Tag Archives: BIBLE

The Church at Philippi and Christian Political Allegiance

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The gospel of Christ enters Christians into a life-long process of discipleship in which everything, but everything, sooner or later, including our politics, must get squared with the gospel. This is what dawned on the church at Philippi one sunny morning concerning their Roman political identity and allegiance. As a result, that early church issues us a challenge concerning our political loyalties as American Christians. It begins with a little history and ends with the Cross.

During the time of Christ, the city of Philippi, Macedonia, had been a strategic military outpost of the Roman Empire for nearly 200 years. There were Greeks and Jews in the city, but a large percentage of the population were Roman citizens, people who treasured that citizenship for the special civic and political privileges it gave them. Roman citizenship was for them essential to their national identity and it afforded them many benefits, included having their rights protected by the government. It would have been second nature for the Roman citizenry of Philippi to rely on the laws of Rome to protect their rights and to demand those protections should the need arise. Citizenship was a big deal. Even the children of the Roman citizens were taught to get that.

About twenty or thirty years after Christ’s death and resurrection, a church was founded at Philippi by the apostle Paul (along with Silas and some of his other companions) during one of his missionaries journeys. Given the large percentage of Roman citizens among the local population, it’s reasonable to conclude that a good portion of the church established by the apostle at Philippi was comprised of Roman citizens. It’s also reasonable to say that the Roman Christians in the church had a pronounced pride in their Roman citizenship, not unlike we American Christians take pride in American citizenship.

Some months after establishing the church, Paul left Philippi to continue his missionary journey; then some years later, while imprisoned in Rome, he sniffed out a serious problem in the church. Paul learned (probably from Epaphroditus’s visit to him in prison) that a number of believers in the Philippian ekklēsia were holding on much too tightly to their Roman citizenship as their fundamental political identity and allegiance. Paul then wrote a letter to the church, which appears to have been a vibrant and well-organized community. The Epistle to the Philippians shows the apostle’s deep affection for the church and a considerable amount of praise for them.

But here’s the thing. The apostle to the Gentiles admonishes the church for going overboard with their political loyalties to Rome. This is significant. Religion’s scholar Richard A. Spencer has written that only in Philippians does the apostle use language that speaks specifically of political identity, when he admonishes the church to live in a way that is worthy of the gospel of Christ. That political admonition is found in 1:27 and 3:20. Yet there’s been bit of mischief in the English translations of 1:27, which in turn conceals the takeaway in 3:20. Here’s how.

What is overt in the Greek – Paul’s admonition about the church’s politics – is hidden to us in the English translations. A key New Testament Greek phrase in 1:27 is commonly translated: “Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” Almost identical is another common English translation: “… let your conduct be worthy of the gospel of Christ.” The trouble, here, is that the translations focus our thoughts on moral behavior in general. Yet in 1:27, the key verb construction in Greek, politeúesthe, refers not to moral behavior in general but to political conduct. Of course political life disciplined by the gospel of Christ cannot be disassociated from general moral conduct, but who thinks of that when reading about general moral conduct? In the Greek, the language has a clear meaning about political loyalty: i.e., let your political behavior be worthy of the gospel of Christ.

A little further on in the short letter (3:20), Paul reinforces the political point of his earlier statement (1:27) with the word politeuma, a commonly used noun of the day to denote Roman “citizenship.” Everyone would have understood politeuma that way, and by implication the rights and privileges of a Roman citizen. Even those who were not Roman would have understood the word that way, perhaps somewhat enviously. And the word is translated as “citizenship” in English Bibles in 3:20. But notice that Paul deliberately draws attention to a unique type of citizenship: in heaven: “Our citizenship is in heaven.” Notice, too, that the word politeuma closely correspondences to politeúesthe. The clear similarity would have set the Philippians to thinking.

By the time of the Epistle the church in Philippi had become well-established. It was filled with serious believers and practitioners of the gospel. It had its own deacons and elders. The letter reveals an ekklēsia that, all-in-all, was doing quite well, even when enduring periods of persecution. Throughout the Epistle it is obvious that the apostle to the Gentiles loves these believers dearly. Yet he loves them enough to include a clear exhortation to examine their political loyalties. Even a vibrant body with able leadership can overlook having its long-held political allegiances disciplined by the Cross. For the Philippian Christians who were Roman citizens, their civic and political loyalties to Rome needed rethinking. So Paul, whom we know is no slouch when it comes to argument, seeks to turn the tables on those loyalties.

He sets them up for that by first by using the verb construction politeuomai (1:27): “let your political behavior be worthy of the gospel of Christ”; then he draws their attention to their politeuma, “citizenship” (3:20). When coming to the word politeuma, perhaps they thought, oh, Roman of course; we’re Romans after all! But while they are congratulating themselves on being Roman citizens, Paul immediately upends their glory with: “your citizenship is in heaven” (3:20; emphasis added). With the words “in heaven,” he suddenly “forces” the church to face what he was really on about in 1:27: rethink the state of your political identity and allegiance. Paul was not patting them on the back about being Roman. You have a fundamentally different identity: as citizens of heaven. Too bad, I say, that the apostle’s warning about political conduct has been hidden from us.

I can almost hear Paul saying to his friend Epaphroditus as they are talking in Paul’s prison quarters in Rome: “They are such a great assembly. I love them to death, but I hate to think that their Roman citizenship holds such a powerful grip on their public witness for Christ. Their citizenship in heaven must be reflected in their political behavior. Let’s pray for them. Maybe the Lord will give me an idea about how to address this issue and I can include it in the letter I’m writing to them. They need a shift of mind-set, from Caesar and Rome to Christ and heaven.”

Whether any such conversation occurred between the two friends, the fact remains that the political admonition of 1:27 and the takeaway meant in 3:20 is hidden from us by the English translations. The crucial question “where is your ultimate civic or political identity and allegiance?” is never asked of us. I think Paul would have “Amen’d” what Charles A. Wanamaker said in his commentary on Philippians. The apostle Paul, he wrote, is exhorting them, and us, to live as citizens of heaven, “in a manner commensurate with the values and norms of the good news of Christ.”

The Philippian challenge to American Christian political loyalty remains. The believer’s citizenship in heaven is not about waiting for a life to come in the sweet by-and-by, so that in this life you just get to go ahead and think and act politically according to the basic principles of this world. Our political lives do not get a free pass on being disciplined by the gospel of Christ. Although Paul has much to say about the resurrected life elsewhere (1 Cor. 15), in Philippians he leaves no doubt that citizenship in heaven entails a basic identity with Jesus that instructs our way of life on earth, including our political life.

“Brothers and sisters,” I hear the apostle’s voice echoing down the corridor of history to us. “You are following Jesus in many areas; follow him in your political life also. Sure, that may be tough. Believe me, I get it. I’ve been hounded, persecuted, beaten, arrested, and now I’m in prison! Still, don’t let your American political loyalties get the better of you. Don’t let anything trump your political witness for the gospel. Jesus suffered politically by decree of the government. Follow his lead.”

But back to the Epistle. In the same breath in which Paul challenges believers to live their political lives in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ, he adds,“[t]hen, whether I come and see you or am absent, I will hear about you . . . standing firm in one spirit, with one mind, working side by side for the faith that comes from the gospel” (1:27).

That there will be no misunderstanding of what he means by the gospel, in between 1:27 and 3:20, Paul reminds the Philippian church, and us, of their responsibility to imitate Christ’s humility in all things. He does this by quoting the extraordinary Christological hymn, sung by the early church, about our Lord’s unmatched humility:

“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death – even death on a cross! . . .

“Therefore, my dear friends . . . continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (2:6-13). Your citizenship is in heaven. Live politically, as well as in every other way, in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.

©Charles Strohmer, 2025

Easter?

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Dear Friends,

Okay, you’re right. I’ve never before written a letter to you my faithful readers here on my blog, but I wanted this post to be a bit more personal. So here goes.

We live during such a fast-paced and unusually dramatic and demanding period that the day we take to stop in grateful memory of the most significant event in history can by now seem like an event in the distant past. Old news. No longer on our minds. Even though it was only a few weeks ago. We’ve moved on. Today’s events are the thing.

But is the greatest event in history, what we call Easter, behind the times? Behind your times? I ask you.

Thanks to one of the more constructive benefits of the Internet, I listened online to two Sunday morning messages by Pastor Mike Osminiski in the quiet of my study on the afternoon each one was preached, Palm Sunday and Easter. Each teaching was an hour long and I found myself taking a lot of notes, but it was not time spent but time deeply blessed. I was so totally blessed receiving fresh and relevant insight and understanding about the last week of our Lord’s life and the resurrection that I’m linking both messages here on my blog for you.

Opening up Psalm 118 and Psalm 22 in the context of Mark 11, Pastor Mike took me into the story of Jesus as Jesus personally entered the story of God for the closing days of his life on earth, moving from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem to the Passover meal and then through the betrayal to Jesus’ trial, death, and resurrection. Although this was theologically solid stuff, it wasn’t abstract theological teaching. It was rich immersion into Scripture corresponding to what Jesus faced then and there, during a week that at times even for him seemed unimaginable.

We are often told that Jesus fulfilled the Scripture. And that is true. Yet Jesus’ life was also embedded in the Scripture. The two Sunday messages brought out to me that Jesus had a very real personal understanding of having entered the narratives of Psalm 118 and Psalm 22. Jesus saw in them timely words from Father to Son (from hundreds of years earlier!) that gave him courage to face the way ahead, to keep going, so that his own mind, will, and emotions did not dominate his decisions that terrible week, when unthinkable grief and suffering were to be placed on his shoulders (that he might fulfill the Scripture). Also, and importantly, the two Psalms gave Jesus vision and hope of the joy he will experience after his resurrection from the dead.

And there was this too. Both messages gave me fresh insight that helped me understand more clearly as to why seeking the Lord to locate ourselves in scriptural narratives, particularly during dramatic and demanding days such as ours, is a vital part of following Jesus.

Mike did not use the word “Easter” to talk about this. He talked about Resurrection Day.

Resurrection life, not bunny rabbits, is what we ought to be gratefully remembering on the day everyone calls Easter. That indestructible life is God’s gift to us. It’s not passe. It’s for our life today. Hey, here’s a thought. Perhaps we should start a movement to replace the name “Easter” with “Resurrection Day”?

As we understand more about Jesus’ life that week, its unprecedented personal challenges, and where he took inspiration from, perhaps we may be able to see and be inspired to keep going by seeing at times where to enter the story for God in Scripture for our own lives, humbly and obediently, to receive more of that resurrection life of Jesus to get us through whatever kind of trial or suffering we face. Please don’t read that as offering a “there, there now” brother or sister, “all will be fine.” This is not that. Who knows what lays ahead for us during the ongoing, demanding, time-foreshortened moment that we still find ourselves in as followers Jesus. We live in seriously shifting times. Let us not take the world-historical event of Resurrection Day as a thing of the past.

I ask you, what other than the everlasting power of the life that defeated death will do for you today?

I don’t know how Pastor Mike’s teachings will personally bless you. But this I pray. If you’re longing for a fuller lifting of the veil in order to better see Jesus today, and to receive insight into the power and authority of Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection as essential graces for your faith and life today, in whatever you face, or that faces you, no matter how demanding, I pray that you will find all of that and more in these two messages.

‘Nuff said. It’s over to you now. Here’s the two links. Oh, I should add that Mike opens the start of each Sunday service, but you may then want to scroll ahead to where he starts each message, as preceding each one is a 20+ minute word on Communion from someone else – not to say those are not worth your time! Also, you’ll see two different ways to listen. I suggest listening by clicking the little white arrow at the bottom of the church scene, rather than the one below it, which is audio only.

Pastor Mike starts the Palm Sunday message around the 20min, 30sec mark:
https://www.lhcfwarren.com/sermons/palm-sunday-and-psalm-118/

He starts the Resurrection Day message around the 38.00 min mark:
https://www.lhcfwarren.com/sermons/psalm-22-good-friday-and-resurrection-sunday/

If you have any difficulty accessing a talk, let me know.

Yours truly, in His life,
Charles

©2022 by Charles Strohmer

Image courtesy of Creative Commons, Samantha Simmons

Why the Experts Need the Intelligent Amateurs

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“For the task [of] developing an authentic biblical wisdom among the people of God in this generation, we need in particular two kinds of Christians in our churches. One kind will be what rather hesitantly we might call the experts, those called to work in a particular area of life. It may be what they do for a livelihood, and often it is. But in this rather odd fallen world it may be a spare time activity. These people develop expertise by a certain degree of concentration and specialization. They are likely to be experts in only one field, and so in other respects they will be no better off than the rest of us. They tend either to become leaders and spokespersons in particular aspects of life or to provide resources for leaders and spokespersons.

“Besides the experts, we need the intelligent amateurs. These people are ordinary, average Christians who pursue their own callings but who also seek to understand the world around them as far as God grants them resources, abilities, and opportunities. They won’t be experts, but then they won’t speak like that, either. Most of the time they won’t be on platforms or in pulpits or writing authoritative books. This does not mean that they will be silently submissive or inert.

“They will do all sorts of study as their interests lead them, and they will be able to talk clearly, to listen intelligently, to make worthwhile contributions in discussions, and to have opinions worth accepting or disputing. Any of which may lead to discoveries. When they see a call to action, they soberly commit themselves to it. Above all, they know how to ask good questions. Such people are indispensable for creating a climate in which wise leadership can flourish. They may volunteer for community projects, or join education committees, or become precinct delegates, or even deacons and elders.

“The experts need the intelligent amateurs. This above all the expert needs. The worst possible thing is for the experts to go unchallenged. We suffer at present far too much from the tyranny of the expert. Not only does the expert tend to have an inadequately challenged authority in his own area of competence, but he also gets to be listened to with reverence in areas in which he is not competent. So rock stars are interviewed to pronounce on social ethics, physicists pontificate on the meaning of history, and politicians seem expert about everything! The only people who are expected not to address the world (though within the church the situation is different) outside their competence are religious leaders. (We wonder why?)

“Further, constant work within one’s own discipline easily leads the expert to become unaware of significant questions from outside that are vital for that work. Any teacher worth her salt knows, possibly more than she cares to admit, that her thinking and understanding has developed best in response to intelligent questioning, especially the sort that rocks her on her heels and makes her rethink some position.

“The intelligent amateur has a special power of discrimination. This is invaluable. Paul prays for those engagingly loving Christians at Philippi that their love would abound in thorough knowledge and insight, so as to discriminate the best from the rest (Philippians 1:9–10). Experts, curiously enough, are not the best endowed with this ability – maybe they are too busy studying the trees to appreciate the forest and the surrounding countryside.

“None of us can fulfill our callings as well as we might without a supporting community, and the experts are no exception. Other things being equal, a community like the church is going to have teachers and leaders whose quality is chiefly determined by the acumen of its general membership. If the members are suckers, they will be led by fools or rogues and hardly suspect it.

“If we hope to witness Christianly to this age in the Name of the Lord and in the interests of a more obedient culture, it is essential that as a Christian community we do good work in this area. A doctor will tell you that half her task is about good diagnosis, and half of that is about good observation and analysis. Careless work or arrogantly superficial efforts are going to be disastrous on the part of people who think that they are automatically experts because they know the Bible text or have a degree in sociology.

“It would be easy to give up. We may not be experts, and we may not have the time or the talents to embark on taxing programs of study. We may not be used to such demands being required of our intellectual life to become intelligent amateurs. And maybe our background has taught us to believe that our answers must always be simple, so that “he who runs may read” the message.

“Certainly there is a simplicity in the Gospel. To meet Jesus and trust him is the most natural thing in the world for a child. But living faithfully as an adult in a complex world is not simple. We are not expected to think like geniuses (unless we are one), but each of us is expected to think as hard as we can and to make what contributions we can to the ministry of the whole body of Christ in its witness, teaching, preaching, healing, and persuading. We must all do our part in this, as service to God in the world according to our particular gifts and callings. And we may need to be prepared to double up for others who have stopped functioning.” (Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World, S.P.C.K, 2000; cpt 15.)

©2021 by Charles Strohmer

The Strangeness of Scripture

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suprised lookIn a tribal area in Asia, a group in the tribe were shown pictures of four objects: a hammer, a saw, a hatchet, a log. They were then asked to say which did not fit together. We Westerners would typically put all the tools together, because we have been taught to analyze and classify things in abstract categories. So to us the log is the odd one out. Because oral societies like this Asian tribe tend to think in concrete-functional terms, this group placed the saw, the hatchet, and the log together, because you could make something with them. The hammer was did not fit because it was no good without a nail.

I heard that illustration years ago from a Westerner with a Ph.D. who worked as an educator among Asian tribal groups. Pamela had been explaining to me about some of the worldview differences she had to consider, between herself and the tribal peoples, if she hoped to teach effectively there inside their worldview for their good.

The illustration, of course, reminds us of obstacles that must be overcome for effective understanding between different peoples in the field of cross-cultural communication. As I noted in a recent post, when we are confronted with the wisdom (the way of seeing life and living in it) of a different culture, it may seem so alien to us that we cannot imagine how any reasonable person would think and act like that.

This is also a huge issue for anyone encountering what to them are foreign-sounding places in the text of Scripture. Some (if not much) of the Bible, of course, is pretty straightforward. Only the most self-serving of adults would pretend to have trouble with: do not steal; do not kill; do not commit adultery; love your neighbor; turn the other cheek; forgive those who sin against you; and many other obvious statements or narratives.

But, truth be told, there are places where the Bible does speak strangely to us. They are puzzling: why did so and so say that, or what’s that all about? I think most people would assume that this occurs because the Bible was written thousands of years ago and by people whose culture was very different from ours today. Of course. But there is more to it than that.

It is not just that the Bible is an ancient text from foreign culture. The Bible also has a way of seeing life and living in it (a wisdom), which includes how I think and reason, and at times its way can be quite different from our way. When I encounter that strangeness in the pages of the Book, I take it as a sign that my own way of seeing, thinking, and reasoning (about God, life, myself, others, my theology, whatever) probably needs a course correction.

woman and childrenTake, for instance, Jesus’ parable of the wages. Crowds had been following Jesus, and because he had been healing people’s sicknesses and teaching about the kingdom of God, they interpreted it as sure sign “that the kingdom of God [the Messianic age] was going to appear at once.” I don’t we think should  judge them for this, unless we Christians today want to first judge ourselves for more than a hundred years of failed attempts to pinpoint the time Jesus will return.

Knowing that they were thinking this way, Jesus tells them the parable of the wages. Because this is one of Jesus’ longest parables, I’m not going to cut and paste it here in a short post. But do read it (Luke 19:11-27). What I want to offer is this. If asked today about the coming of the kingdom of God, or the Messianic age, or what Christians typically refer to as the imminent return of Jesus, many Western Christians would trot out their preferred eschatology about the end times, or the rapture, or a sophisticated millennial view, or perhaps some homespun theory in a book they had just read or a film just seen. But not Jesus.

Jesus tells a long and involved story about what today we would call people making capital investments and earning their livings from them. In other words, Jesus responds to their faulty “religious” view about the Messianic age with a story about the importance of one’s stewardship in economic life. Let’s face it, to us that’s an odd way of reasoning. What in the world does earning a living have to do with the coming kingdom of God?

Where you find the Bible speaking strangely to you like that, it is speaking much more than because it’s old and cross-cultural or as a mere curiosity. Like Pamela, who had to get inside the worldviews of the various tribal groups she taught, we have to struggle with the strangeness of the worldview out of which the Bible came to us if that strangeness is to teach us for our good. It is indispensable to the renewal of our minds and to our discipleship to ask questions like: “Why is it given to us in that particular way, and does it have an interpretation for today?” Of course, it’s not often easy to puzzle it out. But we must not collapse mentally in the face the Bible’s wisdom: its way of seeing life and living in it.

The parable of the wages, apparently, is meant to knock in the head a faulty view the crowd held about the coming Messianic age – which they assumed would make life easier for them – that it was going to appear immediately. After all, two of the king’s city managers in the parable do not retire when they get huge raises from the king. They are then placed in charge of additional cities. So now they’ve got more, not less, work to do! Jesus seems to be saying: don’t conclude anything about when the kingdom of God will appear (see also Acts 1:6-7). Instead, get on with earning your livings and be faithful to your employers as you do.

electron microscopeThat is as far as I have gotten in puzzling out the parable, and it leaves much else about the parable foreign to me, even after consulting some good commentaries, which did not deal with the why of the economic answer from Jesus in the context of the coming kingdom of God. (If anyone has any insight about this, I’m all ears.)

The strangeness of Scripture arises from the wisdom (the way of seeing life and living in it) out of which it came to us. Struggling to gain gaining insight about the hows and the whys of a text when we encounter its strangeness would enable us to be more fully taught by God’s Holy Spirit. We would then see, think, and act more clearly and consistently biblically and to relate more effectively and communicate more believably to those who hold to different wisdoms. For those concerned about the changes and challenges we face today as individuals, as churches, and in society, it’s worth the struggle.

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

Top image by George Thomas, middle image by The Iglesia’s, lower image by EMSL, (permissions via Creative Commons).

Related posts: The series of Jesus as a teacher of wisdom, which begins here, and this post on the hard but necessary work of thinking.

A personal note from Charles Strohmer: If you want more of the perspectives that wagingwisdom.com seeks to present, I want to invite you to follow the blog. Simply click here wagingwisdom.com, find the “Follow” button in the right margin, enter your email address just above that button, and then click “Follow.” You will then receive a very short email notice whenever I publish a new article. And, hey, if you really like it, tell some friends! Thank you.

Our Children’s Wisdom: Some Questions for Parents

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joys of homeworkThe search for wisdom is so highly valued in the Bible that Christians, others too, often ask, “How do we get wisdom?” It’s a perennial question and a particularly urgent one in the context of raising and educating children (see, e.g., the book of Proverbs). It occupied the minds of baby boomer parents (maybe not as many as it should have!) and it is now pressing in on millennials with kids.

Of course we know two answers right away, that we can get wisdom from the Bible and through prayer. But not everyone prays or reflects on Scripture. And even if the do, there is also an overlooked way in which everyone gets wisdom, even those who don’t pray and read the Bible. Here is some food for thought on this, which may help parents prime the pump.

We get wisdom from childhood, through a process as simple as it is profound. That is, for the most part early on, our wisdom simply grows up with us and in us. We don’t manufacture it or study it as a school subject, and we don’t spend much time thinking about it. We absorb it throughout childhood. It develops in us, and we in it, as a singular part of its development in the history of the family, community, and culture in which we live.

Perhaps the best analogy for the way we “get wisdom”(Proverbs 4:7) in this sense is found in the way we come to speak our mother tongue. We simply “pick it up” as we go along, by hearing, by imitating, by others correcting us. Long before we go to school to “learn English” from textbooks we are already using it with considerable fluency. By the time we begin to study it from books it is such a second nature to us that the way it comes across as a subject to be learned makes it seem strange, like algebra.

We develop in our wisdom in the same way. We pick it up, we absorb it, as we go along. Yet the analogy goes further. When we come across products of other wisdoms – Indian music, African medicine, Chinese architecture – our initial response is commonly like hearing a foreign language for the first time. We say, “How peculiar!” We take it for granted that our products are the normal ones and that the others are odd or even abnormal. This feeling can persist long after we know that the other people naturally regard their products as normal and ours as peculiar or abnormal.

So in the normal course of our formative years, we do not formally learn our wisdom; we absorb it, more or less uncritically, as we go along. It develops in us largely within our homes and through various significant others and authority figures with whom we interact: fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, older siblings, baby sitters, and perhaps Sesame Street and other sources. It’s not long before we are absorbing it from friends and neighbors, our teachers, rivals and enemies, sports and religion, radio, television, film, the Web, social media, the blogosphere, and much more.

chinese architecture (Nidhi M)But there are two things I want to point out about this process. One is that, although these sources have their own spokespersons and expositors, we are not absorbing each source’s wisdom in its entirety. Nothing even close to that. Instead, it’s done piecemeal. Each of us, from childhood, takes whatever we do take and we give it a particular imprint from our own individual circumstances and personalities, just as we all have our own handwriting. Slowly, what we have absorbed becomes a part of us – from here, there, and elsewhere.

The eyes of our minds are continually and imperceptibly gathering additional tints to their lenses, so our own wisdom – our own a way of seeing life and living in it effectively – is developing in us. Eventually, this absorption process gives us highly developed instincts for responding selectively to the world around us, such as in determining what is important or unimportant. It is our wisdom.

And we notice its distinction from that of others. For instance, by the time we are confronted with the way of seeing and living (the wisdom) of a different culture, much of it may seem so alien that we cannot imagine how any reasonable person would think and act like that. Some of it just gets explained away as being archaic or special or aberrant, or it is ignored or overlooked because there is no place in our minds to put it.

The second thing is this. And it’s as crucial and it is vital. The process of absorbing wisdom from childhood is not just about being taught and relying on obvious facts (don’t touch a hot stove; don’t play in the traffic) or overt moral values (don’t lie; say you’re sorry; be honest). The process is also subconscious. In fact, it is the absorbed, subtle influences and attitudes, the non-taught ones, that can be the most powerfully influential in the long run, and thus the most difficult to identify and change if they are wrong, for they come to us in childhood like the Gibeonite embassy, as if from far away, in disguise, unnoticed until it is too late.

An illuminating illustration, and one with far-reaching ramifications across the spectrum of everyday life, is how children get wisdom from parents subconsciously; that is, the parents don’t realize what hidden values, ideas, and attitudes they are imparting and the children don’t recognize they are picking them up.

Are the children, for instance, raised in a home where they get to see their parents arguing, or do the parents hide their fights from the children? If the former, do the children get to see the parents make up afterward? If so, how that is done will also influence the children. Or are the children left hurting and further bewildered because the parents kissed and made up privately, so the children don’t know that a reconciliation took place or how that was accomplished? And if the parents hid their fights, what has that said to the children as they get older and their own arguments arise?

We are not talking about one-off incidents but patterns of various kinds of parental behavior that betray hidden values, ideas, and attitudes that are rubbing off on the kids. So, to continue. Is an atmosphere of honest questioning fostered in the home, or do the children see in the parents an unapproachableness here? Or if a child pushes it questioning too far, in hopes of a satisfying answer, is he or she then impatiently fobbed off: “Just do what I say!” Or: “That’s just the way it is.” Or: “You’ll understand when you grow up.”

human eyeWhat topics are discussed at the dinner table? What topics are taboo? Does the family ever eat together? What do the children see their parents regularly spending money on, and how much money do they see them spending on these things? What kind of entertainment do the children see the parents enjoying on a regular basis? Is there any pattern of activity in which a child gets involved with a parent in helping the poor, the needy, the aged? Do mom and dad ever admit their mistakes to the children? What is the parental attitude toward religion, politics, the children’s friends, school teachers? How are people of different races treated?

I remembered growing up working alongside my dad in his auto repair business. He was known as “the car doctor,” and you won’t believe me when I say that he began to teach me about cars and car repair starting when I was nine or ten years old. But it’s true. And by the time I was sixteen I was glad of it, for I was earning lot of money as a mechanic! But that’s not what I want to call attention to here. I just needed to say that to get to this.

Year after year of working with my dad in a very public and busy auto repair shop in Detroit, I was able to watch how he interacted with people of different races. I put a lot of hours in at that shop, many days a week, especially during school breaks and the summer months, and I can’t recall ever seeing even a hint of racism in my dad. What I absorbed was his respectful manner of talking to and getting along with all sorts of people. He ended up with regular customers of different races, and in Detroit. Although I can recall my mom saying, “We try to get along with everyone,” neither of my parents ever sat me down to talk about “race issues.” I simply absorbed his peaceable values and attitudes about race throughout my teenage years. What if he had been a racist?

Again, absorbing wisdom is not just about what children are taught. The questions posed above are just several of many that parents need to struggle with for their children’s sakes. Subtle influences are loaded with powerful implications for the shaping of a child’s wisdom. Parents whose children are not home-schooled may not have as much influence over what goes on inside the classroom as they might like, but they do have control over what the children absorb in the home.

(Part of the above was adapted from Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World, by John Peck and Charles Strohmer, chapter six.)

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Cayusa, Nidhi M, and Cesar, respectively (permissions from Creative Commons)

USING THE BIBLE TO THINK part 4 of 4

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ABC building blocksAll cultures have developed out of the same “basic ingredients.” In fact, cultures do not develop unless their peoples learn mastery over the basic ingredients. As noted in a previous post, the most advanced mathematician began by learning the simplest calculations and the international concert pianist began with five-finger exercises. If the most elementary principles are not mastered, then a severe limit is set on how far one can cope with new demands.

Of course this is a well known fact of life and hardly needs mentioning, but I’m reminding us because when we are confronted with something new and unfamiliar that we want to make sense of, as often occurs in these changing times, it is a sound instinct to see it in terms of its basic ingredients. Most adults read words and even phrases in whole units, but if they have to read out some unfamiliar word, they will revert to the childhood method of dealing with it syllable by syllable.

The Bible uses the same principle. As we saw in another post, it deals with the ABCs of human culture, its fundamentals. It introduces us to God’s dealings with people in respect of the basic elements of human culture, under conditions in which they can be perceived most clearly – in the simpler forms of human society. Scripture deals with the issues of life, then, we may say, in its primary units. It shows us the beginnings of the historical process that leads on to the present day.

In the development of human history, the basic features of human life are seen most clearly in elementary types of society, and then they become combined and complicated in ways that make the result as different as a cake is from the ingredients that make it up. If you don’t like your cake, or if you want to improve it, you go back to the cookbook recipe, where the basic ingredients and original instructions are set out. No cook, however, would expect the cookbook to describe in detail every possible variation and refinement of the recipe that there might ever be. Rather, enough information is given about “the raw materials” and “the process of cultivation” to be able to vary the recipe or to make intelligent experiments from the basic features.

In Scripture we are presented with cultural life in the history of ancient Israel and her neighbors, and we are shown the way that some early historical processes and responses led to certain results. By faithfully identifying those basic ingredients, processes, and responses we can learn wisdom for addressing and dealing with things in today’s complex and changing world.

Sometimes cooking requires a thorough mixing of the ingredients (as in baking a cake). At other times, as in a meringue, it requires a division of the ingredients (“separate the yolk from the white…”). We can expect to see such processes in Scripture history and in our own history.

In a previous post I gave an example of how the “what is it?” question, when asked of one of today’s complex issues (foreign policy), is a good way to discover its basic ingredients, which we were able to trace to Scripture to learn wisdom from in ABCs applied to foreign policy today. This means that we need not fret when we cannot find today’s complex technical language in Scripture (socialized  medicine, geopolitical structures, free market economy, common core state standards, particle physics, multilateral diplomacy, the Web, iPads, whatever) for we will most likely find the basic ingredients.  Here’s two more examples, briefly .

What is a business corporation? What is this thing? To answer this properly will involve asking other basic questions, like “What is its purpose? What is its basis? What special characteristics distinguish it from other human activities or institutions?” We will also need to understand it by breaking it up into its component parts, what we normally mean by “analysis” – what the Hebrew language of the Jewish Bible calls bîyn.

Some elements of a business corporation will be fairly obvious, such as work and working with others, and the latter, we can say, is, in part, about human relationships within a social unit. It also involves the economic aspect, such as the use of capital and earning money to keep the bills paid! Now we would find quite a bit of wisdom about these “basic ingredients” of life in Scripture, and that wisdom would come into sharper relief by asking more “what?” question, such as what does the bible say about work, spare wealth, social relationships in the context of work, as so on?

Therefore, although the Bible does not use the term, or even the concept of “business corporation,” it does carry instruction about its basic ingredients. Given the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court’s major decision (Citizen’s United) that corporations are persons and its radical implications on political campaign spending, I’m waiting for some enterprising soul to tackle this problem biblically.

What is a state? If ever there was an influential institution today, the state is one. It is difficult to detect anything in Scripture that quite corresponds with it, but if we ask our basic questions – what it is; what goes to make it up – then things get a bit easier. For instance, one key element in the state is centralized governmental authority, which gets a prominent place in Scripture. The state is also about territory and nationhood, both of which are significant dimensions of human life in the Bible.

It is also about what today we call politics, which is not a word you can look up in a Bible concordance! But is you ask any good dictionary “what is politics?”, you’ll see that it is about guiding and influencing government policy, and the Bible has a lot to say about that. And when unpacking that you soon come on to bureaucracy, which is another element found in Scripture. For instance, the growth of bureaucracy under Solomon, or the way it functioned to quite a high pitch of sophistication in the Persia of Daniel’s experience, are fascinating matters for study.

suprised lookOf course, much more is involved for the state and the business corporation. I merely wanted to introduce these illustrations, and the one about foreign policy, as perhaps a fresh and exciting way of closely reading and using the Bible to think Christianly about today’s complex and changing world. I hope these recent posts, begun here, will be of some help to you in seeking wisdom for daily life. I may introduce a few more such themes next year sometime.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

The above article was adapted from Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World, by John Peck and Charles Strohmer (SPCK, 2001).

Images by Artful Magpie & George Thomas respectfully (permissions by Creative Commons)

USING THE BIBLE TO THINK part 2 of 4

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thinking sculptureOkay. So I’m arguing that we should learn to use the Bible to gain wisdom for our “secular” lives. I admit that for many people such a claim can put stress on the system, and I get why others will feel a bit groggy and unclear about it. Others will, quite naturally, want to “search the Scriptures” to see whether it’s true.

Does the Bible address aspects of life that are not noticeably religious or moral? In other words, to use some common language of today, does the Bible concern itself with secular matters? Does it deal with socio-economic and geopolitical questions? What about issues surrounding art, law, business, science, linguistics, ecology, and communications? Or how about justice, racism, abortion, and marriage? In other words, does the Bible have any secular literature? The strange thing is, once you start looking for it, there is so much, and it is so obvious, it is a wonder we ever missed these present-day secular interests.

Take the Book of Deuteronomy, for instance. If our Lord could be said to have had a favorite biblical book it would be Deuteronomy. If put on the spot and asked to say what was in this book, many of us would typically know this as a book where one finds the Ten Commandments and the famous declaration of faith made by Jews everywhere in worship, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (6:4).

We might also recall Deuteronomy as one of the great basic texts for the teaching of the prophets, and that chapters 10-11 carry a higher concentration of language specifically about love between God and people than possibly anywhere else in the Old Testament. And there is also some overt religious instruction,such as about sacrifices, festivals, and the priesthood. But then our knowledge of the book probably tails off.

And yet Deuteronomy includes provisions about everyday life – ranging from nesting birds to digging toilets. The text also addresses issues of war, finance, politics, eating habits, jurisprudence, and public health and safety, not to mention the treatment of criminals, children, wives, slaves, and the poor. We may have ignored such passages because they are not concerned with the overt religious, moral, or devotional areas of our lives.

But there is another reason, which I want us to spend some time with. We may have ignored such passages because the topics they address can seem non-germane to the complexities of our Western world. So what can we possibly learn from issues and interests that were the “secular” concerns of people who lived 3,000 years ago? Good question.

Our complex and specialized societies think and talk in terms of technical language, and we’re used to that: socio-economic indicators, climate change, socialized medicine, geopolitical structures, fiscal control of inflation, free market economy, multilateral diplomacy, common core state standards, particle physics, the Web, smart phones, iPads – you name it. I once heard someone describe the person who came to get rid of the mice and termites as a “certified pest control technician.” And I once had a job as a “petroleum transfer engineer” – I worked at a gas station! Well, you get the picture. Everything seems to be getting more complex.

nesting birdsWe have grown so accustomed to our culture’s highly technical language that we cannot see how it could possibly relate to the many secular matters dealt with in Deuteronomy. But we should not let today’s technical jargon confuse us. It is frequently about the same basic elements of everyday life as are dealt with in Deuteronomy. The Jubilee, for instance, was an institution whose significance was chiefly socio-economic. The laws against cutting down fruit trees in war (20:19), or taking a mother bird (22:6), or mixing seeds (22:9), as well as a reason given for the delay in conquering Palestine (7:22), are plainly ecological in nature. The laws about body fluids, quarantines, and sanitation (23:1–14) address practical health care concerns.

This brings us to what we could call the ABCs of Scripture, its basic ingredients. We can learn wisdom by understanding ways in which the ABCs of Scripture relate to our “secular” lives today. I want us to look at that in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

The above article was adapted from Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World, by John Peck and Charles Strohmer (SPCK, 2001).

Images by Davide Restivo & Victor Berzkov respectiviely (permissions via Creative Commons)

USING THE BIBLE TO THINK part 1 of 4

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Bible studyThe ability to form and use theories is a gift from God to us. It often is ignored or misused, but it is still as much a gift as human affection or natural beauty, and to be used for God’s glory. It doesn’t matter whether we realize it, or even whether we like it, we are using theories all the time, as a humorous story in the previous post made clear.

If we do not use godly theories, and if we do not develop a means of finding out which are godly and which are not, we will be using whatever comes along. Since we have no right to presume on God for the things that he has left it our responsibility to do, and since sin influences the intellect often quite unknowingly, the likelihood is that any theory uncritically adopted will be ungodly.

Here’s a simple illustration from law-making. Good laws, in part, liberate people to be loving.  So what are we to think of a law that makes medical professionals, who happen to be first on the scene of an car wreck, afraid to help the injured parties because they could get sued? This is not a law that liberates doctors and nurses (who could be quite loving in such a situation) to be loving. There is a bad theory behind such a law, which Christians working in the area of jurisprudence could seek to correct.

In the previous post I called attention to the relationship between our wisdom and the theories we use that help us cope with life, and I said that the way to better theories is through acquiring a wisdom that is becoming increasingly biblical. Here are a few tips along the way.

Begin with humility of mind. You are entering a process of change. Yes, on becoming a Christian a radical change is introduced into one’s outlook. Yet it would be unscriptural, besides being extraordinarily naive, to think that your entire wisdom on life changes completely straightaway and with it any wrongheaded theories. The Bible, after all, would not speak of the need for our mind’s ongoing renewal if that were so (Romans 12:1-2). And we ought to keep in mind the apostle Paul’s complaint that Christians may fail to let the process keep working itself out (1 Corinthians 3:1-3; Galatians 3:1-3; Colossians 2:20-3:2).

Prepare to hit resistance but press on. People, including even our ministers, may raise bewildered, even disapproving, eyebrows at our questions. Christian friends may struggle to understand what we are talking about and asking of them. Group discussions, even among those who do understand, may feel like a pooling of ignorance. Temptations may arise to become impatient, to fall for simplistic or dogmatic answers, or to wallow in self-pity (“nobody understands me”). But whoever said Christian discipleship was going to be easy? So press on but proceed humbly – that’s where the grace is.

Learn to read and study the Bible as a “secular” book. There is a lot of biblical wisdom for daily life to be gained through such an approach. Traditionally for many of us, the Bible slides past our eyes with a “stained glass window effect.” That is, we read the Bible as a “religious” book only – for instructions about prayer, worship, doctrine, church activities, moral behavior, evangelization, and so on. Certainly religious instruction must not be downplayed. Yet that alone leaves us ill-equipped to study and apply Scripture with reference to the many “nonreligious” issues and aspects of daily life.

Sure, many Christians can quote from the Book of Proverbs, say for business principles, relationship taboos, or parent–child environments. But I’m talking about a much wider horizon. When it comes to immigration laws and health insurance, for instance, or to medical debates and  economic development, or to government subsidies of the arts and US foreign policy, it usually does not occur to us to check out the Book, for we assume that it has little or no distinctive wisdom for such “secular” matters.

But that is not how Jesus, or the apostles, or God’s Old Testament people saw Scripture. They had a God who was involved in the whole of life and they had a Scripture to match. The knew that Bible was not relegated to “religious” affairs only; it held instruction for what today we often call secular life.

In the next post I want us to look at that way learning wisdom from Scripture.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

The above article was adapted from Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World, by John Peck and Charles Strohmer (SPCK, 2001).

Image by Steel Wool (permission via Creative Commons)