I got the idea to write this after seeing a lecture event titled “The Case for God,” (based on an upcoming book of the same title, by the lecturer) and thinking how utterly ridiculous that notion is.  God is not an abstract that we should talk about “it.”  That is a total logical reversal of reality and a grammatical absurdity of speech.  So without further ado, I present here the case for Man

Our Father in Heaven, You made Us in Your image and have revealed Yourself to Us through Your wonderful creation, through Your words spoken by prophets, through Your commandments and covenants handed down from generation to generation, and finally in the person of Your Son, Jesus Christ.

But We refused to acknowledge You, our maker.  We transgressed Your Law and have broken Your Covenant.  There is no health in Us.  Man has gone astray like a lost and stubborn sheep, refusing to hear the voice of a Shepherd.  We have walked in blindness and called it light.  We have espoused foolishness and called it wisdom.  You gave Us speech, and We used it to deny You.

Even so, You have seen fit in Your mercy to redeem Your humble creation; to reestablish Man not only to Our original estate, but to exalt Us to the Heavens by your Son, who was made Man, who died and rose again from the dead; who is ascended to sit at Your right hand.  In Him, You have brought Us out of darkness into Your light, out of sin into righteousness, and out of death into life.  With Jesus’ blood you have sealed to Us Your Covenant and have given Us the promise of life everlasting, to as many as have believed in His Name.

Therefore, Father, spare your creature, this Man who has offended You to Your face.  Do not consume Us in Your anger.

You have made a New Covenant with Us, so that by faith We may claim Your promises.  By Your word to Abraham, to whom You promised a Seed, We claim Our future generations.  By Your word to Israel, to whom You promised a redeemer, We claim freedom from bondage.  By Your Son, who bought Us with His blood, We claim life.  By His promise to be with Us until the end of the age, We claim the power of Your Holy Spirit.  By the water and Spirit of rebirth, and by the meal of bread and wine that Your Son gave Us, for which We give thanks and by which We declare His death and resurrection, We claim the benefits of Your Covenant.

Our Lord and Our God, judge of all, look with mercy upon Man, for Your Son has assumed Our nature that in Him We might be raised to Your glory.  He bore Your wrath, that We might not.

This we ask, Father, that your Name might not be blasphemed among the nations, but that it might be glorified in all the earth.  In the Spirit of Jesus the Christ, in whose Name we ask this, and who also intercedes for Us:  AMEN.

The defense of Man rests its case.

I had intended to first look at the Church Calendar from an Old Testament point of view, as well as from a Christian conception of time. I still want to do that, but first I think it might be good to take a look at the practical effects and uses of the Church Year.

Much has been said of the “pagan origins” of certain Christian holidays.  The one that springs immediately to mind is Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve), stemming from the Celtic Samhain.  Other holidays that receive objections of paganism are Christmas and even Easter (Pascha).  We look at these origins and wonder, why did the Church adopt pagan festival days for its Christian holidays?  One view is that this was an error of the Roman Church, which was synchretizing with the paganism of the world and corrupting itself.

I suggest there is another more Biblical way of looking at it—namely, that the Church Year is, in fact, the apostle Paul’s Mars Hill apologetic applied on an epic scale.  So let’s take a look at what exactly Paul does at Mars Hill in Acts 17.

“Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for

“‘In him we live and move and have our being’;

as even some of your own poets have said,

“‘For we are indeed his offspring.’

Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, “We will hear you again about this.”

Acts 17:22-32

The two quotes that Paul uses here are from the Greek writers Epimenides and Aratus.  Is Paul endorsing a Greek conception of God?  Of course not.  Rather, he is taking their philosophical insights and religious practices (even their sacrifices!) and turning them on their head, wresting them from the paganism in which they were formed and re-purposing them to describe and illuminate the One True God.

In essence, Paul tells them that they have been sacrificing to God, whom they did not know . . . And here’s your chance to know Him! He takes their philosophers and poets and assumes that they had discovered a measure of truth . . . so, men of Athens, here is the rest of the story!

This is an apologetic method that most Christians today wouldn’t dream of using, for fear of appearing to endorse paganism.  But this was Paul’s method.  It was John’s method in the prologue to his Gospel account when he described the second person of the Godhead as the Logos.  And it was the method that the Church adopted throughout history as it formed its Calendar.

It started with Easter.  Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  So the Church began to celebrate the true Passover, leaving the shadow behind.  Incidentally, I don’t like to call it Easter, but Pascha.  Eostre is the goddess of the dawn.  She represents rebirth and fertility.  The Church displaces her and instead preaches Resurrection.

Christmas takes place around the winter solstice, when the pagan cults celebrated the returning of the sun.  It is the point in the year where darkness begins to recede and light begins to gain ground again.  The Church took this and said: You celebrate light overtaking darkness, but in ignorance.  Let us teach you about the True Light that shines in the darkness, Jesus Christ, who came into the world at its darkest hour.

At Samhain, the Celts celebrated the harvest.  On this day they believed that the spirits of the dead could pass between the world of the living and the underworld.  The Church fixed All Hallows Eve and All Saint’s Day at this point, in effect telling the pagan cults: You celebrate the dead in ignorance.  Let us teach you the truth that the souls of saints who have fallen asleep are with the Lord, and will rise on the last day.

Of course, the Church has a long way yet to go.  The application of this Mars Hill apologetic has not been perfect or entire in history.  Especially in this modern age, because so many Christians have relinquished their claim on these days, and on time itself, the Church has allowed paganism to creep back in.  We still have Easter bunnies and eggs, and yule, and ghosts, goblins and ghouls running free in our neighborhoods on Halloween.  There is still a great deal of work to do if we are to effectively displace paganism from the year and preach the Truth.

But the concept is sound and Biblical.  Wrest away from the devil what was never his to begin with, and turn it on its head in order to illuminate the Truth of Jesus Christ and his rule over time and space.

“If the theory of love were perfectly clear to you and Love’s dart had ever touched you, your own feelings would have shown you that love cannot exist without jealousy, because . . . jealousy between lovers is commended by every man who is experienced in love . . .”

So said Andreas Capellanus, the scribe of The Art of Courtly Love, during the reign of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in England. It was the time of chivalry and pageantry, when kings and knights marched boldly to Crusade in the Holy Land . . . or to rape and plunder their neighbors—whichever impulse took them first.

Capellanus revolutionized the idea of romantic love. There is some debate over whether he was being totally serious about what he was writing. So much of Courtly Love oozes with cynicism and satire. In any case, I ran across this particular “rule” of courtly love earlier today while reading a book, and that made me stop and think.

Is this statement true? Is love really impossible without jealousy? Shouldn’t true love be generous, giving and forgiving, tolerant, and unconditional? I suppose that would require one to define jealousy. First, I think we must distinguish it from envy. Often the two are confused with one another. But envy requires an object—a person to be envious of. When one envies, one covets something that object of envy possesses.

On the other hand, jealousy is an attitude. A particular way of regarding a relationship. A man might be a jealous person without having anyone to be jealous of. Capellanus defines jealousy thus:

“Now jealousy is a true emotion whereby we greatly fear that the substance of our love may be weakened by some defect in serving the desires of our beloved, and it is an anxiety lest our love may not be returned, and it is a suspicion of the beloved, but without any shameful thought.”

That last is, as he makes clear later, any “shameful thought” regarding the beloved’s fidelity. In other words, “suspicion” of faithlessness without actually believing that the beloved is unfaithful. Well, that is worded a bit subjectively for a definition, so let’s abstract it a little bit. Essentially, jealousy is the lover’s desire for the beloved to requite one’s affections and the displeasure the lover has in the case that the beloved does not, and especially, at the notion that the beloved might love another.

Okay, so where am I going with this? I had a couple observations regarding this definition of jealousy.

First, I think Capellanus is correct. Without this kind of jealousy, it is impossible to love. Today’s idea of free-wheeling male-to-female and casual-intimate relationships, which is so glorified and idealized in modern media and story is not love. Any “love” that cares not whether the beloved is exclusively faithful is false. That means “you do whatever you like with whomever you like” is something entirely other than love.

Secondly, jealousy is a reflection of the divine, just as love is a reflection of the divine.

For YHWH your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.
~Deuteronomy 4:24

The covenant God of Israel gets a lot of flack because skeptics look at this verse and others like it and say, “God is jealous? What kind of an almighty deity would be subject to such a petty emotion as jealousy? Surely God, if he/she/it does exist, is above that.”

But apply my distillation of Capellanus’s definition of jealousy, and one then reads this to mean that YHWH Elohim desires for his chosen people to love Him (with all their heart and soul and mind), and is most displeased when they do not love Him, choosing instead to go after idols and strange gods.

When people say today that so-and-so is “not a jealous man,” it’s usually intended as a compliment. But a lover who does not urgently desire the affections of the beloved and cares little whether or not his beloved loves someone else is no lover at all. Capellanus observes that such a lover will not go to any great length to secure the affections of the beloved. He has no concern that what he does will offend or displease his beloved, and he will not exhibit any of the other things that Capellanus has on his list of things that lovers do, because he doesn’t care enough to do so.

An un-jealous God would be incapable of the covenant sacrificial love with which YHWH regards his chosen people. Those who say that God should be above jealousy are in fact saying that God should be above loving them. If you say “God is so great that he does not care what I do. He is above being offended by such a little thing as me,” you are really saying, “I am so insignificant that God cannot and does not love me. And by the way, I don’t want him to.” Which is a truly terrifying thing to say.

We ought to be thankful for God’s jealousy. It is precisely because God loves that He is jealous. And it is because He is jealous that He loves. Were it not for his jealousy, He would not have cared whether we wandered in sin and darkness, chasing false gods and destroying ourselves with them. It is because of God’s jealous love—because of His desire that we should love Him as He loves us—that He sent Jesus, his only Son, to reclaim us.

God loves perfectly, and he is perfectly jealous. When man is jealous, even as when man loves, he is imperfect. That does not mean that jealousy of itself is sinful. Rather, it is when envy and covetousness creep in and taint jealousy that it becomes sin. God loves perfectly, and his love for his people is a jealous love. So we must conclude that in order to love more perfectly as God loves, we also must be jealous in our love.

On the point of jealousy, Capellanus is correct in the most essential sense. A love that is not jealous is not love, and he who is not jealous cannot love.

Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of YHWH.
~Song of Solomon 8:6

Sources and additional reading:

Capellanus’s Rules of Courtly Love

The Art of Courtly Love (at Google Books)

There have been some interesting discoveries in archeology recently. The ossuary of James the Just is a curiosity; the so-called “tomb of Jesus” is a farce. Most recently though, has been a discovery that actually informs and helps to fill out the picture of what the first century Jewish context might have looked like. The Hazon Gabriel (Revelation of Gabriel) tablet isn’t garnering as much attention as the previous two discoveries mentioned, but in my view it’s a more important find.

First I want to take a brief look at prophetic language in the Bible itself, particularly references to Ephraim. A professor of mine once suggested that the apparent special affinity of Yahweh to Ephraim in the Old Testament is simply because the tribe of Ephraim lies at the heart of Israel geographically. So speaking of Ephraim is a sort of poetic short hand for referring to Israel as a whole. Sure. Sounded plausible at the time, and I didn’t have any better explanation, so I accepted that. It sort of makes sense of passages like Jeremiah 31:20, though it doesn’t necessarily make sense of the fact that Judah and Ephraim are often mentioned side by side. It also doesn’t explain why Ephraim would seem to be singled out as opposed to the rest of Israel in passages such as Jeremiah 31:9:

I will make them walk by brooks of water,
in a straight path in which they shall not stumble,
for I am a father to Israel,
and Ephraim is my firstborn.

Poetic language? Perhaps. But when we begin to look at the literature of the period, we find that those of Jesus’ time did not read references to Ephraim as simple prophetic short hand. As messianic expectations intensified under first Greek then Roman occupation, the name Ephraim came to be closely associated with Messiah.

In the Hazon Gabriel, Ephraim is even portrayed as ranking above David. We see phrases like “My servant David, ask of Ephraim [that he] place the sign; (this) I ask of you.” The current issue of Biblical Archeology Review does a good job of highlighting messianic references to Ephraim in the literature, and brings them to an interesting conclusion. The reference to Ephraim here in a messianic context ties in with post Second Temple Jewish sources that scholars had always attributed to Christian influence. For who is Ephraim of the Old Testament?

Genesis 46:20
In Egypt, Manasseh and Ephraim were born to Joseph . . .

That’s right. Ephraim is the son of Joseph and a type of Christ. He is Joseph’s younger son, specifically. However, Jacob blessed Ephraim before his older brother Manasseh (Genesis 48:14-20), echoing the blessing of Jacob before Esau.

Because of the messianic references to Ephraim throughout the Old Testament, many Jewish scholars began to look for and refer to the Messiah as the “Son of Joseph.” The BAR article theorizes that the Messiah the Son of Joseph historically becomes associated with a suffering servant Messiah, whereas the Son of David is the conquerer.

Until recently, many modern scholars had dismissed “son of Joseph” references as Christian corruptions of or influences on Jewish texts. But artifacts like the Hazon Gabriel are making them think again.

Another interesting feature of the Hazon Gabriel is the reference to “three days.”

77. Who am I? I am Gabriel …….. [ ]
78. You will rescue them………….. for two [ ] …[ ]
79. from before of you the three si[g]ns three .. [ ]
80. In three days, live, I Gabriel com[mand] yo[u]

It’s the first known pre-Christian and extra-biblical reference to a resurrection on the third day. Biblically, third day resurrection has its roots in Hosea 6:1-2.

Come, let us return to the LORD;
for he has torn us, that he may heal us;
he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him.

In the early church, the newly baptized were admitted immediately to the table. There is a great deal of evidence from the writings of the church fathers that this was the case even for infants.

At some point in the first couple centuries of the Church, someone had the slick idea to add a little oil to the waters of baptism. More precisely, a small element was added to the rite of baptism in which the newly baptized was anointed with oil to symbolize the anointing of the Holy Spirit. This anointing, called chrismation, was originally viewed as simply a part of the baptismal rite. It is an extra-biblical addition to the sacrament. It must have been a fairly early tradition, since it is found everywhere in the ancient churches, and also in denominations today that hold claim to the ancient church. So the alien element of oil was interposed between water and supper.

In the Eastern Orthodox churches, we can see something similar to what this rite might have looked like in the ancient church. Baptism is immediately followed by anointing with oil, and the newly baptized and chrismed is immediately admitted to the Eucharist. This immediacy in administration of the sacraments is maintained in the East because any priest could both baptize and chrismate, and then administer the elements. In the West, the story is quite different.

Conscious to guard the hierarchy of the bishopric, which it considered to be essential to the doctrine of apostolic succession, the Roman church ruled in the West that while the priesthood could baptize and administer the Eucharist, chrismation required the services of a bishop. Without the anointing, the baptism was deemed incomplete. As the church spread throughout the empire into more rural areas, it became hard to come by a bishop. Priests could administer baptism, but without the authority to perform the rite of chrismation, they could not complete the initiation of converts or their children into the new faith.

More and more, chrismation had to be delayed until a bishop passed through the area. Because chrismation was technically a part of the baptismal ritual, the baptism was not complete until this anointing of oil had been given. The result was that administration of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was also withheld from those who had been baptized but whose baptism had not been “confirmed” by a bishop in chrismation.

Often it could be years before the services of a bishop were available. A traveling bishop would pass through, chrismate all those who had been baptized but not confirmed, and then admit them to the table of the Eucharist. By then, those who had been baptized as infants but had never been chrismated would be old enough to be aware of what was taking place. In order to prepare these children for the anointing of oil and the partaking of the Supper, a system of catechism was introduced. The baptized would be instructed in the doctrines of the church and so made ready for chrismation and communion.

And so the Western rite of Confirmation was born. As chrismation was increasingly separated from baptism in the greater part of the Western church, confirmation came to be seen as a separate sacramental rite—one that drove a man-made wedge between baptism and communion. If you consider that chrismation with oil, whether in baptism or years afterward, is an extra-biblical practice, then the fact becomes unavoidable that this later development amounts to the unnatural and unlawful excommunication (barring from the table) of baptized Christians.

It is a curious thing that this rite continues even in Reformed churches today, albeit without the oil. Granted, they don’t consider it a sacrament, and Confirmation as such is sometimes optional or simply called something else. But the essential idea continues that there must exist a period of instruction between baptism and communion, at least for those who are baptized as infants, and a “credible confession” must thereafter be made in order to gain access to the table.

By introducing catechism as a prerequisite for chrismation, the Western Roman church placed an emphasis on understanding as a requirement for confirmation (of baptism), and thus for communion in the Eucharist. When the Reformed church rightly did away with the oil of chrismation, they nevertheless retained the rite and all its implications for the sacraments. I find it ironic that a controversy regarding the communication of children today in Reformed churches has its roots in two erroneous Roman practices: the chrismation of oil in baptism and the safeguarding of apostolic succession in the hierarchy of the church by requiring that a bishop must confirm a baptism administered by a priest.

The lex orandi of the Roman church has become the de facto lex credendi of of Western Christianity, including many Reformed Christians.

Bibliographic Sources:

Kavanagh, Aidan, Confirmation: Origins and Reform, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996

Turrell, James F., “Muddying the Waters of Baptism: The Theology Committee’s Report on Baptism, Confirmation, and Christian Formation,” Anglican Theological Review, July 1, 2006

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Everyone, on either side of the debate should either order the CDs or download the mp3 files, free of charge (shipping is even free). If you have ANY interest at all in the issues, you won’t want to miss hearing this one.

Dr. Bahnsen was a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary, a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and had a Philosophy Ph.D. with a concentration in Epistemology from the University of Southern California.

Dr. Stein was the Senior Editor of Free Inquiry Magazine, Director of the Center for Inquiry Libraries, Consultant on the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal, Editor of the American Rationalist Magazine, God Pro and Con: A Bibliography of Atheism, and the Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism.

Both were uniquely qualified to argue their positions.

There was a slight glitch with CMF’s ordering system, which would not allow transactions of $0.00, so you now have to pay $0.01 ($0.02 if you download both parts of the mp3 version). Believe me, it’s worth every penny.

Order yourself a copy and pass the link along to all your friends!