2 Corinthians 6:14 and Interfaith Marriages

      Why do we assume 2 Corinthians 6:14 has anything to do with marriage, or marriage specifically? There's nothing in the immediate context to even suggest it. Nowhere before or after the whole passage, or even within the passage, is Paul discussing marriage or any kind of relationship. So why do we apply this to marriages specifically?

     My point is that nothing in any of the verses preceding 14 has anything to do with marriage or relationships. It's a weird, jarring transition to suddenly go from explaining or defending your apostleship to "don't marry unbelievers." And the language itself doesn't really necessitate that interpretation either. There's no actual mention of marriage itself in 14. Another thing too that's weird in the verse. There's no word in the Greek for "with" in this sentence. The translation we usually have is really from the Latin, "nolite iugum ducere cum infidelibus", which literally reads, "Don't lead the yoke with unbelievers." But the Greek literally says, "Don't become differently yoked by/to/for untrusted/unbelieving [people]." You'd expect the preposition "sun (syn)" meaning "together with" but it's not there. I checked the Textus Receptus, Byzantine, and Critical Texts and it's not present in any of them. It's just the plural substantive in the dative case. That's actually weird. There are three different prepositions which could have been used for "with" but none of them are present. Now, There are also about four hundred years in between the Greek of Paul's writing and the Greek which Jerome would have known when he translated it in the fifth century. That's almost to the point of unintelligibility between different stages of the same language. I kind of wonder if language evolution had anything to do with how he rendered it. 

     Regardless, interpreting it as meaning "don't marry unbelievers" doesn't fit the preceding context or anything afterwards. It also somewhat contradicts what he said in 1 Corinthians about not leaving an unbelieving spouse if they're content to stay married to you. If Paul had applied the same reasoning that he does in the rest of the chapter, he would have encouraged them to leave. Something doesn't mesh.

     It makes more sense in the context of both of Paul's letters to Corinth that Paul is talking about not being "unequally yoked" with, as he says in 1 Corinthians 5, "anyone named a brother who is immoral, greedy, a slanderer, drunkard," and so on and "not even to eat with such a person. In truth, in his letters to the Corinthians, this is the only group of people that he is so harsh with, those who call themselves Christians but "whose god is their belly, whose glory is their shame, who set their minds on earthly things." This makes perfect sense when he says "don't be unequally yoked by the untrusted/untrustworthy/unfaithful. As he writes of those outside of the Church, "I didn't tell you to keep away from those on the outside of the Church, otherwise you'd have to leave the world completely, but to not keep company with the one named a brother who is immoral..." This interpretation also fits the harsh language he uses in the rest of 6 where he quotes from the LXX, "Exit out from the middle of them and be excommunicate [from them] says the Lord." As I wrote before, Paul did not have marriage or other personal relationships with "those on the outside" in mind when he wrote these words, but continued communion with those named Christians who do not actually live as Jesus Christ taught or walk as He walked. This should also be illustrated in that, in 1 Corinthians 7, believing spouses were not to divorce their unbelieving spouses if they consented to live with and remain married to them.

     Paul wasn't forbidding interfaith marriages, he was reiterating a point that he makes over and over again, that the Corinthian Christians should have nothing to do with and no communion with those who, as John describes, claim to walk in the light but walk in darkness instead.

The Ridiculousness of Being "Saved" Based on What Theology You Profess

      Why does it make sense to us that God judges based on the theology someone professes? That is, why have we decided that what theological teachings we profess to believe are more important to God than whether or not we love or how we live? It's pretty clear from the testimony of Scripture that the God who is described and describes Himself in the pages therein is far more concerned with how we treat one another, how we love, and how we live our lives than with what we think He is or whether or not the Earth is young or old. Even Jesus taught explicitly that the final judgment would be based on how we treat the "least of these," the poor, the hungry, the foreigner, the sick, the prisoner, and so on. In the Scriptures, Widows and Orphans are high on the list of God's priorities while whether you're trinitarian or unitarian is not. So, given what God's M.O. actually is, why does it somehow make sense to us, even when He explicitly says otherwise, that "believing" a specific creed is the standard by which salvation is granted?

     The religions which we have constructed make no sense given who God has revealed Himself to be if you really sit down and think about them. Even the word "believe" isn't really the right translation for the word in Greek which all of this rests on. The better translation for Koine Greek is "trust," and that's a very different shade of meaning from just "believe." You can "believe" a certain set of facts, or at least you can say you do, or you can "trust" those facts. You can say you believe in Jesus Christ, or you can put your trust in Him. You can give mental assent to the truth of what He taught, or you can trust Him and do it. To actually conform to the conditions of the verb in Greek, you have to actually put your trust in Him enough to live as He taught.

     And what did He teach? In a nutshell, to love and be love for everyone. To forgive, turn the other cheek, not judge, go the extra mile, do good to those who hate you, and do to others what you want them to do to you.

     Here's another question, why have we decided that our salvation only has to do with the afterlife when Jesus explicitly said and preached that the Kingdom of Heaven is right here and right now, so close as to be touchable? He explicitly said that the Kingdom of God is inside of you. Nowhere in the New Testament is the deliverance which comes through Jesus Christ ever described as only pertaining to the afterlife, if it pertains to the afterlife at all. The writings of Paul in particular describe the effects of this deliverance or salvation as being in the immediate present and this life, not the great by and by.

     The truth is that I do know where these things come from. They come from medieval theologians in the dark ages trying to make things more comfortable for those wealthy and powerful rather than actually adhering to the discipleship which Jesus taught, and the Kingdom of Heaven which He and His apostles described. Because as Jesus said, the Kingdom of Heaven isn't in the afterlife, and it's not a metaphor for getting into the good place when you die. It's right here and right now inside of you. It's disengaging from your own malfunctioning flesh and coming under the control of, cooperating with, the Spirit of Christ already inside of you. It's returning to being the image of God just as He was the genuine image of God. It's submitting to Jesus Christ, the Logos of God, acting and speaking through you just as He submitted to the God and Father acting and speaking through Him.

     God doesn't care one whit about how you think the mechanics of the spiritual world work. No matter what, we're all wrong on that count anyway in some way. What He has always cared about is restoring us to being His image in the here and now, and that image is being love for all those around us and especially the person right next to us. This is what is most important to Him, how we treat each other no matter who "each other" is. That is, how we love.

The Most Important Diploma on My Wall

 I was going through our "important papers bag" a few days ago looking for something completely different when I ran across the worn, smudged, thirty three and a half year old diploma I hadn't paid attention to since I was about sixteen or so. It was February of 1992, and I was in my junior year of high school and a Police Explorer with the Westminster Police Department in Orange County, California. 

     That weekend, as part of the Police Explorer program, I attended the Orange County Law Enforcement Explorer Academy starting on the Friday evening and ending on the Monday afternoon. Put simply, if you were to take all two or three months of a regular Police Academy and role it into a four day boot camp for teenagers with very little sleep, that was what we signed up for. This wasn't a fun weekend camp. There were a couple hundred of us from many different Departments there. From the word go, our tactical officers were screaming in our faces, forcing pushups, and being as unpleasant as possible trying to get us to quit. I still remember there was one guy standing next to me who quit within five minutes. There were several others who followed suit. Their objective was to get at least one Explorer to quit every day.

     At the time, I was a sixteen year old kid with ADHD and undiagnosed ASD and attachment disorder that had quit almost everything that he had started after it got hard. Everyone knew that too. I remember I only lasted a week on the Freshman Football team at Bolsa Grande High School. My track record wasn't great. So for me, for who I was at the time, that weekend was hell and I felt it keenly. Between the constant yelling and the constant physical exercise and running (I still had asthma and couldn't keep up running to save my life), it was the hardest thing I'd ever attempted in my life.

     If I were to be honest, I wanted to quit within the first five minutes too. I didn't. I was determined to get through it and not just quit. They could kick me out, they could fail me, but I refused to quit, and it was the first time in my life that I made that choice. In order to do that, I kept telling myself, "I just want to see what happens next." And then that next thing would happen, and I would tell myself again, "I just want to see what happens next." I also told myself, to keep myself from smiling (because we would be punished for smiling at our tactical officers), "I'm in hell and that's all there is to it" as well as "Do everything you're told by the tac without question." Every five minutes I would tell myself these things for the next four days.

     We went through police procedure classes, PT, meals, and late night watch duty (we even took the oath to protect and defend the constitution), and then suddenly it was Monday, and somehow I had gained enough points to graduate (my classroom scores making up for my abysmal PT scores). I walked the stage in full uniform with my badge, and received my diploma with the other Explorer graduates.

     For me, it wasn't about being a Police Explorer. I would leave the Police Explorer program the following summer in order to become more involved in my church and pursue the career track I felt called to. For me, it was the first time I had finished something and not quit because it was too hard. I hadn't taken the easy way out. No one made accommodations for me. No one gave me a pass. I either kept up and worked as hard as everyone else or I was out. This four day academy taught me how to keep going even when things seemed too hard or nearly impossible for my AuDHD self.

     The lessons I learned from that weekend stayed with me as I then went on to pursue a career in ministry and attended Bible School in Wisconsin. Within months if not weeks of the semester starting I was running afoul of the deans for behaviors that I didn't even know were wrong or out of place. This particular Bible School put a heavy emphasis on conformity of both theology and behavior, and they just didn't know what to do with me. I took the lessons I learned from Explorer Academy and applied them here too, making plenty of mistakes, socially and behaviorally as I sought to play catch up and at least try to fit in and "pretend" to be a mature, relatively normal young adult; doing whatever I had to in order to keep going and not give up as well as not be told to leave. It was a rough two years, but that December of 1995, once again, I walked the stage and received my diploma as a graduate.

     The lessons I learned that one weekend in February of 1992 to not give up and keep going stayed with me for the rest of my life.

     Thinking it through, I decided to frame and hang this diploma next to my others on the wall of our library at home; the first time I ever thought to. I realized that if it hadn't been for this diploma, I probably wouldn't have earned the others that it now hangs next to.

No, the Church Fathers Did Not Teach the Pre-Tribulation Rapture

In response to the claims that the pre-tribulation rapture can be traced back to the second or third century:

Did some digging on your claims. As I suspected, your information is based on citations taken out of context, mistranslated, or outright fabricated. The writings of the Pre-Nicene fathers were a required study for me during my seminary courses as I prepared for the priesthood. I knew something wasn’t right when you listed of Irenaeus and Cyprian. I’d heard of the Ephraim citation, but have never been able to find a copy of the source text to read for myself. Regardless, Ephraim was very much an Orthodox Catholic Priest

Irenaeus Book V, Chapter 29 - “1. In the previous books I have set forth the causes for which God permitted these things to be made, and have pointed out that all such have been created for the benefit of that human nature which is saved, ripening for immortality that which is [possessed] of its own free will and its own power, and preparing and rendering it more adapted for eternal subjection to God. And therefore the creation is suited to [the wants of] man; for man was not made for its sake, but creation for the sake of man. Those nations however, who did not of themselves raise up their eyes unto heaven, nor returned thanks to their Maker, nor wished to behold the light of truth, but who were like blind mice concealed in the depths of ignorance, the word justly reckons as waste water from a sink, and as the turning-weight of a balance — in fact, as nothing; Isaiah 40:15 so far useful and serviceable to the just, as stubble conduces towards the growth of the wheat, and its straw, by means of combustion, serves for working gold. And therefore, when in the end the Church shall be suddenly caught up from this, it is said, There shall be tribulation such as has not been since the beginning, neither shall be. Matthew 24:21 For this is the last contest of the righteous, in which, when they overcome they are crowned with incorruption.” - Irenaeus is clearly speaking of the resurrection when both dead and living will be transformed. In your parlence, a “post-tribulation” rapture. Not a pre-trib.

Cyprian Epistle 63 and Treatise 4 – The first writing is about a specific Christian, and Christians in general who fall away. The second is a treatise on the Lord’s Prayer. There is nothing in his writings describing an escape from the tribulation of the last days, nor two comings of Christ.

Both of the above texts are available for free at newadvent.org

St. Ephraim of Nisibis “On the Last Times, the Antichrist, and the End of the World”, also known as the “Apocalypse of Pseudo-Ephraem” – I’m afraid I can’t find any actual English translations of this work except as produced by organizations with a vested interest in promoting a pre-tribulation rapture. This being said, most scholars believe this work wasn’t actually written by St. Ephraim himself, but a “pseudo-Ephraim” centuries after, and there are serious questions by scholars about the translations being made available by those aforementioned organizations as being deliberately mistranslated to reflect a pre-trib rapture. I know for a fact that St. Ephraim originally only wrote in Syriac, his native tongue. Those Latin and Greek texts which exist are either translations or forgeries written long after St. Ephraim’s death. The text in question is currently dated to the seventh century. According to the Wikipedia article on this text,

A passage from the Latin version of the text has been used to argue that a pretribulational rapture view existed in the early church. This passage from the Latin version says:

"All the saints and elect of God are gathered together before the tribulation, which is to come, and are taken to the Lord, in order that they may not see."[6]

However, the Syriac version implies that it is death that will cause some to avoid the tribulation. The Syriac version says:

"Pronouncing the good fortune of the deceased Who had avoided the calamity: 'Blessed are you for you were borne away (to the grave) And hence you escaped from the afflictions!"

Additionally, there are several passages even in the Latin version that imply Christians will not escape the tribulation. For example:

"In those days [during the tribulation] people shall not be buried, neither Christian, nor heretic, neither Jew, nor pagan, because of fear and dread there is not one who buries them; because all people, while they are fleeing, ignore them."

"Then, when this inevitability has overwhelmed all people, just and unjust, the just, so that they may be found good by their Lord; and indeed the unjust, so that they may be damned forever with their author the Devil."

Based on this evidence, I maintain that the teaching of the pre-tribulation rapture is a modern invention at the very least by Darby, if not by Margaret MacDonald, and was never taught in the ancient church.

The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

 "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who hunt you, and pray for those who abuse you." "Don't give back evil for evil." "If anyone hits you on one cheek, let him hit the other one also."

     Yesterday, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. So far, I haven't heard if they caught the person or who it was. I only know of him from what I've heard through certain podcasts. I didn't really know much about him apart from them. I imagine that I'm like most people these days with regards to this. From what I've heard, he's a man with whom I would have likely disagreed on many points. As I understand it, he said a lot of things which hurt a lot of people with whom he disagreed. He was also a major supporter of Donald Trump, something of which I've made no secret where my opinion is concerned. It is likely this person would have considered me and people who hold similar opinions to me "the enemy."

     Doing violence against him was not what Jesus taught, no matter what he said or did. Jesus, and the entire New Testament, explicitly teaches the opposite of doing violence to those who hate you, disagree with you, and count themselves your enemies. Murder is a malfunctioning flesh reaction born from anger/aggression which itself is a response to fear or panic. It's trying to destroy that which you feel threatened by. Jesus taught as much by example on this subject as by words when He let them torture Him, and He let them crucify Him until He died; and even in the middle of it, He forgave those doing it and begged His Father to forgive them too. It would have only taken one word from Him, and they would have withered like the fruitless fig tree did. Jesus taught to love your enemies, and He practiced what He taught.

     Murdering Charlie Kirk, or anyone by whom you feel threatened, accomplishes nothing good and more harm to the murderer's cause than he ever intended. A martyr has been made today, and the backlash will likely be far more intense than anyone realizes. It will likely produce more violence against those with whom the murderer presumably identifies, and not less. It gives an excuse for those on Charlie Kirk's side of things to seek and exact revenge and feel justified in so doing. By this one action, this shooter has harmed potentially thousands if not millions of people with whom he likely at least sympathized.

     Right now, somewhere in Eternity, there are two possible outcomes for Charlie Kirk. Either He's met Jesus and is going through a life review right now seeing everything he's ever done from the perspective of the other people affected, or he's enveloped in darkness and possible torment until he cries out for help, and then he'll go through the life review. Either way, he will eventually come to his senses, as will we all, and embrace the all consuming Love that is God, and be embraced by Him. 

      In this life though, he leaves behind a grieving wife, son, and daughter, not to mention other family members and friends. The shooter has not just harmed Charlie Kirk, he has harmed all of these people as well. In addition are all those who followed and listened to Charlie Kirk, and thought well of him. They are now grieving too. The shooter has harmed them as well. By this one calculated action, this shooter has harmed potentially hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, most of whom Charlie Kirk never interacted with personally, and whom the shooter had no idea existed.

     And the shooter, by this one action, also harmed himself irreparably. If he hasn't already taken his own life, he will be hunted. Everyone he knows will be questioned. His life and the lives of everyone he loves will be turned upside down, and it is likely when he is caught and prosecuted, his own life will be ended for it.

     The Way Jesus taught was different. It avoided all of this harm and sought to stop it before it started. Forgiveness, non-retaliation, and even flat out pacifism were the hallmarks of the very early followers of the Way as they practiced the love which He taught.

     Yesterday, Erika Kirk watched her husband bleed to death from a gunshot wound. Her world has been destroyed in one moment. His children watched their father die. That is not an image which will ever leave their minds. They will see it in their nightmares possibly for the rest of their lives. Put yourself in their skin for a minute. Imagine what it must feel like to be them tonight. It doesn't matter if you disagreed with him or saw him as a threat. Put yourself in their skin and watch it through their eyes. Feel every moment of horror as the man you love and spent your life with, the father whom you loved and respected and thought the world of, falls to the floor, his own blood spilling everywhere. Be her, be them, in that moment. Experience that moment as they experienced it, and also as God experiences it through their eyes and ears. Tell me then, how can you honestly claim to love anyone if you can, much less God Himself, if you can pull this trigger and cause this much pain, horror, and harm.

     It doesn't matter what kind of a man he was. He was a man. He was loved. If I am to follow Jesus Christ, I am to love this man as though he was me. And so in the very end, he was me and I was him. In the end his wife and kids are me, and I am them.

     I feel deeply for Charlie Kirk's family as I imagine what they are feeling and having to live through right now. I also feel deeply for the shooter, and what must have driven him to take this extremely harmful and devastating action. I feel deeply also for all those others who are impacted by this one action in which they had no say.

The Most Divine and Most Human Thing You Can Do

      Why should we love our neighbor as ourselves? Because my neighbor is myself. The person next to me is just as much "me" as I am. Sure, they inhabit a seemingly different body, they have a different set of experiences, emotions, relationships, and so on, but the person next to me is a mirror of who this person, myself, would have become if I had been born in that body, had that set of experiences, had been influenced by those relationships, and so on. The person next to me is a "me" from an alternate reality, so to speak.

Being kind and treating the person next to you as you want to be treated, when it comes right down to it, can only help you in the long run. Just from a purely selfish standpoint even. It helps to build the connections and relationships which you may need to survive. By placing the welfare of others as at least equally as important as your own, by ensuring everyone else's survival if you will, you increase the odds of your own, as well as the odds of the survival of your own progeny, family, and loved ones. I am reminded of the economic model which was described in the movie "A Beautiful Mind" by "who gets the blond?" Put simply, when you remove yourself from the equation and focus on the welfare of the people around you, everyone wins. When everyone in the group does this, then no one goes without. When people don't compete with one another but work together for each other's good then everyone prospers and can do so without guilt, shame, or having to worry about losing what they own.
The immaterial part of every human being, the logos of every human being, is born of God and is a piece, fractal, or shred of the Logos who is the image of God. By loving the person next to you like yourself, you are in fact loving God, being kind to God, being compassionate and showing empathy to God. In addition, by doing so you are simply obeying what God instructed, which is itself a demonstration of love and respect for God.
Loving your neighbor as yourself is submitting to that original image of God which is the "real" you. It is reconnecting with the person you genuinely are at your very core, unaffected and unadulterated by the dysfunctional survival responses of the human brain which are dominated by fear. Fear and love cannot coexist in the same space. Loving your neighbor as yourself is giving permission for the God who is Love to manifest through you uninhibited by this fear.
Loving your neighbor as yourself is both the most divine and the most genuinely human thing you can do.

Conversing with the Authors of the New Testament on Their Terms

 I started on translating 2 Corinthians 3 again this morning. It's not the first time I've done 2 Corinthians, but I'll admit, I have some kind of a block about this letter more than any other work in the New Testament that even I don't really understand. 

     There's something just very different for me in engaging with the text in Greek and then writing down a translation. I've done it now so many times I've lost track. I've gotten through the whole New Testament several times over the last thirty odd years or so, but it's not the written translation that works for me. That can change every time I do it because of the semantic drift between ancient Greek and English, and every new piece of data I acquire on the culture, philosophy, and society of that time period. 

     Truth is, with my own brand of neurodivergence, I can read an English translation too fast and just lose everything I just read as my focus goes all over the place and I space it. ADHD can be a pain. But doing it in the Greek forces me to lock in, every time, even passages I've been over a hundred times. Words I already know the meaning of I look up again anyway if they stand out that particular time so that I can understand the full semantic meaning and not just the simple lexical definition given. As I am forced to slow down and do this, the English translation itself doesn't matter as much as the concept of what the author was saying that forms in my head. I start to pick up the rhythms of speech, the tone, the sarcasm, and just the way the authors spoke. So much starts getting communicated in that moment that just doesn't happen with an English translation. I start to hear how it was said in my head as much as what was said. And that is the point where the real understanding starts taking place. What I write down on the page is almost inconsequential after that, and really only serves to keep me on task so that I don't start spacing again. 

     I've filled notebooks with such translations. I've gone through Romans so many times I've lost track, but every book in the New Testament, some portions of the Septuagint, Early Church Fathers, and Epictetus are represented. Every translation is different, even if only slightly so, and most were never meant to be published for the public. But it is through this process that I came to know the voices of the N.T. authors very well, and I came to "hear" where certain verses or passages were or were not written by the author in question. 

     I'm not the best translator, to be honest. I'm not even close. The best translators have to not only understand the source language, but be able to express the meaning in the target language in a meaningful, accurate, and engaging way that the reader can understand. I'm not always there on that last point. I go back to my own translations and cringe sometimes. Not because they don't reflect what it means, but because they don't sound right in English. But I think it is this experience which I have had while spending time working through and translating the text which is the reason why I advocate for others to engage with the text in its own language and on its own terms. It's the closest thing you're ever going to experience in this life to having a conversation with these original authors themselves.