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Book Review (Part 0)-- This Book Will Change Your World: How All Things Become New

Here's the book review as promised. I've decided to review this book one chapter at a time because of the weighty issues that author Kevin Beck addresses as far as Biblical interpretation and praxis is concerned. Part 0 of the review will deal with the book's introduction.

I’m writing this from my local café. Besides me, three tables are occupied—all of them with people doing Bible studies. The first is a young lady in private meditation. The second is a group of two men planning “strategic outreach.” The third has a gaggle of men discussing how we’re witnessing the unfolding of Biblical end-times events. I don’t know what the woman is thinking about, but the men are preparing the way for world domination or destruction based on their reading of the Bible. I can’t help but think that if similar conversations were taking place over an open Qur’an someone might call Homeland Security. (Beck, p.10)

Here's a very pertinent passage of Scripture. Please read it very carefully, although it is a bit lengthy:

And while some were speaking of the temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, he [Jesus] said, "As for these things that you see, the days will come when there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down." And they asked him, "Teacher, when will these things be, and what will be the sign when these things are about to take place?" And he said, "See that you are not led astray. For many will come in my name, saying, 'I am he!' and 'The time is at hand!' Do not go after them. And when you hear of wars and tumults, do not be terrified, for these things must first take place, but the end will not be at once."
Then he said to them, "Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven. But before all this they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name's sake. This will be your opportunity to bear witness. Settle it therefore in your minds not to meditate beforehand how to answer, for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict. You will be delivered up even by parents and brothers and relatives and friends, and some of you they will put to death. You will be hated by all for my name's sake. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your lives.
But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let not those who are out in country enter it, for these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written. Alas for women who are pregnant and for those who are nursing infants in those days! For there will be great distress upon the earth and wrath against this people. They will fall by the edge of the sword and be led captive among all nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.-- Luke 21:1-24 (English Standard Version: emphases mine)

Before you read on, let the passage above speak for itself and let it soak in. Don't try to explain things away and dismiss them just because they don't fit your theology or what you have been taught. Set aside all preconceptions and everything you think you know. The Word of God interprets itself, and it can open windows to vistas you may have never visited before. It might even change the way you approach Scripture. It did for me.

Done? Great!

So, what was the above passage about? Are you sure? If you said that this section from the Gospel of St. Luke is about the last day of history, the end of time, or the catastrophic destruction of our planet and universe, look again. Would a natural reading of the text lend itself to such an intepretation? Would Jesus' audience have understood his words in that way?

The passage above is a prophecy by Jesus about the coming destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. This is the most natural way we can read the text. We Christians today make a big mistake by taking texts such as this and project them into an indefinite future. It is vital to remember that Jesus was not prophecying into a void. The words of Jesus must be taken contextually and the context must be understood in its 1st century historical setting, for that is when Jesus carried out his ministry among the Jews.

This is exactly the point Beck is making in the introduction to his book. Of course, he said it much more eloquently than I just did. But the point is made. We are so accustomed to imposing a catastophic future onto the texts of Scripture that it has become second nature. Beck is calling us to stand back, take a deep breath, and look again.

Current conventional readings of apocalyptic sections of Scripture make Jesus out to be a soon-to-come, 80-foot, cloud-surfing tyrant who's hellbent on destroying everything, except for a chosen few who will be "raptured" away to heavenly bliss. For a growing number of people, that's not very good news. In fact, it sounds quite hopeless. You can say "Jesus loves you" all you want, but that doesn't help in alleviating so much end times angst among the people of God. There is still an unspoken anxiety among many Christians who have been taught that Jesus is coming back sometime in the future that there's a chance that they "might not make it." This is what happens in the hearts and minds of many who listen to preachers like me talk about the everlasting destruction of those opposed to Jesus. Says Beck,

For centuries, people have told the Biblical story in terms of humanity's rebellion and God's intense yearning to make us pay. That way of telling the story portrays an irate God who resolves to whack all humanity in a genocidal act of revenge because the first couple took a piece of fruit. He decided to give us a second chance by taking out his frustrations on Jesus. People who believe these facts will escape never-ending torture. Moreover, these believers need to think the right thoughts about the metaphysical make-up of the Lord God—sputtering doctrinal, traditional, and creedal shibboleths. Then they need to agree to a certain cosmology, regardless of what the visible evidence suggests, and they need to behave according to preset dictates; otherwise, they're going to regret it for a long, long time.
Those lucky enough to believe, think, and act in harmony with God's revealed and hidden purposes call their good fortune grace. To them, God in his infinite mercy is waiting patiently for all people to come to their senses. Yet, the vast majority of them won't. One day God's patience will run out and he'll get so fed up that he'll send Jesus back to earth. Upon his arrival, zombies will come forth from the ground and the planet will miraculously flourish and/or explode.
This is the good news?
No wonder there is so much anxiety surrounding religion. This way of telling the story portrays God as a petty, neurotic, and secretive tyrant. It puts humanity in the position of seeking to appease this God by the performance of enigmatic rituals and adherence to arbitrary moral standards. It gives us all one chance to get it right. Our fate is sealed by death, and even God is bound by death's decision. Most disturbingly, it places God at enmity with humans and our world. (p. 12, 13)

According to Beck, we have the power to tell stories any way we want. This can be a curse, as he demonstrates in a retelling of The Wizard of Oz in a way that makes Dorothy seem like a terribly naughty person, while keeping the narrative intact. However, we also have the ability to tell stories in a very positive light. What Beck suggests is that there is a way to tell the Biblical story in a way that doesn't make God out to be the godfather Vito Corleone. Again, Beck:

I simply must believe that there's a truer way of telling the story. One that pictures God as someone kinder and gentler than the godfather. One that honors God for walking with us through the hurts, sorrows, and wounds of life. One that depicts God as love incarnate. One that sees Christ on the cross as the ultimate expression of divinity and humanity. One that blesses all families of the earth. One that finds God to be infinitely immanent rather than completely separate. One that recognizes humanity’s comprehensive connection in the ultimate all-in-all. One in which God decrees, “There's no place like home,” and so God has already made his home with us—not as an abusive despot, but as a tender and understanding presence (Revelation 21:3). (p. 13, 14)

I agree. This kind of reading of Scripture is truer to the overall sweep of the Biblical narrative. Never once, as many scholars now point out, did God's covenant people foresee the annihilation of the space-time continuum. We must learn to tell the story of God as revealed in Jesus Christ in a way that isn't fatalistic toward God's marvelous creation. Kevin Beck has given us a fantastic start in understanding the Scriptural narrative afresh by the tedious, but ultimately satisfying, study of history. Beck realizes that this cannot be accomplished in the matter of a 137 pages of text. But at least it's a start.

I have taught the Biblical narrative all the way through (including the Apocrypha) twice in my 15 years of ministry and have become convinced that we read the Scriptures with predetermined doctrinal lenses that turn Jesus into an amateur philosopher. I've also become convinced that we must learn the themes that weave their way through the Bible, tie them together, and then behold the beautiful tapestry that the Lord God has made for us!

Part 1 next time.

How I got to know Kevin Beck

This blog entry is a precursor to the book review I promised in my previous post. I thought it would be fitting and appropriate to first write about how I got to know the book's author. It's a long story, so if you're willing to wade through it I'll try to make it as short as possible.

A few years ago I was involved in a Bible Study on the Gospel of Mark. In this study we made a cursory overview of the Old Testament and the Intertestamental Period to get somewhat of an understanding of what Jesus was dealing with in his ministry. In passing I should mention that the Bible Study leader was (and still is) a Biblical scholar in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, of which I am a member. He is a man I greatly admire for his knowledge of the Scriptures and for his charitable work. When the course he was leading got to Mark 13, he told us that Mark's "Little Apocalypse" was not about the end of the world. I was shocked to hear this because I always understood Mark 13 as Jesus' predictions of the end of the world. I had always taught and preached that Jesus will visibly return on the last day of history, snatch up all of the believers to heaven, and destroy the planet and the universe in a ball of fire. And I regularly used the accounts of the Olivet Discourse (Mark 13, Luke 21, Matthew 24 and 25) and other statements in the Epistles as proof of what I taught.

The course instructor insisted that we have to read Mark 13 very carefully and make sure that we read it in its historical context. We already had in our minds, after surveying the Old Testament, a picture of God as a deity who takes great displeasure in any buildings that claim to "house" him and keep him locked in a room. The Jerusalem Temple served as one such building, confining the presence of God to a cubicle and all the while keeping people out. This "house" had to go, and Jesus was warning that such a day would occur "within this generation", meaning Jesus' contemporaries. I was so accustomed to projecting Mark 13 to some indefinite future that it never occured to me to read it as something that would have been very important to the Jewish people in the 1st century.

Now I need to back up a bit. A couple of years before I took this course on Mark I read a book called The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is by N.T. Wright. In this book, Wright had made the claim that the Fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple was prophecied by Jesus in Mark 13 in its entirety. In other words, the whole chapter is devoted to the destruction of the Temple. So claimed Dr. Wright. I automatically blew off this assertion thinking that it had no real significance to the Biblical story anyway. But Wright's interpretation kept ringing in my ears. Lo and behold, I heard it again, and this time it was from the course instructor (did I mention he's LCMS?). But something was a little bit different.

In the course we were taught that Mark 13 is about the destruction of the Temple, but not in its entirety. Our instructor said that a division must be made at verse 32, because from then on, Jesus is talking about the last day of history. I won't get into the details of how that could be. Many theories have been offered to try to explain this division. But now I was a bit confused-- one scholar said that the entire chapter is about the destruction of the Temple; another one said that only part of the chapter is about the destruction of Temple. Who was right?

After studying the issue a bit, I started to side more with Wright because the flow of Mark 13 seemed to be maintained with his interpretation. The theories offered to explain a supposed division in Mark 13 seemed to me to be nothing more than mental gymnastics, desperately trying to hold on to deep seated beliefs about an end to the planet, while concurrently keeping up with modern scholarship about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. It's called "having your cake and eating it too"! So I concluded that Mark 13 is about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, which occurred in AD 70-- the whole chapter!!

I then began to wonder if there was anyone else out there who was thinking along these lines. I went to Google and typed in the search bar "AD 70 destruction of Jerusalem". The first link was to a website called "Preterist Archive". Since I didn't know what a "preterist" was, I clicked on the link out of curiosity and found out that a preterist is one who holds to the view that all Scriptural prophecy has been fulfilled, the final event being the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70. I found the Preterist Archive website to be quite tedious and hard to navigate, but there were links to other sites. I clicked on them thinking that they would be much easier to glean information from. Most of them were just as noisy as the Archive, but there was one that, for me, stood out above the rest as far as navigability and simplicity. It was called "Presence Ministries". Here was a site with friendly voices and friendly faces. It was also a site that, while holding to a preterist interpretation of Scripture, worked out the implications of such interpretation. I became intrigued by it and delved a bit further. The site had an open forum that anyone could join, so I did! I "lurked" for awhile, reading what other people were saying. It turned out that there were more people than I thought who held to a preterist view of Scripture.

I was convinced that Mark 13 was about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, but I was not ready to hold to the preterist view. I was bound and determined to hold to the traditional Amillennial view that the Lord will visibly return in the future, but it was through the Presence site that I got to converse with a man by the name of Kevin Beck. At the time, he was serving a Church of Christ parish in Ohio, but was also the vice president of Presence Ministries, which is located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I remember thinking that it's very odd to have your vice president living a thousand miles away!! The president of Presence Ministries was a man by the name of Tim King, who's father Max, wrote a 700+ page tome entitled The Cross and the Parousia of Christ: The Two Dimensions of One Age-Changing Eschaton. Tim is an author himself and wanted to spend more time in his writing career. Kevin Beck was then asked to become the president. He accepted and moved to Colorado Springs.

I have never met Kevin Beck face-to-face. We only know each other over the internet. I have met Tim King, who is a gentle giant of a man, and thought if Kevin is anything like Tim then he must be a great guy. I hope to meet him someday, and finally shake his hand for fielding my many questions, commenting on this blog, and being in charge of a ministry that is well-equipped to address pertinent issues facing our post-modern society.

Thanks for reading!!

Sorry for not posting in a while

I apologize for not posting in quite a while. I'm in the middle of reading a book written by a friend, and I promised I would write a review on this blog. So sit tight! I'll finish reading the book soon, think about it, and then write about my reactions to the book.

In case anyone is interested, the book is called This Book Will Change Your World by Kevin Beck. I'm enjoying the book so far, Kevin (in case you're reading this)!