A comparison

The HB is usually much more explicit than the Mesha Inscription about motives and why God acts in certain ways, and due to the strong impulse in the HB to encourage Israel’s faithfulness to God, this moral foundation plays a more dominant role in the HB than it does in the Mesha Inscription. An important way this is expressed is in terms of God’s covenant with Israel and the faithfulness and loyalty that God expects from her.—M. Patrick Graham in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, p. 133

A counter-cultural God

Greco-Roman cities loved appearances. They loved what people looked like, how much money they had, their connections, and how they spoke. Fully trained rhetorical professionals could captivate audiences for hours. They were the rock stars of the ancient world, and they commanded huge fees for their performances. They looked beautiful and spoke beautifully

In one of the most profound passages he ever wrote, Paul points out that the Christian God revealed in the crucified Jesus could not be more different from this ([1 Cor] 1:18—2:16). By journeying down into the human condition and ultimately accepting a shameful death, Jesus revealed that God was a reaching God, an inclusive and gentle God, who valued everyone, including the most despised and marginalized. Those whom society looked down on, God was especially concerned about and eager to reach. (The older theological term for this virtue was “condescension,” but it has now been inverted into its opposite, being freighted with unhelpful connotations of superiority and haughtiness.) This is what a Christian leader should look like. It could hardly be more dramatically countercultural, and Paul lived this leadership style out in person.—Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, 98

<idle musing>
Indeed! Measure the current crop of megachurch pastors against those standards. How do they measure up? Right. I suspect Paul would have a few choice words for their lifestyle. Just an
</idle musing>

Chemosh vs. YHWH

[I]t is essential to note that, at least in two respects, the HB differs strikingly from the Mesha Inscription. First, the HB goes to great lengths to show that Israel’s God is righteous, just, and merciful and that humans routinely fall below the divine standard (Eccl 7:20), even the most righteous of the kings (see 2 Sam 11–12). In addition, God exemplifies grace by continually forgiving a wayward people and blessing them, even when they disregarded the divine faithfulness (1 Kgs 8:22–61; 2 Chr 30:6–9). Therefore, God violates the principle of reciprocity time and again, and the reason or justification for this is hidden in the mystery of God’s grace and sovereignty (Exod 33:19).—M. Patrick Graham in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, p. 132

Remember those in prison

The officials detaining people in the ancient world had little interest in their welfare, and less accountability. They provided few if any resources—things like water, food, fresh clothing, bedding, and so on. Prisoners might hope for a daily cup of water and a slice of bread from their jailers and that was it, and they didn’t always get even this. People in prison in Paul’s day were primarily supported by their friends and family on the outside. But this was expected, and facilitated by bribes, and Christians developed a reputation for being involved with their imprisoned brothers and sisters to a positively irritating degree. Lucian, a cynical Roman writing in the second century CE, wrote the following about a Christian leader who had been imprisoned: “from the very break of day aged widows and orphan children could be seen waiting near the prison, while their officials even slept inside with him after bribing the guards. Then elaborate meals were brought in, and sacred books of theirs were read aloud, and excellent Peregrinus—for he still went by that name—was called by them ‘the new Socrates.’” In view of this practice, a likely explanation for the epithet “fellow-POW” switching between Aristarchus and Epaphras in Colossians and Philemon is that the two men are taking turns sitting with Paul through his incarceration and probably staying overnight, thereby sharing in its conditions.“ When he wrote Colossians 4:10 Aristarchus was staying with him; when he wrote Philemon 23 Epaphras was.—Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, 82

About some of those comparative models that people use…

When comparing two distinct phenomena, the temptation is always toward reduction—to count things in each to see which is greater or to list things for quick and easy comparison. Results are typically superficial. More substantive and useful comparisons require some sort of qualitative approach.—M. Patrick Graham in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, p. 129

What is church all about then?

It is about relating, and about learning to relate together ethically, in a good way. This means gathering together and learning from one another, especially from the community’s teachers, who are copied and imitated. Admittedly, this is a Christian development of the ancient Greek philosophical tradition. But it enjoys strong theological warrant. Jesus did this, and Paul and the Thessalonians continued the basic pattern, although in a distinctively flexible way since the guidance of the Holy Spirit at Antioch. However, in the light of what we have just said, this flexibility makes perfect sense. In a relational community the how is more important than the what—something the Pharisees sometimes failed to appreciate.—Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, 71

The ineffectiveness of preaching

Most of our pedagogies are not set up imitatively, and this might explain why most of them are so ineffective at transforming people’s actual relationality and relating. Protestants have long placed their faith in the transforming power of the preached word. They are frequently surprised at how little the communication of information about the Bible and from its texts—however eloquently and passionately done—changes the behavior of its churchgoing listeners. How unsurprising though. There is nothing to imitate here, or to copy. People cannot copy a preacher except by becoming a preacher, and that activity can leave a lot of other moral activity unaddressed. Writing a book will not change much either. It can help, but it can only be secondary to the main business of constructing healthy learning communities out of people that are influenced by people.—Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, 68

Thought for the day

You could make worse use of your time than following the Sankes and Ladders blog. Today's is especially memorable. Final paragraph:

Our investigations indicate there are no epidemiologists, virologists, or infectious disease doctors in the entire freaking world who think Trump is right about this stuff. The President is talking through his hat and wishing on a star.

Yep.

Following the example

People are incredibly sensitive to one another. They respond to mute shifts in emotion, often without even registering the fact consciously. These responses then radiate through their relational networks to four degrees of separation and beyond. Aristotle’s insight consequently seems well confirmed, both by theological warrant and by the evidence of social psychology, that people change in relation to one another, communally. To teach people to relate lovingly, then, we must construct a loving community and live in it, copying its most loving members.—Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, 68

Is this church?

A loving person will trust God, and other people where this is warranted. They need not be naive, but neither should they be needlessly cynical or suspicious. In part this trust will be oriented toward the future. There will be an expectation of promises fulfilled and good things over the horizon——an attitude of hope. To live as love and within love is to be happy, although to be happy in a deep and profound way, not in a superficial fizzy one. We can speak here of joy. It is also to be fundamentally at peace with God and the cosmos, and to work for peace where people are disrupting and sabotaging this. Love is restorative. People who love respond in particular ways to those who are misbehaving or struggling. They are patient and kind. They are giving when this is needful, and they are generous with their time and resources. They are not violent or coercive, actions that violate loving relationality at a very fundamental level. Conversely, they are gentle and self-controlled. All of this activity—what we might call love in action—constitutes goodness. We see Paul thinking in these terms in his letter to the Galatians:

the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Gal. 5:22-23)

But someone might ask me, is this really what church is all about? Is church basically ethical? Is it focused on how we behave and relate to one another? Is this it?

If we turn to the earliest Christian community we know about from Paul, the Thessalonians, the short answer is “yes, it is.”—Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, 65–66

Read this article!

If you only read one thing today, read this article. A couple of excerpts:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

And this:

Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.

and finally,

The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

Tolle! Lege! And then put legs to it!

The freedom of faith

When we accept that our faith is in a living God who meets us in history but is not fully contained or defined by that history, it frees us to study the history with an open mind and genuine curiosity. In this way, the ancient look-alikes need not pose a problem to people of faith at all. In fact, rather than a problem, I might call it an opportunity. If other ancient peoples believed similar things about their deities, then we have even more opportunity to study and learn about the world the Israelites inhabited and how that world shaped their depictions of God. This, in turn, gives us more opportunity to come to understand our own story and the myriad ways God has entered into it to seek us. 125

Defective!

Many of us probably think about church as a walled compound like a fortified city or castle. This sort of church is a bounded entity with a space inside it and a great barrier between Christians and non-Christians—a wall. This leads to endless discussions about what non-Christians have to do to get through the wall—presumably through a gate by saying the right password—and what exactly the wall consists of. Church is a gated community. The relationality and personhood of those both inside and outside the wall are neglected.

Alternatively, Christians are all independent entities that gather together consensually to affirm the basis of their gathering. They are like a bag of marbles. They get collected together into the bag for church on Sunday, and then get thrown out of the bag to cannon around for the rest of the week with all the other marbles in the world. (Perhaps they regather in a small bag on Wednesday nights for home group.) Here again the terms of the gathering are to the fore, and the nature of the interactions between the marbles is secondary.—Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, 63

But, what if…

So, what should all of this mean to a modern-day person of faith? First, and perhaps most importantly, people of faith should not be afraid of the data. No matter the direction the evidence points, the evidence itself need not become a stumbling block. Faith in God cannot be challenged or changed by any evidence or data one might unearth. Simply put, no data could ever prove or disprove God’s identity or existence. That is why belief in God is called faith. As a scholar and a person of faith, I find great comfort in this fact. Yes, it is possible that the data will challenge things we believe about history or the Bible. It may even challenge things we believe about God or ourselves. But the data has no power to change God, to make God any less real, or to make us any less beloved by God.

Second, God gave us brains, and it is okay to use them. Faith will always be belief in things we cannot know, but it does not require turning a blind eye to things that can be known. Nor does it require forcing the evidence to fit any particular viewpoint in order to “prove” a certain perspective. Studying the Bible can and should change what we believe about who God is. The more we learn, the more our faith grows and matures. Sometimes that growth is uncomfortable, and sometimes it takes us places we did not expect, but God does not abandon us along the journey.— Josey Bridges Snyder in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, p. 124

Who are we?

Many people today think that a person is something deep and internal and individual. We are who we are deep down inside, in our hearts or minds or spirits. To understand ourselves we must journey within. But we aren’t and We shouldn’t. These things are important. Without them We can’t function as people. But they are just a sort of platform that we need in order to get on with the really important activities that define who We are as people—our relationships with other people.

We need to let this insight sink down into our bones. We are our relationships.—Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, 61

What's a believer to do?

Growing up in the church, I was taught from a young age that there is only one God. I was aware that other peoples in the Bible worshipped other gods, but I knew them only as “fake” and “bad.” They did not warrant any attention because they were not real. To the extent that we did discuss the gods of other peoples in the Bible, we contrasted them to the one true God. There was no room for acknowledging similarity between, say, the (“little g”) god of Moab and the (“big G”) God of Israel. One was fake and one was real. End of story.

I am still a person of faith grounded in my belief in one, true God. However, I no longer feel that beliefs about other deities in the ancient world are irrelevant to my faith. Beliefs about the God of Israel did not emerge in a void. The ancient world was full of ideas about the gods and how they interacted with the human and natural world, and the Israelites were clearly familiar with these other peoples and their deities.

Whether the earliest Israelites themselves worshipped one god or many—a question debated among scholars of the ancient world—we know that they lived in a world where the existence of multiple deities was assumed. Moreover, examination of these other gods and the beliefs and practices associated with them reveals many similarities with the beliefs and practices of the earliest Israelites.— Josey Bridges Snyder in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, p. 115

What taking the form of a servant looks like

We need to let the full implications of this statement sink in. Paul, a former member of the Jewish ruling council no less, whose learning was legendary, arrived in Thessalonica and worked away like a humble craftsperson. He would have looked like one as well, wearing a single set of clothes, carrying a few tools, dirty and bedraggled from his journey, and with little to no money in his belt. He could have showed up and asked for free meals and lodging. He could have insisted that his former hosts send him on in the manner to which he was accustomed, possibly in a rented carriage. A professional like him could demand to be paid a speaking fee. His rivals did. But he didn’t. He abandoned his cultural capital, lowering himself to the place where the Thessalonians lived, and became like one of them, so they could become like him (see Gal. 4:12). And this is just what we would expect. In another highly significant passage Paul says exactly the same thing about Jesus.

Christ Iesus . . . being in the form Of God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he emptied himself
by taking the form of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross! (Phil. 2:6—8, NIV modified)

—Paul: An Apostle’s Journey,57–58

<idle musing>
One can't help but make a comparison to many of today's megachurch pastors, with their expensive toys. But, as Jesus said, the last will be first and they have already received their reward. 'Nuff said.
</idle musing>

Among the gods

Because it is God’s free decision to become a god among gods, the equation of YHWH and God (“YHWH—he is God!”) is sealed with the tensile strength of God’s own volition. It is thus not like the association of divinity and YHWH in the “ray of truth” approach, which does not embrace the fullness of God’s coincidence with this one, specific god, instead imagining a divine being that YHWH only partially concretizes–and which other gods partially concretize also! This third theological way of addressing YHWH’s ancient look-alikes also improves on the “ray of truth” approach in that it can full-heartedly praise YHWH’s incomparability. It does not divert that praise solely to an all-transcending One who connects only tenuously back to the biblical God. Rather, like Israel, it wonders at the singularity of God’s act of drawing near—in Deuteronomy, by exodus and fire: “Has any people ever heard the voice of a god speaking out of a fire? . . . Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation?” (4:33–34a)—but also, on this line of thinking, by taking on human form, and even by accepting a human artifact as true divine self-disclosure.—Collin Cornell in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, p. 113

He emptied himself

As James Scott has shown, centuries of social hierarchy have equipped disempowered groups with techniques for dissembling and subtly subverting those above them who have power and resources. Lying, parodying, stealing, cajoling, avoiding, loitering and mocking are entirely understandable ways of resisting the powerful and exploitative. But they are deadly to any healthy relationship, which ultimately needs to unfold between equals. Moreover, once they are in play, these corrosive dynamics are next to impossible to erase. A relationship that begins in this fashion tends to stay there.

The church today is especially aware of this dilemma. The modern missionary movement was launched by Christians from Europe and the USA, areas that were the cradle of the industrial revolution, which in turn catapulted these regions to enormous accumulations of capital and to global dominance. Consequently, missionaries sent out from these regions to evangelize other parts of the world arrived with vast amounts of capital, in material, political, and cultural terms. The result was frequently a pernicious colonial dynamic. Converts were framed in terms of need and were victimized and infantilized. Missionaries were framed in terms of provision and identified with European mores—often described as quintessentially white values. Authentic relationships were distorted and difficult. What are we to do? Can Paul help us here?

In fact he can. Although he was not materially rich, Paul was rich in cultural capital. He was highly educated, well connected back in his homeland, and a leader. He was accustomed to organizing, pronouncing, and formulating and directing policy. So he was a wealthy person compared with the despised handworkers who occupied one of the lowest echelons in the ancient city and had no such training, connections, or confidence. But what did he do?

It is highly significant that Paul arrived in Thessalonica looking like the people he was hoping to befriend and to convert. He adopted the persona of a handworker and worked alongside the humble Thessalonians.—Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, 57

The god we have

Anybody who simply cannot “put up” with the incarnation will also not know what to do with YHWH, who speaks and hears, who wounds and heals, who comes down and visits us, who walks in the garden and confuses the language of the tower builders, who accompanies his people in pillars of fire and cloud, who sits enthroned on the cherubim and precisely as such is the God of heaven and earth.—K. H. Miskotte, When the Gods are Silent, 128, quoted in Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, p. 112