Tag: theology

Be Like the Sons of Issachar Who Understood the Times

The Kingdom of God is among us and it is yet to come

kevingdrendel8 Comments

I recently finished a review of the of history of the blogging on this site: Looking Back at 13 Years of Navigating By Faith. One article stands high above the rest in the sheer number of people who have read/viewed it.

I wrote that article, Who Were the Sons of Issachar? And What Might They Mean for Us Today?, during Donald Trump’s second presidential campaign. Christian support for Donald Trump was characterized by a sense of urgency and high stakes. State COVID restrictions jeopardized religious liberty. BLM aroused woke, liberal, mobs in streets around the country. Christians sounded the alarm that people of faith would be canceled by the most anti-faith Democratic ticket in years if Trump didn’t win.

Prominent Christian leaders like Robert Jeffress and Franklin Graham argued that Trump was a “strongman” needed to protect the nation from “anarchy” and “socialism.” Jeffress excused Trump’s obvious flaws, saying that American Christians didn’t need a “Sunday School teacher” but a “fighter” who would protect Christian interests in a hostile culture. Lance Wallnau framed Trump as a modern King Cyrus—the Persian king used by God to protect His people and restore them to the promised land.

Support for Donald Trump was increasingly framed as a battle against “darkness” and “anti-Christian” forces. While many traditional evangelicals focused on policy, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) was mobilized by prophecy, spiritual warfare, and the “Seven Mountain Mandate.” Dozens of self-identified prophets in this network insisted that Trump’s re-election was divinely mandated in a cosmic battle between good and evil controlled by a demonically influenced “deep state.” The current was strong, and a large number of Christians were swept along with it.

A conversation with my best friend from college, who I loved more than a brother, and who I trusted implicitly, left me in full spiritual crisis mode. He expressed his continued support of Trump on the basis of those prophetic claims predicting another presidential victory and the belief that God ordained Donald Trump for this time. My friend urged my to be like the sons of Issachar “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.” (1 Chronicles 12:32)

I have a healthy respect for God’s ability to speak through people in what we call prophecy. The Apostle Paul commands us not to despise prophecy, but to test everything, hold fast to what is good, and abstain from every evil. (1 Thessalonians 5:20-22) I resolved to give Donald Trump another look and to reconsider him.

I had written in 2020 about wolves in sheep’s clothing with Donald Trump expressly in mind. Jesus said we would know falsehood by its fruit, and the fruit I saw in Donald Trump belied the claims of God’s providential blessing.

That a president is not a pastor made some sense. God can use anyone, even a donkey, right? Maybe Trump is like the Persian King Cyrus who is divinely appointed to restore the Christian heritage of the United States….

A year earlier, in 2019, I reflected on those claims that Trump is like a King Cyrus, and I came to a different conclusion. Trump seemed to me more like a King Saul, the king God’s people wanted – the king they wanted because they did not trust God. They wanted a king like all the other nations, though the Prophet Samuel warned them against it. God gave them the king His people wanted, even though they were rejecting God to ask for a king:

“[W]hen they said, ‘Give us a king to lead us,’ this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord told him: ‘Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.‘”

1 Samuel 8:6-9

God gave them the king they wanted in the same way that God gives people over “to the sinful desires of their heats.” (Romans 1:24) The people were rejecting God as their king, so God gave them over to the king they wanted.

People of that day might have assumed that God was blessing them to give them the king they wanted, but that was not the case. Samuel warned them against it, but they insisted anyway.

King Saul was rebellious, insecure, self-absorbed, and psychotic. He failed to obey God’s commands. He became obsessed with his power and reputation among the people, and he became jealous of David.

Though Saul remained king, God had already rejected him and anointed David to succeed him. Saul tried to take David’s life multiple times in fits of jealous rage, and David escaped into the wilderness.

This is where the Sons of Issachar entered the picture. Though Saul was still king, they “understood the times.” They could see the proverbial writing on the wall. They knew that David was God’s man, and Saul’s reign was ending.

Many people have argued that Donald Trump is like the foreign king, Cyrus, who protected and funded the nation of Israel to return to the Promised Land. I have argued that Donald Trump is not like the foreign king, Cyrus, but like the Israelite King Saul. Donald Trump is the king that God’s people wanted.

Continue reading “Be Like the Sons of Issachar Who Understood the Times” →

Is the American Church a House Divided Against Itself?

Whether God for us or against us is the wrong question.

kevingdrendelLeave a comment

I have yet to find my equilibrium after the Charlie Kirk killing. I didn’t know Charlie Kirk. I didn’t follow him. I heard him speak one time at an event in which Ravi Zacharias was the keynote speaker, but I never watched, or listened, or read anything from Charlie Kirk online. I didn’t agree with his Republican apologetic, though I couldn’t have identified anything Charlie Kirk specifically said before his death.

Since his death, I have heard and read testimony of his love for Jesus. His wife, Erika, publicly forgave his killer in an ultimate act of sacrificial obedience to Jesus.

Charlie Kirk’s legacy will always be that of a follower of Jesus and a staunch Republican, friend and defender of Donald Trump, who maintained political views opposed to mine.

I am a born again Christian. I believe in the death of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of my sins and his resurrection from the dead. I believe the Bible is the word of God and His revelation to mankind. I read the Bible daily. I believe there is only one path to God, and that is through Jesus Christ. I go to church every Sunday, and I am involved in Wednesday evening and Saturday morning Bible studies.

I have been a Christian for 45 years. The fundamentals of my faith have not changed in that time, but I have gone down some side roads from which I had to retreat back to a more orthodox faith. I was tempted by the prosperity gospel, and I once embraced an Americanized Christianity verging on idolatry.

Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God has not changed during my life (or at any time since the foundation of the earth), but I have changed often, as I have had to adjust my thinking, confess my sin, and allow my mind to be transformed by God’s Word and the influence of the Holy Spirit in my life.

I am a work in progress, of course. I have yet to arrive at any final destination, but I look forward with yearning for the day when I see Him face to face, and I will know as I am fully known!

I used to believe that all true Christians should (and therefore must) believe all of the same things about everything. That makes sense in a rationalistic way because we all have the same Holy Spirit, and we all read the same Bible, so we all should believe exactly the same things about everything. Right?

Continue reading “Is the American Church a House Divided Against Itself?” →

Putting Experience into Gospel Perspective

Love, truth, and personal experience

kevingdrendelLeave a comment

I think most people are skeptical of other people’s experiences. It’s only natural to be skeptical of experiences we have not had and do not share. When people have had experiences in common with or similar to us, we are much less skeptical. It’s also natural to assume the validity and legitimacy of experiences that we share in common or similar to the experience of others.

We have an affinity for people with whom we have shared experiences and for people whose experiences are similar to ours. Shared experiences bind us together. Those shared experiences affirm us and become part of our individual and common identities.

We let our guards down with people with whom we have shared experiences, and we can “be ourselves” with them. We want to affirm them because they affirm us.

These are all good things in and of themselves, but the affirmation is not always positive. Shared experiences can form the basis of co-dependency that is unhealthy and even destructive.

If we spend all our time with people with whom we share experiences, we can become insular and narrowminded. If we don’t venture beyond those circles of commonality, we may find ourselves in an echo chamber of conformation bias that blinds us to the false stories we tell ourselves and reinforces our narrowmindedness.

Common experiences can also have the opposite effect. People who spend significant time in other countries and with people not like them tend to be more openminded, more humble, and more accommodating of people who see the world differently.

As Christians, the common experience of being “in Christ” with people who are very different from us in ethnicity, native language, economic strata, age, etc. is mind and heart expanding. The usual commonalities that define us – like Jews and Gentiles, male and female, slave and free – give way to a greater identity that we find together in Christ.

Being in Christ should be a defining commonality for Christians, though we often default back to commonalities that are of lesser significance. We need to guard against that.

Jesus challenges every Christian to stretch ourselves in these things – to strive to make our shared experience in Christ the commonality that is preeminent in our lives. That commonality should be the one thing that unites us, though we may have little else in common.

Jesus also urges us to stretch back from that one commonality to engage a world that does not share that one common, all encompassing identity that unites Christians around the world. Jesus bids us to go out into the world to share the Gospel with people who do not yet share that common identity.

In doing that, we need to use other, lesser commonalities to bridge the gap, to make connection, to open doors to sharing the Gospel. Jesus is our ultimate example. In Jesus, God became flesh so that He could share in our humanness and, therefore, to connect with us so that he could share the good news with us.

We often become insular in our Christian community, however. It’s comfortable there, and the effort to connect with people who do not share the most important aspect of our lives is hard work.

We sometimes vacillate between the groups of people with whom share certain commonalities like chameleons, fitting in where we go. It’s hard to maintain our distinctiveness as Christ followers among people who do not know Jesus. Yet, this is our calling.

The religious community in the first Century was insular. The religious leaders criticized Jesus for making those human connections with the world – the tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners of his day.

If Jesus was born today, I am convinced he would be criticized for hanging out with the LGBTQ community, Muslims, and atheists. The people in those communities would be just as critical of Christ followers as they were in the 1st Century, yet our commission is to bridge the gap to share the good news. I don’t think the dynamics were any different when Jesus walked the earth in the flesh than they are today.

We cannot let our experiences define how we operate in the world. They can be good and bad, positive and negative, helpful in living out the Christian life and unhelpful, depending on our perspective. They can define us and bind us in our closedmindedness, or they can be tools for making critical connections in furtherance of the plans and purposes of God.

My thoughts today are inspired by something Preston Sprinkle said in response to a questions posed by a listener to his podcast, Theology in the raw. Sprinkle gets much criticism from within the Christian community for his efforts to bridge gaps with the modern world – especially the LGBTQ community.

I appreciate his heart and his attempts to make connections with the “sinners” of the world. Of course, we are all sinners. We know that, but we have a hard time putting it all in perspective. It’s difficult and sometimes messy work trying to remain pure and undefiled in the world and to “go into” the world at the same time with the Gospel.

One thing that he said seemed important enough for me to write it down. He said:

“I don’t determine my theology from other peoples experiences. You can’t. Which experience are you going to choose to determine it? .. . But I do think listening deeply to other people’s experiences should shape how we think theologically, how we hold on to our theology. Listening well to other people helps us put our theology into the conversation with real people.”

If you will indulge me, I am going to try to break down what I think he is saying. I think it is critical to our role as ambassadors of Christ to get this right.

Continue reading “Putting Experience into Gospel Perspective” →

The Need for Unity of Purpose in the Church: Focus on Jesus

When Paul heard of the divisions in the Corinthian church, he came to them with the centrality of the Gospel – Jesus and him crucified.

kevingdrendelLeave a comment

I have been meaning to write on unity in the Church for some time, but the subject has seemed too large for me to tackle. I am not a theologian. I took all the classes to be a religion major in college, but I didn’t hand in my thesis paper (on inerrancy), so I settled on being an English Literature major only.

Over the last 15 years, approximately, I been serious in reading Scripture and thinking (and writing) through the many difficult issues that face modern Christians. I have always been about “mere Christianity” since my earliest days as a Christ follower over 40 years ago, and I am convinced more than ever of the importance of being unified around basic or essential Christian principles.

My church is going through 1 Corinthians for the next several months or more, and the first chapter of the letter focuses on unity. I began writing about the need to be intentional – to agree – to end divisions and be unified in mind and purpose in Fighting for Unity in the Body of Christ.

I learned that the Greek word translated “mind” (or mindset”), nous, means more than just our thinking. It encompasses our attitude and disposition also. As we follow Jesus as he followed the Father, we should have same attitude/mindset that Jesus had.

Jesus is our pattern, and he calls us all to live as he lived, conforming to the same pattern he described when he said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:34-35

Paul reminds us that Jesus left aside his privilege and humbled himself to become one of us. (Philippians 2) Paul adds that our knowledge and ability to fathom all mysteries are nothing if we don’t have love. (1 Corinthians 13:1-2) Therefore, our mindset – our attitude and disposition (love) toward one another – is vitally important in what it means to be unified in mind and purpose.

Unity does not just mean intellectual assent on matters of doctrine. Paul says that we only “know in part”. (1 Corinthians 13:12) We need to bear that mind, therefore, as we try to be obedient to the commandment to end divisions and be unified in mind and purpose.

This all begs the question, though: what mind and what purpose is Paul talking about? What is it that we must be intentional to agree about?

In the first article, I found some clues in the Greek meanings of the words translated “mind and purpose”, but they only scratch the surface. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, the Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich Lexicon, and the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament all agree that νοῦς (nous) (translated mind) refers not only to the intellect, understanding, or reasoning faculty; it it also encompasses the mindset or disposition of a person.

Doctrine is implied in the concept of being of one mind, but doctrine is not all that this word implies. In fact, the summary of the Law Jesus provided for us (love God and love neighbor) seems to emphasize attitude and action over intellectual, theological constructs.

That doesn’t mean that Jesus was not doing theology when he summarized the Law. In fact, I think it is safe to say that we do theology far less perfectly than Jesus did!

We tend to complicate theology, but Jesus simplified it. In simplifying it, though, Jesus was not discounting or minimizing the rationality and intellectual rigor of it. Rather, Jesus was prioritizing the intellectual aspect of knowledge below below love. As Paul says: even if we can fathom all mysteries and have all knowledge, we have nothing without love. Love, therefore, is the priority over knowledge and understanding.

As we have already seen, the mindset we adopt must also incorporate our disposition and attitude toward God and each other. Any doctrine divorced from these things is empty. It is like a clanging gong without a symphony.

I think it is safe to say that doctrine, by itself, is devoid of life. Knowledge and understanding are nothing without love. It seems to me that love, even without knowledge or understanding, is better than knowledge and understanding without love.

Some might say though, that love cannot be divorced from truth. Jesus said that he is the way, truth and the life, so truth is obviously important.

But, not all truth is of the same value. It is true that today is sunny and warm in the Chicago area, but that truth is not nearly as important as the truth that Jesus is God incarnate who died on the cross for our sin and rose from the dead to redeem us from sin and death.

Having the same mind and purpose implies that we agree to the certain key value and truth propositions. It cannot mean that all of us view all value and truth propositions the same way. As finite beings who know only in part, that would be impossible! So what does Paul mean?

Continue reading “The Need for Unity of Purpose in the Church: Focus on Jesus” →

St. Augustine on the Literal Meaning of Genesis

How Augustine read Scripture in light of experience and reason.

kevingdrendel2 Comments

People cite the great church father, Augustine, in defense of the view that the earth is only thousands (rather than billions) of years old. Indeed, I believe this was (more or less) Augustine’s view, based on the science and knowledge that was available to him in the 5th Century when he lived. Augustine believed the earth was young.

That isn’t the end of our understanding of Augustine, though. To understand Augustine, we might be aided by a basic review of the mythological, philosophical and scientific views that were prevalent in his world at the time.

According to my inquiry on Bing Co-Pilot, the mythology of the time didn’t attempt to date the age of the earth. Science (such as it was) also had not established a position. Philosophy, however, provided two opposing views.

The philosophical camps were led by Aristotle and Lucretius. Aristotle argued that the earth was eternal, and Lucretius argued that the earth formed relatively recently (based on a lack of records prior to the Trojan War). (The Trojan War dates to the 11th or 12th Century BCE.) Thus, the two competing views in Augustine’s day were 1) eternal earth or 2) young earth. There was no inkling in Augustine’s time that the earth might be very old, but not eternal.

Interestingly, Aristotle’s view of an eternal earth shifted to an eternal universe, and that view became the accepted scientific view that lasted well into the 20th Century. This was Einstein’s view when he developed the Theory of Relativity.

The past eternal view of the universe was only debunked and rejected by the scientific consensus in the second half of the 20th Century, and then only very reluctantly. (Even now, some scientists demonstrate a desire to find support for a past eternal universe, but support for that view seems to get thinner and thinner as time goes on.)

In the uncertain stew of mythology, philosophy, and science in the 5th Century, Augustine acknowledged that a literal, 6-day reading of the creation story in Genesis is not an irrational interpretation. That is basically how he put it.

He didn’t endorse that view, however. He thought the better view was that the “days” in Genesis 1 do not correspond to earthly (24 hour) days. Even in his exploration of a “literal” reading of Genesis, Augustine incorporated allegorical nuance.

Augustine did not believe that “literal” and “allegorical” meanings were mutually exclusive, and neither did most of the early church fathers. What Augustine and the early church fathers meant by the “literal” meaning of Scripture was what the people who wrote the original words literally meant and how the audience to whom they communicated understood them.

In this effort to understand what the writers meant, the early church fathers assumed that the original meanings included metaphor, symbolism, and literary devices. None of the early church fathers (that I am aware of) argued for the modern sense of strict literalism in the interpretation of Scripture.

Though most early Christians believed literally in the historicity of the biblical accounts (to use a modern term), they also accepted the richness of allegorical meaning in Scripture at the same time. In fact, the metaphorical meaning of Scripture was assumed to be the deeper, more significant meaning of Scripture.

Augustine (along with Clement of Alexandria and Origen) ultimately rejected the calendar-day view of the Genesis creation story in favor of instantaneous creation with a kind of day/age view of the creation passage in Genesis. The great Jewish theologians, Philo and Hilary of Poitiers also took this view that God created the earth instantaneously.

We should recognize that the day-age view that Augustine and others preferred was probably not the consensus, but it also wasn’t considered heresy. The theology and the philosophy were unsettled, and science had not yet developed as we know it. The Church allowed for robust disagreement on age of the earth, because it was not considered essential doctrine.

I should stop here, at the risk of pointing out something you already know, and look at the meaning of the Hebrew word, יוֹם (yom). This word is translated into the English word, day, in Genesis 1. As with most Hebrew words, yom has many nuanced meanings and applications, both literal and figurative. The various meanings include:

  • Day, as opposed to night
  • Day as a division of time
  • Day as defined by evening and morning
  • Day as in a time (like harvest)
  • Day as in an age or epoch of time

In addition to the definitions, most Hebrew words have both literal and figurative meanings and applications. Thus, Augustine’s position that the days in Genesis can be read to mean an “earthly” or “ordinary” day did not exclude the idea of applying them more figuratively. That duality is consistent with the way Hebrew words and Hebrew language works. This built-in literal/figurative duality of Hebrew words informed the thinking of the early church fathers.

Augustine is famous for preferring allegorical readings and applications of Scripture. In his early two-volume work on Genesis in which he took issue with the Manicheans, Augustine explored the position that the days in Genesis are seven epochs of redemptive history corresponding with seven stages of the Christian life. (See Did Augustine Read Genesis 1 Literally? by Gavin Ortlund citing De Genesis contra Manichaeos 1.23.35-1.25.43, in Augustine, On Genesis, 62-68.)

When Augustine set out to write a “literal” interpretation of Genesis, he didn’t mean what people today might think he meant. Even his “literal” reading of Scripture was not strictly literalist. It was an attempt to understand what the original writers and audiences (literally) meant and what they understood it to mean.

Science in St. Augustine’s day was not advanced enough to weigh in on the age of the earth, but Augustine was a strong proponent of understanding science. The science of his day, for instance, had settled the spherical shape and circumference of the earth. That the earth was round and even the size of the perimeter of the earth was well established and understood among academics since before the time of Christ. (It is purely a myth, for instance, that Columbus had to convince people the earth was not flat.) Augustine’s view of scientific knowledge and its relationship to Scripture is what I want to highlight here.

Continue reading “St. Augustine on the Literal Meaning of Genesis” →