Resurrection and the Source of the Tyrant's Power

Here is another great reason why I wish people red mor ded peepl. This is a passage from 2 Maccabees. Now, regardless of questions of historicity, canonicity, and so on; it illustrates a theology of resurrection (not disembodied afterlife) alive in Judaism before Jesus and Christianity. In fact, it is illustrative of a belief in bodily resurrection, which would become foundational to the Christian proclamation and hope. The fear of death is the secret to the tyrant's power. This is a moving passage illustrating how the hope of resurrection fueled the courage of faithful martyrs in the face of torture and death. (This story is set within the Jewish revolt against Antiochus IV Epiphanes.)

It happened also that seven brothers and their mother were arrested and were being compelled by the king, under torture with whips and thongs, to partake of unlawful swine’s flesh. One of them, acting as their spokesman, said, “What do you intend to ask and learn from us? For we are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our ancestors.”

The king fell into a rage, and gave orders to have pans and cauldrons heated. These were heated immediately, and he commanded that the tongue of their spokesman be cut out and that they scalp him and cut off his hands and feet, while the rest of the brothers and the mother looked on. When he was utterly helpless, the king ordered them to take him to the fire, still breathing, and to fry him in a pan. The smoke from the pan spread widely, but the brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die nobly, saying, “The Lord God is watching over us and in truth has compassion on us, as Moses declared in his song that bore witness against the people to their faces, when he said, ‘And he will have compassion on his servants.’”

After the first brother had died in this way, they brought forward the second for their sport. They tore off the skin of his head with the hair, and asked him, “Will you eat rather than have your body punished limb by limb?” He replied in the language of his ancestors and said to them, “No.” Therefore he in turn underwent tortures as the first brother had done. And when he was at his last breath, he said, “You accursed wretch, you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.”

After him, the third was the victim of their sport. When it was demanded, he quickly put out his tongue and courageously stretched forth his hands, and said nobly, “I got these from Heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again.” As a result the king himself and those with him were astonished at the young man’s spirit, for he regarded his sufferings as nothing.

After he too had died, they maltreated and tortured the fourth in the same way. When he was near death, he said, “One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!”

Next they brought forward the fifth and maltreated him. But he looked at the king, and said, “Because you have authority among mortals, though you also are mortal, you do what you please. But do not think that God has forsaken our people. Keep on, and see how his mighty power will torture you and your descendants!”

After him they brought forward the sixth. And when he was about to die, he said, “Do not deceive yourself in vain. For we are suffering these things on our own account, because of our sins against our own God. Therefore astounding things have happened. But do not think that you will go unpunished for having tried to fight against God!”

The mother was especially admirable and worthy of honorable memory. Although she saw her seven sons perish within a single day, she bore it with good courage because of her hope in the Lord. She encouraged each of them in the language of their ancestors. Filled with a noble spirit, she reinforced her woman’s reasoning with a man’s courage, and said to them, “I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws.”

Antiochus felt that he was being treated with contempt, and he was suspicious of her reproachful tone. The youngest brother being still alive, Antiochus not only appealed to him in words, but promised with oaths that he would make him rich and enviable if he would turn from the ways of his ancestors, and that he would take him for his Friend and entrust him with public affairs. Since the young man would not listen to him at all, the king called the mother to him and urged her to advise the youth to save himself. After much urging on his part, she undertook to persuade her son. But, leaning close to him, she spoke in their native language as follows, deriding the cruel tyrant: “My son, have pity on me. I carried you nine months in my womb, and nursed you for three years, and have reared you and brought you up to this point in your life, and have taken care of you. I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed. And in the same way the human race came into being. Do not fear this butcher, but prove worthy of your brothers. Accept death, so that in God’s mercy I may get you back again along with your brothers.”

While she was still speaking, the young man said, “What are you waiting for? I will not obey the king’s command, but I obey the command of the law that was given to our ancestors through Moses. But you, who have contrived all sorts of evil against the Hebrews, will certainly not escape the hands of God. For we are suffering because of our own sins. And if our living Lord is angry for a little while, to rebuke and discipline us, he will again be reconciled with his own servants. But you, unholy wretch, you most defiled of all mortals, do not be elated in vain and puffed up by uncertain hopes, when you raise your hand against the children of heaven. You have not yet escaped the judgment of the almighty, all-seeing God. For our brothers after enduring a brief suffering have drunk of ever-flowing life, under God’s covenant; but you, by the judgment of God, will receive just punishment for your arrogance. I, like my brothers, give up body and life for the laws of our ancestors, appealing to God to show mercy soon to our nation and by trials and plagues to make you confess that he alone is God, and through me and my brothers to bring to an end the wrath of the Almighty that has justly fallen on our whole nation.”

The king fell into a rage, and handled him worse than the others, being exasperated at his scorn. So he died in his integrity, putting his whole trust in the Lord. Last of all, the mother died, after her sons. Let this be enough, then, about the eating of sacrifices and the extreme tortures. (2 Macc 7:1–42, NRSV)

Tadeusz Borowski and Postmodernism

Borowski has written some fine Holocaust literature based on his experiences in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. He delves into the psychology of evil and gives a glimpse of the beginnings of postmodernism in Europe. I disagree with the movement, but I understand that some have suffered much more than I have, and that has led them to conclude that "The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money cannot be obtained through work but through exploitation of others. And if we cannot exploit as much as we wish, at least let us work as little as we can. Moral duty? We believe neither in the morality of man, nor in the morality of systems. In German cities the store windows are filled with books and religious objects, but the smoke from the crematoria still hovers above the forests. . . . Responsibility for the world? But can a man living in a world such as ours be responsible even for himself? It is not our fault that the world is bad, and we do not want to die changing it. We want to live--that is all" (from "The January Offensive," part II).

But is this the only option after experiencing or even just seeing the horrors of Auschwitz? The Enlightenment view of man has certainly been blown out of the water; man cannot save himself by reason (or science, for that matter). Do we then need merely to try to live our lives and avoid moral matters? Should we just look out for ourselves and hope that brutality will never find us?

There is another response, but we'll have to be patient. There is One who has said all along that the heart of man is desperately wicked, and seeks overwhelmingly to do evil, so much so that he is thoroughly depraved. We could hear these stories as a call back, a call to repentance. Perhaps love is the answer. Perhaps Love will conquer all.

Dietrich and Judging Others

From Cost of Discipleship:
"Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are. But in the love of Christ we know all about every conceivable sin and guilt; for we know how Jesus suffered, and how all men have been forgiven at the foot of the cross. Christian love sees the fellow-man under the cross and therefore sees with clarity. If when we judged others, our real motive was to destroy evil, we should look for evil where it is certain to be found, and that is in our own hearts."

May we pray the prayer of the tax-collector and not the Pharisee - "Have mercy on me a sinner!"

What is Wrong with the World?

What's Wrong with the World by G.K. Chesterton


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Again, never disappointed. He has been called "The Apostle of Common Sense" and "The Prince of Paradox" - and rightfully so. What may be maddening for some is that Chesterton does not give a straightforward argument from science or reason. His style is the argument from fairy tales. He draws on things that ring true and smell right.

In this book, he takes on the problems with liberalism and conservatism. Essentially, he argues the problem with both of them is that they lack an "ideal." Without an ideal there is nothing to progress towards, and neither is there anything to conserve.

In the scope of this book, Chesterton takes the ideal of the happy and healthy family, and demonstrates how the collectivism of the liberals and the oppression of the conservatives both work against and undermine the sustainability of the family. But if I continue to try and describe his argument, I will fail miserably because I will describe it with such inferiority that you will lose your motivation to actually read him.

I will only attempt to describe for what he is arguing. It is distributionism. Unlike socialists, he believes in property. He believes in each family working, possessing, and caring their own family and their own property. Unlike the so-called "Capitalists" - and I say so-called because he argues that they are actually the enemies of capitalism - he believes in the distribution of wealth (not state ownership but that each person would be given land and a house to own). He argues that there is no other way to make progress toward this ideal than to redistribute wealth because the poor families will not be able to attain to the ideal under the current inequalities of wealth.

The book is written in 1910 but is still very relevant for today. However, you quickly notice that he lives on the other side of such movements as woman's suffrage and politically correctness. So, you may find a few things uncomfortable, but you need to take him in his context.

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Dostoyevsky and Human Depravity

In his Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky directly challenges the enlightenment thinkers of his day (the late 19th Century). He does so through the testimony of the underground man, who has sought to live their ideology to its logical ends. To those who believed that man’s freedom and happiness was to be found in becoming an awakened or enlightened—or we might say educated—individual, he offers the underground man. This man’s new consciousness opened his eyes to his own wickedness. This man’s quest for personal enlightenment, made him isolated and inactive. He was awakened to a war within himself, and he was at war with everyone around him (precisely because he thought himself more intelligent and more conscious). He is miserable. He lives in a world of ideas unable to “live life” and unable to love. He is presented as enlightened individualism at its logical end.

Even today, enlightenment is presented as our answer. How many times have you heard education as the answer to the problems plaguing our world? The assumption is that when we become conscious of what is good for us, we will stop doing destructive things. The underground man offers the following rant:

“Oh, tell me, who first announced, who as the first to proclaim that man does dirty only because he doesn’t know his real interests; and that were he to be enlightened, were his eyes to be opened to his real, normal interests, man would immediately stop doing dirty, would immediately become good and noble, because, being enlightened and understanding his real profit, he would see his real profit precisely in the good, and it’s common knowledge that no man can act knowingly against his own profit, consequently, out of necessity, so to speak, he would start doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! And when was it, to begin with, in all these thousands of years, that man acted solely for his own profit? What is to be done with the millions of facts testifying to how people knowingly, that is, fully understanding their real profit, would put it in second place and throw themselves onto another path, a risk, a perchance, not compelled by anyone or anything, but precisely as if they simply did not want the designed path, and stubbornly, willfully pushed off onto another one, difficult, absurd, searching for it all but in the dark. So, then, this stubbornness and willfulness were really more agreeable to them than any profit…Profit!”

According to the introduction of this book, Fyodor wrote to his brother lamenting the fact that the editors of Epoch (the magazine in which it was originally published) had censured the parts where he deduced “the need for faith and Christ.” As it stands, the book is an effective defense of the first half of the Gospel—there is no one who is good, not one. The book begins with the words: “I am a sick man…I am a wicked man.” And like the tax-collector in the Temple, that is the place where we must begin as well. “Have mercy on me a sinner!”

Two Words with Terribly Broad Definitions

In The Mark of the Christian, Francis Schaeffer urges true Christians to love all human beings, especially to love their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ; and this love is the mark of the Christian (drawn from John 13:33-35). But in light of the failure on the part of so-called Christians to love one another, plus their wide divergence of beliefs, he remarks: "The meaning of the word Christian has been reduced to practically nothing." Schaeffer has in mind the question of whether the liberal theologian is really in the same camp as the Christian fundamentalist sitting in the pew. What is it to be a Christian?

Perhaps we can restore the meaning of this word by asking what it was in the first and second centuries to be a Christian.

A second word that suffers from a similar loss of meaning is the word evangelical. Grenz, Guretzki, and Nordling's Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms provides a concise definition: "In its most general sense evangelical means being characterized by a concern for the essential core of the Christian message, which proclaims the possibility of salvation through the person and work of Jesus Christ. More specifically, evangelicalism has been used to refer to the transdenominational and international movement that emphasizes the need to experience personal conversion through belief in Christ and his work on the cross, and a commitment to the authority of Scripture as the infallible guide for Christian faith and practice." My question at this point is whether this leaves Joel Osteen out of the evangelical camp. I gather from the popular culture that Osteen is considered to be an evangelical; but the dictionary definition seems to rule him out. Is the popular definition of the word evangelical too broad, as is that of the word Christian? I tend to think it is. But what do you think? What comes to mind when you hear that someone is an evangelical?

(Note: The quotation from Schaeffer's The Mark of the Christian appears on p. 135 of his The Church at the End of the 20th Century, published by IVP, as the former book was originally an appendix of the latter book.)

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was a prominent Irish playwright. His works address serious social issues through satire. Though you would not be able to tell from his picture, he was pretty freakin' funny.

He was an advocate for liberalism and socialism and a critic of religion, moralism, and capitalism. He was friend and sparring partner of one of my favs, G.K Chesterton, and though they fiercely disagreed with each other's worldviews, they maintained a cordial relationship. Reading them together is very interesting as many of their debates are predecessors of today’s. Thus, while reading them, I am always surprised by how relevant they are for today, even though they were writing in the early 20th Century.

Pygmalion is one of his most celebrated plays, which earned him both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. Eventually it would be adapted into the musical My Fair Lady. It addresses the relationships and conflicts between the classes.

Doctor's Dilemma seems every bit as relevant - and perhaps more so - than it was in 1906, given the current health care debate. It addresses the problems of health care driven by profitability and self-interest as opposed to patient care. Obviously, it makes a case for socialized health care.