Let's see if I can pick up where I left off....
"Why do most hard core religious zealots believe that drinking booze is a sin if the first miracle that Jesus performed was to turn water into wine? (Don't give me that grape-juice nonsense because I don't believe it. The writer meant wine)"
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Many Christians are confused about what Christians believe. There are two major confusions that are made: people confuse their own culture and history with Christian faith and practice, and they confuse legalism with virtue. I'll tackle the easy one first: culture.
John Poole once commented about the hours which were spent by American Christian churches debating whether it was appropriate for women to wear pants. Many thought this horribly inappropriate, possibly sinful--women were to wear women's clothes, which meant dresses, not men's clothes; it was abominable. Now, I don't want to minimize the arguments against such "cross-dressing"; if there is a lesson in the Corinthians injunction that women should wear long hair, it's that we shouldn't dress and groom ourselves in a way which the culture will associate with something we would disapprove (Corinthian pagan temple prostitutes shaved their heads as a badge of their status). But Poole asked, how would this debate have run in the Christian churches in Japan? They have an entirely different culture. The clothes worn by men and women there were quite distinct from those we wore. We were wasting a lot of time trying to decide whether something was sinful which was probably not significant.
In a similar vein (and much more on point), Chuck Smith reported going to Sweden to preach at a revival meeting. After the meeting, they took him out to dinner, and all the Christians ordered beer with their meals. This was startling to him--beer was in some ways the symbol of the evils of drink in America--but he didn't make an issue of it. However, he did order a cup of coffee with his meal--which raised quite an uproar among the faithful there: this horrible drugged beverage was entirely inappropriate for a Christian--especially a pastor.
You've been raised in a pocket of the church which has many strengths but also a few weaknesses; it's easy to think that that which your church preaches is representative of the Church Universal--we all do this. But there are vast numbers of Christians who drink wine, beer, sake, and other alcoholic beverages all around the world. The disagreement lies in the potential for the abuse of alcohol. Many--perhaps most--believe that the use of alcohol as a beverage is perfectly acceptable. After all, for most of 19 centuries of Christian history, it was not safe to drink many things which were not sanitized and preserved by their alcohol content. For a few of the more recent branches of the faith, the potential for abuse of alcohol is considered so serious that it would be better for Christians to refrain from its use entirely. After all, you can never be sure which member of the congregation will become the alcoholic through your casual consumption--it might even be you.
This leads me to the confusion between legalism and virtue.
Everytime I return to the study of the New Testament--and especially the epistles of Paul--I'm struck by the constant presentation of a gospel I rarely hear preached. It appears as part of a struggle against a faction which Paul (as well as Peter) opposed back then which seems to have remained a constant within the church through the centuries.
In the second century, the "Didache"--fully translated, "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles"--was written by a group of church leaders who had little comprehension of what the apostles really taught. It is a useful sourcebook as it appears to have been a major guide to the practice of Christianity in the second century (and a clear illustration that they were not the great thinkers who created this religion, as some liberals of this century have suggested). At one point, it tells us that we must be completely unlike the Pharisees, those terrible religious hypocrites. They fast every Tuesday and Thursday, and we must not be like them in any way, so we must fast every Wednesday and Friday. You can see the fallacy here; yet this "rule" has survived down to the present--many Catholics still do not eat meat on Friday because of the history which flowed from this injunction. But the point is that even then, Christians and even Christian leaders thought that pleasing God had to do with following rules.
Paul saw the entire matter very differently. Let me reconstruct something of the origin of Paul's conception of the gospel.
Paul was a Pharisee himself, and a "damned good one" (if you'll excuse the pun). He says of himself that according to the righteousness which is under the law, he was found blameless. But to understand Paul fully, you need to understand Phariseeism. Looking back at the history of the Jewish nation, one quickly sees that each time the Hebrew people turned away from keeping the law, God punished them, generally by sending conquerors in to enslave or deport them. Thus the Pharisees reasoned that keeping the law was the correct way to please God. Following this reasoning through, if the Pharisees were to keep the law as well as could be done, God would send his Messiah to THEM, to lead them against their enemies and set them above all other nations and peoples in the world. We rightly criticize some of their thinking. There's a humorous passage which observes that one cannot tie a rope to a bucket on the Sabbath in order to draw water from the well, as that would be work; but it would not be improper to tie a knot in a woman's undergarment to secure it, as she would need to do so to preserve her modesty before God and man--therefore, if you need to draw water from the well on the Sabbath, you should do so by tying the bucket to a woman's undergarment. But they recognized the flaws among their own people, and truly strove for perfection under the law of God handed down through Moses.
Suddenly, this group of sinners shows up. These people have no understanding of the law, and have never dedicated so little as a decade of their lives to trying to achieve perfection. Goodness, most of them are peasants--fishermen and such--and not a few are sinners, such as tax collectors for the evil Romans. Yet these men claim that God sent the Messiah, not to the holy Pharisees, but to them, the uneducated sinners who neither understood nor reached toward perfection. This is not merely a doctrinal dispute--the fate of the nation is at stake. If this error is allowed to spread, people will think that you don't have to follow the minute details of the law to please God, and they will turn away from keeping the law and the sacrifices, and God will be angered and again destroy the nation. And so Paul became a persecutor of the faith--and he lists that with his credits as a great Pharisee, because to the Pharisee, this notion that the Messiah might have come to these sinners was the worst kind of heresy.
But then on the road to Damascus, Jesus interrupted him: "Saul, why do you persecute Me? I am Jesus, whom you persecute." Ouch. The sinners were right--God did not come to those who were trying their best to please him through keeping the requirements of the law, but to these simple sinners; and He identifies Himself with them.
This led Paul to the conclusion which he saw more clearly than any of the other New Testament authors: Keeping the law has nothing to do with pleasing God. The way some preachers put it, you'd think that the gospel was all about keeping the law. It's not at all about keeping the law.
The epistle to the Romans deals with this over the course of several chapters. Through the first three chapters, Paul builds up the case that those who keep the law, who preach moral rules and regulations and obey these themselves, are condemned by God, because you cannot please God by keeping the law--not because keeping the law is a bad thing, but because it is an impossible thing. You will fail--it is in fact one of the laws that you will fail. But, he says, "You are not under law, but under grace." If you study this carefully (and I taught this material this way before I went to law school), you'll realize that it's a jurisdictional matter. Everyone who tries to please God by keeping the law is condemned to death because of their failure. Every jot and tittle of that law remains the Law of God through the end of time, and everyone ruled by it fails. I should note that part of his argument is that if you write a different law, even just for yourself, you intrinsically recognize that law is the basis for justification before God, and therefore you are obligated to the law God delivered, not merely your own diluted version. But for the Christian, although the law remains forever, it doesn't apply in our jurisdiction.
The illustration I used was to suggest that there was a law in Boston Massachusetts concerning the required length of a man's hair. My hair violates that law, but I am not guilty because I am not in Boston. At every turn in my life, I find myself violating the Law of God--I frequently eat pork and shellfish; I do not properly cleanse myself in all the right circumstances; I've never delivered a dove, ram, or any other sacrificial animal to the temple as required. (The artificial distinctions about the "moral" versus the "ceremonial" law are raised later in your letter, so I won't tackle those yet.) But those laws don't matter, because I don't live there. I died, and am no longer bound by the rules which apply in this world; I was born again in the new world, part of the Kingdom of God, where the rules are that there are no rules, where we don't please God by observing these regulations of our conduct, but by living as loving children of a loving Father.
It is at this point at which I must turn the matter back on itself. I am in great danger of being accused of a heresy known as antinomianism--that is, of suggesting that Christian conduct doesn't matter in the least. If there are no rules, then we can do whatever we wish, enjoy the full pleasures of all those activities which were considered sinful under the Law. Our conduct is not controlled by that law--but it is not completely out of control, either.
At a simple level, it can be said that what makes us Christian (or more accurately, what being Christian makes us) involves our desire to please God; and that we have been given a clear record of that which God found pleasing and displeasing in his people in the past. Certainly we can learn from their example. However, this is not the approach Paul takes to the question.
All things are lawful--he repeats this many times; its appearance in Corinthians suggests that he preaches it in his sermons (certain phrases in Corinthians appear to be statements Paul has made which the Corinthians have quoted back to him which he is clarifying, and this is one of those). But not all things are profitable; but not all things edify. That is, you can do anything you want to do, but you should consider what you want to do in light of what would be good or bad for you, and what would be good or bad for the body of Christ, the church. And in considering this, you should try to get beyond what the world thinks and reach to the truth, the way God reveals reality. I've written a leaflet regarding premarital sex--it obviously doesn't apply to you at this point in your life, but it is instructive in another way. In it, I suggest that most of the reasons given to teenagers for waiting to have sex, while they may be compelling, suggest that the reason for not having sex before marriage is because of the problems it will cause; thus the implication is that if you can solve all these problems, you can go ahead and have sex. But that's not the reason you should wait. The fact is that sex means something; even at a biological level, we know that this physical relationship promotes bonding, causes us at a very primal level to tend to stay together. It doesn't cause a relationship where there was none before, but it does intensify an existing relationship. On a spiritual level, this is about committing yourselves to each other--and how many times can you commit yourself to a new person before it loses its meaning? (The complete leaflet is on the web, if you're interested.)
One of the common errors made by the world today is the notion that any sexual conduct between consenting adults is O.K. I don't want to suggest that what people do should be regulated or restricted in some way; but I do think that there is a mistake in suggesting that any two people who engage in consensual sexual activities "aren't hurting anyone". The effects of such activities may have far reaching consequences. Can it be said that President Clinton and Monica Lewinski haven't hurt anyone with their private liasons? I would say that Mrs. Clinton has been hurt, and that the relationship between the President and his wife will never be fully restored (although it is possible that the damage from this is negligible added to that of previous events known to them but hidden from us). His relationship with his daughter has been injured, and it has hurt her. It has in many ways hurt the entire country. Miss Lewinski's reputation is ruined--no man will be unaffected in his attitude toward her; returning to a normal life may be impossible. Mr. Clinton and Miss Lewinski have both compromised their ability to tell their children how to be responsible about sex--teenagers frequently feel that parents who recommend caution about sex but might not have exercised it themselves are hypocrites who should not be heeded--and for Miss Lewinski, those children are not yet even born. It remains to be seen whether the Clinton grandchildren will be citing their grandfather's conduct when they reach their teens. It is probable that I and my children have also been hurt in this way--how can I persuade them that chastity and fidelity are good things when the President of the United States is engaged in lewd and promiscuous, possibly adulturous, conduct with young girls in the White House? Don't tell me that the conduct of these two consenting adults hurt no one; and the ripples of damage done by this illicit relationship, although magnified immensely, are not different in kind from the damage done by all similar relationships.
But I mention it to clarify the distinction. Under grace, it was not sinful for these people to act this way. Under grace, they will not be punished for their crime before God. If they are Christians who have acted in this way, they are not condemned for committing a sin. Rather, they have done something which tore down part of what God was doing in their lives and in the lives of everyone they have touched. They have done something which was stupid and cruel.
Thus it is important to understand how God sees our actions, because often we can't see the picture as He does. And if we don't see it His way, we don't really understand it.
Now, in defense of the preachers at so many churches, what I've just explained is a very difficult notion of why certain conduct should be avoided. But for your children, especially when they are young, these difficult concepts may be lost or misunderstood. Isn't it just easier to tell them, this is wrong, don't do it? With our toddlers, we prevent them from burning themselves on the stove by slapping their fingers and saying "no"--because saying, "dear, you don't want to touch the hot stove because it will hurt you badly and possibly do severe damage to your dermal tissues" is too much for them to grasp. Yet by the time they're teenagers, they can grasp the more difficult concept. The problem we have with moral issues is that we keep telling younger minds that this or that is wrong, and we never get back to saying "Wrong isn't quite the right word. What it is is dangerous and hurtful." But when you address a congregation of people at all levels, that is not an easy thing to explain. Besides, so many times the notion that these things are wrong has been handed from generation to generation without the subsequent explanation that many charged with teaching us do not themselves know; they have processed the list of hurtful dangerous activities into a new code of law to be obeyed without understanding--a new legalism.
The problem with legalism is that we reach the point where we believe, as did the Pharisees, that we are pleasing God with what we are doing. One of my classmates at Luther College commented about a few of our fellow students that attending Bible school was "what they were doing for God". I understood what he meant. These people weren't trying to serve God, or to learn or know him better, or to prepare to serve him. They were trying to please him by doing something which was on their list of things to do to make God happy. But God isn't like that--He looks at the heart.
There is one other little point to be made about legalism, and that is the matter of personal legalism. I have a rule in my life that I developed over twenty years ago: I do not listen to secular music. In understanding this rule, you need to know that before that I was a musician and a singer, and I became extremely skilled at learning the lyrics to songs merely by listening to them. Garage bands functioned because the singers could sing all the words to most of the songs on the radio, and I could. But that which I sing repeats inside me, and the words to those songs were filled with comfortable lies and wrong ideas and paths which lead to pain. I realized that through learning these songs, I was meditating on ideas antithetical to my faith--I was thinking on the things which would destroy me. So I stopped. I determined that I should not listen to such music again, so that I would not build my perception of reality on the lies of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
At first, I thought I had risen to a spiritual level above those who still listened to such music; I told others that God would probably lead them to stop listening also. Then I recognized that my situation was exactly like that of the meat offered to idols in Corinthians--I was the weaker brother easily injured by the evil connected here; other Christians could do this with impunity, suffering no ill effects.
A good friend of mine doesn't drink because he was an alcoholic. He doesn't eat seafood because his body doesn't tolerate it. He doesn't consider either of those things sinful; they are just bad for him.
I think that having personal laws which you have built in recognition of your own weaknesses is very valuable. There are two caveats to this. First--and most important--you must remember that your laws are not God's laws for you. They are a way of protecting yourself from your own weaknesses. It may be that God will call upon you to do something which requires you to break your own rules, and at that point you may not tell Him that you can't because it would be wrong for you to break your law. People use law to avoid obedience; that is a mistake. But second--and like unto it--you must remember that even if your law is something God has impressed upon you Himself, it is not God's law for everyone else. I had to understand that those who listened to secular music might be foolish from my perspective, but they were not being disobedient. God calls some to be involved in every area of life, including the entertainment industry. It is necessary for some Christians to do that which for me is harmful. My law is not to be used to criticize or condemn them, nor even to be suggested as a measure for their conduct. It should be explained if the matter comes up, but always as something related to me and my relationship with God, not as a standard to which others should adhere.
Well, that's a lot to have said--and your next issue is also a big one, so I think I'll cut it off here. If I'm moving too fast for you, take your time--the letters aren't going anywhere, and you can read them again later. I hope they continue to be helpful.
--Mark
To Mark J. Young's Bible Study Materials
Read about the Multiverser role playing game--accused by some critics of being "too Christian".
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