world, please don’t think to justify your passivity and cynicism by appeal to Lewis–though, come to think of it, Screwtape and his ilk likely are involved.  And should we despair in the face of the powers that be, our Christian faith also reminds us that we, together with all the saints who have gone before us, are part of something larger than politics: the Church of Jesus Christ, “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.”

AFTERWORD: October 31 is also my Dad’s 91st birthday, and October 3rd was my 69th.  So, happy birthday to US!

I was surprised to learn yesterday that thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of people had heard of a prediction unfamiliar to me–that the Rapture would occur September 23-24, 2025–and that many who heard this prediction believed it.

An article in the New York Times traced this prediction to a video posted by South African Christian Joshua Mhlakela:

In the video, he says that Jesus came to him in a dream in 2018 and told him, “On the 23rd and the 24th of September, 2025, I will come to take my church.”

The context, as Mr. Mhlakela understood it, was the 2026 FIFA World Cup. “He was telling me that by June 2026, the world is gearing up toward the World Cup,” he said, but because chaos would descend after the Rapture, “there will be no World Cup in 2026.”

According to Google Trends, searches for “rapture” and “the rapture Tuesday” started to climb around Sept. 20.  The hashtag #rapturenow leads to over 311,000 videos.

Sadly there is nothing new about this kind of end-time hype.  The Rapture did not occur yesterday, obviously, and although this day is not yet over, I am writing confidently to predict that it will not happen today, either.  In fact, the Rapture will not happen at all.

How can I say that?  And why do I say it so forcefully?  A bit of personal history, friends.  Over fifty years ago, when I was fifteen, I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit at a prayer meeting in my family’s living room.  I have no doubt about the reality of that experience, or of its profound effect on my life.  Although I had grown up in the church, I now felt an increased zeal for the Lord.  I always wore (as in this picture) a cross around my neck.  I carried my Bible–for which I had a renewed and passionate hunger–with me everywhere, and was always careful that it was on top of my pile of schoolbooks.  I told everyone about Jesus: in study hall, in the lunch line, on the school bus–whether they wanted to hear or not.  I covered my notebook with Christian slogans: “One Way,” “PTL” (Praise the Lord), and of course, “In case of Rapture, this notebook will be abandoned.”

You see, one of the cornerstones of my young, passionate faith was the certainty that I would one day, very soon, be taken up out of the world in the Rapture.  I never expected that I would ever grow up and marry, that I would ever have children, or a career.  I knew–I knew–that the world was going to end very soon.  Curiously, for all my love for Scripture and my passionate study of God’s Word, I never realized that the Rapture was not in the Bible.

If you search any Bible concordance for the term “Rapture,” you will not find it (for a little about where the notion of the Rapture originated, see this blog). Not only do neither Matthew 24:40-41 nor 1 Thessalonians 4:13, the two passages commonly alleged to describe the Rapture, use that term, but neither describes a miraculous end-time escape from the world.

Matthew 24:40-41 reads,

At that time there will be two men in the field. One will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding at the mill. One will be taken and the other left. 

For many readers, the one “taken” is Raptured, taken up to glory. The one left is, as Timothy LaHaye’s series title has it, “Left Behind,” to suffer the torments and tortures of Tribulation.  But I am not at all persuaded that this is the best reading of that verse.

Matthew 24 is Matthew’s version of the Synoptic apocalypse: a description of the end of time (compare Mark 13 and Luke 21) that offers warnings of coming persecution and trial, not instruction on how to escape them.  Indeed, Jesus tells his followers, “They will arrest you, abuse you, and they will kill you. All nations will hate you on account of my name” (Matt 24:9).  Jesus compares those days to “the time of Noah,” when devastation came suddenly upon a people unprepared:

In those days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark. They didn’t know what was happening until the flood came and swept them all away (Matt 24:37-39).

Likely, then, the “one taken” is not saved, but lost: perhaps metaphorically taken by death or disaster, or perhaps quite literally taken–arrested by the Roman authorities, and hauled away to prison or forced labor.

Matthew 24 is not after all about us “going up,”  but about Jesus “coming down”!  The return of Jesus, the Human One (literally “Son of Man”), will be unexpected, and unpredictable:  “But nobody knows when that day or hour will come, not the heavenly angels and not the Son. Only the Father knows” (Matt 24:36; emphasis mine).  Jesus himself does not know when this will be!  He compares himself to a thief:

But you understand that if the head of the house knew at what time the thief would come, he would keep alert and wouldn’t allow the thief to break into his house.  Therefore, you also should be prepared, because the Human One will come at a time you don’t know (Matt 24:43-44).

The point, then, is to be ready–whenever his coming might be–so that we will not be taken unawares.

1 Thessalonians, Paul’s first letter, is the oldest book  in the New Testament (dating to around 50 CE).  Paul writes to offer reassurance to a struggling church: the first he had established in Europe (see Acts 17:1-10).

The Christians of Thessalonica were concerned because some of their members had died: perhaps from persecution, but perhaps too from illness or old age (1 Thes 4:13-14).  Believing, as Paul had taught them, that Christ’s second coming was imminent, they feared that those faithful dead would have no share in Christ’s kingdom.  Paul, however, assured them that, far from being left behind, those believers who had died would have the inside track in the world to come:

My current research on Proverbs has taken me into a consideration of wisdom traditions in other cultures, and so, to The Analects of Confucius from the sixth century BCE (I am working with the translation of Simon Leys [New York: W. W. Norton, 1997]).  In my reading, I was brought up short by Analect 15:24:

Zigong asked, “Is there a single word that could guide one’s entire life?”  The Master said, “Should it not be reciprocity?  What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.”

I immediately was reminded of the saying of Rabbi Hillel,

That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study (b. Shabbat 31a).

Therefore, you should treat people in the same way that you want people to treat you; this is the Law and the Prophets (Matt 7:12).

We love because God first loved us.

We love him, because he first loved us.

So you see, our love for him comes as a result of his loving us first.

We, though, are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first.

Why the difference?  A warning–answering that question takes us into the weeds of text criticism.  Friends, we do not have the single, pristine, “original” text of ANY biblical book, New Testament or Old.  For every passage of Scripture, we have multiple witnesses, among which we must choose.

Going to the Greek, I found that the CEB, NRSVue, NIV, ESV, and The Message were faithfully following the text in my critical edition of the Greek New Testament–which, however, notes that some old texts do provide an object for the verb “love”: either “him” (like the KJV) or “God.”  In fact, the reading “him” is found in the majority of our old manuscripts, Byzantine texts collectively called (after their characteristic style of handwriting) the minuscules.  Its prevalence prompted Erasmus to include this reading in his Textus Receptus: an influential source for the KJV translators.

However, the majority text is not necessarily the best text, since the most commonly available texts all come from the same tradition.  As Bruce Metzger notes in his A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, the best evidence from a range of textual witnesses across traditions supports reading simply ‘agapomen (“we love”) without a specific object.  Metzger writes, “Feeling the need of an accusative object after the verb. . . some copyists added ton Theon [“God”] . . . and others auton [“him”].

The best concise statement I know of why text criticism matters comes from Julia O’Brien: “Knowing what words are in the text is often as complex as understanding what those words mean” (The Oxford Handbook of the Minor Prophets, ed. Julia M. O’Brien [Oxford: University Press, 2021], xxii).  Certainly, for this passage, “what words are in the text,” the choice we make of which traditional reading to follow, makes a world of difference.

The majority reading followed by the KJV, the Living Bible, and some other translations yields a more spiritual reading–but also, let’s face it, a pretty tepid one.  I respond to God’s love with piety, by loving God back.  It is all about my internal life: what happens in my own heart.

But if what is arguably the best reading is followed, then this passage is rather about how we live, and the choices we make, in the world.  As Eugene Petersen said in his paraphrase, “First we were loved, now we love.”  We respond to God’s love for us by loving–without discrimination or distinction.

As Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus all recognized, respect for the other–any other–is fundamental to living rightly in the world.  And as the Elder realizes in 1 John, we are able so to act because of the transforming love of God, concretely demonstrated and powerfully communicated by Jesus Christ.  How do we live?  We love.  Why do we do so?  Indeed, how can we do so?  Because we have ourselves been loved by God, who knows us inside and out, we can–indeed we must–extend that grace to others.

To bring this home, friends: just last week in Minneapolis, a shooter fired through the windows of Annunciation Catholic School, killing two children and wounding 18 more, as well as three adults.  In response to the now rote “thoughts and prayers” response to yet another tragic school shooting, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called for action on gun violence: “Of course we’re standing up with love.  Of course we’re standing up with thoughts and prayers.  But thoughts and prayers are not gonna cut it.”  Former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki posted on X

I recently read a wonderful interview in The New Yorker with Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, the director of the Vatican Observatory, who is (as the article’s title reveals) often introduced as the Pope’s astronomer.  I was so taken with the interview that I have been chasing down his books; right now I am reading God’s Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008) and the delightfully named Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? . . . and Other Questions from the Astronomer’s In-box at the Vatican Observatory (New York: Random House, 2014)–written as a dialogue between Brother Guy and his fellow Jesuit, historian and philosopher of science Paul Mueller.

As a planetary astronomer, Brother Guy’s specific scientific interest and admittedly wonky area of research involves meteors: their ages, origins, composition, and (the area to which he has made his most particular contribution) their density and porosity.

However, Brother Guy was also actively involved in the recent decision by the International Astronomical Union to designate Pluto as a dwarf planet–one of a vast swarm of transneptunian objects–rather than a planet like Earth.  That designation has nothing to do with the facts about Pluto, of course; Pluto has not been “demoted.”  Rather, it has to do with how astronomers can most naturally talk about this distant body, and relate its study to like bodies:

You know, when it was just another planet, Pluto was always an ugly duckling.  It was the wrong size and in the wrong kind of orbit.  Every time I would teach a class giving an overview of the solar system, I would have to always add, “except Pluto” . . .

But now that Pluto has been defined as a “dwarf”–a fascinating and important category of solar-system objects that until recently we never knew existed–it’s no longer an ugly duckling.  It’s one of a whole family, among dozens of similar objects.  And, indeed, it has become the new standard against which all the other dwarf planets are defined (Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial, p. 106).

In the New Yorker interview, Brother Guy expresses a frank puzzlement as to why anyone would think that the science he does and the faith he practices are somehow at odds:

If people think you have to be a weird kind of scientist to be religious, or a weird kind of religious to be a scientist, then we’ve missed the point. The point is that our faith—our ordinary faith—fits perfectly with our ordinary, but wonderful, delightful science.

In America, sadly, the perception that science is at odds with faith–and further, that we must choose between the two–is very much alive and well.  But that animosity is not actually that old; it traces back little more than a century: specifically to the 1920’s, the Scopes Trial, and the emergence of Fundamentalism.

The Fundamentalist movement began as a response to modernity–and particularly, to the threat that modernity was believed to pose to the foundations of a moral society.  Brother Guy recognizes that that fear was not without warrant:

In the nineteenth century, social Darwinists used the brand-new theory of evolution to justify their greedy, rapacious version of capitalism.  The Nazis used the same theory to justify eugenics and other horrors, convinced as they were of their own racial superiority. . . .  The abuse of the theory of evolution by pseudo-scientists has given nonscientists a very understandable reason to distrust what started out as a perfectly innocent and quite valid observation of nature (God’s Mechanics, p. 34).

However, the founders of Fundamentalism believed that only by recovering the “fundamentals” of Christianity could the church meet that perceived threat.  The “sure foundation” of the true church was an inerrant and infallible Bible, and if what that Bible said differed from what science had to say about anything–from the origins of species to gender and human sexuality–then the person of faith must believe what the Bible says, and reject science.

Concerns about the reading and interpretation of Scripture were a major justification for the pastors and congregations who have left the United Methodist Church (where I continue to worship and serve).  A no longer available FAQ on the website of the Wesleyan Covenant Association, one of the organizing groups behind the present Global Methodist Church, read:

Pastors and congregations have expressed an interest in creating a “place” where traditional, orthodox UM churches can support and resource each other – both for ministry to our changing culture and for facing the challenges presented by a denomination that is unclear about its commitment to Scripture.

But I do not believe that I or other United Methodist Christians like me are at all “unclear about [our] commitment to Scripture”!  Indeed, I am absolutely clear about my commitment to Scripture.  I believe that God has called me to the study and teaching of the Bible–that is why I am, after all, a Bible Guy! However, at least some in the GMC have a very different idea than I do about what the Bible says, and means.  As Brother Guy notes,

Scripture is written in many different genres.  There are historical accounts, mythic stories, morality tales, poetry, and more.  At least from the perspective of the Catholic faith and mainline Protestantism, it’s a mistake to try to read every line of Scripture as if it were intended by its author to be understood as a literal account of historical events that actually happened.  That’s just not how many parts of Scripture were meant to be read (Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial, pp. 177-78).

Many evangelical Christians will be surprised to learn that C. S. Lewis also did not hold to a fundamentalist view of Scripture.  In a letter to a Mrs. Johnson, on November 8th, 1952, C. S. Lewis wrote:

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our ancestors too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and read without attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

Lewis, whose love for Nordic mythology first awakened him to the reality of the Spirit, had no difficulty using “myth” to describe important elements in Scripture.  Unfortunately, in popular parlance, a “myth” is a lie: something at odds with the facts. Little wonder that folk bridle when Bible scholars refer specifically to the accounts of beginnings in Scripture as “creation myths.”

But if, as Joseph Campbell wrote, “the first function of mythology” is “to evoke in the individual a sense of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence” (Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation [Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004], 6), then myths are of course true. Our problem comes from the post-Enlightenment view in the West that “truth” and “fact” are one and the same.

A little reflection reveals the poverty of that assertion. Consider what matters most to you—your faith, your friendships, those you love, what you find beautiful, what brings you joy.   Now, ask how you might go about establishing these claims as facts. How would you prove them, empirically: what evidence could you marshal? What tests could you use?

I love my wife. But how would I establish that, empirically? I could analyze my actions toward Wendy, but could those same actions not be performed if I were practicing a deception, and only pretending that I loved her? If I were a chemist or biologist, I could talk about glands and hormones and chemical reactions in my brain. If I were a sociologist or anthropologist, I might compare our marriage with others statistically, and determine the likelihood of our relationship enduring; or examine courtship rituals in Western cultures. None of this, however, has anything to do with what I mean when I tell Wendy that I love her, or how I feel when she says that she loves me.

Certainly we want to affirm as truth much that we cannot demonstrate as fact. To put this more precisely, we realize that what we can demonstrate as fact does not adequately express truth: as if love were reducible to bioelectrical impulses in the brain or hormones or social convention. Such oversimplifications fail to comprehend the tremendously complex world of human life and experience, wherein the whole cannot be reduced to the mere sum of its parts.

Yet, curiously, avid creationist Kenneth Ham and militant atheist Richard Dawkins share that reductionist worldview. On his website “Answers in Genesis,” Dr. Ham writes:

If Christians doubt what at first appears [sic] to be insignificant details of Scripture, then others may begin to look at the whole Bible differently, eventually doubting the central tenets of the Christian faith, namely the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus the historicity of Scripture is quite important.    

. . . Ultimately, the controversy about the age of the earth is a controversy about the authority of Scripture. If millions of years really happened, then the Bible is false and cannot speak with authority on any issue, even the Gospel.

For his part, in his book The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Dr. Dawkins writes:

Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we don’t take the book of Genesis literally anymore. But that is my whole point! We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories (p. 238).

The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book. . . . When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn’t happen with holy books (p. 282).

As Brother Guy observes,

Religious fundamentalists insist that every line of Scripture must be literally true, and that we should refuse to accept anything science says that is at odds with the literal sense of Scripture.  Scientific fundamentalists also insist that the Bible be interpreted literally; however, from this they conclude that the Bible should be rejected, since portions of it, when interpreted literally, are at odds with modern science (Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial, p. 178).

To say that the Bible is true, according to both Ham and Dawkins, must mean that it is factual.  A close reading of the Bible, however, demonstrates from its very beginning that this assumption is wrong-headed.  When we read Genesis 1 and 2 closely and carefully, it becomes evident that we really are looking not at one story of creation, but at two.  Since both cannot be “factual,” we must either choose one and reject the other, or find some way to collapse the two into a single account.

The NIV attempts to resolve this perceived conflict grammatically. In this translation, Genesis 2:8 reads, “Now the LORD God had planted [Hebrew wayyitta‘] a garden in the east, in Eden” (emphasis mine). Rather than rendering the verb as a simple past tense, the NIV has a past perfect, implying that the plants had been made before the human was formed (as Gen 1:11-13 describes), even though Genesis 2:5 says that when the Human was formed, “no plant of the field was yet in the earth for there was no one to till the ground.”  Similarly, in Genesis 2:19, the NIV reads, “Now the LORD God had formed [Hebrew wayyitser] out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky”–implying that these creatures had been created before the Human, as Gen 1:20-25 describes.

This translation is possible for the Hebrew verb form used in Gen 2:8 and 19 (the so-called “wayyiqtol”), but the verbs in these verses are typical of Hebrew narrative style, and no different than the forms that surround them (including the verb for the creation of ’adam in Gen 2:7, where the NIV uses a simple past tense). There is no grammatical warrant for rendering these two verses in a different tense. Indeed, the translation of the NIV loses the narrative logic of the story, where the LORD God sets out to solve the problem posed by human loneliness (Gen 2:18). Collapsing the two stories into one does not solve our problems; it only creates different ones.

If, however, we let go of our insistence that these accounts are factual, scientific descriptions of the world’s origins, then we can embrace the implications of both traditions, while still permitting each its autonomy.

For example: in Gen 1:1—2:4a, God calls everything into being, including time and space (see Gen 1:1-8). To use the theological language of Karl Barth, God is “‘wholly other’ breaking in upon us ‘perpendicularly from above’”; there is an “‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between God and man” (The Humanity of God, trans. John Newton Thomas [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960], 42)—that is, God is transcendent.

But in Gen 2:4b-25, the LORD formed (yatsar) ’adam “from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen 2:7, NRSVue); a very intimate, personal, indeed human-like view of the Divine. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, that we are shaped by the LORD’s hands “expresses. . . the bodily nearness of the Creator to the creature, that it is really he who makes me—man—with his own hands; his concern, his thought for me, his design for me, his nearness to me” (Creation and Temptation, trans. John C. Fletcher [London: SCM Press, 1966], 45). In theological shorthand, God is immanent.

Clearly, believers want and need to affirm both: God is transcendent and God is immanent. If all we had was the first account of creation, we could well think of God as distant, abstract, and uninvolved. If all we had was the narrative in Gen 2, we could well lose the wonder, majesty, and mystery of the Divine. But Genesis 1 and 2 together present God as transcendent and immanent. These two views of God and the world need not be seen as in conflict, either with one one another or with science.  As Brother Guy affirms, “[T]here is a sublime beauty to how the universe works that we can only begin to touch. That, to me, is where I see the presence of God.”

FOREWORD:  I am reposting this blog from 2019 concerning Amos’ alleged “plumb line”: a common, and I am persuaded, mistaken reading of Amos 7:7-17.  What the LORD is placing in the midst of the people is not a plumb line, but the prophet–just a God has placed us.  May we too with holy boldness stand and speak, empowered by the God of justice, on behalf of the poor and oppressed.

The Hebrew Bible text for Sunday in the Revised Common Lectionary is Amos 7:7-17, which begins with a vision report:

This is what the Lord showed me: The Lord was standing by a wall, with a plumb line in his hand.  The Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?”

“A plumb line,” I said.
Then the Lord said,
“See, I am setting a plumb line
    in the middle of my people Israel.
        I will never again forgive them.
The shrines of Isaac will be made desolate,
            and the holy places of Israel will be laid waste,
            and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword” (Amos 7:7-9).

This famous prophetic image is beautifully reflected in a prayer for the day from the Lectionary’s editors:

Steadfast God, your prophets set the plumb line
of your righteousness and truth
in the midst of your people.
Grant us the courage to judge ourselves against it.
Straighten all that is crooked or warped within us
until our hearts and souls stretch upright,
blameless and holy,
to meet the glory of Christ. Amen.

The trouble is, this translation of our passage is suspect.  The word rendered “plumb line” in the Common English Bible is ‘anak, which actually means “tin.” In Amos’ vision, the LORD is standing  al-khomath ‘anak (“beside a wall of tin”), holding ‘anak (“a piece of tin”) in God’s hand.

The ancient versions attempt in various ways to come to terms with this Hebrew original.  The Greek Septuagint reads teichous adamantinou (an impenetrable, that is metal-sheathed, wall), and in the LORD’s hand is a piece of metal (adamas).  The Latin Vulgate, understanding the piece of metal in God’s hand to be a trowel (trullu cementarii), has the LORD standing on a plastered wall (murum litum).  The Aramaic Targum, as it generally does, eschews metaphor for what its translators thought the metaphor actually intended–here, the wall is a place of judgment (Aramaic din), and a judgment against Israel is in the LORD’s hand.

The reading “plumb line” is relatively recent, going back only to the medieval Jewish interpreter Ibn Ezra (1089-1164).  However, it was popularized by Martin Luther in his 1534 translation of the Bible into German (which uses the German Bleischnur, meaning “plumb line,” here) and today is found in nearly every English translation (see some examples here).  Even the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanak (an abbreviation for Torah [Law], Nebi’im [Prophets], and Kethubim [Writings], the three parts of the Hebrew Bible) has “plumb line,” although footnotes in the NJPS translation suggest that the LORD holds a pickaxe, and that the wall is “destined for a pickaxe”!   In the end, the footnotes say, the meaning of the Hebrew is uncertain.

However, as we have seen, the Hebrew is not at all uncertain: in Amos’ vision, the LORD stands by a wall of tin–or perhaps, a wall sheathed in tin–holding a piece of tin.  God says that God is placing tin “in the middle of my people Israel; I will never again forgive them” (7:8).  What the text says is plain.  The question is, what does this mean?

Both Ibn Ezra and Luther apparently understood the metal in this vision to be the weight on a plumb line, and the wall to have been built using a plumb line.  The point of the vision therefore is that God is holding Israel to account, testing that they are true to the LORD as a mason uses a plumb to test whether a wall is truly vertical.  However, plumb bobs were made of stone or lead, not tin (note that the German Bleischnur used by Luther literally means “lead line”).  The ancient versions all seem, similarly, to interpret based on the metal.  But comparison with Amos’ other visions suggests another possibility.

In Amos 8:1-2, the prophet is shown a basket of summer fruit (Hebrew qayits) and told, “The end [qets] has come upon my people Israel; I will never again forgive them” (compare 7:8, where that same expression is found).  His vision is not about qayits (“summer fruit”) at all, but about the word “qayits”—a punning reference to Israel’s end (qets). So too, Jeremiah sees the branch of an almond tree (Hebrew shaqed), and is told, “I am watching [shoqed] over my word to perform it” (Jer 1:11-12).  So what if Amos 7:7-9 is also a pun?  What if the point of Amos’ vision is not ‘anak (“tin”), but something that sounds like ‘anak?

As S. Dean McBride, Jr. notes, the second person singular pronoun (“you”) in Hebrew has a complex history.  The free-standing form of the pronoun is ‘atta (contracted from an original ‘anta) or ‘at; however, the pronoun may be appended to a noun as ka or ak (meaning “your”).  The first-person pronoun may offer a clue to this complexity.  While later Hebrew texts prefer the shortened form ‘ani, the older form ‘anoki is also common.  Some Semiticists propose that the older form of the second person pronoun may have similarly been something like ‘anak.  McBride proposes that Amos’ vision of ‘anak, “tin,” in 7:7-9 is a pun on an archaic ‘anak[?], “you” (like qayits/qets in 8:1).

If this is so, then God is telling Amos, “I am placing YOU in the middle of my people Israel” (7:8)–making this vision Amos’ call to prophesy.

The narrative in Amos 7:10-17 shows us Amos snatched from his home in the village of Tekoa, in the southern kingdom of Judah, and placed by God in Bethel, one of the great cities of the northern kingdom of Israel.  There, Amos’ message of justice places him in opposition to both the high priest Amaziah and the northern political leader, Jeroboam II–which is not comfortable for the high priest or the king.  However, it is not comfortable for Amos, either!  He protests to Amaziah (and to us!) that this life was not his choice:

I am not a prophet, nor am I a prophet’s son; but I am a shepherd, and a trimmer of sycamore trees. But the Lord took me from shepherding the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’ (Amos 7:14-15)

I am reminded of Michelangelo, who always regarded himself as a sculptor rather than a painter.  So, throughout the years he spent painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling at the Pope’s command, Michelangelo stubbornly signed his letters “Michelangelo, Sculptor.”

Similarly, Amos saw himself as a shepherd, not a prophet.  Had he had his own way, he would never have left home!  But there is no doubt in Amos’ mind that he is in the right place, whether it is the place he would have chosen or not.  He is where he is because God has put him there: “the LORD took me from shepherding the flock” (7:15).  Amos was not comfortable.  Nor strictly speaking, was he successful: his passionate summons to God’s way of justice (Amos 5:21-24) went unheeded, and as he had warned, the northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians.   But Amos was faithful–and that is what mattered.

Just as God spoke to Amos, so God says to us, in our day, “I am placing you in the midst of my people.”  If we believed that following Christ’s call would save us from conflict and discomfort, we were laboring under a major misapprehension!  It is not hard to see how we could have gotten there: knowing that God is love, we concluded thereby that God is nice, and wants us to have a nice life: peaceful and conflict-free.  But it was not so for Amos, or for John, or for Jesus, and it will not be so for us!  God is love–but love wills the good, not the nice; justice, not expedience.  Elsewhere in his prophecy, Amos makes this plain: “Woe to them that are at ease in Zion!” (Amos 6:1, KJV).

We too, I am persuaded, have been placed in the midst of God’s people in our day, and so in the midst of conflict and controversy. God has called and empowered us, friends, for just such a time as this.  As Charles Wesley’s powerful hymn reminds us,

To serve the present age,
My calling to fulfill:
Oh, may it all my pow’rs engage
To do my Master’s will!

Wesley is starkly–indeed, terrifyingly!–forthright regarding the stakes of our faithfulness to that call:

Help me to watch and pray,
And on Thyself rely,
Assured, if I my trust betray,
I shall forever die.

God grant that we, like Amos, will be faithful to our call.