Humanitarianism and Resentment

In his book Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Herbert Schlossberg argues that "if humanism is the theological arm of the Religion of Humanity, the ethical arm is humanitarianism"1 (emphasis mine). According to Schlossberg, humanitarianism's praise of the lower class in America has been so enthusiastic that it has effectively produced the "divinization of the poor"2 and a distinctive form of idolatry: resentment. 

Schlossberg writes:

When Judas criticized the use of expensive ointment to anoint Jesus, it was ostensibly due to his concern for the poor (John 15:5f.).  In general this phenomenon praises the worthiness of what is unsuccessful or debased while expressing contempt for the exceptional and successful. Along with the exaltation of the poor comes the abasement of the middle class... Thus the poor are foils through whom resentment can strike at the successful while hiding its evil intentions under a mask of goodwill. A common humanitarian complaint is that the poor are not sufficiently interested in their own welfare, making it necessary for the humanitarian gospel to be preached among them... 

The dual effort to raise the lower classes and debase the higher has long been called "leveling," and in recent years has grown into the movement with the awkward name of equalitarianism (often used in the French form, egalitarianism). Equality in its original meaning in the United States required that immutable privileges of birth and position be uprooted from the new nation. There was no longer to be king or nobility; hereditary offices were abolished, and people were to reach whatever station in life their qualities and their efforts earned for them... 

As society erases social distinctions and moves toward a leveling... the demand for equality is not satisfied, but intensified. People do not envy a Rockefeller his millions as much as they envy their neighbor a ten percent differential in income. All inequalities, monetary or otherwise, are more galling to the envious when they are nearby, when the advantage is held by those whom one knows and when it is seen daily. The leveling movement has nothing to do with justice, because its impulse is not to raise those who are down but to topple those who are up; resentment is the motive.3

Is it true that, generally speaking, Americans have divinized the poor in this sense?

And if true, how many Christians have unknowingly imbibed these secular ideals, thereby fueling further resentment?




1.  Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture [Crossway Books: Wheaton, IL; 1990] p. 50
2.  Ibid., p. 54
3.  Ibid., pp. 54-55

None has clean hands

As I was researching some commentaries regarding Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and the subject of mammon (an Aramaic word which Jesus used to describe material possessions), I came across some interesting comments by Herbert Schlossberg. In his book, Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, Schlossberg spends an entire chapter discussing "Idols of Mammon", and I thought his insights about its destructive pathologies shed a lot of light upon a number of concerns I have with America's moral decline. He writes:

When Jesus told his disciples they could not serve both God and mammon, the reason he gave was that the two were rival loyalties and that if one were loved the other would be despised (Matt. 6:24). This admonition came in the midst of a portion of the Sermon on the Mount that warned against the preoccupation with wealth and material possessions...  Instead, the disciples [of Jesus] were to seek the kingdom of God first... The mammon described here as the rival of God, therefore, is the idolatrous elevation of money and the material possessions it will buy...  Like idolatries, it finds ultimate meaning in an aspect of creation rather than in the creator. And like all idolatries it finds outlet in destructive pathologies that wreck human lives. 

Those pathologies cannot simply be subsumed under such labels as liberal, conservative, or radical. The ideologies common to American politics all have a share in them; none has clean hands...  If that contention seems odd, it is only because political rhetoric, the media, and the educational establishment have badly distorted the political and economic landscape, making it appear that the only alternatives to liberal idols are conservative idols. 

Those whose loyalty is to mammon quite naturally cast anxious eyes on the property belonging to others, and that is why the apostle called covetousness a form of idolatry (Col. 3:5; Eph. 5:5)... It often accompanies envy, which is a discontent at or resentment of another's good fortune. Envy precedes covetousness and is itself the object of sever biblical censure. The chief priests demanded that Jesus be condemned because they were envious of him (Mark 15:10). In the long list of wicked acts by which Paul described the conduct of the reprobate, envy comes directly before murder (Rom. 1:29)...  

On the other hand envy may act in a more straightforward, less devious, way by simply striving to take what it desires from those it envies. In most cases, this action is associated with the idolatry of mammon, and it accomplishes its end by practicing one of many forms of theft. That is why the command "You shall not steal" (Ex. 20:15) is not only an ethical injunction but also a warning against practicing the idolatry of mammon.1

Outright stealing is widely recognized as an expression of idolizing mammon. But aren't there other ways -- less obvious ways -- to accomplish the same thing?

What about political programs which monopolize your capital investment and redistribute to others without your approval or sanction? Is that not legalized theft?

What about the continual debasement of "money" and its purchasing power through inflationary policies? Is that not another direct product of the idolatry of mammon?




1.  Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture [Crossway Books: Wheaton, IL. 1990] pp. 88-89

The Importance of Red Letters

In a previous post, the narrative of Jesus' young life in Matthew's gospel (chs. 1-4) was closely paralleled with the life of Israel, beginning with the birth of Israel and continuing with an exodus out of Egypt all the way up to Mount Sinai where Moses ascended to receive God's Law (cf. Beginning, Birth, & Exodus; Sept. 2012). As F. F. Bruce has noted in his book, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?,

[Matthew] the evangelist is ...at pains to show how the story of Jesus represents the fulfillment of the Old Testament Scriptures ...that the experiences of Jesus recapitulate the experiences of the people of Israel in Old Testament times. Thus, just as the children of Israel went down into Egypt in their national infancy and came out of it at the Exodus, so Jesus in His infancy must also go down to Egypt and come out of it, that the words spoken of them in Hosea 11:1 might be fulfilled in His experience, too: 'Out of Egypt have I called my son' (Mt. 2:15).1 

But these are only a few brush-strokes of the entire gospel-landscape which Matthew painted for his Palestinian-Jewish audience.

As Matthew's narrative continues in chapter five, a new and unique sort of texture is added: we find Jesus teaching for the first time and He is teaching for a very long time! In fact, if one were to flip through a red-letter bible a few times, it's very noticeable that once Jesus ascends the Mount in chapter five, a very lengthy discourse begins, leaving page after page with only red-lettering, and it doesn't end for a few chapters when Jesus descends the Mount (at the end of chapter 7).

As Peter Leithart has noted in his book The Four: A Survey of the Gospels, 

The first discourse, the Sermon on the Mount, is clearly modeled on the revelation at Sinai. Jesus is on a mountain, after having passed through the Jordan and spent forty days in the wilderness. From the mountain, He quotes from the law, and teaches His disciples that they must produce a righteousness that surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees. He is Moses on the mountain, or Yahweh delivering the law to His people.2

As can be seen easily with any red-letter copy of the Bible, chapters 5-7 begin the first of five lengthy discourses in Matthew's Gospel (chs. 5-7, 10, 13, 18, 23-25). Each of the five discourses end with an identical phrase, "when Jesus had finished" (7:21, 11:1, 13:53, 19:1, 26:1), indicating that Matthew structured his gospel around those five discourses.

But if the first discourse, the Sermon on the Mount, is intentionally modeled after the revelation at Sinai where Yahweh delivered His law to His people, what portions of Israel's history are the remaining four discourses modeled after?

1.  F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981; first published in 1943) p. 38
2.  Peter Leithart, The Four: A Survey of the Gospels (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2010) p. 124

Halo of hatred

Last night I wanted to read something that I haven't picked up in a long time, and so I sorted through the section of "classics" in my library and found a book by G. K. Chesterton called The Everlasting Man, which, if I recall correctly, C. S. Lewis said was one of the most profoundly influential pieces of Christian literature he had ever read. As I finished reading one chapter before bed, the words posted below stood out to me as being so powerful, that I couldn't resist posting them. Hopefully this will spark some more interest in the works of Chesterton. In The Everlasting Man, he writes:

...Atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees. Lucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavored to substitute Evolution for God, had already dangled before men's eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos. But it was not his strong poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it possible for men to entertain such a vision. It was something in the sense of impotence and despair with which men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp. They could easily believe that even creation itself was not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight. They could fancy that all the stars were falling stars; and that the very pillars of their own solemn porticos were bowed under a sort of gradual Deluge. To men in that mood there was a reason for atheism that is in some sense reasonable. Mythology might fade and philosophy might stiffen; but if behind these things there was a reality, surely that reality might have sustained things as they sank. There was no God; if there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He would have moved and saved the world... 

It was the end of the world, and the worst of it was that it need never end... 

Nobody yet knows very clearly why that level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst; but they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to revolve round them. And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of life or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.1

1. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man [Ignatius Press: San Francisco, CA; 2008; original edition published in 1925] pp. 162-165

Beginning, Birth, & Exodus

As noted in a previous post (cf. Israel's Expectation, Sept. 2012), the opening genealogy of Matthew's gospel begins with God's promise about the "seed" of Abraham and the expectation of a promised Messiah to sit on the throne of Israel. Just as God's plan for His kingdom begins in Genesis with a promised "seed", so Matthew's Gospel begins with the fulfillment of that promised "seed", King Jesus, who brings a new beginning to the advancement and expansion of God's kingdom on earth.  But this is only the beginning of Matthew's gospel. This is only the launch pad from which his audience learns the nature of Jesus' mission.

Matthew is not interested in having the gospel of King Jesus remain in the narrative of Genesis. It's interesting what occurs immediately after Matthew's genealogy. Matthew first provides us with a story about a man named Joseph in whose dream the Lord speaks and directs to adopt Jesus as his own firstborn son; and then that narrative is followed by magi (foreign representatives of other nations), and then finally by Herod ordering the little children in Bethlehem to be killed.

Although many commentators focus mainly upon the birth narrative of Jesus in the opening chapters of Matthew and how it harmonizes with Luke's account, such a narrow focus is likely missing Matthew's main point. I recommend that before diving into a discussion about harmonizing the birth of Jesus with Luke's gospel, it's probably best to zoom out a bit and see the much larger picture being painted for Matthew's audience.

Remember, I have already discussed in previous posts the way Matthew's gospel begins and ends. It begins with Genesis and ends with the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures. In Matthew's eyes, that is the farthest his audience could "zoom out" to view the entire scope of his Gospel. But for now, in this post, I'm recommending that we only zoom out a little -- just enough to cover the first few chapters where we find explicit thematic and textual parallels between Israel's birth and Jesus' birth (i.e. as the Father's "firstborn son", Exod. 4:22; Hos. 11:1), and between Israel's exodus and Jesus' exodus.

Below is a list of parallel themes and textual indicators between the story of Jesus and the story of Israel. The majority of this information comes from Peter Leithart's thesis (as noted in earlier posts), but I have made a few modifications of my own below:

Matthew

1:1                          "Book of Beginnings" (biblos geneseos)                              
1:1-17                     Jesus, Son of Abraham                                                                                    
1:18-25                   Joseph the dreamer                                                                                                                
2:1-12                      Foreign Magi travel from east to west          
[2:6   Quotation from Micah 5:2-5a, which refers to Genesis 46:27]

2:13-15                    Herod orders young children to be killed
[2:14   Jesus is rescued + flees to fulfill Hosea 11:1, which reads: "Out of Egypt have I called my Son"]

3:1-12                      Announcement of judgment (by John the baptizer) + immanent judgment
3:13-17                    Jesus passes through waters
4:1-11                      Temptation in "wilderness" route
[4:7, 10   Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:16]
[Matt. 4:1-2   Jesus fasts for "forty days and forty nights"]

4:18-22                     Jesus calls disciples

Old Testament

Gen. 2:4; 5:1             "Book of Beginnings" (biblos geneseos)
Gen. 12-26                 Abraham and a promised son
Gen. 37                      Joseph the dreamer
Gen. 46:27                 Representatives of the nations travel from east to west
[Gen. 49:10   LXX & Syriac says "for he is the expectation of the nations."  The MT says "until Shiloh comes", but has a variant which reads: "until he comes to who it belongs."]

Exod. 1-2                    Pharaoh orders young children to be killed
[Exod. 2   Moses is rescued & flees]

Exod. 13:1-15:21        Exodus/Passing through waters

Exod. 15:22-17:16      Temptation in "wilderness" route

[Deut. 6:16   Description of Israel in Exod. 17:7]

[Exod. 24:12-18; 34:27-28   Moses fasts for "forty days and forty nights"]

Exod. 18                      Moses appoints rulers

And what do we find Jesus doing immediately after Matthew finishes this birth and "exodus" narrative?   We find Jesus ascending a mountain to receive God's Law and deliver it to the people of Israel, just as Moses did (cf. Exod. 19ff with Matt. 5-7).

These explicit literary connections (especially the quotation of Hos. 11:1 in Matt. 2:14) must be more intentional and calculated than what ordinarily meets the eye, and certainly much more than coincidence. And to a Palestinian Jewish audience, which myself and many scholars contend was Matthew's intended audience, there is no way this would have been viewed as merely coincidental.

What we learn from all of this is actually very important for understanding the rest of Matthew's gospel. In chapters one through seven Matthew portrays Jesus, using true historical facts of providence, as the greater "firstborn Son" of God. He is greater than Israel as a "son" because he is the faithful and obedient son par excellence; and Jesus is even greater than Moses because Moses was only a mediator of God's Law (and a sinful one at best), but Jesus is the actual lawgiver and source of Divine Law.

Incarnation & Sacrament

This book looks really good. 

For further information on what this book is about, download or stream the MP3 audio interview with author Jonathan Bonomo and Pastor Uri Brito of Providence Church, Pensacola Fl. 

Judges: Opening Structure

In The Literary Structure of the Old Testament: A Commentary on Genesis-Malachi, David Dorsey outlines the first two opening sections of the book of Judges. Below is my own adaptation of Dorsey's outline:

First opening section:  Judges 1:1-2:51

A.  Optimistic opening assembly (1:1-2)

• conquest of Canaan begins
• obedient Israelites initiate positive communication with Yahweh
• tribes prepare to conquer, with Yahweh's blessing (because of obedience)

               B.   Rise and fall of Israel's dominion in the promised land (1:3-36)

1. Judah: seven victories (Bezek, Jerusalem, Hebron, Debir, Arad, Hormah, and region of Philistia)
2. Benjamin: failure
3. Joseph: one positive victory (Beth-el) and six failures
4. Zebulun: failure
5. Asher: failure
6. Naphtali: failure
7. Dan: failure

A'.  Ominous closing assembly (2:1-5)

• conquest of Canaan ends
• Yahweh initiate negative communication with disobedient Israelites
• Yahweh will no longer help tribes conquer the land (because of disobedience)

Second section:  Judges 2:6-3:62

Optimistic opening remarks: Israel sets out to receive their inheritance; they serve Yahweh (2:6-9)

           
            A.  Sin of next generation (2:10-13)

• contrasted with their fathers
• served the Baals; worshipped other gods
• went after other gods
• occurred once; and they had an excuse ("they did not know")

                    

                    B.  Judgement: defeated by surrounding nations (2:14-15)

• Yahweh was angry with Israel

Central Section: Yahweh's gracious intervention (2:16)

            A'. Sins of each successive generation (2:17-19)

• contrasted with their fathers
• served the Baals; worshipped other gods
• went after other gods
• not just once (but repeatedly); no excuse is given 

                      

                    B'.   Judgement: defeated by surrounding nations (2:20-3:4)

• Yahweh was angry with Israel

Ominous closing remarks: Israel fails to receive their inheritance; they serve other gods (3:5-6)

1.  David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament: A Commentary on Genesis-Malachi [Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI; 2005] p. 106

2.  Ibid., p. 107