Episode 181: Privilege–what it is, isn’t, and why it matters

When I teach the kids, they call me Miss Tyler, but today I am Auntie Tyler. Privilege is a concept that appears all over the Bible and in every sort of literature within it. Privilege is incredibly important within the Biblical narrative–but why? I want to peel back a lot of the rhetoric, talking points, and misinformation out there to take a hard look at how Christians should view privilege and what it should mean in the life of the Body of Christ.

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So, this morning we are going to do something very different than usual. We’re going to talk about the sociological reality of privilege and what it is, what It isn’t and why it matters—especially to the church because we find it mentioned all over the Bible and in all types of Biblical literature from the historical narrative to poetry, and wisdom sayings to apocalypse. Privilege is a word that tends to provoke strong reactions from white people, like me, even when we readily acknowledge the ways in which we ourselves don’t have it as good as other people do for this or that reason. Personally, I believe the topic has been poisoned by those who want to make it look like the argument of privilege is saying things that it absolutely is not saying—that every single white person has it better than every single person of color (POC) in this country or that if you are white then you haven’t struggled. The truth is that absolutely no one is saying that even though there are talking points out there that have been designed to provoke fear and defensiveness in white people. But the Bible talks about privilege.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have years’ worth of blogs at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on Amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids. (affiliate link) I also have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for adults and kids. You can find the links for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com, and transcripts for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

Let’s look at the UK. It shouldn’t even be remotely controversial to say that, if you are a member of the royal family or the nobility then you have natural privileges and perks that average everyday folks do not have. You are more likely going to attend Eton and Oxford than public schools. You will have top-notch health care and access to whatever it is that will assist you in developing your natural talents. You won’t worry about money as long as you are responsible with it because you have inherited wealth from your ancestors, as well as titles—giving you standing that you did nothing to earn. In fact, you didn’t earn anything you were born to possess or benefit from. No one does, rich or poor. We would all agree that it is a privilege to not have to deal with certain hurdles that others have to try to jump over.

Let’s look at Israel, and I understand this is a sensitive topic right now but who on earth would choose to be born behind the barriers in Gaza or the West Bank? Any takers? Of course not—there is no one who would not rather be born to a Jewish family in Jerusalem instead. Who would make the conscious choice of being born a woman in Iran or Afghanistan now that the Taliban has regained control of the country? Who would choose to be born in a war zone, or in an apartheid state on the side of those being oppressed? I am very grateful to be living in America and to be white because it means that I didn’t struggle in the ways that many of my friends of color have struggled. I am grateful that I wasn’t born into poverty in Mexico or South America, whose governments are either in cahoots with, controlled by, or in a losing battle with powerful drug cartels. I am grateful I have never had cause to live in mortal fear of what will happen to my sons who, despite being biracial, easily pass as white. There are hurdles I have never had to jump because I am who I am and I am sure you can say the same thing. The Bible flatly tells the have’s not to despise the have not’s and to not ignore them or mock them. When we deny the privilege all around us, we are despising and mocking those who suffer the consequences of the situations they were born into.

And there are other kinds of privilege. Generational wealth and education within the middle class. Although slavery was made illegal in the 1860’s, various forms of it lingered long afterward and even to the present day. Even poor whites, during antebellum days, benefitted and profited from cheaper cotton and tobacco than they would have if the workers were fairly paid and were free to seek employment elsewhere or were educated. My ancestors didn’t own slaves, as far as I know, but they did enjoy the benefits of what was being perpetrated against enslaved people. At the end of the Civil War, my family retained what they had before the war, while freed blacks were let loose with absolutely nothing. No land. No money. No education. No open arms waiting to embrace them anywhere. It is only within recent memory that the black community in America has been able to begin generating generational wealth–the ability to send off their children with a fair start in life educationally and financially and for the children to someday inherit and build upon what they had growing up. People who are firmly middle-class often fail to see what an advantage it is to have things provided for them because their parents had things provided for them. People who are upper middle class and rich are often completely oblivious to it. But the Bible isn’t. And the prophets sure weren’t.

The way your family life is set up constitutes an area where advantage and disadvantage can be quite obvious. No one would deny that growing up in a loving, non-abusive, supportive Christian two-parent family free from addiction—regardless of socio-economic conditions—gives young people a huge leg up psychologically over those who do not have it. Attending a school where the teachers truly care and support their students makes a world of difference. Never having lived in foster care, being raised by relatives while parents are incarcerated, dead, or just gone remove a lot of hurdles that real kids out there face. Foster kids are often put out onto the street when they hit their 18th birthday; when the support money stops coming in, and they end up at men’s shelters or on the streets.

Some privileges are seemingly random—physical beauty, musical or athletic ability, intelligence, health, and being able-bodied. All of these contribute to a person’s chance of success—including color and gender. Nothing I have mentioned so far has anything to do with merit or virtue. They are very much what we could call “accidents of birth.” No one is born deserving or not deserving any of these. They just are what they are. I would be a ridiculous fool to say that it isn’t a privilege to be very intelligent, white, and to have come from a family that was mid to upper-middle class by the time I graduated from High School. My parents paid for college—another privilege. My husband has those same privileges. We never had to worry about how to pay for college, and neither did our kids. Neither of us earned that—even though we worked hard in school because there are people who worked even harder to had to work full-time or part-time or take out student loans to afford their tuition. They, through no fault of their own, had that hurdle that we didn’t even hardly know was there. Not only that, but we were able to attend more prestigious schools with better science and engineering programs.

Let me just stop right there. Do I feel guilty about that privilege? No, I don’t—that would be counterproductive and self-centered. But that isn’t the same thing as me not seeing the injustice of it and knowing that change needs to happen. I really like Star Trek because it represents a world where a lot of this inequity has been defeated. I mean, there will always be abuse and irresponsible parents, but I believe that a world where no one is hungry and every child has equal education and opportunities is in alignment with the trajectory of Scripture. That we should greatly desire it goes without saying. I had a dream back on September 4 that I want to share. I wrote this in the morning when I woke up but haven’t shared it until now:

Last night, I dreamed that I woke up one day as a black woman in America. I still had all my memories of being a white woman, and the voice I used while talking to others was the voice of a white woman but the reactions to it were very different. I saw neglect and disrespect. I saw black youth in what can only be called a pit of vipers–cobras specifically–and my demands that those in charge do something about them going unheard and not taken seriously. And I am talking big obvious cobras just under the sand. Then, suddenly, I was white again, and I yelled about it and people scrambled to deal with the cobras as though this was the first they had heard of them. I went from setting to setting like this with similar results.

It wasn’t a matter of attractiveness because the woman whose face I bore was younger and far more attractive (I would kill for her hair, lemme tell you). The face was far more professional looking, well groomed, you name it, but she wasn’t white.

For many years now, I have been asking God to really make the reality of “privilege” clear to me, and that did it. I was so frustrated. Being “white” on the inside, in the way I thought, acted, spoke, etc. had absolutely no effect on these people’s reactions to me compared to how they responded when my face and body reverted back to my own. It was like a switch flipped in their heads that I should be listened to, cared about, taken seriously, and even feared.

Not caring about cobras waiting to strike at kids who were black until someone white was there demanding action and help in getting rid of them? And that’s the point, isn’t it? The not caring. It’s worse than hatred, really. The pretending that things aren’t wrong when steps can be taken on behalf of kids, even.

It was strange; the cobras were actually yellow. I had no idea there were yellow cobras but I looked them up and there they were, Cape Cobras. Geez, they looked just exactly like the ones in my dream, venomous and highly aggressive. They live in South Africa. And white adults were just standing by, casually uncaring. To care would mean needing to do something because no one could ever, ever see something like that in real life and refuse to act if they had even an ounce of love for kids. We don’t want to compare ourselves to apartheid South Africa—but after my dream, I think that maybe we really need to reconsider if we are different enough from them to feel good about ourselves.

How can this be true in a country that calls itself a Christian nation?

And that brings me to another reality in life about privilege, one that I knew about but had normalized until my book designer David posted something about it. I hadn’t ever realized that it shouldn’t be normal for me to worry about being sexually assaulted if I am out walking at night. It isn’t something that men need to obsess over or even really think about. They might get beaten up and mugged, of course, that can happen to men or women, but they don’t lie in their beds at night thinking, “What if an intruder breaks in and rapes me?” I think about that. I have always thought about it. Imagine being a single woman. Oh sure, I have had to deal with my fair share of discrimination—having started my working life in the 90’s. And I have had to deal with dismissive comments no man would ever hear, regardless of color. But the worst treatment I have received as a woman has been in the Church.

It was in the second church I attended as an adult that the modern worship leader began to come on to me and harass me sexually. When I rebuffed his advances, he didn’t stop. When I went to church leadership, I was told that it must be nice to know that I’ve “still got it at my age.” I was 33, hardly geriatric. And the idea that any woman naturally loves that sort of attention from a married man with six kids? Ew. It creates a hostile worship environment. Before too long, when his wife found out, I was blamed and it was made known that I was unwelcome in that congregation. He was more valuable than I was. I was the problem, even though I had done my due diligence in reporting it. It was a Southern Baptist Church, and although it surprised me then, now it wouldn’t.

But that still paled in comparison to what began to happen when God called me to teach—even though I make no effort to teach men. Heck, I make no effort to teach anyone except by posting on my websites and social media pages. I am only on the radio because people came to me and asked me to do it and I have only spoken at conferences where I was asked to come and given authority to teach. And yet, even in minding my own business, I get gender-based hate mail from men who (instead of simply disagreeing with me) get ugly and pull verses out of context to tell me that I must remain quiet. Even at home, I guess, because that is where I teach from. The reason is because of my gender, and not my level of knowledge, intelligence, giftedness or calling. It’s something men never have to deal with. Likely, it is something they can’t even imagine—and any sort of discrimination we can’t even imagine represents a privilege in our lives.

In the outside world, in many ways, I am more privileged than a black man. But inside the evangelical churches (along with too many others) he would be privileged over me. Someone white might tell him to shut up, regardless of how good a preacher or teacher or leader he is, but it would only be based upon his color.

One of the ways I like to explain privilege is this—“who would you never, in a million years, want to trade places with?” For all that many Evangelical white men (certainly not all) complain about a war on men and specifically a war on white men, I don’t see any of them volunteering to be a black man and much less a black woman. And it is because they (and we) recognize that it is far better to be white in this country than black. This doesn’t mean that as long as you are white, you have it made because you absolutely do not. A white male can struggle terribly because of poverty, a lack of generational wealth and opportunity, poor education, disability, poor health, etc.

Privilege isn’t the same thing as having no struggles, it’s just an acknowledgment that the playing field isn’t equal. And that shouldn’t make any of us bristle. Nor should it make anyone feel guilty for whatever privileges they did have. We were born into an unjust system, but it doesn’t mean we have to ignore it or have a right to deny it. We need to pray and work for a better world. One of the things I hate to hear the most is that America is a great country because the best and the brightest can rise to the top. Yeah, they can, but not always and it isn’t inevitable. As a special needs mom, I am not satisfied with living in a society where we are okay with only the best and brightest being able to escape abominable circumstances but where everyone else is destined to continue to suffer and somehow it’s okay. America won’t be great until everyone escapes, and every child is fed and educated and safe. Maybe the worst thing I ever heard another believer say is, “Well, God knew that people would be born into those circumstances,” when I made the statement that it broke my heart how much more difficult it is to preach the Gospel to people who have never known anything except deprivation and fear and righteous anger at being sidelined. It isn’t okay with me. It shouldn’t be okay with any believer to allow it and ignore it and even institutionalize it or see it as inevitable. And if that makes me a liberal then what on earth is wrong with conservative Christians? I am simply siding with those with whom Messiah identified in Matthew 25 in the parable of the sheep and the goats.

Those of us with whatever measure of privilege we have, as believers, must always speak up on behalf of and assist those who do not.

Prayers for a Privileged People by Walter Brueggemann C. 2008 pp 87-8 (affiliate link)

A Prayer of Protest

Since our mothers and fathers cried out,

since you heard their cries and noticed,

since we left the brick production of Egypt,

since you foiled the production schedules of Pharaoh,

we have known your name,

we have sensed your passion,

we have treasured your vision of justice.

And now we turn to you again,

whose precious name we know.

We turn to you because there are

still impossible production schedules,

still exploitative systems,

still cries of pain at injustice,

still cheap labor that yields misery.

We turn to you in impatience and exasperation,

wondering, “How long?” before you answer

our pleading question,

hear our petition,

since you are not a labor boss and do not set wages.

We bid you, stir up those who can change things;

do your stirring in the jaded halls of government;

do your stirring in the cynical offices of the corporations;

do your stirring amid the voting public too anxious to care;

do your stirring in the church that thinks too much about

purity and not enough about wages.

Move, as you moved in ancient Egyptian days.

Move the waters and the flocks and the herds

toward new statutes and regulations,

new equity and good health care,

new dignity that cannot be given on the cheap.

We have known now long since,

that you reject cheap grace;

even as we now know that you reject cheap labor.

You, God of justice and dignity and equity,

keep the promises you bodied in Jesus,

that the poor may be first-class members of society,

that the needy may have good care and respect,

that the poor earth may rejoice in well-being,

that we may all come to Sabbath rest together,

the owner and the worker,

the leisure class and the labor class,

all at peace in dignity and justice,

not on the cheap, but good measure,

pressed down,

running over … forgiven.




Episode 170: Why Gender and Identity Confusion Are All YOUR Fault…and MINE Too.

Last summer, I did a series on my kids show about gender identity issues and I wrote this at that time to help adults understand how it is absolutely not the kids or just the liberal media who have created this problem—we’ve been just as bad and even worse as believers. How can that be? What can we do? This week we are going to explore just that. My series for kids can be found here. There is also an extensive book list on this topic below.

(My affiliate links for Amazon products are included in the post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)

If you can’t see the podcast link for this episode, click here.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have six years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids (affiliate link) and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.

This week is really different and this episode is designed to dovetail with the series I did last summer with the kids. I designed it to help children deal with the modern crisis of gender confusion—without talking the slightest bit about sexuality because I don’t believe this has anything to do with sexuality. I believe it has to do with kids not being able to win no matter what they do, and not being permitted to be the unique people that God created them to be. Between worldly culture, and religious culture, we have really done a terrible disservice to children that has created problems that were worse than the ones we thought we were preventing.

Evangelical Christianity has been positively obsessed with creating “masculine” Christian men and “feminine” Christian women. But what does that even mean, and who decides, and based on what cultural time period and values, and what about people who were never born to meet those elusive standards? How are our kids reacting to these standards and how do these expectations damage and confuse them and drive them into thinking they aren’t really boys and girls but instead people who can’t measure up for this or that reason? Little boys are made from snips and snails and puppy dog tails, right? Not always right. Big boys don’t cry, but Jesus wept, and so did Jacob, Joseph, David and many others in the Biblical text. Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, except when they aren’t. Girls are supposed to be meek and submissive, not bring home any income that will threaten their husband’s fragile egos, and stay home and raise families based upon 1950’s upper and middle class white household standards that weren’t feasible for much of anyone even fifty years before, but what about those who never marry or can’t have children, and do not meet our culture’s standards of physical beauty? If we look back through recent and ancient history, what expectations of ours would we find to be worldly and culturally determined and which would actually be commanded and celebrated throughout Scripture? We will be covering this and a whole lot more today.

First things first. In the Bible, God never endorses any culture. The Bible, in fact, stands as a critique of human culture—past, present and future. That’s why it is useful. It didn’t tell Abraham that the ancient Near Eastern way of doing things was good. It didn’t tell the Israelites in Egypt that their culture was good. It didn’t tell the people at Sinai that they had it right. The Bible, from front to back, is the story of God rescuing us from not only our sins but our cultures—from the brutal ancient Near Eastern reality of the OT to the brutal Greco-Roman Hellenistic reality of the NT to the unique brutality of our modern times. Hellenized Judaism got slammed and so would American Christianity if we would spend a lot more time listening to what the Spirit has to say. In fact, the Bible never says, “Yes, you guys are perfectly just and absolutely doing it right.” The Bible can’t say that because we have always been and will always be creatures who are influenced by worldly standards of worth, beauty, justice, ethics, and morality. We can no more claim ourselves to be unaffected by the injustice of the world than by the pollutants in the air. We are all compromised, and we have even incorporated our culture into our religious observances, and we do that because we read our own cultural ideals into the text without even thinking about it or being aware of it. But perhaps the most damaging thing we have done is when we lift the cultural reality, the background scenery, of the Biblical world and set it up on a pedestal as an ideal for our lives in the here and now. Guess what? God was initiating a campaign to bring them out of that culture and into His, which is founded on the principles of justice and righteousness, love and goodness, grace, kindness and gentleness, and perhaps most importantly, self-control. We cannot be completely like Him when we are also clinging to the culture—no matter whose culture it is. Yahweh has reached out to us both through His instructions at Sinai and even more dramatically through the New Creation inaugurated at the Cross, not to enshrine the standards and culture of ancient societies but instead to set humanity on a trajectory of reform and freedom from participating in the evils of this world. Evils, I might add, that come in some really surprising forms.

In many ways, we have reformed. Slavery is almost unheard of within the Judeo-Christian world—despite being accepted as good and even God’s will into the 18th century by just about everyone who wasn’t enslaved. Women can now be educated in almost all Christian sects and have been freed from the tyranny of polygynous marriages that set them as rivals to their sisters in Christ and subjected them and their children to the divided attention and resources of their husbands—who enjoyed their undivided attention and partook of the undivided resources of many women. Women can now survive abandonment, as there is now respectable employment for us in the world. Children are no longer left exposed on hillsides to die as people walk by without noticing, even though we still have abortion and many of the social problems that lead women to make that choice. So much has changed but so much more needs changed. It is a better world than it once was, as any student of history can attest, but we still have a long way to go.

We get some things right, don’t get me wrong, but one of the things we have gotten very wrong is our very American idea about what is manly and what is womanly. Ideas that very much exclude men who are not naturally tall, muscular, or rugged looking. Ideas which exclude women whose facial features aren’t delicate enough or their bodies thin enough or curvaceous enough to conform to this decade’s idea of what makes a woman beautiful. Pastors give sermons talking about how men need to have a beautiful woman on their arm, one who is a model of social perfection. But social perfection differs widely from era to era and a woman’s/girl’s body is subjected to the fickleness of the worldly culture that tells men what to consider beautiful while they themselves must often deny whom Yahweh uniquely made them to be in order to measure up to the men on the covers of romance novels. We have created a tyrannical system where only a few can measure up—not to Biblical standards of beauty and gender-perfection (which are characterized not by looks but by fruit, virtue, and industriousness inside and outside of the home for both sexes) but to cultural norms. Christian men want a woman who looks good according to the culture, and women have been trained to want a man who is likewise culturally acceptable. Such is the tyranny of the worldliness of the church and such is the trap our children have fallen into—but they are increasingly realizing that it is futile and are responding in unhealthy ways.

Pastor Stewart Allen, in January of 2021, preached a sermon that became viral on the internet where he complained about wives letting themselves go and how men “need” a beautiful woman on their arm. It did not go unnoticed that he wasn’t thin, as he demanded of his wife, or attractive by modern standards, as he demanded of his wife, or even well dressed in the pulpit. Everything that came out of his mouth was worldly—and being cheered on by his audience. And he isn’t the only one saying these sorts of things—giving the message that men only need to be men but women have to meet cultural standards of beauty that few attain, not even with the help of airbrushing and computerized manipulation of their images. We live in a world where men may age but women must not. This is a message that is exalting our sons (as long as they are suitably masculine in their behavior, as defined by culture) and setting our daughters up either for failure or for vanity at a very early age. That culture does it, of course, is to be expected. That the church follows culture is criminal and vile. I do also find it strange that in terms of dealing with transgendered individuals, we say that a man and a woman are defined by their chromosomes and not by anything else, while saying the opposite when it comes to how men and women are required to behave and look. In that case, it isn’t enough to have that XY chromosome and to have male genitalia—because to be a Christian man you also have to go to lumberjack school and be capable of growing facial hair—or you aren’t really a man at all. It’s a no-win situation because we have become decidedly unbiblical and worldly in our expectations.

We weren’t always like this, obsessed with these ideas to the point of forcing Christian men to be uber-rugged in order to be acceptable as men of God. And we certainly didn’t get these ideas from the Bible, which says absolutely nothing about the ideal man in terms of appearance but instead focused on the heart and on the actions required of Kingdom humans, male and female alike. The problem came in when we decided we needed to look not only respectable in terms of our behavior, but also prosperous in terms of our appearance. Again, not biblical. Instead of standing out as counter-cultural and a refuge for the least of these and the poor and the outliers of society, we strive to look like the world in terms of their values—only, it is the 1950’s white middle and upper class world that never worked for anyone else and doesn’t represent the historical reality that both men and women have been breadwinners and that makeup and fancy hair were reserved for royalty and not for normal people because of the time and resources required to indulge in such luxuries. But now a woman isn’t deemed to be an acceptable wife or to look professional without looking like the royalty of ages past while men get away with a far, far lower standard.

What about the kids who don’t and can’t measure up to cultural standards (as opposed to Biblical standards)? Are we going to make our congregations into extensions of the hell so many of us endured in High School? Maybe some of you enjoyed the social life of High School but if you did then there’s a really good chance that you lack the perspective to appreciate what we adults are doing to our kids to try and get them to measure up to worldly standards before they ever even see a schoolroom. It’s nothing but peer pressure, and it is an insult to God and how He made individuals, not Barbie and Ken dolls.

God does not control us or commandeer us. God has never demanded we look a certain way or work out or wear elaborate outfits or makeup or spend a ton of money at the salon on our hair and nails. God stands as a witness against out materialistic and beauty-obsessed culture and not as a fan of it. Women aren’t even allowed to look like themselves if they want to appear professional, or if they want to keep a man—when he leaves, we get the speculation that we have let ourselves go instead of looking at the faithfulness and self-control of our husbands. And self-control, by the way, in Greco-Roman context, was inherently tied to the ability to control oneself sexually. But in a culture focused on externals—in a church culture focused on externals—that’s just where our worldly minds take us. And our kids watch it, and they internalize it, and they judge themselves according to those standards even before their peers get ahold of them. Am I pretty enough? Am I doing the right things to be attractive? Am I macho enough? Am I enough of a man to satisfy the crowd’s demands?

Here are the questions we force on kids when we inflict severe and unyielding gender stereotypes on them: “If I am not feminine or masculine enough, does that mean I am gay? I have all the girl parts but my body is not very girlish—so maybe I am really not a girl at all. And I am not interested in hair or makeup or being a cheerleader, am I a lesbian? I love sports and science and I am loud and boisterous and my parents tell me that I came out of the womb that way. Maybe I am a boy trapped in a girl’s body.” Or how about, “Grandpa says that I am a 98 lb weakling and that I need to get outside and play sports, but I was in the hospital three times last year with asthma attacks. I get told that I need to toughen up if I want to be a real man but I am really interested in music and painting. I write my own songs and play three instruments and my art teacher tells me that I have a real talent in oils. I don’t enjoy watching sports, much less playing them. Even though I have a crush on Sheila down the street, the other boys say that I must be gay and even the guys at church. Did God make me wrong? Why am I so skinny and sick? Why am I so talented at the arts and music? If I go to Julliard will I really come back as a…well, I hate that word a lot. Why is the way I am not manly? Why do I have these talents if they aren’t for guys and only for girls? It seems as though—if I show the world who I really am, that I don’t belong to any group at all and I don’t know how to deal with that.”

What values are we really promoting here? Where is the emphasis on fruit and godly living? Why are we focusing on attractiveness and the seventy-year-old cultural norms of a select few in order (promoted on television, no less) to show the world that Christians somehow have most-favored nation status? It’s simply another form of prosperity Gospel but just as in the areas of health and money and stuff, most people come up empty. Instead of the church being a sanctuary, it becomes just another reminder that they don’t measure up. And our kids are watching. And our kids are the victims. And our kids are fighting back by trying to mesh who they know they are on the inside, messy and unique individuals who do and do not measure up to this and that, by showing it on the outside. Or, in extreme cases, by changing their outsides. Very frankly, it is because we have given them no way to be whom God created them to uniquely be, while still validating them as males and females. It’s a heart issue we adults have and we have forced the hand of all the kids who have never really fit in, and who have no idea how to fit in. People like me. And I wonder what I would have done when I was a teenager if this had been an option for me, this counter-culture pushing back on the insane ideals that were never really reasonable for the majority. Resentment and confusion build throughout the generations until they explode into something really damaging. And not just with gender. And when it happens, we blame the generation which explodes when we should blame ourselves for perpetuating anti-Kingdom values. Haven’t we always known that it was wrong? But haven’t we gone along with it anyway, desperate to belong?

When our kids are struggling with this insane, unjust, and ungodly system of measuring up—when they don’t even know if they are really boys or really girls because they don’t fit into that very strict mold that Evangelical Churchianity has foisted on the (and the rest of us have adopted as our own and gone along with) how dare we judge them when what we must do is step back and measure what makes a real man or a real woman in terms of godly character. Until we can accept others as image bearers regardless of how well they fit in socially, aka in worldly ways, then our kids won’t be able to stomach what they hear in church as we preach one set or values from the text while we live out our faith and indoctrinate one another and especially our kids according to the worldly standards of the 1950’s while pretending that they are somehow Biblical. Or that they were a great time to be living if you weren’t upper or middle class suburban whites. There are books out there telling girls and boys what they need to be in order to be pleasing to God and none of it comes from the Bible—it comes from the culture of the last few centuries and especially the golden age of Hollywood, when men were portrayed as tough and as controllers of the world, and women were soft, and delicate and occasionally spunky but still knew their place and couldn’t get anything done without a man to protect them. That led into the era of John Wayne and Billy Graham, who changed the way the world saw evangelists with his rugged good looks and focus on physical fitness. Today, it looks like Mark Driscoll and Allen Stewart telling men and women from the pulpit about how they must measure up physically and not spiritually.

If we want to talk about gender confusion, we must start with what the Scriptures demand of both genders and then look at what they are being taught from many pulpits. And we have to learn to be discerning about the messages we teach our children—often with the agenda of not wanting them to be socially unacceptable or homosexual or whatever it is that embarrasses us—and the messages that our kids are receiving from the pulpit and asking ourselves if we are making them into barbie and ken dolls or into servants of the most high, meeting different standards and living up to what it really means to bear the image of the unseen God whose character, and not appearance, must be emulated. This God without DNA because He had to create it and who is unapologetically described in the Bible as both paternal and maternal, emotional and forgiving, merciful and justice-minded, patient, loving, kind, gentle, self-controlled, generous, an ally to the vulnerable, no respecter or persons Jew or Greek, male or female, Greek or Barbarian (an idiom meaning educated or uneducated), slave or free and we are to emulate Him in that. No excuses. What we are not called to do is to create an idol out of any cultural ideal and substitute that for the command to represent Him to the world—and the manifestation of His glory to the world will look the same and different depending on who He created us to be.

When God gifts someone with the talents of music or other arts, it isn’t because He wants them to play baseball instead. And we insult God when we shun His beautiful gifts just because of cultural pressure. Evidently, God is under the impression that masculinity is about having a penis but other than that, a man can be so many things, have so many talents and interests—and it is only the idolatry of culture that tells us otherwise. And frankly, whether you or I approve of homosexuality or not, same-sex attraction doesn’t eradicate gender. Suggesting otherwise drives people in the wrong direction and toward gender confusion and not away from it. When we penalize culturally “un-masculine” or “un-feminine” traits, we compound the problems. There is nothing wrong with a man who wants to be a stay at home dad. In fact, that might very well be God’s design for him. Who are we to tell God what men and women should do and look like? This is what we do when we marginalize Deborah for being a leader or Paul for being sickly and, by his own admission, meek in person and only forceful in writing. Or when, as Mark Driscoll and others have attempted, made their version of Jesus into a tattooed, swearing, muscle-bound fan of cage fighting who would mock men who didn’t measure up to modern masculine ideals.

We’re the problem. As moms and dads and relatives and teachers and preachers. In fact, we are worse than Hollywood because anyone can see they are worldly but we pretend that our standards are somehow not worldly because they reflect the worldliness of another generation and one specific ethnic group. It seems holy and right because we look back with rose colored glasses and refuse to see what life was really like in those days and the cost of that lifestyle for those who couldn’t ever hope to have it. Men can be meek, and women can be strong. God makes and uses all sorts of people. Not everyone will be married and not everyone will have kids. Since the Resurrection, our command to be fruitful and multiply has been tweaked into a need to preach the Gospel and multiply the children of God in that way. There is nothing wrong with being our unique selves in service of God’s Kingdom as long as we image the character of God as preached by Yeshua and by Paul—who both set such high standards that growing into them should be far more of a focus than our appearance.

Are we giving our kids what they need to measure up to Kingdom standards? Or are we desperately wanting them to look attractive to the world based on standards that have nothing to do with the cruciform message of Christ and Him crucified, resurrected, and reigning?

Helpful books (affiliate links)

Valente, Sarah Hawkes Mary Ellen Rutherford is a Brave Little Girl –uses the story of Deborah to show that brave, rough and tumble girls are still girls

Pyle, Nate Man Enough: How Jesus Redefined Manhood–this book revolutionized my understanding of how we harm boys and men

Baumann, Andrew How Not to be an *SS: Essays on Becoming a Good and Safe Man

Snodgrass, Klyne Who God Says You Are: A Christian Understanding of Identity –this was the book I based my children’s series on, but it was written with adults in mind

McKinney, Jennifer Making Christianity Manly Again: Mark Driscoll, Mars-Hill Church and American Evangelicalism –excellent book on the problems with promoting certain destructive male stereotypes as inherently Christian.

Gregoire, Sheila Wray She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up

Payne, Philip The Bible vs Biblical Womanhood –new release, read it last month and it was a really terrific challenge to those who wish to lock women and girls into man-made boxes

Barr, Beth Allison The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

Williams, Terran How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy

Byrd, Aimee Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood

 




Episode 140: Avoiding ”Torah Terrorism”–a beginner’s guide to not destroying your witness (and your family)

When I wrote The Bridge: Crossing Over into the Fulness of Covenant Life, it was for the purpose of bringing people together who didn’t understand one another. On one hand, we had the burgeoning “Torah movement” of Christians who were discovering the delights of the Sabbath and Festivals, and the benefits of eating cleaner and on the other hand we had their families who were taught that this was legalistic. And no one was really behaving themselves or really listening and so people got needlessly angry and when people are angry, they are very likely to believe the worst about one another. And so they did–and we all forgot that we were saved at the Cross and not when we came to a certain level of knowledge. I gave a talk like this a couple of months back to an online group and I am recreating it from my notes today. My notes will be in the transcript at www.theancientbridge.com but it will not be the usual full transcript.

If you can’t see the podcast link, click here.

So, this is a bit different–no full transcript, I went from these notes and added a lot more so you might want to catch the actual podcast this time around.

I want to mostly talk about the problems with a lot of the teachings and propaganda and mantras and paradigms within the HRM and MJ that I see causing problems

  1. One of the most important things is that people largely don’t read the Bible correctly—we look at what was happening in the Biblical accounts and see things as ideals instead of descriptions. But the Bible, and I was reading Sandra Richter’s The Epic of Eden the other day and she made the point that I absolutely agree with—the Bible isn’t endorsing or canonizing Hebrew or Jewish culture or any other culture. The Bible is critiquing all human culture and shows how God is leading us out of our own worldly kingdoms into His Kingdom. Biblical heroes are also often monsters. They do terrible things. We were never meant to make excuses for them—when we see bad behavior the Bible, being a wisdom text, is inviting and even demanding that we engage viscerally with the story. We aren’t supposed to read it and be unmoved. Sometimes we will be thrilled and at other times we will be utterly disgusted. We will have questions about things that outrage us with no answers given. According to Yeshua, Moses even gave laws that were basically allowances for evil—slavery, and patriarchy, and alternatives to wartime rape. And it’s okay to react to that and even grapple with it as Jacob grappled with the angel of the Lord. If we aren’t struggling with the text then we aren’t really reading it as it was written to its ancient Near Eastern audience. When people coming to Torah aren’t taught that–that Torah is wisdom literature designed to promote critical righteous thinking and to serve as really a training manual for Israel’s judges, it gets misused as a very black and white list of do’s and don’ts with no discernment allowed for when to make exceptions, when to place one instruction before another, when one even invalidates another. Obviously now we see that chattel slavery, which Moses allowed, goes specifically against the commandments to love neighbor and foreigner both. We keep pushing the envelope of love, and we look back with gratitude that the world has come so far from the brutality of the ancient Near Eastern world of Abraham, Moses, and David that a lot of these laws were very avant-garde when they were given in terms of protecting women and children and foreigners and the vulnerable, now horrify us because the Cross has changed how we view everything.
  2. Everyone who has given their allegiance to Yahweh through His Son, no matter what name they call Him by, is our brother and sister. Period. Salvation is about allegiance, not about how much Torah we think is still in play.
  3. If you wouldn’t be willing to die on a cross for someone, don’t be too keen to overturn their tables. Or engage in polemic with them—ie name-calling—because it meant something in those times that it doesn’t mean now. And overturning tables was a prophetic act that only applied to the Messiah, just FYI. When we do it, it’s usually just bad behavior.
  4. Don’t forget your salvation—it’s easy when gaining knowledge (and not yet knowing how to figure out if it is true or not because Torah peeps dish out just as much nonsense as mainstream Christians, if not more) to forget what we know. And what we know is the very real experience of the New Creation, the very real changes in our lives, after we made that decision for Jesus. Although a lot of people scream and shout about not being saved by Torah, their words and actions are the opposite.
  5. No one keeps Torah, some people just keep a few more commandments than other people. And Christians aren’t lawless, they keep more than half (58%) of what can currently be observed (42%). Your average “TO” keeps maybe 8% more. And, sadly, the mainstream Christians who are keeping that 58% are more likely to be keeping the weightier matters of the law than TO peeps. These are mantras—TO and lawless, which don’t apply to anyone. I have found that once people are aware of it, the gulf between us really radically decreases. The Hebrew Scriptures have multiple words for sin—and different levels. The lowest is chattat, meaning an oopsie. You had no idea you were sinning and it wasn’t on purpose, you aren’t in rebellion. The worst is pesha, high-handed rebellion, spit in God’s face while you are purposefully doing something He really hates, like oppressing people. I’ll talk about this more later but God really does differentiate through the Torah, Prophets, and Writings. All sins are not created equal.
  6. Don’t get prideful about the easy stuff, like resting on the Sabbath and throwing the right parties, and eating cleaner. That’s why those aren’t included in the Matthew 25 separation of the Sheep and the Goats but caring for the vulnerable is the only criteria mentioned.
  7. It is important to keep in mind what an image-bearer is and is not. An image-bearer is quite literally a representative of God’s character on earth—the language used actually makes us out to be the equivalent of ANE idols, tselem, which were supposed to be indwelt by the spirit of the deity it represented. The people saw the idol and they were supposed to remember that god or goddess. It’s the things we do in public that show people God’s character, right rulings, justice, righteousness, and generosity. Speaking of fruit—we have to be careful about zeal. Because holy and unholy zeal are juxtaposed in Galatians 5. When we make the grave mistake (and I think almost everyone does it) of neglecting the NT and focusing on the Torah, we can become dreadfully unbalanced and even violent in our speech, actions, and in our faces. And people can’t see the love we are to have for one another because it has been replaced by anger, and anger can grow the wrong kind of zeal. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar. I am warning you about these things—as I warned you before—that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
  8. The three-year tree requirement (lesson from the fruit tree). Learn, study, and keep your mouth shut. People who have recently made major shifts lack the understanding to rightly divide the new information they are getting. Being a Berean cannot be accomplished by listening to YouTube videos and just taking people’s word for things—if the Bereans had just taken Paul’s word for everything, they wouldn’t have bothered studying.
  9. Anger at the church compromises our discernment and judgment. They aren’t wrong about everything and, in fact, they are right about most things. You know, we are blinded to what we are blinded about. God opens eyes. Folks get ridiculously frustrated just because they preach and people don’t believe them. It doesn’t work that way. One, we have to have credibility with the people we are talking to (or they will be stupid to just take our word for everything) and also, they have to be receptive when we do it, plus, we can’t be behaving like unloving jerks. Speaking the truth in love—it isn’t done with a club or a machete. Pro 28:9 Anyone who turns his ear away from hearing the law—even his prayer is detestable.–>this one gets abused a lot. Hardly anyone would turn their ear from hearing Torah—the only question is how much has a person been conditioned to believe is still in play. This isn’t about rebellion, it’s about blindness and goodness knows we are all blind.
  10. Hebrew is not a unique language—it is very similar to many other languages of that region in antiquity. The idea of “returning to a pure tongue” is Rabbinic and much later than Biblical times. Also, Paleo-Hebrew isn’t a secret language, it’s a font like Times New Roman. This whole idea about the pictographs having meaning was created within the last hundred years because it took archaeologists a while to even figure out that it was Hebrew after they first found it in 1870 and at first they believed it was Phoenician. But the pictures were typical of the early origins of language and represented sounds and not concepts. This means that there are no ancient documents describing any such language, as the font went out of use in the 5th century BCE when the Aramaic language came to be used.
  11. Calendars and Names. I think there are five or six “Biblical calendars” out there. I know a guy who has actually preached all of them and has condemned as damned and stupid those on any other calendar than the one he is on right now. First, he was on Rabbinic, and then first-sliver, this is about ten years ago and he beat people to death with it. Then some folks preached dark moon conjunction to him and he was all over that and yelling at people. Then lunar Sabbath. Then the Jubilees calendar and now he is teaching Enoch calendar—and he isn’t the slightest bit humbled by how many times he has been “wrong.” He always thinks “Now I have got it!” And he is far from alone. Same thing with Names. I don’t even know how many names our floating along out there. And then there are people who will tell you that if you don’t say the Name exactly right, your prayers won’t be heard—but that’s right out of ancient magic beliefs, the idea that if you say the Name, just so, that you can control the god or goddess or demon and they have to hear and obey you. I have even heard it taught that if you are using Jesus that any miracles you receive are from the devil and not from God!
  12. A lot of what is taught by the HRM and MJ is simply not true but is passionately held to as though it is Scripture and I have taught some of it myself. Hislop, genetic hierarchies, etc. patriarchy, Hebraic vs Greek vs ANE. C&E. Marriages in crisis because not honoring vows to love them when they haven’t changed. And so we get all these memes filled with urban legends, lies, and outright propaganda from nonsense books and teachings that get aimed at Christians over Christmas and Easter that aren’t founded in one iota of archaeological evidence. But people made a lot of money writing books that weren’t researched or documented or footnoted, and sometimes when there are footnotes, they just refer to other books with no footnotes. There’s a reason why the people who really seriously study don’t teach this sort of thing. And why so many ministries have quietly removed these teachings from their repertoire.
  13. Pagan vs cultural. This is a biggie. There is a huge difference between something being idolatrous—which is actually bowing down to and serving another god, on purpose, and giving that god credit for the works of Yahweh—and something being simply cultural. Perfumed oil was placed on the head and feet of idols. It was also done to Yeshua—does that endorse paganism. The Egyptian tree of life was the acacia—does this mean that the paneling in the Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant was pagan? For that matter, the Egyptians also had a portable shrine that looked a lot like the Ark. The ancient world also served their gods with sacrifices, unleavened bread, and hymn singing. Why were they also done for Yahweh? Because they are cultural ways of honoring the divine. It’s what you do with them that decides whether or not they are idolatrous.
  14. Fake names—hurting and angering the Jewish community by pretending to be Jewish and behaving badly online and putting them in danger of being hated even more. There is nothing to be gained in denying who we were when we came to faith and putting on what amounts to airs. And it is a real point of contention with other Christians, who see it as ridiculous and cultish. Our identity is in Christ—if Apollos and Junia, of all people, didn’t change their names when they were named after a false god and goddess respectively, then why do we feel like we need to do it? We can have no greater identity than we have in Messiah. Took me a lot of years to learn that I wasn’t a second-class citizen and I even wrote a book about it, King, Kingdom Citizen.
  15. Don’t call people unclean as an insult—we all have corpse impurity. And all it meant was that you couldn’t go within a certain distance of the Temple or a city. And unclean animals are only unclean as corpses and for food. We can ride them, have them as pets, and we can have pigs on the farm to deal with the trash and all that. Everything is clean for something or another. Clean just means in its proper place or proper state.
  16. Bad scholarship. If you can’t ask questions then don’t listen to someone. If they won’t give you their sources then what they are telling you cannot be credited as truth. Just because something shocked you or gave you a warm feeling doesn’t make it correct—we’ve all been misled by our emotions and our body’s reactions to those emotions. It’s rarely the Holy Spirit endorsing something we hear.
  17. Genealogies and pointless arguments—Titus 3:9 But avoid foolish debates, genealogies, quarrels, and disputes about the law, because they are unprofitable and worthless. 10 Reject a divisive person after a first and second warning.
  18. Truth is that we need to be looking out for people more than we do. In congregations it is easier—we mustn’t dare be so afraid of confrontation that we are unwilling to have a pretty short leash on the people who are new. We need to remove this false idea that they are expected to produce ministerial fruit right away and that is very counter to how churches are traditionally run. You know, we love those new people because they are so excited and energetic, but they are also generally foolish. Not foolish meaning stupid but lacking wisdom and perspective. The OT definition of a fool is someone who doesn’t understand their place—and the place of a new student isn’t to go out trying to teach the world and that causes so many problems with people coming out of mainstream churches and into more of an awareness of Torah

 




Conversations that Christians Must Have–#MeToo and #BLM

So, last week I posted an article on social media with a video about Stewart-Allen Clark who (being quite plump himself) was going on and on about how married women let themselves go (and he is married) and he was talking about the male “need” for a beautiful wife and the importance of her being at least a “participation trophy” wife and all that (warning, it is quite upsetting that such a thing would be preached and laughed at and “amened” at from the pulpit). Of course, it was horrifying and I did something I never do. I allowed people to take the gloves off and express themselves, even though I dislike insults. I did it for a reason and God taught me a lot of things that were important through allowing that expression.

When people are subjected to unjust treatment, in whatever way, and it has gone on systematically all their lives (and by “systematic” I mean that there is a culture, i.e. governmental, social, socio-economic, and/or religious structures backing it up so that it is hard to escape from) and they are finally given a chance to vent, it can be ugly. And yet, that ugliness is there because of frustration and anger and heartache and a feeling of hopelessness and wanting things to be different (read Psalm 137!)—but when a future difference is contingent upon the actions of another person and how they feel about you and how their beliefs dictate that they treat you and even how God wants you to be seen and treated, all those things can turn easily to rage. Rage is a response to institutional injustice—a form of injustice where we just accept the illogical as logical and even internalize it because it is all we have ever known.

When the #metoo movement began, a lot of women started coming forward who never would have before. Because we couldn’t. I know all too well what happens when an 80’s-era high school teacher gets reported for repeatedly molesting a student. Unless someone saw it or it met certain standards, the accusations were swept under the rug and the accuser subjected to ostracism. But pedophiles aren’t generally sloppy enough to allow that to happen and they are generally such charming people that the non-victims rally around them protectively. Within the Churches, even Ravi Zacharias has his rabid supporters, as does Andrew Savage, who are still victim-blaming–despite independent investigations confirming assault and wrongdoing on behalf of the ministry staff.

Closer attention is now finally being paid, within Christian communities, to certain books aimed at men and their “needs”—books that subjugate their wives’ humanity in order to fashion them into becoming the focus of their husbands’ sins. It’s “okay” for them to lust, they “can’t help it”—just look better than everyone else so they will lust after you. It’s “okay” for them to be covetous of having a trophy wife, just make sure you meet the criteria. It’s “okay” for them to be shallow and want to show off a beautiful wife, it’s your job to be beautiful no matter how hard you work and no matter how many children you’ve had and menopause be damned, just spent another hour a day on the treadmill and eat next to nothing as your hormones betray you. Be willing to do whatever it is he saw when he was looking at porn, no matter how depraved and demeaning, no matter how violated you feel while doing it, and he will stop if you are submissive enough. It’s the way to keep him from divorcing you, they say, the way to keep him from cheating on you. It’s an unjust burden that no woman was ever meant to carry—being held responsible for the church-sanctioned sins of her man. But it’s an institutional problem within society. That preacher didn’t make up this attitude, He was just dumb enough to express it and post it on YouTube.

So much for “no male and female” in Christ—they can lust and covet and be prideful and let themselves go but we are required, in some “Christian” thought, to be the focus of their character flaws—and even encourage and feed said flaws. We are expected to enable sin while dealing with and eliminating our own. Imagine a husband being told to get a second and third job to satisfy our “need” to shop and wear expensive clothes! It’s no different in terms of being ludicrous and ridiculous.

These are good things to finally be able to discuss but not all I want to talk about.

I want to talk about racism. I want to talk about the kind of anger that all those women (and quite a few men) were venting on that post, howling in their frustration over the trap that man had his wife in, and the trap so many of us have been in over the years in one way or another—physically, psychologically and sexually. There were two people who came on playing the shame game and trying to passive-aggressively shut down the conversation. A lot of people don’t want to hear the anger. And I see the same thing in conversations about racial injustice. Although we whites would prefer to talk about how much better things are now than they were, as Christians we can never be satisfied until they are good. Women have it better now too, but things aren’t good as long as these sorts of mindsets exist (ones we can be divorced over and must live in fear because of).

We have this cruel thing we do, and I see it on social media. They (our black brothers and sisters) talk about the pain and shame of slavery. Some white person reminds them that slavery is over and that my ancestors, the Irish (grandma was full-blooded and dad is 75% Irish and we’ve been in this country since well before the Revolutionary War), were slaves too and brutalized. But if they escaped, could you look at their face and tell? Would you look at me right now and do you wonder if I am the descendant of slaves? Have my ancestors been denied the vote or judged to be 3/5 of a human being? Were we ever barred from living in whatever neighborhood we could afford over the last century? Have any of us been lynched lately? No, of course not—there are even parades where people can pretend to be “one of us.” So, please stop using my ancestors to shut down the conversation. I mean, that was hundreds of years ago and the consequences erased long ago. We look like y’all so you couldn’t do anything to us anyway.

Black Americans will say, “Black Lives Matter” and whites will counter with “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” or, my personal favorite, “Unborn Lives Matter” as an intentional slap on the face of the entire black community about the high rate of abortion, as though all black Americans support abortion and do not mourn deeply over it. Hey, police lives are important to me—my kid is going to be a cop; it’s been all he has wanted since he was two and in 18 months, he is headed for the Academy. But it’s just an attempt to, again, shut down the conversation that things are wrong—something my future cop son and I discuss a lot. Black Lives Matter, Black Pride, Black is Beautiful—unlike the corresponding White Pride and White is Beautiful, they have never meant “only black lives matter” or legally enforced racial purity or supremacism. Instead, they mean, “Why is this still happening in a nation that claims to be Christian?” How about, “Why don’t you love and respect me?” These mantras mean, “I am tired of being ashamed and treated differently because of my skin color.” They warn, “I am not going to apologize because I am fearfully and wonderfully made and God Himself is going to ask you what your problem was with that!!” They inform us of the truth, “We are tired of our sons being pulled over and detained for things that no white person would be pulled over for, much less detained unless he was a known criminal.” But we want to tell them that things are better than they used to be and we are scared to death of how uncomfortable and unprofitable it might be for us to fix this. The truth is, that the price of not fixing it is even more expensive and just as devastating to our collective souls as allowing slavery to historically continue so long in the first place.

We do other things too. We make excuses for whites using the n-word by pointing out that blacks use it too—even though we all know full well it doesn’t mean the same thing when we say it. But we don’t want to talk about how horrifying it is that black children still hear those kinds of words from white adults, that they have to deal with the sort of fear that must induce, so we deflect and side-step. But those of us who were brutally bullied and rejected as children—we can manage a glimpse. Can we stand by and allow it? Can we say, “I survived it and so will they?” Is mere survival what we actually want for black children? Or black adults–are they expected to just have thicker skins than whites need? And, if we believe that, are we any different than the overt racists? Is shrugging any different than personally speaking those words? I tell you the truth, that racism is a heart issue that runs deeper than we know. That we can find it on both sides is irrelevant to our need to fix it within ourselves. There is no place for such lukewarmness toward suffering in the life of any believer–when someone made in the image of God is made to suffer, He suffers.

One of the most horrible things we do is point out that the slums and the ghettos aren’t so bad because “the best and the brightest escape all the time—therefore, it’s all about hard work.” I am not okay with a system that only the “best and the brightest” can escape. And what does that even mean? Does it mean we hold to a hierarchy of worth based on intellectual aptitude? “Smart people can escape, so it’s okay. They don’t deserve to be there”—that’s the unspoken truth of that attitude, as though some people do deserve it. Anything that the least of these cannot escape from is not okay, and as believers how on earth can we even promote this sort of thinking? Are we really going to be counted among the sheep or will we be found among the goats?

And people of color have to just bite on their tongues and take it because when they bring it up, we bring them right back down. But this is a conversation that needs to happen. There are changes that we need to make—and I have no idea how to do it. But if we don’t try then we might just find ourselves on the left with the goats, chewing on cans. The Gospel isn’t the Gospel at all if the only lives it changes are our own. Christianity isn’t a white European religion. The first three major centers (besides Jerusalem) were Syria, Rome and Alexandria, in Egypt. Christianity was thriving all over North Africa and it produced brilliant minds like Tertullian and Athanasius but it isn’t an African religion either. It belongs to the world. Every color. Every language. Every culture and cultural expression. And we have to mourn over injustice and hunger and thirst for change that will bring justice every bit as much as we mourn over sin and hunger and thirst for holy behavior in general. One without the other is a false picture of the Gospel of the Kingdom. And in “Christian nations” we can’t turn a blind eye or shut down uncomfortable conversations. We have to talk about what is wrong. Cancel culture wouldn’t exist if we were all willing to talk about it and move toward resolution together, as a team and not as adversaries. Cancel culture is our own fault for being unwilling to listen without being dismissive. People do what they feel they can when all avenues for reasonable action are shut down. I am not saying it is right, but I am saying that maybe that’s the only option we’ve allowed. You can’t blame the balloon for succumbing to the eleventh slow leak when you’ve plugged the other ten with your available fingers. The yearning for dignity and justice and relief will find an outlet.

I started out with the incident from back in February, and how outraged and humiliated we all were as women. Ladies, remember how you felt. And when our black brothers and sisters cry out in that same frustrated, angry and outraged voice over the things in their lives that we don’t allow them to talk about—we have to suppress that instinct to sweep it all under the carpet. Everyone knows the problems go deep and they are not going away until we begin to come together as believers, as members of the same family, and deal with it. Remember how much you want people to listen when it is you. As human beings, they want and feel the exact same things and they deserve acknowledgment and redress of wrongs just as much as we do.

Things aren’t right for women until they are right for black women too, and for their sons and husbands, brothers and fathers. And if we as Christians aren’t leading those conversations and striving toward reconciliation of all people, male and female, and all colors and creeds—well, we will find ourselves at odds with the very Kingdom we claim to serve. We’re all going to be equal and equal in dignity in the world to come, so what are we waiting for? The time has come for equality now—not as a future hope but a recognition of the spiritual reality that we already are all equal to God.

Book recommendations:

McCaulley, Esau Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

Bantu, Vince L A Multitude of All Peoples: Engaging Ancient Christianity’s Global Identity

Tisby, Jemar The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

 




Setting the Record Straight about the Spirit of the Law

One of the most important things we can learn how to do in our religious lives is to question our own learned rhetoric and paradigms. And so today I want to say a few words about keeping the Law according to the spirit and not the letter. I have tackled this previously in my blog Setting the Record Straight about Christianity where I came against the idea touted by some of those in the Hebrew Roots Movement and among some Messianic Jews that if you don’t keep all of the commandments you are unsaved. Consider this the sequel.

So what is it to “keeping the Law according to the spirit and not the letter” and where does it come from?

This is grossly misunderstood in many circles so, I am just going to briefly summarize the problem we have out there. When a Christian decides to keep more of the commandments than your mainstream Christian, they might be called a “legalist,” or “not believing in the finished work of Christ on the Cross.” But how do we get to that point where somehow keeping commandments becomes sinful?

Let’s first look at what it means to keep the Law according to the spirit and not the letter. First, where do we even get that phrase? Since it is repeated so often, we need to know. Here is the source of the confusion:

Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (I Cor 3:5-6, ESV)

What does this mean, that the letter kills and the Spirit gives life? And I want you to notice something–Paul does not say that we are to keep the Spirit of the Law and not the letter. Even though this is the mantra we repeat and believe, it is not actually in the Bible. Let’s look at the other “spirit/letter” verse from Paul:

But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God. (Ro 2:29, ESV)

This verse is also not, in context, telling people to obey the “spirit of the law” and not the letter. Instead, it is pointing out a man whose parents kept the commandment to circumcise (which was considered to be one of the cultural markers of Judaism) yet who lives in violation of the commandments, has what amounts to a sham circumcision because that person is not living as a true Jew, for whom God’s commandments and His Word are precious. And what does Paul say about the concept of breaking the Commandments of God so that good may come?

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? (Ro 6:2, ESV)

Obviously sin still exists and we can still commit it. So where does the mantra really come from?

But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. (Ro 7:6, ESV)

That’s a lot closer to our mantra, right? So now we need to look at the next verse for context:

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” (Ro 7:7, ESV)

The Laws of God are not sin–they instead show us what sin is. And so for those people who have been trained in this saying and never really thought about it, I have an honest question (because I used to say it too so I am in no way condemning anyone): You know that you keep a lot of commandments. In fact, you almost certainly keep the majority of those that can be kept in this day and age without a Temple and a functioning Priesthood (the regulations of which make up a whopping 58% of the laws). You love those laws that you keep. You promote them to others. You know they are good and protect us from one another. Our Savior was asked which law is the most important and He quoted from the Shema of Deut 6:4-9, and Lev 19:18:

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matt 22:36-40, ESV)

So, what was going on then, and what is going on now? Jesus/Yeshua has clearly said that the Law and the Prophets depend first, on loving God and second, on loving our neighbors as ourselves. In stating this, He was re-emphasizing what the Law was given to us for–the laws were given to us in order to be the bare minimum to protect us from one another’s beast natures. But He says nothing here about that Law being evil, nor does Paul, nor does anyone. The law must be used, however, for the purpose of loving God and neighbor, and not as a system of earning brownie points, or else it can become not only a trap but a deadly one. But what this doesn’t mean is that breaking the law is, in and of itself, somehow a sign of faith and keeping it somehow an act of faithlessness. Remember that faith, in the Greek, is the word pistis, which comes down to meaning trust. It would be silly for us to say we trust God and try to prove it by breaking all the commandments that (according to our beloved Messiah, to the great sage Hillel, and many others) teach us how to love God and love and protect others from our evil instincts.

Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully (I Tim 1:8, ESV)

We can’t, for example, love others and keep the spirit of the law by breaking the incest commandments, right? Or by committing murder, theft, or adultery. When we lie, slander, and gossip, it isn’t because we trust God but because we ignore His love and disregard His justice by refusing to be reflections of His mercy. We show that we have no fear of or respect for Him when we casually break His commandments. And we must not have disdain for His commandments because they are the bare minimum requirements, as we learned in the Sermon on the Mount.

Jesus not only preached the Law but raised the bar exponentially. Not only are we commanded to keep the commandments on the outside but also on the inside. Does that mean we will do it perfectly? Of course not! And this is where faith/trust comes in. We have to trust Him to fill in our honest gaps and to not condemn us over our weaknesses as we grow in His love and righteousness.

So, no, the spirit of the law doesn’t mean disregarding the law because that wouldn’t be in the spirit of it at all! We would have to ignore all of our Messiah’s teachings! How is that trust? Jeremiah prophesied about the days of the Messiah:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jer 31:31-33, ESV)

Loving God and neighbor by keeping His commandments was promised to be internalized within us, and that is our trust in the “finished work of the Cross”–that we would be granted that transformation, and that we would live in the reality of the New Creation that Paul wrote of:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Cor 5:17, ESV)

Jesus ushered in a new reality at the Cross, a second and greater Exodus out of sin and death. Not a death that nullified the definition and existence of sin but a death that conquered the stranglehold of sin and death over all those who would believe. Those who have truly tasted salvation know what I am talking about–slowly but surely, as we grow in Him and learn to love, those sins that were once so naturally a part of our lives fall away and become unthinkable–but they never become unsinful! We increasingly just don’t want to commit them anymore. But this is a gift. One that we once languished without–a gift that the entire world was suffering for lack of in the early first century.

But I come back to the original question–“what is the spirit of the law?”

Those who are unaware of the historical realities of the first century often do not know that it was a time of gratuitous hatred among the deeply factionalized Jewish people. Different groups (we could call them denominations and not be entirely wrong) had some rulings in those times that have been denounced by later generations. Just as, among Christians, we look back in disapproval of a great many former policies perpetrated by the Church and by Christians in the name of God–pogroms, inquisitions, the burning at the stake of those considered to be heretics, the condoning of slavery, etc..

But, the Jews have a concept–“Pikuah Nefesh” and we would rightly call it “the spirit of the law.” Yeshua made reference to it when He spoke of the “weightier matters” in Matthew 23:23. These are justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Mercy is the attribute which guides Pikuah Nefesh–which literally means “saving lives.”

Pikuah Nefesh dictates, in a situation where two commandments are at odds with one another, which you keep and which you break. And whenever anyone comes to me unhappy that a friend who keeps fewer commandments has called them unsaved or not trusting in the finished work of Yeshua at the Cross, or a legalist, I ask them a few questions:

(1) If you were held hostage by a terrorist and they had a gun to the head of a child and told you they would shoot if you didn’t eat a plate full of pork, would you eat it? (Note: no one has ever said no to this question because everyone realizes how heartless and selfish it would be to end a child’s life, one of the weightiest matters, over food restrictions, a much less important matter)

(2) If someone was drowning on the Sabbath, would you move heaven and earth to save them no matter how much work was involved? (no one says no to this either, but at least some of the Qumran Covenanters who penned the sectarian documents found among the Dead Sea Scroll would have allowed them to drown)

(3) If refugees flooded into your town on the Sabbath and there was no food in the house to feed them, would you go shopping so that they could have rest on the Sabbath even though it would mean work for you? Would you kindle a flame? (I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is a former orthodox Jew and is now a believer in Yeshua and he agreed that he would definitely do this as well)

A legalist would refuse to serve others in all of these situations, believing that the keeping of the letter is the most important. But in doing so they would not be observing the spirit of the law, Pikuah Nefesh. We were never meant to be robots, using one law to get us out of the obligation to serve another and telling God that we were just doing what He said. A great many legal arguments in the Talmud center around this very concept. We must first and foremost serve life and mercy–and this is why the letter can kill if we misuse it.

But this nonsense about saved/unsaved over the number of commandments kept has really got to go. On both sides.

Only 42% of the Laws of the Torah can currently be observed, as 58% revolve around the Temple. On that 42%, 67% is kept and cherished by the overwhelming majority of mainstream Christians. Messianics/Hebrew Roots believers, at most, observe only 11% more. That leaves a lot of laws that we don’t observe. So, the whole idea of “Torah Observant” is really just as much of a myth as more mainstream Christians claiming that they believe the Law has been done away with. Both of these are mantras that people think they believe but actually do not–and certainly do not live by. It comes down to a lot of unwitting posturing on the different “sides” as each side tries to be right by saying things that aren’t actually all that true once we really stop and think about it. So how about we all ditch the illogical rhetoric that none of us truly live by and get to work, together, for the good of the Kingdom and for the sake of those who are still perishing. We all love God’s commandments–the majority of believers just have different opinions on which of the non-moral ones are still important to God. Let’s try to keep it in mind that none of us can claim to entirely know His mind, nor are our individual interpretations of Scripture faultless. We are very much in need of the very grace we should be extending to others.