Was Romney Sincere?

Ann Coulter recently wrote that Mitt Romney is a true conservative.  In his 1994 Senate race against Ted Kennedy, Romney affirmed his support for Roe vs. Wade.  Now, however, he claims to be pro-life.  Ann Coulter states the following about this:

“Romney’s one great ‘flip-flop’ is on abortion. (I thought the reason we argued with people about abortion was to try to get them to ‘flip-flop’ on this issue. Sometimes it works!)  Nearly two decades ago, when Romney was trying to defeat champion desecrator of life Sen. Teddy Kennedy, he sought to remove abortion as a campaign issue by declaring that he, too, supported Roe v. Wade.  (Nonetheless, Kennedy ran a campaign commercial against him featuring a Mormon woman complaining that Romney, as a Mormon elder, had pressured her not to have an abortion, but to give the child up for adoption. Are you getting the idea that Massachusetts is different from the rest of America, readers?)  Romney changed his mind on abortion — not when it was politically advantageous, but when it mattered. As governor of liberal, pro-choice Massachusetts, he vetoed an embryonic stem cell bill and ‘worked closely’ with Massachusetts Citizens for Life. The president of MCL recently issued a statement saying that, ‘since being elected governor, Mitt Romney has had a consistent commitment to the culture of life.’”

Coulter appears to be saying two things, which may be contradictory.  On the one hand, she is saying that Romney went from being pro-choice to being pro-life when he was Governor of Massachusetts, which is basically Romney’s story.  On the other hand, she seems to be implying that Romney only pretended to be pro-choice when he was running against Ted Kennedy because Romney sought to “remove abortion as a campaign issue” in a state that was rabidly liberal.

If the latter is the case, then I have serious issues with Mitt Romney.  Here’s why:  According to an article in Salon by Justin Elliott, a close relative of Romney died in an illegal abortion in 1963, which was prior to Roe vs. Wade.  This lady was the sister of Romney’s brother-in-law.  When Ted Kennedy in 1994 was attacking Romney for being “multiple-choice” on abortion, since Romney opposed abortion yet said that he wanted it to be legal, Romney sought to buttress his pro-choice credentials by talking about how the death of his relative shaped his views on abortion.  Romney fired back to Kennedy:

“On the idea of ‘multiple-choice,’ I have to respond. I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.”

I hope that Romney was sincere when he was speaking those words, and wasn’t just using his relative’s death to score political points.  I would be disgusted at an insincere use of such a tragedy for political gain.  But I would understand Romney appealing to that tragedy to explain how he became pro-choice.

Segal on Paul, Judaism, and Conversion

I’m continuing my way through Alan Segal’s Paul the Convert.  I have two items:

1.  For this first item, my understanding may be flawed, but, for the purpose of interaction with this book (however imperfect that interaction may be), I’ll still say how I am understanding Segal’s argument.  Segal says at one point that instantaneous conversions were looked down upon in the ancient world, since many people preferred for conversions to occur after a period of education.  Paul’s conversion was instantaneous, even though it was followed by a degree of education within the Christian community, for Paul does quote Christian teaching that was handed down to him.  At the same time, although Paul’s instantaneous conversion was unusual compared to how conversions back then often took place, there are (according to Segal) a few places in ancient Judaism in which conversion is accompanied by some sort of ecstatic experience, which is what Paul undergoes.

This item is about conversion, so I will highlight another point that Segal makes about that topic.  Segal does not believe that Paul was simply a Jew who was embracing and proclaiming the one whom he believed was the Jewish Messiah.  Segal acknowledges that there were Jewish-Christians who fit this description, which means that they were technically not converts, for they were remaining within Judaism, on some level.  (My understanding here may be flawed, however, for Segal does argue that joining a new religious community with its own set of values is an element of conversion, and it is the case that Jews who became Jewish-Christians joined the Christian community, even though they also remained part of the larger body of Israel, by worshiping at the temple, etc.)  Paul, however, was a convert from one system of thought to another.  He went from being a Pharisaic Jew to being one who viewed the Torah as temporary and did not think that Gentiles (or, presumably, he himself) had to observe its ritual requirements to be part of Israel (but, according to Segal, Paul did regard the moral requirements of the Torah, the Noachide Commandments, to be binding on Gentiles).  Paul was a convert, not a Jewish-Christian.  (Paul was a Jew and also a Christian, but not a Jewish-Christian, the way that Jewish-Christians were.)

2.  I turn now to the Noachide Commandments, the laws that many rabbis believed were binding on Gentiles, whom they did not think had to observe the entire Torah.  Segal argues that this belief emerged because conversion to Judaism was stigmatized in the first century C.E.  Josephus’ story about Izates (see here) shows that Gentiles did not like for their Gentile rulers to become circumcised, and so there were Jews who held that Gentiles could please God and honor the Torah without circumcision.  And, in the late first century, in the aftermath of Jewish revolts, there were Roman imperial attacks on proselytism.  On page 112, Segal says that some Jews thought Gentiles should obey the entire Torah, whereas others held that Gentiles could observe the Noachide Commandments to please God, since conversion would result in a blacklash from Gentiles—-against the converts and also against the Jews.

Andrew’s Brother, Stephen, on Rigid Doctrines and Real-life People

I wrote yesterday about Andrew’s experience with church “discipline” at Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church, which has been a prominent topic of discussion throughout the Internet over the past few days.  On Matthew Paul Turner’s site, there is an excellent piece by Andrew’s brother Stephen.  Stephen makes a point that, in my opinion, is important and poignant:

“One reason I count Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville, starring Nicole Kidman and Paul Bettany, as one of my favorite films, one I’m constantly recommending, is because I see a part of myself in the character played by Bettany, someone more interested in hypothetical situations and ideas than in how they affect the real flesh-and-blood people surrounding him, with the tragic consequences playing out on the stage over the three hours von Trier takes to tell the story.  It is one of my biggest regrets today, when I look back at the years I was a fundamentalist, that when my mother was struggling with the idea of divorce from my father – an action she had been counseled to take by multiple sources for legal purposes, partly so that his inevitable future financial troubles would not destroy the new life she was trying to piece together – that I was for a long time strongly opposed to it, because, I was sure, ‘the Bible is clear.’ It didn’t matter that this course of action was only considered after God, my father said, had told him to kill her and us kids, or that a judge had already issued a permanent restraining order. The Bible was still clear. Sin was still sin. Divorce was wrong.  I was, it should be noted, being faithful to the ideas I had learned growing up in church, convinced that principles are always more important than people, that everything is always black and white, ambiguity be damned.”

Conversion, Exalted One

I started Alan Segal’s Paul the Convert.  There were two interesting items in my reading so far.  First, Segal attempts to demonstrate that Paul indeed was a convert, against thinkers such as Krister Stendahl who maintain that Paul merely saw himself as one who was called to be a missionary to the Gentiles, not as a convert from one religion to another.  According to Segal, Paul contrasts his life then and his life now as well as talks about his transformation, and that fits our understanding of conversion.  While Segal acknowledges that Paul did not say that he repented—-when repentance, according to Judaism and Christianity, was a key ingredient of conversion—-Segal says that Paul was a convert according to definitions today, not necessarily according to how conversion was conceptualized in Paul’s day.  (UPDATE: I may be misunderstanding Segal here, for he later appears to argue that Paul was a convert according to ancient standards.)  Segal says that Paul leaves out repentance, in part, on the basis of Paul’s statement in Philippians 3 that he was blameless in his observance of the law before he came to Christ.  But, in my opinion, repentance and transformation are similar, and Paul did believe that where he was as a Christian was better than where he was as a Pharisee.

Second, Segal talks about the belief in Second Temple and subsequent Judaism (albeit not rabbinic Judaism) that God has exalted certain human beings (i.e., Enoch, Moses) to a status of heavenly ruler, and sometimes has even given them his own name.  I’ve asked before why the early Christians believed that Jesus had a divine sort of status.  Did Jesus claim that for himself?  Maybe Jesus did not, but his followers believed that he was a special and a righteous man and applied to him what others applied to Enoch and others: they said that God exalted Jesus to become a heavenly ruler.  I don’t know.

Mark Driscoll’s Church “Discipline”

I’d like to share some links on Mark Driscoll’s program of church discipline at Mars Hill Church.  These links are about a young man named Andrew, who was recently subjected to that discipline.

Matthew Paul Turner, Mark Driscoll’s Church Discipline Contract: Looking For True Repentance at Mars Hill Church? Sign on the Dotted Line.

Matthew Paul Turner, Mark Driscoll’s ‘Gospel Shame’: The Truth About Discipline, Excommunication, and Cult-like Control at Mars Hill.

Dr. Robert Cargill, how much more evidence do you need?  mark driscoll’s mars hill church is a cult.

Sarah Moon, Mark Driscoll, spiritual abuse, and fluffy bunnies…

This is why I am very reluctant to get involved in conservative Christianity.  This church has a right to run itself as it sees fit, but I don’t have to be a part of it.  And I do not believe for a moment that I will go to hell on account of that!  I’ll stick with mainline Protestantism, or attending Catholic churches.  As a Catholic told me in response to all of this, the Catholic church dealt with the issue of sin and repentance years ago by setting up the confessional.  You sin, you confess to a priest, and you go out of the booth and try to live the right way.  There doesn’t have to be meeting after meeting with church officials, who are eager to exercise their “authority” and to show how spiritually superior they think they are.  There doesn’t have to be a threat hanging over the person’s head (even if it is merely implied) that those officials will go public with what the person did wrong if the person doesn’t play ball.  Heck, even the so-called evil “world” knows better how to restore people than Mark Driscoll’s church!  If I wanted healing and restoration, I’d pay for a therapist rather than listen to Mark Driscoll make an ass out of himself every week or experience “discipline” at the hands of his cultish church.

Some will tell me that I’ve only read one side of the issue.  In a sense, that is true.  But Turner in his posts above links to Mars Hill’s discipline contract as well as the church’s letter to church members about Andrew.  I can tell from the self-righteous, controlling tone of those documents that this is not a church with which I’d like to associate.

“But Mark Driscoll is being biblical”, some will tell me.  Many actually care about this.  Personally, I would not subject myself to spiritual abuse, even if it technically were “biblical”.  But, for those who care about whether something is “biblical”, I wonder if there is a reasonable way to apply Matthew 18.  I mean, not all evangelical churches are this cultish.  Mark Driscoll’s church is applying Matthew 18 and other passages about church discipline in a specific manner, but are there other legitimate ways to apply those passages?

My advice for people reading this: If you attend a conservative Christian church that practices this kind of discipline, don’t limit your social circle to that church.  That way, it won’t hurt as much if you are kicked out or disciplined, for you will have other friends.

My hope is that people will call Mark Driscoll out on this.  I like it when people stand up to bullies, especially bullies who pompously think that they have some divine mandate.  Rachel Held Evans called out Mark Driscoll a couple of times, and that got his attention (whether or not he knew he was responding to her specifically)—-as he responded with a degree of humility one time, and with defensiveness another time.  As Dr. Cargill says in one of the comments, it would be nice if this could get on the national news!

Ben Witherington’s Critical Methodology and Apologetics

I finished Ben Witherington III’s Jesus the Sage.  I have two items:

1.  Are the Gospels fiction, or are they historical?  Witherington says on page 154:

“I have argued elsewhere that the ancient popular biography provides us with our closest analogies for the genre of the Gospels…There are certainly many other options besides pure fiction and photographic recall.  For instance, it is possible the Gospel writers have used material of some historical substance and a broad historical outline of the life of Jesus, coupled with their selection, editing, and arrangement of various pericopes according to their various theological purposes.”

On the TV program, Faith Under Fire, Witherington said that the Gospels contain eyewitness testimony, and that the testimony is reliable (even though the Gospels were written about forty years after the events that they clam to narrate) because the Mishnah states that disciples were able to remember vast amounts of material that their teacher taught them.  Witherington notes that Luke claims to draw from the testimony of eyewitnesses, and that both Matthew and Luke carefully use the sources that they have, such as Mark, showing that they were responsible historians.  For Witherington, there is a good chance that Mark wrote the Gospel of Mark and that Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke, even though these Gospels are formally anonymous, for the second century church would not attribute Gospels to non-eyewitnesses or to non-apostles unless those figures actually wrote them (and Mark and Luke were not apostles).  Regarding Matthew, Witherington does not claim that Matthew the apostle was responsible for the Gospel of Matthew’s final form, but he does suggest that the Gospel contains traditions going back to Matthew the apostle.  And, if my impression is correct, Witherington appears to believe that John wrote the Gospel of John, and he notes that the end of the Gospel says that it represents eyewitness testimony.  You can watch or listen to Witherington making his points here and here.

Is this consistent with what Witherington argues in Jesus the Sage?  I’d say yes and no.  In both, Witherington maintains that the Gospel authors used sources, and he is confident that these sources, on some level, reflect the historical Jesus.  At the same time, I think that Witherington in Jesus the Sage is more sensitive to the fact the the Gospel authors had ideological and theological agendas and were not simply recalling what actually happened.  He criticizes scholars for unjustifiably (at times) preferring Luke’s forms of sayings over how other Gospels’ present them, and he attributes that to the scholars’ attraction to Luke being less Jewish and apocalyptic in his presentation of the sayings (page 215).  Witherington also proposes to uncover what is authentically Q by peeling back the layers that obviously reflect Matthew and Luke (and one can see the characteristics of Matthean and Lukan interaction with sources by looking at their use of Mark).  Witherington affirms that Matthew softens Mark’s portrayal of the disciples as dense in their failure to understand Jesus, and he also discusses differences between the synoptic Gospels and James.  For example, Witherington notes that James does not really talk about the inbreaking Kingdom of God through Christ.

Regarding John, Witherington does not believe in Jesus the Sage that the Gospel of John goes back to John the Galilean son of Zebedee, for there is not much in that Gospel about Jesus’ Galilean ministry or the sons of Zebedee.  But Witherington does acknowledge that the Beloved Disciple could have been a Judean eyewitness to Jesus as well as the source of traditions that made their way into the Gospel of John (whose present form came from someone other than the Beloved Disciple, according to Witherington).  This is similar to what Witherington said about Matthew on Faith Under Fire.  Another point: In Jesus the Sage, Witherington says that Peter in the Gospel of Matthew is given a scribal authority to bind and to loose.  Does this imply that there were written sources going back to the original disciples of Jesus, according to Witherington?

I think that the passage with which I opened this item, the one from page 154, is a reasonable way to see the Gospels: they are not a photographic recall of events, but rather they are the result of a process of using sources and composing a work that accords with the ideologies of the Gospels’ writers.  Some, or even many, of these sources may go back to eyewitness testimony.  But a significant part of uncovering the historical Jesus is sifting what is ideological in the Gospels from what is historical—-though it is possible that the ideological can overlap with the historical, as Witherington seems to believe when he regards the Gospels of Matthew and John to be accurately depicting Jesus as one who claimed to be wisdom itself.

2.  On page 353, Witherington says: “Kings were often said to have miraculous births in antiquity, and Jesus is no different.”  In my opinion, this differs from Witherington’s defense of the historicity of the virgin birth in his blog post, The Virginal Conception—-Miracle on Nazareth Street, where he argues that the virgin birth is historical because (1.) Matthew and Luke had to get the idea from somewhere, and there were no true parallels in the ancient world, and (2.) the story was embarrassing within that honor and shame culture, so it was most likely not made-up.  Based on what Witherington says on page 353 of Jesus the Sage, I can argue that early Christians could have attributed to Jesus a miraculous birth to show that he was like other kings (even if other kings were not said to be the products of a virginal conception).

Santorum and Romney On People Who Lost Their Homes

I’m watching the NBC Republican Presidential debate that was on last night.  Something that stood out to me was that both Rick Santorum and also Mitt Romney expressed compassion for people who have lost their homes to foreclosure.  Rick Santorum says that he supports allowing people to deduct off of their taxes money that they lost in a bad home deal.  And Mitt Romney is criticizing the Dodd-Frank law because it hinders people from being able to renegotiate their mortgage.

In my opinion, this is a step up from where Republicans have been.  I remember Bill and Hillary Clinton in 2008 proposing that people be allowed to renegotiate their mortgages so that they could keep their homes, and (although John McCain adopted that idea in his own campaign) right-wingers considered that to be unconscionable!  They called it a bail-out.  They said that people should be held responsible for their mistakes, and that people should recognize that not everybody can live in a house.  Their approach was “They made their bed, let them sleep in it”.  So it’s refreshing to see Republicans—-a right-winger like Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney (whatever he is)—-proposing policies of compassion for people who have lost their homes.  But it would also be saddening if Dodd-Frank were actually inhibiting people from being able to renegotiate their mortgages.  That makes me wonder which party I should vote for.  I think that, overall, the Democratic Party is more compassionate towards the middle class and low-income people than are the Republicans.  And yet, some Democratic policies may do more harm than good.

James Carville and School Choice

I applaud Democratic strategist James Carville for speaking at National School Choice Week in New Orleans (see the video here).  School choice has its positives and its negatives, and I will not debate it in this post.  But I admire people who think outside of the box of their own ideologies—-whether those people are on the Right or the Left.  Should the money that is spent on school choice be used instead to make public schools better?  I can see legitimacy in that point of view.  But a lot of the African-American people in the video are probably not right-wing Republicans, and yet they are happy to be given a choice regarding their kids’ education.

Witherington on Jesus as Wisdom

On page 204 of Jesus the Sage, Ben Witherington III states:

“What is especially daring about the idea of Jesus taking the personification of Wisdom and suggesting that he is the living embodiment of it, is that while a prophet might be seen as a mashal or prophetic sign, no one, so far as one can tell, up to that point in early Judaism had dared to [suggest] that he was a human embodiment of an attribute of God—-God’s Wisdom.  Indeed, as M. Hengel has remarked to me, no known person in early Judaism other than Jesus between the time of Alexander and Bar Kokhba was identified with the personification of Wisdom.  Some explanation for this remarkable and anomalous development must be given, and the best, though by no means the only, explanation of this fact is that Jesus presented himself as both sage and the message of the sage—-God’s Wisdom.”

According to Witherington, there are parts of the Q source in which Jesus identifies himself with wisdom, as when Jesus affirms that he is greater than Solomon, to whom a lot of wisdom literature was attributed.  Witherington believes that the association of Jesus with wisdom (which is different from simply saying that Jesus said wise things) could very well go back to Jesus himself, for others in early Judaism did not identify themselves with wisdom, and Q had to get from somewhere the idea that Jesus was that particular attribute of God.  I wonder why one couldn’t just say that Q decided to associate Jesus with wisdom.  The question would then be why it chose to do so.  What was it about Jesus that led some people to conclude that he was more than a mere holy man, but was actually wisdom itself, or even a divine sort of being?  And, if Jesus claimed that he himself was wisdom, what are the implications of that?  Are we placed in a variant of C.S. Lewis’ trilemma: that Jesus is who he says he is, or he is insane, or devilish?  Not many sane people, period, make the grandiose claim that they are the actual embodiment of wisdom, and such a claim would probably have been even more revolutionary or extraordinary in first century Judaism.

In his chapter on the hymns about Christ that are in certain New Testament books and epistles, Witherington says that wisdom helped people who were seeking a way to conceptualize Jesus without violating monotheism.  In wisdom literature, wisdom was a hypostasis or attribute of God, and hymns about Christ try to conceptualize Jesus’ pre-existent state in terms of that.  At the same time, Witherington argues that the hymns do not necessarily adopt the whole ideology of wisdom literature, for wisdom literature tended to regard wisdom as created, whereas Witherington appears to believe that the pre-existent Son was begotten, not made.  Consequently, Witherington interprets the statement in Colossians 1:15 that the Son is the firstborn of creation to mean, not that the Son was the first to be created, but rather that the Son is pre-eminent over creation.  Similarly, when God in Psalm 89:27 promises to make the king his firstborn, he’s referring to the king’s pre-eminence, not his origin before all things.

Not Stupid, but Learning

I don’t like it when people call me or other people “stupid” for not knowing something.  I mean, unless people calling others “stupid” had all knowledge inside of the womb or from birth, then there was a point in time when they learned what they currently know.  So why am I stupid, just because I’m not omniscient?  I have to learn things, too.