As we have seen in the two previous blogs, the Old Testament has some amazing stories that show God acting in ways we would not expect. Some might argue that the revelation of God in the Old Testament is fragmentary and distorted by the primitive nature of Israel’s response to God there. But while it is true that the New Testament provides the clearest revelation of God’s character, the clarity of the revelation in Christ only highlights the unpredictability of God as something essential and inherent to his character. John 1:1 is an example of such a text.

It is felt in some circles that the Christian use of Allah as a name for God is a mark of syncretism. And there is a certain appeal and logic to this position or few Christians would hold to it. Guilt by association, right or wrong, is a major way that people negotiate their way through the various spiritual options available to them. Christian apologetic literature, therefore, notes the associations of the term Allah with the paganism and polytheism of pre-Islamic Arabia to draw the conclusion that both Christian and Islamic use of the term is unacceptable. But the unpredictable God of the New Testament seems less concerned with guilt by association than most Christians are. An example of this is found in John 1:1: "In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (theos)."

By the time the Gospel of John was written, pagan philosophers such as Heraclitus and Plato had long used the Greek term logos (Word) as a name or title for a "second god" who functioned as the creator and sustainer of the world and then as a mediator between the great God (theos) and the created, material world. Philo, a Jewish philosopher in Alexandria and a contemporary of Jesus, applied this Greek term logos to the God of the Old Testament, the One who gave the law on Mount Sinai. For Philo the Word was a "second God," the high priest in the heavenly sanctuary, an intercessor with God, the lawgiver, the mediator of creation, the mediator of revelation, and the sustainer of the universe. Philo also called him God’s firstborn, his eldest son, the image of God, and the second Adam.

There are strong parallels between Philo and Plato, on the one hand, and the New Testament descriptions of Jesus, on the other. When John called Jesus "the Word," readers of the Gospel who had been influenced by Greek philosophy would have recognized the term as expressing everything they knew about Jesus. John, a disciple of Jesus (John 21:24), had no problem using this Greek term in order to communicate important truths about Jesus. John was contextualizing the message and actions of Jesus in terms that made sense in the Greco-Roman environment. John=s reference to logos is explicit and unmistakable. In saying this I do not mean to imply that John was dependant on the Greek concepts for his picture of Jesus. His world is still a Jewish world. But that did not prevent him from using this charged Greek concept (logos) to connect with his non-Jewish readers.

In a more general way the same pattern occurs with the biblical use of the Greek term for God, theos. In the pagan environment the term theos was used to denote a polytheistic totality of gods. Zeus was the father of the gods as well as the human race. One might expect that the God of the New Testament would encourage his people to stay as far away from this term as possible. Nevertheless, New Testament writers used that term for the true God some 1,300 times. The Muslim and Christian use of Allah may have some unfortunate associations in the Arabic language, but Muslims never use it in a polytheistic sense, it is only used with reference to the one true God. Even the English term "God" has plenty of associations with the paganism and polytheism of pre-Christian Europe. The Islamic world is not the only place where the choice of words for "God" is a challenge. Whenever a new language or culture is approached, a decision has to be made regarding what to call "God" in that culture. One has to choose between local words for God with all of their local connotations and bringing in an unfamiliar name for God, which brands genuine Christian faith as foreign or colonial in that culture.

Human language is an imprecise and problematic tool, but it is the tool God has chosen to reveal himself to the human race. The "unpredictable" God seems less concerned with "guilt by association" than many of his followers are.

Sorry for the long silence. I've been in Australia and didn't have the kind of robust internet feed needed to get this blog out. I'm not saying Australia is behind the times (it is not), but the kind of places I was staying were not kind to my internet habits. Anyway, here goes!

In an earlier blog I argued that the God of the Bible is unpredictable, at least from the human perspective. Over and over again, the Bible tells stories in which God acts in ways we would not expect. His ways are not our ways (Isa 55:8-9). The awareness of this biblical theme has enormous implications for the way we do mission and the way we relate to God and to other people who are trying to understand and follow Him.

Another startling story is found in 2 Kings 5. Naaman, military chief of staff to the Syrian king, is afflicted with leprosy. Upon the advice of an Israelite servant girl he goes to Israel to find healing. After washing seven times in the Jordan at the instruction of Elisha, he is healed and returns to the prophet with a strange request for two mule-loads of earth from Elisha=s property. He then declares his intention to worship no other God but Yahweh while asking for an exception. Would it be all right for him to bow down in the temple of Rimmon when he escorts the king of Syria there? “Go in peace,” is Elisha’s surprising reply.

There is a connection between the two mule-loads of earth and ancient religious beliefs. In all of known human history the era of the most radical religious change occurred in the first millennium B.C. During this period people in general moved from a devotion to what we would call heathen religions, where religion was associated with the land and the forces of nature, to the philosophical or world religions we are familiar with today.  All the great world religions of today either had their origin between 800-200 B.C. (Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism) or are directly dependant on those that did (Christianity, Islam, Sikhism). These religions have largely displaced the primal religions although the primal religions still have influence below the surface in many parts of the world.

For the primal religions of Naaman’s day, all gods were associated with one land or another. That meant that Naaman could not worship Yahweh, the God of Israel, in Syria unless he brought with him Israelite dirt to spread in his garden. As noted in the SDA Bible Commentary, volume 2, page 878: “Although Naaman had recognized the fact that outside of Israel there was no God, he had not entirely divested himself of the view that the God of Israel was in some special way attached to the land of Israel, and in his own country he wanted to worship that God on Israelite soil.” So when Naaman wanted to worship Yahweh, he would kneel on the Israelite soil. When he entered the temple of Rimmon with the king, he would bow his head but not his heart. Elisha agrees with this arrangement, somewhat to our surprise.

Many godly people love to exalt the Bible as the rule of all faith and practice. We must not come to the Bible in a critical or suspicious spirit. Instead, we must bow before the Word of God and submit ourselves to its teachings. And I agree totally with these sentiments. But truly submitting to Scripture can be a lot more challenging than merely a verbal assent to its superiority. It sometimes means discovering a God we didn’t know about before, or One that we didn’t believe in. Then our level of submission to Scripture is truly exposed.

God's ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts (Isa 55:8-9). The specific context of this passage is that God's compassion and His willingness to pardon extends to people we would not expect. The Bible is full of examples where God acted in ways that orthodox believers, including me, would not have expected or allowed. I will share a few brief examples in this blog and then draw a conclusion regarding how we should relate to such a God.

In Genesis 22:2 God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, creating a major test of Abraham’s faithfulness. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done that. After all, according to Jeremiah (32:35), sacrificing one’s son or daughter is taken for granted to be a detestable and sinful act.

If I were God I would have chosen Joseph rather than Judah to father the line of the Messiah. Not only did Judah sleep with his daughter-in-law Tamar, but that action produced a son who would be an ancestor of the Messiah (Gen 38:13-30; cf. Matt 1:3). The messianic line also includes Rahab, the prostitute from Jericho, and Bathsheba, the adulterous wife of Uriah (Matt 1:5-6). God is more tolerant and forgiving than we are, and does not avoid guilt by association.

One of the many challenges of 2 Samuel is the way God related to David’s family. In one text (2 Sam 12:8) it is implied that polygamy was God's will for David. Rebuking David for seducing Bathsheba, God says, “I gave. . . your master's [Saul's] wives into your arms.” We would not expect to hear God asserting that he "gave" David more than one wife. After all, the grand biblical principle is clearly stated in Genesis 2:24. It is two that become one flesh, not three or four. Yet God did not rebuke David or even the patriarchs for their multiple wives, a practice with tragic consequences for family life in both instances. Whatever we make of 2 Sam 12, God proved Himself well able to work with people involved in a marital system contrary to his ideal. It took time for God’s original ideal in marriage to be restored.

Things get really bizarre at times in the prophets of the Old Testament. God told Isaiah to wander the streets of the city naked for three years proclaiming a message of doom for the allies of Judah (Isa 20:2-4). Would we want to work with a mission partner who claimed God had told him to preach naked for three years? This command was not calculated to enhance Isaiah’s reputation (or even God’s reputation) among the people, yet this extreme action served God’s revelatory purpose to get the people's attention. While Isaiah must have been embarrassed by this command, Micah became even more of a laughingstock. He not only walked around naked, he was howling like a jackal and moaning like an owl (Mic 1:8)!

The story of Daniel 2 is widely known and appreciated by believers everywhere, yet its implications for the character of God are often missed. Before God ever approaches the faithful Hebrew Daniel with a vision, he gave one to Nebuchadnezzar the pagan king, the enemy of God and his people. A careful look at the Aramaic of Daniel 2 and 7 makes clear how radical this action was. Most readers of Daniel think Nebuchadnezzar had a “dream” in chapter 2 and Daniel had a “vision” in chapter 7. But the Aramaic of Daniel 2:28 and 7:1 is essentially identical. Both men saw a “dream and visions of (their) head as (they) lay in bed.” Whatever it was that Daniel experienced, Nebuchadnezzar also experienced. In other words, God treated a pagan king, who did not believe in him and warred against his people, as an object of revelation on the same terms as a Hebrew prophet, and the mode of revelation in these two cases was the same. This is hardly the kind of behavior most of us would have expected from God. His ways are not our ways.

These Old Testament references help us to see that while God never contradicts himself, he is never totally predictable either. We can often fit his words and actions into our understanding only with a great deal of discomfort. This has led me to a much more open mind in regard to creative approaches in the area of mission. Just when I think I have God figured out, he does or says something that surprises me. The unpredictable God is likely to be at work in our world in the places where we would least expect it.

According to Isaiah 55:8-9, God reaches out in compassion to those who are "wicked" and "unrighteous." How much more will he be willing to pardon and include those who follow Him with all their hearts, even though their knowledge of Him is limited? We must keep this reality in mind as we seek to avoid the dangers of religious syncretism (intentionally or unintentionally mixing truth with error). While syncretism is a grave danger to mission, its equal and opposite danger is the tendency to bind up outreach work in ways that limit God's freedom of action in the name of doctrinal and lifestyle purity. To use the words of Joshua Massey, "His ways are not our orthodoxy.”

Can one trust that the Bible is truly the Word of God, given to guide our lives? In a scientific, skeptical, whatever’s right for you kind of world, can we really have confidence in the Scriptures? Can we really believe what Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 2:13? I believe that we can.

I will support that belief with four reasons of the head and then move to some reasons of the heart. First of all, God uses prophecy to demonstrate that the Bible is more than merely the words of human beings, who can only guess regarding the future. Human beings do not know the future. They can predict events with some level of accuracy one, five or ten years in advance, but hundreds and thousands of years? That requires divine knowledge. The Bible contains such knowledge. The accuracy of prophecies like Daniel 2 and Matthew 24 show a God who reveals secrets that human beings cannot know on their own.

In their approach to the Thessalonians; Paul, Silas and Timothy demonstrated how Jesus fulfilled the prophecies in relation to the Messiah. Acts 17:2-3 tells us that when Paul arrived in Thessalonica, he reviewed the prophecies regarding the Messiah and then showed how Jesus fit the specifications. I detail Jesus’ remarkable fulfillment of the Old Testament in my book Meet God Again for the First Time. As we discover a God who knows the future, we gain confidence that God can use His Word to read our hearts and guide us in the right path (see John 2:23-25; Heb 4:12-13).

A second reason I have confidence in the Bible is the evidence we have in ancient manuscripts. Most ancient documents are found in, at most, a handful of hand-written documents, often only in translations, or in a fragmentary state. By way of contrast, our New Testament alone is based on around 5800 different Greek manuscripts. While there are some interesting variations in that evidence, more than 99% of the words in the NT text are based on multiple pieces of evidence from different traditions and locations. The original words of the New Testament have not been manipulated or distorted. We can have confidence that the Bible we hold in our hands today is the book God intended us to have.

A third reason I have confidence in the Bible is its account of the resurrection of Jesus. The main reason to doubt the resurrection of Jesus is bias against the possibility of resurrection. Consider the empty tomb. It makes no sense apart from a resurrection. Why was the tomb empty? Why has the body of Jesus never been found? The enemies of Jesus had no motive for removing body of Jesus. And if they had control of the body of Jesus, why didn’t they produce it when the disciples started proclaiming Jesus’ resurrection? The enemies of Christian faith could have destroyed it in a moment, if only they had had the body of Jesus in their possession!

The friends of Jesus had no motive for removing the body of Jesus either. Nor did they have the power to do so. They exhibited a total lack of courage at cross. They were devasted by this unexpected event. What could possibly have changed that perspective only a day later? The disciples didn't believe He would allow himself to die in the first place (Matt 16:21-23; Mark 8:31-33), and they were very slow to believe resurrection when it actually did occur. Even if they had wanted to steal Jesus’ body, there was a platoon of highly trained Roman soldiers guarding the tomb. So the theory that the disciples stole the body of Jesus makes no sense historically.

Think about it. If the disciples had somehow stolen the body of Jesus, they would have known that they were suffering torture and death for a hoax, a flat-out lie. Maybe one person might be dumb enough to do that, but there were hundreds who claimed to have seen Jesus after his crucifixion (1 Cor 15:6). So purely in terms of the historical evidence, the best explanation for the empty tomb is that Jesus was, in fact, resurrected from the dead. And if the resurrection of Jesus really happened no other miracle in the Bible is impossible or incredible.

A fourth reason I trust the Bible is archaeology. There was a time when we knew little about the ancient world. Wherever the Bible differed from what we thought we knew, many assumed the Bible was in error. But more and more findings are verifying the historicity of the Bible. For example, it was assumed for a time that the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem never existed, it was a made-up story. But now the pool has been found and it was huge! I could mention many more examples, but space does not permit.

But let’s move to reasons of the heart. Ultimately, the Bible is self-authenticating. In other words, as we read the Bible we become increasingly aware of the presence of God in the text. You can’t necessarily put your finger on why or how, but millions of people over nearly two thousand years have testified to this awareness and I have experienced it many times.

You haven’t experienced this? One possible reason is that people often approach the Bible as a book of history or a book whose teachings are disputed. They stand in judgment over the Bible, seeking to determine what about it is true and what is not. Jesus Himself pours cold water over this idea (John 7:17). If the Bible is truly the Word of God, it is not to be handled in a trivial manner. The Spirit of God is bound up in this Word and God will manifest Himself through the Bible if we approach it with an open heart and mind.

One of the hardest things for human beings to learn is a teachable spirit. We love to be right and we bristle when anyone tries to correct us. But the Bible is given for correction and if we approach it in a teachable spirit, it will not only modify the detours in our own thinking, but minister the presence of God into our hearts. You gain confidence in the Scriptures the same way a couple gains confidence in their relationship. You spend time with the Word and the God behind the Word will reach out to you. Over time that presence becomes more and more real to you.

Beyond the presence of God, we discover that the Word of God meets our needs. It is almost as if God’s word can read our minds, discern our needs, and apply the truth of God directly to our hearts (John 2:23-25; Heb 4:12-13). So if you have never developed the kind of confidence in the Bible I am talking about here, I invite you to taste and see for yourself. I believe that if you will open God’s word with an open heart, you will gradually come to experience what so many before you have experienced. God’s Word will become real to you, and in the process God Himself will become real to you.

Our God is a God of love. He enjoys showering His beloved ones with little gifts. Just to say “I love you.” Perhaps you’ve just lost hope of finding a parking spot in time to meet a critical appointment. You send up a desperate prayer and suddenly a space appears. A worried mother wonders where her boy is and sends up a quick prayer. Just then the phone rings and she discovers all is well. Or you survive a harrowing experience and discover later that several friends felt impressed to pray for you at exactly that time. Millions of believers around the world have experiences just like this every day. God is real and He loves to make His presence known to those who are open to it.

But just now the skeptic in you is saying, Wait a minute! Are you trying to tell me that God manages the comings and goings in every parking lot around the world just in case one of His followers needs a spot at the last minute? What about all the real heartaches in this world that are met with silence? What about women who are raped and their cries for help go unheeded? What about men who contract terminal cancer in the prime of their life and feel as if their prayers go no higher than the ceiling? What about parents who pray for wayward children and go to their graves without a clear response from God?

These objections have serious weight. Believers often fail to realize how trivial their experience of God’s presence may seem to others who have suffered deeply in this life. Our glib expressions of how God is working in our everyday lives can be like a knife in the heart to someone experiencing the absence of God (something Jesus also experienced when He was on the cross– see Matt 27:46 and parallels). Such was Job’s experience with his friends. It can feel as if God answers only trivial prayers.

The story of Job makes it clear that there is no answer to most of the specific objections raised above, at least in this life. The tragedies in Job’s life were unexplainable in earthly terms. They had to do with complexities in the larger universe that Job never came to understand. Even when God came down in person to talk with Job (Job 38:1 - 41:34), He never mentions the real reason for Job’s suffering, a reason the reader of the story is allowed into (1:6-12; 2:1-7). There is a cosmic conflict in the universe that affects all that we do and all that we experience. God’s actions are sometimes limited by larger considerations in that conflict, things we may never understand until eternity. Perhaps God’s intervention in Job’s situation would have upset the whole space-time continuum of the universe in a way even quantum physicists could not understand. God cannot explain what we cannot understand. What we do understand is that larger divine interventions can change things in a way that causes collateral damage at some unspecified time in the future. The good we hope God will do in the present could cause greater harm in the future.

There is an interesting biblical illustration of this. It is the story of Hezekiah as told in Isaiah 36-39. Hezekiah was one of the most faithful kings in the history of Judah. When the time came for him to die, he pleaded with God (Isa 38:1-3). God granted an extension of fifteen years (38:5) along with a major astronomical token of His presence (38:7-8— how Hezekiah came to have this experience is not explained). Yet during those extra fifteen years two things happened that undid all the good that Hezekiah had done during his lifetime, the visit of the Babylonian envoys (39:1-8) and the birth of his son, who became the evil king Manasseh (2 Kings 21:1-9). In the context of the cosmic conflict between God and Satan major interventions in people’s lives are very complicated. The ramifications are usually way beyond our understanding.

Having said this, I still want to argue that a believer’s experience in a parking lot is not necessarily imaginary. I cannot explain the timing and the effort involved in God’s actions. But I do believe that God would answer every prayer in a positive manner if pleasing us were the only consideration. If finding someone a parking space or timing a phone call will not upset the space-time continuum of the universe, why wouldn’t a loving God intervene? If a woman makes a full commitment to Jesus just as a rain shower happens to be passing, why wouldn’t God arrange that if the stakes were low enough? I guess what I am saying is that the lower the ultimate stakes, the lower the potential consequences of any particular divine intervention, the more likely that a loving God can use the circumstances of life as a token of his love. We serve a God who delights to please His children whenever so doing would not cause harm to anyone. Having said that, those of us who have experienced this kind of intimacy from God need to be careful when and how we share such experiences with others. Our well-intentioned testimony can do harm even when God’s gift did not. I think we need to be aware how often testimonies cause pain.

What do you think?

I am sharing a few thoughts about the new General Conference President as a person. I have addressed some interesting aspects of his personality and some of the fine personal qualities he brings to the task. Now I want to suggest some tendencies that have caused people concern. I don’t claim divine perspective and all the following needs to be taken with the appropriate grain of salt. But I am well aware even the best of God’s people are flawed and sometimes our strengths can also be turned against us. Those who love this church and care about Ted Wilson will want to help him be the best that he can be. That may at times include of word of counsel or admonition. Please take the following in that spirit. I will not be offering generalizations about the state of the church, but the unique challenges that Ted as a person may face in addressing those larger issues.

Ted Wilson’s first sermon as president did not go as well as he would have liked. He used some technical terms that have multiple meanings and thereby exposed some good people to unnecessary criticism. The tone of the sermon was also alarming to many of the non-SDAs present. In an internet age, bluntness gets attention, but it can also be hurtful to those who were not intended as the target of one’s speech. I understand that when Ted realized that non-SDAs felt excluded by his message he wanted them to understand that he was talking “in-house.” But in an internet age there is no more “in-house.” Everything we say can be analyzed and nuances drawn that may not have been intended. Openness and candor are admirable qualities that need to be balanced with the carefulness in speech that Wilson’s predecessor exhibited so well. Ted is in the middle of a learning curve here.

The nominating process at the General Conference session has been characterized as “ruthless” by some who were there. Changes were made, sometimes without warning of any kind. I’m not sure the process was any different than what has occurred in previous sessions, but the impact of those changes was greater in the context of the current housing crisis. Individuals brought to the General Conference from overseas in the last two or three years (for example), own houses that are seriously “under water” (value much lower than remaining mortgage), which means they cannot sell and go somewhere else. More than one of these were suddenly replaced with devastating consequences. This has left a sense of insecurity on all in a similar situation, even if they retained their positions. The instability of the process will make it harder to attract good people to the GC in the future. Wilson needs to find a way to balance the president’s need to make changes with the pastoral consequences of those changes.

Will Ted Wilson be able to maintain his authenticity, humility, and approachability in the context of the enormous pressures the presidency puts on a person? Previous presidents were often changed by the position, becoming more isolated in the face of the burdens and political pressures that come with the job. More conservative elements in the church have high expectations for Wilson. Will he be able to maintain his role as a consensus builder in the face of those pressures? And will he be able to retain the support of the conservative base if he does seek consensus? The future is open here, but history suggests that GC presidents tend to become isolated from feedback over time. In Wilson’s case, where his greatest strengths are in the areas of listening and flexibility, such isolation would become a matter of major concern. It is very important that he surround himself with strong people who can provide a variety of perspectives on the issues.

The dark side of being a good listener is a tendency to micromanage. You want to be helpful to people who express concerns about things happening at lower levels. You feel somehow responsible, so instead of trusting those under you, you raise questions, seeking to understand and address issues that may not be in the direct purview of the president. While well intended, micromanagement tends to discourage mid-level managers and create an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. It also diverts a chief executive’s time from the big issues. This is a danger Ted will want to avoid.

Finally, bluntness combined with power is intimidating. All the GC presidents I have know have been somewhat intimidating due to a combination of personality and power. This can cause people to be silent when they should be vocal, to go along when they should challenge. Fortunately, Ted welcomes counterpoint and can be confronted with courage combined with gentleness. But if you want to be taken seriously with Ted, he needs to know that you are on the same page with him, that you are as committed to the mission of the church as he is. The more individuals have the courage of their convictions in Ted’s presence, and the more he listens, the more successful he will be as a president. I hope this blog will be taken in that spirit.

The future lies before the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Both the opportunities and the challenges are great. Our new leader needs our support and our counsel (when opportunities arise) as well as our prayers. I hope you will join me in praying for our new leader, who brings many strengths and also some potential weaknesses to the task. I extend that invitation also to those not of the SDA Church, pray that this church will fulfill its unique mission and help hasten the return of Jesus that will bring suffering and oppression to an end. Let’s “hold up Ted Wilson’s hands” to that end.

Ted Wilson brings a number of excellent personal qualities to the office of President of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. One of the most important of these is authenticity. While you may not agree with his theological positions, they are not a game with him, he truly believes what he says and he says what he believes. He loves the writings of Ellen G. White and consults them carefully as he makes decisions. Also, in the culture of the General Conference building, it is often expedient on committees to keep silent once the president has spoken and revealed his position. But as a vice-president, Wilson was forthright, even when opposing the position of the president did not seem to be in his best political interests. Openness and candor are critical in the process of determining the best future directions for the church.

I also find Wilson to be approachable and a good listener. Like his father, he has a terrific memory of names and previous encounters with people. At the Loma Linda University board, he was approachable during breaks, often reminding people of times they met in high school or college. He is a good listener and I have seen him bring back things said by others hours or days before in spite of a life of information overload. On more than one visit to the General Conference building since his election, I have encountered him simply “hanging around the halls” chatting with people, something I rarely saw in his predecessors. The presidential office tends to isolate people and Wilson is well-constituted to resist that and get the feedback necessary to be successful.

The quality about Ted Wilson I find most likeable is his humility and simplicity. I understand that when he became president he turned down the designated parking spot that provides convenience and anonymity to the one in the position of power. Instead he continues to park his car in the general lot and work his way into the building the slow way. When he led the SDA church in Russia, he provided car budgets for the local leaders and directed the Americans, including himself, to use public transportation. He continues to live simply and prefers to be called “Ted,” rather than Dr. Wilson, Elder Wilson or Mr. President. In spite of the pressure of the presidency, I understand that he still teaches a Sabbath School class in his local church and is treated like a “normal” person there, rather than a celebrity. I pray that the pressures of the office will not change him in this regard.

Ted Wilson is a conservative in belief and lifestyle. Contrary to some internet opinion, I do not find him mean-spirited or political. He is a “nice” conservative. Language that sounds like a campaign speech and actions that seem political to others are not so intended. As I mentioned above, Ted really believes what he says and he doesn’t say or do things simply for political effect. Nor does he intend to be hurtful toward those who disagree and he does what he can to mend situations, when he becomes aware that hurt has occurred.

Arising out of his strong convictions, Ted Wilson tends to come across as rather blunt. He enters the room with an opinion and a goal, but this is tempered by his listening skills. I have seen him change his mind and adjust his position when data is presented that he wasn’t aware of upon entering the room. So I would characterize him as blunt but flexible. Those who deal with him should not be intimidated by his bluntness, but appeal to his listening skills to communicate other perspectives on an issue. His record with those who know him best is as a consensus builder rather than a divider. Flexibility is critical in a church leader and Wilson has more of that than many people think.

Finally, those who have worked under him consider him a master administrator. Everything he does runs “like a well-oiled machine.” Such efficiency can produce both good and bad outcomes, but it is much to be preferred over against incompetence. Ted is a very competent person, but he is facing challenges that will test his competence and his many fine qualities to the limits. I will address some of those challenges in my next blog.

Readers not in the Seventh-day Adventist tradition may want to skip this blog and any others like it. The name Ted Wilson may mean little to most people in the world, but it is really big in the Seventh-day Adventist community. Why? He got elected president of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists last summer, and that makes him important to the 17,000,000 members and an equal number of children, attendees, and general adherents of the church around the world. Since Adventists around the world are wondering what kind of leader they have, I thought I would set out a few thoughts from personal connection and conversations with others who are even closer to him.

I have known Wilson personally off and on for some 35 years. We started out in church ministry together in New York City in the last half of the 1970s. We were ordained to the gospel ministry together at Camp Berkshire, 90 miles north of the City, in 1978 (his wife was hugely pregnant that day). His father, who became General Conference President that year (serving in the role until 1990), officiated at the service. Since 1981 we have served in different parts of the world most of the time, but have had the opportunity to keep in touch from time to time. While I wouldn’t characterize our relationship as really close, he still uses a name for me that I haven’t used in 25 years (that’s for me to know and you to find out), a reminder that we go way back.

Wilson was born and raised in Egypt, which means he has a great love for the muslim world in general and the Middle East in particular. Although the son of a man who would become General Conference President (sound a little like the Bush family?), he never wore his father’s position on his sleeve, he was always a regular guy. You never got the impression, “Do things my way or I’ll tell Daddy!” He has always tried to earn his own way, and I appreciated that. In addition to his years in Egypt, Wilson has also served for several years each in Ivory Coast and Russia.

On the personal side, Ted Wilson loves to work with his hands, particularly remodeling houses and handyman type of stuff. I really admire that as I am pretty lost when it comes to replacing a ceiling fan or a fried outlet. He kept that up as Vice-President of the General Conference, but now will likely have to give that up for the foreseeable future. Another thing he may have to give up is serious involvement in his local church, Tridelphia SDA near Silver Spring, Maryland. Up until the time of his election as president, he served as head elder of the church (highest local position under the pastor in Adventist churches) and regularly taught an adult Bible class (Sabbath School lesson). So he blends in easily with the “common people” and does not shy away from the tough work of making a local church community successful. And a little secret note, I understand from those close to him that he really loves fires. Expect a bonfire if he ever invites you over on a Saturday night!

For those who care about his election (and that includes a whole lot of my friends and workmates), I plan to share what I know about his special gifts for leadership and also some of the unique challenges he will face as president of the General Conference. While it might be presumptuous of me to call him “close friend” in light of the long absences over the years, I do think I know him well enough to offer a little insight on his character for those who don’t know him personally. These are just one man’s impressions. But I think it is encouraging for Adventists to know that the better most people know Ted Wilson, the better they like him.

Do religious institutions mirror these stages of faith in their growth and development? The best research suggests so. Religious institutions reflect the spiritual stage that is the common denominator of the total membership. Since the vast majority of adherents to any religion would be in the earlier stages of faith, most religious institutions would be in stages one, two or three. The interesting question is whether any religious institution has ever moved beyond stage three into the higher, more mature stages of faith. Or do religious institutions inevitably get stuck in one of the earlier stages?

What is a religion, or a religious institution? Religious institutions are a human response to the perception of God’s work in the world. The institution is created out of that awareness (stage one?) and is intended to promote the work of God on earth and help people learn and grow in their knowledge and experience of God (stage two?). New religions are God-focused and God-honoring. But over time they become more and more occupied with self-preservation. The natural selfishness of individuals has its counterpart in corporate selfishness. Institutions become less and less about God and more and more about preserving the existence of the institution. This is rarely by anyone’s intention, it seems to be a natural process that happens over time. Although religious leaders can be perverse, it usually seems to happen in spite of the best intentions on the part of leaders (see my blog on unintended consequences, posted on 12/6/2006).

In a real sense the question is whether any religious institution is capable of growing past stage three, the success stage. In the success stage the institution grows in numbers and financially. It expands its operations and becomes an “empire.” The bigger the institution becomes the more it can do for God, so growing and preserving the institution becomes increasingly the focus. But in order to move beyond this corporate focus a religion would have to go through a dark night of the soul, which would likely result in the destruction of the institution, at least in the form that people have grown accustomed to. Has any religious institution ever found life by dying? Has any religious institution ever “taken up the cross” in the full implications of that term (Mark 8:34-38)? I’m not sure any matured religious institution has ever done that (the early church of the New Testament made great strides in the bloom of the initial romance with Jesus, but in the second century that quickly faded).

So as a rule, religious institutions inevitably get stuck in stages two or three. That means that people who experience the dark night of the soul and enter stage four and beyond inevitably feel more and more out of synch with the religion they are part of. If you have experienced this you are not abnormal. This is probably as natural as breathing. People in stages five and six have no real home on this earth, their home is in heaven. They are often a source of perplexity and even amusement among those in the throes of spiritual success. How much more do they perplex whose who have become stuck at stage two or three! These are enamored of their success and their theological correctness and cannot understand the shifting winds of the Spirit who creates unique, unpredictable spiritual partners of God.

So what is a person in stages four to six to do about this? If a religion has truly abandoned God in some perverse way, then they should leave it. But that doesn’t mean that they will feel more at home somewhere else. God-following institutions are still subject to the law of the common denominator. So higher-stage followers of God are not likely to find a religious institution that fully affirms their walk with God. Fortunately, their spiritual nourishment is no longer dependant on the institution, it comes from those rare upper-level mentors and God Himself.

So, how to survive the sense of dislocation that is so common among stage four to six followers of God? The key lies in the mission principle of meeting people where they are. It is the mentoring principle. People are attracted to those who are one stage ahead of them. The high-level mentor can place himself or herself in the place where the individual or audience needing to be mentored needs them to be. Approach a stage two context from stage three. Approach a stage three context from stage four. That is easy for the higher-stage person to do since they have been through all the stages.

This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is going back to an earlier stage for selfish reasons or to avoid losing control. Hypocrisy is about getting stuck in an earlier stage because the challenge of moving on is too threatening somehow. Mentoring is about going back for the sake of others, not for our own sake. We can be comfortable in our spiritual skin, at home with God in stages four, five or six. But we go back for the sake of mission, for the sake of others. This is the way people at the upper stages can remain useful and engaged with the institutions God has allowed and encouraged to be put into place.

Religious institutions are not bad things, in and of themselves. They started out with the purpose of honoring God and pointing people to His mighty activity in their midst. Institutions provide a great deal of organization and efficiency in the service of that mission. Even when they get stuck, God can still use them to reach individuals with a message that might not otherwise have come to them. But religious institutions are not an end in themselves. They are useful only to the degree that they point outside of themselves, to the great work of God on the earth. Such institutions need higher-level companions of God to keep them on track. They need the prophetic challenge to die to self and point all things toward God. Don’t abandon your community because you no longer seem to fit. This sense of dislocation is likely God’s call to a sacrificial ministry outside of one’s comfort zone (in the upper levels of spiritual relationship with God). You can be true to yourself and still serve an institution that is imperfect.

One final point. My spiritual life has been nurtured in the Seventh-day Adventist tradition. That tradition was grounded in end-time reflection. Part of that end-time thinking is the concept of a “time of trouble” (some prefer the term “tribulation”) through which God’s faithful people must pass in order to attain their spiritual destiny (Rev 7:14). Some have called this view “final generation perfection.” The view is inspired in part by the statement of a beloved mentor, “When the character of Christ is perfectly reproduced in His people, then He will come to claim them as His own (Second Coming).” (Ellen G. White, Christ’s Object Lessons, 69). Note, however, that White did not say “in His individuals” as if this perfection was a personal thing, she says “in His people,” which sounds like a corporate thing, a community experience.

So while the Adventist view of end-time perfection has failed to attain its goal at the individual level (the very concept of end-time perfection seems to sabotage individual progress toward that goal), perhaps there is a corporate dimension to this expectation. Is it possible that God will so arrange events that His faithful people from every nation, language and religion will find each other in a glorious end-time remnant (Rev 12:17)? That this remnant will collectively pass through a dark night of the soul and be taken to another level? That this level will demonstrate to the universe that sinful, selfish humans in community can connect with God at the most intimate level in spite of the obstacles to such on this earth? That God will be uniquely glorified in His end-time people (1 Thess 2:19-20)? Time will tell.

My dream is to see something never before seen in the spiritual history of this earth. A worldwide community of faith that has collectively passed through the dark night of the soul (the biblical concept of end-time tribulation) and has moved collectively into a sold-out, intimate faithfulness to God’s purpose and God’s mission. May I live to see Him come in the fullest sense of that term.

In this series we have been looking at various stages of faith and some of the implications of each stage. Now I’d like to conclude with some reflections on the big picture of these stages and their implications for making our way in a challenging world.

First, I don’t want to leave the impression that people march through the stages with lock-step precision. Things are more complicated than that. It is possible to live in more than one stage at a time. Everyone has a “home” stage at any given time, but we may move back and forth between stages; more like the progress of the stock market than a straight-line journey. The one clear progression is that each stage builds on the ones before it. One cannot leap forward to stage five from stage two, the stages in between are a natural development, like stages in the life of a plant. But it is possible to go back a stage or two, either a natural, unconscious slipping back if a new stage is too challenging, or a deliberate moving back for selfish or altruistic reasons. A certain amount of ambiguity is natural and normal. This underlines the fact the spiritual growth, like plant growth, must be natural, in God’s time, rather than a program forced on someone else or one’s self. Let God grow you at His pace.

Second, every one of these stages is natural, normal, good and appropriate. Later stages are not “better” than earlier stages. Each stage is the best place for a person to be in a natural progression of development. To be in a particular stage is only negative if one is stuck in that stage and becoming mired in the negative elements that can cause concern at each stage. Stage two, for example (the discipleship stage), may sound negative and inferior because of its tendency to rigidity and judgmentalism, but it is actually a beautiful stage of learning and growing and integrating into a spiritual community. It only becomes negative when people lose the courage to keep growing.

Third, it is extremely helpful for leaders and mentors to learn the characteristics of each stage so they can recognize where people they mentor are in this continuum. We are attracted to people who are one stage ahead of us. We are perplexed by people who are two stages ahead of us. And people who get three stages ahead sometimes get killed (Jesus Christ). So effective mentoring occurs when the mentor willing goes back a stage or two in order to meet people where they are (at stages one, two or three). This is not hypocrisy, it is recognizing that people learn best when the information is in a form they are prepared to handle (John 16:12), which is usually at most one stage ahead of where they are at the moment. Moving backwards for the sake of others is an act of grace, not selfishness. It is an act of mission. On the other hand, to move backwards out of fear, selfishness or the need for control can lead to to spiritual stuckness or fossilization, a dangerous position to be in.

As you mature spiritually, the mentors get fewer, at least finding a mentor who can help is harder. But as you mature spiritually, the opportunities to mentor increase. We mentor those who are in earlier stages, we have been there and done that. We learn from those who have explored stages where we have not yet been. Mutual nurture takes place between people at the same stage of spiritual development. Stage six people are mentored by God alone!

Fourth, the Bible addresses all six stages of spiritual development and the dark nights of the soul that often accompany them. That’s one of the reasons parts of the Bible are closed to us. They may speak to stages we have not yet experienced and, therefore, cannot fully understand. But as we grow spiritually, more and more parts of the Bible are opened to our understanding. I suspect that parts, at least, of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, chapters 5-7) are written to those at stage six, the stage of unconditional love. How many people do you know who could be slapped in the face and yet feel no stir of resentment inside? How many people do you know who despise or resent absolutely no one in their hearts? How many people find it natural to bless those who curse them? For most of us, the Sermon on the Mount is aspirational but not always experiential. The good news is that the Bible has something for everyone who is on the journey of faith. That’s why no matter how many times we have read the Bible, we still need to read it every day, seeking those insights we may have missed before. As we grow spiritually, the Bible grows with us, so to speak.

This blog is already long enough and I have one more major implication to share. The stages of faith help one understand and cope with institutions of religion. I have met few people (stage six types?) who do not find religious institutions frustrating in one way or another, no matter how helpful they may be. I’ll reflect on that next time.

I interrupt the series of blogs on stages of faith for a quick announcement. I will begin an in-person series on the Book of Revelation at the Calimesa SDA Church on Tuesday night, October 26 at 6:30 PM. The class will meet one or two Tuesdays a month and will cover the entire Book of Revelation. If you live in driving distance of Calimesa, California, this is the program for you! Registration fee is 30 dollars and includes detailed four-color guides to go with each lecture and full access to abundant web materials as well. DVDs of the Hope Channel TV series will also be available on site at special price.

Visit the church's special web site for the series: http://www.calimesasda.com/#/special-events/revelation.

For those who live elsewhere in the USA, DVDs should shortly be available through the Hope Channel offices and advertised on the program. Translations of the programs are already in the planning for the Chinese and Spanish languages. Interest has also been expressed with regard to the German, Serbo-Croatian and Rumanian languages.

Those who work their way through the second dark night of the soul reach the sixth stage, the stage where unconditional love becomes the rule of one’s life. Very few live consistently in this stage for long. Stage six people are compassionate toward others, even under extreme hardship. God’s loves flows through them toward others in every direction. Stage six people reach out to those who have hurt them, even people who in earlier stages would have repulsed them, people they used to despise. They have allowed God to change their hearts, to experience His mercy and compassion even toward “enemies.” Many people feel uplifted simply being in their presence. Stage six people have truly learned how to forgive. They see others through the eyes of God. God’s behavior becomes their model (Matt 18:23-35). They treat others as if they were serving God Himself in person (Matt 25:31-46).

Stage six people may not renounce materials things, but they certainly need them less than others do. They are free from the things that bring anxiety to others. If you don’t need material things to be content, you won’t fear losing them, and you won’t fret if you do lose them. They have an inner peace, a contentment that nothing seems able to shake. They have little ambition to be well known, rich, successful, noteworthy, goal-oriented or even spiritual. They don’t lose heart when others criticize them because their inner soul is grounded in the love and approval of God.

Since stage six is the goal of the journey, there are no humans left to mentor people in stage six. Instead, they are mentored directly by God. It also makes no sense to speak of “getting stuck” in stage six. The only issue would be maintaining one’s place there. Like stage five, stage six people may appear to be out of touch with real life, neglecting their own personal needs, wasting their lives doing things that don’t seem productive in worldly terms. Yet they are serene in the knowledge that they are following God’s leading and mentoring. If God approves, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.

While stage six people are an enormous blessing to the world, they have an extremely hard time fitting in to religious institutions or even normal human society. One would think that unconditional love would cause them to be the most popular people on earth. But the reverse is the case. There is no more destabilizing behavior than unconditional love. Stage six people love everybody, including the people I can’t stand, even my enemies. The one thing I will not allow you to do is to love my enemy. In fact, enemies have been known to reconcile with each other in order to do away with someone who loves everybody. That’s what happened to Jesus. Pilate and Herod reconciled over the trial and condemnation of Jesus. People who love everybody often find themselves isolated from nearly everybody, because they seem to be a threat to a system that favors one person over another, one group over another.

The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is for stage six people. No one else would even know where to begin with that sermon. Stage six people know what it means to be poor in spirit, meek, hungry and thirsty for righteousness. You can smack a stage six person on the cheek and no rising up of fury responds. They may simply offer you the other cheek. This is not normal human behavior, it is Christ-like, God-like behavior. As I have said, few in this life live consistently at this level. Jesus was talking about stage six when He said, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matt 10:39)

We might prefer that the stages of faith ended with stage three, the stage of success in human terms. We would like to believe that the closer we come to God, the more others will recognize that closeness and honor us for it, like they do the prophets of old. But the prophets of old were not honored in their lifetimes because they were so out of step with the accepted religious norm. Only at a distance can we clearly see the work of God in their lives. Their living presence would drive most of us crazy just as it did back in Bible times. The journey of faith does not lead to glory in human terms, but it does lead to glory in the eyes of God and that is what spiritual growth is all about in ultimate terms. It’s all about God, finding him, learning about Him, teaching others about him, learning to listen to Him, seeing the world through His eyes, loving others the way He loves them. It’s all about God.

Coming up. Two last blogs on the implications of the stages of faith.

In this series of blogs I have been cataloguing a series of stages in the spiritual life. We have observed people growing spiritually from an initial romance with God through periods of discipleship to success in spiritual leadership. That time of success brings in numbers and finances, all the marks of spiritual success, or so it would appear in human expectation. But at some point in this success comes a dark night of the soul that reveals hidden selfishness, mixed motives and a greater commitment to the human trappings of success than to the call of God. The dark night can begin to strip that self-centeredness away and connect a person with God at a deeper level than before. Instead of being motivated by an inner selfishness or the agendas of others or a religious institution, he or she hears the call to a deeper and more selfless walk with God. In stage four a person discovers the unique purpose God has for their lives. They add to a head knowledge of God and others a heart knowledge driven more by compassion than the facts. While in stage four they sought solitude and the attentive of high-level mentors, in stage five they go back out into the world, doing many of the things they did before, but now with different motives and a different purpose. Their lives are driven by their connection with God more than by the consensus of committees or the direction of others. They put into practice what it means to “walk with God.”

One would think that the closer you come to God, the more you are in tune with His will and His ways, the more you would be appreciated by others who are also on the spiritual journey, the more you would be appreciated by religious institutions. But the opposite is the case. The second dark night of the soul is the discovery that the closer you walk with God the more out of step you seem to be with religious communities and institutions. The less you are understood by others, even though they are also on the spiritual path. As the approval of God becomes deeper, the disapproval of others becomes a burden that you have to carry. It has been said of Jesus that He was neither elated by applause nor downcast by censure. But at stage five the pain of rejection is still felt and often precipitates a second dark night of the soul. The second dark night can arise for other reasons than rejection, but that is the major one. What is its purpose in the plan of God? Another opportunity to heal. Another opportunity to grow. Human beings are like onions, with layers upon layers of selfishness and hiding from God that need to be peeled away one at a time. In a real sense the dark night may manifest itself multiple times as God engages a human heart in a journey that leads ever-closer to Him.

I believe Scott Peck was on the right track when he observed: “We are attracted to a person who is one stage ahead of us. But we are perplexed by a person who is two stages ahead of us. That’s why Jesus was killed, the Jews and Roman thought he was evil.” Mentoring occurs best when you are one stage ahead of the person you are mentoring. To be two stages ahead of someone is perplexing. They have no context in which to understand what God is doing in your life. Your attempt to engage them from that perspective may do more harm than good. But it gets worse. If you are three stages ahead of you, they will not praise you, they will kill you! This is one of the great precipitants of the second dark night of the soul, the awareness that the spiritual journey does not lead us from triumph to triumph, but actually leads us to a deeper and deeper discovery of the suffering that Christ went through for us. By now you may have wished that I had stopped with stage three. But that would not be the truth. In the words of Bonhoeffer, “When Christ calls a man, He calls him to come and die.”

This brings to mind the second dark night of Jesus life and ministry. Jesus’ first dark night came in the wilderness, where he fasted for forty days and nights seeking clarity regarding His mission in the purpose of God. There he was assaulted by Satan, but came out with a renewed vision and a clear sense of God’s purpose for His life. But a far deeper dark night occurred in the Garden of Gethsemane. There He wrestled with the full cost of following God’s plan, a plan that called Him to die for those who did not seem to care one way or the other. Gethsemane occurred in the presence of living evidence (His disciples) that those He would sacrifice Himself for did not understand or appreciate what God had called Him to do for them. In a real sense, the second dark night of the soul brings to human beings a taste of Jesus’ ultimate experience. Through this our hearts are knitted more deeply to God’s heart  than any other experience could accomplish.

I should make it clear that the dark night of the soul is a reality and a necessary part of a deepening walk with God. We might wish it were not so. We might prefer the gospel of success in which money and praise flow constantly in the direction of those who are faithful to God. And this is not intended as a criticism of those who are “successful.” At various stages of spiritual development we may experience success in human terms as well. But the dark night takes different forms for different people. For some it is a huge, overwhelming burden that occurs once or twice and never again. For others it may come in smaller increments that are repeated over and over. For some it is relatively mild and easy to bear. For others, like Mother Teresa, the dark night of the soul may last for decades. Why all the differences? It is in the hand of God who knows best what we need. The point in laying it out here is so that we might not lose heart, thinking that we are rejected by God in the ultimate sense. The dark night is actually good news. It is an indication that God is not finished with us yet, that there is more ahead, that His purpose for us is deeper and more connected than we can imagine now. When we drink in each dark night, we are readied for the journey that lies ahead.

In stage four a spiritual person wrestles to discover their own unique purpose in God’s eyes. Selfishness is gradually stripped away and God increasingly becomes the primary or even single focus of one’s life. In stage five God points him or her back into the world and often back to the same kind of occupation held before (spiritual leader, teacher, doctor, counselor, etc.), but now that job will be performed with a new sense of vision and purpose. Stage four has produced inner change, now you go out to bring about change in the rest of the world. Transformed people can transform others.

But there is an additional difference in stage five. In the success stage (stage three) you were driven by the needs of your religious community, your family, your friends, and hidden voices from the past. In a real sense you were driven by various forms of self-interest. But in stage five your motivation comes out of a direct call from God, not from anyone else. Stage five spiritual leadership is a venture outside of self-interest. It is performed for the sake of others and with an eye to pleasing God and God alone. Pleasing people is seen as another form of self-interest (1 Thess 2:3-6). Stage five leaders work tirelessly for God. They are comfortable to toil for the success of a community or an institution without getting any credit for positive changes in the organization. Their efforts may have been instrumental to success, yet their work is often unnoticed, they are content in the knowledge that God notices. This new perspective is grounded in the growth and healing that takes place in stage four.

Outwardly, stage five leadership may not look all that different from stage three, but the motivation and the passion are more authentic. Arising out of a new vision and purpose there is an increasing focus on compassion. Those who have suffered deeply are attuned to the suffering of others. The focus is less and less on one’s “success” or reputation, spiritual motivation at this stage comes from two things, the purpose of God and compassion for others. We discover that fulfilling God’s purpose with our lives also fulfills our own deepest desires, desires we may not even have been aware of before. In the past we were motivated by a sense of duty, but now we are motivated by a God-given love for others. In stage three people are often stressed and driven, stage five brings a calmness, a patience. When you put everything in God’s hands, you can sleep at night knowing He is the one who is really in charge.

This God-focus often impacts the jobs one holds at this stage of spiritual life. Stage five people will often change direction in life to a vocation that is smaller, humbler, riskier or newer. Top leaders in an institution may resign their post and replace it with something small, isolated, seemingly far less important to the success of the institution. I am reminded of Albert Schweizer. He was a world-recognized figure in three areas: music, biblical studies and medicine. He gave all that up to take over a remote mission station in West Africa and largely disappear from the world stage. Yet the example he set probably motivated many more people in positive spiritual directions than his music or his biblical scholarship ever would have.

How do you recognize this stage in someone else? It is similar to stage three, but the motives are different. The person is peaceful and patient, rather than stressed and driven. It is as if they have come out of a deep crisis, they are unafraid of people or whatever situation might come. I think of Daniel. After the lions den, what king could possibly intimidate him? As mentioned above, people in stage five often change jobs, mission and/or location in ways that mystify others. But they are living God’s purpose, not the purpose that others would set before them. As a result, stage five is much more misunderstood than stage three. The ways of human beings and human institutions are not God’s ways (Isa 55:8-9).

What are the points of concern with people in stage five? Is it possible to get stuck here too? One thing that already stands out from the above is that stage five people may appear out of touch with everyone else. They march to a different drummer. They hear the still, small voice of God, which for most others is drowned out in the cacaphony of earthly voices and background noise. They may seem indifferent to some of the practical concerns of everyday life. They have become counter-cultural. They take their marching orders from God so they no longer fit in with the expectations of a world that is out to be productive and win. People at earlier stage may even think they have “lost their edge.” “He (she) used to be really successful, but I don’t know, they really lost it somehow.” People at stage five may appear careless about things that “really matter” at earlier stages. They are no longer attracted to religious controversies. They are no longer interested in fighting over the details of creeds and rules. They may even seem less “spiritual.” They connect with God naturally in the course of a day and don’t feel as much need for rituals of devotion and discipline.

Mentors can help stage five people continue their spiritual development by encouraging them to look at everything and everyone through God’s eyes and through the lens of His revelations. When others don’t understand what God is doing in their lives, encourage them to have a sanctified “no care” attitude. It really doesn’t matter what other people think when you are living out God’s purpose in your life. The essence of stage five is to be driven by God’s call and the resulting passion to please Him, rather than the expectations of others. Stage five leaders are driven by compassion for those others don’t care about and in so doing they are attuning their lives to the heart of God.

But at this stage, something happens that one would least expect. Stay tuned.

Some have called this stage the journey inward. The result of the dark night of the soul is an inward journey to discover our true selves, our true purpose. We had a strong sense of purpose in stage three, but that purpose was driven more by the church and by our gifts and talents than by the direction of God. In stage four we spend more time alone, we love to study deeply and pray. We are eager for the kind of mentors who have walked this way before and can help us dig below the surface. While we have been in relationship with God, we crave something deeper now, both with God and with others. We become frustrated with shallow and surface relationships, we want to go deep with other people (many others will prove not ready for this).

We have been satisfied with a general sense of God’s direction for our lives, but now we want a more personal direction from God. We want to discover our uniqueness, that unique purpose that God designed us for from the beginning, a purpose unlike any other on this earth. This is crucial to this stage of the spiritual walk. After all, if you are a dentist or a doctor, you will be out of a job in eternity. But if you have discovered God’s unique purpose for your existence, you will continue to exercise that purpose throughout eternity. You may discover that many of the rituals and practices of your faith tradition don’t work for you anymore, yet you are even more bonded to those in that tradition who have found their unique purpose as well. This is also a time to experience healing of unresolved psychological and spiritual issues. You are becoming a whole person, filling in the gaps and tasting something of what could be in a more intimate walk with God. In a sense this is a move from head to heart. It is like a second conversion. The sense of romance with God returns but at a much deeper level than before.

Since the fourth stage of spiritual development concerns relationship, let me briefly share a helpful summary of the stages of friendship. I owe these to my good friends Bill Underwood and Ed Dickerson. Each stage offers an increase in both intimacy and vulnerability. It is the increase in vulnerability that causes some people to be reluctant to get close with anyone. But people in the fourth stage of spiritual life are annoyed with shallow relationships and crave intimacy and vulnerability.

The first stage of friendship is the greeting stage. When it comes to strangers on the street, even this stage can feel vulnerable. Stage two is the exchange of facts and reports, as simple as “Nice day isn’t it?” or “Have you heard the latest news?” The third stage of friendship is the exchange of opinions and judgments. One’s opinions make one more vulnerable than the mere sharing of facts. If someone rejects my opinion, it comes a little closer to home than if they simply don’t like my choice of shirt or a fact I got off the internet. The fourth stage of friendship is where we become comfortable enough in a relationship that we are willing to share how we feel. To be rejected for one’s feelings is more painful than to be rejected for one’s opinions, so this is a very vulnerable step. Stage five is where we are comfortable enough in a relationship that we are willing to share our faults with others. This is also the stage in our relationship with God where we confess our sins and receive salvation. What could be deeper than that? Stage six is where we are trusting enough of another person to allow them to confront our faults. This is very deep relationship when it occurs both ways. But often in religious contexts people feel free to confront others when they have not earned the right to do so. Do unto others. . . The seventh stage is total intimacy, where there are absolutely no secrets between us. This level of friendship is rare on earth if it exists at all.

As we enter into relationships, we feel our way up this ladder, checking constantly to see if the other party is as willing to be vulnerable as we are. If a relationship is at stage two, the exchange of facts and reports, one party will throw out an opinion or judgment to see how the other party responds. If the relationship survives that move, it grows to that stage. If it does not, the venturesome party make pull back and relegate that relationship to the casual category. One of the problems in marriage is that one spouse will confront another, yet the other is not even willing to share feelings, much less faults. This is an unbalanced relationship. We must earn our way into intimacy with another. There are many other implications of these stages of friendship, but those will have to be explored at another time.

In the spiritual life, stage four people tend to be very impatient with shallow relationships. They want to push on to intimacy as quickly as possible. That is where the real growth happens. But most people are not equally willing, so stage four people often feel alone, or connect deeply with only one or two people, usually mentors. The cocktail circuit, where people move around a room and share facts, reports and an opinion or two (unless fueled by the agent of pseudo-relationship— alcohol), but keep the deeper levels of themselves locked up, has little interest for a stage four spiritual person.

How do you recognize that someone is in stage four? They are constantly asking challenging questions. While this can indicate lack of faith, in a spiritual person it is a sign that God is calling them deeper. Stage four people like to be alone, yet are eager for mentoring. Cavilers simply enjoy tripping people up with their questions, stage four believers are genuinely seeking answers. When they find the right person, they are quick to open their hearts. They are known by their desire for deep relationships. The caviler uses questions to avoid relationship with spiritual people, the stage four believer uses questions to determine who is willing to go deep in relationship.

There are points of concern with stage four as well, places where people can get stuck and stop growing spiritually. Stage four people can get stuck wallowing in negative thinking or discouragement. They are sometimes consumed with self-assessment. They spend huge amounts of time journaling, processing, and in self-absorption. They may be constantly wondering why and never finding answers. They may even enjoy the sense of spiritual ambiguity (this can drive their friends crazy). They feel that no one understands them (and sometimes they are right). They can become immobilized by the struggle. There is a doubt that leads to faith (the true stage four experience), but there is also a doubt that leads to more doubt. Stage four is wonderful as a transition to a deeper walk with God. But it can be a miserable place to get stuck. How do you help people move on at this stage?

Encourage stage four people that their questions and doubts are not a scuttling of the spiritual journey, but a renewed call from God to a deeper relationship with Him. What stage four people need in their mentors above all else is acceptance and affirmation. They tend to be very hard on themselves. Help them know that God is with them in their questions, searching and even doubt. Encourage them to let God out of the box that He may have been placed in during stages two and three. Encourage them to be open to God’s teaching and leading. Help them process past traumas honestly and if you are in over your head refer them to someone who is better equipped to help. With the help of a high-level mentor and much solitude, stage four people can be ready to grow to the next stage. They can hear God’s call to move back out into the world again. The journey inward (and the dark night of the soul) helps us find our true purpose and prepares us for deeper service to others. Stay tuned.

Let me apologize right from the start. This blog is way too long. But please stay the course. This one may change your life.

At the very height of spiritual success, something tends to happen that we least expect, usually between the ages of thirty and fifty. When followers are increasing, people are feeling blessed, funds are flowing in to support the ministry, and awards are being given, comes a very unwelcome guest. It is a personal crisis many have called the dark night of the soul. Past certainties suddenly become inadequate. We call into question everything we have ever believed and everything we have ever done. We feel like failures, like we can’t do anything right. We are humbled. Our world caves in. Our faith, which sustained us powerfully up until this point, doesn’t seem to work anymore. All of our answers are replaced with questions. God either vanishes from view or breaks out of the comfortable box we held Him in. We “hit bottom,” we reach “the end of our rope.”  We “hit the wall” and can seem to go no further on the spiritual journey. We have saved others, but ourselves we cannot save. We feel completely alone and abandoned by God. As one person put it, “Just when I got it all together, I forgot where I put it.”

There are many examples of this phenomenon in the Bible. The classic case is Job, who did nothing to deserve it, yet went through both real-life tragedy and an inner crisis of spiritual depression almost to the point of suicide (Job 3:1-26). I think of Jonah, whose life as a prophet was going just fine until God disrupted everything with a big fish. I think of Elijah, who at the point of his greatest spiritual triumph on Mount Carmel went immediately to the deepest level of discouragement (1 Kings 19:3-4). I think of Jesus, who at the very point His glorious mission is revealed to Him ends up forty days in the desert under attack by Satan.

The dark night of the soul seems like the end of all our spiritual hopes and dreams, but it is not. It is actually a summons to deeper intimacy with God. It reveals that all of our success, all the good things we have done, were to some degree motivated by ambition and selfishness or by a desire to please others. We discover that our strong sense of purpose in stage three was driven by others and/or the church as much as by God. We realize that, while the God we have known up until this point was real, we need to rediscover Him as if for the first time.

The dark night of the soul can be precipitated by many things. It could simply be a stage of life, what some people call “mid-life crisis.” This often comes to people between the ages of thirty and fifty. It could be precipitated by an external event, such as a rebellious child, the loss of a job or the death of a loved one. Sometimes it is precipitated by an internal event, such as physical illness or the resurfacing of an emotional trauma that was buried in the past up until this point. The dark night of the soul can simply be the sense that God has withdrawn His presence from our lives. We seek Him but we cannot find Him.

A young psychiatrist once asked me, “What is the difference between the dark night of the soul and clinical depression?” I agreed that there is such a thing as clinical depression, a darkness fueled by chemical imbalances or other disorders. But the dark night of the soul is a depression that comes as a call from God to go deeper with Him. It can be combined with clinical symptoms of depression, but includes a strong dimension of spiritual crisis.

Most spiritual people feel distressed about this development. They believed that God’s presence in the life soothes the spirit, calms all fears, and brings joy to life’s journey. The dark night seems like a wrong turn, a sign that they have somehow lost their spiritual way. They are tempted to “defeat it” or back away from it. The ego rises up to resist the experience. They may feel guilt- or shame-ridden, feeling that they have deserved this experience. They may put themselves down or in some sense “enjoy” their misery.

Spiritual leaders may feel that dark nights are for the people, not for them. They are supposed to be strong and confident in God. They feel the need to hide the darkness from others, even from themselves. They may feel all alone, as if no one else is going through an experience like it. But in spite of how it feels, this darkness is actually a call from God, it is a positive sign. It is a sign that God is deeply engaged in your life. While doubt can be a negative thing for spiritual life, the dark night of the soul is a doubt that can lead to deeper faith.

You cannot deal with the dark night by working 60 hours a week or trying to ignore it. The pain is there for a purpose. God uses it to call people to drink it in and learn what needs to be learned. The best remedy for the dark night is lots of solitude in which to listen to God’s voice, to feel what He is trying to communicate, to think and reflect. A high-level mentor can also be an asset at this point, someone who has been through the dark night and survived it, who has moved on and incorporated the things God wanted to teach through it.

But there are two major points of concern that potential mentors need to keep in mind when someone is in the dark night. First, there is the temptation to back off from the experience and go back to stage three. That is the place where the individual was successful. That is the place when things were going well. That is the place where God seemed near. So there is the temptation to reject the dark night and go back to the place where we were successful. And this may seem to be a successful tack. You go back to what you did when you were successful. You do the things you did before. And most people will probably not notice the difference in your work. The problem is that you will know, deep down inside, that God called you and you said no. So the person becomes what I call a “hollow three,” a person who is going through the motions of leadership and success, but there is something missing. He or she has gotten stuck in the trappings of success, but the heart of the spiritual life is gone. From my experience teaching thousands of pastors through the years I would estimate 50-60% of pastors take this course and that may be one reason so many churches appear to be spiritually dead.

Perhaps 25% of spiritual leaders go in a different direction. They see the dark night of the soul as calling into question their entire spiritual journey up to that point. They believe the reason for the dark night is not the call of God, but the failure and the error of the religious institution that they aligned with in stage two. The shattering of spiritual confidence that comes with the dark night can bring great disillusionment regarding the confidence of stages two and three. And this is normally a healthy thing. But the dark night results in a side-step if one gives up all that one believes in or abandons one’s spiritual heritage in the illusion that some other institution will not have similar spiritual flaws. I don’t mean to imply that it is never spiritually productive to change religions, but that one must do so for the right reasons. Perhaps a quarter of pastors, in my experience, leave the church during the dark night because they can find no suitable mentor, and interpret God’s call as a call to leave one faith for another or leave the faith entirely.

Perhaps ten or fifteen percent of all who walk the spiritual journey stay the course, drink in the lessons God wants to teach them, and move on to stage four. With the help of a high-level mentor (stage four or beyond) they become increasingly aware of their own self-centeredness. They come to understand that all their spiritual efforts up until now were driven largely by self and by the expectations of others and the church. They learn to recognize the call of God in the dark night to break away from self and go deeper into the walk with God than they had ever imagined. They learn to see themselves as God sees them and accept their own humanness and limitations. They begin to learn how to forgive themselves and to forgive others. Their love for themselves begins to deepen (because of the deep love they discover God has for them) and with it an increase in love for others. They may have known these things intellectually before, but now they drink these insights deep into their soul and embrace them as persons who are becoming more and more whole.

How do you mentor someone who is going through the dark night of the soul? Very patiently.  High-level mentors are a precious resource at this time. Suffering people will dump their hurt, frustrations, anger and loneliness on you. Don’t offer answers the way Job’s friends did, just be present with them. Avoid shock, just listen and empathize with them as they wrestle with traumatic memories and regret. Share your own dark night (if you haven’t been through it you probably can’t be much help). Assure them that what they are going through is normal in the walk with God. Share the stories of Elijah, Job, Peter and Jesus. Radiate your own acceptance of them as a token of God’s acceptance. Forgive them as needed and encourage them to experience the forgiveness of God. In most cases the day will come when the dark night ends and they will be able to move on. Some people may have to experience the dark night more than once in order make it through, but eventually, if they stay the course, they can move on.

What lies beyond the dark night of the soul? Stay tuned.

Continuing our series on the stages of faith and spiritual development. The third stage is what I call the “success” stage. The believer senses God’s call to move from being a disciple to being a leader. They begin to teach others the things that they have learned. As people show a giftedness for spiritual leadership, they will often be pushed into it, even if they are not spiritually or emotionally ready. They more and more gain confidence in their ability to lead as they get the opportunity. It is the stage of spiritual production, where they are changing lives and accomplishing important spiritual tasks. Their followers grow in number, contributions rise, people applaud their efforts and they win awards. Leaders at this stage discover their spiritual gifts and assume roles in religious institutions that are effective and appreciated. Moses at the burning bush and Peter at the Sea of Galilee are biblical examples of individuals moving into stage three.

How do you recognize this stage in others or yourself? In this stage you feel as if you have “arrived.” There is a strong sense of making a difference in the lives of others. There is a lot of spiritual satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment that comes with spiritual success. Like stage two this is a stage where there is a high degree of confidence. You know you are doing good, and you know you are where you are supposed to be. A weakness at this stage is that it is the most resistant stage to mentoring. Stage three leaders don’t feel a need for mentoring. They are now experts who mentor others, but have little need to learn from others. They are at the top of the mountain, there are no further stages to climb. As far as most religious institutions are concerned, people at this stage have reached the top, this was the goal and it has now been achieved. If the stages of faith ended with stage three few would be surprised.

Such confidence, of course, leads to a number of points of concern about this stage. Although God is the focus of all spiritual ministry, there is a tendency for stage three leaders to serve God in their own strength, motivated by secular goals such as numbers, acclaim, awards and financial growth. They love achievement and recognition. Life sometimes feels like a performance, where all they do is for the benefit of those who are watching them. Stage three people are often hooked on perfection, they want to be the best; the best pastor in the conference, the best teacher in the school, the best leader in the church, the most successful evangelist. Stage three leaders love feeling busy, but that business is often a mask that covers inner anxieties and wounds. Where this is true, they will often be the last to know, as they do not go out of their way to seek genuine feedback. Stage three leaders can become weary and burned out, they can feel unappreciated and become resentful of it. Secretly they may resent the community they lead or even God for using them at the expense of what could have been an easier life. These are some of the dangers of spiritual success.

Most religious institutions are stuck at stage two or three. One reason is that the majority of all followers in a religious institution are relatively new and just beginning the journey themselves. A second reason is that religious institutions over time focus more and more on preservation of the institution rather than on the glory of God. Institutions crave and document all signs of success. But those successes are often measured in human terms more than God’s terms. Religious institutions can come to crave power and wealth as much as any individual, but find it even harder to repent than most individuals do! More on religious institutions in a later blog.

How can stage three leaders move forward? The first step is to surrender to the full control of God, as far as anyone is capable of that at this stage. This means a willingness to surrender one’s ego, one’s desires, even one’s leadership position so that God will be glorified rather than us. Stage three leaders need to recognize that God calls everyone to face the truth about themselves, to work on their distorted images of God, to gain recovery from childhood wounds, from unhealed past experiences and from the lack of forgiveness toward others who have hurt us. They need to practice personal spirituality; prayer, the study of sacred writings, the practice of spiritual disciplines and sharing with others what God has done in their lives. More than anything else, stage three leaders need to swallow their pride and seek out a mentor who is at stage four or above. High-level mentors are people who have faced the temptations of stage three and overcome. But finding such mentors will not be easy. If we look to those who have helped us in the past, we may find that they are inadequate guides for this part of the journey. People who have been through the success stage and moved on, people who have been trained to mentor others through these stages, are unique people and must be sought out. Whenever you find such a one, hang onto him or her, for that is a rare treasure.

In many ways stage three feels like the end of the spiritual journey, but it is not. In some ways the spiritual journey has only begun. It is around this point, usually between the ages of thirty and fifty, something stunning occurs in most people who are on the spiritual journey. It is the last thing that we would expect. It is usually an unwelcome guest. But more on that next time.

Continuing a series on the stages of faith. In stage two, people who have fallen in love with God join a community of fellow believers. It is a time of learning and belonging. They want to learn and grow in every way they can. They also want to develop an identity with a group of fellow believers, so they explore, absorb and practice the belief systems of the community as they seek to draw closer to God. During this stage there is a strong sense of being right; they have found the “right” community and they are learning the right way and worshiping in the right way.

During this stage, spiritual growth is particularly stimulated by strong leaders, teachers and mentors. In some cases the greatest mentors are found in books. A strong, biblical example of this stage would be the relationship between Paul and Timothy, and between Jesus and His disciples. Since this is a stage where mentoring is extremely important, new believers need a lot of help to find the “right” mentor. Unhealthy mentors can guide new believers into dangerous digressions. If your spiritual mentor is named Osama bin Laden or David Koresh, your very life could be at risk, so it is imperative that new believers be guided to mentors appropriate to their stage of spiritual growth.

How would you recognize that someone is in stage two? Stage two believers have a strong desire to follow. They will attach themselves to anyone who seems able to teach them and help them. They are eager to learn and very respectful of authority, at least within that particular community. Strangely, this openness to learning is combined with a high degree of self-confidence. Even if they don’t know everything they “know” they are on the right track. So stage two believers can suffer a bit from spiritual inflexibility. But this is not a problem unless they get stuck in stage two. Normally as people mature spiritually, the inflexibility will lessen, it is a natural stage in a growing spiritual experience. Another weakness of this stage is a tendency to like easy answers. Stage two believers are not very fond of nuance. But as they grow spiritually, they will want more and more solid food.

There are some points of concern with this stage. It is very common for people to get spiritually stuck at this point and have difficulty moving forward. Stage two believers can become very legalistic and judgmental. Their lives can be governed by “should” or “ought” or “must” and they can be quite frustrated with believers who don’t see things quite the way they do. If they don’t grow out of their initial inflexibility and simplicity of thought they can become rigid in their approach to faith. If they have been taught one particular perspective by an influential teacher or mentor, they may conclude that their teacher’s way is the only way to think or act. They may feel that everybody needs to do things that way. They may even be incline to “punish offenders” if they are in a position to do so. And worst of all, they cannot see their own rigidity. They see things in terms of black and white, us against them. They feel right and strong, while other perspectives are wrong and weak. Every spiritual community has some stage two members that have become stuck there.

So what can spiritual leaders do about it? How can mentors help stage two believers to move ahead spiritually? While stage two believers who are stuck can be unpleasant to deal with, the only way forward is through nurturing relationships with the community and with godly mentors. Rigid believers have placed head ahead of heart and certain beliefs ahead of relationships. Such rigidity will remain unless through spiritual nurture they gain some self-awareness of what is wrong and the find encouragement to repent and renew relationships that have been broken. The mentor must resist the temptation to strike back in kind, but instead be gentle, humble and teachable (2 Tim 2:24-26).

Another important element to growing stage twos is providing opportunities for them to serve. Help them discover their spiritual gifts. Give them opportunities to discover leadership gifts. This will involve some risk, but the reward is also great. Help them to become contributors and not just spokespeople for certain viewpoints. As they learn and grow for themselves and find God using them in positive ways, they can begin to make the transition to the third stage, which will be our topic next time.

This is the stage where one’s initial discovery of God occurs along with a personal commitment to Him. We come to recognize that there is a God, that He is real and that it truly matters to our lives. It is a time of “first love.” There is great joy in the spiritual life. There is the sense that one has experienced a new start, been given a new lease on life. People at this stage are not particularly rational about their faith, they just know what they have experienced and they order their lives accordingly. This is a stage of childlike trust in God. In the words of Jesus, “Unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of God” (Luke 18:18-17). Jesus didn’t say “Stay like little child,” there is a childlikeness to the initial perception of God and the commitment to God that follows. But it doesn’t end there, as we have seen. You can recognize this stage in others by its newness, joy and simplicity.

People tend to find God in two basic ways; a sense of awe and a sense of need. Some people, particularly children, encounter God through an overwhelming spiritual experience of His presence. They encounter Someone way bigger than themselves, come to recognize that it is God they have encountered, and readily commit to Him. Adults, on the other hand, are more likely to come to God on the basis of need. Faith in God is seen as a way to resolve the personal pain of divorce, prison, illness, job loss, grief and/or loneliness. Many adults have to “hit bottom” before they are willing to give God a try. Either way, there is tremendous joy in the new life that comes from a relationship with God. Stage one may not be a one-time thing. We may return to this stage more than once in times of great need.

At every stage it is possible to “get stuck.” Getting stuck happens when spiritual growth slows down and stops for whatever reason, often a reason unique to that stage of spiritual life. The biggest danger points in the first stage are a sense of unworthiness and lack of knowledge. People in this stage can be devastated by any slip back into former ways. They know that God freely forgave them once and gave them a new start, but now they have blown it and are unworthy of a “third” lease on life. This sense of unworthiness can freeze them spiritually and make it difficult to move forward. The other major danger point is a lack of knowledge of spiritual things. They may lack practical knowledge of the gospel and assurance in Christ. They may not know the power and support available in faith. They may be a prisoner of superstitions: “God will make me sick if I don’t pray,” or “If I pray I will get whatever I want.” Superstition keeps one from moving forward spiritually.

How do you help (mentor) stage one people move ahead and grow spiritually? Three things stand out. First, help them feel accepted as a child of God. The grace of the gospel is bigger than our failings. Every person is extremely valuable to God. When people begin to understand that value, they will be freed to move ahead wherever God will lead. Second, help them discover that they are supported by a community of believers. The transition to stage two involves connecting with a spiritual community that will provide teaching and support as they grow. To the degree that they lived their faith in isolation up to this point, it is time now to connect with a living community. For all of its weaknesses, community is vital to spiritual growth. Third, it is critical that they develop a strong relationship with one or more spiritual leaders or mentors at this stage. Mentors can set a living example of the value of moving ahead through the stages. Having moved forward themselves, they are able to guide others in the path forward.

Next time: Stage Two!

From time to time I have made presentations on stages of faith, how people of faith develop through the seasons of life. Many people have asked me to put some of that in writing so I thought I’d use the blog to get some of those thoughts out to my friends in cyberspace.

There is a whole body of literature out there on the subject, some of which is more helpful than others. Some of the best-known names are Fowler, Kohlberg and Maslow. While all of them are helpful to a degree, the version that has been the most helpful to me is found in The Critical Journey, by Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich (who passed away before the second, fuller edition). Credit where credit is due. I probably would never have heard about this book had it not been for a recommendation by a former colleague at Andrews University, Skip Bell. Thanks, Skip, this did me a lot of good.

In what follows you will note significant differences from Hagberg. I have thought through her system and evaluated it by my personal experience, my experience as a mentor, and my study of the Bible and other trusted literature. So what I offer here is both dependant on others and uniquely my own perspective. Take it for what it is worth. There are six stages in all, with some points of transition.

The first stage is initial acquaintance with God. I sometimes call this the “romance” stage. It is a time of “first love” with great joy in walking with God. At the same time there is not a lot of knowledge, so the person is vulnerable to superstition. The key at this stage is connecting with a community that can nurture and train the new believer in a healthy way.

The second stage I call the learning or discipleship stage. It is a time when new believers explore, study, and learn how to fit into their new spiritual community. Finding the right mentor is crucial at this stage, as people are eager to learn and can be often led astray. This is a time of high confidence, where new believers feel that they have found the truth and can become somewhat legalistic and inflexible.

If people find a healthy mentor they will continue to grow, moving from disciples to teachers and leaders. This third stage can be called the success stage, a time when believers help others learn what they have learned. Their leadership is often praised and rewarded and they feel like they have “arrived.” It is often a confident stage, the pinnacle of what people expect from spiritual growth and leadership. If things ended right here, everyone would be happy. But it is not so.

At some point in the third stage, usually somewhere between the age of 30 and 50, most people of faith experience what I call the “dark night of the soul.” This is a personal crisis where past certainties become inadequate, where you begin to question everything you have ever believed and find God to be silent or distant. This frightening experience is not destructive, but a doubt that leads to greater faith, because it strips away the subtle selfishness that permeated the success stage without our being aware of it.

Some people back away from the dark night as if it were not from God and others blame their spiritual community for all that seems to be going wrong, but those who drink in this suffering as a call from God move on into the fourth stage, which I call the journey inward. Up until this point, we accepted the purpose of the church or our own ambitions as the purpose of God, but the dark night drives us to understand and embrace God’s unique purpose for our lives. Our faith moves from the head to the heart and becomes much more relational. It is like a second conversion.

The fifth stage I call the journey outward. At this stage we go back into the world and do the kinds of things we did in the success stage, but with different, more selfless motives. People will often change ministries at this stage and become willing to go smaller, humbler, and riskier. They are now living God’s purpose rather than that of an institution or others.

At this point a surprising thing happens. We would have thought that deepening spirituality would be recognized and supported. Instead, the closer we come to God the more out of touch we seem to be with the “system.” This often provokes a second dark night of the soul, which wrings the hidden selfishness out of our spirituality.

In the sixth stage followers of God are ruled by unconditional love. They have learned to see people through God’s eyes and love them the way God does. One would think this would be a popular stage but the opposite is the case. The one thing most people will not tolerate is for you to love their enemy, be that an abuser, another ethnic group or an annoying relative. Unconditional love often proves disruptive in relationships.

By this time you probably wish I had stopped at stage three. We would love for the ladder of faith to lead from triumph to triumph. But that is not the way things go. In this broken world the closer we come the God the stranger we become to others, even when the others are “in the faith.” In blogs to come I would like to take each stage, one at a time, and explore the implications for faith, leadership and mentoring. This is the most life-changing material I have ever learned or shared. Thanks for listening so far.

After six years of hard work and input from some 200 people, the new seminar called Revelation: Hope, Meaning, Purpose is finally ready for widespread distribution. The whole idea behind the new seminar was to provide high-quality materials for people to use in sharing the message of Revelation with neighbors, friends and large public audiences. Why another seminar on Revelation? The seminars already out there have done a good job in accordance with their purpose and will continue to be used wherever they connect well with audiences. But I have felt for years that there was a strong need for a seminar with the following characteristics.

1) More exegetical. Current seminars are often billed as “Revelation Seminars” yet they are more like topical studies of the Bible as a whole and people sometimes feel misled by the title. They wanted to study Revelation and they got something else. The new series goes chapter by chapter, verse by verse through the Book of Revelation. Teachings emerge naturally from the text of Revelation itself, rather than from other places or philosophical reasoning. In a post-modern world, this type of narrative approach is appealing. For those interested in how this relates to Adventist teachings, the seminar covers 16 of the 28 fundamental beliefs. The rest are covered in follow-on baptismal classes. There is no attempt to force teachings into the text.

2) More Christ-centered. The book’s own title and introduction (Rev 1:1-6) makes it clear that the central focus of the book is not the revelation of Middle Eastern oil or the war on terror, it is a revelation of Jesus Christ. So the primary purpose of the seminar is not the communication of information (although that will occur), it is about connecting with the One who revealed the book to John so many centuries ago. The Jesus whom John knew personally is still knowable today and is the ultimate game changer in our lives.

3) More gospel-oriented. Once again, the book’s title and introduction (Rev 1:1-6) states in plain language that the life, death, resurrection and heavenly reign of Jesus Christ are the core themes of the book. According to Paul in 1 Cor 15:1-7, those things are precisely what the gospel is all about. As one wanders through fantastic images of seven-headed dragons, vultures that speak and women standing on the moon, it is easy to get lost in the imagery and forget that there is a saving purpose in everything that is described.

4) More practical, everyday impact. People today want to know: What difference will Bible study make in my life today? In the seminar we have gone to great lengths to point people to the practical, everyday, life-changing insights that emerge from study of the text. For example, in the DVDs, my wife appears toward the close of each program asking the kinds of questions they don’t discuss in graduate school. She throws a wet blanket on the whole discussion with questions like, “Has the study of the trumpets made you a better husband and father?” I don’t know about you, but I think questions like that let a whole new class of people connect with the Book of Revelation.

5) More positive toward other faiths. In the past, some people have felt that in order to highlight the importance of new truths it was necessary to bash faiths that differed with those truths. But in many settings today such an approach turns off more people than it attracts. It can come across as arrogant, self-centered and abusive. If God is “not without witness” (Acts 14:16-17) even among rank pagans and if God “removes kings and sets up kings” (Dan 2:20-21) then we might discover He had a positive purpose even in faiths that seem destructive to us.

For example, it is not hard to show that Roman Catholic theology has deviated at significant points from Scripture and that the church’s practice was often very abusive in the Middle Ages. The Pope himself has apologized for the latter. But that raises the question: If there were a number of directions mainstream Christianity could have gone, why did God let the Catholic version “win” and become the dominant version of Christianity for more than a thousand years? My dear friend Ed Dickerson offers an intriguing and positive explanation: Because they got the one thing right that truly mattered, the biblical canon. Other options in the early centuries would have led to radically different canons of Scripture. The Bible, as we now have it, was the product of centuries of debate and ecclesiastical actions. If you get the biblical canon right, all other things are correctable. A religious organization doesn’t have to have everything right to be serving an important purpose for God. And that leads me to the last point.

6) More humble and vulnerable. If other faiths can serve a purpose without having everything right, then maybe I don’t have everything right either. Maybe my faith organization is here because it has gotten one or two things right that were overlooked or forgotten by others. Such an approach opens the way to more humility and vulnerability on the part of the teacher. I don’t have to have everything right to make a difference for God. And that means that I can learn from others even when they don’t have everything right.

These were our goals as we developed the seminar. Kudos are due to Graeme Bradford, without whose untiring efforts this would never have come to fruition. Others may find that we haven’t quite hit the mark on the six goals above, but they were in view all along and we have made every effort to achieve them.

If you are interested in the seminar you can go to the seminar website to learn more and also order materials: www.revelationhope.com . Perhaps at some point we will be allowed to offer these materials on this web site as well (the primary sponsors are the South Pacific Division of Seventh-day Adventists and The Hope Channel). I will certainly let you know if and when that happens.

There are two main things available to everyone. One is a set of DVDs that total 24 sessions of more than 50 minutes each, covering the whole Book of Revelation. The other is a set of printed materials that goes along with the DVDs. The prices on the web site are in Australian Dollars, so there is some discount when paying in US Dollars. Both sets of material together should cost about a hundred US dollars. Not a bad deal!

The DVDs were done in studio and on location in Turkey and Greece. They also include contributions from 25 world-class scholars, each speaking in the area of their top expertise. The printed materials are in beautiful four-color format and include multiple thousands of dollars in fresh artwork to illustrate the text.

Pastors and church leaders who would like to use the seminar in public meetings can contact the webmaster of revelationhope for a special presenter’s DVD that includes powerpoints, advertising, handbills and all kinds of teacher’s helps. This is not offered on the web site as it is exclusively for leaders who wish to make more than personal use of the material.

It has been an honor to be part of such an exciting project. Now you can be part of it too!

In a couple of previous blogs I noted that politics seems alive and well in the church today (Politics in the Church– Sept. 27, 2009) and that it was the norm in the church of New Testament times as well (Politics in the New Testament– May 14, 2010). Now that a rewarding European vacation is over, I thought I’d complete the short series of blogs on Politics in the Church. If politics is the norm rather than the exception in the church, how can we manage politics in a way that does not undermine the gospel?

Before I do that, let me briefly note my delight in being able to attend the famous Oberammergau Passion Play in the Alpine region of Germany. Beset by the plague in 1633, the villagers pledged to God that if He spared their lives they would marshal the resources of the entire village every ten years to produce a play on the cross of Jesus Christ. Not one person in the village died of plague after that (some suggest a third of all Europeans died) and they have kept their pledge until this day. For pictures, video and history go to the official English-language website: http://www.oberammergau-passion.com/ . The play was deeply theological, connecting the scenes of Jesus’ passion with the stories of the Old Testament. A once in a lifetime experience.

Coming back to politics in the church, I’d like to note the difference between a problem and a situation. A problem is something that can be solved, a situation, on the other hand, cannot be solved, it is part of reality and needs to be managed. We often think of politics in the church as a problem to be solved, but if it is as ongoing as the New Testament indicates, it is more of a situation that needs to be managed. While individuals may at times “turn the other cheek” or “adopt the self-sacrificing spirit of Jesus,” groups of people with a common ethnic or theological interest rarely do. Politics (the balancing of competing interests) is not the ideal, but it is the way things are, even in the church. So how can leaders of the faith manage the politics that comes with competing interests in the church? I would like to offer four principles that have helped me manage politics through the years. I don’t claim to do these well, but to the degree I have been able to implement them, it has enhanced spiritual outcomes in faith communities.

1) The leader must practice humility and self-distrust. Paul discusses such an approach in a powerful passage, 2 Tim 2:24-26 (my translation): “The servant of the Lord must not be quarrelsome, but rather gentle toward everyone; teachable, bearing slander without resentment, in humility instructing those who ‘oppose themselves,’ in the hope that God might give them repentance leading to knowledge of truth, and that they might escape the trap of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.” “Difficult people” in the church cannot free themselves from Satan’s trap. Nor can we free them or ourselves. Only a miracle of God will do. It is not by coercion or shame-talk that politics can be managed, but by exhibiting in our own behavior as leaders the self-sacrificing spirit of Jesus. No group will deny itself unless led by self-denying leaders. When we shame people, they raise walls of defense. When we practice humility, gentleness, teachability and meekness, the way is opened for God to transform the hearts of others. Self-denial is not natural, it is a miracle whenever it occurs. The best counter to politics in the church is not to demand our fair share of whatever, but to be willing to yield our rights for the sake of the whole.

2) The leader must learn and exhibit empathy. Genuine empathy is also a miraculous event whenever it occurs. By nature selfish human beings are primarily concerned with their own interests and welfare. But an immersion in the grace and mercy of God can open our eyes to the suffering of others. A negative example of this is the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matt 18:21-35). Not appreciating the mercy of the king, the unforgiving servant did not see what the onlookers saw, that his fellow servant was in the same position toward him that he had been toward the king. Seeing that fellow servant through the eyes of the king would have given him new glasses with which to see and understand the heart of another. We develop empathy when we experience the empathy of God. We learn compassion from the compassion that was first shown to us. We love because God first loved us. We forgive because we have been forgiven. Empathy enables us to see and care about the interests of others and thereby to find a way to balance those interests in a way that unites people rather than divides them.

3) The leader must have a passion for fairness (justice). Some people have more of a passion for fairness than others by nature. But I believe we can all learn to be more fair in the way we look at issues. In a way fairness is not possible until we have discovered both humility and empathy. A learning spirit, combined with empathy, will produce a passion for justice. When we have determined the facts of a situation, as far as that is possible, and when we care deeply about all of those we serve, we will be able to move people toward the fairest possible outcome. When the people know that the leader intends to be fair, they are more willing to trust the process, believing that unfairness, should it occur, can and will be corrected. New Testament words like “righteous,” “righteousness,” “justification,” and “judgment” all are grounded in the concept of fairness.

4) Distinguishing the clear and the unclear. This is particularly relevant when theological discussions become political. While the Bible is the rule of faith and practice, not everything in the Bible is equally clear. Understanding the difference between what is clear and what is unclear in the Bible helps us to avoid arguments over ideas that are not clearly established in the text. One side of a discussion may see one side of truth clearly, but not see the other. Truth is often a tension between poles rather than an either/or directive. When people see that the Bible often clearly teaches things that strike us as opposites, we come to realize that many of our political conflicts arise from competing groups seeing the side of truth that appeals to their personalities and then trying to eliminate from the group those whose personalities incline them to see the other side. A commitment to Scripture over our opinion about Scripture, a willingness to subject all that we believe to the text, is one of the best ways to manage theological politics in the church. I have written at length about issues of interpretation in the book The Deep Things of God (available as part of the book CD in the shopping portion of this website).

It would be nice if all politics could be eliminated from the church. On the other hand, that might cause us all to become theologically lazy. It is often in the heat of conflict that people open their Bibles with a fresh willingness to learn and grow. It is often in the heat of conflict that we are forced to engage the other and discover that they are partly right. The One who sets up “kings” and puts them down is well able to manage the mess that human politics can create, even in the church. I have found that confidence in God and His ultimate outcomes gives me the patience to deal with politics in the church, and even begin the process of dealing with the self-interest in my own heart.

In a previous blog (posted September 27, 2009) I raised the question whether or not there should be politics in the church. On the surface the obvious answer would seem to be “no.” Jesus’ teaching is clear. “If someone strikes you on one cheek, offer the other for a second strike. If someone curses you, offer instead a blessing. If someone abuses you, pray for him or her.” This seems to leave little room for “competing interests” in the church. All subgroups in the church should adopt the self-sacrificing spirit of Jesus toward others.

Yet all who have experienced religious institutions recognize that political action is alive and well in them. Church people struggle to find a balance between competing interests among ethnic groups, people from different economic backgrounds, and people with differing theological perspectives. While it seems they should be exempt from politics, theological discussions are easily politicized when the outcome of a theological discussion would favor the competing interests of one side or the other in a church. Is there any way to get rid of politics in the church?

A careful look around the New Testament suggests that the Sermon on the Mount was not often followed to the hilt, even in the earliest church. Within a short time of Pentecost, competing interests arose in the Jerusalem Church (see Acts, chapter 6). It seems the Jerusalem Church set up a safety net for the widows in the church who may have been abandoned by their families when they accepted Christ. The Greek-speaking members of the church complained that the Greek-speaking widows of the church were not getting their fair share of the daily distribution of food. The complaint was brought to the apostles and they responded that it was not their responsibility to turn away from preaching to focus on food distribution. They invited the church instead to appoint seven men to take care of the matter.

But there are two elements in the story that are puzzling if these “deacons” were simply being appointed to relieve the apostles of administrative responsibilities. First of all, the seven “deacons” hardly confined themselves to menial tasks. The two we know the most about, Stephen and Philip, did a lot of preaching themselves, and in Philip’s case, he even did a lot of traveling. So the seven “deacons” behaved much as the apostles did. The other puzzling element in the story is that the seven deacons all had distinctively Greek names. While some of the apostles had adopted Greek names, their primary names were Hebrew: for example, Peter was a Greek name, but that is only because of translation, his real name was Simeon and Jesus’ gave him the Aramaic nickname Cephas, the linguistic equivalent of Peter. So it seems likely that the seven “deacons” were added to leadership to ensure that the interests of the Greek speakers were fairly represented in the councils of church leadership. The problem in the church was competing interests, the solution was to make sure the neglected segment of the church was represented in the decision processes of the church. Sounds like a political solution to me.

A little later in the book of Acts (15:36-39), Paul and Barnabas are contemplating a second mission trip together. The previous trip had been hindered somewhat when John Mark, the nephew of Barnabas, suddenly abandoned the apostles at a difficult time. Barnabas wanted to give him a second chance to prove himself, but Paul would have none of it. There arose such a sharp disagreement (the underlying Greek word is the root of the English word paroxysm) between the two apostles that they separated from each other. Barnabas took Mark with him and Paul sought out a different companion for his mission. Couldn’t one or the other of the apostles have “turned the other cheek?” Couldn’t they have worked it out in the “spirit of Jesus?” Maybe they could have, but they didn’t. Instead they chose to go their separate ways, pursuing a political solution to strong differences.

A less-well-known story in the Book of Acts has to do with Paul’s last visit to Jerusalem in Acts 21:16 and following. Paul, Luke and a number of others, including at least one Gentile Christian named Trophimus, came to Jerusalem and stayed at the house of Mnason who had been an early disciple of Jesus (probably one of the 70 or 72 mentioned in Luke 10). The text tells us “the brothers received us warmly” (Acts 21:17). So at first glance, Paul and company seem quite welcome in Jerusalem. The next day, however, it is clear that thousands of believing Jews in Jerusalem did not yet know Paul was there (Acts 21:22) and these were believing the worst about him. Following the advice of the apostles to appease this other group of believers, Paul is arrested in the temple and his mission in the Book of Acts is brought to a close. Clearly, the church in Jerusalem remained divided between Greeks and Hebrews many years after Acts 6. Mnason, a Greek believer from Cyprus, was happy to welcome Paul. The rest of the church in town thought other thoughts about him. The end result was pretty ugly.

This brief survey of just one book of the New Testament makes it clear that politics in the church are the norm rather than the exception (see also Galatians 2:11-14). If the apostles themselves could not avoid it, church leadership today will not be able to eradicate politics from the church. Instead, it is wiser to be aware of the politics and find ways to manage political action in a way that causes the least possible damage to the gospel.

    Let me begin by apologizing for the distasteful spam that got onto this site for a few days about a week ago. We have software that protects the site normally, but somehow missed this even though it affected every thread of this blog. I trust it is now fully removed. Let me now conclude my series on the book The Word of Life.
    In my opinion, the very best part of Craig Koester’s book (The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008]) is the first half of the chapter on faith (163-174). While firmly grounded in the text and setting of the entire Gospel, Koester offers the clearest explanation of how faith works and the practical struggle for faith in today’s world that I have ever read. This part of the book brilliantly blurs the line between scholarship and devotional writing, along the lines of Richard Hays or Tom Wright. I will attempt to summarize the key points of the chapter here. If you are interested in a summary of the book’s chapters, see the full review on the Armageddon web site (www.thebattleofarmageddon.com).
    Koester begins by pointing out that the author of the Gospel deliberately addresses the faith issues of future generations (20:30-31). A continuing issue throughout the Gospel is how believing is related to hearing and seeing. For John, a “sign” is a miraculous act that demonstrates the power of God in a way that is accessible to the five senses. But the miraculous “signs” in the Gospel (water to wine, feeding 5000, raising Lazarus) do not, in themselves, bring about faith in Jesus. In fact, they can even create pseudo-faith (2:23-25) or opposition (5:16; 9:16). This is because everyone sees the signs from a different point of view.
    Why then do the signs cause some to believe and others to doubt? People do not merely see signs, they interpret them. The key is what the observer thinks the signs mean. Characters in the Gospel respond positively to Jesus’ signs if they have already been brought to faith through the words from or about Jesus. It is the words that bring faith, not the “signs.” The signs can only confirm faith, they do not create it. If a person was skeptical before seeing the sign, they tend to harden in their skepticism when the sign occurs.
    For example, some characters’ point of view was shaped by a certain approach to the Torah. If Jesus heals on the Sabbath day, this is not to them a sign of His divinity, but a sign that He is a law-breaker, a sinner (5:16; 9:16). If a character has a political point of view, they will interpret the sign as indicating Jesus is aspiring to a political office (6:14-15), or attempting to raise up a revolt against Rome (11:47). But if a character comes to believe the words of Jesus before seeing the sign, he or she will interpret the sign in a more positive way (4:46-54).
    This insight is extremely important for us today. Readers who live after the resurrection of Jesus cannot see the actions of the earthly Jesus. Yet they have what is essential. They have received the words from and about Jesus through the Gospel. If Jesus were present among us and doing the miracles He did before, it would not in itself bring an increase in faith. Characters in the Gospel responded to signs with faith if they had already been brought to faith by words from or about Jesus. The words people heard from Jesus enabled them to interpret the signs which they saw. We today do not need miracles in order to believe, we need the words from or about Jesus. These are available in the Gospel of John.
    Readers of the Gospel today are like the royal official of John 4:46-54. They have received the promise of life from Jesus, but they will not know whether that promise is true before believing in it. The only way to find out is to trust in the promise and move forward. That is what the official did. The question of the Gospel is whether the readers will do the same.
    For the man born blind in chapter nine, the birth of faith brings only conflict and dislocation. For him, as well as for readers of the Gospel, faith means believing in a Jesus they cannot see in the face of conflicts that they can see. Through the Gospel the signs of Jesus come to the reader in verbal form. They need not look elsewhere for wonders to believe in. John’s text has all the works and words that they need to come to faith.
    The sisters of Lazarus send requests that are only met by silence from Jesus. But faith is kindled in Martha in the visible presence of death (11:27, see 20:30-31) in response to Jesus’ words about being the resurrection and the life (11:25-26). Martha expresses faith in spite of Jesus’ absence, delay and her brother’s death. Jesus’ assures her that her faith will enable her to “see the glory of God” (11:40). Faith creates the point of view from which she can rightly interpret the Lazarus miracle. Like Martha, we today must come to believe in the face of God’s silence and in the face of death.
    For John, faith is the context in which genuine understanding develops. Those who show an initial trust in Jesus do not have all their questions answered at the outset. They come to understand Jesus as they follow him. So if faith is the context in which understanding develops, relationship with a Jesus we cannot see can begin in the absence of sight and even of understanding. It is triggered by the words and works of Jesus and acted upon by his surrogate, the Holy Spirit. To those of a modernistic world-view, Koester’s outline of faith in John’s Gospel may seem naive in a scientific world. But a younger, post-modern generation will find the stories of the Gospel fertile ground for faith.

Craig Koester’s book The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008) takes a surprising approach to John’s perspective on the human condition in death. Throughout history scholars have tended to see John 11:25-26 as an affirmation of the immortality of the soul. Those who live and believe in Jesus "will never die." But Koester approaches this assertion in light of the whole Gospel and its testimony regarding death and resurrection. This approach yields a different conclusion on these texts.

One of the great, central themes of John’s Gospel is life and how to have it more abundantly. The great forces that threaten life are sickness and death. But if God is the giver of life, why do sickness and death exist? According to Koester, the Gospel does not offer an answer to this question, instead it reframes the question (9:3-4). Sickness and death are a given in this life, the great question is, what will God do with them? They become the context in which Jesus brings God’s gift of life. In the Fourth Gospel the solution to sickness is healing and the solution to death is resurrection, not an immortal soul.

On the human side, faith is the key to both healing and resurrection. Eternal life begins in the present through faith which leads to relationship with God. But how can it be called "eternal life" when believers die? The relationship with God that begins in faith is not terminated by death, but continues in the promise of the resurrection (6:33, 39). But what happens in between death and resurrection? In what sense is it that the one who lives and believes in Jesus will never die?

Koester addresses this question in some detail on pages 179-182. For the Gospel death is an intruder that constantly threatens life through sickness, violence and decay. People are threatened with death throughout the Gospel. Even Jesus, Peter and the beloved disciple fall prey to it. So the Gospel says two things about death, it is real but it is not final. Death is not an illusion. It is not an altered state of existence. It is the opposite of life. The Gospel does not tell us where it came from, it is simply a given. Jesus begins with the problem that exists and looks forward to what can be done from there.

When Jesus appears in Bethany, He faces hard questions from the two sisters of Lazarus. They see death as final and complain that Jesus could have prevented the death of Lazarus had He come to them sooner. This would have been the golden moment to tell Martha that everything is OK. Lazarus’ soul is in heaven. He has gone to a better place. He is in a superior state of existence. Instead Jesus says, "your brother will rise again" (John 11:23). Death is real and it is tragic but it is not final. Jesus treats Lazarus as a whole person. He no longer exists but has the promise of rising to a new life.

When He says, "I am the resurrection and the life" (11:25), Jesus indicates that resurrection will be defined by His own experience. Jesus dies and rises again as a whole person. There is no suggestion that when His body died his soul ascended to heaven. In fact the opposite is asserted (20:17). Jesus’ death and resurrection sets the path that Lazarus will also take. He is dead as a whole person and has been dead for four days (11:17). His death is real and it is complete. The theology of resurrection in the gospel means that death is real without qualification, but it is not final. The way Jesus calls Lazarus out of the tomb anticipates the last day, when all who are in the graves will hear the voice of Jesus (11:44; 5:28-29).

What then, does Jesus mean when He says that the one who believes in Him will never die (11:26)? People of faith do die in the ordinary, physical sense. But there is another sense in which they do not die. Life and death are not just physical. They also have a relational aspect. The highest kind of life is the relationship with Jesus and His Father that comes through faith. Wile conscious existence ends with a person’s final breath, the relationship with God is not ended by death. It extends into the future through the promise of the resurrection. The Gospel’s metaphor for death is "sleep" (11:11-14). Someone who is asleep can remain in the care of someone else until he or she is awakened. Those who sleep in death remain in God’s care until they are awakened to life in Christ at the last day (6:39, 44).

Koester’s outline of life and death in the Gospel of John is in contrast with popular notions of dualism in which body and soul can be separated. Koester rightly rejects this dualistic perspective on the basis of the Gospel. In this he demonstrates a willingness to follow the text, even where it leads to unpopular conclusions. That is one of the things I liked most about his book.

The thing I did like most was Koester’s perspective on faith in the Gospel of John, which I will tackle in the next and final blog on The Word of Life.

I just past through the worst month of my 25-year computer life. Some benign viruses left unattended called in all their friends and one was a deep, dark, evil virus that required the complete dismantling and rebuilding of my hard drive. Needless to say, I have been hard to reach for those accustomed to emails and blogs, etc. Anyway, I'm back for now and all seems well again with the laptop.

    As I mentioned in the previous blog, the power of Craig Koester’s language (The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008]) is better experienced than described. So here I share some of my favorite short quotes from the book. Most of these are even more powerful in context. Along with each quote is a number indicated the page on which the quote can be found. If you are interested in a summary of the book’s chapters, see the full review on the Armageddon web site (www.thebattleofarmageddon.com).

“A witness speaks in contexts where the truth is disputed.” (34)

“The enslaving power of sin might be compared to addiction, where a chemical distorts the way people see reality and overpowers their will, taking away the freedom to do something other than what the addiction demands. The relationship to the chemical becomes the primary relationship, distorting all other relationships.” (74)

“The prologue takes readers to an elevated vantage point, where they can see things that those confined to the flat plain below cannot see.” (98)

Regarding John 13:1-3: “John says that God put all things in Jesus’ hands, and Jesus now uses his hands to wash the disciples’ feet, apparently including the feet of Judas.” (117)
    
“Sins and their consequences hem people in, so that they cannot move forward without some act of release. This is what forgiveness provides.” (159)

Regarding the challenge of Christian faith as expressed in the Gospel: “(The author) calls readers to believe in a God whom they have not seen by believing in a Jesus whom they have not seen (20:29)!” (171)

“If people are created for life, they will seek whatever they think will bring it. The issue is not whether people will seek life—that is a given. The issue is where their pursuit of life will take them and where their faith will be centered.” (171)

“To say that those who believe have life now, and those who do what is good will have life in the future, is to understand that faith shapes action.” (178)

With reference to death and resurrection: “Someone who falls asleep can remain in the care of someone else until he or she is awakened.” (182)

Regarding John 13:31-35: “The traditional commandment makes self-love the standard. People are to love others as they love themselves. In the new commandment, the basis and the standard is the love that Jesus gives.” (194)

“Abiding means wholeness in relationship. It points to a relationship that endures rather than one that is transient.” (195)

    I found the following combination of statements very powerful: “Theologically, the empty tomb is a presupposition for resurrection faith, but it is not the basis of resurrection faith. Such faith requires an encounter with the risen Jesus himself. . . . The Gospel speaks to those who have not seen the risen Jesus (20:29), and Mary’s story shows that seeing the tomb, seeing the angels, and even seeing Jesus himself do not guarantee faith. Like Mary, others will be called to faith by the risen Jesus. . . . The call to resurrection faith occurs, for people of later generations, when the message about the risen Jesus is made effective by the risen Jesus.” (125-126)

This book is worth meditating on line by line. Hope these summary statements are meaningful to you.

    There is one more book I’d like to bring to your attention. It is a very different kind of book from that of Selmanovic. It is a work of New Testament theology and it is not racy and inviting. But if you like the Gospel of John, the content is worth line by line meditation as it unfolds the theology of the Gospel and its practical implications for faith today. The book I have in mind is The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), by Craig R. Koester.
    According to Craig Koester, to read the Gospel of John theologically is to ask a series of questions. “Who is the God about whom Jesus speaks? Who does the Gospel say that Jesus is? And how does the Gospel understand life, death, sin and faith?” Koester finds these issues coming up again and again in the narrative of John’s Gospel, each time disclosing a fresh dimension of these themes. So he tackles each theme in the book in light of the Gospel’s message as a whole. While it is always a useful exercise to compare Bible texts with similar texts throughout the Bible, Koester tries to understand John through the words of John alone. He lives with the book and its author until he might have missed if “distracted” by the perspectives of a Paul or a Moses. So this book offers a unique and refreshing perspective on the message of John, the best book I have read on the subject.
    The book is elegantly written, a model of clarity and organization. I don’t mean to suggest that the book is light reading. It is not. But Koester has thought deeply about scores of recognizable themes in the Gospel and has brought fresh wording and insight to bear on them. In the process he has a knack for contemporary analogies that clarify inner connections within the Gospel without over-simplifying. Koester uses an economy of language, saying much in a few words. While the writing is understandable, it is not suitable for speed reading! To put it in other words, the more you know about the Fourth Gospel, the more you will appreciate this book. Koester repeatedly illuminates connections and themes in this book in a way that made me marvel that I had not seen things that way before. You could say he points out the obvious, except the obvious wasn’t obvious before he pointed it out. Biblical theology doesn’t get any better than this.
    The power of Koester’s language is better experienced than described. In my next blog I will share a few gems. If you are interested in a summary of the book’s chapters, see the full review on the Armageddon web site (www.thebattleofarmageddon.com).  A third blog recounts Koester’s surprising outline of how John’s Gospel treats the human condition in death. In a final blog I want to share Koester’s amazing perspective on the implications of John’s Gospel for faith in a secular world. I have been so moved by this that I think I might write a whole book on it some day. The title I have in mind is The Challenge of Faith: Penetrating the Silence of God.
    As one who has written a couple of books on the Gospel of John, I find Koester’s scholarship impeccable. As one who loves to blur the line between scholarship and popular devotional writing, I was deeply nourished by this book. For those who appreciate the combination of great scholarship and great writing, this book will be a challenging read but an extremely rewarding one.

Final part of a review of Samir Selmanovic, It’s Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009).

    In this third and final review I turn to some concerns about the above book. First, it seems to me that the weaknesses of this book are closely related to some of the strengths mentioned in the previous blog. It is true that we can learn from others, both others of faith and others who express doubt and skepticism. But learning from others can also lead us astray. We can learn things from others that are not God or are contrary to God. We can become fascinated by their idols without even realizing it. So I wish the book had focused a bit more on the matter of discernment. While God can be found in the other, God is not always found in the bustle of human activity, but in the “still, small voice” that goes against the popular grain.
    I find that there is some looseness in the way the author handles “truth.” He grounds his view of “learning from others” in the image of God concept of Genesis 1:26-28. The fundamental truth of this conviction is compelling, but it does raise the question of where to draw the line between truth and error, good and evil. Can we learn about God from Adolph Hitler or Osama bin Laden? If the line between truth and error, good and evil, runs down the center of each of our hearts, can we really trust anything that we learn from others? What is the safeguard for this kind of learning that prevents us from falling into gullible nonsense at every turn? Most Christians would find that safeguard in the Bible. Samir seems a little less sure. A little more clarity on how he distinguishes truth and error in his own life would have been helpful.
    For example, the author clearly appreciates the work of the great “mystics” of the Christian church. At its core mysticism is the process of finding God within. There is clearly danger in this. One can find many things within, including one’s own personal confusion, the projected expectations of others, satanic deceptions, etc. One can also find the promptings of the Holy Spirit within. What I don’t see clearly in the book is any kind of guideline as to how to discern right from wrong, or the voice of God from the other voices in our heads and hearts. Traditional Christian faith finds its guidelines in the Scriptures. Dr. Selmanovic rightly recognizes the dangers of bibliolatry, where the Bible (which is “not God” in Samir’s terms) in essence becomes an idol that takes the place of God. We can fall in love with the words of the Bible or our views about the Bible instead of the God to which the Bible points. But the answer to bibliolatry is not an abandonment of revelation in favor of an unfiltered acceptance of what our hearts and the hearts of others have to teach us about knowing God. This is an area that I felt lacked some clarity in the book.
    Second, the book rightly highlights the perils of certainty. Religions help people find certainty in life, but one person’s certainty becomes another person’s threat. When a person or a group “knows” there is an implied criticism of every person or group that differs. So religious certainty tends to divide the world and isolate people from “outsiders.” There is much to be said for this critique of certainty. Paul himself echos Samir when he says “we know in part and we prophesy in part” (1 Cor 13:9-12). Those statements are a key part of the “love chapter,” 1 Corinthians 13. Evidently, for a human being to be absolutely certain diminishes love.
    Nevertheless, something bothered me as I read this part of the book. Perhaps this is an unfair criticism, but in the post-modern context I get the impression that the author is certain that the certainty of others is more flawed than his own uncertainty. “All certainties are wrong,” is a certainty of its own. So I’m not sure Samir has fully escaped a logical circle here. Having said that, I think he offers a message that the religious zealots of the world desperately need to consider.
    Finally, there is one place in the book where I, as a biblical scholar, just could not follow the author. On pages 238 and 239 he takes Genesis 12:1-3, which describes Abraham being a blessing to the world, as a call to allow the world to bless Abraham and his descendants. While there is much that is appealing about that idea, it simply is not in the text itself, and implying that it is seems to me a leap of faith. I loved the part of the book that follows, where Dr. Selmanovic points out the pitfalls in being a blessing, but his argument there is not grounded in Scripture, it is grounded in life. That for me is enough, I wish he had left the Scriptural claim out of the book.
    Here’s the “life” part I liked. The recipient of a gift is usuallyperceived as the weaker party in a transaction. The receiver becomesobligated to the giver and loses some of his or her independence. Thisexplains the reluctance of people to receive gifts at times. Givingputs us in control of the other to some degree. So a major motivationfor Christians to “bless” the world is that it makes the worldobligated to them. Everyone wants to teach, nobody wants to learn. Theauthor argues that a mature Christianity will offer its gifts in thehumility that accepts gifts in return. It will offer teaching in ateachable spirit. It will learn along with those who learn from it. Theworld will need Christians once Christians learn to need the world.
    Let me offer a small caveat to this challenging argument that cuts to the heart. The blessing which was offered to the world through Abraham is a blessing that came from God and God alone. Abraham could bless others only to the degree that he himself was already blessed by God. It was “bless others as you have been blessed.” In the end, the hero of this story is not Abraham, but God. So if it’s really all about God, it is possible for Christians to “bless” the world without implying any obligation in return. When self is put out of sight, God alone will be honored. When God alone is exalted in the blessing, the world will truly be blessed. And to the degree that Christianity has failed to bless in this way, it has failed in its mission to the world. When the blessing we offer is a tool to gain political and economic advantage over others, whether or not we have intended it as such, it is no blessing at all.
    The author of this book has “blessed” us all with a clearer vision of the one God who is all in all. But he could only give what he has already received. I invite you to embrace the gift and pass it on. Or in the words of a recent movie, “Pay It Forward.”

    The biggest strength of this book is that the author asks the kind of questions the rest of us would rather not answer. He forces us to consider evidence that we would rather not know about. So even if we don’t want a book like this, I believe we need a book like this. Believing Christians need a book like this because we have tended to isolate ourselves from the world in order to avoid corruption. But that very isolation has meant that our messages resonate less and less with the mainstream of society. Christian bookstores everywhere are struggling because fewer and fewer people expect to find anything there that will be relevant to the lives they live every day. Many Christians have shut the world out and as a result, the world has shut us out. This book offers a painful but powerful diagnosis.
    If there is one thesis in the book that stands above all the others, it is the idea that in today’s world people of faith need to “find God in the other.” I detect two fundamental reasons for the author’s taking that position. First, we live in a world where people of radically different faiths can no longer hold each other at arm’s length. We have all been tossed together into a mixing bowl. The diversity that has long characterized cities like New York is now found almost anywhere. Children named Harry and Sally are now growing up and going to school with children named Mohammed, Keisha, Sanjay and Hiroshi. Before you know it Harry meets Keisha and Sally meets Mohammed and two worlds are blended into one. So we can no longer ignore the “other” as if the other were somewhere else. Second, there is a biblical reason to find God in the other. All human beings are made in the image of God. To some degree each of our life stories reveals something important about God. In that case listening to others will confront us with evidence about God we would have missed in isolation.
    The author, therefore, argues that in today’s world Christians can no longer “preside” in discussions about religion, as was the case in the colonial era. He calls on Christians to enter into dialogue with others and not expect to “call the shots.” There is Another who presides over every religious conversation, God Himself. And we all have to submit our certainties and our prejudices to the One that we all know only in part. For those who live by the evangelistic imperative, this is foul-tasting medicine. Yet it must be admitted, true evangelism has always been a two-way street. Every evangelist has to accommodate the message to new audiences and new situations. This is exactly what God did in Scripture. So as troubling as Samir’s book may be to some, there are profound truths here that have often been ignored. That’s what makes this book such a treasure.
    I think my favorite part of this book is the author’s picture of God. He remembers an early experience with footwashing, a ritual his new religion drew from John 13 (pages 162-164). A local church leader tenderly washed his feet and said, “This is how God does things in the world.” This perspective is confirmed by the biblical text. John 13:31-32 declares that in the footwashing, Jesus demonstrated the “glory” of God. God’s greatness is not found in power, wisdom or universal presence. It is found in humility. This kind of God is the opposite of religion, which boasts about how great it is and wants to conquer all other religions.
    Dr. Selmanovic drives home how easily religions become “God management systems.” While religions arise in response to God they too often end up helping people avoid God. God can be “tamed” by the words of our theology and the rituals actions of our liturgy. We extol God’s work in the past in order to avoid His work in the present. According to Samir, the unwritten code of most religions is, “We are in charge of God. If you want to find God you have to come through us. If we haven’t thought about God in a certain way, you have no right to think that way.” But God can never be made captive to our religions. He cannot be managed by us.
    Related to this is the author’s expansion of the concept of idolatry. Pagans worship physical idols. Non-religious people worship nongods such as work, possessions, lovers, children, causes and sports teams. But if idolatry is the worship of anything that is not God, then religious people often worship churches, doctrines, festivals, rituals and laws. The purpose of idolatry is to shrink God to a size we can manage. The fascinating thing is that we can always recognize other people’s idols. They are obvious and strike us as ridiculous, which they are. But our own idols make perfect sense to us. In other words, nongods create delusional fields around us. Judaism is not God. Christianity is not God. Islam is not God. And anything that is not God can become an idol. Since we are blind to our own idols, people of other faiths are needed to challenge the idols we have created out of our own faith. True conversion is not so much generating faith in God as transferring our faith from nongods to the true God.
    This brings me to the author’s most radical insight. Samir considers at least some forms of atheism a “blessing.” Atheism at its best challenges the religious certainty that leads to delusion, division and violence. Atheism at its best serves the world by challenging the “God” offered in the markets of religion. Atheism at its best helps challenge the idols we love to put in the place of God. So even atheists can bear witness to the image of God. Samir reminds us that in ancient Rome Jews and Christians were considered atheists, because they refused to acquiesce to the prevailing pictures of God. Early Muslims were considered atheists by their pagan contemporaries. In today’s world, when traditional views of God seem inadequate, believers with a fresh view of God may again be rejected as atheists. So atheists today can have a “prophetic” role in challenging the false gods of our time. Doubt can feed genuine faith as well as destroy it.
    Dr. Selmanovic’s view of God leads him to a fresh answer to an age-old question. If God is both infinitely good and infinitely powerful, why is there evil in the world? The book’s answer is: God is not like us. If I were infinitely powerful and good, I would certainly clean up the mess in the universe and do it yesterday. I would make a frontal assault on evil and put an immediate end to evil-doers. But God is not like me. My thoughts are not His thoughts. My ways are not His ways (Isa 55:8-9). The footwashing of John 13 shows that real and permanent change comes through the power of humility and weakness. Hatred does not disarm the enemy, love does. God subverts evil with good. He subverts power with humility and weakness.
    To most human beings this sounds crazy. Humility doesn’t work. Showing weakness seems naive. But that’s the whole point of John 13. God is not like us. And that is why religions tend to become “God management systems,” as Samir puts it. If we can make God over into our image, we can control God. We can have a diminished certainty. And we are satisfied. But what we end up with is not God.
    Let me close this blog with one more positive about the book. I think the author offers a profound insight into the reading of the Bible. All the major religious texts include statements that explicitly exclude others. The rabbis said the world is like a thorny bush with one rose and Israel is that rose. The Bible says that no one comes to God except through Jesus. The Qur’an tells us that there are times when unbelievers need to be destroyed. Samir makes a powerful suggestion. “The meaning of these texts will change if they are read in the presence of the other” (260). The golden rule is at the core of the three monotheistic faiths. Texts like these need to be read in the light of the golden rule. When the “thorns,” “infidels,” and those outside of Christ are present, we will read these texts differently and we will weigh the impact of our words on others like ourselves. We will feel the pain of rejection and begin to see them, not as partisans to be excluded or destroyed, but children of God who need to be loved and nurtured. “In the presence of the other, everything changes” (261).
    In the third and final blog I will address some concerns about the book.

    We live in an age when spirituality is considered good, but religion is considered bad. People want to know God, but find religion getting in the way. Enter Samir Selmanovic. He has written a ground-breaking book called It’s Really All About God: Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009). The book combines serious reflection about God and religion in the context of the author’s own unique and fascinating journey. He grew up in a secular Muslim home in Croatia, converted to Christianity, became a pastor in New York and California and keeps the Sabbath. Life has uniquely prepared him to address the intersection between all three monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and secular, post-modern spiritual concerns. The book has an almost prophetic power to jar the reader into considering thoughts and options that the reader had not imagined before picking up this book. You get a sense of his jarring style in chapter titles such as “Your God Is Too Big,” “The Blessing of Atheism,” and “When My God Becomes Our God.” But this book is no treatise on traditional ecumenism. It is rather a throbbing, personal spiritual quest that points to God as the sole legitimate purpose for religious institutions.
    Why are people rejecting religion today? Because religion is the place where many have experienced division, violence, anger, hatred, manipulation, accusations, judgmentalism, coercion and many other unpleasant things. In the name of God we religious people have made God an undesirable option for many. But this book is not about getting rid of religion in the service of some higher kind of spirituality. Rather the author tries to find the balance between affirming religion when it offers a positive witness of God and critiquing it when it makes God look bad. The author sees religion at its best as crucial to our learning about God in this world. Each religion is a witness to some facet of God’s character that might be missed if that religion did not exist.
    Religion at its core is not a bad thing. Religion is how human beings respond to their perception of God’s presence and revelation. At its best, religion is a human response to a mighty act of God. As such, religion can become a powerful witness to the presence of God among us. But religions that were founded to point toward God too often end up pointing to themselves and perpetuating themselves. Religions too often end up managing God more than extolling Him. Painful as it may be to read, Dr. Selmanovic’s critique of religion sounds a lot like the biblical prophets to me.
    In some ways, this a quintessentially post-modern book. It does not pursue truth with a rigorous, logical, scientific precision. Instead, its prose often meanders from point to story to point, carrying the reader along more like poetry than prose. One comes to the conviction that something important has been said and learned, yet at times it is difficult to put one’s finger on exactly what it was or how to put that truth into a short, summary sentence. Yet I would have to confess, reading this book is a life-changing experience. Having worked with the author over more than one draft, I still found the most recent reading a fresh, moving experience. I recommend the book to everyone whose faith is not so dependent on certainty that any expression of doubt or uncertainty will cost them their faith. If you haven’t changed a religious opinion in a decade, this book is not for you. But if God has made you painfully aware of your own ignorance, this book will be a joy.
    I could write a whole book in response to this one, but I will restrain myself to three fairly brief blogs. In the next blog I will share a few of the most profound ideas I picked up from this book, the stuff I loved about this book. In the third and final blog I will share a couple of concerns or ways I might have written it differently were it up to me.

I know this would have been more appropriate to post this two or three weeks ago, but it was the Christmas experience itself that led to the reflections below and I didn’t want to lose track of them.

Many people in today’s world are concerned about self-esteem or self-worth. We all have a certain sense of personal value or lack of it, often grounded in childhood experiences. People can spend a lifetime searching for value and few seem to find it in ways that are both satisfying and lasting.

What does this have to do with Christmas? Christmas is not about what we think we are worth, it is about what God thought we were worth when He sent Jesus to be born in Bethlehem. In the words of Matthew 1:23: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel (which means, God with us).” In sending Jesus to be born of a woman, God placed a high value on human existence. It was something like the architect of a church becoming a cricket or a beetle to explain to the insects in the church the meaning of their existence and environment.

There are three basic ways that people attempt to find value for themselves. First, they seek value in the things that they possess. This is expressed by the bumper sticker on the Mercedes: “He who dies with the most toys wins!” This is the bottom line approach: the more you have the more you are worth. But it doesn’t really work. The things we buy rot, rust, scratch and crash. The more you have the less value you find in things. And in any case, you can’t take it all with you when you die (although the Pharaohs really tried!). It may feel good to buy stuff, but the feeling doesn’t last. Ask any rich person.

The second way people seek value is in performance, to be the best at something, whether it is sports, business, politics, fashion or even church. “If I can be the best, then I’ll be somebody.” “If I become president, then I’ll be somebody.” And achievement really does mean something. But again, as the basis for self-esteem, it does not last. Athletes get old and decrepit, teachers get old and senile, beauty queens wrinkle and fade, and even if you are at the top of your game, you can still have a bad day, and then what?

The third way people seek value is in other people, what others think of them. The ugly duckling becomes a beautiful swan in the eyes of a young Prince Charming. People drop names of the celebrities they have met. Parents find pride and meaning in their children. But even this method doesn’t last. The people you love may move somewhere else, change their minds, betray you or even die. And nothing is more damaging to self-esteem than divorce. Relationships are meaningful parts of the value we sense in ourselves, but they are rarely permanent enough to based one’s self worth upon.

The bottom line is this. If possessions, performance and people solved all of life’s problems, Tiger Woods would be the happiest man on earth. He is worth a billion dollars, has achieved the top all-time rank in a high-profile sport, and obviously has the attention of more beautiful women than he knows what to do with. But would any reader really want to trade places with him right now? The rich know that things don’t truly satisfy. The high-achievers know the limits of satisfaction that performance provides. The well-connected know how fragile relationships really are. The rest of us are dreaming about things that will not get us where we need to go.

It seems to me that there is only one path to genuine and lasting self-worth. And that is to find our value in relation to a unique kind of friend, someone with the following four characteristics: He or she is genuinely valuable, knows all about us, loves us just the way we are and lives forever. The love of such a friend would provide a sense of worth that would even out the emotional ups and downs of life, it would provide inner peace and stability. To be loved by such a person means it would no longer matter what other people think of us.

Such a friend lives! His name is Jesus. Is He genuinely valuable? He made the whole universe. He knows all there is to know about us, yet loves us just the way we are. Having died on the cross, He will never die again. No one can separate us from His love. To know the love of Christ is have a sense of infinite value, He would have died just for you. And no one, not even death, can take that away from you. That’s the infinite value of God did on the original Christmas day.

That’s what Christmas is all about.

I will be making a short presentation on this topic on Loma Linda Broadcasting Network Saturday morning (10:30 PST). So I thought I would welcome the new year by sharing the essence of that presentation here. I also hope to post some reflections on Christmas before the weekend is over.

In the Bible the main place where the “fruit of the Spirit” concept is found is in Galatians 5:22-23. This is figurative language. When it comes to spiritual matters it is very difficult to use direct speech. God is real, yet very few human beings have ever seen, heard or touched Him in any way (Moses and Jesus are examples of exceptions). So when it comes to spiritual matters, we generally use metaphors, analogies or other figures of speech.

For example, when it comes to salvation, the Bible frequently makes use of law court metaphors. The human condition is described in terms of guilt and condemnation. We are legally out of synch with God. Salvation is then described in legal terms such as justification, acquittal and vindication. On the other hand, if the human condition is described in terms of debt (a banking or financial metaphor), the appropriate salvation word would be forgiveness or possibly redemption. People often treat such language as if it were scientifically precise with reference to salvation (which itself is a metaphor based either in the realm of rescue operations or healing), but it is actually metaphorical, speaking about something beyond the five senses in the language of concrete, everyday existence (“concrete” itself is here a figure of speech!).

The Bible also uses metaphors when it comes to expressing Christian community. For example, Paul speaks about the church as the “body of Christ” (1 Cor 12:27; Eph 4:12), an analogy based on the human body. Christ is the head of the church and individual believers can be described as various parts of a body, some more critical to survival than others, but all useful. Another metaphor speaks of a temple, with Christ as the cornerstone and each believe as a brick or stone out of which the temple is constructed (1 Pet 2:4-10). Both the body and the temple metaphors express the essential unity of the church, while the body metaphor also describes the diversity in function of those who make up the Christian community.

The “fruit of the Spirit” describes Christian character growth, in contrast to the “gifts of the Spirit” (1 Cor 12:28-31– which combines analogies of body and gifts), which focus more on abilities than virtues. It is an agricultural metaphor. Fruit grows on trees and trees grow in soil. Agricultural metaphors can be used to express a variety of spiritual concepts, in Galatians 5 the fruit expresses qualities of character, such as love, joy, peace, kindness and patience.

Horticultural analogies are very fruitful (metaphor alert!) in describing spiritual life. Let me close with a few examples. 1) The deeper the roots, the stronger the plant. It won’t fall over in times of storm and stress. The root of spiritual life is found in relationship with God (John 15:1-7 is an agricultural metaphor expressing this, although “fruit” there is describing the outcome of the disciples’ evangelistic efforts rather than character qualities). 2) Plants are healthier when they are pruned. Christians need to deal with emotional and personal issues if they wish to grow spiritually. 3) Shallow-rooted plants need others around them to hold them up (the importance of a spiritual community, especially for new believers). 4) Food, water and sunshine are not normally generated from inside of a plant, they come from the outside. The healthiest kind of spiritual life comes by looking outward rather than inward. 5) In order to be healthy, nutrition needs to be supplied to plants in a certain balance. Too much of one nutrient and too little of another has a detrimental effect. Spiritual communities that focus only on one spiritual metaphor are rarely healthy. 6) The same plant can look quite different if located in the middle of a desert or by a river. Plants are affected by their environment and adapt to it. The spiritual environment in which we place ourselves has a powerful impact on our lives.

Obviously, metaphors have their limits and can even be dangerous. It is easy to switch from reality to analogy and turn the conversation in directions that the Bible doesn’t support without people even noticing the shift. While we need metaphors to describe spiritual life, we also need to be careful in their use. In light of the above, I invite you to have a fresh look at Galatians 5:22-23.

Back in August I mentioned a number of significant projects that kept me from blogging for the better part of a year. The most exciting of these projects was to produce a set of 24 DVDs on the Book of Revelation. Most of this was shot on location in Turkey and Greece and in studio in southern California last summer. Things are moving along and the DVDs should be ready by March of next year, the latest. I will let you know here, of course.

But perhaps more exciting is that the series was accepted for broadcast by the Hope Channel and will be available on Direct TV and by satellite dish and internet beginning on January 2. The plan is to broadcast the 24 programs one per week on weekends. They plan to run the program five times every weekend beginning on Saturday the 2nd of January at 4 PM EST. Other scheduled times are 10 PM EST on the 2nd and 5 AM, 11 AM and 5 PM EST on Sunday the 3rd of January. Each program will include material shot on location in the area of ancient Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey, and the island of Patmos), and clips from some of the world’s finest specialists in the study of the Bible. My co-host will be Graeme Bradford of Australia, who has decades of experience in holding meetings for the general public on biblical themes.

The programs will include some footage that has probably never been seen on TV before, such as the remains of a small odeon in a back yard of ancient Philadelphia. We were also able to get special permission to visit ancient sites before and after hours, so we could do filming without having to work around large crowds. Among the 25 scholars who contributed to the series you will recognize accents from Germany, Norway, Africa, China, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and, of course, the USA.

You can watch the programs online at http://www.hopetv.org/watch-now/watch-live-online/english/
See me there!

Thanks to Terrie Aamodt for correcting my information on Joan Hedrik in the previous blog. Hedrik is not a professor at the University of Southern Maine. Rather she is the Charles A. Dana Professor of History at Trinity College.

Grant Wacker is a major figure in church history studies. He was trained at Stanford and Harvard. He is Professor of Christian History at Duke University. He is president of the American Society of Church History. For eight years he served as the senior editor of the scholarly journal Church History. He is currently working on a cultural biography of the evangelist Billy Graham. To have him involved in the Ellen White biography project (he is writing the introduction to the projected volume) is a major asset. On Friday night the 23rd of October, he gave a lecture entitled “Billy Graham and the Challenge of Biographical Research” at the First Unitarian Church of Portland, one of the few downtown buildings to remain from the time of Ellen White’s childhood. In what I write below I am attempting to share what Wacker said that night, rather than my own views.

Billy Graham is still alive, 91 years of age, and lives alone with a nurse. It is estimated that Graham has spoken to some 215,000,000 people face to face. But in spite of that a large portion of the younger generation doesn’t know him anymore, so this is the golden time and the last chance to do a living biography right.

The working title of the biography is Billy Graham’s America. There are already some 40 biographies of Graham. What do you do when there are already a lot of books on the landscape? You hope to fill in parts of the story that haven’t been covered. You ask about the larger significance of the story. Why does Billy Graham’s life matter?

Wacker reviewed a number of key differences between Billy Graham and Ellen White. They lived in different centuries. Had he lived in the 19th Century Graham couldn’t have traveled the way he did and had the world impact he has had today. Obviously Graham was male and Ellen White was female. As a white male he was a recipient of “unearned favor” in the larger society. He certainly was born with a remarkable voice. By contrast, we don’t know much about what White’s voice sounded like. White had visions. Graham claimed no visions or healings. Ellen White was a revealer, Billy Graham was an expositor.

The first step in writing a biography is determining the role of the author. In a way, the author needs to find his or her own voice in writing about another person. As an evangelical Christian, Wacker approaches Graham from the perspective of an “insider.” He has some automatic knowledge of the nuances that make evangelicals unique. But the problem with “insiders” is that they have a tendency to varnish the story. The “hagiographers” do more damage to the subject than the detractors do. Hagiography damages the author with the audience and robs the subject of their human nobility, the nobility of the human struggle, of learning how to be who they are. Graham often made mistakes and had to say he was sorry.

Another option is for the biographer to deliberately write as an “outsider,” using the language and tools of academia. As an outsider, you immerse yourself in the available materials until you know the subject better than the subject knows himself or herself. You study the person until you know the difference between a twitch and a wink. But you don’t go so deep that you lose your own perspective on the subject. The ideal biography is suspended somewhere between the insider and the outsider perspective.

The outsider must strive to be fair. Wacker believes it is important that you can “look the subject in the eye” when you’re finished. The subject needs to be able to recognize themselves in the portrait. Fairness is also needed toward the critics of the subject. In biography there are often non-negotiable divides. For example, either God was working in a given situation or it was coincidental. Either Ellen White’s visions came from God or they did not. You can call it “plagiarism” or you can call it “insufficient attestation.” There is a certain pretentiousness in an ordinary person sitting around and evaluating someone who changed the world. The responsibilities of Graham and White were much greater than that of their biographer’s. The responsibility of speaking to thousands (in Graham’s case 50,000 to 100,000) of people at a time. It is draining when you know how many people are listening to or reading your material.

Sometimes when you are writing a biography there is too little evidence, it is just too sparse. But at other times the evidence is just too vast. That is the problem with both Graham and White. It is the problem of selection. Which statement is normative? Which statement tells us who the person really is. It is an issue of low priority versus high priority. Which are more important, considered comments or off the cuff comments? When is a subject intentionally not talking? There is also the problem of protection. The “handlers” are usually more protective of the subject than the subject is himself. So the biographer needs to develop a relationship with the handlers in order to be successful. On the other hand, the lieutenants (in Graham’s case musicians, organizers, tech people) rarely receive their due, so their sensitivity is understandable.

In the end, the biographer has to decide which Graham to choose. Is it the one who could be very sensitive or the one with the thick skin? Is it the one who was extraordinarily humble in his self-descriptions or the one who was constantly dropping names of the people he met and worked with? Is it the one who was naive or the one who was politically astute? His multiple personalities were and are mediated by the organization that represents him. And these are often barriers to the evidence. Who is the subject? Is a person like Graham best understood as a celebrity, a hero, a leader, simply interesting, a receptacle of others’ values, someone who was influential, a legend in his or her time, or a “sower of winter wheat” (someone who’s greatest influence may be after death)?

A biographer needs to evaluate but not to judge. A biographer needs to lay out the correspondence between the subject’s best intentions and their actions. There needs to be a hermeneutic of charity. Sometimes there is an isolated comment or a single event that is totally out of character with everything else the person stands for. Critics will want to judge the entire person on the basis of those isolated occurrences. On the other hand, hagiographers prefer to hide the evidence. The biographer needs to find a fair and appropriate balance.

Wacker offered a striking conclusion. All good biography enables us to live the present in the light of the past. The task for the biographer is not so much to evaluate the subject but to stand back and let the subject evaluate us.

This concludes my five-part review of the Ellen White Conference in Portland, Maine that took place from October 22-25, 2009. I hope this review has been helpful.

The opening event of the Ellen White Conference in Portland, Maine was a public lecture by Joan Hedrik, a Pulitzer Prize winning author and professor at the University of Southern Maine. Hedrik received the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a contemporary of Ellen White. The lecture took place at the University of Southern Maine, which is also in Portland. Her lecture was entitled, “The Art of Biography.” I take it from the title (and the lecture by Grant Wacker the following night) that the organizers of the conference wanted these renowned biographers to help the group understand what it takes to write a successful biography of a significant historical figure such as Ellen White was.

According to Hedrik, there is no such thing as a truly objective biography. Biographies by definition must select from the body of evidence, skip over many important things, and view the person from a particular point of view. The biographer needs to be aware of the angle they are taking and be open with the reader about it. They must do more than just tell a story, they must also tell the significance of that story. So great biography cannot be divorced from interpretation.
It must also strike a balance between being didactic (where the reader learns new things) and entertaining (so potential readers will buy it and actually read it).

When it comes to writing a biography, the first step is a matter of plot. How do you find the right plot for a stereotypical woman’s life in the 19th Century? Most 19th Century American women were perceived to have spent the first part of their lives sitting around waiting for the right man to sweep them away. Then the rest of their lives were lived in relation to the goals and interests of their husbands. Both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ellen White ended up breaking that mold to a degree. The stereotype may also help to explain some of the challenges Ellen and the strong-minded James (her husband) faced in their marriage.

Hedrik then asked a fascinating question. What “authorized” Ellen White to write? Most Adventists would glibly answer “her call from God.” But Hedrik suggested the answer might be a little more complicated than that. She illustrated from her work on Harriet Beecher Stowe. What authorized Stowe to write in a world where women largely remained at home? Three things. Her family, her education and her religion.

First of all, family. The typical role for the women of Stowe’s day involved four things related to the home: piety, purity, domesticity and submissiveness. But Harriet Beecher Stowe transcended her domestic world through writing. The central social activity of mid-19th Century America was gatherings in the parlor. To write from the parlor was not out of keeping for the role of women at that time. They often wrote occasional poems for family occasions. So while woman’s role was largely domestic at the time, writing was an important feature of home life.

Second, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s education broadened her world beyond the parlor. It threw her together with girls from all over North America. Most women did not go to college then as they were expected to marry after high school. But Stowe did go on to prepare herself at a higher level. This was in contrast with Ellen White, whose formal education was limited to third grade because of illness associated with an accident around the age of 9. Imagine a woman with three grades of education founding medical schools and other institutions of higher learning! (The last line is mine not Hedrik’s)

An influence related to the first two was her involvement in the “Semi-Colon Club” where the writings of members were read anonymously and critiqued, which would have been greatly valuable to a budding young writer. This literary parlor culture (to which women had as great access as men) might be invisible to the typical historian yet it was critical to her development. The roles of both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ellen White were shaped in the 19th Century world, yet both women clearly transcended the roles that were typical for women at the time.

A third foundation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing was her religion. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a prominent minister, a major public figure. He was deeply concerned about the cultural diversity being introduced into American society by Catholic immigrants, who brought their saloons and carnivals over from Europe. So Stowe grew up in the home of a major “culture warrior.” Perhaps on account of her education, Harriet was much more open to diversity than was her father.

If the subject of a biography was married, the biographer must determine the weight that relationship should have in the biography. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s husband, Calvin Stowe, was one of the top biblical scholars in the country (JP note: Calvin Stowe was the source of Ellen White’s wording on biblical hermeneutics in Selected Messages, vol. 1: “It is not the words of the Bible that were inspired, but the men that were inspired.”). So Harriet and Calvin were intellectually compatible. On the other hand, they were psychological opposites. He was very ordered and she was spontaneous. He delighted in permanency and she delighted in eternal change.

Another important aspect of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s experience was losing her child by illness (something Ellen White also experienced). This helped Stowe to understand how a slave woman felt when her child was put on the auction block. Theologically, Harriet (like most people of the time) believed that the death of her child was a punishment from God for not learning the lessons to be gained from the illnesses of her older children. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was her way of redeeming the punishment which she felt God was placing on her in the death of her son. She wrote out of her sorrow. She felt that God’s wrath would be poured out on the United States of America if it didn’t abolish slavery. The plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was conventional, but the subject was extraordinary.

In a related detail, all nine of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brothers became ministers. In those days women couldn’t preach or vote, so novels were the only way they could express themselves politically. Harriet used the pulpit that was available to her, her writings. (JP note: Ellen White ended up adding the traditional pulpit to the one she gained through writing.)

One final note. Ellen White has often been criticized about leaving her children for long periods of time in order to travel and preach. But this was not unusual in that time and place. Families then were much more extended than they are today and so mothers were not expected to be as consumed with their children as mothers in our society. Children were often left with aunts and grandmothers for periods of time. (JP note: Ellen White herself wrote against the practice, but was torn between her own mothering and the call she felt from God to impact her wider world.)

Thank you, Joan Hedrik! The last blog in this series will address the Friday night lecture by Grant Wacker on the challenge of biographical research. That lecture was delivered in the venerable Unitarian Church, one of the few buildings in Portland that was around when Ellen White was a child. Most of the city center was destroyed by a fire in 1866.

For photos of the conference see http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellenwhiteproject/.

The Ellen White Conference in Portland, Maine (October 22-25) was by invitation only. Recordings were deliberately avoided so the conversation could be free and authentic. The purpose of the conference was to help the primary authors prepare for a multi-author scholarly book telling the story of Ellen White’s life (a biography). The book would be introduced by Grant Wacker of Duke University and a retrospective article (after the other chapters are complete) would be written by George Knight (retired– Andrews University). The working editors of the volume are Gary Land (Andrews University), Ron Numbers (University of Wisconsin), Julius Nam (Loma Linda University) and Terrie Aamodt (Walla Walla University).

The goal of the editors is to have all the chapters in hand by early summer and arrange for publication as soon as possible after that. In my opinion, this will be a very challenging goal. Many of the papers presented at the conference were still at a fairly rudimentary stage and the critiques generally called for major rather than minor revisions. So it remains to be seen when we can expect the finished volume in our hands. My personal guess is 2011 at the earliest with 2012 more likely. A lot depends on the editors finding the time to coach the writers through to rapid and effective completion. The rest depends on the time-frame of the chosen publisher. The goal is to publish the book through an academic publisher of top rank. The presence of Ron Numbers among the editors is crucial for that goal, as he has achieved much success in the past with these types of publishers.

For now, outsiders to the conference will have to be content with blogs such as these and personal encounters with people who were there. I thought it would be helpful to provide a list of major presenters, their assigned topics (in italics), their chosen titles, and their respondents. (In a side note: I mentioned in the previous blog that Adventists at times characterized others at the conference as "unbelievers" in the inspiration of Ellen White. They also tried the language of "insiders" and "outsiders." Both terms of comparison were rejected by the "outsiders." They preferred simply "non-Adventists.") The following list is in the order of presentation at the conference and the presumed order in the book. The introductory and retrospective articles by Wacker and Knight have not been written yet.

1) Jonathan Butler, Biographical Sketch ("Ellen White as a Modern Victorian Woman"), respondents: Craig Newborn and Heather Curtis.

2) Gary Land, Historiography ("Between Faith and History: Ellen G. White Among the Historians"), respondents: Don McAdams and Amanda Porterfield.

3) Ronald Graybill, Religious Culture ("Visions and Revisions"), respondents: A. Gregory Schneider and Joseph Conforti.

4) Merlin Burt, Shaping Sabbatarian Community ("Ellen G. White and the Emergence of Sabbatarian Adventism"), respondents: Gilbert Valentine and Margaret Bendroth.

5) Graeme Sharrock, Development of Adventist Community ("Ellen White’s Testimonies: The Pursuit of Perfection and the Development of Community among Eearly Adventists"), respondents: Beverly Beem and David Rowe.

6) Ann Taves, Early Religious Experiences ("Experiencing Visions: Methodists and Adventists"), respondents: Ginger Harwood and Robert Fuller.

7) Ronald Numbers, Health ("Science and Medicine"), respondents: Daryll Ward and Jean Silver-Isenstadt.

8) Eric Anderson, Race Relations ("Race, Slavery and Rebellion: Ellen White’s Understanding of the House Divided"), respondents: Joan Francis and John Grayson.

9) Rennie Schoepflin, Mind and Metaphysics ("Ellen White and the Self: Mind, Body, and Soul"), respondents: T. Joseph Willey and Jon Roberts.

10) Benjamin McArthur, Popular Culture ("Ellen G. White and the Dilemma of Cultural Change"), respondents: Roy Branson and Charles Reagan Wilson.

11) Theodore Levterov, Adventist Understandings ("From Defense to Dogma: Adventist Interpretation of the Prophetic Gift, 1863-1882"), respondents: Alden Thompson and Ruth Alden Doan.

12) Douglas Morgan, Society ("Ellen White and Society"), respondents: Ronald Lawson and Shawn Peters.

13) Woodrow W. Whidden, II, Theologian ("The Triumph of God’s Love: The Optimistic, Theological Theodicy of Ellen G. White"), respondents: George Knight and Grant Wacker.

14) Jeff Crocombe, Eschatology ("The Eschatology of Ellen White"), respondents: Jon Paulien and Paul Boyer.

15) Jerry Moon, Institution Builder ("Ellen White as Denomination Builder"), respondents: Bert Haloviak and Randall Stephens.

16) Arthur Patrick, Author ("Ellen Gould Harmon White: Author"), respondents: Susan Gardner (For some reason I have no record of a second respondent).

17) Terrie Aamodt, Public Speaker ("Hearing Ellen White: A Woman Finds a Public Voice"), respondents: Marilynn Loveless and Joan Hedrik.

18) Laura Vance, Women’s Roles ("Ellen White and Gender Issues"), respondents: Lisa Diller and Bernadette McCauley.

19) Floyd Greenleaf, Education ("‘Proper Education,’ An Adventist Reform Initiative"), respondents: W. G. Nelson and William Trollinger.

20) Michael Campbell, From the Outside ("Ellen G. White from the Outside"), respondents: Ciro Sepulveda and J. Spencer Fluhman.

21) Paul McGraw, Legacy ("Epilogue: The Legacy"), respondents: Jud Lake and William Peterson.

Which papers did I like the most? It is probably not fair for me to respond to that question as I did not have the opportunity to read all of the papers ahead of time. So take the following with a grain of salt. Hands down my two favorite papers were those by Graeme Sharrock and Ann Taves. Sharrock’s analysis of Ellen White’s series of testimonies to members of a single church in Michigan over more than a decade was entertaining and hugely enlightening. He also did a great job of tying the local situation into the larger economic and political setting of the times. Ann Taves’ article (actually an excerpt from a published book) was a model of objective, fair, respectful analysis of Ellen White’s early visions and charismatic experiences.

Will all 21 papers become chapters in the final book? Perhaps, but one option the editors have is to go with the papers that are truly ready by the cutoff point next summer. Any 12-15 of these papers published together would be a huge advance in our understanding of the life and times of Ellen White. Authors of weaker papers would be advised to step up their efforts in response to the comments at the conference. Based on responses at the conference a number of papers are "on the bubble" moving forward.

The first two evenings of the conference were taken up with presentations by Joan Hedrik and Grant Wacker. These presentations will not be part of the biography, but were the highlights of the conference for me. Since no papers were handed out, I took copious notes. The final two blogs will offer a summary and reflections on each of these two presentations.

The conference on Ellen White took place in Portland, Maine from October 22-25. In terms of background, the participants brought two radically different worlds of study to the conference. On the one hand were the Adventists and "Adventist alumni" who were as familiar with the life and writings of Ellen White as most people are with breathing. Many had written books on the subject and virtually all had written something and/or lectured in relation to the life and writings of Ellen White. On the other hand, the non-Adventists at the conference were largely ignorant about the life and writings of Ellen White but instead brought a vast and diverse expertise regarding the religious world of 19^th Century America. Many of us were concerned that the conference might get bogged down with all this diversity of knowledge, that people might just talk past each other and everyone go home convinced that they had just wasted a good weekend.

In addition there was an unspoken "elephant in the room." The Adventists, in particular, were well aware that some of the attendees had written books and articles that were severely critical of the life, writings, claims and motivations of Ellen White. Would Ellen White’s claims to inspiration become a point of contention, splitting the attendees into warring camps that would set Ellen White studies back for a generation? Scholars are not immune from the fearful emotions that sometimes make people overly cautious or slow to take decisive action. I, for one, felt from the beginning that the conference was absolutely necessary and a huge opportunity, but I nevertheless wondered what the outcome would be. Conferences like this are not risk free.

Well, we need to wonder no longer. The conference is now history and I am aware of no attendee who feels that it was a failure or a waste of time. While leaving open the question of inspiration (which is what diverse scientific historians do when they talk with each other), the overall outcome of the conference was an increased appreciation for the amazing contributions of a frail woman who could easily have spent her life as an invalid whose impact on the world was limited to a close circle of family and friends. There was also an increased appreciation for how skillfully Ellen White worked within the thought world and history of 19^th Century America.

The process in general was if the person reading the paper was an Adventist, the paper would be critiqued by an Adventist and a non-Adventist with expertise in the specific area of the paper. If the paper was presented by a non-Adventist, there were usually two responses, one by an Adventist and another by an "Adventist alum." The process meant there were no "free rides." Every paper had to pass muster with individuals who had specific expertise on the topic and in many cases had expressed divergent perspectives in the past. While such a procedure can be frightening to people of faith, it makes sure no one gets away with nonsense or incompetence. Every presenter and respondent needed to "have their game face on" if they wanted their work to be respected.

The non-Adventist scholars present faced a steep learning curve as paper after paper was presented by Adventist scholars who were often accustomed to in-house audiences and in-house language. Adventist presenters were often criticized for not connecting their work to the wider context of the times and not making reference to the historical and literary scholarship that already exists in regard to those times. Several Adventist presenters were criticized for not using inclusive language in a paper about a woman! But in spite of these valid criticisms the overall sense was that the non-Adventist scholars were drinking in the content of these papers and rapidly developing a great appreciation for the contributions of Ellen White within her time and place. Scholar after scholar stood up during discussion times and said, in effect, "I have never in my life attended a conference in which I learned as much as I have in this one." Statements of appreciation overwhelmed statements of concern. The non-Adventists took home a treasure-trove of new knowledge about Ellen White and they seemed universally enthusiastic about what they learned. Many seemed determined to find ways to "put Ellen White on the map" of 19^th Century religious leaders in America. It was even suggested that at some point it would be interesting to have another conference focusing on Ellen White’s contribution to the world outside North America.

A sideline to the "elephant in the room" was how to characterize the division among attendees with regard to Ellen White’s inspiration. It was humorous to see Adventists try to express that divide without offending anyone. Adventists have often been told that the term "non-Adventist" is offensive, so some Adventist speakers instead threw out the terms "believer" and "unbeliever" to characterize the divide. The non-Adventists in the room quickly rebelled! They much preferred to be called simply "non-Adventists." There was a general understanding that all attendees were interested in Ellen White as a person and a historical figure and that we could all contribute to the understanding of who she was and of the world in which she lived.

For their part, the Adventists at the conference were amazed at the relevance of the vast historical knowledge that the non-Adventists brought to the subject. Time after time, non-Adventist respondents brought up individuals and historical trends that illuminated Ellen White’s writings and actions. Each attendee brought both a body of knowledge and many gaps in understanding. Because the bodies of knowledge were so diverse, nearly every comment at times was an "aha" moment for someone. The Adventists came away with a sense that there were new worlds to explore and that the journey would shed a flood of light on issues that are heavily debated among us. Adventists were also taken aback by the enthusiasm with which these great non-Adventist scholars expressed their appreciation for the Ellen White they were discovering. They were coming to see her as a hugely important figure in her time, not just for the Seventh-day Adventist church, for a much wider audience.

Due in part to the vitriol of recent internet debates regarding Ellen White, many Adventists have been tempted to downplay her role and authority for the church. To see the admiration with which these great scholars addressed the same issues was a surprise to me and a great encouragement. While triumphalism is never appropriate, Adventists do have a "treasure" that we have often been reluctant to share with others. The attitude of most of the non-Adventist scholars seemed to be "bring her on, this is good stuff!" So a surprising outcome of the conference may be a greater willingness of Adventist scholars to share what they know with a wider world that can use all the help it can get. Ellen White was not an embarrassment at the conference, she was a source of great learning and much delight. The extreme views on the internet, both for and against her, did not get any encouragement at this conference.

Since the conference was by invitation only, many are wondering when the wider world of people interested in Ellen White will be able to get their hands on these "treasures." Stay tuned.

This previous weekend I had a chance to be part of a truly historic event. It was the Ellen White Biography Project Conference at the Regency Portland Hotel in Portland, Maine, Ellen White’s childhood home town. According to a leading participant in the conference, "This is the most important conversation about Ellen White in 90 years." The conference was co-sponsored by a consortium of Seventh-day Adventist colleges and universities and the University of Southern Maine, which is located in Portland.

For those who have never heard of Ellen White (1827-1915), she was probably the most prolific female religious writer in 19^th Century America. The recipient of dreams and visions, she helped to found and develop the Seventh-day Adventist Church through a writing and speaking career that spanned more than 70 years, from 1844 to her death in 1915. Although she was sickly for much of her life and faced much opposition both inside and outside of the church, her achievements are absolutely amazing. She helped turned a few dozen scattered Americans into a church that today has some 17,000,000 members that can be found in virtually every country on earth. She helped found a parochial education system that today is probably the largest Protestant educational system in the world. A hundred years ago she directed the founding of a small medical school in Southern California that today is the world-renowned, billion-dollar Loma Linda University Adventist Health Science Center. Not to mention that Loma Linda, California is considered the longest-lived community in the United States, largely on the basis of the health principles she taught. Not bad for a frail woman that most people have never heard of. (Full disclosure: I grew up reading the writings of Ellen White and found them inspirational as well as a guiding light for everyday behavior.)

Just a quick note. I have not forgotten my promise to continue a series of blogs on politics in the church, but the Ellen White Conference seemed too significant to ignore, so I will report on that first and then get back to the other series.

What does Ellen White have to do with a web site on the battle of Armageddon? She herself wrote a significant book on church history that concludes with a visionary outline of the final events of earth’s history that is based, in part, on the Book of Revelation. The book is known today in its seventh edition (1911) as The Great Controversy. At the conference I served as a respondent to a proposed chapter on the eschatology of Ellen White.

The Ellen White Conference was historic in that it brought together just about everyone alive who has written something significant about Ellen White or about the 19^th-Century American religious context in which she lived and wrote. By my count there were 66 participants at the conference. About half of these participants (34) were Seventh-day Adventists who work for the church or its institutions. These included such illustrious names as George Knight, Ron Graybill, Kendra Haloviak, Doug Morgan, Gil Valentine, Merlin Burt, Gary Land, Roy Branson, Jud Lake, Floyd Greenleaf, Alden Thompson, Ben McArthur and Jerry Moon. Another 10 participants were Adventists in background, but have either left the church or chosen employment outside the church. These included well-known names such as Ron Numbers, Jonathan Butler, Vern Carner, Ron Lawson, William Peterson, Don McAdams and Graeme Sharrock.

The 22 non-Adventists were almost a "who’s who" of American religious studies. There was Paul Boyer, Harvard-trained professor who specializes in America and prophecy. There was Ann Taves, president-elect of the American Academy of Religion. There was Amanda Porterfield, co-editor of the journal Church History. There was Joan Hedrik, the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Harriet Beecher Stowe (a contemporary of Ellen White). There was Grant Wacker, president of the American Society of Church History and author of the upcoming, definitive biography of Billy Graham. The better-known institutions represented by these scholars included Harvard, Princeton, Duke, Wheaton, Wisconsin, Tufts, Bradley, Trinity, Boston, Florida State and Mississippi and Brigham Young. A very distinguished list. Never before has a group like this gotten together to study the life and work of Ellen White. It is hoped that outcome will be a carefully researched and respectful biography of Ellen Gould Harmon White.

Some inside scoop into the workings of the conference in my next blog.

Should there be politics in the church? Isn’t the idea of politics in the church something of an oxymoron (putting two things together that don’t fit together)? At its most basic, I define politics as the process of balancing competing interests in a social system. For example, in the island nation of Fiji you have two main ethnic groups, native Fijians and Asian Indians. The two ethnic groups have very little in common. Native Fijians are darker-skinned (Melanesian) and have lived in the Fijian islands since before being "discovered" by westerners. The Indians are lighter-skinned and arrived during the colonial period. The Fijians tend to farm and live in the countryside, the Indians tend to live in the cities and towns and to be involved in commercial businesses. The Fijians tend to be Christians, while the Indians are usually Muslim or Hindu. When it comes to dividing up the island nation’s resources, the interests of Fijians and Indians almost always diverge. So the political way to keep the peace is to make sure that the respective political interests of Fijians and Indians are kept in a rough sort of balance. Colonial rulers sometimes kept the balance out of a lack of interest in the concerns of either side. But now that Fiji is an independent country, the prime minister will naturally come from one group or the other. There is always potential for power plays and strife as the competing interests are sorted out.

Sometimes different regions within a country will have competing interests. In China, for example, the people who live on the coast have very different interests from those who live in the interior. Coastal people tend to be involved in business and trade, people in the interior tend to be involved in farming. Coastal people interact more with the outside world, people in the interior of China tend to be more inward-looking. The coastal areas of China have a larger proportion of Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group. Various parts of the interior have large numbers of other ethnic groups, such as the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Keeping the country together by distributing resources fairly is a major focus of Chinese government. But competing interests have made it hard to keep the country together throughout its history.

Whether we like it or not, there are competing interests in any religious organization. Growing up in New York City, I remember the tensions that arose in my own church conference (diocese) between Hispanics and Anglos. The power in the conference had historically been held by Anglos, but as the Spanish-speakers rose in numbers, they felt that they were often left out in the distribution of power and resources and demanded greater representation in the "halls of power" or they would secede and form their own conference. Today there are strong and continuing efforts to make sure the composition of leadership in that church organization roughly reflects the ethnic makeup of the membership. Should it be that way, or should the leadership be chosen by God through more "spiritual" processes?

Theological differences can also create competing interests. Among Seventh-day Adventists, for example, there has always been some tension between a healing and service focus, on the one hand, and a doctrinal focus based on the study of biblical apocalyptic, on the other. Both of these foci are grounded in Scripture, but tend to lead in somewhat different directions theologically. The healing side of Adventism tends toward an outward focus of engaging the world to make it a better place. The apocalyptic side of Adventism tends toward an inward focus of avoiding contamination from the world. Naturally, when Adventists from both sides get together, there can be tension, as it is always possible that each side will see a given issue from a somewhat different perspective. Theological discussions are easily politicized when the outcome of a theological discussion could favor the competing interests of one side or the other within the church.

Is the politicization of a theological discussion helpful or hurtful? Is there any way to avoid such politicization? Does God express his will through the outcome of political debate or does political discussion make it harder for people to hear the voice of God? Is it possible to balance competing interests in the church without conflict? Is "politics in the church" always a bad thing? Stay tuned.

For those who expected a more regular presence from me on this web site, I have an apology to make and some "splainin" to do. When I set up this web site it was fully my intention to blog once or twice a month and add new content on a regular basis. But life turns out to be what happens when you are making other plans (anyone catch the allusions?). I apologize to the regular visitors who were expecting more.

What happened is that long-range promises combined with once in a lifetime opportunities to create an unsustainable situation. I ended up starting and completing three massive projects, any of which would have been fully worthy of a year’s time. I will report on these in detail at a later time. One you may already be aware of. I am one of the author’s of the Andrews Study Bible which seeks to provide marginal helps that are scholarly in quality but provided to assist readers in the basic questions and accessible to the average person. I wrote the helps for John, the Thessalonian letters and Revelation. I believe there are twelve other authors, each expert in their own parts of the Bible.

Next I wrote some Bible Study guides to the Thessalonian letters of Paul. I was the primary author and this took all of six months in itself. Most recently I became involved in a massive film/TV/Documentary project which was the culmination of a five-year collaboration with colleagues in Australia to provide materials for pastors and lay people to hold Revelation Seminars for both small groups and larger audiences. A set of DVDs was conceived to provide a model for how to teach such a class. The project expanded to include location shooting in Turkey and Greece and the collaboration of some 25 top scholars in the field, thanks to some gracious sponsorships. But that meant doing the whole project (24 one-hour DVDs) in less than three months! Needless to say, I have been working 14 hour days pretty much since the last week of May.

But the bulk of that project is now in the hands of professional film editors, so I am beginning to breathe a little easier. That means I can start to catch up on the many things that fell behind while I was involved in these three projects. I will keep you posted on developments here as things move forward.

The next major event in my life is an office move from Griggs Hall in Loma Linda to the spectacular new Centennial Complex on the north end of the Loma Linda University campus. The School of Religion will be taking up residence on the third floor overlooking the beautiful San Bernardino mountains. The move-in date is September 8. This move will consolidate the School of Religion with its two centers, the Center for Spiritual Life and Wholeness and the Center for Christian Bioethics. Hopefully, we will be completely moved in by the middle of September. The bulk of classes will begin the last week of September.

I need to begin with an apology for the long time between blogs. A number of issues arose, including trips, an accreditation visit and the opening of a new school year at Loma Linda University. I think of my readers on a daily basis and appreciate every comment that has come in, but urgencies have blocked the way for a while.

The quality and vigor of the comments since my last blog have been excellent and there are many issues I would like to address. I will take them somewhat in the order that they were posted.

R. J. Humpal wrote in response to the blog on the first part of Revelation 17: "I am amazed at the opinions of all of the people I meet who believe the Woman of Revelation 12 must be the "Church". Since when was the church ever in heaven? And as for the church giving birth to Jesus Christ? Where do people come up with this news? But what puzzles me the most is how can a church have offspring? Isn’t the church always the church?"

With regard to the church in heaven, New Testament scholars generally agree that the NT age did not replace the Old, rather it "overlapped" it, with the new and the old going on side by side until the Second Coming of Jesus. I have written on this at some length in What the Bible Says About the End-Time. I will post some of that on the web site soon. That means NT writers often portray believers as if they were already in heaven. Eph 2:6 and Col. 3:1-3 are examples. Revelation scholars often include Rev 14:1-5 as a further example, although the spiritual location is less clear there. Now if past posts are to be believed, Humpal might respond that Paul was a tool of Satan and is not to be believed. In which case the vast majority of Christians are the ones who should be "amazed." (smile) But more on that another time.

With regard to the church giving birth to Christ (Rev 12:5), the symbolism may seem weird, but that is what apocalyptic is all about. There are many first century examples of apocalyptic outside Scripture and it gets even wilder than Revelation. God meets people where they are, using their language and imagery. I am comfortable with the response of Kevin James to this on July 31. As to the church having offspring, while the "church" can be described as a single entity throughout time, it also has various manifestations at different times. Note Revelation 7, where it is 144,000 from the twelve tribes and also a great multitude from every nation. I believe the evidence is overwhelming that these are two different ways of describing essentially the same thing, perhaps at different times and places.

Credit where credit is due. Humpal notes the challenging identity of the Great City in Revelation (11:8; 14:8; 17:18; 18:10). It sounds like Jerusalem in 11:8, but is clearly identified with Babylon in 14:8 and 18:10. It may be helpful to note that Jesus warns his disciples ("when you [plural] see") to "come out of" Jerusalem before the Romans destroy it (Matt. 24:15-20; Mark 13:14-19; Luke 21:20-24). In Revelation, on the other hand, God’s people are called to "come out of" Babylon in the last days (Rev 18:4). So a strong analogy is drawn between the fate of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the fate of Babylon at the end of the world. Babylon is clearly a hostile world power that has an identity as a follower of God (note the similarity between Babylon’s clothing and that of the OT High Priest).

To the other respondents, don’t worry, your day is coming (God willing). (smile) I want to treat ideas and opinions carefully and with respect and also do a little research and checking as I have time. I could talk off the top of my head easily (known to do that all the time), but I think this venue calls for more carefulness, hence my slow responses at times. Thanks for checking in.

Sorry for the delay in finishing this blog series. I was in Russia for over a week (including travel time from California) and did not have access to email the whole time. I have been struggling to catch up ever since!

I appreciate the responses and suggestions made so far. I agree with Kevin James that one cannot ignore the parallel between the woman of Revelation 17 and the woman of Revelation 12. What one does with that parallel is the challenging question. I am reminded of the time I had lunch with Josephine Ford, a Roman Catholic scholar (and author of the Anchor Bible commentary on Revelation). In the middle of lunch, she suddenly asked me, "What do you do with the harlot of Revelation 17, anyway?" She is a dear, sweet lady, so I knew there was no hostile intent, yet I realized that how I responded would be as important as the content of what I would say.

After brief thought I said, "I believe John was telling us that the greatest enemies of the Church would be inside the house rather than outside." She looked me in the eyes for a moment, then smiled, "I believe that, too. I’ve never been convinced by the Roman Empire interpretation anyway."

Her response indicates that she (a lifelong expert in Greek and Hebrew, etc.) saw the same connection with chapter 12 that Kevin and I have seen. It underlines the point that all institutions of religion are human attempts to respond to the revelation that God has given to the human race. As human attempts, all religious institutions are flawed and even capable of being "turned" to serve the opposite of what the founders intended. Profession must be accompanied by constant vigilance and careful attention to the words of Scripture. Revelation 17 projects that the great counterfeit of true faith at the end of time will have a Christian face. When that time comes, we will all hear the call, "Come out of her, my people." Rev 18:4.

Here’s the notes for Rev. 17:7-18:

17:7 angel. Angel of verse 1 explains the vision of 3-6a. carries her. She is in a position of temporary dominance (until verse 16). Religion controls the political realm, just as it did in the Middle Ages.

17:8 was and is not. Parody of God (1:4; 4:8, etc.). ascend. . . pit. See 11:7. perdition. The eternal destruction of the wicked. Book of Life. See note on 3:5.

17:10 one is. The seven heads are consecutive. Since John is the point of reference, the "one is" would be the Rome of his day (17:18). The five fallen kings would then be Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia and Greece.

17:11 eighth (head). The beast of the final crisis. of the seven. A rebirth of one of the previous seven heads.

17:12-13 ten horns. See 12:3; 13:2; 17:3-11; Dan. 7:7-8. no kingdom as yet. These powers did not exist in John’s day. with the beast. Time of eighth head, the final crisis.

17:14 Lord. . . kings. See 19:16-21. called. . . faithful. The saints, who are sub-kings with the Lamb (1:6; 5:10).

17:15-16 waters. . . sits. See note on 17:1. The Euphrates River represents end-time, worldwide political power. ten horns. See note on 17:12-13. hate. . . fire. This event is parallel to the drying up of the Euphrates River in 16:12. burn her. See Lev. 21:9.

17:17 God is ultimately in control of the events of history, including satanic actions (9:1-5; 2 Thess. 2:11).

17:18 great city. See note on 11:8. Rome was the Babylon of John’s day. End-time Babylon will be a religious counterfeit of gospel faith. See notes on 13:1-7, 18; 14:8; 17:4-5; 18:1-4. rules. Continuous present tense. The great city lies behind all opposition to God throughout history.

I here post Study Bible notes on Revelation 17:1-6, the most natural breakpoint in the chapter. There is a vision, followed by a lengthy explanation in verses 7-18. I will share the notes on the rest of the chapter in a couple of weeks.

I was delighted with the rapid and vigorous response to the first set of notes. A few comments on those responses would be in order. As one reader notes, if anyone wants to know the exegetical and theological principles upon which I do my work, they are clearly delineated in my books What the Bible Says About the End-Time (theological principles) and The Deep Things of God (exegetical principles). I consider these principles a work in progress, yet they have not been confronted with significant objections in the last twenty years (I have been teaching them well before the dates of publication), so they are a useful in ferreting out the evidence of the biblical text. Those who don’t follow principles like these tend to overlook significant evidence, leading to problematic conclusions.

While the word "Armageddon" occurs only once in the whole Bible (Rev 16:16), it is clearly the defining point of the sixth and seventh plagues (Rev 16:12-21), which are elaborated in chapter 17, although the word "Armageddon" is not repeated there. I am well aware of the "har-moed" interpretation, but have not gone in that direction because it requires too much of a stretch (I believe) in the linguistic move from moed to mageddon. For the scholarly details, see my entry on Armageddon in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, volume 1.

I agree that more words would be desirable, but that is not a decision for me to make. I understand the reluctance of some to even have an "Adventist study Bible" and I hesitated on those grounds, but since the project was going ahead with or without me, I thought it was too significant to ignore. It might have more of an impact on people’s thinking than anything else I have written, I’d be a fool not to try to make a difference in this way.

It does not seem to me that a project like this violates Rev. 22:18-19, as one reader suggests. It seems plain to me that the passage warns against tampering with the wording of Revelation itself rather than warning against interpretation of the text. If the latter were the case, we should have nothing at all to say about the Bible. Don’t preach it, comment on it or write about it, just read it! I note that the writer raising the concern also writes about Revelation, so I am not sure I follow the point.

Anyway, here’s the next batch of notes:

Study Notes on Rev. 17:1-6

17:1-18 This chapter elaborates on the sixth and seventh plagues (16:12-21).

17:1 one of. . . bowls. Probably the sixth bowl-angel (16:12), as the waters of this verse are the Euphrates River. harlot. Prostitute. See 17:4-5. many waters. See 17:15; Jer. 51:13. The river of Babylon (Euphrates).

17:2 See 14:8.

17:3-6a A vision of prostitute Babylon riding on a beast.

17:3 in the Spirit. See note on 1:10. wilderness. See 12:6, 14. woman. Same as prostitute of 17:1, 5. scarlet beast. See 12:3 and 13:1-2. Represents worldwide political power in support of Babylon.

17:4-5 Many parallels between prostitute Babylon and the OT High Priest (Exod. 28:1-43). A counterfeit end-time religious system (see 16:13, 19), the heir of the medieval papacy. forehead, name. In Hebrew context, a reflection of character.

17:6 the martyrs of Jesus. See 6:9-11. Many interpreters note that the medieval papacy produced more martyrs than any other opponent of God’s people.

I am currently involved in a truly fun project, helping a team of a dozen biblical scholars write a study Bible, which provides notes at the bottom of the biblical text. It means being able to say a lot in a few words and that has made it a lot of fun. The version chosen by the editors was the New King James Version. It is not my favorite version, but the Word of God shines through in all translations, so I am happy to work with it.

I thought it would be great to get some feedback from visitors to this web site. So I will share the notes I have made on the Battle of Armageddon texts in the Book of Revelation (Rev 16:12 - 17:18). I have added the notes on Rev 16:12-21 below and will share the notes on chapter 17 when they are ready in a few days. Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

16:1-21 Many parallels with seven trumpets of Revelation 8-11. Trumpets affect thirds of the earth, these plagues affect the whole earth. The first four bowl-plagues are probably to be taken literally, as there is not a natural symbolic meaning. The last three bowl-plagues have clear symbolic reference.

16:12 Euphrates. See note on 9:14. Babylon’s defense system (Jer. 50:35-38). Here represents political powers of the world (17:1, 15). dried up. See Isa. 44:24-28. Here means Babylon’s loss of political support (17:16). east. Literally "sunrise." See Luke 1:78; Matt. 24:27.

16:13-15 The symbolism implies the possibility of human decision, so these verses describe prior events leading up to the sixth plague and Armageddon.

16:13 unclean spirits. See 18:2. Agents of the dragon, beast and false prophet. frogs. Recalls Exod. 8:1-9. Dragon, beast, false prophet. The counterfeit trinity of Revelation 12-13. Together they make up end-time Babylon (16:19).

16:14 demons. Satanic angels. Counterparts to the three angels of 14:6-12. signs. See 13:13-14. kings of the earth. Equivalent to Euphrates River, as defined in 17:15.

16:15 thief, awake. Recalls Matt. 24:43-44; Luke 12:38-40; 1 Thess. 5:1-6. blessed. See note on 1:3. garments, naked, shame. Allusion to 3:17-18.

16:16 they. Actually "he." Armageddon. A Hebrew/Greek mixture meaning "mountain of Megiddo." Could recall Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18) or OT battles at Megiddo (Judg. 5:19).

16:17 out of the temple. See 15:6. throne. There is no distinction in Revelation between the heavenly temple and God’s throne room.

16:18 noises. . . earthquake. See 4:5; 8:5; 11:19.

16:19 great city. See note on 11:8. Babylon. Summary fulfillment of 14:8-11. three parts. See 16:13.

16:21 talent. 30-45 kilograms. blasphemed. Confirms unwillingness of the wicked to repent during the plagues.

Last week we noted that the validity of the Bible stands or falls on the validity of its testimony regarding the resurrection of Jesus. N. T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church) argues that the only credible historical approach to the New Testament texts is that the disciples had overwhelming evidence that Jesus was raised from the dead. Wright offers four arguments that he believes would make sense to a historian. In my mind they place Christian faith in the resurrection on solid historical ground.

First, the gospel writers never mention the Bible in their accounts of the resurrection of Jesus. Elsewhere in the gospels, there are multiple quotations and allusions from the Old Testament. In the resurrection stories of the gospels there are none, even though Paul always associates the resurrection with "according to the Scriptures" (1 Cor 15:3-4). The Fourth Gospel even tells us that the disciples did not know the OT prophecies about the resurrection (John 20:9). The resurrection of Jesus was a surprise. Only later did they study the Scriptures to understand the meaning of the resurrection. Their study of the Bible did not lead them to expect the resurrection of Jesus. The best explanation of that story is that they fully believed it had actually happened.

Second, the presence of women as the primary witnesses to the resurrection is striking. Women were not regarded as credible witnesses in the ancient world. Paul completely ignores the role of the women in the story (1 Cor 15:4-8). No one in the ancient world would fabricate a story in which women were the primary evidence the story was true. The best explanation of the women in the gospel stories is that those stories recall actual events that didn’t follow the expected script.

Third, someone fabricating the story of a resurrection would embellish the appearance of the resurrected one in the attempt to make their belief credible and convincing. Instead, the resurrected Jesus is quite ordinary in the gospels. He is not some shining superstar. He is easily mistaken for a gardener or a fellow traveler along the road. The best explanation for the low-key element in these stories is that they actually happened.

Fourth and finally, the gospel stories about the resurrection never connect it with the hope of the Second Coming. Elsewhere in the NT the resurrection of Jesus is always connected with the Christian’s future hope (see 1 Cor 15: 20-23, for example). But in the gospel stories of Jesus’ resurrection there is no mention of the Second Coming, life after death, or the resurrection of the righteous. The best explanation of this is that the gospel stories were not manufactured at the end of the first century on the basis of Christian theology, rather they reflect the actual circumstances that created Christian faith in the first place. The gospels stories are not the product of faith, they are the origin of it. The stories are very early, before the time of Paul and have not been substantially altered in the process of transmission and reflection.

Wright concludes that the compelling power of early Christian faith lay in the conviction that something unique had happened among them, something not even imagined before (Jewish faith anticipated an end-time resurrection of the righteous as a whole, but not an individual resurrection within history, the Gentiles anticipated nothing of either sort). In the midst of history, God Himself came down in the form of a man and by dying and rising in a tangible body, completely reshaped the world view of those who experienced him. If God Himself had broken into this world, something fundamental has changed in terms of life, death and history; a new creation has come. This is the unique and decisive testimony of biblical faith.

The day after I posted last week I received my author copies of the new book Armageddon at the Door: An Insider’s Guide to the Book of Revelation. So you should be able to get copies from Amazon or at www.adventistbookcenter.com. This book is the sequel to The Deep Things of God (2004) which lays out an approach to the interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Armageddon carries out that approach for chapters 16 and 17 of Revelation and includes a number of pieces that can be found on the main web site (http://www.thebattleofarmageddon.com/).

Last week I communicated my excitement over the new book by N. T. Wright called Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. I promised to share some thoughts on the resurrection of Christ and its crucial relationship to the New Testament understanding of the end of the world, which includes the Battle of Armageddon.

For Wright the old idea that all religions are basically the same is nonsense. There is a world of difference between a Muslim who believes that a boy killed by Israeli soldiers goes straight to heaven and a Hindu who expects to return to earth after death to work out another stage of his or her destiny. There is a world of difference between an Orthodox Jew who believes in a bodily resurrection of the righteous and a Buddhist who hopes to disappear like a drop of water into an ocean. And for Christian faith, death is not just a transition into a new form of existence, it is an enemy, but an enemy that has been defeated in the resurrection of Christ and will ultimately be abolished forever from the universe. This is substantively different than all other views of death and its relation to human existence.

At this point the skeptic chimes in and says, "So what? Everybody believes what they want to believe. But why should we take the Christian claim any more seriously than any other?" Wright would respond along the lines of Karl Barth and a famous children’s song: "The Bible tells me so." This is of interest to visitors to this web site, because if the Bible is not true then all discussion of a Battle of Armageddon at the end of time (which is based on the Bible’s account of the End in the Book of Revelation) is a waste of time. So we, like the skeptic, are interested in Wright’s answer to the question: Why? Why should we take the Bible seriously?

Wright believes the validity of the Bible stands or falls on the validity of its testimony regarding the resurrection of Jesus. It is not just modern skeptics, but also ancient skeptics who mocked the idea of resurrection (Acts 17:18, 31-32). Resurrection from the dead was no more a common experience for the ancients than it is for scientifically-oriented people today. What caused early Christians to believe something that made no sense at all in everyday experience? Something must have happened. Did the disciples have hallucinations? Were they deliberate deceivers? Did they make up stories based on their Old Testament expectations? Wright rules these options out as not worthy of historical rigor (you’ll have to read the book for the details on that). Instead he argues that the only credible historical approach to the New Testament texts is that the disciples had overwhelming evidence that Jesus was raised from the dead. Wright offers four arguments that he believes would make sense to a historian. I will summarize those arguments for you next week. In my mind they place Christian faith in the resurrection on solid historical ground.

I apologize for the slow pace of blogs the last few months. As an administrator now, my life often carries me along with urgent demands that limit opportunity to read, reflect and write. Nevertheless, I celebrate the publication of my latest book (Everlasting Gospel, Everchanging World). My copies arrived three weeks ago. Unfortunately, although it is listed online by both Amazon and Barnes and Noble, the publisher has not yet arranged to supply books to them! I did find it by entering my name into the search engine at www.adventistbookcenter.com. The book explores what I have learned about sharing faith from my three children (ages 20-26) and son-in-law. They have been an awesome laboratory regarding the impact of "post-moderism" on faith in today’s world. If you have teen or young-adult children or grandchildren, you should find this book helpful.

Ironically, a further new book from me (Armageddon at the Door) is available from Amazon for a special pre-publication price, although I have not yet seen a copy of the book. Revised excerpts from that book are available here by clicking the button "Armageddon Trilogy" on the main web site (http://www.thebattleofarmageddon.com/). My webmaster hopes to have daily devotionals on that site up in a short while.

What triggered this particular blog was a gift. I was handed a book and asked to evaluate it. This happens a lot and I rarely have time to follow through, but this case was different. The book was called Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. It was written by N. T. Wright, perhaps the best-known and most-prolific New Testament scholar in the world today. He is the Anglican Bishop of Durham and has been resident theologian at Westminster Abbey. He is the heir to the legacy of C. S. Lewis, as one might guess from the title of the book. He recently published Simply Christian, a fresh update of the classic Mere Christianity.

Wright’s new book Surprised by Hope should be of great interest to guests of this web site. He offers a fresh and biblical critique of traditional views on the Second Coming (including an offhand comment on Armageddon), human nature and life after death, and the nature of resurrection, judgment, heaven and hell. While I think there are problems here and there at the edges, I found the core of what he wrote profoundly moving and thoroughly biblical.

I particularly gained a fresh perspective on issues related to the resurrection of Jesus, which Wright sees as foundational for the entire Christian world view in general, and its view of the end-time in particular. I plan to share some detail on how he approaches the resurrection of Jesus next week. Stay tuned.

 

I stumbled into this text in the Bible the other day. It is one of the more troubling passages I've run into. Thought you might like to see how I handle texts like these. "Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; he who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere youth; he who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed." Isa 65:20, NIV.

The problem with this text is the context, Isaiah 65:17-25. The whole passage contains one of the most beloved descriptions of what life in the new earth will be like. God will create a new heavens and a new earth (verse 17). There will be no more weeping and crying there (19). God’s people will build houses and live in them, they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit (21). Then there is the glorious climax, "‘The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, but dust will be the serpent's food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,’ says the LORD" (25).

What troubles people about this text is the presence of death in paradise (verse 20). God’s people will live long in this new earth, "as the days of a tree" (22), but they will not live forever. How can this be harmonized with the "forever" of other biblical texts (Daniel 7:18; Joel 3:20; Micah 4:5; 1 Thess 4:17; Rev 22:5)? The key to resolving this problem is to explore briefly the historical context in which the prophecy of Isaiah 65 was given.

The central theme of Isaiah through Malachi is the exile of God’s people to Babylon followed by their eventual return to the land promised to Abraham. This "Exile and Return Theme" is dominant in the writing prophets whether they wrote before, during, or after the Exile. They prophesy that the return from Babylon would be accompanied by a three-fold transformation of reality. In Ezekiel 36, for example, God planned to transform human society by restoring Israel to her land and to her witness to the nations (Ezek 36:24,28,33-36, see also Mic 4:1-5, Isa 2:2-5; 11:2-5). He would transform human nature with a new heart and a new spirit (Ezek 36:25-27, see also Jer 31:31-34; Joel 2:28-29; Isa 35:5-6). And He would eventually transform the natural world itself, banishing hunger and violence (Ezek 36:30,35, see also Isa 11:6-9; 35:1,2,7; Ezek 47:1-12).

Unlike the Flood story and the Book of Revelation, where the end of the world means the full, physical destruction of the planet, the End of the prophets would come within history and geography as they understood it. God would intervene mightily within history to transform society, human nature and the natural world. This End is usually described in the context of the exile to and return from Babylon.

There is no question that the view of the End in the Old Testament was a developing one. God always meets people where they are. As they are able, He reveals more and more of His purpose. This principle is clearly stated by Jesus in John 16:12: "I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now."

The danger in this is that later readers would try to universalize these early prophecies and expect every detail to be fulfilled at some time in the future. Instead we should allow later revelation (such as the New Testament) to guide us through the Old Testament material to a clearer picture of the End than was possible earlier. Each stage of Biblical history offers a fresh window into the mind of a God who meets people where they are, yet knows all along where He is going!

Isaiah 65:20 needs to be understood in light of the triple transformation of reality that was promised at the time when God’s people would return from Babylon. This triple transformation would take place within history, within the time, place, and circumstances of the prophetic writers. The "new heavens and new earth" of Isa 65:17, at first glance, sound very much like the book of Revelation, where God destroys the earth before creating it anew. But in Isaiah, it is Jerusalem that is created and the life span is far short of eternity (Isa 65:18-20). "Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; he who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere youth; he who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed." Isa 65:20, NIV.

As attractive as these numbers sound in our degenerate age, they fall far short of the text "there will be no more death" (Rev 21:4). Isa 65:20 is a "problem text" when read from a New Testament mind-set, but it made perfect sense in the setting of what might have been after the return from Babylonian Exile. Although God would intervene in spectacular fashion, according to the prophets, the fullness of paradise would only be restored a little at a time. In the wake of the Christ event, the book of Revelation portrays a much more radical picture of the End.

I suspect this brief essay may not connect with where most people live today. But it does offer a reason why there are so many challenging statements in the Bible. God meets people where they are. That means a text makes the best sense in the original context. When we move to today, it is easy to get confused by the differences between the Bible's world and our own. The same holds true for what the Bible says about the Battle of Armageddon. Only as we interpret Armageddon texts in their original context can we avoid the kind of wild speculation that is taken as fact in all too many circles.

Adventist study of Revelation early on focused on the identification of the United States with the land beast of Revelation 13. Particular attention was paid to idea that the land beast has lamblike features when it first appears but comes to speak as a dragon (Rev 13:11). In this perspective, America comes on the historical scene as a relatively positive power, a haven for the oppressed, particularly the religious minorities of Europe. Unlike most nations, whose political position is governed by corporate self-interest, America arose with a corporate vision of its responsibility to feed the hungry, help the weak, and rescue the oppressed. When America went to war, it was for a just and noble cause, not out of corporate selfishness.

America’s geographical location is fairly unique. It is sheltered by oceans on the east and on the west. It is so rich in natural resources that, until the last fifty years (the need for foreign oil), America was self-sufficient in most raw materials. Its abundance of rich farmland means that wars need not be fought for basic survival needs such as food. From the mid-nineteenth century on, the only nations that border the United States, Canada and Mexico, have not been hostile and are, in any case, relatively weak militarily. (The recent bout of insecurity regarding the border with Mexico is a relatively new thing for the United States) The last invasion of the "lower 48 states" was during the War of 1812, unless you count the brief foray into New Mexico by Pancho Villa in 1917. America’s borders have not been a major concern for some time until recently.

The United States, therefore, has been blessed with the luxury of living without significant threat to its existence from potentially hostile neighbors. Because of its abundant natural resources, it has not needed to be an aggressor power like Japan, dependent for its survival on imports of food and raw materials. Japan has to be obsessed with the good or bad intentions of its neighbors (including the United States), as there are so many ways that the country’s survival can be threatened from outside. The United States has had few such concerns until very recently.

Compare the United States with China, for example, a country of similar physical size. China has always felt itself under threat from hostile neighbors. There is the great bear of Russia to the north. There are the unpredictable tribes of Central Asia. There is India to the southwest and Vietnam to the south (China has fought brief wars with both since World War II). To the east are Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Wars have been fought with all three in the last hundred years. And then there is the unlimited reach of the United States navy to worry about. So the Chinese must be constantly thinking of their own political and economic self-interest. The very survival of its people demands it.

As the examples of Japan and China suggest, most nations are naturally driven to a political stance of corporate selfishness. When people feel cornered, they defend themselves vigorously. Their full attention is on their own needs and interests. America was no different at the time of its founding. It was threatened by native peoples nearby and by European powers such as Britain, France and, for a time, Spain. But by the mid-nineteenth century, America felt secure from outside threat and began to develop the sense of "manifest destiny," that it had been placed on the earth to be a blessing to the world. It was not to operate from selfish ambition. Freeing the slaves was, to some degree, motivated by the desire to be a nation that was not tainted by the kind of selfish ambition that is so characteristic in traditional geopolitics.

But all of that began to go by the wayside with World War II. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor shattered the sense of security that had once been complete. The Cold War also made it clear that in today’s world, a nation does not have to be near to be threatening. America came to realize that its security and even its survival depended to a large degree on events in the Eurasian land mass (from Great Britain to Singapore). The population and resources of Eurasia are so great that any power that can completely control the Eurasian landmass will rule the world. So the continuing worldwide reach of the American navy and air force is not an accident. Contented isolation is no longer an American option. It is very much in the national interest of the United States to act in ways that keep the nations of Eurasia divided.

This has transformed the United States from a benevolent power that intercedes in world affairs to protect the weak to one that aggressively acts to ensure its own interests. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was perceived as a major turning point in the minds of many. Whatever motives of rescuing the Shiites or the Kurds there might have been, the overwhelming purpose of the invasion was America’s own political self-interest. In the eyes of the world America is now perceived more as a neighborhood bully (dragon?) than as an understanding partner.

And there is no turning back. Al Qaeda and its allies will not go away quietly. The threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists is an ongoing threat. In order to ensure its own survival America must act as an empire, intruding into the affairs of its neighbors around the world in the hunt for those who desire to harm her. It does not matter if a Democrat or a Republican is president. The geopolitical realities of today’s world cannot be ignored. The same President Carter who sought to slow down the development of the "dragon," set in motion events that led ultimately to the invasion of Iraq. America now speaks as a dragon and feels fully justified in so doing.

I hope that readers will not mind, but I’d like to focus once more on the Seventh-day Adventist context and the book Questions on Doctrine. Readers from outside the Adventist tradition may find analogies to their own situation, but I will be addressing the Adventist context directly in this blog.

Recently at Loma Linda University, several presenters repeated their contributions at the Questions on Doctrine conference in October (along with a couple of new presenters) in an attempt to share that experience with the Loma Linda audience. We were reminded of the long history of inner-church conflict precipitation by the publication of the book.

It dawned on me during a panel discussion that there are several inner forces at the core of Adventist belief that will inevitably spawn conflict. In other words, the core values of Adventism tend to work against each other somewhat in a dynamic tension that can be invigorating and fruitful, when people are open and affirming, but can be destructive when people focus on one or the other value at the expense of the others.

The first of these values is a strong concern for the "landmarks" of Adventist faith. There is the sense that Adventism has made some significant contributions to the world of faith and no amount of doctrinal development can or should change that. Those who see this value as central to the neglect of the other two will tend to be overcritical of change of any kind.

The second core Adventist value that can create conflict as well as positive change is what I call restorationism. This is the idea that Adventists are called to restore the values of the New Testament (such as Sabbath and sanctuary) that have been lost in the course of Christian history. This value was a major driver of change in the first two generations of Adventist doctrinal development. Related to this is the idea of "present truth," that Adventism at its best will be constantly evolving in its relevance. People who adopt this value as central to the neglect of the other two will tend to promote change at the expense historic Adventist views.

The third core Adventist value is mission, the sense that Adventists have a message for the whole world. But as the Adventist world president said recently, "Theology is being driven by mission." The challenges of reaching out to a world filled with Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and many others is causing God-fearing people to reconsider how the gospel can best be expressed in settings other than the Western, Christian world in which Adventism came into being. So mission is becoming an increasingly powerful engine of doctrinal change and re-expression. But the great danger of a theology driven by mission is syncretism, where true faith is diluted by accommodation to world views that may not be compatible with the gospel.

Each of these core values is thoroughly Adventist. Yet the confluence of these core values will inevitably lead to conflict whenever one is privileged over the others. The more we become aware of our own natural biases, the more sympathetic we will be to perspectives that differ from our own natural tendencies.

In looking at myself, I think my theological work has been driven by mission, restorationism and fidelity to the landmarks in that order. All three have been important to me, but I realize that I may not have given the "landmarks" perspective as much weight as mission in the development of my own understanding of theology. But self-awareness here is half the battle. And to the degree that I keep all three values in balance, my own understand of God and faith will be richer and more helpful to others.

So when it comes to discussions such as those surrounding the book Questions on Doctrine, conflict is inevitable due to people’s natural tendency to emphasize one or another of the basic Adventist core values. But when we discover that there is more than one right way to think, we will find ourselves enriched by those we have disagreed with in the past.