Monthly Archives: February 2016

Key to happy marriage

How to save your marriage in one easy step

First, disclaimers. This is a simple post on how to have a happy marriage. It is not about culture wars, it is not about gender roles, it is not about finger-pointing or blame. I have a happy marriage. My wife and I just celebrated our 11th anniversary. I have one secret. Here it is. Enjoy.

Recently I encountered one of the best articles I’ve ever read about how to have a happy marriage.

Now understand: my wife and I work hard to have a good marriage. We regularly take time alone together, we’ve read books, we’ve gone to classes & retreats, we’ve used therapy when needed. We are each other’s top priority. All of that is important, and any one of those is potentially a good blog post, but none of it is “the secret”.

For all of the sound and fury coming out of the church these days over the state of marriage, the place I found the purest distilled essence of the Bible’s advice on marriage was in a secular article by a guy whose marriage failed, reflecting on the reasons why. It was called, “She divorced me because I left dishes by the sink.” It’s about how to sacrificially love your spouse.

What is love?

Our society gets all twisted up about love. “Love is romance,” we think, or “love is a feeling,” or “love is sexual passion.” All of that is nice, but none of it is the real point.

Here is the point: Love is a decision. Love is sacrifice. Hollywood shows us a naked couple on the screen and says, “This is love,” but the Bible shows us a naked man hanging from a cross for our redemption and says, “This is love.”

  • This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.
  • For God so loved the world, he gave his one and only son…
  • But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
  • Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

As long as something else is more important to us than the well-being and growth of our beloved, we have not truly loved. Especially as long as “holding to our own” is more important.

How to love

The number one thing you gotta know about Christ is, he didn’t insist on his rights:

Much heat nowadays centers on the passage in Ephesians that says “the husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the church”, across the whole spectrum from those who want women to submit, to those who would rather see the Bible discarded. In either case, the passage is read without much reference to Christ, as if it could interchangeably read, “…as a general is head of his army.” The husband makes the decisions, gives the orders, and the wife says, “Sir, yes sir!” From a Biblical perspective, though, that is nonsense.

To emulate Christ in anything is to take the lowest place, the servant’s place, to empty one’s self of privilege. Here are some tips for Christlike leadership from my own marriage:

  • Walk the dog
  • Change the baby
  • Buy the groceries
  • Fold clothes
  • Do the dishes
  • Take out the trash

Important in all of this is the spirit of loving gift. A loving marriage is not made by simply sharing responsibilities or “doing stuff”. It is made by accepting our Lord’s invitation to beauty, in the bearing of one another’s burdens, by acts of Christlike splendor and Christlike grace.

In so doing, we are given the privilege of glimpsing God’s own love for us. More than any other metaphor, scripture likens the love of Christ to the love of a husband for his bride.

 

(This week’s post is dedicated with much love to our friends Neal & Mandi… Congrats you two!)

What Google says the Bible advocates

Correcting what the World thinks “the Bible advocates”

I’m depressed. Go to Google, type “Bible advocates”, and see the popular suggested searches that appear: “violence”… “killing non believers”… “slavery”. You can’t even get “love” to appear. Type an L to try and prompt it, and you won’t get anything. Google just sits there, confused, not suggesting anything. Same with F (for forgiveness) and J (for joy). P (for peace) just gives you “polygamy” and “death penalty”.

So today, I am fixing it. Some of that stuff is treated in the Bible, but none of it is what the Bible is about. Here is what it is about:

Google suggestionWhat the Bible is really about
A“abortion”, “child abuse” Abundant life, Atonement
B(no suggestions) Baptism, Begotten son
C“child abuse” Christ, Carry your cross
D“death penalty” Divinity
E(no suggestions) Eternity
F(no suggestions) Forgiveness, Freedom, Father
G“genocide” God, Grace
H (no suggestions) Holy Spirit
I“inc” Incarnation
J (no suggestions) Jesus
K“killing” King of kings
L (no suggestions) Love, Lord
M (no suggestions) Mercy, Messiah
N (no suggestions) All things new
O (no suggestions) Only begotten son
P“polygamy”, “death penalty” Peace, Prayer
Q (no suggestions) Quiet
R (no suggestions) Redemption
S“slavery”, “stoning”, “socialism” Salvation, Sacrifice, Son of God, Sabbath, Service, Freedom from sin, Defeat of Satan
T“the bible advocates slavery, violence, genocide” Trinity, Truth
U (no suggestions) Unity
V“violence” Virgin birth
W (no suggestions) Worship, Will of God
X (no suggestions) Example of Christ, Crucifixion
Y“yelp”, “yale” Pray
Z (no suggestions) Zion
Outdated Bible

Is it time to give up on our outdated Bible?

The number one complaint about the Bible is, it’s outdated. It’s the only ancient writing any of us read with regularity. Some assert that, despite the millennia, all of it applies directly to us with no interpretation; others feel that in modern times it has become useless, if not harmful. Ironically, some even insist on both: more than once, an atheist has argued I must hold Bible to such a high standard that it cannot measure up and must be rejected, and even to attempt understanding by ordinary scholarship is “cheating”.

In fact, whatever we believe about the divine inspiration of the Bible, the reality is that it was set down by particular people in particular places, in their own languages and for their own cultures. We must take account of the original worldview if we are to ever understand what it meant to the original audience. Once we can do that, we have hope of understanding what it is supposed to mean to us.

Outdated

It is objectively true that the Bible is “outdated” in the same way that the plays of Shakespeare are outdated: our language and our worldview have changed since they were written.

Consider a phrase like, “When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin, who would fardels bear?” Few would claim it is “cheating” to seek the meaning of such a phrase in the everyday speech of Shakespeare’s time, and then to take that as the intended meaning. This is done through study of his culture. We cannot understand Shakespeare without some understanding of Elizabethan England. The same is true of the Bible. No one now living has the same language and worldview as the original authors.

Even when a good translation renders the Bible into familiar language, the cultural distance remains, and attempts to take its meaning directly from our cultural perspective are likely to lead us astray. Again, consider other “outdated” works:

  • Shakespeare’s Henry V has several of his former close friends summarily executed; did Shakespeare intend us to take him as a murderous tyrant?
  • Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn uses “the N-word”; does that mean he hated black people?

In fact, Shakespeare intends Henry V as a wise and benevolent king, and Huckleberry Finn was a revolutionary in its advocacy for friendship-as-equals between black and white. Correct understanding of the authors’ intents is only available when we compare what happened to what the original audience would have expected.

For better or for worse, correct understanding of the Bible is rooted in some knowledge of Palestinian culture during the first and second millennia BCE. The question then becomes, why then and there? Why not here and now, and save us all the trouble of scriptural exegesis? And, since scripture was revealed then, does that reflect a divine endorsement of their particular culture? Or is “ancient Palestine” simply a lingua franca shared by all Christians throughout time and space?

Lingua franca

My (English-speaking) parents were chemistry majors, so they had to learn German. Meanwhile, many German-speaking pilots were learning English to talk to air traffic control. At one time, French was the language of diplomacy, and to this day, all passports worldwide (even yours) include French. And Latin, for many years, was the common language of scholarship, which is why the term for “common language”, lingua franca, is in Latin.

How do these languages get chosen?  Is it because they are intrinsically suited to the purpose? Not at all. It’s more or less random. Chemists wound up with German because the Beilstein Handbook is in German. French for diplomacy goes back to Napoleon. English for flight goes back to the Wright brothers.

So. In the same way that understanding the Beilstein Handbook requires knowledge of German, understanding the New Testament requires knowledge of 1st Century Palestinian culture. It is simply a shared reference point, not a divine endorsement. Jesus worked hard to change many aspects of their culture, just as I’m sure he would do with ours.

But this gets to the question of “ours”. Why shouldn’t God update the Bible to “our” culture? The question is profoundly narcissistic. What is “our” culture? Since January 1, 2016, even this humble blog has been read in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Russia, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. Which culture should God “update” the Bible to? Should he go pre-or-post microwave ovens, or VCRs, or automobiles, or the Internet?

Doing the work

The Bible is— yes— tied to specific times and places. But in so being, it is timeless. 21st Century Americans can look back and understand if they will take the trouble, just like we could in the 20th Century and in every century before that, and just like they can in Brazil and Iraq and China.

No matter our country, no matter our beliefs, there are parts of the Bible we embrace easily and parts that challenge us, and depending who we are, they are going to be different parts. I think that’s the point: no matter the standards we set for ourselves, we all fall short in some way, and God’s standards are no exception.

There is the fundamental core of the Gospel message, and then there is everything else. We have to interpret, based on culture, if we have any hope of figuring out which is which. We cannot separate “understanding the Bible” from “understanding the original intent”. The Bible can never mean what it was never intended to mean.

 

P.S. My 10-year-old daughter and her cousin got a glimpse of this blog during our visit. I think they said it best in a lot fewer words: “No,  I feel that we should keep the Bible. Many parts of the Bible are not meant to relate directly to our situations; instead, they provide motions towards the right directions for us.”