Monthly Archives: March 2009

40FP(6): Hosea 4.1-6

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This needs to be from the RSV translation:

1 Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel; for the Lord has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land.
2 Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed.
3 Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.
4 Yet let no one contend, and let none accuse, for with you is my contention, O priest.
5 You shall stumble by day; the prophet also shall stumble with you by night, and I will destroy your mother.
6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.

Why is this a favourite passage?

I first discovered this text when I was an undergraduate, attending a lecture on Hosea, and I still use the Bible that I had that day where I marked the page ‘eco’! It has become a text laden with personal meaning for me, which sums up my vocation, in so far as I can perceive it accurately.

Verses 1&2: in Scripture, so far as I can tell, there is a direct link between believing in God and behaving well – the two are different descriptions of the same thing, the life of righteousness. This is the context for the Psalmist saying ‘The fool says in his heart there is no God’ – he goes on to explain what is meant by this when he says that there is nobody who does good, no not one. To believe in God simply IS to be righteous; conversely where there is a lack of righteousness – swearing, lying, adultery etc – then the real knowledge of God is absent.
Verse 3: this failure of relationship, this breaking apart from God, manifests itself in global symptoms of disorder, especially ecological ones, building upon the human violence of the previous verse. This is how I see the ecological crisis we are living in (and where I have something in common with the more barking fundamentalist elements of pre-trib rapture in the US) in that I see the world as being in God’s hands and not in ours. We are not able to put everything right with the world – but if we turn back to God, then God will put it right (the symptoms will be relieved).
Verse 4: the root of the problem lies with the religious class; they have failed in their duty to share the living faith, and have become distracted with the perks of the job (spelled out later on in Hosea 4). “With you is my contention O priest” – a totally different translation to the NIV and one that captures this intent. What the ‘right’ translation is I shall leave to those better qualified; from my point of view, though, this was the text as I originally discovered it, and it is this translation which sunk its claws into me.
Verses 5&6: the priestly class will share in the bad consequences that follow from falling away from God and living unrighteously. In particular they will be rejected as priests – presumably by God, but also, as I read it, by the people themselves. The people will turn away from the worldly priesthood, and will seek the living God wherever they can find him. This is how I interpret the decline in church attendance; Western Christianity in general, the Church of England in particular, has lost its way, has forgotten what it is here for, has been suborned by the worldly state, domesticated and castrated, kept on as a cute housepet that’s useful for ornamental functions.

Woe to you O Christian!

Woe to you who seek the living God! – for you shall find Him!

40FP(5): John 5.39-40

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This came up in Morning Prayer today.

“You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”

Why is this a favourite passage?

This is Jesus in argument with the Pharisees and other religious authorities (the ‘Jews’ in John) and I love these verses because it is an explicit statement by Jesus of the purpose of Scripture – that they point to Jesus himself, and that Jesus himself, as the living Word, is the source of life. The Scriptures only give life in so far as they mediate Him. This was the burden of my last Learning Supper talk when I argued that through Scripture there is an ongoing evolution in how “the Word of God” was understood, moving through at least five stages: i) prophetic inspiration; ii) the Law; iii) Scripture; iv) the Gospel (kerygma) and ultimately v) Jesus himself. So long as we keep Jesus as the summit we can interpret the others aright. When we distort that hierarchy, eg through pushing iii) to the top of the tree, then we end up missing the point. That is what Jesus is criticising: mistaking the finger for the moon.

A relevant quote from John Stott that I love:
Interviewer – You didn’t mention the Bible, which would surprise some people.
John Stott – I did, actually, but you didn’t notice it. I said Christ and the biblical witness to Christ. But the really distinctive emphasis is on Christ. I want to shift conviction from a book, if you like, to a person. As Jesus himself said, the Scriptures bear witness to me. Their main function is to witness to Christ.

TBTM20090304

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One of the reasons why I have become more sceptical about the ‘climate change consensus’ is that the IPCC overestimates the extent of fossil fuel reserves. This is another item confirming that the amount of coal available is less than previously assumed (95% less in this case!).

40FP(4): Matthew 7.21

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Continuing the theme of ‘doing’ from yesterday, a single verse from the Sermon on the Mount – which we will return to several times in this sequence!

“Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in Heaven.”

Why is this a favourite passage?

I love this verse because it stands over against the exclusivist emphasis that sometimes dominates Christian thinking, especially the ones which quote ‘there is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved’ – which might qualify as a least favourite verse! Jesus is explicit that the naming is not the essential thing; it is the doing which is essential. I believe that it is possible to do the will of God using all sorts of different religious languages – the different forms of Christian language, but also Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist etc. To say otherwise is, to my mind, to recklessly restrict God’s gracious activity and borders on saying that there is a realm of creation from which God is absent. Which is bonkers.

Of course, if you want to know precisely what doing the will of the Father entails, please see the previous passage in this sequence!!

40FP(3): Micah 6:6-8

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This should have been posted on Saturday – I’m behind already! – which means you might get another one this afternoon. Click ‘full post’ for text.

6 With what shall I come before the LORD and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8 He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Why is this a favourite passage?
I see this short passage as summarising the prophetic critique in the Old Testament. Roughly speaking (very roughly!) there is an ongoing dialogue in the OT between the voices of the established temple cult and the prophets who criticise the cult. There are some analogies with the arguments of the Reformation era, I see the prophets as being people who God raises up to say to the religious establishment ‘You’ve missed the point!’ This passage expresses the critique in a nutshell.
Verses 6 & 7a: simply remarking on what is laid down as requirements for a sin offering, setting the context for what follows.
Verse 7b: this is a text worth pondering (not least by those atheists who go on about the Abraham and Isaac story as evidence for God’s abominability (if that’s a usable word!)). The God revealed in the Old Testament is, so far as I can see, resolutely rejecting of child sacrifice – much more rejecting of it than the people themselves (eg Jephthah). All the present-day atheists are doing, here as so often elsewhere, is repeating, unacknowledged, the prophetic critique. I’ve often felt that the Bible is an anti-religious text; certainly Jesus is one of the most anti-religious characters ever known.
Verse 8: One of the best verses in Scripture: no complications, no distractions with doctrine – we have been shown the right way to live. That right way is active, it is about establishing a righteous environment (which always, in Scripture, means a bias to the poor, ensuring that the rich are not oppressive), later called ‘the Kingdom’ by Jesus. It also, necessarily, involves spiritual humility – we are called to cooperate in the process, not to try and achieve it in our own strength.

So here is another manifesto: don’t think that following the religious cult is what God is seeking; it can become an end in itself and distorting of God’s true intentions. What God is seeking is righteousness, and our principal spiritual task is to pursue it.

NB there is a good song using this text on this album.