To Be A Christian - Part 2

 Being a Christian has very little to do with what happens in the afterlife, and everything to do with what happens in the here and now. Being a Christian has nothing to do with going to heaven when you die, but everything to do with experiencing heaven and bringing heaven down for others to experience in this life. The goal of being a Christian is not passing through the pearly gates after death, but full submission to the Spirit of Christ so that when others see and hear you, they see and hear Christ. The deliverance, the salvation brought about by being a Christian is about deliverance from one's own malfunctioning flesh and its behaviors, not deliverance from judgment in the afterlife. Being a Christian has little if anything to do with what you profess to believe, and everything to do with how you live in the world, and from what source of behavior you operate.
     If we take Jesus at His word, no one will be tested on their theology, but everyone will be judged on whether or not they treated others with loving kindness and compassion. The only rule which God cares about us following is the rule of love for one another and for Him. Literally nothing else matters, and when we love we experience God and others experience God through us. It literally makes no difference how correct or how orthodox or heterodox your theology is. But it makes every difference whether or not you are compassionate and care about the person next to you as yourself. Remember, what you dish out will be dished back to you, and with what standard you use to judge, you yourself will be judged using the same standard. Whatever a person plants he or she will also harvest.
     As Paul also wrote, without love, I am nothing, I gain nothing. Why? Because God is love, as John wrote, and God is the goal. The person who claims to be a Christian, a disciple of Jesus Christ, and does not love, does not care about the person next to them, or has no compassion or empathy for their neighbors is a liar. They are lying to themselves, to others, and to God. They may have the facade of a religious person, but they are, as Jesus expressed, "whitewashed tombs." Pretty on the outside, but inside full of death and decay.
     Professed belief is worthless without the behaviors which go along with that professed belief. Your actions and how you live your life will always betray what you actually believe, no matter what you profess. Love for one another, for the person next to you, and the love of God within and through you is the evidence of one's actual discipleship and belief. Without love, what you say or profess is worth nothing, and you cannot hide this from the God who sees everything you see, feels everything you feel, and knows your mind better than you do.

To Be A Christian

 What does it mean to be a Christian? I've asked this question many times, and I think it needs to continue to be asked because we need to understand what the answer really is as it was originally meant. To be a Christian was to devote oneself to being a disciple of Jesus Christ. It meant that you were devoting yourself to living as Jesus Christ taught, and walking as He walked. To operate as He operated throughout His entire life.
    The Christians of the first and second centuries taught that if anyone is found not living as Jesus Christ taught, then they were not a Christian even if they professed with their lips what He taught. Even Paul was explicit when he told the Corinthians to expel the man sleeping with his father's wife, and to not associate with anyone who named himself a brother (in Christ) who operated from the responses of his malfunctioning flesh (Paul used the examples of whoring, avariciousness. idolatry, alcoholic, and so on). Both Jesus and Paul taught that if a brother had fallen into error, then another brother was to go to them and gently correct them. If the brother refused to be corrected, then they were to take one or two more for an intervention. If the brother still wouldn't be corrected, then they were to expel the person from their congregation. In the book of Acts, when Simon Magus, who had been baptized by Philip, offered money to Peter in order to be able to give someone the Holy Spirit, Peter rebuked and completely disowned him as a Christian regardless of his baptism. John was explicit in his first epistle that anyone who claims to make their home in Him is obligated to walk as He walked.
     Trying to follow the law of Moses, the ten commandments, adhere to six-day creationism, being anti-abortion, belonging to a particular political party, or supporting a particular secular leader do not make one a Christian. Going to church, praying a prayer, tithing, going to Bible school, becoming a pastor, preaching, or believing particular theologies do not make one a Christian. According to the ancient Christians themselves, what makes someone a Christian is devoting themselves to live as Jesus taught and walking as He walked. Period. Baptism was the initiation of one's discipleship, but it was not the end. To be a disciple meant, literally, to make one's home in Jesus Christ and to stay there, turning around and returning if you were found wandering off.
     Disciples of Jesus Christ are best when they are in community with others who are also genuine disciples and have the same goal of staying put in Jesus Christ. This being said, discipleship is, first and foremost, a personal choice and commitment. No one can do it for you. You are either in submission to the Spirit of Christ, or you are not. No one can be in submission to Him for you. It doesn't work that way. No one can walk as He walked for you. You are personally responsible to watch yourself as to whether or not you are operating from your own malfunctioning flesh or from the Spirit of Christ. A disciple of Jesus Christ must be a functioning disciple solo before they can really be a functioning disciple in community.
     If a person is not going to bother making their home in Him and staying put there, they shouldn't bother calling themselves a Christian. If a person is going to continue to operate from their own malfunctioning flesh without correction, then they shouldn't speak evil of Jesus Christ by calling themselves a follower of His. Being a disciple of Jesus Christ means representing Him and being Him for others around you.

A Ramble About Climate and Farming

 My wife and I went to get more hay yesterday from a farmer not too far away. As we were loading the hay, we were chatting. As it turned out, this farmer was the former sheriff of Ohio County, and he was in office during the huge tornado that hit here just a few years ago shortly after we arrived. What stuck in my mind about that conversation was how he was talking about one or more of his neighbors not being able to plant that season after that. It's the case this year too. We dodged local tornadoes but many of the fields are still flooded even weeks after the latest "1000 year storm" blew through. The window for getting the crops in on time is closing. It's a distinctly rural America problem, but it doesn't just impact the farmers here. In fact, the more I thought about it, things like this are absolutely devastating for everyone. Let me explain.
     What is the absolute foundation of human civilization? Farming. To urban ears, that might sound ridiculous, but it is and has always been farming for thousands of years. Human beings didn't stop being hunter-gathers and settle down into population centers and settlements until they started intentionally planting crops and keeping livestock. Ancient cities couldn't exist without the food production to support them, and neither can modern cities.
     To support a city area like Southern California, for example, which boasts a population of fifteen million people give or take, you need an obscene amount of food production, almost none of which is really local to places like Los Angeles, Orange County, or San Diego (yes California is a huge agricultural state, but it focuses more on luxury or specialty crops). Almost all of the staple foods like wheat, rice, corn, and so on are imported, and this is true of New York, Chicago, and all of the major cities in the United States and around the world. Most of it is produced elsewhere, either in more rural states such as Iowa, Nebraska, Idaho, Kentucky, and so on, or it is produced overseas in places like China, Thailand, and India in the case of rice.
      The most important thing needed in farming is a stable, predictable climate. One of the things I've noticed being here in Kentucky is the weeds. What's interesting about them is that you don't always get the same kinds of weeds every year in the same quantities. Why? Because of variations in the climate and weather patterns. How hot it gets and how early, how much or how little rain we get and when, or how late the freezes go impact which weeds we get. Plants will only grow when the conditions are favorable for them to grow, and every plant has its own particular conditions for growth, be it a weed or a crop. The only reason farming is possible is because the farmer can trust that he or she's going to be able to predict with a reasonable amount of accuracy when to plant, how hot or how cold it's going to be, and how much rain the ground's going to get. If the farmer can't be certain of any of that, it's a complete crap shoot. More and more over the last several years, farming has been becoming like taking your money to Vegas and seeing what happens.
     There have been too many years recently where the climate has completely turned against the farmers with flooded fields or crops scorched by summer sun so hot that they wither and die in the fields. This isn't a problem even confined to the United States as the increasingly unstable climate worldwide has impacted basic food crop production. And this doesn't just impact the price of, say bread or rice. It impacts the price of meat too as it becomes more expensive to keep livestock fed when grain supplies get squeezed.
     Climate-wise, there've been several indications now that we've passed the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold for warming, and this is the cause for all of the unstable weather which has been impacting the farms. We've passed it, and we're still getting warmer. We get warmer, the weather patterns become even more unstable. When the weather patterns become more unstable they can't be predicted. When you can't predict the weather, you can't farm reliably. When you can't farm reliably, you can't have large human settlements or populations centers.
     In the Book of Revelation, it talks about one of the seals being famine, and a very small amount of wheat (maybe enough for a loaf of bread) being sold for about a day's wages (a denarius in the text). This is already the reality in more parts of the world than people in the United States realize. As the weather becomes impossible to reliably farm with, it will become the reality here too, and when that happens, civilization will fall because its very foundation will have been pulled out from underneath it.

The Linguistic Noise Inherent in Modern Bible Translations

 What a lot of people don't realize about Bible translation, and specifically the translation into English is how much linguistic "noise" there actually is between the source and the target languages. Let's just take the New Testament for a moment. The New Testament was originally written in the colloquial Greek of the first century Eastern Mediterranean. The dialogue and teachings of Jesus that it records however were likely originally spoken in Aramaic (Classical Syriac, not the Biblical Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra), at least most of the time, and as such there are a number of Aramaicisms in the text which were translated directly by four different authors into the more widely spoken Greek.
      In the fifth century, the Greek text was translated into colloquial (or "vulgar") Latin. Think about the amount of linguistic change which occurred just between the first and fifth centuries when Jerome translated the texts. That's about 4-500 years worth of change. To put that into perspective, that's the difference between Anglo-Saxon (think the original Beowulf poem) and Elizabethan English (think Shakespeare and the KJV). The latter is still mutually intelligible with Modern English, the former is not and must be learned as a foreign language. So when Jerome translated it into the Latin of the fifth century, he translated first century Greek with a fifth century Greek understanding of the words and syntax, and both changed over that period of time.
     The Latin text, the Vulgate, was the de facto standard text of the New Testament for the Western Church and Western Scholarship for about a thousand years, and long past the time when Latin was the colloquial language of anyone. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it had morphed into what we now know as the Romance languages and their respective dialects (much as Anglo-Saxon morphed into Elizabethan). Latin as such only remained spoken as, essentially, an artificial language used for education and ecclesiastical liturgy. It was no one's birth language. While it was artificially maintained, the meanings of the Latin words continued to shift and change over that thousand year period. The artificial Latin spoken in Martin Luther's day would have been barely intelligible if at all to Jerome in the fifth century.
     When John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the other early translators and Reformers first read the New Testament, they read it in this artificially maintained Latin, not their own native tongues, and not in the Original Greek. The Greek texts themselves had been maintained by the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church, but were largely unknown in the Western Roman Catholic Church until after 1451 CE when the Byzantine capital of Constantinople fell to the Turks and a large number of Greek scholars and clergy fled with their manuscripts west to Rome, and other European capitals. Those who came spoke Greek, but a Greek which, like the other languages, had morphed over the fifteen hundred year time span since the original texts were written, and was mutually unintelligible with the Greek of the New Testament. Furthermore, there was no one unified text of the Greek New Testament until Erasmus compiled his Textus Receptus from Eastern Orthodox Lectionaries and other manuscripts. Ironically, he only did this so he could place it side by side with the Latin to prove the superiority of the Latin text over the original Greek!
     This is the linguistic context of Luther's German translation from the original languages, as well as Tyndale's English, and Calvin's French translations. They all may have been excellent scholars, but in many if not most cases their translations relied heavily on the meaning of the Latin text as they understood it in the sixteenth century even if they were trying to translate it from the Greek because they simply did not have the tools at their disposal to achieve enough of a fluency in first century colloquial Greek laced with Aramaicisms in half the text.
     Modern translations of the New Testament often still rely heavily on the work of these men. Virtually all modern translations into English rely on Tyndale's understanding of what the text was saying, even if they don't copy his words directly, they often paraphrase them. Probably a good 75% of the King James Version of the New Testament is plagiarized directly from Tyndale, and most follow suit to a greater or lesser degree because few translators want to deviate from what has already been done, even if modern translation tools tell a different story. Put simply, the New Testament which is read today in English has 2,000 years worth of linguistic, cultural, and theological noise which makes it difficult to understand what the original authors were trying to say to their own target audiences who knew the language, culture, and worldview because they shared it.

A Ramble About Empty Temples

 Something which occurred to me tonight. There could be no Day of Atonement sacrifice without the Ark of the Covenant, and specifically the hilasterion, or "Mercy Seat", according to the Torah. The Ark of the Covenant hadn't been returned to the temple after the Babylonian exile. No one actually knows what happened to it. It wasn't present in the restored temple, much less Herod's temple in the first century. Therefore, the priests in the temple were committing fraud to begin with, and they knew it.
     They were going through the motions, but the throne of God, the literal presence of God within the temple, the Shekinah between the cherubim had departed and had not returned. There was no mercy seat for them to sprinkle the blood on for at least five hundred years by the time of Jesus in the first century. It was the religious facade of a people who had broken their contract so many times that the other, Divine party had literally left and not come back (something which Ezekiel actually details, and which Jeremiah goes into as well). He simply wasn't present within Herod's temple, not until Jesus set foot in it at the age of twelve.
     This doesn't mean that there weren't faithful individuals among the Judean people, and those who sought to keep the spirit of the Torah as much as the letter. But the temple religious sacrifices were empty, and couldn't actually be physically completed according to what Moses wrote. Herod's temple was a glittering magnificent empty fraud, and it was torn down stone by stone as a result.
     In a way, there is a parallel here with modern Christianity. People go to church, partake of the ordinances or sacraments, listen to the sermons, and go through the motions of ritual worship, but how many encounter and experience Jesus Christ in their houses of worship? How many are taught to let go and let Him act and speak through them? Within how many can the presence of Jesus Christ, and through Him the God and Father, be felt and observed? How many "Christians" are glittering, magnificent, yet empty temples? How many abandon the terms of the New Contract to "make your home within Me and I within you"? How many abandon His commands to "love one another as I have loved you" in favor of "orthodox theology"? How many celebrate their Christianity with songs, tee-shirts, magnificent church buildings, and other paraphernalia, yet do so without living as He taught, walking as He walked, or even knowing what it is to experience His living presence within them?
     To him who has not, even what little they think they have will be taken away, and not one stone will remain upon another.

That Saturday...

      From the time he was arrested to the time they saw Him standing there again, it was pure terror. Most of them were hiding in the house for fear of being arrested, but also because they themselves were the only other people they could turn to. There were a little over a hundred of them that made it back and stayed there from the Thursday night to the Sunday morning. They didn't see John, Mary His mother, Mary Magdalene, or a few others until just close to sundown on that Friday. Thomas had disappeared completely, as had a few others. They only heard bits and pieces of the details of what was happening when it was happening which were relayed back to them through mostly children who were able to pass through the crowds without fear of arrest. No one in the crowds paid any attention to them as they came and went.
     It is hard to adequately express what they were going through that Saturday. The men, the women, and the children who were behind the walls of the house. There was fear in abundance, there was shame, there was guilt, and there was a deep, deep depression and despair which was evident in their expressions and in their eyes.
     They all knew what He had taught them, and He had lived what He taught when the soldiers came for him. He didn't return evil for evil, just as He taught. When Peter tried to use a sword to defend Him, He put a stop to it and mended the damage done. From what they had been told, even on the cross, He forgave those murdering Him. "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who hunt you, and pray for those who abuse you." This is what He taught, and this is what He did even as He was bleeding out and suffocating. It was a powerful final lesson for them, and it weighed on each one of them, especially John who had been there to see and hear everything. His eyes were haunted and his entire disposition traumatized by what he experienced in the death of his best friend and son of his mother's sister. Each one of them had to keep living, but that Saturday they just didn't know how. None of them.
     The crucifixion happened. It happened to real people in real history. It affected and traumatized real people who had even been told it was going to happen, but were still in shock when it did. In the same way, the resurrection happened, and so many people saw Him raised from the dead that it almost became the first century "Elvis sightings" phenomenon in the Eastern Mediterranean. Kayafa and Khannah had to work hard to suppress the truth of what too many people had seen with their own eyes. Jesus wasn't selective about who saw Him risen. He didn't hide it and had no intentions to. The lies and slander they spread about Him even made its way into the Talmud as they sent out agents to stop those who saw Him alive from saying anything further. One such agent had been Saul of Tarsus... that is, until he saw Him too.
     There is so much evidence, circumstantial and even direct, of both the crucifixion and resurrection that it's honestly ridiculous and absurd when people call it or even Him a myth and doubt His existence at all. Usually the reasons have nothing to do with evidence, but because they are angry, and often rightly so, with those who claim to represent Him and the religion that came to be.
      But He was very real. He was like everyone's favorite brother, and when He talked to you, you felt like the only one there. You could tell Him anything, and He would understand. He Himself wasn't always in the best of health, but He healed everyone who came to Him. He owned nothing, yet the whole world lent itself to His use. He Himself couldn't read or write, yet His knowledge and wisdom were absolute. There wasn't a person who came into His view that He did not care about, and you could tell. There wasn't a person with whom He interacted that He did not love, even those who tried to trap Him, even those who were murdering Him. When He rebuked, you could hear the pleading for those He was rebuking in His voice. When He became angry with someone, it was as an older brother angry at their younger sibling for doing something that could hurt themselves or others. It was always corrective, but never vengeful.
     April 4th, 0033CE was a hard, hard day for those in that house. Some could barely process what was happening. For others, the shock of His loss so overtook them they didn't notice when the sun rose or set. They wouldn't again until throughout the day of April 5th.

The RPG of Life and the Choices We Make

 Yesterday, I shot and killed my son with an automatic laser pistol. Before you call the police on me, let me explain.
     I was playing the RPG "Fallout 4" on my computer. This is a PC Role Playing Game where you take on the persona of a former military veteran who was cryogenically frozen for two hundred years and then woke up to find a post-nuclear holocaust world. Right before he wakes up and the game really begins, he has to wake up and watch his wife be murdered and his son kidnapped before he's frozen again. This leads to the main questline of the game which is avenging his wife and rescuing his son, Shaun.
     What you don't know at the beginning of the game is that Shaun's kidnapping (and his wife's murder) occurred sixty years before your character actually escapes the underground vault where he was frozen. In that time period, Shaun was raised in a safe, relatively loving and caring environment where he grew up to be a respected scientist and eventually became the director of that facility, the Institute. The Institute in the year 2287 is deep underground beneath the ruins of the "Commonwealth Institute of Technology" and has been doing unethical experiments and occasionally replacing people with "synths," artificial human beings which can be shut down or reprogrammed at their whim, robbing them of their free will. The Institute is the main antagonist faction in the game, and while you can choose to side with them, the game strongly leads you to see them as the bad guy. Which brings me back to my aforementioned murder.
       I had hoped to do this playthrough without killing Shaun. I was looking to achieve an endgame result in favor of a more freedom loving faction, the game's rather weak but well intentioned "good guys," the Minutemen. I had intended to visit the Institute, do the requisite quest, get into an argument with the now sixty year old Shaun (physically at least thirty years older than my character), and be banished from the Institute without committing (technical) infanticide. But, the game simply wouldn't let me. No matter what response I gave, Shaun just kept rolling with it and keeping me around. So, I went with it until I got stuck. The quests just wouldn't progress, and it was going to force me to choose. It was either Shaun or the freedom of everyone else in the Commonwealth. In this playthrough, I chose the Commonwealth over my son and ended his life. For the record, it's revealed in the game that he's dying of cancer regardless. Also for the record, I sided with the Institute on my first playthrough, so I know how that one ends as well. After I ended Shaun before the cancer could, the game unstuck itself and I was able to continue the main questline.
     It got me thinking though. It's not the first time I've had to make an unsavory choice in a game. Skyrim has a number of less than savory choices in order to finish a quest or achieve something. I literally committed cold blooded murder in that game on my first playthrough a couple of times because, like with Shaun, I couldn't see a way around it. That is, I couldn't see a way around it until my next playthrough where I was able to either talk my way around it, or do something else to achieve the same result. Choices have in-game consequences which affect how the story progresses and how others in the game see your character. Trust me, it's no fun to immediately have guards try to arrest or kill you the minute you set foot in a certain province because you made a bad choice.
     Don't get me wrong, I don't play these games as a "murder hobo." I genuinely try to make the best choices possible where the most people benefit and hopefully the least amount of people die. My favorite part of Fallout 4 is genuinely helping people try and rebuild their communities and through rebuilding them also rebuilding the Commonwealth and making it a thriving, just society again. In Skyrim, those murders were committed, literally, with the best of intentions in order to either help a bunch of kids at an orphanage or prevent a really bad demonic entity from doing even worse things. I just didn't know at the time how to avoid them.
     The reality we live in is, in many respects, a lot like these RPGs. Who and what we are is a consciousness, a soul, temporarily inhabiting a physical body. What happens in this reality cannot actually harm what we actually are, the real "us" as it were, any more than what happens to my character in Fallout 4 can genuinely harm me as I sit at the computer and play it. The only thing that is "real," the only thing that truly belongs to me in this life are my responses and the choices I make. The same of true of the RPG. While nothing that happens in it is "real," nevertheless the choices I make are still mine. The responses are still mine. I can own nothing else, either in this life, or in the RPG. When I shut down the game, I take the memories and lessons of those choices with me and nothing else. When my consciousness finally leaves this body behind, I do the same. When I start the game up again with a new character, I bring those memories and lessons with me to apply to a new playthrough where I can potentially make different if not better choices and responses to produce a better outcome. If the testimonies of many people, both Near Death Experiencers and those who remember bits and pieces of their past lives (kids especially), are to be believed then I can potentially do the same upon my next "character" and "playthrough" of this life (albeit with the post-birth amnesia to a greater or lesser degree). In Fallout 4, there's really no right or wrong way to play the game. The same is true of Skyrim and nearly every other RPG. There are consequences for your choices and they can be either beneficial or harmful. The same is true of this life. We make beneficial choices and we make harmful choices and, regardless of the outcome, we learn from both what works best for everyone and what doesn't. What allows us to make real progress, and what leaves us stuck.
     We learn and we grow by the experiences we have, and no experience is wasted if we are able to put it to use in making more progress, even if it's a "don't do that again" experience. This is how wisdom is built up and accumulated over time, and potentially over many lifetimes.
     One of these days, I'm going to figure out how to unlock the ending where neither the Institute wins nor do I have to kill my son who is much older than I am. I just didn't manage it this playthrough. The same is true of this life.