Category Archives: Bible and Theology

#140: Societal Implications of Romans I

December 6, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #140, on the subject of Societal Implications of Romans I.

We began this miniseries with The Sin in Romans I, where we stated

…ultimately there is only one sin listed in the first chapter of the Book of Romans:

…they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved….

We were deriving that from Romans 1:19ff. We then continued in Immorality in Romans I to explain that the “sins” we see described in that first chapter–the immorality, homosexuality, and total depravity–are not given to us as the proof of guilt but as the demonstration of punishment, that God punishes those who fail to recognize and thank Him by delivering them to the desires that destroy them. We ended that article with the thought

…if these are the punishment of God, why would I want them? Obviously, there is this draw that they have, because people are drawn into them, and many Christians will admit being tempted in those directions. The black hole of death pulls everyone toward it. The message of the gospel includes that Jesus saves us from this, that He enables us to be free from this death.

Then I noted that there was something else, something I had missed before.

That is where we are today, but to get there we are going to begin with a meandering discussion beginning with divorce law.

This has been not true for so long that some of my readers might be surprised to discover it was ever true. At one time, when a man and a woman signed their names to a piece of paper and swore before a public gathering that they would remain together for their entire lives, the government regarded those to be legally enforceable promises which it, the public at large, and the couple themselves fully expected they would keep. The part about “better or worse…rich or poor…sickness and health” underscored this: there were no outs. In England, if you wanted a divorce you often needed an Act of Parliament.

Of course, exceptions were made, what some will remember as “divorce for cause”. The promises that were made to each other included loving and caring for each other, and forsaking all others. If it could be demonstrated in court that one party had breached those promises, the other party was entitled to damages, including dissolution of the marriage. If the husband beat the wife, or abandoned her; or if the wife was sleeping with the neighbor–these were causes, breaches of the promises, and the injured party could be released from the obligation, often with compensatory damages in property settlements or alimony.

Usually.

By the middle of the twentieth century, affluent Americans who believed that they had earned what they had, and forgot that God had given it to them, began to be bored with monogamy. They felt like they should be able to divorce each other for no better reason than that they wanted to marry someone else, to find “happiness” with another lover. Hollywood gossip certainly fueled this–the stresses on the marriages of movie stars who were frequently separated working on different projects, frequently put into close relationships with other actors, and adored by fans who made them believe they deserved better caused many of them to fail, and the tabloid press popularized the idea that a star or starlet was escaping a bad relationship for a better one. Ordinary people thought that happiness was found in leaving the wrong person and finding the right one. The law in most places, though, was very much against them: you could not be divorced for a whim, only for a cause, a breach of the promise by one party against the other.

And the law was strict. There is a New York case in which a couple wanted a divorce but could not get one without cause, so the husband arranged for his wife to have an affair with his best friend, and they went to court and presented the matter to the judge–and the judge said no, that since the husband colluded in his wife’s infidelity he could not claim that he had been harmed by it, and therefore had no cause for a divorce. People were being forced to stay married to each other for no better reason than that at one time years before they promised each other and the government and the world at large that they would.

And somehow we no longer thought that a good enough reason. Why should you have to do something just because you promised, and benefited from the promise?

Gradually over several decades we changed those laws, to allow ourselves to break those promises. In the wake of that, the upcoming generation saw that the promises were becoming meaningless, and we entered the beginning of a “sexual revolution” in which such promiscuity became more open, accepted by larger and larger segments of society. Today promiscuity is the assumed norm. Unmarried adult virgins are treated as a comic element in popular media, a rarity, and sex among teens is expected even by their parents who don’t counsel them to wait but to be careful when they don’t.

And the law has moved to a place where it says, it is nobody’s business whether you have sex, whether you break promises made to a spouse, whether you get your pleasure from the opposite sex or the same sex. Follow your own moral compass, and if you don’t like where it points, break it and go where you want.

In the process we have lost the ability to commit, to keep promises, to love and trust each other. That is a serious loss.

This was the part I did not see a decade ago when I taught that class (or three decades ago when I taught Romans to those college students). I could see that the immorality, the homosexuality, and the depravity were punishments on individuals who were destroying themselves because they refused to acknowledge God. What I did not then see was that it was bigger than that. It was not that Joe would not acknowledge God and now was having an affair with Alice, or that Bill was rejecting God and now found himself in a relationship with Steve, or that Mary ignored God’s kindness toward her and now could not figure out what was right and what was wrong. That was all true, but it was also true that there were others who had failed to acknowledge God who still lived moral upright lives, who were not suffering from the punishment Paul described. It was not targeting every individual evenly.

However, it was targeting society. People who kept their marriage vows started to discover that their spouses did not. People who embraced only heterosexual relationships discovered that they had homosexual children. People who lived moral lives based on a moral compass that followed sound principles but not God found that those around them, even those closest to them, could see no reason to follow those principles and were ready to do whatever profited them, whatever felt good, whatever they wanted. The society that rejected God, the society that failed to acknowledge Him, was falling into a downward spiral into depravity.

The wrath of God has come upon us. We can see it in the world around us, and as Paul said, it proves that God has begun the end of the world with the judgment of those who reject Him.

There is at least one more piece to this miniseries, because this is not the end of the story.

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Bible and Theology

#139: Immorality in Romans I

December 5, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #139, on the subject of Immorality in Romans I.

We began a miniseries with The Sin in Romans I, where we stated

…ultimately there is only one sin listed in the first chapter of the Book of Romans:

…they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved….

We were deriving that from Romans 1:19ff.

Some of you were undoubtedly struggling with that, because your understanding of Romans 1:24ff is that Paul begins cataloguing the sins for which mankind is being judged. He starts to talk about immorality, promiscuity, segueing into homosexuality and lesbianism, and then into an entire catalog that we can best describe as total depravity. Surely these are the sins for which men are punished, no?

No.

If we read what the next two verses say, we find

Therefore, God in His wrath handed them over to their promiscuous drives, so that they would lose all respect for their bodies. He punished them because they traded the truth they had about God for a lie, and worshipped and served creatures instead of their Creator, who is the source of all good things forever, and that’s certain.

All that promiscuity, all that immorality, that is not the sin–it is the punishment.

Some of you are thinking, what kind of punishment is that? God gets upset because we don’t recognize how good He has been to us, so He punishes us by sending us lovers, causing us to have affairs? Bring it on!

That actually demonstrates to some degree that you are already touched by that wrath; but then, why should sexual immorality be punishment? It has always been a temptation, something we desire. It seems, then, if we’re bad, God gives us what we desire. How should that be a problem? It sounds like punishing a bad child by giving him ice cream and candy.

It should be said first that if God says this is a punishment, there must be a reason for us to perceive it as a punishment. There must be something fundamentally undesireable about that thing that we desire. Maybe we don’t see what it is, but it must be there.

In fact, speaking in the abstract, God never forbids anything just because He doesn’t like it. He forbids that which is bad for us and others. We see short-term enjoyment in promiscuity, but God sees damage to people. Years ago I wrote a page entitled Why Shouldn’t You Have Sex If You Aren’t Married? in which I talked about all the people who are hurt by these casual liasons–beginning with the partners themselves, extending to their future loves, their children, and people around them. There I put some time into discussing how such promiscuous conduct is self-destructive, destroying the person’s reputation, their trustworthiness, their ability to love and be loved, and never really bringing any fulfillment.

God created us to form us into creatures who could engage in honest, trusting, loving relationships with each other and ultimately with Him. Promiscuity, immorality, adultery, fornication–whatever specific form you give it–destroys that.

So, too, as the punishment worsens, we find in 1:26f

Because they did this, God handed them over to strong self-destructive feelings; their women traded all for which their bodies were made for something unnatural, and the men also abandoned that for which women’s bodies were made and felt strong passions for each other, and so men performed indecent sexual acts with other men, and suffered the consequences of having rejected God.

–that is, God punishes those who refuse to acknowledge and thank Him by pushing them into homosexuality, another even more self-destructive conduct. This is the punishment. It then worsens in 1:28ff, restating the crime,

Further, since they were no longer willing to recognize God, God handed them over to depravity in their thinking, so that they could no longer understand that anything could be wrong in itself, being completely filled with injustice, cruelty, greed, malice; full of envy, killing, rivalry, deceit, nastiness; they are rumor mongers, slanderers, God-haters, insulting, prideful, braggarts, inventing new evils, disobeying parents, foolish, promise-breakers, unloving, merciless, who fully aware that God is right to sentence to death those who do things like these not only do them themselves, but encourage others to do them as well.

People who do not recognize God ultimately become parodies of what we are supposed to be.

Of course, arguably not all of them do, or at least, not that we can see. This punishment falls on some more harshly than others. Yet it is evident that today people are rushing into these traits.

I would say one more thing about the immorality, the homosexuality, and the general depravity before I end this article: if these are the punishment of God, why would I want them? Obviously, there is this draw that they have, because people are drawn into them, and many Christians will admit being tempted in those directions. The black hole of death pulls everyone toward it. The message of the gospel includes that Jesus saves us from this, that He enables us to be free from this death.

All of this I have covered elsewhere. Yet there was something else I only recently realized–which will be the next article in the miniseries.

Bible and Theology

#138: The Sin in Romans I

December 4, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #138, on the subject of The Sin in Romans I.

Just over a decade ago, on February 6, 2006, with the permission of the Christian Gamers Guild, I began using one of their Yahoo!Groups lists to teach a Bible class–something more than a Bible study, on the level of an undergraduate course but that the pace would be moderated and there would be no homework assignments. I began with Paul’s Epistle to the Romans for some significant reasons–I had taught it as an undergraduate course before, I had recently rebuilt the notes I needed for it, and as primarily a Pauline scholar it made sense for me to begin with his most recognized and comprehensive work. That class is still continuing, currently studying the First Epistle of John; you can read more about it here.

I mention it because there are several significant points I learned from that book that most people get completely wrong, and in those lessons (still available through Yahoo!) you can read about this in detail–but I have more recently begun to realize that there was something very important in that which I missed.

It is going to take more than one article to explain it, so I will begin by trying to get you up to speed so you don’t have to read all of those posts.

The first thing to grasp is that this is, in a sense, Paul’s resume. He has never been to Rome, and it appears that the people he names in the greetings he sends at the end of the letter are all people he met somewhere else. He wants to preach in Spain, but he needs a base of operations, a church that will support him and send him that direction. Thus he is sending a letter to them in which he lays out the message that he preaches, the gospel of Jesus Christ as he understands it. This is what Paul preached in cities throughout the Roman Empire that changed the world; this is the fundamental Christian message.

He launches into this in the seventeenth verse, where he writes

For I am not ashamed to talk about the good news. The good news is what makes it possible for God to save everyone who believes in God from the just punishment that comes upon all wrongdoers as the world now comes to an end, starting with the Jews and reaching to everyone else.

That’s my translation from the Greek, made with a lot of comparison to a lot of other translations and a strong reliance on whatever materials I had available at that time. Notice, though, that what Paul is saying is that the end of the world has begun–sometime in the middle of the first century. However, any Jew then would have told you that the there would be two things that would happen at the end of the world: the righteous would be rewarded and the wicked would be punished. Paul says that this is now happening, that the punishment is starting and those who believe God are being rescued from it.

Then the surprise comes in verse eighteen, where he says

The good news shows us how God is right now acting as the just judge of the world, meting out rewards and punishments even now, if we have the faith to see it. After all, the scripture says, “The righteous person will live because of his faith.”

He in essence says that we know that the end of the world is arriving because judgment has already begun. The wicked are already being punished, and the righteous are already being saved.

We might at this point expect that he is going to launch into a description of how the gospel saves us, but he surprises us again:

We can see God’s just judgments in the world because His wrath can be seen plainly against all the ungodliness and injustice of men who unfairly try to deny and hide the truth, because within themselves they know something about God, and God has made his existence clearly evident to everyone. For God’s invisible attributes have been readily recognized and understood since the beginning of creation, in creation itself, which shows us His eternal power and divine nature, so that they cannot claim they did not know. Even though they knew God had to exist, they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved, but instead started to think and believe all kinds of silly things, and all together lost the light that they had. Claiming that they were becoming truly wise, they actually became fools, and gave up the glory of the God who remains forever in exchange for something that looked like a picture of men and birds and beasts and other creatures which all ultimately decay and are destroyed.

The chapter is going to continue to describe a lot of things God apparently thinks are terrible–beginning with immorality and infidelity, moving into homosexuality and lesbianism, and ending with a level of depravity that suggests the complete loss of any moral compass. Many who read this chapter, many who preach on it, think that it is telling us all the wickedness, all the sins, for which men and women are being punished. God rightly punishes people who act like that, we are told, and the punishment will come.

However, Paul’s entire case rests on the idea that the punishment already has come, and that he is going to describe that punishment which is obvious to everyone who looks at it the right way–and if those statements are the sins for which people are punished, he never gets to the punishment.

That’s because ultimately there is only one sin listed in the first chapter of the Book of Romans:

…they did not give Him the glory or the gratitude that they owed Him, robbing Him of what He justly deserved….

That is the crime of which humanity stands accused, and of which I think we all at some point have been guilty. That is the sin of which we repent to be saved. We agree to acknowledge that God is right, we should be grateful to Him for what He has given us, and we owe Him everything. Otherwise, we are robbing Him.

So, what about the rest–the infidelity and homosexuality and depravity and all that? Well, that’s the second thing everyone misses, and that’s the second article in this miniseries.

Bible and Theology, Logic and Reasoning

#133: Your Sunday Best

November 17, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #133, on the subject of Your Sunday Best.

I recently heard a radio announcer talking about dressing up for church. I think he was parodying the idea, because he said he didn’t want to wear a tie but wanted to wear one of those Elizabethan collars in which William Shakespeare is sometimes depicted. It brought back to my mind a question I had often considered over the years, ever since a friend raised it back in college: why do we, or many of us, dress for church?

I had always thought that people dressed for church to show respect to God. I had also thought that a bit silly, because to my very Baptist mind God was not more present in the church than He was in the bathroom, and if it was disrespectful to God to enter His presence in less than our Sunday finest, we should never pray in our pajamas before bed–something I was always taught to do. When the issue arose, I made that point–and was surprised that not everyone thought that was the reason.

Of particular interest, my friend Walter Bjorck had what I would have said was the exact opposite view. He said that he thought people dressed for church because they could. After all, well into the twentieth century most people worked farm or factory or labor jobs, jobs that required them to get dirty and sweaty and so to wear clothes that could take the dirt and the wear. Sunday was for many the only day of the week on which they were not working, and thus the only day on which they did not have to wear those work clothes. People, he maintained, like to get cleaned up and dressed up once in a while, just to make themselves feel better.

I agreed that if that was the reason, there was in essence no harm in it. I was never one who liked to dress up in that way–I always wanted clothes to be comfortable, and never cared how they looked. Thus if this is the reason, it is good reason for anyone who wants to dress in fancy clothes for church, but not good reason to make me do so. Make yourself comfortable, and I will do the same.

In considering the matter since, though, I have recognized that there are other reasons for people to dress for church, and not all of them are good.

Some people consider dressing for church to be a sign of respect for others who are in church. They consider it rude if you don’t wear a tie, as if you don’t care about the people with whom you share the sanctuary. I can almost see that, but frankly I think their perceptions are skewed. I don’t think it rude for you to visit me in your normal clothes. You’re welcome to visit in whatever you wear to work, or whatever you wear around the house if it meets public decency standards, or whatever you’re comfortable wearing. I would not expect anything different if we went to the same restaurant, or the same public meeting, or the same concert. Why should I be impressed that you dressed up for church? Don’t do it on my account; I won’t do it on yours.

And that raises the slightly different reason people dress up, and the reason I dress up on those rare times when I do. Some people dress to impress. I do it when I have to appear in court. To a lesser degree, I do it when I am on stage, paying attention to what I wear. I do it in essence to manipulate your opinion of me.

That, it strikes me, is not a good reason to dress for church. My opinion of you, and your opinion of me, should not be based on what we wear, particularly in church, but anywhere else as well. I promise not to dress to impress you when we’re in church; I will wear my ordinary clothes, although to please my wife I will try to make sure the T-shirt isn’t ripped or stained. I don’t mind if you want to dress for church, but I do mind if you do so to manipulate my opinion, or anyone else’s opinion, of you. If you’re dressing to impress people in church, stop it now. Better that you should come to church in rags and suffer the ire of people who think it rude (such shallow people need to come to grips with recognizing the value of people rather than the price of clothing) than that you should be attempting to manipulate others by your appearance. That’s fine in court, and it’s fine on stage, and its fine if you’re running for public office or campaigning for support for an important issue or leading others in a business or other organization that requires they respect you. It is not fine when you are gathering with people who are supposed to be family, who are supposed to love you as you really are and not as you pretend to be.

If it makes you feel better to dress up for church, that’s fine. Don’t judge those who do not share that. They might specifically be dressing down to avoid the sin of dressing to impress; they might be avoiding tempting you to the sin of showing them favoritism. There’s no requirement in the New Testament that says we have to dress for our gatherings. There is one that says we have to love each other as we are, and not show favoritism to those who dress well or snub those who dress poorly. You’ll find it in James, if you missed it.

Bible and Theology, Elections, Law and Politics

#126: Equity and Religion

November 7, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #126, on the subject of Equity and Religion.

I saw an article online, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, entitled Amendment 3: A Stealth Attack on Religious Freedom The title intrigued me, since I had no notion of what was happening in Missouri, so I skimmed the piece–and was rather surprised at what I found. It struck me that the author did not have a very good grasp on exactly what “religious liberty” is, so I decided to pursue the matter here.

The purpose of “Amendment 3”, apparently Missouri’s version of what we in New Jersey now call a Public Question, is to create a cigarette tax and use the money to fund early childhood education. The tobacco industry has not made a lot of noise about it, at least directly–they have learned that people who smoke are very unlikely to stop simply because the amount of money they burn increases. It seems like a positive idea, that if people are going to kill themselves slowly at least they can help fund the education of our children.

At issue is text that says the disbursement of funds raised will not be limited or prohibited by the State of Missouri Constitution’s “Prohibition of public aid for religious purposes and institutions” clause. That means that if whatever method of distributing the money to help with preschool education would otherwise mean that a Lutheran- or Baptist- or Muslim or Jewish-run facility would qualify for some of that money, that facility is not automatically disqualified simply because it is administered by a church, mosque, synagogue, or other religious organization. Opponents of the measure say that this is an attempt to bring funding of religious organizations in through a side door, and so force people to pay for religious education with public money.

It is not at all clear that that is what this is, and in fact from the description it sounds rather as if it is an attempt, not to show religious preference, but in fact precisely not to show it. It is saying that the fact that a group of people trying to provide early childhood education happen to be believers of a particular religious philosophy will not disqualify them from being funded by this program–exactly what freedom of religion means, that we will not discriminate against you on the basis of what you believe. As long as the program is administered impartially, part of that impartiality has to be that a program is not disqualified based on religious connections.

That is important for multiple reasons.

Social programs and particularly education have always been spearheaded in the Anglo-Saxon world by Christians and Christian organizations. Our Ivy League colleges and many other schools and universities were originally founded by Christians to educate doctors, lawyers, and ministers. Christians were the first to attempt to help the poor in England through education of their children. In America, many settlers would arrive in a new location and build a church and a school as the fundamental institutions of society. Meanwhile, the Jews have long put a heavy emphasis on educating their children, going back more than centuries, possibly millennia–a Hebrew boy became a man by proving he could read from the Torah, at least as early as the first century. Religious people have been proponents of education, and education for all, even when the approved thinking was that education was for the privileged and powerful, to maintain their power and privilege.

Encouraging a group to do what we want them to do and they want to do anyway is good politics.

Besides, if the objectors are saying that it is a violation of the principle of freedom of religion to fund any organization that promotes a religious position, they’re going to have to stop funding public education as well. St. Louis is a particularly interesting case, as it is the home of the headquarters of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church–not the most conservative Lutheran group, but conservative enough that they honestly believe in a six-day creation. You might disagree; I don’t know that I agree. However, whenever the State of Missouri uses its collected tax money to teach the scientific views about the Big Bang Theory and the Theory of Evolution, it is spending money to promote a religious idea–the idea that the Missouri Synod Lutheran belief in six-day creation is wrong. Our objectors say that they do not want their tax money spent to fund organizations that will promote religious notions with which they disagree; now they know how their Lutheran neighbors feel.

The only way to treat religious people and their organizations fairly is to make the question of religious belief irrelevant to the question of funding social efforts. Otherwise, it would be the same as saying that the government will not fund a day care run by a black man, or a preschool run by a woman. Not discriminating on the basis of religion means that religious views are not a factor in the decision. That’s what the amendment is saying.

How those programs are going to work has not yet been determined. The simple way, though, is for the government to provide scholarships or tuition reimbursement for needy families trying to send their children to whatever preschools are available. Some have argued that this kind of “voucher” system unconstitutionally funds religious schools because the parents can give the money to those schools and the government winds up paying the church, as it were. However, to do otherwise unconstitutionally discriminates against religious groups, requiring that parents send their children only to schools which reject religious views entirely–itself a religious view–or forego the government assistance they cannot afford to be without.

It would be akin to refusing to provide food stamps to any family that says grace before meals.

Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#125: My Presidential Election Fears

November 6, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #125, on the subject of My Presidential Election Fears.

I mentioned (originally in #68: Ridiculous Republicans back in March, most recently this past week in #123: The 2016 Election in New Jersey) that this election was going to be about whom you vote against. A lot of people are afraid, very afraid, that one of these candidates will win–probably equally applicable to both candidates, and some voters are afraid of both. I have thought about it, and agree that there is reason to be afraid, but I think I am afraid of only one of them. So permit me a moment to explain.

I am not afraid of a Donald Trump Presidency.

I recognize that Trump presents a lot of bluster and arrogance. He is perceived as a buffoon, a cartoon, a joke. However, he probably has laughed all the way to the bank more than once. He is a successful businessman, with experience in the real world both nationally and internationally. He knows how to run a business, even several businesses.

The perception of Trump from the outside is that he will make many rash decisions. One does not become ludicrously wealthy by making rash decisions–bold, yes, rash, no. Rather, there are two things which someone successful in business learns very early, or he does not continue to be successful for long:

Hire experts who know their subject, listen to their advice, and follow it.
Hire executives who know their jobs, and let them do them.

This, incidentally, appears to be how Ronald Reagan ran his White House: surround yourself with people who know what they’re doing, and trust them to do it. I don’t say that Trump is another Reagan; I do expect that he would follow that same effective pattern. Presidents who think they know how to do everything and try to control it all are generally viewed as lesser successes–Wilson, Carter. Those who know how to obtain good advice and delegate important tasks and decisions prove to be the best executives–and the President of the United States is ultimately an executive, not different in kind from the president of a multi-national corporation.

I don’t know that he has always been completely honest, but I believe that he has avoided doing anything illegal, and I think that he means what he says even if he’s a bit dramatic at times. I think in those senses he is trustworthy. He might rattle the big stick quite a bit, but under the bluster he obviously has enough sense to make things work.

As far as some of his “crazy policies”, well, despite the nonsense our present President has tried with his executive orders attempting to end run the legislature, Presidents do not get to do whatever they want. I don’t see even a solidly Republican Congress rubberstamping his ideas, and I’m doubtful we’ll have a solidly Republican Congress. The laws that do get passed will be no more nor less ridiculous than those passed in the past, because we have a good system that works well in that regard. The legislative branch is totally independent of the executive, and has a fair amount of influence over executive appointments and actions, so there is a check in place for all of that.

I am afraid of a Hillary Clinton Presidency.

The simple reason is that I do not trust her. I believe that she lies to obtain power, wealth, and fame. I don’t see that changing simply because she gets it. There are serious concerns about whether she and her staff are guilty of treason in leaking classified information through carelessness–and while one might thereby excuse it because everyone makes mistakes, there are also serious allegations of influence peddling when she was Secretary of State. There is the potential that she will be indicted for any of these offenses before she can take the oath of office.

I do not want our President to be available to the highest bidder.

I do not want our President to lie to us about her intentions or her actions.

I do not want our next Supreme Court nominee, or appointee to the State Department, or any other government official to be selected from the short list of Clinton Foundation donors.

I have had enough of government corruption and overreaching with the present administration, and would like to see it ended. A Clinton Presidency would more likely escalate it. There is good evidence that she has lied, cheated, and stolen in the past, and no evidence that she will do otherwise in the future. I would prefer not to give her that opportunity.

I believe that we are all in God’s hands; that does not mean He will protect our nation. We will get either the government we need or the one we deserve. That might not be the one we like, but God knows what He’s doing. My fears might become reality, or they might be allayed; I might be wrong in my assessment of the dangers in either direction. However, I am going to vote against the candidate I most fear. We do not need a Democratic version of Richard Nixon.

Bible and Theology, Music

#121: The Christian and the Law

October 22, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #121, on the subject of The Christian and the Law.

This is a rough presentation of the teaching I delivered at Living Water Connections Dinner Theater on October 21st, 2016. It was drafted prior to that appearance and polished afterwards, but is not intended to be a transcription.

Good evening. My name is Mark Joseph Young. It’s an easy name to remember–it’s a sentence: mark Joseph “young”.

I apologize for that; it’s not my fault.

I have been asked to share briefly tonight, and since I am a composer and musical performer I will be doing several songs–but I am also a teacher, and it would be negligent of me not to share something valuable you can recall later. And it happens that that first song [The Secret] gives me a wonderful opening, because it touches on an issue that is a huge problem for many Christians. It was a problem for me for a long time, even after I had earned two degrees in Biblical studies: what is the Christian’s relationship to the Law?

We hear a lot of answers to this. There are some who will tell you that the Christian is responsible to keep the entire Law, and that Jesus helps us do that and forgives us when we fail. However, I don’t see a tabernacle or sacrifices, and I do see Paul making sacrifices in Acts, so I think maybe these people aren’t trying very hard.

A much more interesting solution suggests that the Law is actually several kinds of law, a ritual law, a dietary law, a civil law, but that the only part we are obliged to keep is the moral law. Thus on this theory when I see a commandment like “Do not kill” I know that this is a moral law and everyone is obligated to obey it, but when I read “Do not boil a lamb in its mother’s milk” I conclude that this is dietary and doesn’t apply to me. However, I notice that my Bible does not label individual commandments, this is ceremonial, this is moral, this is civil. What about the directive that we not eat sharks? Is this just a dietary rule, or is there some moral basis for the idea that sharks are a higher life form–not as high as man, but above ordinary animals and deserving some kind of special respect? And what of that command about keeping the Sabbath? That’s one of the top ten, but sounds more like ceremonial law than moral law.

What we find with this solution is that there really is no objective law but the one we decide–we make ourselves the lawgivers, and decree that God said these things and intended for them to apply to everyone, but these other things don’t apply anymore. That’s not really a law; that’s us using scripture to support our own opinions.

It is obviously a vexing question, and you’d think that for something as important as this the Bible would have given us an answer–but it did give us an answer, it’s just that the answer is so radical that we don’t like it, so we ignore it and try to find a different answer.

You’ll find the answer–well, all over, really, but particularly clearly in the fifteenth chapter of Acts, what we call the Jerusalem Council. The heart of the church was in Jerusalem, and several of the original apostles were there. Jerusalem, being in the center of Judea, was populated almost entirely by Jews, and so the church there was comprised of Jewish believers who all kept the law, made sacrifices, ate kosher food, and circumcised their children. However, up the road in Syrian Antioch Paul and Barnabas were part of a different kind of church. Syria had some Jewish residents, but the majority were not Jews, were what we call gentiles. Many of them had come to have faith in Jesus. It was a mixed church. And it was from that church that missionaries had been sent to carry the gospel to people elsewhere, so they were carrying the gospel as it was understood in Syrian Antioch, and it reached many more gentiles.

Some of the Jews in Jerusalem thought that these gentile Christians needed to keep the whole law as they did, to be circumcised and make sacrifices and stick to a kosher diet. After all, the church’s own understanding of itself was that it was the correct denomination of Judaism–kind of like the disagreement between the Lutherans and the Catholics at the time of the Reformation, the former believing that the latter no longer represented the true faith and that they did. If you were not Jewish but became Christian, that made you a child of Abraham and a true Jew, and that meant you should keep the Law as completely as every other Jew. Paul and Barnabas disagreed, so they came with a delegation to Jerusalem to discuss it, and the church came to a conclusion and wrote a letter to the gentile Christans living in places like Galatia, part of modern Turkey, to tell them. The answer was this: you gentiles who have come to faith, you who were never Jewish, do not have to keep the Law at all. It does not apply to you. Oh, they suggested a couple things that should be done to prevent creating tension with the Jewish believers who were also part of the church, but these weren’t the Ten Commandments–one of them was don’t drink blood.

So does this mean that we can completely ignore the Law and do whatever we want? Well, yes and no. Paul explained it well when he wrote to the Galatians, probably just before this meeting, but he uses a word for which we don’t have an English equivalent because it identifies a specific household servant in households in the Roman Empire for whom we do not have a corresponding job in the modern world. This person was almost always a slave, but he was given the task of raising the children and so was given complete authority over them. He told them when to get up, what to do, when to go to bed; he could punish them, even beat them if necessary. He was to see to it that they learned their academic subjects, did their homework, got their exercise and physical trainng, learned how to act in polite society, and altogether grew up to be responsible adult members of the household. Then once he had accomplished that, he lost all authority over them. His job was finished.

The Law, Paul tells is, is like that: it was assigned to train us so that we would grow up to be responsible adult members of God’s family. We who are Christians, we have become those responsible adult members of the family. We act the way we do because it’s how our Father acts, and He expects us to act like Him. We don’t follow rules; we act appropriately.

I have a wonderful example of this; I love this example. How many of you remember Mommy saying, “Don’t touch the stove?” Many of you have probably said it to your own children, because stoves are dangerous. But gradually the rule changes, becoming “Don’t touch the stove without Mommy to help you,” then “Be careful when you use the stove,” then “I don’t have to tell you to be careful when you use the stove,” and ultimately the rule disappears–not because stoves have become safe, but because we have learned to use this dangerous tool safely. Many of our childhood rules are like that, morphing into something else as we grow. I still don’t fight with my brother over toys because I have learned that this is not a good way to resolve our differences. I no longer hold my mother’s hand when I cross the street because hopefully I have learned to use the same care that she used when I was young.

This is not something I made up; the church has always known this. It is exactly as Augustine said it was: “The law for the Christian is love God and do as you please.” He knew that was right because he understood that if you love someone, you try to be someone they approve, to be like them. You don’t have any rules you have to follow; just be like God, showing love to everyone.

Which is a good segue into this next song [Free].

Video of the beginning of my portion of the evening is available on Facebook.

Bible and Theology, Elections, Law and Politics

#120: Giving Offense

October 14, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #120, on the subject of Giving Offense.

A couple days ago I was asked whether I had again offended a Specifically Named Person by writing another piece on homosexuality.

I had no idea how to reply to this. I was unaware that I had offended this individual previously by my writing; I have no reason to believe he identifies as homosexual. I obviously know that some people in my circle of relationships disagree with me on any subject you care to name, and this is one on which there are some significant disagreements–but I don’t keep track of who holds what positions on which issues, so I could not have told you that he disagreed with my views on this one. It does not surprise me if he does; I know he disagrees with me on some issues, but then, everyone disagrees with everyone on some issues. As the anonymous wise Quaker is quoted as having said to his closest friend, “Everyone’s a little queer ‘cept me and thee, and sometimes I’m not so sure of thee.” I know of no one with whom I am in complete agreement about everything. That does not bother me. After all, I know that everyone is wrong about something, and I know that that includes me, but it also includes everyone who disagrees with me. The trick is figuring out where you’re wrong and where you’re right, and not being more certain of it than you can justify.

What bothers me is that he would be offended by my opinion, or perhaps by my expression of my opinion.

I have probably written about tolerance before. Being tolerant does not mean not caring about an issue. It means having a strong opinion but treating others respectfully who hold a different opinion. Many people who are not religious believe that they are tolerant when they are actually indifferent and condescending. That is, their attitude is “all religious ideas are nonsense, so it really does not matter what nonsense you believe.” However, changes in society are forcing these people to recognize that this is not true–that it really does matter what one believes about God, because that in turn controls what one believes about many practical issues, such as abortion, homosexuality, and the “norms” of society. The criticism is that some religious people–those who disagree with the current attitudes on specific issues–are intolerant; the truth is that those who hold to those current attitudes are proving to be less tolerant.

Being tolerant does not mean that we all agree. It means that we agree to disagree amicably, and to allow each other to hold differing opinions, to live by them as our own beliefs dictate, and to discuss them openly. That’s all First Amendment: the absolute protection of religious and political opinion. Today those who hold certain viewpoints also hold the opinion that to disagree with those viewpoints ought to be criminal. We encounter it in the homosexual marriage debate; it is rampant in the environmental field; it appears in issues related to reproductive choice. If you do not agree with the approved opinion (whether or not it is held by the majority), you will not be tolerated.

On the specific issue of homosexuality, I agree that homosexuality is “natural”; it is as natural as heroin addiction: you can encourage it, and once you’ve got it you probably can never really be fully rid of it. There is sufficient evidence that homosexuality is not fixed in the genes, but involves environmental factors and choices on some level. The position that the unborn are as human as their mothers and deserve equal protection equal to that extended to their mothers–and probably then some, as they are the more vulnerable class–is certainly defensible. The issue of whether global warming is heading us into an environmental disaster, or whether it is instead staving off potentially disastrous global cooling and an ice age, can also be debated.

I hold some opinions which are apparently minority viewpoints, but I hold them honestly because of what I consider solid rational bases. To say “I am sorry if that offends you” is not really an apology; it is more an expression of compassion for your disability, that you are such a person as would be offended by the expression of an opinion with which you disagree. I think better of you than that. I respect you and your opinions, even, or perhaps particularly, where I disagree. I am willing to hear your evidence and your arguments. I expect only the same courtesy in response.

Bible and Theology, Logic and Reasoning

#114: Saint Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles

September 17, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #114, on the subject of Saint Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles.

You probably have already heard that the woman known to most of us as Mother Teresa is now officially Saint Teresa of Calcutta.

The first I saw it was in an article critical of the Roman Catholic Church, in the Salt Lake Tribune. My initial glance at the piece noted that it somehow connected the canonization of this world-respected woman to the issue of pedophilia among the priesthood, and I thought it was going to say that an organization which so poorly handled that situation had no business making people saints. I was musing on that, but I hate it when people criticize my articles without having read them, so I went back to read it completely and discovered that his complaint, while I think just as wrong-headed, was much more subtle.

It is of course rather easy to criticize the church for its handling of these pedophile cases, but difficult to see from their perspective. After all, they’re older and larger than most countries, consider their priests something like diplomatic envoys to everywhere in the world, and have a long history of handling their own problems internally. Add to that the necessity of balancing justice with mercy, the concerns for the sinners as much as for the victims, and the awareness that the quickest way for an ordinary parishoner to remove an unwanted priest is to make sexual allegations against him, and you’ve got a very difficult situation. It is thus easy to say that they handled it poorly–but not so simple to be certain that any of us would have handled it better. That, though, was not what the article was addressing.

It is also a mistake to think that the Roman Catholic Church “makes” people Saints. Canonization is rather more a process of identifying those who are. There are few people in the world, perhaps of any faith, who would say that Teresa was not a saint. She certainly fit the standards most Protestants hold: she loved Jesus so much that she abandoned all possibility for a “normal” comfortable western life in order to bring the love of God to some of the most impoverished and spiritually needy people on earth. Many ordinary Catholics were pressing for the Vatican to say officially what they believed unofficially. The problem was that the Roman Catholic canonization process has a requirement that to be recognized officially as a Capital-S Saint an individual must have performed miracles. At least two must be certified by Vatican investigators.

As one of my Protestant friends said, she should be credited with the miracle of getting funding for so unglamorous a work, and probably also for doing so much with what she had. Those, though, are not the types of miracles considered; there has to be an undeniable supernatural element involved. The author of the critical article is unimpressed with the two that they certified, but his argument is rather that miracles do not happen, and the events cited in support of her canonization were not miracles. He then argues, seemingly, that if miracles really did happen, if God really did intervene in the world, then certainly God Himself would have acted to prevent those priests from abusing those children. No loving father could have permitted that kind of treatment of his own children; how can the Church assert that God is a loving Father, if that God did not intervene on behalf of these victims?

We could get into a very involved conversation about why the writer supposes the conduct of these priests to have been “wrong”. Certainly it was wrong by the standards of the Roman Catholic Church. However, the Marquis de Sade wrote some very compelling arguments in moral philosophy in which he asserted that whatever exists is right. On that basis he claimed that because men were stronger than women, whatever a man chose to do to a woman was morally right simply because nature made the man capable of doing it. The same argument would apply to this situation, that because the priests were able by whatever means to rape these children, their ability to do so is sufficient justification for their actions. I certainly disagree because, like the Roman Catholic Church, I believe that God has called us to a different moral philosophy. The question is, on what basis does our anti-God critic disagree? If he asserts, as he does, that there is no God, why does he suppose that it is wrong for adults to engage in sexual acts with children? It seems to be his personal preference; the Marquis de Sade would have disagreed, as would at least some of the men who do this. To say that something is morally wrong presupposes that that statement has meaning. We fall back on “human rights”, but the only reason Jefferson and the founders of America could speak of such rights is that they believed such rights were conferred (endowed) upon every individual by the God who made us. No, they did not all believe in the Christian God (many were Deists), but they did found their moral philosophy on a divine origin.

However, let us agree that the conduct of those priests was heinous. We have a solid foundation for holding that position, even if the writer who raises it does not. The question is, why did God not stop them?

It is said that during the American Civil War someone from Europe visited President Lincoln at the White House. During his visit, he asked whether it were really true that the American press was completely free of government control–something unimaginable in Europe at that time. In answer, Lincoln handed his guest that day’s newspaper, whose lead story was denigrating the way the President was handling the war. It was obvious that such an article could not have been written if the publisher had any thought of the government taking action against his paper for it.

If God is able to work miracles, why does He not miraculously silence critics like the op-ed piece in the Salt Lake Tribune?

Perhaps the writer thinks that even God would not interfere with the freedom of the press in America. Why not? There is nothing particular about the choice to write something which is offensive to God that would make it less objectionable than the choice to do something which is offensive to God. God could perhaps have prevented many atrocities–the development of the atomic bombs that devastated two Japanese cities, the rise of the regime which exterminated nearly six million Jews and even more Poles plus many other peoples, and we could fill the rest of this article with such acts. Yet these are all choices made by men, and just as God chooses not to prevent one writer from criticizing Him in the Salt Lake Tribune, so too He has not prevented billions of other hurtful actions by everyone in the world. He allows us to make our own choices, and to hurt and be hurt by those choices. If he prevented all of them, there would be no freedoms whatsoever.

Two footnotes should be put to this.

The first is that we do not know and indeed cannot know whether God has limited human wickedness and disaster. We can imagine horrors that never happened. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union never “went hot” into a nuclear battle despite the many fictional scenarios describing how it might have happened. We do not know whether God prevented nuclear war, or indeed whether He will do so in the future; we only know that it did not happen. Our perspective of the “bad” that happens in this world lacks perspective because, apart from horror stories, we measure it against itself. Be assured, though, that if the worst thing that ever happened in the world was the occasional hangnail, someone would be asking how God could possibly allow the suffering that is the hangnail. We complain of the worst wickedness in the world, but do not know what might have been or whether God saved us from something worse than that.

The second is that God, Who is the only possible foundation for any supposed moral law to which we could hold anyone accountable, promises that He is ultimately fair and will judge everyone. He has made it His responsibility to see to it that everyone who has caused any harm will be recompensed an equal amount of harm, and anyone who has been harmed will be compensated an appropriate amount in reparations, so that all wrongs ultimately are put right. The writer of the article does not want there to be ultimate justice, but present intervention. However, I expect were we to ask if what He wants is for God to remove from the world the power to choose what we do and have our choices affect each other, he would object to that as well. There will be ultimate justice, and may God have mercy on us all. Meanwhile, we are given freedom to act in ways that are either beneficial (as Saint Teresa) or baneful (as the priests), so that we may then be judged.

How there can be mercy and justice at the same time is something I have addressed elsewhere, and is much more than this article can include. It is perhaps the problem that the Catholic Church has in handling its errant priests. The bishops are not God, and neither are we, and we all do the best we can, which often is not as good as we might hope. We all also fail, hurt others, and need forgiveness and correction. God offers that, and that is the true miracle.

Bible and Theology, Music

#111: A Partial History of the Audio Recording Industry

September 3, 2016 M.J. Leave a comment

This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #111, on the subject of A Partial History of the Audio Recording Industry.

In a previous post, #109: Simple Songs, I said that I had some criticism of Christian record companies that I would defer to another article. This is that.

I avoid criticism, generally, so I am approaching this more as an attempt to understand and explain why things are as they are, that is, how they got that way, by going back decades and looking at the relationship between the artist and the recording company and a few other entities that were involved in that relationship.

Thomas Alva Edison pictured with his invention

Audio recording of course began with Thomas Alva Edison, who invented the phonograph and subsequently founded the first record company. His early recordings were cylinders; his competitors forced him to change to disks, which had worse fidelity but were easier to store and use. They spun seventy-eight time each minute, were usually ten inches in diameter, and had one song on each side. I have little knowledge and less experience of that time, so I can’t tell you too much about it other than that there are some recordings of a few nineteenth century musicians which have survived. The invention of audio recording was followed by motion pictures and radio, both of which impacted the music business. In the early days of radio, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) objected to broadcasters airing prerecorded music, except in the case of concerts that were aired live but recorded for rebroadcasting later. Then beginning in the nineteen fifties television began its ascendancy, and the FCC was considerably less interested in radio; record companies saw this as the opportunity to sell records by getting airplay, and the connection between record companies and radio stations became the lynchpin of the music industry. (This was the age of “payola”, when record companies paid people to air their records, recognizing intuitively what was later demonstrated scientifically: that what makes a recording popular is the perception that it is popular.) Recording technology improved, such that it was possible to put more information on a disk by using narrower grooves and more sensitive needles. This gave us the Extended Play (EP) disk with two or three songs per side, the “forty-five”, a smaller seven-inch disk that ran at a slower speed, and eventually the Long Play (LP) album, which ran at thirty-three and a third turns per minute and squeezed over twenty minutes on each side. Along the way, better needles began to be able to detect and distinguish vertical as well as horizontal vibration, and stereo records took over.

At this time, record companies tended to buy a recording outright. It was possible then to use a small quarter-inch width seven-inch-per-second tape recorder with one microphone and record a single which had the potential to become popular on radio stations and sell a lot of copies. The model in the book publishing industry had long been that a publisher paid an author for the right to print a specified number of copies of his book; the risk was then on the publisher to bet that he could sell that many at a price that would recoup his investment. Copyright law arose to protect publishers, and indirectly authors, from others printing copies of books for which those others had not paid anything–but it did not cover audio recordings. Thus once a record company had paid for the right to sell the recording, all the proceeds from sales went to the record company, but there was no protection against “song piracy”.

This changed in the sixties, for a couple reasons. One was that copyright law caught up with technology, and it was possible to protect an audio recording separate from the songs it contained (previously only covered as songs when they were printed and sold on paper). Now there was a shift toward revenue sharing–the artists began to get a percentage of the gross. However, they signed recording contracts, which in essence meant that they worked for the recording company–they had to perform concerts as directed by the company, record and perform the songs the company said they should, and produce product on schedule. Even The Beatles had to record songs which were not theirs, because the recording company thought they would sell.

The next big change is generally agreed to be the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles were by that time a phenomenon–they probably could have reached the top of the chart with a recording of the four of them snoring. They told the record company that they would sign a new contract and make another record if, and only if, they had full creative control of it. With trepidation–after all, the company thought they were the professionals who knew what would sell and what wouldn’t–the company agreed, Sgt. Pepper’s was a huge success, and thereafter music aimed at the youth market (about thirteen to thirty) included giving creative control to the artists, on the assumption that they were all young and in touch with what the young wanted to hear. Record sales of successful musicians were good, and companies had capital to spend on new artists (which would be money lost if the artist failed). Records made a lot of money, and record companies put a lot into promoting them. Concert tours were in essence promotional efforts to sell records: a band would lose money on the tour in order to make it back on the sales of records, and the company paid part of that cost.

However, as technology advanced in the recording industry, the demand for quality increased. No longer could someone record a hit single in his garage. Chicago‘s song Twenty-five or Six to Four was about paying for recording studio time when it was twenty-five dollars an hour or twenty-five dollars to use the studio overnight, plus the cost of recording tape–and three-inch width recording tape at fifteen or even thirty inches per second was not cheap, but it was only the beginning. By the late seventies and early eighties, recording studios that produced the kind of quality product record companies wanted cost sometimes thousands of dollars an hour, and it took many hours to lay the tracks, check them, re-record problems, do the mix, and process the final product. Vinyl was a petroleum product, as were most of the substances used for recording tape, and with the appearance of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) these were becoming more expensive. The cost of making a record was rising; the profit from selling one was falling. Record companies were paying a lot of money in promotions and advertising. Contracts started shifting away from percent of gross to percent of net, so that artists would not get paid for their recordings until the company had recouped all the expenses.

In the film industry contracts for major headline actors sometimes include a percentage. Ed Asner (once President of the Screen Actors Guild) has been quoted as saying to make sure it is a percent of gross, not a percent of net: the major studios have a system by which a movie never makes any money, but always owes the studio for production and promotional costs. The same thing has been happening in the recording industry. If you sign a contract today, it usually says that you will be paid once all the costs of producing and promoting the album are covered, but those costs include printing copies, buying advertising, shipping product, and paying the salaries of everyone involved at the company. As the return on investment on records fell, the balance shifted: by the early nineties, concert tickets were outrageously high because artists got no money from selling records, and thus making a record for them was a way of promoting a concert tour. By the dawn of the third millennium, record companies were being hit by file sharing–and many artists did not care, because they never expected to make a dime from their records and file sharing brought people to their concerts. Record companies compensated by changing the terms of contracts so that the record company owned all rights to all performances by the band, and could get a cut of the concert income. Artists often find themselves very famous but not very wealthy.

Meanwhile, record companies are struggling because the model has changed drastically at the sales end but has not caught up at the production end. Artists still think in terms of recording albums; the majority of consumers don’t buy albums, they buy tracks–if they buy anything at all, rather than pirating copies from YouTube® videos and file sharing programs. The quality that goes into making these now digital recordings is in the main wasted on an audience that listens to low quality recordings on low fidelity equipment.

The impact on the Christian market has been somewhat less, because Christians tend to do less pirating and are more likely to buy whole albums of bands they follow. However, Christian record companies have not escaped the crunch despite the rising popularity of Christian contemporary music. A recording contract is no longer a mark of success in the music world; in many cases it’s a badge of slavery. It buys you a lot of help with promotions, but at a very steep price. It is probably the right choice for some musicians, but is becoming less and less so as it becomes more and more possible to produce your own recordings and promote and sell them over the Internet without such professional assistance. The main things that a recording contract gets you are funding for production which you will have to repay, and possible radio airplay which only happens for a few.

The problem with Christian record companies is that they are becoming obsolete and see no clear path to reinvent themselves. I have no advice on that, I’m afraid, despite having worked in Christian contemporary music radio and done some recording myself. The world changes and old industries fail; it is doing so now.

mark Joseph "young"