Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

Black Saturday: Satan, Hades, and the Beginnings of Hell

by Don M. Burrows in Christian History

Oft forgotten amid the Holy Week observances of Palm Sunday, Maundy-Thursday, Good Friday and then Easter is Holy Saturday, or Black Saturday, the day Jesus supposedly lay in the tomb after his crucifixion on Friday and prior to his resurrection on Sunday.

But this day worked on the imagination of early Christians in fantastic ways. In the Apostles’ Creed is the statement that Jesus “descended into Hell” as it is often translated into English. But in the Greek it is κατελθόντα εἰς τὰ κατώτατα, or “going down into the lowermost parts,” and in Latin something almost identical, descendit ad inferos, or “he descended to the lower ones/places.” This is not necessarily Hell, because such a concept was not fully worked out yet. It was rather the netherworld or underworld of Greco-Roman mythology, the conception of which would eventually provide us with the imagery most commonly associated with Hell.

The most fascinating account of Jesus going down to the underworld has been handed down in the Gospel of Nicodemus, an apocryphal work that includes the Acts of Pilate (yes, that Pilate, whose ahistorical contrition in the Gospels is later elaborated to the point that he becomes canonized in some Christian sects) and Christ’s Descent into Hell. The older, out-of-copyright translation of Nicodemus by M.R. James is available in many places online. But the more updated and much less baroque translation by J.K. Elliot is far superior.

Probably… [Read more…] about Black Saturday: Satan, Hades, and the Beginnings of Hell

The Earliest Picture of Jesus on the Cross

by in Christian History

As we remember the Crucifixion today, it’s important to also remember the extraordinary tradition of our Christian faith, and the centrality of Christ’s death and resurrection to Christians throughout history.

We can glimpse a bit of the historical importance of the crucifixion through early Christian depictions of that event. The absolute earliest visual depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion exist in the form of a symbol called the staurogram.

This is a staurogram:

The symbol was used by early New Testament scribes when writing about Christ’s death: within the text itself, they substituted the staurogram in place of the words “cross” and “crucifixion.”

The monogram comprises two letters from the Greek word stauros, meaning “cross.” In Greek that word looks like this:

You take from that word the letter T (that is, the tau), and the letter P (the rho), combine them, and you have the staurogram—which is also a pictogram of a person on a cross. Brilliant, no?

Though the tau-rho symbol was used as an abbreviation prior to Christianity, Christian scribes appropriated it for their own needs and imbued it with theological significance, using it in late 2nd- and early 3rd-century New Testament manuscripts such as P45, P66, and P75.

You can see the staurogram in this image of John 19:15-20, from the manuscript P66. I’ve highlighted the three spots on this page of the manuscript—much of which, as you can see, is missing—where it… [Read more…] about The Earliest Picture of Jesus on the Cross

Love your neighbor as yourself–unless they’re gay

by Lynette Cowper in LGBT

View image | gettyimages.com

Jesus and the disciples who carried his message to the world had a lot to say about love. I think it’s important when dealing with any question of how to behave toward LGBT people that we take into account the following verses:

This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister. For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another…. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him. This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. (1 John 3)

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in… [Read more…] about Love your neighbor as yourself–unless they’re gay

World Vision and Children: Love Loses

by in LGBT

Rachel Held Evans offered an eloquent summary of the World Vision debacle and the crumbling façade of evangelicalism in her March 31st piece “How Evangelicals Won A Culture War and Lost a Generation.”

Kanon Simmons’s response to Evans, “Evangelicals and Homosexuality: A Response to Rachel Held Evans,” provides a typical example of the conservative’s understanding of what’s at stake regarding this issue.

Simmons asks, “What does it matter if we feed the poor, but we so mar the gospel of Christ that the poor are lost for eternity?” She closes her post with this deeply troubling challenge:
Is this fight worth it? Absolutely, because it ensures that those thousands of needy children, who are in need of salvation and nourishment, will have access to the only information that can save their souls.
Simmons believes that by tacitly endorsing homosexual marriage, World Vision would have done irrevocable harm to the gospel message that Christians are tasked with spreading. She feels that by over-emphasizing love, much of the Church has abandoned the crucial fact that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

But must a starving child be told that homosexuality is a sin while they’re being given food?

Must the one giving that food publicly profess a specific understanding of the nature of sin in order to receive our support?

The Bible never places such strictures on helping those in need; it consistently speaks out against imposing theological caveats on expressing… [Read more…] about World Vision and Children: Love Loses

The Waco tragedy and the cult of Christian evangelicalism

by in Fundamentalism

Embed from Getty Images

In the March 31st, 2014 New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the 1993 F.B.I siege on David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and the government’s failure to understand the motivations of the group they were dealing with.

Gladwell places the Branch Davidians in “the religious tradition that sees Christ’s return to earth and the establishment of a divine Kingdom as imminent. They were millennialists. Millennial movements believe that within the pages of the Bible are specific clues about when and how the Second Coming will arrive.”

He also compares the Branch Davidians to Mormons, identifying both groups as actively cultivating a culture of separatism. From David Koresh’s Branch Davidians to Joseph Smith’s Mormons, “countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.”

It seems clear to me that modern American evangelicals also fit this mold. These self-proclaimed “defenders of biblical Christianity” perpetuate a narrative of themselves in constant conflict with a debased and immoral culture; it’s all us versus them, the faithful versus the faithless, their sacred versus everyone else’s secular.

As today’s evangelicals continue to self-identify in terms of opposition to society, they find themselves increasingly isolated not only from American culture, but from the mainstream of Christianity itself.

Just as Koresh and his… [Read more…] about The Waco tragedy and the cult of Christian evangelicalism

Godly Christians: Don’t stop at World Vision! Keep going!

by in Fundamentalism

Dear Warriors for Christ:

Yesterday it was disclosed that 10,000 God-fearing Christians abandoned their sponsored children when World Vision USA made the abominable choice to allow for the hiring of married gay employees.

Congratulations, brothers and sisters! By withdrawing your financial support of children in need, you have shown the world what the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ really looks like! Yes, it hurts not to give. But sometimes that is the price we must pay.

Speaking of  how we spend our money, let’s keep the pressure on! Our unswerving Godly convictions demand that we continue to boycott all companies and organizations that support gay marriage. Such companies include: Starbucks, General Mills, Costco, Kraft, Levi’s, Nike, Gap, Target, Campbell’s, Pepsi, Coke, Oreo, Ben & Jerry’s, Nordstrom, Sears, J.C. Penney, Macy’s, Chevron, Shell, BP, 3M, Chrysler, Ford, GM, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, Comcast, Sony, Walt Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, Hallmark, Kellogg’s, Land O’Lakes, Safeway, Hershey, Mattel, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, DuPont, GE, Whirlpool, Home Depot, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, Staples, Office Depot, Walgreens, OfficeMax, Crate and Barrel, Kodak, Lexmark, and Xerox.

Refraining from spending with these companies should not prove too difficult for you, for surely you own no credit card issued by Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or American Express. (Nor, of course, do you have any money in or with Citigroup, J.P. Morgan,… [Read more…] about Godly Christians: Don’t stop at World Vision! Keep going!

Top 7 claims for why homosexuality is "unnatural" refuted

by Lynette Cowper in Christian Issues, LGBT

Anti-LGBT groups routinely claim that homosexuality is “unnatural.” Let’s look at the seven most common arguments offered in support of that claim, shall we?

1. Only humans engage in same-sex relationships, so it must be unnatural.
False. Over 1000 species have been shown to engage in same-sex mating and pair-bonding.

2. Reproduction is the purpose of sex; same-sex intercourse cannot produce offspring; ergo, homosexuality is unnatural.
Based on an incorrect assumption. While reproduction is one function of sexual intercourse, it is far from the only one. Many animal species, including humans, engage in non-reproductive sexual behaviour. Among humans, the benefits of regular sexual intercourse are myriad. Various studies have found that it: improves one’s ability to deal with stress; lowers blood pressure; boosts antibody production; burns calories; reduces the chance of a heart attack; improves self-esteem; deepens intimacy; builds trust; makes one more generous; raises pain tolerance; reduces the risk of prostate cancer; reduces incontinence; improves sleep; stabilizes the menstrual cycle; improves bone and muscle health; keeps one’s skin looking more youthful; promotes longevity; improves tissue repair; reduces cholesterol; reduces depression; increases creativity; improves flexibility; relieves nasal congestion; heightens the sense of smell and taste; slows tooth decay; protects against osteoporosis; protects against… [Read more…] about Top 7 claims for why homosexuality is "unnatural" refuted

Which story are you in?

by in Book Reviews

“Which story are you in? Have you chosen your story wisely? Have you challenged the story you tell yourself, if it doesn’t align with reality?”

So asks C.S. Lewis during an imagined lunchtime conversation in Alister McGrath’s new book “If I Had Lunch with C.S. Lewis.” (Tyndale House, 2014) McGrath uses Lewis’s writings and biography as a springboard to explore important questions of life and faith.

In chapter 3, “A Story-Shaped World,” he examines how and why Lewis came to write the Chronicles of Narnia and the importance of the Narnia stories as representations of the Christian story.

Lewis saw stories as a means to better understand the deep truths of life and as a way of “sneak[ing] past the ‘watchful dragons’ of a dogmatic rationalism.” For Lewis, stories are able to make theological ideas intelligible, making them “real” in a way that dry exposition never could.

As a young man Lewis struggled to understand what story he inhabited and what relevance Christianity had to his life. It was through his friend J.R.R. Tolkien that he came to understand Christianity as a “true myth,” a story that “unifies and transcends” the “fragmentary and imperfect insights” of our lives.

McGrath says that “For Tolkien, the Gospels narrate ‘a story of a larger kind,’ which embraces what is good, true, and beautiful in the great myths of literature, expressing it as ‘a far-off gleam or echo of the evangelium in the real world.’” It was this conception of Christianity that captured… [Read more…] about Which story are you in?

"Noah" in a nutshell: Watchers lose, love wins

by in Movie Reviews

In my previous post about “Noah,” I observed: “Like any artist with a singular vision, Aronofsky’s work is often uneven and polarizing, but always thought-provoking and engaging.” I didn’t realize how prescient those words would be. Though intended to describe Aronofsky’s entire oeuvre, that sentence turned out to be an apt summation of my feelings after seeing “Noah.” Uneven? Definitely. Thought-proving? Undoubtedly.

Spoiler Alert: I reveal some plot elements that aren’t in the Bible and are key to the movie. If you haven’t yet seen it and plan on doing so, don’t continue … you’ve been warned!

First, the uneven.

Aronofsky’s Watchers are the ultimate Gnostic archetypes: beings of pure light entrapped by the muck of the material world, yearning for release from the bondage of physicality. But the Watchers, as depicted by Aronofsky, are lumbering, cartoonish beasts, an awkward and uninspired mix of Ent, Transformer and Muppet that would be laughable if not for the naïve earnestness of their role in the script.

The film would have been far stronger had they been omitted entirely, along with the underwhelming battle scene in which they featured. Aronofsky is clearly at his best when examining the psychological motivations and interactions of his human characters, not when orchestrating CGI battles featuring ballet dancers with yoga boxes taped to their arms and legs.

Rather than further bemoaning this misstep, I have another interpretation of… [Read more…] about "Noah" in a nutshell: Watchers lose, love wins

Sink or swim, "Noah" is a story worth retelling

by in Movie Reviews

Darren Aronofsky’s film “Noah” hits theaters this Friday (March 28) but has already caused controversy within some Christian circles.

It’s sparked a few interesting conversations for me as well. Questions I’ve encountered in discussions with friends have included: “Who’s Aronofsky?”, “Was there really a flood?” and “Does the movie follow the Bible?”

When discussing “Noah,” it’s important to remember that this is a Darren Aronofsky film. Like any artist with a singular vision, Aronofsky’s work is often uneven and polarizing, but always thought-provoking and engaging. From “Pi” all the way through to “Black Swan,” Aronofsky has always been willing to pursue his aesthetic vision, to push the limits of convention and propriety and to craft movies that remain true to his intent rather than seeking mere mass-market appeal.

It’s also important to remember that this is a story from the Bible that has transcended the Biblical text itself, becoming firmly ensconced as part of modern Christian mythology. In light of our seemingly ubiquitous familiarity with the story, reading (or re-reading) Genesis 6-9 prior to weighing in on cinematic interpretations of that passage seems like a wise undertaking. It’s a quick read, notable as much for what it doesn’t say as for what it does. If you’re going to see the film, why not take five minutes to read the original?

To better understand that Biblical story of the Flood, I recommend Paul Seely’s three part series for BioLogos: The Flood: Not… [Read more…] about Sink or swim, "Noah" is a story worth retelling