Zach’s Theological Musings

  Scripture, hands down!

  As an illustration, consider that most of the Bible’s explicit teaching on marriage, at least in the New Testament, comes from single men: Jesus and Paul. OK, Jesus is the perfectly wise, all-knowing Logos of God through whom everything was created, so of course He has full authority on every subject. So consider Paul with me for a moment.

  There is general consensus from passages such as 1 Cor 9 that the apostle Paul never married. This is the same Paul who wrote such passages as the cornerstone of a Biblical perspective on marriage: Ephesians 5:22-33. If perhaps Paul was married earlier in life, lost his wife to death, and was a widower during his Christian and apostolic years, I’ll still stand by my point. Paul’s teaching on marriage is an illustration of my point, not the proof of it.

  Regardless of personal experience, Paul knew his Lord intimately, he knew the Jewish Scriptures, and he knew the fulfillment of those Scriptures in Christ. Boom, that’s a recipe for being an expert on marriage in my book. Say on the other hand we have a couple that have been married for 80 years, have stayed together, and would even claim a mostly “happy marriage”, but they don’t have a clue what their marriage has to do with Christ. Well, there may be a thing or two worth hearing and considering from their experience, but I’d rather listen to the single guy who knows his Bible deeply any day.

  Experiencial wisdom is valuable if our experiences have forced us to dig harder and deeper into God’s word for answers and direction and understanding on issues we are confronting. But years of experience gained through a pagan, secular, humanistic, godless lens either needs to be redeemed by filtering all of it back through the grid of Scripture, or else thrown out in the rubbish bin.

  The area of application which has prompted me to write this post is that of evangelism and discipleship strategies targeting specific sub-cultures. In particular, I’ve been compiling some articles for missionaries to Muslims lately, and certain ideas and issues repeatedly come up. Now, let me first say that any talk about “targeting” certain groups, about “strategy“, and about “effectiveness” makes me feel edgy at the outset. That aside, the question relevant to us now is: should ministry approaches be guided by insider believers within the “target” sub-culture or by outsiders who have crossed cultural boundaries to reach out to them?

  Well, first I would want to stake a claim that insiders and outsiders both have unique advantages when it comes to understanding a cultural group and their needs. Insiders of course have years of experience, understanding on a deep level many nuances of their culture that outsiders will never fully appreciate. However, what is less often noted is that outsiders bring some crucial advantages of their own. In particular, they see the new culture with fresh eyes and probably in many ways without certain biases that insiders have. Just as each one of us individually finds it easier to see others’ sins while downplaying our own, cultural insiders often have blind spots to their own group’s weakness and faults (or conversely can even be overly critical and not aware of their own strengths).

  On that note, let me mention that I promote much more intercultural accountability in the church. We need not just white evangelical American men holding white evangelical American men accountable to God’s word, and not just mainland Han Chinese holding mainland Han Chinese accountable, etc., etc., but we need Christ’s church in Korea to keep the American church in check, the Americans to keep the Nepalese in check, the Nepalese believers to keep the Syrian church in check, and the church of Syria to hold the Ugandan saints accountable, and the church of Uganda to expose the oversights of the Koreans.

  For example, by and large I’ve seen that most American Christians don’t feel a sense of utter shock and horror to hear about a congregation spending millions of dollars to add an extension on to their already overly spacious under-used building structure, but bring in a visiting pastor from a poor African country where there is one Bible per congregation and people struggle to have enough to eat and the abomination of it all is unmistakable. Or again, by and large I’ve found that ethnic Chinese Singaporean and Malaysian Christians don’t find it utterly unthinkable to hear that a church would actually prohibit distribution of Bibles in the Malay language for fear of being known as a church that is trying to reach Muslims, whereas any outsider can clearly see the appalling hypocrisy.

  So then, if insiders and outsiders both have advantages, who is ultimately more qualified to judge what a people group or sub-culture needs and what is best for them? I would argue that, on any particular given issue, it is the one — insider or out — who has the most Biblically-saturated perspective on that particular issue. The crucial qualifiers here are that it can vary on a case-by-case basis for different issues. An insider can have profound Biblical insight into his own culture in one area and glaring worldly blindspots in another area. An outsider can have penetrating Biblical exhortations for a foreign culture in one area, and shallow, naive, humanistic wisdom in other areas.

  Who’s to decide which is what? In the end we must each make a choice as to what we believe to be right and act on it, and let others do the same. Each one to his own master must stand or fall (Rom 14:4). In the process, at least as for me I will continue to judge the validity of ideas not on the experiences of the one promoting them, but ruthlessly and solely based on fidelity to Scripture. When I’m 80 years old and have been married for 50 of those years (God willing) and a single 20-year old young man comes to me and says, “I’ve got something I think you need to see about marriage from the Bible,” O Lord that I would listen to him carefully. When an Asian believer comes to me and says, “Can I talk to you from the perspective of God’s word about some blindspots in the culture you spent your entire life growing up in?”, I hope that I would genuinely say, “Please do!” And I pray my brothers and sisters would do the same.

  I voted for a black man in the 2008 US presidential election. And if indeed Alan Keyes (together with his running mate Brian Rohrbough, president of Colorado Right to Life) had won, then it indeed would have been a magnificent occasion to celebrate, amongst other things, progress against the evil spirit of racism in America.

  But that didn’t happen. Barack Obama won the presidency instead. A question that arises then is this: despite whatever policy disagreements someone like myself might have with the Obama administration, it this nevertheless an occasion to celebrate progress away from a history of ugly prejudice in America? With all due respect to my black and white countrymen who see it that way, I must say that no, I don’t think so. Allow me to explain.

  Imagine with me a hypothetical scenario for a moment. Let us say that over the last two hundred years there was an additional ethnic group in America called the Taiers. Through the 19th and first half of the 20th century the Taiers enjoyed favored social status. Indeed they were given special treatment and highly regarded by all other segments of society. Moreover, say in our hypothetical situation that about the time of the civil rights movement, about the time society started to recognize that African Americans deserved the same rights and equality as white Americans, a strange thing happened — Taiers gradually started to become an oppressed group! Whites, blacks, hispanics, and Asian Americans together gradually began to see too many Taiers as a burden on them and on society, rather than as a blessed group that everyone loved to love. Hate terms like “Nigger” were becoming socially unacceptable, but simultaneously whites and blacks together began to find new ways to describe Taiers as if they were now something less than human. Whereas in the past black people would be lynched by white people and the courts would bring no measure of justice against the whites, Taiers had now been dehumanized to the point that courts started giving approval to kill Taiers for the crime of being inconvenient to non-Taiers. It was if the focus of discriminative anger, injustice, and oppression had simply shifted off of blacks and onto Taiers. American society was not an inch closer to recognizing the value of human life, it had simply redrawn the boundaries of which groups would be considered valuable — blacks were now in and Taiers were out.

  Of course, the only imaginative part of the above scenario is that Taiers were/are not an ethnic subgroup of Americans, but rather a developmental subgroup of Americans — those still in the womb (”tai er” is Chinese for “fetus”). You see, we should be careful and realize how the very vocabulary of our language shapes our thinking about the things it describes. In English we have the word “racism” that carries (rightly so) a very negative connotation. But what if I say I hate all Buddhists: “Black, white, brown, red, and yellow Buddhists, I hate them all equally and wish they were dead.” Does that make me a “racist”? No, not by the dictionary definition. Perhaps I could be called a “religious bigot”, but not technically a racist since Buddhists come from different races. Now say that I hate all old people, I think that their hefty health care expenses are a needless, useless burden on the economy, and thus nature should be allowed to “take its course” in wiping out anyone after retirement age. What word or phrase would you use to describe me? Now it gets harder to find a accurate and precise word that is in common use. You could say I’m a “selfish jerk”, and that would be true enough, but that phrase certainly doesn’t differentiate me from the wide variety of other manifestations of selfish jerkiness out there.

  The point is this: whether my animosity and devaluing of human life is directed towards a group defined by skin pigmentation, by religious affliation, or by age, the spirit and attitude and sinfulness behind it all is identical even though common vocabulary might describe my attitude with different terminology depending on the nature of the categorical boundaries defining the target group. More succinctly, “alreadybornism” is just “racism” repacked in a slightly different flavor.

  To put it yet another way, if Barack Obama, with his current core set of values and ethics intact, was born a white man in the Southern US in the 1940’s, would he approve of the lynching of “trouble-making niggers”? I think there is good reason to believe that absolutely yes he would. When Obama says he wouldn’t want his daughters “punished with a baby“, when he opposed legislation to protect babies born alive due to botched abortions (see pages 86-87), when he made it a priority as President to resume taxpayer funded support of aboritons worldwide, etc., etc., he repeatedly proves that he sees nothing inherently valuable in human life itself.

  Sure, under the current real life circumstances he supports equality for black, white, and brown Americans; why wouldn’t he? But he has clearly stated that sees no transcendant, “universal value” which would affirm that babies of all races shouldn’t be killed while in the womb, while partially in the womb and partially out, or (in some circumstances) even after fully exiting the womb. Relegating Scriptural authority to the realm of “personal belief”, his criteria for determining what constitues a genuinely valuable human life apparently has no where to rest except on that which is “self-evident”. Interestingly though, many of the signers and supporters of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence apparently did not consider it to be “self-evident” that Negroes were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. Such notion only became “self-evident” to the majority of (white) Americans nearly 200 years later (if at all). For a white man in the South in the 1950’s it was “self-evident” that trouble-making Niggers deserved to die. So again, Obama’s refusal to ascribe universal truth value to God’s word in the Bible (or any other so-called sacred text, for that matter) tells me that if he was born into a different context, he would have had no grounds for opposing, for example, the gruesome murder of Emmett Louis Till. Insofar as the entire white population of Money, Mississippi is part of the “universe”, it would seem that no “universal” principle “accessible to all people” would condemn Till’s murder.

  So, one more time to be clear. The reason I can’t say that I’m excited about the Obama presidency in one sense (progress towards racial reconciliation demonstrated in an African-American president) and yet sad about the Obama presidency in another sense (increasing approval for the slaughter of innocent babies) is because I don’t see these as TWO DISTINCT SENSES. The great irony is that the very spirit and fuel behind America’s ugly history of racism (dehumanization of a weaker group of people that are considered a bother to the stronger group) is the exact same spirit that is embodied in so much of what Obama stands for. Do we see superficially shifting sands of allegiances, variation regarding who’s on whose side, changes in which is the “stronger group” that is in position to stomp on which “weaker group”? Yes! But progress towards acceptance of universal and transcendant principles which can form a foundation of genuine racial harmony and love, no, sadly I don’t see any evidence for that in the outcome of this election.

  The only true grounds for harmony, reconciliation, love, and unity between Jew and Gentile, male and female, black and white, Western and Eastern, born and preborn, young and old, etc., is through coming into the oneness that has eternally existed in the Triune God (John 17, Gal 3:28).

But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity. AND HE CAME AND PREACHED PEACE TO YOU WHO WERE FAR AWAY, AND PEACE TO THOSE WHO WERE NEAR; for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit. Eph 2:13-22

Human society has not, and never will, make “progress” towards racial harmony. The church of Jesus Christ is the one place that you can and should expect to see love for all manner of human life. May it be so.

  To end on a practical note tying all of the above together: I am told by a friend with experience in the American adoption bueracracy that, while there is generally a waiting period of years to adopt a white American baby, “you can adopt an African-American baby tomorrow.” Sounds like an opportunity for American Christians of all colors to take seriously!