Top 12 of CiHD: #1

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

This is it! We’ve travelled this 2018 path of the Top 12 Blog Posts at Covered in His Dust and we have arrived at the end of our list — the most viewed post in my blog’s history. The winner of this title is the blog I wrote on the Resurrection back at the end of August 2015. The post was titled “Empty” and you can read the original post here.

So, for one last time, let’s remember what I’ll try to do.

In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else? Why do I think these posts got so many views; why were others drawn to them? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?

WHY THIS POST?

Well, if you would have asked me about which post I had hoped would get the most views, it would have been this one. I am a big believer that the most important truth, the most profound reality, the pinnacle of all theology and of the Kingdom is the resurrection. There are many theologians who talk about the crucifixion as being the most central to theology, that everything revolves around the work of Jesus on the cross. Many of these theologians are men and women I respect very deeply. But I respectfully disagree.

The apostle Paul did not say that without the crucifixion, our faith is in vain. No, he said that without the resurrection, our faith is in vain. That’s a strong assertion to make and it drives my theology.

Having said that, I wonder if there are other reasons the page views were driven up. I don’t feel like it was one of my best written posts. Are people that driven and interested in the resurrection? That hasn’t been my experience, typically. I can’t seem to find any unique or unusual words or phrases that would have caught some other Google search. Did people think I was posting about how I was feeling empty and so they were driven to click in and read? That could be.

WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?

Well, the truth and power of the resurrection is really, in a lot of ways, a mystery. Part of the reason we don’t get more excited about it is because there is so much about it that we don’t understand. Much of the last century has been misdirected in simply trying to prove the historicity of the event. This is a shame, as the power of resurrection doesn’t lie in intellectually proving that it happened. No, the power of the resurrection lies in realizing what it means for our daily walks, trusting that great truth to be real, and leaning into the consequences.

Even I struggled (then and now) to write about the resurrection in such a way that captures the power of this great truth. To that end, I recommend a great book called Surprised by Hope by NT Wright. It does a good job of talking about the resurrection in a western way that helps us capture some of the applicable ramifications of the resurrection.

WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?

I would talk about the power of hope.

The story of God’s people, all the way back to the story of Abram, is a story about hope. It’s a story about people who believe there is more going on — that more is possible than simply the concrete thing we experience in the Order of Brokenness. This reality is deeper and greater than a battle between optimism and pessimism. This isn’t about whether or not the glass is half-full or half-empty.

This is about whether or not you believe the glass was meant to be full — and, no matter what happens, will be full again.

The resurrection is about what you fundamentally believe is true about the world. What is the truest true? What is the realest real? What is the thing that if you burned away all of the dross, would remain? Does love win? Does life end in death? Or is death not really an end? And no, I’m not just talking about what happens when we die. I’m talking about the true order of things.

Here. Now. When we are alive.

When the Order of Death rears its ugly head, is it a roar of triumph, or is it the gasping and grasping of a creature whose days are numbered?

When you encounter greed and selfishness, are you dismayed? Or are you grounded — as a Child of the Resurrection — in a truth that what you are looking at is a fleeting shadow? And does this change the way you live?

It should. It should make us more selfless. More generous. It should make us better priests. It should prepare us for Kingdom, making us conduits of God’s redeeming work. It should rid us of fear and equip us to lay our lives down — because we understand that there really is no way to lose our life.

Maybe this is the reason the Rabbi said the only way to save your life is to lose it.

MAKING AN IMPACT: Church

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

One of our values at Impact Campus Ministries is church.

It might seem like a silly value, but let me explain why we put it on the list.

Too many times, para-church organizations get started because of some need that the local church isn’t meeting — oftentimes because it would not be practical, wise, and good stewardship of their time and resources. There are many ministries like this and almost any missions organization you can think of will fit into this category. While some of these efforts are less para-church than others (e.g., sending missionaries to international settings is less about filling an unmet need and more about sending missionaries to do the work in other corners of the world), a bulk of these organizations will be like this. Homeless shelters, food pantries, and benevolence ministries will be like this. Pregnancy crisis centers and free medical clinics will be like this. Campus ministry organizations often make the list.

Because of this natural gap, there is often an animosity that grows, whether intentional or unintentional. Oftentimes these organizations are started because of a frustration that the local church isn’t meeting an obvious need. That chip on the shoulder is an unhealthy attitude that festers in the church world. In places like campus ministry, it can become easy to critique the local church, throw stones at their methods, and start our own thing to replace the broken piece. In return, churches become increasingly frustrated with organizations critiquing without helping, wanting to take without giving back, and always draining the resources of a church community that struggles to give generously.

And so, ICM wants to be sure we state up front that we value the local church.

We do not think we are here to critique or fix the state of the church. We are not the answer to all the world’s problems. We are simply here to help. And we want to start by coming alongside what God is already doing in His local church.

We will not try to replace the local church. We will not talk negatively about the local church. And while not all of our teams will have intentional partnerships on the level that some teams do (like our team on the Palouse), we will seek to partner with the local church whenever that partnership will be effective and efficient.

We want to do our job in a way that encourages all of our brothers and sisters to run the race well. And we want to do our job in a way that makes the church want to return the favor.

If we truly believed in the work of MILIEU (that we spoke of before) then we have to be active partners with the local church. You may remember Eric Wright sharing his stories of having students exposed to different ideas. We want to remind ourselves that if we are Impacting the U because we believe it will Impact the World, then we have to keep our students surrounded by healthy diversity and a wide demographic of people. This kind of exposure will enhance their personal development, make them better professionals, and increase their ability to lead others later in life. How could we truly pursue this and not value a connection with the local church?

And yet, it is easy to miss. And so we have to remind ourselves by putting it on our list of values.

Top 12 of CiHD: #3

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

This month in the Top 12 Blog Posts at Covered in His Dust, we’ll look at the third-most-viewed post. And again, like last month, there is a little bit of a disclaimer. If I would have been true to the “twelve most-viewed posts” on my blog, then nine out of those twelve posts would have been posts on the book of Revelation. Instead of making this series a review of my thoughts on Revelation, I chose to pick the most viewed of my Revelation posts, which happens to be my introductory thoughts and a great place to have a conversation. You can read the original post here.

In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else? Why do I think these posts got so many views; why were others drawn to them? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?

WHY THIS POST?

I don’t think there is any reason to doubt or wonder why this post (and apparently eight others) made the list. We have an infatuation with the book of Revelation. I mean, just let the idea sink in. One of the most recently written sections of my blog is on the book of Revelation. The series has only been up for just under two years, yet the posts on Revelation overwhelmingly dominate the most-viewed list.

I’m not sure there has ever been a book of the Bible so ripe for sensational reading (and mis-reading), more misunderstood, bringing more anxiety, and usurping the rest of the teaching of Scripture like that of Revelation. As I allude to in the original post, it would seem that there are two dominant groups in terms of studying this book. Either you feel like the book is so crazy and confusing that you refuse to engage it — or you are obsessed with the future forecasting, absolutely certain that you are reading it correctly, and you are so committed to your interpretation that you will undoubtedly break fellowship with other believers over its content.

It’s ridiculous. And both extremes seem unbelievably foolish and destructive to me.

WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?

I hope the reader found an objective and respectable hermeneutic grounded in critical thinking, legitimate history, and backed by biblical scholarship. If the reader was a member of the “I Don’t Read Revelation” camp, then I hope they were given some tools and a little hope that, in fact, this book is worth giving a second chance.

If the reader was a member of the “Revelation or Bust [Someone’s Face]” camp, then I hope they realized their position was more asinine than they’ve realized and were able to be honest about the unbelievable complexity of the book and the problems we have to face when we interpret it. All in all, no matter the reader, I hope we always approach the Bible with a sense of reverence and humility, while still being unintimidated by the task.

WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?

If I were to say something in addition to what I’ve already written it would be an encouragement to truly examine the way we approach and interpret the scriptures. Brothers and sisters, it matters. And I’m not saying it matters because of some childish commitment to orthodoxy. I’m saying it matters because of the implications.

Around the same time I wrote this series, our church was preaching through a series on the book of Revelation. It was insane. While I enjoyed the series immensely, my comrade Aaron Couch swears he will never preach through the book again. I saw things in people that concerned me deeply.

First, I saw people absolutely gripped with fear. If we know anything about the other 65 books of the Bible, we know this is not the posture that the gospel, the Church, or God is supposed to invoke in others. However, we’ve cloaked the discussion of the “End Times” in so much doomsday, apocalyptic, fire-breathing, demonic nonsense that people can’t even think straight when they start thinking about the return of Jesus and “the end of the world.” How did we get here?

And second, I have never seen so much rage come out of people that I have had fellowship with for years. All of a sudden our relationships were in jeopardy, our friendships rendered meaningless, and many found other churches. The only thing that even begins to rival the work of this book is the topic of politics (an issue I won’t even begin to touch here). We have some serious idolatry issues in these areas. Its horribly out of whack. We can talk about racism, loving our enemies, the glory of the empty tomb… and we get nothing. Nobody is sweating or has spit in their beard. Nobody is leaving the church and writing emails laced with profanity. But you mention some other idea about Revelation…

We are followers of Jesus. We should have a Christocentric theology (meaning that our theology should center around Jesus). Nothing should be more important than the teachings of Jesus. Not politics. Not eschatology. Not philosophy. Not Torah. Not Paul’s letters. And not Revelation. Not crazy YouTube videos about how some unaccountable Messianic Rabbi is convinced he broke the “Bible Code” and figured out the date the world comes to an end. Not some slick presentation on Blood Moons and the ancient Jewish calendar. Not the current events and how they line up with misinterpreted prophecy.

Nothing before Jesus. Jesus came so we would be one (John 17) and that through this oneness the world would know who He is. Jesus came to teach us how to chase down prodigal sons and welcome the sinner. Jesus came to tell us how to appropriately read everything else — including Torah and the book of Revelation. Jesus came to teach us how to forgive and live at peace. Jesus spoke very little about how the world would end.

I think that was on purpose.

Top 12 of CiHD: #6

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

The next post in our series examining the Top 12 Blog Posts at Covered in His Dust is a teaching on the Tabernacle. I called it “Falling on Joyful Faces” — and you can find it here.

In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else? Why do I think this post got so many views; why were others drawn to it? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?

WHY THIS POST?

To be honest, I don’t have many ideas as to why this teaching made the list — let alone so high up. I do know this is one of my favorite lessons to teach in person, either in the classroom or on my trips in Israel. There is a built-to-scale model of the Tabernacle in the Negev desert and I love to take my students there. I know that it communicates well in person, but I never felt like written teaching was the way to go here. Maybe I’m wrong.

I also remember this post being shared by others more than usual. Many have pointed out that there is no science behind why something gets shared and some others do not — there is no correlation to quality of content — but I imagine those shares were a big part of the view count.

The only other idea I can come up with is that if people were searching the Internet for Tabernacle and Temple and their relationship to each other, this post would have shown up on the search.

WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?

Obviously, this is one of my more “poetic” pieces, so it would be safe to say I hope people found inspiration and a compelling call to engage the missio Dei in the world.

I hope it challenged readers to pause and consider the reaction of the people. Growing up in the Church and being exposed to the Bible routinely had caused me to make some assumptions about God and His presence. I had picked up the idea that God is scary; when people meet God, they fall down terrified. Without a doubt, there are those instances in the Text. But with that being my go-to assumption, I read over instances like this one — so much so that I remember having to give serious thought to what it would have looked like to “fall on their faces in joy” when I first heard this teaching.

WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?

I would certainly point out how much the original lesson impacted me and provided the basis for my own teaching. I first heard this lesson in 2008 from Ray Vander Laan while we were spending time in the Negev desert. Later, I was able to revisit the lesson when it was produced by Focus on the Family in the That the World May Know series (Volume 10, “With All Your Heart,” Lessons 1–2).

If I could, I think I would have added more to the idea of the corporate “we” being the Temple of God. It’s a common idea and so I think I just assumed it at the end of my original post, but I would have been wise to let more of the Text speak there. I would have included passages from the New Testament like 1 Peter 2:4–5:

As you come to him, the living Stone — rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him — you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

I would have also included 1 Corinthians 3:16–17:

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.

Connecting this idea to Pentecost is a powerful way of reminding the readers that we all — as the corporate Body of Christ — are a new Temple, opened on that day. If we are familiar with how people responded to the grand openings of God’s other spiritual houses, it would be an easy assumption to make about how they ought to respond when they meet us. In order to make this point even more poignant, one could hear this idea of God using us as living stones as a call back to Isaiah 51:

“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousnessand who seek the LORD:Look to the rock from which you were cutand to the quarry from which you were hewn;look to Abraham, your father,and to Sarah, who gave you birth.When I called him he was only one man,and I blessed him and made him many.”

It would be a powerful consideration to think about the qualities of Abraham and Sarah that we studied early in the series. If they are people of radical hospitality (referenced by Jesus himself!), it would give us an indication of the missional methodology behind the reaction of people who see the goodness of God and the enduring nature of His love.

Top 12 of CiHD: #7

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

We continue our look at the Top 12 Blog Posts at Covered in His Dust by introducing the seventh most viewed post in the history of the blog. This is the first post I ever wrote for this more-than-four-years journey; it was written all the way back in February of 2013 and served as the launching point for my entire body of work. It is titled “SABBATH: A Trust Story” — and you can find it here.

In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else? Why do I think this post got so many views; why were others drawn to it? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?

WHY THIS POST?

First of all, I’m super happy to see that this post made it onto the “top 12” list. This is the foundation of my entire body of work. The first time this idea was presented to me, it changed everything. I began to orient my entire theology around this idea. It was the approach that I believed (and still do) maintains the most hermeneutical integrity, logical consistency, and compelling potency.

There are a lot of reasons people might have found this post. They may have been researching Genesis 1 and the creation narrative. They might have been trying to study Sabbath. I know this particular post has been shared by many, many students and people connected to my ministry. People who know me well know this lesson is where it all begins and where it all keeps circling back to.

For me, this is it. It doesn’t matter so much to me why they got here — but I’m thrilled they did.

WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?

This concept is the result of me piecing together two separate teachings that impacted me and changed my theology forever. The many questions and observations I had compiled over years of study and Bible college education finally found expression, and over the course of a few years I was able to package them in a way that finally “clicked.”

To give appropriate credit, the first teaching was one I heard in person at the Black Sheep in Colorado Springs. It was the Everything Is Spiritual tour by Rob Bell, and I got to see an earlier version with additional material that never made it into the recording. This was before Bell’s more provocative days when he became such a controversial figure. I also listened to a sermon from Mars Hill Bible Church on August 16, 2009, that finally dropped the last few pieces into place for me intellectually.

What had bothered me for years was the fact that almost all schools of Protestant theology I had been exposed to had made the story of Christian theology about the entrance and removal of sin. As I studied the Text, though, the story seemed to be about something much wider, deeper, and comprehensive than that. Sin was certainly a part of the story, but it seemed not to be taking its proper place in a larger theological narrative — it had become the narrative.

To hear a teaching that spoke of the importance of beginning where God started His story and ending where God ended His story was like throwing the lights on in a dark room. I realized the theology I had been handed started a tad late in the biblical story. Even if Genesis 3 was only a couple chapters later, skipping the first story (or rendering it irrelevant because of the second) was a major theological faux pas.

Obviously, I want to keep writing about this, but that is what my four-and-a-half-year blog series was for. Suffice it to say that I hope people found a refreshing way to reframe the biblical narrative, and perhaps a different way to begin to understand God.

WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?

I’m not sure there is much I would add to this post. It’s relatively thorough. Over the years, I have continued to learn, shape, and adapt this teaching in different ways. There might be nuances I would approach differently, but I would be nitpicking. There is a lot of material here to get introduced to beyond just the theological shift. This whole teaching is bathed in a combination of historical-contextual and literary hermeneutics. There are conversations about chiasms and other Hebraic literary devices. There is a lot in this post!

I can also appreciate the way Rabbi David Fohrman’s teachings have shaped the material in this post (and even more so over the following years). I would certainly recommend his online academy (Aleph Beta) for those looking to learn more from an orthodox Jewish perspective. While Fohrman is not a follower of Jesus at all, his approach will help one become familiar with how Jews interact with the Text, and his conservative perspective will temper the progressive overtones of a voice like Bell for those who struggle to accept that.

Overall, I’m thrilled to have this make the list. Here’s to trusting the story!

CHURCH HISTORY: AD 1925 thru Today

NB: For readers who missed it, I suggest going back to review my setup to this section on church history to know about my disclaimers. For the graphics used in this post, the timelines are not to scale, and the dates represented are not intended to be exact. They are meant to be visual aids for understanding the larger conversation.

Fundamentalism and secular humanism continued to be locked in a fierce battle for “truth” for a decade. It would be worth answering the question that often goes unanswered in these conversations: What happened to the parts of Christendom that wouldn’t have aligned with fundamentalism? At this point in history, those who would have rejected fundamentalism often drifted towards theological liberalism. While the Church (in this century) would eventually learn how to have more progressive conversations and put more “options” on the table (rather than a simple bifurcated presentation of the argument), this is not that point in history. For much of [theological] liberalism, their position felt like a weak take on humanism, with Jesus slapped on the label.

The two options most 20th-century Christians had to choose from seem today like equally bad options; it also looked like Christianity, while putting up a good fight, was not going to have the staying power to outlast the run that humanism was putting together.

But that all ended with the arrival of World War II.

Any hope that humanity could usher in some utopian societal existence, whether it was by fascist, socialist, communist, or even democratic means, would come to a crashing end. Every humanistic worldview seemed to show its true self in the face of unbelievable genocide, communist oppression, and nuclear war. Simply put, humanity isn’t as great as we thought it was.

This gave Christianity a great and sudden turnaround that ushered in what I call the modern evangelistic era, and the eventual rise of the evangelical church. Fundamentalism gives way to a broader, softer version of itself in a wide representation of Protestant, American Christianity. While the beliefs that justify “evangelical orthodoxy” change depending on who you ask (even today), modern evangelicalism attempted to plant its flag and set up its defenses. It’s worth noting that we still find ourselves in this tension today. The “culture wars” of the current evangelical church are not the great Promised Land of our day, nor are they the last and final Armageddon we often want them to be. At best, they are simply the awkward phases of a modern evangelicalism that is going through a sociological “puberty” and, at worst, they are the final gasping breaths of a movement coming to a very unflattering end. We would do well to consider these things.

The modern evangelical movement was created by some of the greatest evangelists of our era. People like Billy Graham and Bill Bright (founder of Campus Crusade for Christ) helped the church navigate this very difficult era, giving the Church language for communicating the gospel like we had never seen. I believe history might look back on this era with a similar perspective to our view of the printing press and the Reformation. This modern evangelical push paved the way for cultural engagement like never before.

Evangelism was now in the hands of normal, everyday parishioners — not just the clergy and preachers in revival tents. The creation of the “Four Spiritual Laws” (no matter how you or I might feel about their theological accuracy) created a world where college students, coworkers, and soccer moms could articulate the movement of Jesus in simple language. The same resurgence of cultural engagement would eventually lead to what many from the 1970s call the “Jesus Movement” and the great testimonies of the movement of Jesus in people’s hearts. 

About the same time (the 1970s), the world of biblical scholarship was experiencing a new frontier, as well. While this is highly oversimplified, the work of Jacob Neusner changed the world of hermeneutics as we know it. Neusner, a Jewish literary scholar (not a Christian), was attempting to understand how modern Christian thought had influenced Jewish thought. As he brought modern Christian scholars (mostly Catholic) to the table, they found themselves learning lessons from Judaism that had gone missing some 1800 years ago. Realizing the impact this had on our understanding of the Bible, academic Christians would never again engage in scholastic research or archaeology without the aid of their Jewish brothers.

Many people have asked me, “How could we have not known this stuff for all these years?” The ridiculously simplistic answer is that we just hadn’t asked. Until the work of Neusner and others, Christendom had been too worried about doctrinal purity and theological rightness to ask basic questions about the Bible’s long-lost Jewish context. Since the turn of the century, many evangelical churches are beginning to experience the work of these scholars, finally “turning the corner” to our common knowledge.

I had professors who told me in college that new discoveries often took 20–30 years to find a presence in the Church. These new discoveries have to be vetted and then handed to the educational institutions (universities and seminaries), and then taught to the eventual pastors who would teach these things from pulpits (and through blog posts). Now, with the rise of the Internet, the distribution of this information — and all information (good and bad) — is increasing exponentially.

But that’s not the only thing that changed at the turn of the century. The world of science had also taken an unexpected turn. While the modern era produced a scientific belief that we would be able to figure out everything if given enough time (see how this fits so well with secular humanism?), the discovery of quantum science radically changed all of that. Some of the most basic principles of physics and Newtonian movement no longer applied in quantum science. The scientific world reeled in the implications of this development.

Combine this with the sociological realizations of this century, and we have a major shift in worldview. While humanism took a major hit, secularism was (and is) far from dead. In fact, since the days of the French Revolution, this might be the most shocking shift Christendom has yet to accept. While we talk about it often (“post-Christian culture”), we have not figured out how to respond well to it.

Enter: Postmodernity.

In the late 1990s, the cultural cry became, “What do we truly know, anyway?” Whether it was society or politics or science, it seemed like absolutes weren’t as absolute as we had once thought. While the Church cried out against what they perceived as moral relativism, the world moved on anyway. Some progressive evangelicals attempted to move with this cultural change, bringing the gospel back into the cultural conversation by creating what is known as the Emerging Church. Largely rejected by Evangelicalism (and, I would argue, no longer considered a viable approach to the “new day” of Christian thought — at least in its original form), the Emerging Church helped start some conversations that would set the stage for growth the Church needed to prepare for its survival.

And now, a decade or two later, we find ourselves at today. With the rise of decentralized consumerism (Uber, Airbnb, etc) and social networks changing the language of interaction everywhere, it’s hard to know exactly what lies just around the bend. Where is God calling us and what does any of this mean? Is there any hope at all for the future of Christianity? It seems like we have devolved into such a mess that it's hard to know what God would even approve of in our efforts.

Well, in fact, I believe we find ourselves (as every generation has) perfectly placed for the future.

CHURCH HISTORY: AD 1300 thru AD 1550

NB: For readers who missed it, I suggest going back to review my setup to this section on church history to know about my disclaimers. For the graphics used in this post, the timelines are not to scale, and the dates represented are not intended to be exact. They are meant to be visual aids for understanding the larger conversation.

So Christendom emerges from the period of the Crusades in horrible shape: completely beaten up, completely broken. Having spent everything they had on war and conquest, they now turn their sights toward rebuilding. In order to do this, they need to find a way to get resources.

Well, in a world that is largely illiterate, where the educated are priests and leadership, studying the Text that is written in an archaic, foreign language is difficult. It becomes simple to manipulate the truth that the masses depend on you to communicate. With a little shaping here and a little gloss there, the narrative of God quickly becomes something that can enslave people in a system of fear, guilt, and control. At its best, you had priests and Church leadership who were maintaining a commitment to sound doctrine, modeling a self-sacrificial life, and instilling a message of hope into people who needed the gospel so badly.

At its worst, we saw the rise of the Age of Indulgences. While the entire conversation is incredibly complex and usually oversimplified (as even I am about to do for the sake of brevity), the general understanding of the problem is relatively accurate. As parishioners came for their typical interaction with the sacraments, the Church leveraged this need to help control the general populace.

To understand this conversation, one needs a basic understanding of sacraments. To the orthodox faith of the Middle Ages, people believed you would interact with the many different practices of the Church in order to experience the grace, mercy, and forgiveness of God. You might remember the liturgy and order we spoke of when we talked about the contribution of Gregory the Great. The Church had identified seven sacraments to serve as corporate practices for experiencing the dispensation of grace. For these early thinkers, there is nothing magical about the sacrament itself, other than its service as a conduit to receive the grace of God into your life. Things like baptism, the Eucharist, confession, marriage — these all allow the grace of God to flow into your life.

You can imagine, as people come to engage these sacraments and anticipate the reception of God’s grace in their lives, it is a short leap for the Church to start manipulating this system for their ends. At some of its worst moments, the Church was even offering forgiveness at a monetary price. Come to confession and absolve your sins by going through the appropriate motions — and offering the appropriate gift.

In short, we are seeing a rabid abuse of Church leadership and priesthood.

Not all the educated were prepared to turn a blind eye to these abuses. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are littered with names of those who stood up against this corruption and fought to reveal the gospel as it ought to be seen. Two popular names in the world of scholasticism are Wycliffe and Hus.

John Wycliffe — Wycliffe was known for consistently attacking the imperial privilege of the Church at large. He hated the separation between the clergy and the laypeople and thought the gap should be dissolved. While he railed against the pomp of the high Church system, he also argued that the Text should not be held captive in an ancient language. He wanted the Scriptures to be accessible for all and thought they should be translated into the common vernacular for people to understand in services. In a lot of ways, Wycliffe paved the way for the Reformation.

John Hus — Sometimes referred to as the true father of the Reformation, it’s hard to see Hus apart from the work of Wycliffe. Hus led an informal resistance to the papacy and was eventually executed for leading what history knows as the Bohemian Revolt. There were two successful regional Crusades against the reigning papacy. While his methods may be subject, his thinking deeply shaped the thought process in western Europe and definitely laid the groundwork for what we know as the Protestant Reformation.

Part of the issue in this period of Catholic history was the geopolitical context. With a new sense of what I call “medieval nationalism,” the power structures in the world were shifting entirely. No longer was the world ruled by one giant papacy; as Christendom tried to figure out how to hold onto their outdated systems of governance, the world changed around them. People were seeing their allegiance aligned more with the powers of the state and country than they were with a foreign church. People associated with being French or German as a more immediate identification than they did with being “Catholic.”

This made it easier and easier to reject foreign papacy and rule. The papacy of Avignon actually shifted the seat of power away from Rome and into France for a period of seven popes, leading to what would later be called the “Western Schism” — when the Western Church was spilt between western and eastern Europe.

The Church continued to suffer from divisions and schisms.

In light of the many abuses of religious power, the Protestant Reformation was simply waiting for good leaders. How “good” these leaders were is left to historical debate. I will leave my personal opinions out of it; so much material has been written about the Reformation and I encourage you to do your own study. Needless to say, people like Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin led reformations away from the Catholic Church in their respective lands, each with their own nuances to their understanding of theology.

At this point, we begin to split over the smallest of nuances. No longer held together by a common hierarchy or papal leadership, we were free to disagree over the smallest details, often fueled by our nationalistic identifications. However, each national identity will get a denominational affiliation: Germans would be Lutheran, the French might be Calvinistic Reformers, and the Swiss would follow Zwingli.

Their many opinions splintered the faith of Christendom, and we don’t have time for that full conversation. However, as far as the good this movement did, it is hard to overstate. The invention of the printing press allowed the widespread distribution of the Text in the language of the common person. The Reformation changed the face of education and cinched up the gap between the educated and the uneducated, especially in reference to theology — both orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

And while this might seem like an unbelievable amount of change for the world to endure, the change is only beginning.

REVELATION: The End is a New Beginning

John now works his apocalyptic vision toward its ultimate closing.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

John continues to draw from the imagery of Ezekiel (in this case, chapter 47), using the image of an angel showing the prophets the apocalyptic conclusion to his vision. The allusions continue, as what John sees is very similar to what Ezekiel saw. Ezekiel also saw a river and trees that bore fruit for the healing of the nations. Allusions to the Psalms and to Jeremiah abound, as well. It seems as though everything God’s people longed for is still — according to John — something to long for, and still in process.

It’s coming, John says.

I think it’s also worth noting here that John is deliberately bringing us full circle back to the beginning of the story of God. There are plenty of direct and indirect allusions to the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life. Some have suggested John is mirroring the creation imagery in his vision. This would make sense, as we’ve seen in the rest of Johannine literature that John loves to work around with the Creation story motif. Could it be John is bringing us back to where it all began? Remember, in the beginning, Genesis said God separated light from darkness — but the “source” of that light (the sun) wasn’t created until day four. Could John be alluding to these beginnings by suggesting that there is light, but no sun? It seems likely.

The angel said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true. The Lord, the God who inspires the prophets, sent his angel to show his servants the things that must soon take place.”

“Look, I am coming soon! Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy written in this scroll.”

I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I had heard and seen them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who had been showing them to me. But he said to me, “Don’t do that! I am a fellow servant with you and with your fellow prophets and with all who keep the words of this scroll. Worship God!”

Then he told me, “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this scroll, because the time is near. Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong; let the vile person continue to be vile; let the one who does right continue to do right; and let the holy person continue to be holy.”

“Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”

John (in the vision) is overwhelmed by the things he sees. He falls to worship, but the angel calls to him to make sure his worship remains pure. Is this a call for the readers of this vision, as well? Possibly. The language used by the angel here mirrors that of other visions, in particular at least three different sections in Daniel (chapters 8, 9, and 12). And there may be hints at the closing of Isaiah (chapter 65, and others might even suggest chapter 40).

John’s message continues: It’s all coming true. It’s all coming to pass. You must overcome! You must persevere.

“Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. Outside are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.

“I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.

They must hang in there. John gives them words from Jesus, a testimony for the churches. They must not give in to uncertainly or despair, for the reward of staying true to their convictions will not only be the opportunity to drink freely of the water of life, but to see the culmination of thousands of years of faithfulness on behalf of their ancestors. God’s great redemption project is finding its true and complete fulfillment! But not if they give up.

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll.

While many get worked up about these verses (which are important, no doubt), what is often missed is the fact that these words are taken (surprise!) from earlier writings. Deuteronomy had similar prohibitions. Even the wisdom of the Proverbs used similar words to talk about the record.

He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.”

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.

And with that prayer of anticipation, John closes his apocalyptic vision.

And we close our study of the Scriptures. But we simply can’t end the conversation here, for this conversation raises historical questions that nag us as twenty-first-century readers. As the Bible ends, the persecuted people of God are standing strong against the empire of Rome. They are watching Rome crumble in the face of a subversive movement and a commitment to peace, love, and compassion. Multiple times throughout the New Testament, we heard the writers exclaim or allude to the fact that they believed the world would see the return of Jesus within even a generation or two.

Were they wrong? How could we have gone through such trying times and watch the fall of the most powerful empire in the world and not see the end of this story? How did we get to where we are today?

In short, what happened?