Pronouns

So let's say that you're the Apostle Paul, sitting down to pen Romans in the first century under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The theme of the book, the Spirit has instructed you, is to be the gospel of the righteousness of God (Romans 1:17). And as you ruminate on that theme, your rabbinically trained mind recalls Habakkuk 2:4, where the prophet connects righteousness and faith in a way that has direct connection to your current thesis.

Ah, but which version to use? The Masoretic Text, dating to Ezra's time (5th century BC), reads like this:
The righteous man, by his faith, shall live.

The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament dating to around 250 BC, reads like this:
The righteous man, by my faith, shall live.

The change of pronoun makes complete sense, of course, when viewed through a missional lens. The Hebrews knew that God was the author of faith. The Greeks didn't share that conviction. Hence the scribal emphasis: righteousness was not mustered up by hard work. It was a gift of Yahweh's faithfulness. Pronouns matter.

Now you (remember, you're Paul) are distilling the apostolic gospel for the church in Rome. Both of these textual traditions are at your disposal. Which do you use? The church in Rome, after all, has both Jews and Greeks. And part of the problem is that the two parties are often at odds with each other. Choose either side's "preferred" text, and you'd be picking a fight. Obscure either pronoun and you risk compromising the gospel.

So, in the inspired wisdom of the Holy Spirit, you remove all pronouns:
The righteous shall live by faith (Romans 1:17).

By the righteous man's faith? Sure. By God's faith(fulness)? Sure. Opting for no pronoun at all preserves the carefully nuanced truth of both renderings, and frames the gospel in a most comprehensive fashion: I live by my faith in the faithfulness of God. That's what the gospel is about.

I'm telling you, the deeper you go, the more fascinating this book is!

Free Derek Webb!

If you are not familiar with the music of Derek Webb... first off, why aren't you? And secondly, you need to be. Now there's an easy way: freederekwebb.com.

Derek is giving away his latest album, Mockingbird. By visiting www.freederekwebb.com you can download the entire album for free. Yep. Free.

So hey - free music. LEGAL free music. What better way to get familiar with Derek's work before he comes to Coram Deo on October 29?

Journey On

This past weekend, Leigh and I had the privilege of spending some time with some Acts 29 church planters in St. Louis - including the guys from Journey Church. Check them out here. It's good to learn all we can from others who are planting culturally savvy churches.

This Stuff Ain't So Easy

Tonight as I was putting my kids to bed, we prayed for some friends who are serving as missionaries in China. I asked God to protect them from Satan.
"Daddy, who's that thing you prayed about?" asked my 5-year-old daughter.
"You mean Satan?"
"Yeah, Satan."
Hmm. How exactly do you explain Satan to a 5-year-old? "He's a bad guy that is against God."
"What kind of a bad guy?" she pressed.
"You remember, in the story of Adam and Eve, he's the snake that told Eve to disobey God."
"THAT'S Satan?" she exclaimed. "Is he in China, too?"
"Yeah, he's lots of places."
"How did he crawl all the way to China?"
Man, 5-year-olds are tough.
"Well, he's actually an evil spirit who is opposed to God. He just took the form of a snake when he talked to Eve." I could tell she wasn't quite following me on this one. Spirits are pretty abstract compared to snakes.
My 7-year-old son chimed in to try to clear things up. "You know who else is Satan? The White Witch." (They had been watching The Chronicles of Narnia over the weekend.)
"She's Satan too? AND the snake?" my daughter queried. Every 5-year-old knows that a white witch is not the same thing as a snake.
I tried to wrap it up as tidy as possible for now (we'll obviously have to come back to this one later). "Well, Satan looks like a lot of things, because he is against God. So anytime someone is disobeying God, they are doing what Satan wants."
She thought for a minute, and then offered, "Well, he's a pretty bad guy then, because disobeying God is NOT good."
I think teaching theology to 5-year-olds is about as tough as it gets. Mad props to all you moms and dads out there who are having these conversations!

Calling

On Sunday, I promised some further study on what it means to be "the called of God" (Romans 1:6-7). Click here to read a short 3-page essay on this topic.

Lane gets the props for figuring out Romans Challenge #1 (see below). More to come later.

Romans Challenge #2

Read the whole book of Romans, once a month, every month for the rest of the year. A little every day, the whole thing in one big chunk every 30 days, however you want to do it. Just read it. Let's do it!

Romans Challenge #1

There are literally thousands of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament in existence. The science of textual criticism studies these manuscripts, comparing them with one another to analyze how the text has been transmitted to us. Good textual criticism can trace transmission errors and provide us with the most reliable manuscripts for translation.

Textual criticism shows that there were two versions of Romans circulating in the first few centuries after Jesus: the 16-chapter version we have now, and a 14-chapter version (chapters 15 and 16 omitted). The questions for you to ponder are: 1) which one is the authentic version, and why? and 2) how did the other one come into existence, and why?

Give it some thoughtful study. No off-the-cuff blogosphere ignorance, please... make an informed conjecture. As you read Romans in your Bible, how do the last 2 chapters fit in the flow of the argument? What would the letter gain if they were added, or what would the benefit be if they were subtracted? Can you envision a context in which an "edited" version would be useful?

Let's hash it out. Post your thoughts.

Two Degrees of Separation

In addition to the interesting cover article (see post below), Christianity Today had a feature about Dallas Willard. Since he was a main influence in our series on spiritual formation, I read it with great interest. Two things stood out.

First, Willard told CT, "I have not been a wise husband or father, and this has cost us dearly." He declines to comment further. Perhaps the reason Willard is so vocal about "becoming a certain kind of person" is because he knows firsthand how character affects relationships. It's good to know that even the most influential leaders have scars.

Second, to my surprise, I found that Willard has only two degrees of separation from Coram Deo. The CT article states: "...An early experience...set [Willard] on his life course. He and Jane had prayed to fully surrender their lives to Christ during a campus service at Tennessee Temple University. Afterward, R.R. Brown was laying hands on Willard and praying over him. Jane says Willard lost consciousness, later describing the experience as being enveloped in a cloud. A spiritual reality became tangible for Willard in that moment. In some sense, he has been trying to describe and teach it ever since."

Back in 1923, R.R. Brown founded a little church in Omaha that is now known as Christ Community Church - the mother church of Coram Deo.

A Comeback?

Today I picked up the latest copy of Christianity Today because I saw this cover and it caught my interest. Apparently Calvinism is making a comeback. That was interesting to me for a couple of reasons: 1) I didn't know it was down, and 2) it's always interesting to read popular caricatures of Calvinism.

You won't often hear me refer to "Calvinism" because I don't follow a theologian, I follow Jesus. I do believe the Reformed theology espoused by John Calvin is biblical and right and good. But it is so wrongly represented and so misunderstood by so many people that carrying the label quickly leads to useless debates. For all the people who think they know what Calvinism is about, I have yet to meet more than a handful who have read anything Calvin wrote. Or Romans, for that matter.

"Calvinism" connotes trite academic debates and wrangling about theological minutiae. But the true heart of Reformed Theology is about worship and the gospel and the glory of God and a good sense of humor that can call Jonathan Edwards your homeboy.

However, like the CT cover says, apparently we're young and restless and shaking up the church. Sounds so... subversive, doesn't it? I'll read the article and let you know what I think.

More On Feelings

Part of the fun of hosting a blog is that it opens up a worldwide dialogue. We can invite thoughtful Christians around the globe into the conversation that God is stirring at Coram Deo. And we all learn more when that happens.

Madeline is a thoughtful chick from Austin who was reading our recent blog dialogue about feelings and their role in spiritual formation (more here). Instead of posting a response, she wrote me a lengthy email with some good insights into the topic. Below are some of her thoughts. (Her only request is that if you disagree, you do so gently.)

At first glance, I agreed that "Emotions, in and of themselves, are neither good nor bad." It makes sense to me that sorrow, for example, is just sorrow; it is what I choose to do with this feeling that will evidence whether I am glorifying God or sin.

But I see something else at work too. Feelings are my heart’s responses to life situations, and as such they will most often be charged, not neutral. These responses can reveal whether or not my heart is right with God in a given situation. That is to say, sorrow (or anger or joy) may not be categorically good or bad in every situation, but rather the thing that my heart is mourning over (or rejoicing in) is what carries the charge and indicates whether I am moving toward righteousness or toward sin.

If I am inordinately sad about something, it may indicate a misplaced hope or trust. That is to say, it is likely that I was hoping in this certain thing to fulfill me as only the Lord truly can. This feeling of sorrow would, of course, not glorify God. If, however, I am convicted of sin in my life, it is right that I should feel sorrow because I have grieved the Holy Spirit and as a result my spirit will feel grief. (I would further say that if I do not feel sorrow in this instance it would indicate that my heart has been hardened by sin.) This response of sorrow leads me to repent, to change my mind and my actions in light of God’s holiness, and God is glorified in this. Paul talks about this godly sorrow versus worldly sorrow, and tells me that yes, one leads to salvation and the other to death (2 Corinthians 7:9-11).

I think [Jonathan] Edwards speaks to what you are saying about transformation of the emotions. As we are conformed more and more to the image of Christ, our heart reactions, our feelings, will be transformed in accordance with the heart of God - our anger more apt to be righteous, our sorrow godly, and each always with a pervasive joy in the Lord in our hearts. What good is any of my thinking about God, if at the end of the day I am not becoming a more loving person, ready and willing to die to my own desires and actively love another, even another for whom I do not feel a natural affinity? Or if I am sad much of the time, does that rightly characterize someone who has much hope in God for eternal life and love?