Tensions

The sermon at church this morning was good because the pastor in his sermon was really highlighting some tensions.  He was preaching about John 17, in which Jesus radically distinguishes his own from the world.  Here are some points that the pastor made:

1.  How do we engage the world and benefit from what it has to offer (i.e., entertainment, money, etc.), without being taken over by the world’s mindset?  The pastor’s answer was continuing prayer and Bible reading.

2.  How can Jesus portray the world as evil and his disciples as set apart from that, when his disciples themselves had flaws?  The pastor quoted a commentator who said that God is more interested in the direction we are facing, even if we in our present state have flaws.

3.  The pastor said that Christ can be at the center of our lives, and yet we may still have things that don’t fit into that, such as resentment.

4.  The pastor remarked that obeying Christ can seem burdensome, and yet Christ being at the center of our lives brings us peace.

I was more impressed by the tensions that my pastor highlighted than by his answers or resolutions.  It’s not that I left the service feeling inspired.  It’s more that I left it thinking, “Good thing I’m not the only one who asks questions like that.”

Greeting; Common Sense and Divine Revelation

I have two items for my write-up today on Joseph Telushkin’s A Code of Jewish Ethics, volume 1: You Shall Be Holy.

1.  On page 118, Telushkin talks about greeting people.  He quotes Babylonian Talmud 17a, which says that Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai greeted people first in the marketplace, even if they were Gentiles.  Telushkin then tells a story about how Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzensky found that he could not cheerfully greet everyone he met in Vilna, since that was a large city.  Imagine trying to greet everyone you encounter in New York City.  You really can’t, since you are coming across hordes of people at a time!  After telling this story, Telushkin lays out the principle that “it is appropriate to greet those whose eye we catch, and all those whom we know, even if only slightly.”

The above discussion is a good example of why I am enjoying this book so far: it teaches social skills.  I myself struggle with greeting people.  I fear rejection or not being remembered, or I wonder if I know the person well enough to greet him.  But I’m getting better at greeting people, I hope.  Elsewhere in this book, Telushkin reinforces a point that I have heard in another setting: that, even if another person does not remember you, you can take the opportunity to reintroduce yourself and remind him of where he met you.

Telushkin’s discussion about greetings reminded me of what the New Testament says about this issue.  There’s Matthew 5:47, which says that greeting our brethren does not bring us reward, for everyone does that.  Jesus makes this point within the context of talking about the importance of loving our enemies.  And then there’s Luke 10:4, in which Jesus tells his disciples not to greet anyone while they’re on their way to evangelize a city.  II Kings 4:29 has something similar: Elisha is sending Gehazi to raise a child from the dead, and Gehazi is to greet no one along the way.

On an important mission, a person is to be single-minded, not distracted by the need to greet people.  Of course, Jesus was not saying that his followers should never greet people—-after all, he said that they should greet their enemies—-but, on an important mission, their mission should be what is foremost on their mind.  I wonder why, though.  There are biblical scholars who would say that the disciples believed their mission to be urgent because Jesus thought that the end was near, and so they had to get busy and start getting converts because time was short, and they could not get bogged down in greetings.  If Jesus did not believe that the end was near, what would be the reason for his disciples not to greet people along the way?  Where’s the emergency?  At the same time, if the disciples were continually in emergency mode because they felt that the end was near, why did they allow themselves at least some opportunities to greet people—-such as their enemies (according to Matthew 5:47)?

2.  Telushkin talks about how common sense plays a role within Judaism in defining what God wants for Jews to do.  Telushkin gives a variety of examples, but one that I’ll mention is in Babylonian Talmud Gittin 56a, in which Jerusalem is conquered because a rabbi was inflexible in his application of halakah.  Essentially, Bar Kamtza, who was upset with Jewish leaders, made a blemish on a sacrifice that was to be offered on the Roman emperor’s behalf, and the Torah prohibits the sacrifice of blemished animals.  There were some dilemmas.  Should the rabbis refrain from offering the sacrifice on the emperor’s behalf and thus incur the wrath of Rome?  Should they kill Bar Kamtza to prevent him from telling the emperor that the Jews decided not to offer a sacrifice on the emperor’s behalf?  On these issues, Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkulas was a stickler for the letter of the law: he said that the Jews should not sacrifice the blemished animal because that is prohibited by the Torah, and that they should not kill Bar Kamtza because causing a blemish in a sacrificial animal does not merit death.  Because people chose to go with his inflexibility, which defied common sense, the Romans got mad at the Jews’ refusal to offer the sacrifice on the emperor’s behalf and thus destroyed Jerusalem.

Does reason supercede divine revelation?  There are times when reason dictates an exception to the law within Judaism.  Telushkin mentions, for example, the Maccabees’ rule that Jews could fight to defend themselves on the Sabbath, even though they’re technically not supposed to do any work on that day.  At the same time, there is the rabbinic writing known as the Sifra, which affirms that the Jews should go with divine revelation, even though it may say things that they would not logically conclude.  The Sifra repeatedly says that one might reach a certain conclusion logically, but the Torah says something else, and so one should follow the Torah.  This makes a degree of sense, for, if logic were sufficient, why did God give the Torah?  And yet, Jewish thinkers have pointed out that God did not give us the Torah to hurt us, and so they crafted exceptions to laws when strictly following those laws could result in (say) death.  Still, they did acknowledge times when Jews should take their stand and keep the law, even when doing so brought the death penalty from Gentile persecutors.

Spiritual Children; Tithe in Judaism; Divine Retribution or Time and Chance?

I started Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s A Code of Jewish Ethics, volume 1: You Shall Be Holy.  I won’t be doing this book justice in my write-ups about it, since it has so much in it: ancient and modern stories, personal anecdotes, nuggets of wisdom, etc.  For this post, I’ll comment on three items.

1.  On page 20, Telushkin quotes Beizah 32b, which states: “If someone is compassionate toward others, you can be sure that he is a descendant of our father Abraham, and if someone is not compassionate toward others, you can be sure that he is not a descendant of our father Abraham.”  Telushkin then goes on to say that “Sadly, one sometimes meets Jews who, according to this definition, are certainly not spiritual descendants of Abraham.”

This intrigued me because it reminded me of passages in the New Testament that treat descent from Abraham as something spiritual.  Jesus tells Jewish leaders in the Gospel of John that they are not true sons of Abraham but rather are sons of the devil, since they do the deeds of the devil rather than those of Abraham (John 8).  Paul says that Gentiles who follow Abraham’s faith by believing in Christ are Abraham’s seed, whereas not all Jews are truly a part of Israel.  I was somewhat surprised to see a concept of spiritual descent from Abraham in rabbinic Judaism, though perhaps I should not be overly shocked, since Qumran saw itself as the true Israel (or did it?).

2.  On page 34, Telushkin says that “Jewish law speaks on donating between ten and twenty percent of one’s net income to charity.”  I’ve wondered how Judaism handles the issue of tithing, when there is no longer a Temple to which Jews can give their tithes.  Do Jews now tithe by giving ten per cent of their income to charity?

3.  On page 89, Telushkin quotes Rava in Mo’ed Kattan 28a, who states (and the brackets are in Telushkin’s book): “The length of one’s life, children [i.e., whether one has them, or the number of children one has] and livelihood depend not on merit, but rather on fate [or fortune]…”  Rava tells a story to illustrate this point.  There were two great rabbis in the third century: Rav Chisda and Rabbah.  Both were righteous, for God answered their prayers for rain.  But Rav Chisda had good experiences, whereas Rabbah had bad experiences.  Rav Chisda lived until age 92, “witnessed sixty weddings of children and grandchildren” (Telushkin’s words), and had enough bread that he could give fine flour to the dogs.  Rabbah, by contrast, lived to age 40, saw a lot of premature deaths in his family, and endured poverty and hunger.  According to Rava, their experiences had nothing to do with how moral they were, for both were righteous men.

Rava’s view was not the only one in rabbinic Judaism, however, for Mishnah Shabbat 2:6 says: “For three transgressions women die during childbirth: because they are not meticulous in observing the laws of menstrual separation, in separating the dough offering, and in lighting the Shabbat candles…”  Telushkin appears to prefer Rava’s view.

B.T. Sanhedrin 90b and the Resurrection

I finished Brad Young’s Paul the Jewish Theologian.

On page 125, Young quotes Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 90b.  What’s in the brackets is from Young:

“The Sadducees [minim; literally, heretics] asked Rabban Gamaliel, ‘How do you prove that the Holy One, blessed be He, will resurrect the dead?’  He answered, ‘From the Torah, from the Prophets, and from the Writings.  From the Torah: it is written, ‘And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Behold you are about to sleep with your fathers; but then [you] will rise [again]” (Deut. 31:16, according to the Pharisaic interpretation!).’  ‘But perhaps,’ they argued, ‘the text reads, ‘and they shall rise up’.'  [But Rabban Gamaliel countered], ‘Also from the Prophets: as it is written, ‘Thy dead shall live, their bodies shall rise.  O dwellers of the dust, awake and sing for joy!  For thy dew is a dew of light, and on the land of the shades thou wilt let it fall” (Isa. 26:19).  [The Sadducees retorted,] ‘Perhaps this is referring to the dead who were resurrected in Ezekiel?’  [Rabban Gamaliel, however, argued, 'The resurrection is] also taught in the Writings, as it is written: ‘and your palate like the best wine that goes down smoothly, making the lips of sleepers to speak [or, in Pharisaic interpretation, 'the sleepers' may be understood as 'the deceased']‘ (Song of Songs 7:9).”

I have a variety of reactions:

1.  The quotation of Deuteronomy 31:16 puzzles me because, in both the MT and also the LXX, it reads (in my translation), “Behold, you’re sleeping with your fathers, and this people will rise up and will act as a harlot after the foreign gods”, etc.  How the Pharisees concluded that this passage is about Moses rising from the dead, I have no idea.

2.  Rabban Gamaliel maintains that Moses will rise from the dead.  A while back, I read in the IVP Bible Background Commentary for the New Testament that there was a Jewish belief (whether it was Second Temple or rabbinic, I do not remember) that the sinful generation of the wilderness during the time of Moses would not enter the World to Come.  After all, it was told that it would not see the Promised Land and God’s rest, right (Numbers 14:30; Psalm 95:11)?  That curse carries over into the afterlife, right?  Well, Moses, too, was told that he wouldn’t enter the Promised Land (Numbers 20), so why will he be resurrected?

I don’t remember what the IVP Bible Background Commentary’s source was, if it even referred to one.  The justification that I just made for the position that the wilderness generation would not enter the World to Come was something that I came up with, and it may not be the rabbis’ justification.  In Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:3, it is argued that the spies will not enter the World to Come on account of a redundancy in the text (Numbers 14:37).  Regarding the wilderness generation, Rabbi Akiba argues on the basis of Numbers 14:35 (“In this wilderness they shall be consumed and there they shall die”) that the wilderness generation will not even rise from the dead and experience post-mortem judgment.  Rabbi Eliezer, however, refers to Psalm 50:5: “Gather my saints together unto me, those that made a covenant with me by sacrifice.”  Is Rabbi Eliezer arguing here that the wilderness generation will enter the World to Come?

As I look at Tosefta Sanhedrin 13:10-11, I see more detail.  Numbers 14:35 is said to exclude the wilderness generation from the World to Come due to its apparent redundancy: “they shall be consumed” refers to this world, and “there they shall die” applies to the World to Come.  Akiba also quotes Psalm 95:11, which says that the wilderness generation will not enter God’s rest, so I was not off my rocker to speculate that Psalm 95:11 played some role in the rabbinic position that the wilderness generation would not enter the World to Come.  Regarding Eliezer’s use of Psalm 50:5, he is indeed appealing to it to argue that the wilderness generation will have a place in the World to Come.  Moreover, in Tosefta Sanhedrin 13:11, we read the idea that God can retract what God swore in his wrath.  Perhaps that’s how some could conclude that the wilderness generation and also Moses would enter the Promised Land after their resurrection: God changed his mind.

3.  Young is concluding that the minim are the Sadducees, perhaps because the minim in this passage are disputing the resurrection, as the Sadducees did.  If they are the Sadducees, what is interesting is that the Sadducees in this passage appear to accept the authority of books outside of the Torah, something that many scholars in the past have said that the Sadducees did not do.  After all, Rabban Gamaliel quotes Isaiah 26:19, and, rather than dismissing the authority of that passage, the Sadducee offers an alternative interpretation of it, by referring to Ezekiel.

4.  I’m curious as to what the Sadducees (assuming they are the minim in question) meant when they appealed to the dead who were resurrected in Ezekiel to counteract Rabban Gamaliel’s argument from Isaiah 26:19.  Were the Sadducees like many modern biblical scholars, who see the resurrection in Ezekiel and Isaiah 26:19 as a resurrection of a nation (Israel) rather than a resurrection of individuals?  Or are they saying that only a particular generation of Israelites will rise from the dead, not all people?

Does Popularity Mean Quality?

People often tell me that, if I write quality posts, then people will flock to my blog.  My question is this: Does popularity mean quality?  I’m not asking this out of an attitude of self-pity, for my blogs have been doing quite well lately, in terms of how many views I am getting, or (in the case of my WordPress blog) people choosing to following me.  I just find that there are times when I can be on somebody else’s blog, and a comment there really resonates with me, even though no one else has clicked “like” on it.  And I find that there are posts that I write that are especially meaningful to me, yet they are not necessarily as popular as my posts that are not as meaningful to me.

Where Did Cain Get His Wife?

Where did Cain get his wife?  Many contend that Cain married his sister, for Genesis 5:4 affirms that Adam had sons and daughters.  But I’m skeptical of this, for a variety of reasons:

1.  After Cain killed Abel, God gave Eve Seth as a replacement for Abel (Genesis 4:25).  Eve was elated that God gave her other seed!  In my opinion, that makes more sense if Cain and Abel were her only children prior to that point: she was sad that she lost both of her children (Cain left and Abel was killed), and so she viewed God giving her Seth as a consolation.  But why would that be the case, if she had other sons and daughters at that time?

2.  Genesis 5:4 says (in the KJV): “And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters”.  That appears to me to be saying that Adam begot those sons and daughters after he had begotten Seth.  Is not Seth mentioned in this genealogy because he is technically the firstborn, after Cain left the family and Abel was killed?

(UPDATE: As I look at the genealogies in Genesis 10-11, my impression is that genealogies do not necessarily focus on the firstborn.  Rather, they focus on the figure who can get them where they want to go.  Arpachshad was probably not the firstborn of Shem, for other sons of Shem are mentioned before him in Genesis 10.  But he is listed as the son of Shem in Genesis 11 because he’s the ancestor of Abraham, and the genealogy wants to arrive at Abraham.  Similarly, I think that the people listed in Genesis 5 are not listed because they are the firstborn, but rather because the genealogy aims to culminate with Noah, and so it mentions his ancestors.)

3.  Genesis 4:16 says that Cain left to go to the land of Nod.  There is no mention of a wife leaving with him.  Then Cain is in the land of Nod in v 17, and he has a wife!

TV preacher Arnold Murray, if I understand him correctly, teaches that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 describe two separate creations: God created one set of human beings in Genesis 1, and another set in Genesis 2.  In this scenario, Cain went to the land of Nod and took a wife there, and she was one of the offspring of the first creation.  But I have problems with this view for two reasons.  First, Genesis 2:5 says that, prior to Adam, there was no man to till the soil.  Why would this be, when God already created human beings in Genesis 1?  Second, Genesis 5 essentially equates Adam—-the man of Genesis 2 who eventually begot Seth—-with the man who was created in God’s image in Genesis 1.

Perhaps there are responses that can be made to my reasons for my dissatisfaction with the argument that Cain married his sister.  Maybe Eve had a daughter (who married Cain) before Cain left, and she was the only child Eve had at that time apart from Cain and Abel.  When this daughter left with Cain, Eve was bereft of seed.  And Eve did not mention her perhaps because Eve didn’t think that daughters were as important as sons.  Regarding my third reason, perhaps Cain’s wife was not mentioned as departing with Cain because Cain was the head of the family.  Similarly, in the story of the akedah in Genesis 22, we read in v 19 that Abraham came down from the mountain, and there is no reference to Isaac coming down too.

Questions About Genesis 1:28-29

Each night, I pray ten minutes before I go to bed, and I decided a few days ago to incorporate Bible reading into that.  Essentially, I will read a passage, and then I will talk about it in my prayer.  I figure that it’s better for me to do that than it is for me to struggle to find things to say, or to talk primarily about my day and my plans (which is not to say that I can’t talk to God about those things).  I may blog about some of my thoughts from those daily quiet times, but I won’t obligate myself to do so.  For one, I don’t want to impose on myself another blogging obligation.  Plus, there are some thoughts that I like to keep personal—-rather than displaying them on the Internet for the public.

What has amazed me about my reading so far is that I have had questions rather than answers.  I was expecting to go through the same-old stories and to say the same-old things about them—-things that I have learned from biblical scholarship and other sources.  Instead, I’ve had questions.

Let me give you an example.  Genesis 1:28-29 states (in the KJV): “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.  And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”

The word translated as “replenish” is rendered as “fill” in many other translations because the root m-l-aleph often relates to filling.  I have two questions (or categories of questions):

1.  So the first man and woman are to fill the earth.  That appears to contradict what I was taught about Genesis, which is that, had Adam and Eve not sinned by eating the forbidden fruit, they would have stayed in the Garden of Eden for all of their lives, as would their descendants.  Is there a contradiction between Genesis 1, in which God at creation tells the man and the woman to fill the earth, and Genesis 2, in which Adam and Eve leave the Garden and inaugurate the process of filling the earth only after their transgression of God’s command?

I realize that many scholars say that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have different creation accounts—-that Genesis 1 is by P and that Genesis 2 is by J (or whoever).  But they disagree about whether or not P knew of J’s creation account and was trying to supplement it, thereby creating a sort of “Fall” story in which human beings fall from a state of being good.  Does P in Genesis 1 manifest any awareness of Genesis 2, in which God appears to intend for humans to obey him and thus be cooped up in a Garden for the rest of their lives?  Or would P think that the transgression was the means by which humans could begin to obey God’s command to fill the earth?

2.  Many maintain that Adam and Eve were to be vegetarians, and that human beings were allowed to eat meat only after the Flood, as a concession to human brutality.  This view makes a degree of sense, for, in Genesis 1, God tells human beings that they can eat plants, without mentioning eating animals.  But God specifically tells humans that they can eat animals in Genesis 9:3.

But here’s my question: What does God mean when he tells the man and the woman to have dominion over fish and fowl?  Why would we want dominion over fish and fowl, except to eat them?  Does God granting the first man and woman dominion over fish and fowl imply that he was allowing them to eat those creatures?

Individuality, Community, and Alienation

I finished Texts and Responses.  I’ll use as my starting-point something that Paul Flohr says on page 222:

“[He is unable] ‘to accept the natural aloneness of the ego.’  He thus seeks union with the world, but it is ‘refused him, because it is not the Thou (das Du) but the I of the entity that he encounters, and…I-ness rejects union.’  ‘The real locus of duality,’ Buber observes, lies in one’s ability to accept the separateness of his ego and to view the world as ‘other than I.’”

I’m not going to pretend that I understand what all of this means.  So are we alienated from the world because we see the world as other than ourselves, or because we do not accept that it is other?

I think that it’s important to acknowledge commonalities with the rest of the world, and also to remember that taking care of the “we” can take care of the “me”.  Many of us have a stake in the community benefiting.  At the same time, it’s good when we can love others even when they are different from us, when we can appreciate individuality.  Can refusing to accept our own uniqueness and individuality alienate us from the rest of the world, rather than bringing us closer to it?  When we cannot accept what is special about ourselves, can we truly appreciate what is special about others?

Hebrews and Animal Sacrifices

The epistle to the Hebrews contends that animal sacrifices cannot take away sin. Why not? In Hebrews 10:1-4, we see its rationale:

“Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who approach. Otherwise, would they not have ceased being offered, since the worshipers, cleansed once for all, would no longer have any consciousness of sin? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sin year after year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (NRSV).

I want to concentrate on the part about animal sacrifices being offered “year after year.” The author of Hebrews wonders: if sin offerings truly cleansed the Israelites of sin, then why did they have to offer them every year on the Day of Atonement? Shouldn’t once be enough? By contrast, v 12 says that “Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins.” Unlike animal sacrifices, Christ doesn’t need to be offered on a continual basis, for his one sacrifice of himself was sufficient to atone for sin.

I don’t entirely understand Hebrews’ reasoning. Just because the Israelites offered animal sacrifices every year, does that show that the sacrifices were ineffective for atonement? Maybe they cleansed the sins of the previous year. But when a new year arrived, so came a fresh batch of sins, and they too had to be removed. Just because a ritual is continually needed, that doesn’t make it ineffective. I need to take a bath on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean the bath doesn’t do its job for the day. Does the bath fail to remove dirt just because I have to do it more than once?

And the same is true in Christianity: sure, we have been cleansed through the sacrifice of Christ, but we still need to ask for forgiveness on a continual basis (Matthew 6:12, 14-15; I John 1:9). Why must we do that, if we’ve been forgiven once and for all? Isn’t continual confession and repentance similar to the regular offering of the animal sacrifices? In both, we have to keep the slate wiped clean.

Hebrews says that animal sacrifices didn’t work because the Israelites were not cleansed once and for all, plus they still had a consciousness of sin even after they had offered them. But isn’t that true of Christians as well? They need to ask for forgiveness on a continual basis, which shows (1.) that they need repeated cleansing, and (2.) that they still have a consciousness of sin.

Of course, Hebrews 8:8-13 is clear that the old covenant by itself was defective because of the sinfulness of the Israelites. That’s why the new covenant is about God writing his laws on people’s hearts: we need a new nature in order to become sinless. The Israelites could offer their sacrifices year-in and year-out, but did that change their sinful nature? If it did, then why did they have to sacrifice sin offerings every single year?

Maybe Hebrews is saying that only Christ can take away sins–in the sense of bringing Christians to a state of actual sinlessness. And, indeed, Hebrews does use such terminology as “perfecting.” Yet, at the same time, Hebrews also seems to say that Christ’s death brings forgiveness (not just practical cleansing from sin) in a way that animal sacrifices do not. Hebrews 10:18 says, “Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin,” which indicates that, in contrast to the Old Covenant sin offerings, Christ’s one sacrifice was sufficient for atonement.

And so I’m back where I started: If Christ’s one sacrifice cleansed Christians of sin once and for all, then why do they need to keep on receiving forgiveness? And how does what Christians do differ from the Israelites’ continual offering of animal sacrifices?

Maybe Hebrews doesn’t hold that Christians need to keep their slate clean. Perhaps it thinks that their slate is already clean–and that it always will be, unless they deliberately leave Christ (Hebrews 6:4-6; 10:26-27). Hebrews is clear that Christians will still sin, so it encourages them that they have a faithful and merciful high priest who is eager to help them (Hebrews 4:15-16). But maybe (unlike Matthew and I John) it doesn’t assume that they need to receive continual forgiveness; rather, as far as Hebrews is concerned, Christians have already been forgiven–once and for all time–and they come to Christ primarily for compassion and aid as they struggle against sin.

Could it be that Matthew and I John resemble Catholics in their view on forgiveness, whereas Hebrews is more like a lot of Protestants on that issue?

My Church on the Nature of Jesus

The priest at the Catholic church that I attend spoke about the nature of Jesus in his last two sermons. There are two issues that I want to discuss:

1. Last Sunday, the priest said that Jesus did not become God; rather, he always was God, is God, and ever shall be God. According to the priest, no one can become God–either one has that specific identity or one does not. For him (and, presumably, for the Catholic Church), divinity is not something that one can earn or obtain through maturity.

I’m not going to get into diverse ideas about Christology, but I do have a question about the priest’s claim that people cannot become God. When I was at DePauw, I took a class about Christianity, and we discussed the Arian controversy. My professor said that one of the slogans of the “orthodox” camp went like this: “God became as we are, that we might become as God is.” What exactly did orthodox Christians mean when they said that humans can become like God? Do they mean looking like God, or resembling God in goodness, or being like God in immortality, or what exactly?

Indeed, I John 3:1-3 also says that Christians have the hope of becoming like God. It says, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure” (NRSV). What does this passage mean?

Another point: As my readers may know, I grew up in an offshoot of the Worldwide Church of God, which taught that Christians will become divine beings as part of the “God family.” In The Journal, a newspaper that publishes articles by people in the Church of God movement, someone argued that there are similarities between the Worldwide Church of God’s traditional positions and those of the Eastern Orthodox Church. One example he presented was that both believe humans can become God (or God-like). Is this statement an accurate characterization of the Eastern Orthodox Church?

2. On New Year’s Day, the Feast of the Circumcision, the priest said that Jesus was all-knowing at the time of his circumcision. He disputed the claim that Jesus’ circumcision was meaningless because he did not remember it as an adult. For him, Jesus assumed pain throughout his life, from his birth to his circumcision, and he was fully aware of his pain during that time. The priest contended that Jesus’ awareness even as an infant was due to his divine nature, which is aware and knowledgeable.

What the priest said reminded me of the Infancy gospels, in which baby Jesus actually talks in complete sentences (and child Jesus can get rather vicious!). I’m not sure if I’d go as far as the priest did, since Philippians 2 seems to present Jesus as laying aside several divine prerogatives in becoming a man. There are Christians who believe as I do, but those who say they cling to the “orthodox” position assert that Jesus had all of the divine attributes throughout his life. For them, he even had omnipresence, but he chose not to use it (I think that’s their contention). It’s interesting how creeds these days are as much a test of orthodoxy as the Bible in conservative Christian circles.