Chris Spinks has a wonderful post in which he offers ten points about one of the most controversial passages in the New Testament: Ephesians 5.21/22-33. The post is rich in exegesis while being succinct. It is well worth reading. I’ll re-post my favorite of his ten points, number three:

On the subject of modern interpretations, I have always been perplexed by something. Wives are told to submit to husbands. That’s in the text. No way around it. Husbands are told to love wives. Fine. Rarely any problem for we modern folks on this. Here’s the thing though: I imagine most people would agree that wives ought to love their husbands as well. Right? We understand the ideal marriage as one where both partners love each other. But, the Ephesians text only calls on the husband to love. We easily understand a reciprocation of this love from the wife’s end. Why do we not also just as easily understand a reciprocation of the submission from the husband’s end? Indeed, v. 21 is quite explicit about it. Yet I would imagine if we were to ask a “traditionalist” to describe a good marriage, he (purposefully exclusive language!) would say something about love between the husband and wife and the submission of the wife to the husband. Why no submission between the husband and wife? I’m perplexed.

Well said, Dr. Spinks.

Today we celebrate Pentecost. Acts 2.1-11:

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” (NRSV)

You can read today’s full lectionary text: Acts 2.1-21.

In an earlier post I quoted Dom Helder Camara, who observed that doing justice can be more controversial than doing compassion. I wanted to add this quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr., in his sermon, “A Time to Break Silence.” I think it shows how compassion—helping the hurting—should lead to justice—stopping what hurts people.

On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

The surrounding text of this quotation is extremely challenging.

D. Brent Laytham has a good article concerning capital punishment in the March 2007 edition of Covenant Companion entitled, “Truth, Passion, and the Death Penalty.” The article is challenging to both camps and in good Covenant tradition, seeks to emphasize freedom in Christ while making its argument. Laytham’s contrasting biblical justice versus Greco-Roman justice is worth the read as is his exegesis of the parable of the prodigal son. I’ll quote a bit here:

[J]ustice is not necessarily “getting what you deserve.” This idea has crept perversely into our readings of Scripture, but it is Greco-Roman rather than biblical in origin.

Get-what-you-deserve justice includes two things: a goal of orderly equilibrium where everyone is in the place they deserve, and a strategy of maintaining balance by responding in kind. This Greco-Roman idea conflicts with the Christian conviction that our very existence is an undeserved gift from our creating God. And this strategy is incompatible with our Christian conviction that salvation is available because God refused to respond in kind (Romans 6:23). If creation and redemption are just acts of a just God, then the notion of justice as “just desserts” is incompatible with our faith.

Let’s contrast the Greco-Roman and the biblical ideas of justice when it comes to punishment. The get-what-you-deserve approach to justice translates into a system of retributive punishment that tries to do two things: let the punishment fit the crime and let the punishment fix the crime. A punishment fits the crime by having severity or pain equal to the original injustice: “He got what he had coming.” And if a punishment is fitting, it fixes the crime simply by being carried out. A convict who has completed his jail term says, “I’ve paid my debt,” implying that the moral order of society has been restored and justice has been done.

But Christianity has a God-making-all-things-right approach to justice. This translates into a restorative system that tries to do three things: redress the harm done to the victims of the crime, address the alienation between victim and offender by effecting resolution or even reconciliation, and restore the offender to society so that both are healed. Both the goal and the method are thoroughly relational.

(One editorial note: in the article Laytham writes that the invading Brits oppressed the Malawi people in New Zealand. It was the Maori people, not the Malawi who received the brunt of British oppression on the islands of New Zealand. Malawi is a country in southern Africa. I’m sure this is just a typo.)

I found Morton Kondracke’s editorial, “If ‘surge’ fails, Bush may need ‘80 percent solution’” printed in yesterday’s Pasadena Star-News alarming. While I think Kondracke’s desire to seek a realistic solution to the Iraq conundrum is necessary, his suggestions are, in my opinion, morally suspect. Kondracke is probably right that “winning clean” in which something close to national unanimity in Iraq is growing less possible daily, but I cannot endorse, and I hope no one in Congress or the administration ever endorses his picture of “winning dirty.”

This is the fortune from a cookie I just ate:

Ignore previous cookie.

Seriously. How awesome is that?

Erika Haub is kicking your butt, and you don’t even know it.

She is a fantastic blogger with lots of great earthy-spiritual insight. Check out these posts for a sampling:

1. Good enough.


2. One more.


3. Does Sunday morning really matter?

This post is long overdue. I apologize. I have spent much time working on it, tweaking various drafts, dumping them altogether and starting over. The conversation around theology and home has been important in my life recently, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to interact with others over the topic.

Given the comments in the previous post of this series, more needs to be said about property and its ends. I tried pushing us forward from seeing property—in the case of these posts, owning homes—merely as a gift from God to also begin asking how we can use that gift for God’s glory and to participate in his reign. That is, I think that God gives us things for reasons beyond our pleasure. (Or perhaps pleasure needs redefining, but that should be in another topic.)

Also, I hope that by emphasizing the means by which we use things we will move beyond a purely binary ethic, that is judging behaviors simply as not sinful or sinful. For most of my life, I either explicitly or implicitly wanted to label every action as a sin or not a sin. Much of my time was spent avoiding sin with mixed results. I don’t think that outlook is very helpful, nor is it accurate to life. As a Christian, I believe that a goal in life is to glorify God in all that we do. For example, murdering is a sin, but I don’t think that simply not murdering someone brings glory to God. Rather when we serve the other, forgive the other, and bless the other, we glorify God. How this ethic relates to home ownership is the object of these posts. I would like to return to Holt and Banks’ description that in the NT, homes were expected to be places of spiritual encounter, community, ministry, and expectation. [1] The next few posts in the series will address each of these aspects of home. I would like to look first at spiritual encounter.

In a recent lecture at Fuller Theological Seminary, Darrelle Guder, editor of one of my favorite books, Missional Church, discussed missional congregations. In the lecture he mentioned theologian Karl Barth’s fourth volume of his Church Dogmatics. Guder said that Barth critiqued the traditional understanding of God’s work in humanity that says it is justification and sanctification. Barth thought that understanding was truncated and added vocation to those attributes of God’s work. That is, God justifies us, sanctifies us, and gives us a vocation. That description seems right to me. How well are our faith communities doing in expressing, understanding, and seeking all three of these aspects of God’s work in our lives?

(Eddy, can this three-fold understanding fit in your new diagram?)

UPDATE: The first of Guder’s lectures is up on iTunes U. Check it out here. His discussion of Barth’s three-fold understanding comes around minute 33 of the lecture. A disclaimer: Guder’s material is packed with lots of good information and is very dense.

I want to try an experiment. I’m going to ask a question in this post and I want people to respond with the first legitimate answer that comes to mind, but don’t think about it too much. This isn’t word association, so I don’t want the first thing that comes to mind, but something that actually answers the question. For example, if someone were to ask me, “Who immediately comes to mind when you think of the best football player ever,” the first real answer that I think of without giving the question a lot of consideration is Joe Montana. Capisce?

To participate in this experiment, click the READ More link below to find the question and put your answer in the comments.