Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  7:34] came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (Matt. 11:18–19 = Luke 7:33–34) I leave aside those judgments about difference in character, but I accept those descriptions about difference in program. After all, people fast in preparation for the future, and they feast in celebration of the present (see also Mark 2:18–20). Furthermore, Jesus began as a follower of John who accepted John’s program. It is historically secure that John baptized Jesus in the Jordan, as underlined by a later evangelical diffidence in admitting that fact: Mark accepts it (1:9), Matthew debates it (3:13–15), Luke hurries it (3:21), and John omits it (1:36). But later, when Jesus finds his own voice, he announces, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Matt. 11:11 = Luke 7:28). As far as I can see, therefore, their two programs are divergent, but I also emphasize that Jesus’s movement involved a change from John’s program to his own quite different one. The next step is to look first at John’s Baptism movement and then comparatively at Jesus’s Kingdom movement. Where exactly did they differ? I make one preliminary warning: it is necessary to distinguish clearly between the historical John and the biblical John because in our present texts, John is focused primarily on Jesus. But John’s program was fully operational before Jesus ever appeared on the public horizon. Josephus, for example, explains John’s life and death without ever mentioning Jesus and calls John “the Baptist” without ever mentioning Jesus’s baptism (JA 18.116–119). Always remember, therefore, that the historical John, separate from our present biblical John, was not the forerunner of Jesus, but of God; not the preparer of Christ’s advent, but of God’s Kingdom. But that transformation from the historical to the biblical John is a preliminary example of the ongoing assertion-and-subversion process within the New Testament. It is a preliminary instance of what will happen to Jesus and to Paul in the rest of this Part IV on “Community.” “More Than a Prophet”FIRST, WITH REGARD TO eschatology, I note that the historical John was an eschatologist, and indeed, an apocalyptic one—that is, a prophet who claimed a special divine revelation (apocalypse is Greek for “revelation”) about God’s Divine Cleanup of the World. In itself, such a revelation could be about any matter concerning God’s Kingdom and not specifically about imminence or exclusively about violence. But in the heightened tension of Roman Israel, only one matter was of supreme importance: When would the Kingdom arrive? Soon? Now? And if not now, why not? In other words, apocalyptic eschatology is often taken, far too narrowly, to mean imminent or even violently imminent eschatology. John had a very persuasive answer to “when?” and a very compelling program. The Kingdom was imminent, and its advent awaited only preliminary and preparatory endeavor.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  Woooh, oh Charity.” Another holler went up in front of me, and a large woman flopped over, her arms above her head like a candidate for baptism. The emotional release was contagious. Little screams burst around the room like Fourth of July firecrackers. The minister's voice was a pendulum. Swinging left and down and right and down and left and—“How can you claim to be my brother, and hate me? Is that Charity? How can you claim to be my sister and despise me? Is that supposed to be Charity? How can you claim to be my friend and misuse and wrongfully abuse me? Is that Charity? Oh, my children, I stopped by here—” The church swung on the end of his phrases. Punctuating. Confirming. “Stop by here, Lord.” “-to tell you, to open your heart and let Charity reign. Forgive your enemies for His sake. Show the Charity that Jesus was speaking of to this sick old world. It has need of the charitable giver.” His voice was falling and the explosions became fewer and quieter. “And now I repeat the words of the Apostle Paul, ‘and now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity’” The congregation lowed with satisfaction. Even if they were society's pariahs, they were going to be angels in a marble white heaven and sit on the right hand of Jesus, the son of God. The Lord loved the poor and hated those cast high in the world. Hadn't He Himself said it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven? They were assured that they were going to be the only inhabitants of that land of milk and honey, except of course a few whitefolks like John Brown who history books said was crazy anyway. All the Negroes had to do generally, and those at the revival especially, was bear up under this life of toil and cares, because a blessed home awaited them in the far-off by and by. “By and by, when the morning come, when all the saints of God's are gathering home, we will tell the story of how we overcome and we'll understand it better bye and bye.” A few people who had fainted were being revived on the side aisles when the evangelist opened the doors of the church. Over the sounds of “Thank you, Jesus,” he started a long-meter hymn: “I came to Jesus, as I was, worried, wounded and sad,

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The writer to the Hebrews is here seeking to inspire new courage and a new sense of responsibility by making his readers remember their past. He does it not blatantly but with infinite subtlety. He does not so much tell them what to remember as by delicate hints compel them to remember for themselves. When the Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, was arranging for the education of his son Richard, he said: ‘I would have him learn a little history.’ When we are discouraged, let us remember and take heart again. God’s power has not grown less. What he did once he can do again, for the God of history is the same God whom we worship today. THE DEFIANCE OF SUFFERINGHebrews 11:35–40 Women received back their own folk as if they had been raised from the dead. Others were crucified because they refused to accept release, for they were eager to obtain a better resurrection. Others went through scoffing and scourging, yes, and chains and imprisonment. They were stoned; they were sawn asunder; they underwent every kind of trial; they died by the murder of the sword. They went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, they were in want, they were oppressed, they were maltreated – the world was not worthy of them – they wandered in desert places and on the mountains, they lived in caves and in holes of the earth. All these, though they were attested through their faith, did not receive the promise, because God had some better plan for us, that they, without us, should not find all his purposes fulfilled. IN this passage, the writer to the Hebrews is mixing together different periods of history. Sometimes he takes his illustrations from the Old Testament period; but more often he takes them from the Maccabaean period, which falls between the Old and the New Testaments.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  The minister's voice was a pendulum. Swinging left and down and right and down and left and—“How can you claim to be my brother, and hate me? Is that Charity? How can you claim to be my sister and despise me? Is that supposed to be Charity? How can you claim to be my friend and misuse and wrongfully abuse me? Is that Charity? Oh, my children, I stopped by here—” The church swung on the end of his phrases. Punctuating. Confirming. “Stop by here, Lord.” “-to tell you, to open your heart and let Charity reign. Forgive your enemies for His sake. Show the Charity that Jesus was speaking of to this sick old world. It has need of the charitable giver.” His voice was falling and the explosions became fewer and quieter. “And now I repeat the words of the Apostle Paul, ‘and now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity’” The congregation lowed with satisfaction. Even if they were society's pariahs, they were going to be angels in a marble white heaven and sit on the right hand of Jesus, the son of God. The Lord loved the poor and hated those cast high in the world. Hadn't He Himself said it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven? They were assured that they were going to be the only inhabitants of that land of milk and honey, except of course a few whitefolks like John Brown who history books said was crazy anyway. All the Negroes had to do generally, and those at the revival especially, was bear up under this life of toil and cares, because a blessed home awaited them in the far-off by and by. “By and by, when the morning come, when all the saints of God's are gathering home, we will tell the story of how we overcome and we'll understand it better bye and bye.” A few people who had fainted were being revived on the side aisles when the evangelist opened the doors of the church. Over the sounds of “Thank you, Jesus,” he started a long-meter hymn: “I came to Jesus, as I was, worried, wounded and sad, I found in Him a resting place, And He has made me glad.” The old ladies took up the hymn and shared it in tight harmony. The humming crowd began to sound like tired bees, restless and anxious to get home.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Wisdom, great-heartedness, courage – these are the anchors which no storm can shake.’ The writer to the Hebrews insists that Christians possess the greatest hope in the world. That hope, he says, is one which enters into the inner court beyond the veil. In the Temple, the most sacred of all places was the Holy of Holies. The veil was what covered it. It was believed that anyone who entered the Holy of Holies entered into the very presence of God, and into that place only one man in all the world could go. That man was the high priest; and even he might enter that holy place on only one day of the year, the Day of Atonement. Even then, it was laid down, he must not linger in it, for it was a dangerous and a terrible thing to enter into the presence of the living God. What the writer to the Hebrews says is this: ‘Under the old Jewish religion, no one might enter into the presence of God but the high priest and he only on one day of the year; but now Jesus Christ has opened the way for every individual at every time.’ The writer to the Hebrews uses a most illuminating word about Jesus. He says that he entered the presence of God as our forerunner . The word is prodromos . It has three stages of meaning. (1) It means one who rushes on . (2) It means a pioneer . (3) It means a scout who goes ahead to see that it is safe for the rest of the troops to follow. Jesus went into the presence of God to make it safe for all to follow. Let us put it very simply in another way. Before Jesus came, God was the distant stranger whom only a very few might approach, and that at peril of their lives. But, because of what Jesus was and did, God has become the friend of all. Once, people thought of him as barring the door; now, they think of the door to his presence as thrown wide open to all. THE TRUE KING AND THE TRUE PRIEST Hebrews 7:1–3 Now this Melchizedek was King of Salem and priest of the most high God. He met Abraham when he was returning from the smiting of the kings and blessed him, and Abraham set apart for him a tenth part of the spoils. In the first place, the interpretation of his own name means King of Righteousness and, in the second place, King of Salem means King of Peace.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  It is by faith that we understand that the world was fashioned by the word of God, so that what is seen came into being out of what is unseen. T O the writer to the Hebrews, faith is a hope that is absolutely certain that what it believes is true and that what it expects will come. It is not the hope which looks forward with wistful longing; it is the hope which looks forward with utter conviction. In the early days of persecution, a humble Christian was brought before the judges. He told them that nothing they could do could shake him because he believed that, if he was true to God, God would be true to him. ‘Do you really think’, asked the judge, ‘that the likes of you will go to God and his glory?’ ‘ I do not think,’ said the man, ‘ I know.’ At one time, John Bunyan was tortured by uncertainty. ‘Everyone doth think his own Religion rightest,’ he said, ‘both Jews and Moors and Pagans; and how if all our Faith and Christ and Scriptures should be but a “Think so” too?’ But, when the light broke, he ran out crying: ‘Now I know! I know!’ The Christian faith is a hope that has turned to certainty. This Christian hope is such that it dictates every aspect of the way Christians conduct themselves. They live in it and they die in it; and it is the possession of it which makes them act as they do. As the seventeenth-century Polish poet and hymn-writer Angelus Silesius sang: With Hope for pilgrim’s staff I go, And Patience is my travelling dress Wherewith through earthly weal and woe, I fare to everlastingness. James Moffatt distinguishes three directions in which the Christian hope operates. (1) It is belief in God against the world . If we follow the world’s standards, we may well have ease and comfort and prosperity; if we follow God’s standards, we may well have pain and loss and unpopularity. It is the Christian conviction that it is better to suffer with God than to prosper with the world. In the book of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are confronted with the choice of obeying Nebuchadnezzar and worshipping the king’s image or obeying God and entering the fiery furnace. Without hesitation, they choose God (Daniel 3). When John Bunyan was to be put on trial, he said: ‘With God’s comfort in my poor soul, before I went down to the justices I begged of God that if I might do more good by being at liberty than in prison, then I might be set at liberty. But if not, his will be done.’

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  I summarize John’s program in this imaginary conversation: People: Empires are getting stronger, not weaker, so what holds up God’s intervention, and what will God do about the Romans? John: It is your sins that are the obstacle to God’s advent. How can God come to an impure people? People: So what can we do? How are we to become God’s purified people ready for God’s advent? John: We will reenact God’s last great liberation—in the Return from the Babylonian exile—and maybe also the even earlier one of the Exodus from Egypt. As in both those cases, we will come from the desert east of the Jordan. We will pass through the river with water cleansing our bodies and repentance cleansing our souls. We will then reenter the promised land in a purified state. Then, and it will be soon, God will come as promised from of old. (Notice, by the way, that the Exodus was violent in both the exit from Egypt and the entrance into Canaan, while the Return was nonviolent in both the exit from Babylon and the entrance into Israel.) In any case, whether right or wrong, John’s program was tremendously persuasive and, faced with the military might of Rome, gave one at least some active hope for the imminent advent of God’s Kingdom. Also, of course, that imminent advent would require a transcendent divine intervention for which one should prepare but in which one could not participate. It was for God and God alone to transform the world, and Israel, and Galilee, and the Lake of Galilee. For John, God’s Kingdom was a matter of imminent intervention. Second, with regard to nonviolent resistance, note that it has two aspects—one concerning humans and the other concerning God. John’s eschatological program was not humanly or physically violent. He was not, as it were, mustering desert marauders to wage guerrilla warfare with the troops of either Antipas or Pilate. How can I be sure of this? Because, although Antipas arrested John, he made no attempt to round up John’s followers. That is how Rome dealt with nonviolent as opposed to violent sedition: execute the leader, and the followers will disperse and disappear. The legal strategy of handling nonviolent dissent by executing the leader is codified by the most renowned of Rome’s jurists in The Opinions of Julius Paulus Addressed to His Son : “The authors of sedition and tumult, or those who stir up the people, shall, according to their rank, either be crucified, thrown to wild beasts, or deported to an island” (Book V, Title XXII.1). The other aspect of nonviolent resistance is even more important, as it involves the very character of God. Did John preclude human violence now to allow for overwhelming divine violence soon ? The present biblical John gives us two contradictory responses on this question, as he is subjected to that biblical pattern of assertion-and-subversion. What was the answer of the historical John the Baptist?

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Our terms “good news” or “glad tidings” are plural terms that lack a singular: we do not speak of a single “good new” or single “glad tiding.” But Greek can make that distinction: euaggelion is a Greek singular, while euaggelia is a Greek plural, both combining two roots, eu for “good” and aggelion/a for “message/s.” The Romans announced imperial victories, dynastic successions, and even Augustus’s world-changing birthday as euaggelia (plural), or “good messages.” But Paul, for example, and indeed the entire New Testament, always used euaggelion (singular) or “the good message.” It is always the one and only good news that is the historical Jesus himself. All we have seen so far reaches its climax when the Augustan Age is proclaimed to be the expected Golden Age of the world. Israel’s vision of a transfigured earth and a transformed world was the Kingdom of God as a future advent in linear time. Rome’s was of the reign of Saturn as a future return to a primordial state in cyclical time. In both cases, it was to be the Golden Age of fertility and prosperity, justice and peace. Also, in both cases, from Augustus to Nero and from Jesus to Paul, eschatological transformation was proclaimed not as indolent relaxation, but as active collaboration. Finally, in both cases, that Golden Age, that final, climactic, last, or eschatological era presumed atonement achieved for the sin that had postponed its advent. I conclude this chapter, therefore, with how the Roman poet Virgil saw that golden eschaton in Augustus. Then, in the next chapter, we can compare how the Jewish prophet Paul countersaw it in Christ. “A Golden Age Springs Up Throughout the World”IN HIS Eclogues FROM 40 BCE , Virgil imagined the coming reign of Saturn as unlabored human prosperity in a world where “cattle will not fear huge lions” and “any lingering traces of our guilt shall become void” (4.13–22). By 29 BCE , when he published Georgics, that reign of Saturn was envisaged as labored rural fertility—far away from urban worries, commercial hazards, and military adventures (1.132–134; 2:495–540). Between 29 BCE and his death in 19 BCE , however, Virgil created his epic masterpiece, the Aeneid . There he equated the Golden Age with the Augustan Age and the reign of Saturn with the reign of Caesar. The travels and travails of Aeneas (remember, from above, his Venus-guided flight from Troy) initiated and foreshadowed those of Augustus. Furthermore, that the Golden Age would be the Augustan Age was divinely decreed in heaven, prophetically foretold on Earth, and magnificently accomplished by Augustus. First, in heaven, Jupiter assures his worried daughter Aphrodite-Venus about the destiny of her Trojan family:13 For these I set no bound in space or time, but have given empire without end . . . the Romans, lords of the world, and nation of the toga. Thus it is decreed. . . .

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  clear. On my way out of the house one morning she said, “Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait.” Another time she reminded me that “God helps those who help themselves.” She had a store of aphorisms which she dished out as the occasion demanded. Strangely, as bored as I was with clichés, her inflection gave them something new, and set me thinking for a little while at least. Later when asked how I got my job, I was never able to say exactly. I only knew that one day which was tiresomely like all the others before it, I sat in the Railway office, ostensibly waiting to be interviewed. The receptionist called me to her desk and shuffled a bundle of papers to me. They were job application forms. She said they had to be filled in triplicate. I had little time to wonder if I had won or not, for the standard questions reminded me of the necessity for dexterous lying. How old was I? List my previous jobs, starting from the last held and go backward to the first. How much money did I earn, and why did I leave the position? Give two references (not relatives). Sitting at a side table my mind and I wove a cat's ladder of near truths and total lies. I kept my face blank (an old art) and wrote quickly the fable of Marguerite Johnson, aged nineteen, former companion and driver for Mrs. Annie Henderson (a White Lady) in Stamps, Arkansas. I was given blood tests, aptitude tests, physical coordination tests, and Rorschachs, then on a blissful day I was hired as the first Negro on the San Francisco streetcars. Mother gave me the money to have my blue serge suit tailored, and I learned to fill out work cards, operate the money changer and punch transfers. The time crowded together and at an End of Days I was swinging on the back of the rackety trolley, smiling sweetly and persuading my charges to “step forward in the car, please.” For one whole semester the streetcars and I shimmied up and scooted down the sheer hills of San Francisco. I lost some of my need for the Black ghetto's shielding-sponge quality, as I clanged and cleared my way down Market Street, with its honky-tonk homes for homeless sailors, past the quiet retreat of Golden Gate Park and along closed undwelled-in-looking dwellings of the Sunset District. My work shifts were split so haphazardly that it was easy to believe that my superiors had chosen them maliciously. Upon mentioning my suspicions to Mother, she said, “Don't worry about it. You ask for what you want, and you pay for what you get.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  I WOULD HAVE THE JOB. I WOULD BE A CONDUCTORETTE AND SLING A FULL MONEY CHANGER FROM MY BELT. I WOULD. The next three weeks were a honeycomb of determination with apertures for the days to go in and out. The Negro organizations to whom I appealed for support bounced me back and forth like a shuttlecock on a badminton court. Why did I insist on that particular job? Openings were going begging that paid nearly twice the money. The minor officials with whom I was able to win an audience thought me mad. Possibly I was. Downtown San Francisco became alien and cold, and the streets I had loved in a personal familiarity were unknown lanes that twisted with malicious intent. Old buildings, whose gray rococo façades housed my memories of the Forty-Niners, and Diamond Lil, Robert Service, Sutter and Jack London, were then imposing structures viciously joined to keep me out. My trips to the streetcar office were of the frequency of a person on salary. The struggle expanded. I was no longer in conflict only with the Market Street Railway but with the marble lobby of the building which housed its offices, and elevators and their operators. During this period of strain Mother and I began our first steps on the long path toward mutual adult admiration. She never asked for reports and I didn't offer any details. But every morning she made breakfast, gave me carfare and lunch money, as if I were going to work. She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy. That I was no glory seeker was obvious to her, and that I had to exhaust every possibility before giving in was also clear.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Between humans [God] shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. (Mic. 4:3–4 = Isa. 2:4) None of these visionary synonyms for the Kingdom of God is about the earth’s destruction or abandonment; they are about its transformation and transfiguration. They are not about the end of the world’s existence and our emigration elsewhere, but about the end of the world’s evil, injustice, oppression, violence, and war. This vision was part of Israel’s tradition for more than half a millennium before Daniel 7. There is one codicil, however: if you find an expression like the “Kingdom of God” too antique and too male, my titles on those preceding texts give you some alternatives. But please, do not locate, say, the Peace of God elsewhere than on this earth. Also please, do not subvert its religio-political, ethico-moral, and socio-economic vision as other than a radical challenge to the normalcy of civilization. “Where There Is No Vision, the People Perish”DANIEL, IN THE JEWISH homeland of the 160s BCE , imagined the coming Kingdom of God without detailing its programmatic content. Others, in the Jewish Diaspora of the 150s BCE , gave content that echoed that just-seen Peace of God. First, a preliminary word about matrix. The Sibyl was a female ecstatic and charismatic prophetess whose historical origins were as obscure as her raptured utterances. The Sibylline tradition was later maintained in texts that were recorded, redacted, and re-created from Greeks and Romans to Jews and Christians. Here, then, is how Egyptian Jews imagined God’s “Kingdom for all ages” upon a transformed earth in the Sibylline Oracles: 11 1. The Transformed Physical World: “For the all-bearing earth will give the most excellent unlimited fruit to mortals, of grain, wine, and oil and a delightful drink of sweet honey from heaven, trees, fruit of the top branches, and rich flocks and herds and lambs of sheep and kids of goats. And it will break forth sweet fountains of white milk” (3.744–749). 2. The Transformed Animal World: “Wolves and lambs will eat grass together in the mountains. Leopards will feed together with kids. Roving bears will spend the night with calves. The flesh-eating lion will eat husks at the manger like an ox, and mere infant children will lead them with ropes. For he will make the beasts on earth harmless. Serpents and asps will sleep with babies and will not harm them” (3.788–795). 3. The Transformed Human World: “There will be no sword on earth or din of battle, and the earth will no longer be shaken, groaning deeply.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  No wonder God’s Kingdom will never arrive.” Imagine also this question put to Jesus: “Do you mean that without our participation, the Kingdom will never, ever appear, will never, ever exist here below upon a transformed earth?” And Jesus says, “Yes!” The best commentary on this, besides Emily Dickinson’s epigraph to this chapter, came from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, preaching at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, in 1999: “God, without us, will not; as we, without God, cannot.” Why did Jesus change from John’s vision of imminent intervention to his own vision of present collaboration? I can think of only one reason: John expected God to come imminently, but what came imminently was Antipas. John died and God did nothing. Maybe, thought Jesus, there was no divine intervention, not now, not soon, not ever. There was, is, and will be only a divine and human covenant, collaboration, and participation. I think that Antipas’s execution of John changed Jesus’s understanding of God’s Kingdom from one of intervention to one of collaboration. God’s Kingdom comes only in so far as people take it upon themselves or enter into it . It was a bilateral, participatory, collaborative, and covenantal program. For how can there be a kingdom without members, citizens, and communities? But confusion started immediately. In the face of such a paradigm shift, some will reject it emphatically, some will accept it enthusiastically, and others, maybe the majority, will accept it but understand it within the older paradigm (as some have seen, for instance, a car as a horseless carriage, a radio as a wireless, and a computer as a visual typewriter). The old paradigm imagined an imminent divine intervention; the new one envisioned a present divine and human collaboration. Those who accepted Jesus’s vision of the already present but only-if-collaborative Kingdom almost immediately added on an imminent consummation to that process. The lure of “how soon?” returned to haunt forever the new Christian-Jewish vision. Even those who, like Paul and Mark, insist on the Kingdom’s here-and-now presence and the challenge of entering it promise an imminent consummation, and so, as we see in the next chapter, does the book of Revelation. That “over soon” was wrong, of course. Maybe even Jesus himself imagined a swift conclusion to the Kingdom’s advent. But I myself am far from convinced on that point. My reason is not to claim that Jesus did not commit an error but because the strongest evidence of that belief seems to come not from the historical Jesus himself, but from what the earliest tradition placed on his lips.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  There will no longer be war or drought on earth, no famine or hail, damaging to fruits, but there will be great peace throughout the whole earth. King will be friend to king to the end of the age. The Immortal in the starry heaven will put in effect a common law for men throughout the whole earth. . . . And then, indeed, he will raise up a Kingdom for all ages among men, he who once gave the holy Law to the pious, to all of whom he promised to open the earth and the world and the gates of the blessed and all joys and immortal intellect and eternal cheer. From every land they will bring incense and gifts to the house of the great God. . . . Prophets of the great God will take away the sword for they themselves are judges of men and righteous kings. There will also be just wealth among men for this is the judgment and dominion of the great God” (3.751–758, 767–773, 781–784). It is quite easy—maybe with smile, smirk, or sneer—to dismiss such dreams of absolute physical fertility (no labor) or total animal benignity (no meat). It is quite easy to mock lions liking lettuce, panthers eating pasta, and jaguars choosing jam. Maybe, in reading such eschatological imaginings, it is prudent to distinguish between a rhapsodic and impossible utopia (Greek for “not-place”) and an ecstatic but possible eutopia (Greek for “good-place”). Eutopia imagines a social world of universal peace, a human world of nonviolent distributive justice where all get a fair and adequate share of God’s world as God’s Kingdom. If that is a silly fantasy or utopian delusion with no possible eventual advent, our human species may be as magnificent and doomed as was the saber-toothed tiger. The book of Proverbs warns that “where there is no vision, the people perish” (29:18 KJV ). But with the wrong vision, they perish even faster. Eutopia or eschatology may even be necessary if our species, protected by moral conscience rather than by animal instinct, is not ultimately to destroy itself—because escalatory human violence has never invented a weapon we did not use, never invented one less powerful than what it replaced, and never ceased to confuse lull with peace. Are those eschatological visions of distributive justice and universal peace nothing more than empty fantasies? Finally, here is another example of those Jewish Sibylline Oracles to bring that eschatological faith up to the time of Jesus. It imagines that transformed human world like this: “The earth will belong equally to all, undivided by walls or fences. It will then bear more abundant fruits spontaneously. Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division. For there will be no poor man there, no rich, and no tyrant, no slave. Further, no one will be either great or small anymore. No kings, no leaders. All will be equal together” (2.319–324).

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  Farmers needed to defend themselves and, already organized for irrigation, could easily be organized for defense—or better still, for that ever-expanding defense known as empire, invented by Sargon and his Akkadians in Mesopotamia by the late 2000s BCE . It is not that civilization invented either constraint or violence. It is just that, as people got better and better at everything, so also they got better with escalatory constraint of others and escalatory violence against others. The eternal mantra started its dismal chant: we will protect you from force outside by establishing force inside . Although my dialectic of God’s radicality versus civilization’s normalcy is created especially for this book, you already know that distinction from within the Christian Bible itself. Think of this: on one hand, “God so loved the world” (John 3:16), but on the other hand, “all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world” (1 John 2:16). This ambiguity in the term “world” is between the world as creation (what I call the radicality of God) and the world as civilization (what I call the normalcy of civilization). The Norm of the Christian BibleWE SOMETIMES SAY, IN hyperbolic shorthand, that the Bible is the word of God. Actually, of course, we should say more accurately that the Bible contains the word of God. But even that correction is not enough. It is not adequate simply to think of the Christian Bible as a divine message received and transmitted in human response. Why? Because that response both accepts the divine challenge explicitly and yet often rejects it. And, moreover, both assertion and then subversion are often attributed to God himself. The first and fundamental question of this book is this: How do we Christians know which is our true God—our Bible’s violent God, or our Bible’s nonviolent God? The answer is actually obvious. The norm and criterion of the Christian Bible is the biblical Christ. Christ is the standard by which we measure everything else in the Bible. Since Christianity claims Christ as the image and revelation of God, then God is violent if Christ is violent, and God is nonviolent if Christ is nonviolent. This is even given in what we are called. We are called Christ -ians not Bible -ians, so our very name asserts the ascendancy of Christ over the Bible. But this only raises a second question. Which Christ do we mean? The nonviolent Christ riding on the peace donkey in the Gospel, or the violent Christ riding on the white warhorse in Revelation? In other words, a second normative criterion and decisive standard must be established. If, for Christians, the biblical Christ is the criterion of the biblical God, then, for Christians, the historical Jesus is the criterion of the biblical Christ. This is, once again, rather obvious. Christianity counts time down to the birth of the historical Jesus and up from that nativity.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (1) It is belief in God against the world. If we follow the world’s standards, we may well have ease and comfort and prosperity; if we follow God’s standards, we may well have pain and loss and unpopularity. It is the Christian conviction that it is better to suffer with God than to prosper with the world. In the book of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are confronted with the choice of obeying Nebuchadnezzar and worshipping the king’s image or obeying God and entering the fiery furnace. Without hesitation, they choose God (Daniel 3). When John Bunyan was to be put on trial, he said: ‘With God’s comfort in my poor soul, before I went down to the justices I begged of God that if I might do more good by being at liberty than in prison, then I might be set at liberty. But if not, his will be done.’ The Christian attitude is that, in terms of eternity, it is better to stake everything on God than to trust to the rewards of the world. (2) The Christian hope is belief in the spirit against the senses. The senses say to us: ‘Take what you can touch and taste and handle and enjoy.’ As the poet Robert Herrick wrote in ‘Hesperides’: Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying. The senses tell us to grasp the thing of the moment; the spirit tells us that there is something far beyond that. Christians believe in the spirit rather than the senses. (3) The Christian hope is belief in the future against the present. Long ago, the Greek philosopher Epicurus said the chief purpose of life was pleasure. But he did not mean what so many people think he meant. He insisted that we must take the long view. The thing which is pleasant at the moment may sooner or later bring pain; the thing which at present hurts like fury may eventually bring joy. Christians are certain that in the long run no one can put aside the truth, for ‘great is truth, and in the end she will prevail’. It looked as if his judges had eliminated Socrates and as if Pilate had crushed Christ; but the verdict of the future reversed the verdict of the moment. The American Baptist preacher and author, Harry Emerson Fosdick, pointed out that Nero once condemned Paul, but the years have passed on and the time has come when people call their sons Paul and their dogs Nero. It is easy to argue: ‘Why should I refuse the pleasure of the moment for an uncertain future?’ The Christian answer is that the future is not uncertain because it belongs to God; and it is enough that God has commanded and that God has promised.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  His historical birth is the hinge of time, breaking Christian history into a before and after rather than running it all toward its apocalyptic consummation. And that, of course, is why certain Christians ask “WWJD,” that is, “What would Jesus do?” rather than “WWBS,” or “What would the Bible say?” My proposal in this book is that the same individual studied as the Jesus of history by academic research and accepted as the Christ of faith by confessional belief is the norm and criterion of the Christian Bible. In other words, the meaning of that Bible’s story is in its middle, in the story of Jesus in the Gospels and the early writings of Paul; the climax of its narrative is in the center; and the sense of its nonviolent center judges the (non)sense of its violent ending. Therefore, and with all due respect to Islamic tradition, we are not “the People of the Book.” We are “the People with the Book,” but even more importantly, we are “the People of the Person.” This is why a favorite Christian quotation from John’s Gospel does not say that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Book,” but “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (3:16). Christianity’s godsend is not a book but a person, and that person is the historical Jesus. It is precisely that historical Jesus whom Christians proclaim as “the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4). Succinctly put, for Christians, Incarnation trumps Apocalypse. Where Are We Now and What Comes Next?ALTHOUGH THIS BOOK ’S TITLE is How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, my plan is not just to propose my own personal solution to the problem. My hope is to probe a problem in the Christian Bible so that we discover a solution that is internally revealed from the very depths of the problem itself. The surface problem is the bipolar or even schizophrenic portrayal of the biblical God as both nonviolent and violent, as nonviolent in distribution and violent in retribution. The same dichotomy envelops the biblical figure of Christ—on peace donkey and on warhorse. I use the metaphor of a Biblical Express Train with its twin and parallel rails for that dialectic. Beneath this surface problem, however, a deeper one appears. Those twin aspects—be they of God or of Christ—form a repeated pattern of assertion-and-subversion. Nonviolence and violence are not just parallel but interactive biblical processes. They present a “yes ” from the radicality of God’s nonviolent distributive justice that is then followed by a “no ” from the normalcy of civilization’s violent retributive justice. The metaphor of the Biblical Express Train with parallel tracks cedes place to that of the Biblical Heartbeat with interactive rhythms. It is here that we begin to glimpse a solution to the book’s titular How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them.” (6:11–13) In the Yahwist tradition the reason for God’s cosmic destruction is humanity’s “continual evil.” But in the Priestly tradition a similar general indictment of “corruption” is twice specified as “violence.” Furthermore, in that latter source the problem is not that “all flesh” has become violent, but that Earth itself has become contaminated—like the ground by Abel’s murdered blood in Genesis 4:10–11. In summary, therefore, the problem with Earth for the biblical God is not too much human “noise,” but too much human “violence.” “I Will Never Again Curse the Ground Because of Humankind”IT IS CLEAR THAT human violence has escalated exponentially from Cain to Lamech in Genesis 4 and thence to “the earth” in Genesis 6:11, 13. This is already bad enough, but one other factor renders the violence all the more devastating. In Genesis 6, as distinct from Genesis 2–3 or 4, God has been sucked completely into humanity’s escalatory violence. The transcendental solution for human violence is massive divine counterviolence: “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them” (6:7). And this decision is repeated several times thereafter (6:17; 7:4, 21–23). It is not just humanity but all of creation—except, perhaps, marine species—that are to be exterminated so Earth can start all over again from those saved within the ark. What began with Cain killing Abel escalated from humanity to divinity with God killing Earth. There is, however, one reason for hope—if not for us, then at least for the biblical God as this matrix of Genesis 1–11 concludes. In Atrahasis, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and Genesis 8:20, sacrifice is offered outside the great boat as the flood subsides, and in all three cases the “pleasing odor” was acceptable to divinity. But only the biblical God said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (8:21–22) Later, this divine decision is made into a solemn “covenant” between God and “every living creature”—that “never again” would God destroy life on Earth, and the rainbow would be the “sign” of that covenant between God and “all flesh that is on the earth” (9:9–17, note repetitions).

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Genesis 18:18 is a repetition of that promise. But the promise which God swore with an oath to keep comes in Genesis 22:16–18. The real meaning of this first sentence is: ‘God made many promises to Abraham, and in the end he actually made one which he confirmed with an oath.’ That promise was, as it were, doubly binding. It was God’s word which in itself made it sure, but in addition it was confirmed by an oath. Now, that promise was that all Abraham’s descendants would be blessed; therefore, that promise was to the Christian Church, for the Church was the true Israel and the true seed of Abraham. That blessing came true in Jesus Christ. Abraham certainly had to exercise patience before he received the promise. It was not until twenty-five years after he had left Ur that his son Isaac was born. He was old; Sarah was barren; the wandering was long; but Abraham never wavered from his hope and trust in the promise of God. In the ancient world, the anchor was the symbol of hope. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus says: ‘A ship should never depend on one anchor, or a life on one hope.’ Pythagoras the mathematician said: ‘Wealth is a weak anchor; fame is still weaker. What then are the anchors which are strong? Wisdom, great-heartedness, courage – these are the anchors which no storm can shake.’ The writer to the Hebrews insists that Christians possess the greatest hope in the world. That hope, he says, is one which enters into the inner court beyond the veil. In the Temple, the most sacred of all places was the Holy of Holies. The veil was what covered it. It was believed that anyone who entered the Holy of Holies entered into the very presence of God, and into that place only one man in all the world could go. That man was the high priest; and even he might enter that holy place on only one day of the year, the Day of Atonement. Even then, it was laid down, he must not linger in it, for it was a dangerous and a terrible thing to enter into the presence of the living God. What the writer to the Hebrews says is this: ‘Under the old Jewish religion, no one might enter into the presence of God but the high priest and he only on one day of the year; but now Jesus Christ has opened the way for every individual at every time.’ The writer to the Hebrews uses a most illuminating word about Jesus. He says that he entered the presence of God as our forerunner . The word is prodromos . It has three stages of meaning. (1) It means one who rushes on .

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  The writer to the Hebrews has a flash of insight – despising the shame , he says. Jesus was sensitive; never had any individual so sensitive a heart. A cross was a humiliating thing. It was for criminals, for those whom society regarded as the dregs of humanity – and yet he accepted it. The sixteenth-century saint Philip of Neri encourages us ‘to despise the world, to despise ourselves, and to despise the fact that we are despised’ ( spernere mundum, spernere te ipsum, spernere te sperni ). If Jesus could endure like that, so must we. (6) In the Christian life, we have a presence , the presence of Jesus. He is both the goal of our journey and the companion of our way; at the same time, the one whom we go to meet and the one with whom we travel. The wonder of the Christian life is that we press on surrounded by the saints, oblivious to everything but the glory of the goal and always in the company of the one who has already made the journey and reached the goal, and who waits to welcome us when we reach the end. THE DISCIPLINE OF GOD Hebrews 12:5–11 Have you forgotten the appeal, an appeal which reasons with you as sons? ‘My son, do not treat lightly the discipline which the Lord sends; Never lose heart when you are put to the test by him; For the Lord disciplines the man whom he loves, and scourges every son whom he receives.’ It is for the sake of discipline that you must endure. It is because he is treating us as sons that God sends these things upon us. What son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline – that discipline which everyone must share – then you are bastards and not sons. Surely it is true that we have human fathers who discipline us, and we pay heed to them. Surely we are still more bound to submit to the Father of the spirits of men, for that is the only way in which we can find real life. It was only for a short time that our human fathers disciplined us, and they did it as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our highest good, and he does so to make us fit to share his own holiness. No discipline seems to be a thing of joy when we are actually undergoing it, but afterwards it yields a fruit which is all to our highest welfare – the fruit of a righteous life – to those who are trained by it. T HE writer to the Hebrews sets out yet another reason why people should cheerfully bear affliction when it comes to them. He has urged them to bear it because the great saints of the past have borne it.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Most of us live a cautious life on the principle of safety first; but, to live the Christian life, it is necessary to have a certain reckless willingness to be adventurous. If faith can see every step of the way, it is not really faith. It is sometimes necessary for Christians to take the way to which the voice of God is calling them without knowing what the consequences will be. Like Abraham, they have to go out not knowing where they are going. (2) Abraham’s faith was the faith which had patience. When he reached the promised land, he was never allowed to possess it. He had to wander in it, a stranger and a tentdweller, as the people of Israel were some day to wander in the wilderness. For Abraham, God’s promise was never fully fulfilled; and yet he never abandoned his faith. It is a characteristic of the best of us that we are in a hurry. To wait is even harder than to be adventurous. The hardest time of all is the time in between. At the moment of decision, there is the excitement and the thrill; at the moment of achievement, there is the glow and glory of satisfaction; but, in the intervening time, it is necessary to have the ability to wait and work and watch when nothing seems to be happening. It is then that we are most liable to give up our hopes and lower our ideals and sink into an apathy whose dreams are dead. Men and women of faith are people whose hope is flaming brightly and whose effort is intensely strenuous even in the grey days when there is nothing to do but to wait. (3) Abraham’s faith was the faith which was looking beyond this world. The later legends believed that, at the moment of his call, Abraham was given a glimpse of the new Jerusalem. In the Apocalypse of Baruch, God says: ‘I showed it to my servant Abraham by night’ (4:4). In 2 Esdras [4 Ezra], the writer says: ‘And when they were committing iniquity in your sight, you chose for yourself one of them, whose name was Abraham; you loved him, and to him alone you revealed the end of times, secretly by night’ (3:13–14). No one ever did anything great without a vision which made it possible to face the difficulties and discouragements of the way. To Abraham there was given the vision; and, even when his body was wandering in Palestine, his soul was at home with God. God cannot give us the vision unless we allow him to; but, if we are patient and look to him, even in earth’s desert places he will send us the vision, and with it the toil and trouble of the way all become worth while. BELIEVING THE INCREDIBLEHebrews 11:11–12