The Two Hour Interlude

I spent most of today making a delicious meat stew, partially in hopes of bartering for some birthrights, but I got no takers, which is probably what I deserve for using beef in lieu of venison.

The other night at Bible study, I realized how much it matters to me that I approach Scripture in a way that I can really legitimately and usefully understand it. My current job involves a lot of technical instruction and training from written operational procedures and technical manuals, and a lot of them are incorporate a lot of glaring inconsistencies, shaky assumptions, shady explanations, or loose approximations that engender a lot of indignant protest from the exacting engineering major being trained. But for the sake of consistent training and operation, we have to go with the flow and accept what's written in the technical manuals: we have to hit the metaphorical "I Believe" button. Well, I realized I have a really hard time just letting things go with Bible study. When someone says, "Oh, I read this article online that said this is the answer, so there we have it" and considers the matter settled, I have a hard time not pushing the issue because I view the study of Scripture as an imperative pursuit of truth. I want to make as few blind or unfounded assumptions as I can. So the thought crossed my mind that we shouldn't have an "I Believe" with the Bible. A second later, I thought that sentence was hilarious, and so far, nobody else has found it remotely funny.

But on the topic of unpacking assumptions and textual understandings of the Bible, some of my friends from my old Messianic Jewish congregation sent me a link to a two hour sermon entitled The Hebrew Yeshua vs. the Greek Jesus. The title doesn't really apply until the last fifteen or so minutes of the 2 hour video -- a more descriptive title would have been "Rejecting the Exclusivity and Arbitrary Nature of Rabbinical Authority." If you have two hours free, absolutely watch the video. Watch it with a grain of salt (some of his facts and conclusions are a little dubious), but also watch it in the context of how you interpret truth from Scripture. It's a very compelling message.

I jotted down some notes, some observations to supplement the heavy-handed cases made in the sermon.

-- Gordon makes the case that the Pharisees, by expanding the Torah into a legalistic and hypocritical system, transformed the Law from something doable to something impossible to obey. But according to many passages in Romans that comprise a lot of the basis for how we generally understand the gospel, Jesus's sacrifice on the cross was necessitated by the truth that we as sinful humans could not uphold the holy and perfect Law of God. Even if the Pharisees added a lot of legalism and hoops to jump through, the Law that taught us what right and wrong are was never achievable for our flawed natures.

-- It makes sense that Gordon would omit the aspect of grace inherent in the gospel of Jesus. As a Karaite Jew, he would understand things in the more transactional paradigm of the Torah. For anyone to make it, either the Law has to be doable for a human being, or substitutive atonements have to be made. I guess that's still true in our understanding of the New Testament, but we more or less jump to the conclusion that we fall short of the Law and that Jesus was our ultimate and complete atonement.

-- In the same sense, Gordon concentrates solely on Jesus as a Rabbi, a teacher of the Torah. It's a reasonable distillation given Gordon's background, but again a narrow focus that needs to be recognized and taken into account.

-- The whole discussion of how the Pharisees decided that they had the exclusive right to interpret Scripture with a degree of infallibility decidedly recalls a lot of Catholic arguments for Papal authority in certain levels of magisterium.

-- It's true that legalism and the Pharisees' system of earning your righteousness is antithetical to the gospel of Jesus, but there's also a danger to be recognized in completely throwing out tradition, adaptation, and convention. The gospel is meant for the whole world and thus has to translate into different cultural manifestations: some good and beneficial practices will not find their bases explicitly in Scripture. Also, Scripture is sometimes very difficult to read and interpret. While Gordon mentioned that it was meant to be understood by the practice of reading the scrolls aloud to masses of Israelites, there are also a lot of passages about believers who have received the gift of teaching for the edification of others. It's at once very simple and at once very abstruse.

-- Gordon's final challenge to the audience is true, to some degree. Given a Hebrew Yeshua who corroborates the Torah and a Greek Jesus who updates the OS (or some variety of hybrid or halfsie), we Christians do have a choice to make about whom we're following.

And then again, at a certain point, you have to stop chasing rabbit holes and live your life, and it's at those times that you need an "I Believe" button.