Uninvented: Leviticus 17 – Eating Blood is Forbidden by God, but Jesus says Drink My Blood?

Uninvented: Leviticus 17 – Eating Blood is Forbidden by God, but Jesus says Drink My Blood?

Jul 27, 2022 | Uninvented

No wonder the people who heard Jesus say this were freaking out, and why nobody makes up Jesus saying such absolute craziness. And that applies especially to religious Jews in the first century. What exactly did Jesus say that was so radical? We find this in John 6:

“Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

And what was the response of those who were following him to such talk of eating his flesh and drinking his blood?

60 On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

I don’t know about hard, but it sure is strange. Even 2,000 years ago people found it offensive. Jesus then tried to explain himself to address their incredulity, and that didn’t go any better:

66 From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

Not exactly the old how to win friends and influence people approach. Jesus wasn’t really good at that. As I argue in Uninvented, Jesus was a terrible salesman. Such talk sounds absurd to us today given how enlightened we think we are. Eating flesh and drinking blood is for cannibals and vampires, not religious leaders, let alone Jewish religious leaders claiming to be Israel’s 400-years-long awaited Messiah. Why exactly would this have been not only so distasteful to Jews, but have bordered on blasphemous? The reason is found in Leviticus 17. The chapter is about the Lord’s instruction for the Israelites to not eat blood. I would guess that the heathen nations around them practiced such barbarism, and the Lord was making a people for himself who were holy and wholly different than those people. So, he says,

10 “‘I will set my face against any Israelite or any foreigner residing among them who eats blood, and I will cut them off from the people. 11 For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life. 12 Therefore I say to the Israelites, “None of you may eat blood, nor may any foreigner residing among you eat blood.”

13 “‘Any Israelite or any foreigner residing among you who hunts any animal or bird that may be eaten must drain out the blood and cover it with earth, 14 because the life of every creature is its blood. That is why I have said to the Israelites, “You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off.”

Seems pretty clear, doesn’t it. And it isn’t just not allowed, or that it must be punished, but that anyone who does such a thing must be “cut off from the people.” There is something so horrific about eating blood that the person who does it will no longer be considered one of God’s people, of Israel. Yet here is Jesus, a rabbi, a teacher, the ostensible Messiah Israel has been waiting for and who he claims to be (taking the moniker “Son of Man” is such a claim) and he says this? We only have three options to account for the text:

  1. Jesus was who he claimed to be, as John says, the word made flesh, God himself, and Jesus said this because it has profound theological meaning about his mission to save the world from sin.
  2. Jesus was not who he claimed to be, and he decided that to get people to believe he was Israel’s long-awaited Messiah he would say something expressly forbidden by Yahweh.
  3. Jesus didn’t say any of this, and it was made up by his followers to make him say something expressly forbidden by Yaweh.

There might be a fourth option that is even less plausible than 2 or 3. Biblical critics for well over a century believed the New Testament was primarily a Greek pagan creation written very late in the first century, and well into the second. If that is the case, then maybe some crazy pagans made up this story of Jesus teaching we should eat his flesh and drink his blood, but that position about the New Testament has been completely debunked. All scholars today believe the gospels were written in the first century, and by Jews, except Luke (and Acts) written by a Greek but getting all his information from Jews.

The most plausible explanation, for everything about Jesus, is option 1. As I argue in Uninvented, the conundrum that is Jesus, his teaching and personality, can only be explained if he was who he claimed to be, the divine Son of God come to save his people from their sin. You just can’t make that kind of stuff up!

 

 

Notable Quotation: Abraham Kuyper’s Prophecy of the 20th Century

Notable Quotation: Abraham Kuyper’s Prophecy of the 20th Century

Jul 26, 2022 | Notable Quotations, Uncategorized

I recently finished reading Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism for the first time. If you’re not familiar with the man, I’ve put a brief bio below. The reason I’m posting this extensive quote is because when I read it, it blew me away. The lectures were given in 1898 at the seminary my wife and I attended, Westminster in Philadelphia. What astounded me was his prophetic prediction the 20th century, the coming destruction well under way at the end of the 19th century. He saw with an astute moral clarity, the rise of a noxious secularism, and the sad and bloody demise of Christian Western civilization. He lived through World War 1, experienced the beginning of the end in his lifetime.

________________________

After this manner, then, we in Europe at least, have arrived at what is called modern life, involving a radical breach with the Christian traditions of the Europe of the past. The spirit of this modern life is most clearly marked by the fact that it seeks the origin of man not in creation after the image of God, but in evolution from the animal. Two fundamental ideas are clearly implied in this:

  1. that the point of departure is no longer the ideal or the divine, but the material and the low;
  2. that the sovereignty of God, which ought to be supreme, is denied, and man yields himself to the mystical current of an endless process a regressus and processus in infinitum.

Out of the root of these two fertile ideas a double type of life is now being evolved. On the one hand the interesting, rich, and highly organized life of University circles, attainable by the more refined minds only; and at the side of this, or rather far beneath it, a materialistic life of the masses, craving after pleasure, but, in their own way, also taking their point of departure in matter, and likewise, but after their own cynical fashion, emancipating themselves from all fixed ordinances. Especially in our ever-expanding large cities this second type of life is gaining the upper hand, overriding the voice of the country districts, and is giving a shape to public opinion, which avows its ungodly character more openly in each successive generation.

Money, pleasure, and social power, these alone are the objects of pursuit; and people are constantly growing less fastidious regarding the means employed to secure them. Thus, the voice of conscience becomes less and less audible, and duller the luster of the eye which on the eve of the French Revolution still reflected some gleam of the ideal. The fire of all higher enthusiasm has been quenched, only the dead embers remain. In the midst of the weariness of life, what can restrain the disappointed from taking refuge in suicide? Deprived of the wholesome influence of rest, the brain is over-stimulated and over-exerted till the asylums are no longer adequate for housing the insane.

Whether property be not synonymous with theft, becomes a more and more seriously mooted question. That life ought to be freer and marriage less binding, is being accepted more and more on an established proposition. The cause of monogamy is no longer worth fighting for, since polygamy and polyandry are being systematically glorified in all products of the realistic school of art and literature. In harmony with this, religion is, of course, declared superfluous because it renders life gloomy. But art, art above all, is in demand, not for the sake of its ideal worth, but because it pleases and intoxicates the senses.

Thus, people live in time and for temporal things, and shut their ears to the tolling of the bells of eternity. The irrepressible tendency is to make the whole view of life concrete, concentrated, practical. And out of this modernized private life there emerges a type of social and political life characterized by a decadence of parliamentarism, by an even stronger desire for a dictator, between pauperism and capitalism, whilst heavy armaments on land and on sea, even at the price of financial ruin, become the ideal of these powerful states whose craving for territorial expansion threatens the very existence of the weaker nations.

Gradually the conflict between the strong and the weak has grown to be the controlling feature of life, arising from Darwinism itself, whose central idea of a struggle for life has for its mainspring this very antithesis. Since Bismarck introduced it into higher politics, the maxim of the right of the stronger has found almost universal acceptance. The scholars and experts of our day demand with increasing boldness that the common man shall bow to their authority. And the end can only be that once more the sound principles of democracy will be banished, to make room this time not for a new aristocracy of nobler birth and higher ideals, but for the coarse and overbearing kratistocracy of a brutal money power.

Nietzsche is by no means exceptional, but proclaims as its herald the future of our modem life. And while the Christ, in divine compassion, showed heart-winning sympathy with the weak, modern life in this respect also takes the precisely opposite ground that the weak must be supplanted by the strong. Such, they tell us, was the process of selection to which we, ourselves, owe our origin, and such is the process which, in us and after us, must work itself out to its ultimate consequences.

—Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, Pages 135-137

Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) was one of the most extraordinary individuals of his time. A prolific intellectual and theologian, he founded the Free University in Amsterdam and was instrumental in the development of Neo-Calvinism. He was also an active politician, serving as a member of Parliament in the Netherlands beginning in 1874 and serving as Prime Minister from 1901 to 1905.

At this intersection of church and state, he devoted much of his writing towards developing a public theology. His passion was to faithfully understand and engage culture through a Christian worldview. The most famous example is his articulation of the doctrine of common grace. His work has influenced countless others, including Francis Schaeffer, Cornelius Van Til, and Alvin Plantinga.

CRU Goes Full-On Woke

CRU Goes Full-On Woke

Jul 21, 2022 | Culture, Uncategorized

I Knew when Campus Crusade for Christ changed their name to CRU in 2011 it wasn’t a good sign. I can understand that the word crusade had some negative connotations in the Middle East, but only because Muslims and too many Christians accepted a faulty interpretation of The Crusades as Christian oppression of Muslims. The story is much more complicated and fails to consider that Islam is a religion of military conquest. Be that as it may, Campus Crusade had done just fine with that name for the previous 60 years, and it didn’t seem to hamper its mission. What this name change reflected is a bowing down to cultural shibboleths in the name of Christian sensitivity and compassion. They are not the only Christian organization or church to destroy their real counter-cultural witness in the name of good intentions, not by far.

Fast forward to 2019 and CRU’s annual conference. The reason I choose 2019 is because 2020 and ‘21 probably didn’t happen, and I just happen to come across the following video learning about CRU going full-on woke (thank you, Maya!). When you watch, you’ll see a compilation of videos that a young man, Jon Harris, put together, and you simply have to see/hear it to believe it. When you do, you’ll understand why I put the adjectival phrase full-on before woke.

Jon does some commentary after the video, and one thing he says is that there is no gospel in any of this. This is a tragedy, considering what the actual mission of Campus Crusade was for sixty years prior to 2011. I have no idea how quickly wokeness took over the leadership of the organization, but clearly, they’ve fully bought into wokeness. The reason there can be no gospel is because the entire woke ideology is born of Marxism, specifically the bastardized version now known as cultural Marxism. At the heart of Marxism is two things. One is perpetual grievance against societal and cultural “power structures,” whatever they or that might be, so the people will have what follows from that, revolutionary consciousness 24/7. There can be no forgiveness, mercy, or grace because that mitigates against the fundamental goal of Marxism, which is peretual revolution. I’m not saying any of this is well thought out, especially by well-meaning, sincere Christians, but this drives them whether they know it or not.

I recently read a book called, Awake, Not Woke by Noelle Mering. In it she calls wokeness “an ideology of rupture,” which is spot on. From her introduction, she continues, “The term woke refers to the state of being alert and attuned to the layers of pervasive oppression in society . . . . Specific acts of injustice are used to serve the larger goal of furthering the ideology that sees all of human interaction as a power contest . . . . [It] is an ideology with fundamentalist and even cult-like characteristics that is on a collusion course with Christianity.” CRU might want to consider if such a contention is true or not. Mering says the ultimate target of the woke revolt is God himself in Christ. Ouch! If it’s true. CRU staff and leadership who buy wokeness, would likely deny all or most of this, or that they are even “woke,” but you watch/listen to the video, and you come to your own conclusion.

Uninvented Book Review: Paul Among the People

Uninvented Book Review: Paul Among the People

Jul 17, 2022 | Uninvented

I just finished a book I wish I’d read when I was writing Uninvented. The subtitle made me curious: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in his Own Time. The Author, Sarah Ruden, is a classics scholar, and an impressive one at that. Although she is a Quaker and not an Evangelical Christian, as I am, and does not believe in the doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture as I explain it in the book, she is clearly a passionate Christian. The theme of the book fits an Uninvented perspective perfectly, although she never addresses why the Bible and Christianity are true. If it isn’t true, I don’t much care what Paul had to say, Apostle or not. However, as I argue in the book, the Apostle could not be invented, especially his teaching, which is what she addresses in her book.

To set up the theme of Uninvented, we’ll need to address the proverbial elephant in the room, Paul’s conversion. She glosses over his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus in a couple paragraphs in her preface, but never directly addresses the historicity of the event. No one disputes something happened to Paul on the road to Damascus, but many dispute something supernatural happened. Was Paul actually confronted by the risen Jesus, or not.  Ruden seems to believe the historicity of the events in the Bible isn’t as relevant as our perceptions of those events, however they were recorded or whatever happened. Be that as it may, there is much valuable in her book that lends credibility to the argument of Uninvented. In the vernacular the conclusion is, you just can’t make this stuff up!

Since what has come to be known at “the 60s,” the secular anti-biblical narrative broke out of academia and among intellectual elites in general, into the wider culture. The Apostle Paul in this telling is a big meanie, anti-misogynist bigot, among other things. I might be overstating the case a bit, but not by much. Needless to say, the text doesn’t support such conclusions about Paul, but broader secular culture isn’t much concerned with the text. Ruden most definitely is, in the original language and the Greco-Roman cultural context. Her knowledge of that context is impressive, and she quotes extensively from writers and thinkers of the time to try to understand the real societal situation Paul was writing to and for.

Many people since the Enlightenment carelessly read modern assumptions into the biblical text, including many of the most influential biblical critics of the last several hundred years. For much of that time, critical scholarship almost ignored the Jewish context of Jesus’ world and claimed much of what we read in the gospels was written back into the gospels by Greek speaking, non-Jewish Christians. For them it was the needs of the Christian communities much later that in effect created the gospel stories from a kernel of historical events. For these scholars with an anti-supernatural bias, this was a way to explain away the miracles as having actually happened because their bias wouldn’t allow them to happen. Miracles can’t happen, but they must be explained some way, and this was their way. The same thing, but without the bias, happens when people read Paul about women or homosexuality or slavery. Knowing little about the Jewish and Greco-Roman context of the gospels, they misinterpret what Paul says, and miss its world altering genius.

Ruden tackles these and a few other issues, and shows how those who know nothing or little of the ancient world will never understand Paul. His teaching was radically novel at the time, and it was largely Paul’s teaching based upon the implications of the gospel that created the modern world. Her premise makes the point:

To me, even the first efforts at setting Paul’s words against the words of polytheistic authors helped explain why early Christianity was so compelling, growing as no popular movement ever had before.

Speaking of marriage, she claims Paul’s teaching was “as different from anything before or since, as the command to turn the other cheek.” After Paul, men and women and marriage could never be viewed the same way it was in the ancient world. For Paul, “faithfulness in marriage now applied equally to both men and women” which was “a real shocker.” The fruit of such shocking novelty took a long time to develop, but it was because of Paul that women eventually became equal partners at the marriage table. Everything about the new Christian conception of marriage “was entirely against Greco-Roman norms.” Even Jews, who should have known better, often treated women as second-class citizens, and sometimes worse.

This all raises a question I talk often about in Uninvented: where did such unique teaching come from? And both from the lips of Jesus and Paul. Ruden is not a secularist and believes in a spiritual reality, and at times hints it can only come from world beyond this one, but her focus is more sociological. That is of course valuable, but I’m more interested in truth, if the Bible is what it declares itself to be, God’s inerrant authoritative revelation about himself and the ultimate meaning of all things. If it’s not, I’m not interested. So, I argue, what Paul and Jesus taught was so radical, so contrary to every Jewish and Greco-Roman teaching and expectation at the time, that it could not possibly be merely human invention. It is more plausible to believe that such teaching had behind it a divine source which Paul was confronted by on the road to Damascus: the risen Jesus!

Uninvented: Can Moses See God’s Face or Not?

Uninvented: Can Moses See God’s Face or Not?

Jul 14, 2022 | Uninvented

Some Uninvented arguments are stronger than others, meaning certain passages and stories in the history of Israel can appear more easily made up, while others would require a leap of faith to believe they were. Much is in between, or simply doesn’t apply, like Proverbs, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes, the non-historical books. I would say Exodus 33 fits somewhere in the middle. There seems to be a blatant contradiction which needs to be explained in some way, and we’ll find the Uninvented explanation is much more plausible.

In verses 7-10 we read about the Tent of Meeting, where Moses went to talk to the Lord, and the people went to place their inquiries of the Lord. The pillar of cloud guiding the Israelites through the desert would park in front of the tent so the people knew the Lord was there. Then we read:

11 The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Then Moses would return to the camp, but his young aide Joshua son of Nun did not leave the tent.

At the end of the chapter, though, this face-to-face meeting possibility seems as if it’s completely contradicted:

18 Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.”

19 And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.

21 Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. 22 When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”

As we read this chapter through Uninvented eyes, we think this has to be true because it’s a total contraction on the face of it, pun intended. Since Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, he had to see the apparent contradiction. In one encounter he’s sitting down with the Lord as with an old friend, and in the other such an encounter will kill him. Yet Moses reported it this way because it really did happen, and he saw no need to not report it even with the apparent contradiction. In other words, someone making up the story would never report such a contradiction because it would destroy the credibility of the story. That’s the argument, anyway, and to me it’s a powerful one. We might file this under the criterion of embarrassment. This is a crucial concept to understand if we’re to read the Bible through Uninvented eyes.

I was originally going to call my book “Psychological Apologetics,” but nobody would have had a clue what that meant. I was thinking one of the ways we should train ourselves to read Scripture is through human psychology, so the mental and behavioral characteristics of both the authors and the characters they write about, how they think affecting how they act. When we read the Bible, we can ask ourselves, does this read like real people doing and thinking like real people from what we know of human nature? Or does it read like the myths and legends its critics have claimed it is for the last three hundred plus years? (Spinoza, 1632-77, was the first thinker in Western history to claim the Pentateuch was not written by Moses). One of the key ways to identify if it was made up or not is the criterion of embarrassment.

If you are trying to write a story you want people to believe is true, generally you will not want to contradict yourself, at least not in ways too obvious to the reader. When Moses wrote Exodus 33 the contradiction was so obvious that it must be true because a writer doesn’t want to contradict himself so obviously if he wants to be believed. Unless, of course, it’s only an apparent contradiction, as we have in this case. From what I’ve read, there are plausible explanations for this. One comes from Numbers 12, where Miriam and Aaron, Moses’ sister and brother, are challenging his authority because he married a Cushite woman. How dare he! She could possibly have been a dark-skinned woman, and while we might immediately think of the word “racist,” skin color in the ancient world wasn’t “a concept.” That came much later with American antebellum slavery and its aftermath. People have always been and still are threatened by cultural differences, and the ancient world was no different.

The Lord is not happy with Moses’ siblings for questioning the one clearly chosen by God to lead his people out of bondage to the promised land, and in no uncertain terms he calls them on the carpet. It is a scenario that reads real, as Scripture always does. He says, having declared Moses a prophet two verses prior:

8 With him I speak face to face,
clearly and not in riddles;
he sees the form of the Lord.

How this worked is described earlier in Numbers 7:

89 When Moses entered the tent of meeting to speak with the Lord, he heard the voice speaking to him from between the two cherubim above the atonement cover on the ark of the covenant law. In this way the Lord spoke to him.

We can see “face to face” as an idiomatic usage like it is in the first part of Exodus 33, and not literal as later in the chapter. Whereas here the Lord is communicating information to Moses, the latter is an ontological encounter with the fearsomely holy God. Moses had asked of the Lord, “Now show me your glory.” It must have taken some serious chutzpa to ask such a thing of Yahweh, but Moses wanted to see, visually, the true nature of Yahweh. For sinners, before Christ, that was not possible. Now, in him, we can see Yahweh’s glory, as Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”