By His Stripes

1.) Right click on the word "healed" in Isaiah 53 and select the Hebrew lemma (this will find all of the grammatical forms of that word, no matter how they are translated in English) on the right click menu.2.) Left click on "Bible Word Study" in the menu that popped up. 

3.) Scroll down to "Clause Participants" on the Bible Word Study window (although you may find the pie chart of the ways this verse is translated helpful). Make sure "Grammatical Roles" is selected under clause participants (you can also use semantic roles and use "agent" instead of subject, but I am using grammatical for this example). 

4.) Click on the down arrow to see all of the places where God is the subject of healed. 

5.) You will notice that God is the subject of this lemma for healed 25 times (Isaiah 53 is not on this list, because the Righteous Servant is the subject, not God). Almost all of these refer to God physically healing someone (or the land, or a spring). But the exceptions are notable: Isaiah 57:18-19, Jeremiah 3:22, Jeremiah 17:14, Psalm 41:5 and Psalm 147. Hosea 11:3 may be debatable, but I see it as spiritual. So, strictly on proportions, we would see the healing as physical. But the places where it is clearly spiritual refer to the restoration of peace and the healing of the brokenhearted. That inclines me to think it may be spiritual here.

6.) If we wanted to do more, I would right click on "healing" again, select the English word this time and do an English word study to see if there is a Hebrew word which usually means "heal" metaphorically, or if there is another word which always means "heal" literally. I haven't done this study, but honestly do not expect it to be fruitful. But if you are serious about the topic, it is necessary to check.

7.) Then I would check cross references. Again, Logos makes this very easy with the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge. Many of the cross references just go to further reinforce the idea that healing can be spiritual or physical. If we were left here, we might have to just try and reason it out from the context. Is Isaiah adding something here about physical healing, or is he repeating himself about the idea of spiritual healing? (On that count, the general rule of hermeneutics is that, when there are multiple possibilities, the best interpretation of a word is the one which adds the least to the passage, which would mean spiritual healing would fit here the best. It may seem like a strange rule, but it is basically just a clear test for what fits the context.).

8.) One cross reference in particular is important here, though. Matthew 8:17 quotes (sort of, the way NT authors paraphrase the OT is a study for another day) this passage. So what is the inspired interpretation? From the ESV: "Matthew 8:14–17 (ESV)

Jesus Heals Many

¹⁴ And when Jesus entered Peter’s house, he saw his mother-in-law lying sick with a fever. ¹⁵ He touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she rose and began to serve him. ¹⁶ That evening they brought to him many who were oppressed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. ¹⁷ This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: “He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.”" 

Since the actual quoted verse says "He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows," Matthew's paraphrase here is a way of using the beginning of a passage to summarize its contents. Matthew clearly sees physical healing present in Isaiah 53, and verse 5 is the only place it could conceivably fit in. While he also sees spiritual healing in the casting out of demons, this is secondary in the context.

So physical or spiritual healing? The answer must be, from the immediate context, the regular meaning of the word and the New Testament: both!  

Taxes and Churches

A friend who likes to keep me on my toes brought this meme to my attention last week with the question "Can you not recognize the outcry?". The answer to his question is a resounding yes. I do recognize the outcry. Maybe, as a Christian who thinks that the honor of Jesus is the most important thing, I feel people promoting themselves and using Christianity as a pretense more poignantly offensive than a non-believer would. To me, a pastor in a mansion and a church which doesn't help the hurting is not just unfortunate; it is a personal betrayal of principles and a Person which I hold dear. Still, let me nitpick.



Memes are not known for their careful logic or accurate facts, but more for vague innuendo and broad strokes. Since, by their viral nature, memes eventually fall into the hands of people who take them at face value, let me look at this particular meme. It makes four statements, two of which are false and two of which are misleading.

When the church looks like this

This is a picture of Lakewood, either the largest or one of the largest churches in the country, depending on how you count.The median (half bigger, half smaller) church in the US has 75 attenders.
It is a bad idea to base policy on an extreme outlier, especially since taxing churches will hit the smaller churches hardest and will inherently favor the "big business" churches that are the subjects of scandals. I can't cite this, because I don't even know how you would begin to collect the data, but I think it is a reasonable assumption (which I confirm anecdotally) that as a percentage, small churches benefit their communities more than megachurches. Eliminating taxes makes the situation implied by the first two pictures worse, not better.

In any case, "the church" doesn't look like this. Misleading.

And the pastor's house looks like this

This is not the house of a pastor, but of Paul Crouch (some profanity at destination of link, but it was where I could find the same picture used), founder of the cable channel TBN a larger television group than Fox or CB, . He and his wife, both serving as executives of the broadcasting network, made over $750,000 collectively. I am not a fan of TBN and they are not normative for Christians. Their shady family run boards mean they can't join the Evangelical Council of Financial Accountability and the Christians who The Friendly Atheist quotes to show that Christians liked Paul Crouch when he died are all of a similar ilk to Crouch himself (Creflo Dollar doesn't exactly speak for the Billy Graham crowd). Most pastors, even of megachurches, live in average homes for the most successful people in their fields, almost always with a college education and often a grad school one. The average full time American pastor receives total compensation of about $55,000 per year. The average person with a Bachelor's Degree makes about $51,000, while those with professional degrees make an average of $100,000. Many pastors have Masters of better, but 90% of pastors make less than $89,000 per year (see the link about pastor compensation above).

Some pastors are excessively compensated, but the IRS can take away tax exemption for it (see the final point). Creflo Dollar won't be getting any donations from me. One oft used example is really not one: Joel Osteen (of whose theology I am not really a big fan) lives in a mansion in River Oaks, but takes no salary from the church and makes all of his money off of books, so there are some cases like that where financially, he is not a pastor at all. Some examples like that confuse the issue.

But the mansion pictured is not owned by a pastor. It is not normal. It is not accepted. False.

While 1 in 3 children live in poverty

About 1 in 5 American children live in poverty (plus or minus 2%). Global numbers are hard to find (the definition of poverty is loose - UNICEF doesn't even try), but presumably taxing churches implies American children. 33% overstates the real number by 65%. I will clarify, 1 in 5 children living in poverty is too high, but solving it is notoriously difficult. How do you help a poor child who is poor because their parents are meth heads? WIC gets exploited every day, by people who trade groceries for drugs. More direct means, like school lunches and take home meals are already in place. It is  thorny problem, but churches often run food pantries and feed kids hot meals in person, minimizing the risk of abuse (we do both).

Taxing churches might produce $71 billion dollars a year (I'm going to guess that secularhumanism.com didn't pick the study most favorable to churches, but I'm not going to subscribe to investigate their methods). That amounts to 1/3 of the amount the federal government pays on debts each year. If the United States government has a real interest in making sure no children are in poverty, taxing churches is not the windfall which will finance it, but a budget blip of about $4500 per impoverished child. That may sound like a lot of money per person, until you start calculating. Then you quickly find out that it is less than $2 per day.

I don't think it is possible to calculate the long term effects with any reasonable accuracy, but it is safe to say that there will be fewer churches if they are taxed, so $4500 per impoverished child is the most you would ever get.

To recap: 1 in 3 children do not live in poverty. That 1 in 5 do is a terrible thing, but taxing churches won't solve it and in my experience, would cripple some of the on-the-ground organizations that do the most to help. The meme overstates by 65%. All that makes this False.

It's time to tax the churches and pastors

Pastors are already taxed, of course, and are treated as self-employed for most purposes. That means certain things can be deducted, just like any other profession, Pastors (in general, me included), pay the employer and employee portions of both medicare and social security. Pastors do benefit from parsonages not being taxable, but if the value of rent for the parsonage plus the value of cash compensation is excessive , the church can lose its tax exempt status, just like it can for advocating partisan politics. 

Churches are taxed on unrelated income, like renting property, selling books, et cetera. Just not on donations or property (churches are also exempt from sales tax on times bought for ministry purposes). 

I think I'm being generous by categorizing this whole statement as Misleading.

_______________

This has already taken much longer and been much more work than I anticipated (I also had a root canal today and some Tylenol 3 is floating through my brain), so I will write a post on some objections to taxing churches later this week. Analyzing the bad arguments of this meme will have to do for today.

The Refuge and the refugee

Putting yourself first is antithetical to Christianity.  In what may be Jesus' most famous parable (Luke 10:25-37), He describes a man laying on the side of the dangerous road to Jerusalem,  left for dead, as a priest and a Levite walk by. They walked by because on this road,  people were known to pretend to be hurt so their friends lying in wait could take advantage of your distraction and rob and kill you. They walked by because contact with a dead body would prevent them from carrying out ceremonial duties.  They walked by because they were in a hurry.  To borrow the language of MLK, they walked by because they worried about what would happen to them if they stopped. 

In the great reversal,  a Good Samaritan (hated by the Jews for their racial mixture and religion,  think of it as the Good Half-Black Muslim in Arkansas) thought about not what would happen to him if he stopped,  but what would happen to the other man if he didn't. He risked his life helping him, bound up his wounds and carried him on the back of his donkey with him and gave the equivalent of $200 to an innkeeper to care for him, promising to pay any other expenses the man accrued when he returned.  He laid on the line life and possessions,  took the man close and saved him,  though the man could do nothing in return.  This is the model Jesus holds up for fulfilling the command to love our neighbor: dangerous, intimate,  messy loss without the opportunity fot profit. 

I would be remiss to not point out that Jesus is the true and better Good Samaritan, laying aside all of His riches in the heavens to come and lay down his life so those who asked him (believing He would save them when religion and ethicism passed by,  crying out in faith to his only hope) could be rescued,  healed,  clothed and carried to a place prepared for them.

I am not astute enough of a political observer to say how many refugees should be accepted from where or how they should be vetted (admittedly,  almost impossible in a world of anonymous online radicalization), but I am a pastor-theologian, disturbed by how few of the Christians responding to the refugee crisis seem to be distinctively Christian at all.

If your response treats self preservation as virtuous, it is not a Christian response.  If your response does not prioritize reaching these refugees (radical terrorists,  like Apostle Paul née Rabbi Saul, or not) with the love of God and the gospel of Jesus,  it is not a Christian response.

There are dangers in the other direction,  such as forgetting Romans 12 or Genesis 9:6, but that is not the mistake I see the Christians I know making.  Instead,  I see many who are Christians in word and deed when they are comfortable becoming pragmatists when things get difficult.  That is an integrity issue.

I have no delusions of changing your mind with these arguments. As I mentioned,  I don't have a particular policy to recommend or a process I think should be embraced.  I am just disturbed by an unChristlike attitude. People are afraid and that is powerful.  But I hope you consider Jesus,  whose perfect love casts out fear. I hope you are willing to ask yourself: if I didn't believe the gospel,  how would my response be different?  If it doesn't,  you have a problem. 

If you aren't a Christian and are put off by what you are seeing,  I hope you will ignore the foibles of Jesus' followers and see what Jesus stands for.  You are the man on the side of the road,  dying in sin and abandoned by every one who you thought you could count on. Inside you is the same capacity for evil that the Paris terrorists possessed,  just subdued by the benefits of your environment,  but creeping out in prejudices and moments of blind hate. The religious and the ethical pass you by when they see what you are,  but not Jesus or those who are rightly following Him. He gave Himself up so that if you admit you are have lived as a rebel against God and place your trust in the knowledge that Jesus died for you and rose again,  He will pluck you from death, heal you with His wounds and give you a place forever.  All you have to do is repent and believe.  Turn from your sin and trust.  Ask and pray. Why settle for imperfect imitations when Jesus is ready for you now?

5 Attributes of Punishment, pt 1

This is a follow up post to 7 Things Accomplished on Easter.

When Jesus died on the cross, many things took place. There are several explanations in the Bible for Jesus' death, not to be harmonized and condensed, but to be understood as explaining separate aspects of His work. In his book Christian Theology, Millard Erickson lists five different theories of the atonement:

         "The Socinian Theory: The Atonement as Example

         The Moral-Influence Theory: The Atonement as a Demonstration of God’s Love

         The Governmental Theory: The Atonement as a Demonstration of Divine Justice

         The Ransom Theory: The Atonement as Victory over the Forces of Sin and Evil

         The Satisfaction Theory: The Atonement as Compensation to the Father"[1]

These various theories should not really be thought of as competing, but as each explaining some different angle of what Jesus did. Like any ;l’ty;ilu;tyo 0o’ljlk metaphor (which they certainly are, nothing like the cross occurs in our experience), they are accurate when used properly, but dangerous when pushed beyond their intended scope.

While I hope to blog in the future about these different aspects of the work of Christ, the angle of explanation which seems to be the easiest to use as a starting point (at least in our culture) is called Penal Substitutionary Atonement. That means that Jesus was given the penalty for my sin, as my substitute, to cover up my guilt before God (to atone/make me at-one with Him).

Legal experts acknowledge 5 purposes for punishment. These are deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution and restoration. To help structure our thoughts, we will see how God's judgment of Jesus addressed each of these reasons. You will see the five theories all present here in some sense, but they do not correspond closely. So let's ask the question: what does the cross actually do?

1.) The Cross Deters

Imagine the cross standing against the darkened sky – the agonized cries of Jesus. How terrible must sin be to earn a penalty like that, where God would have to give up His Son to shame, execution and abandonment? The cross serves as a double deterrent to sin. For the lost, it takes away the opportunity to downplay judgment (Hebrews 10:29); if sin was costly enough for the heir to be punished, what will happen to the rebels?

This deterrent is not limited to the unsaved, but extends to Christians, in a different way. While Christians are not constrained by fear of judgment, they are motivated by something much more positive. Someone may give me a car. If I know nothing about them or what they cost, I may be superficially grateful, but perhaps not deeply moved to protect it. If I recognize that it as a $200,000 luxury sports car, I will probably park in a quarter of a mile away from any other cars, and wrap it in bubble wrap ever night. When I understand the value of something, it is precious to me. When Christians see the cost of forgiveness is the terrible suffering of Jesus, the desire to sin is overcome (1 Peter 1:17-21; 1 Corinthians 6:20). For the believer, the cross is an even more powerful deterrent than it is to the one who is afraid.  

2.) The Cross Incapacitates

Incapacitation can take many forms. Often in our society, incarceration is used to prevent people from committing crimes. Keeping someone in jail (theoretically) keeps them from committing another crime. Historically, exile accomplished the same thing – if someone is out of my country, at least they commit no crimes here. The supreme method of incapacitation is, of course, the death penalty. Those who experience the power of the sword do not err again.

Jesus’ death did not incapacitate Him by any means (it was impossible for death to hold Him – Acts 2:24). Instead, by purchasing the world with His blood, Jesus bought the rights to the title deed to the world (Revelation 5:9-10). It is by this double authority (as Creator and Purchaser of the cosmos) that Jesus seals Satan up for 1000 years (Revelation 20:1-3).

More profound and more permanent still – the cross incapacitates Satan eternally, and even incapacitates death itself (Hebrews 2:14-15; 2 Timothy 1:10). Since the cross takes away our sins - and if God is for us who can be against us? – death itself loses the power to be ultimately victorious. Though Jesus was bound, executed and exiled from His people for a season, His death ultimately binds sin, casts it away from us and  kills it forever.  

Come back for the next part on Monday. 

---

[1] Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 714.