Citizens in Colonies of Heaven

This is a re-post of a previous article with minor edits. I actually still agree with most of what I wrote 4 years ago, which is weird.

“But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” Philippians 3:20,21

This passage seems short and simple, but is pregnant with underlying meaning and first century cultural undertones. With our twenty-first century eyes, we typically read this as meaning that our true home is in heaven, and that we should always be longing to return to our true home. Christianity is simply the road-map to get us to the correct destination. All other guides lead to Hell.

But Paul was not a westerner living in the United States, nor were his readers. Nor did they live after the Enlightenment, which loves to force every concept into some sort of dualism. So what meaning could the word “citizenship” have in the time period?

What was the most popular and well-known form of citizenship during the first century, of which Paul himself had attained?

In the Gentile world to which Paul directed his preaching, the power of Rome overshadowed all walks of life, especially in Phillipi, so it is not unreasonable to think that the context here is Roman citizenship. Add the fact that Phillipi was a Roman colony founded by Augustus, planted permanently with Roman military veterans, and was referred to as a “miniature Rome,” and the case stacks up that Paul wrote to a Romanized city filled with Roman citizens.

So what did this citizenship mean? In the rich diversity of the Empire, with it’s sprawling colonies, certainly it did not mean that a Roman citizen longed to return once and for all to the mother city, Rome, and that the ultimate goal of their lives, was to reach that glorious place. A proposal like that sounds silly.

What it did mean, however, was that a citizen could call on the power of Caesar to intervene, as Paul did when he was on trial. It also meant that if there were ever any problems in a colony, or that Caesar’s authority was questioned, that he (or a representative) would come down from Rome (usually at the head of a legion or two) to reestablish Roman rule and authority. Likewise, Roman citizens were to exude Roman values, to essentially carry Rome wherever they went. Leaven for the land.

Here we have a more plausible meaning for the passage. Jesus, the true lord and king of the world, coming to complete the work the church has undertaken since his resurrection, and finally, once and for all, reestablishing the authority of the Father over all of creation. But in the process, the creation itself will be renewed into a “new heavens and new earth”, of which the Spirit was a down payment.

After all, simply “going to heaven when you die”, seeking to escape the good creation of the one true God, would really be no different than the Platonic view of the world, which most pagans held anyway. There’s nothing inherently controversial about that view. But the message that Jesus is Messiah, the lord of all the earth, and to him every knee should bow, including that of Caesar, would turn a few heads, I imagine.

So why do we want to escape an earth that Jesus has in subjection, and will renew (along with our bodies) when he comes again?

The early Christians were not persecuted because they wanted to escape their bodies and leave the world. Who cares if they did that? Good riddance, some would say. They were persecuted because they were odd, peculiar, and stood in direct defiance to Caesar’s authority, claiming another king.

In the same way, our loyalty should not be to any governments of man, nor their agendas of power and death. We tolerate them, and respect their God-given authority, but only as the parodies and shadows they are of the true King. They need to be reminded that they eventually have to report to upper management.

Begin telling people that your allegiance is to another King. That you have a citizenship that trumps your obligations as a citizen of any government on earth. That you reject their claim that there is no authority above them.

You are a citizen of heaven. Act like one.

Baptizing the Straw Man

I grew up in a tradition that claims baptism is necessary to be saved, or to be right with God, or to enter into the covenant. I still believe this. But among much of the American evangelical world , people who believe this are said to hold to the false teaching of “baptismal regeneration,” that it is the act of baptism itself that saves.

But this is a straw man.

We all love straw men, so it’s understandable. They’re so much easier and lighter to carry around than actual arguments. For my side, it’s easy to use them along with a few proof texts to “debunk” Calvinism, to rip off a few petals of the TULIP and then act smug as if the whole flower has been uprooted and flung on the sidewalk.

No one I know actually believes baptism alone saves.  Not many people think that falling into the pool has eternal consequences.

The spectrum of beliefs isn’t a ping pong table, where the ball is on one side or the other.  It’s not all or nothing, where either baptism does nothing, or baptism does everything.

You have most Baptists who think baptism doesn’t actually do anything and is just an outward sign of what has already happened. A part of the public confession, but a person is saved before they get wet. For sure, it is an important act of obedience that every Christian should perform, but if it was necessary for salvation, wouldn’t that mean salvation was dependent on a work of man?

But this denies the power and sovereignty of God.

Namaan and Noah and Israel, Oh My!

The example of Namaan is helpful here. Do we dare scoff at water as he did? As Leithart says:

Like Namaan, some Christians doubt what the New Testament says about the power of baptismal water. (1 & 2 Kings, p. 194)

We would do well to listen to the words of Namaan’s servants:

“My father, it is a great word the prophet has spoken to you; will you not do it? Has he actually said to you, ‘Wash, and be clean’?” (2 Kings 5:13)(ESV)

Would Namaan have had his flesh restored “like the flesh of a little child” if he had not baptized himself? Would his new birth have come?

Leithart continues:

To say that water can cleanse leprosy, wash away sins, or renew life is an insult to intelligence. Water is just too simple, not to mention too physical and tangible.  But that is exactly the point. Baptism is an insult to the wisdom of the world: through the foolishness of water God has chosen to save those who believe. (1 & 2 Kings, p. 195)

A few more hypotheticals.  What if, when God parted the Red Sea, the Israelites just stood there and didn’t cross? Or what if Noah made no move to get on the ark when it started to rain? The baptisms of the flood and the Red Sea were real acts of salvation, and yet each required a form of obedience. And yet, when the Israelites looked on from the opposite shore, they knew it was God that had delivered them, and not the shuffle of their own feet.

So, when presented with baptism, do we look up to God and with Namaan say “Why don’t you just wave your hand and make it so without me getting wet? Seems easier.”

And I must draw attention again to this brilliant satire video that sums up some of the New Testament teachings. I’ll let it speak for itself.

What About the Children?!

I read a lot of the Federal Vision Reformed theologians (Leithart being one of them), and they continually affirm that baptism does indeed do something.  I can get behind that, because it obviously does justice to the larger body of Scripture. However, they typically then take it and try to apply it to infant baptism. On that issue, I stand with the Baptists and am firmly credobaptist.

I understand the desire for paedobaptism.  The idea is compelling and some of the arguments bring up some interesting questions, such as what is meant by 1 Corinthians 7:14.

However, the foundational idea is that baptism has replaced circumcision in marking the people of God.  Hence, baptizing infants into the promise is good and proper.

But I think Paul in Galatians makes it clear that faith in Christ, brought about by hearts put under the knife of gospel preaching, is the new circumcision. Baptism has more to do with the priestly washings and the laver in the temple, and meant for people who can actually perform priestly work in the kingdom (as in, not infants.)

What in the World Did You Just Read?

This post is just a big, personal brain dump. A winding road through rolling hills. It is based on what my current understanding is of the situation.  Pouring it out in blog form was triggered by recent conversations I’ve had, both in person and through blogs, and then reading a passage in a commentary that essentially claimed I was a false teacher (not me personally, just a “those who say that” generalization.) Calling each other false teachers is a favorite sport among Christians, but it can turn into a contact sport with real injuries.

As mentioned earlier, I think a lot of men are being sculpted from straw around this topic, like kids forming men out of snow in their front yards. It’s fun, and you have something to show for your work.  But it never lasts. This was an initial attempt to scare the scarecrows away.

So what does everyone think? I know people from varied traditions have read this blog. Please chime in.

Can You Trust Their GPA?

Higher education is the next bubble to pop, with rising costs and people with large debt and almost nothing to show for it. And then there is the additional question of the value of the actual education, whenever the football and basketball games are over. Taken even further, can you even trust the GPA they received?

This professor decides to stop pursuing cheating in his classes. Why? It’s not worth it. The incentives are twisted.

Not only I paid a significant financial penalty for “doing the right thing” (was I?) but I was also lectured by some senior professors that I “should change slightly my assignments from year to year”. (Thanks for the suggestion, buddy, this is exactly how I detected the cheaters.)

Suggestions to change completely the assignments from year to year are appealing on the first sight but they cause others types of problems: It is very difficult to know in advance if an assignment is going to be too easy, too hard, or too ambiguous. Even small-scale testing with TA’s and other faculty does not help. You need to “test” the new assignment by giving it to students. If it is a good one, you want to keep it. If it is a bad one, you just gave to the students a useless exercise.

I also did not like the overall teaching experience, and this was the most important thing for me. Teaching became annoying and tiring. There was a very different dynamic in class, which I did not particularly enjoy. It was a feeling of “me-against-them” as opposed to the much more pleasant “these things that we are learning are really cool!”

Will I pursue cheating cases in the future? Never, ever again!

He also spent 45 hours dealing with his cheating cases.  That is over 30% more time than he spent lecturing.

This professor is actually taking steps to be more creative in his assignments to make cheating impossible. But how many will take the effort to do this? And as he mentions, that is not possible with all types of assignments.  It’s hard to teach the writing of database queries without some standard exercises that are tried and true.

Here are some of his suggestions to mitigate the damage, however:

  1. Public Projects, where risk of embarrassment is too high.
  2. Peer Reviewing, where the only grade they receive is given by the class.
  3. Competitions.

The secular bastions of the one key Enlightenment virtue, “education,” are crumbling. I’m reminded of this C.S. Lewis quote:

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful.”

Tasty Sample 7/15

1. Where are the fathers? A plea from a child born from artificial insemination.

When I was doing college interviews, one of the interviewers told me that he didn’t have any children, but that he had donated sperm while in college because he needed the money. He didn’t realize that he probably is someone’s father, regardless of whether he knows his child.

2. The War Against Girls. More girls are aborted then boys. And this is held up as women’s right. Yet, this is the consequence of elevating “choice” to a public good.

One Indian abortionist tells Ms. Hvistendahl: “I have patients who come and say ‘I want to abort because if this baby is born it will be a Gemini, but I want a Libra.’ “

3. The Best Women’s Ministry is a Robust Men’s Ministry. This was a good read, with some common sense advice to churches.

What every godly wife yearns for is a spiritual leader. It’s a natural desire. Conversely, wives are most frustrated by husbands who occupy the office of leader but refuse to fulfill it.

Like a Choir of Parrots

Politicians from the President all the way down to lowly state representatives, along with their mouthpieces in the media, keep repeating the same refrain like a choir of parrots drunk from whiskey and buzzing from caffeine at the same time. Jobs, jobs, jobs.  The economy needs to improve, and the way to do that is to create jobs. Every politician who wants to get elected and keep sucking dry the marrow of civilization promises to personally “create jobs.”

But this is a horrible metric. As with most things the government does or believes, it trips over the roots of the first tree it comes across and then can’t see the forest because officials are blinded by their own tears and deaf from the sound of their own whining. The health of the economy is not dependent on the number of “new” jobs, whatever that means.

Let’s take a hypothetical two income household. Each parent brings in $30,000. Their total income is $60,000.

Let’s say the husband gets a big break and more than doubles his income. He is now bringing home $65,000.  His wife decides to quit her job and stay home, because they can now afford the situation.

Gasp! But this family only one has one job now! Certainly they must be worse off than before.  Right?

On the other side of things, we have the idea of productivity.  The reason a job exists is because the value the person creates can eventually be traded for more than that person is being paid. They produce something of worth. that might be part of a product, or it might be ideas or information. Worth is generally subjective.

But according to the jobs, jobs, jobs logic, the job itself is an end, instead of a means to an end.  If this was true, then we could round up a bunch of hobos from the street and give them jobs digging holes in the field and then filling them right back up again. The job itself is the goal, and so we just created a bunch jobs. But no one in their right mind would actually pay for people to just dig holes and fill them back up for no apparent reason. There is no value.

So what does the government do when no reasonable person would do this on their own. They institutionalize it. A group of people can be wiser than their individual parts, but a group of bureaucrats will almost always be unreasonable. And so being the unreasonable entity required to hire hole diggers who add no value, they then need the money for this.  So they tax, taking money out of the economy, skimming a little off the top, and then putting it back in the economy toward something unproductive.

And magically, the economy is improving because they just created new jobs!

As someone once said, the government trying to stimulate the economy is like a man trying to fill up the shallow end of the pool by taking water from the deep end of the same pool.  Except the man uses a colander to carry the water.

Don’t get caught up in the religious mantra of jobs, jobs, jobs. It’s an idol that leads to nothing but…nothing.