Pardon Me, Your Disdain for Biblical Context Is Showing

 “Foreigners who live in your land will gain more and more power, while you gradually lose yours. They will have money to lend you, but you will have none to lend them. In the end, they will be your rulers." Deuteronomy 28:43-44

I'm seeing this more and more as a meme to indicate that foreigners should be unwelcome as if this passage has anything remotely to do with the idea of "illegal aliens." 

Let's start with biblical context. Here's the whole passage (long but necessary):

Blessings for Obedience

28 If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. 2 All these blessings will come on you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God:

3 You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country.

4 The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock—the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.

5 Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed.

6 You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out.

7 The Lord will grant that the enemies who rise up against you will be defeated before you. They will come at you from one direction but flee from you in seven.

8 The Lord will send a blessing on your barns and on everything you put your hand to. The Lord your God will bless you in the land he is giving you.

9 The Lord will establish you as his holy people, as he promised you on oath, if you keep the commands of the Lord your God and walk in obedience to him. 10 Then all the peoples on earth will see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they will fear you. 11 The Lord will grant you abundant prosperity—in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your ground—in the land he swore to your ancestors to give you.

12 The Lord will open the heavens, the storehouse of his bounty, to send rain on your land in season and to bless all the work of your hands. You will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. 13 The Lord will make you the head, not the tail. If you pay attention to the commands of the Lord your God that I give you this day and carefully follow them, you will always be at the top, never at the bottom. 14 Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today, to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them.

Curses for Disobedience

15 However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on you and overtake you:

16 You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.

17 Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed.

18 The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks.

19 You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.

20 The Lord will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him.[a] 21 The Lord will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess. 22 The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish. 23 The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. 24 The Lord will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed.

25 The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth. 26 Your carcasses will be food for all the birds and the wild animals, and there will be no one to frighten them away. 27 The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, festering sores and the itch, from which you cannot be cured. 28 The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindness and confusion of mind. 29 At midday you will grope about like a blind person in the dark. You will be unsuccessful in everything you do; day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no one to rescue you.

30 You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and rape her. You will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit. 31 Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will eat none of it. Your donkey will be forcibly taken from you and will not be returned. Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and no one will rescue them. 32 Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand. 33 A people that you do not know will eat what your land and labor produce, and you will have nothing but cruel oppression all your days. 34 The sights you see will drive you mad. 35 The Lord will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet to the top of your head.

36 The Lord will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your ancestors. There you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone. 37 You will become a thing of horror, a byword and an object of ridicule among all the peoples where the Lord will drive you.

38 You will sow much seed in the field but you will harvest little, because locusts will devour it. 39 You will plant vineyards and cultivate them but you will not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them. 40 You will have olive trees throughout your country but you will not use the oil, because the olives will drop off. 41 You will have sons and daughters but you will not keep them, because they will go into captivity. 42 Swarms of locusts will take over all your trees and the crops of your land.

43 The foreigners who reside among you will rise above you higher and higher, but you will sink lower and lower. 44 They will lend to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the head, but you will be the tail.

45 All these curses will come on you. They will pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the Lord your God and observe the commands and decrees he gave you. 46 They will be a sign and a wonder to you and your descendants forever. 47 Because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity, 48 therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the Lord sends against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.

49 The Lord will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand, 50 a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young. 51 They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or olive oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined. 52 They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the Lord your God is giving you.

53 Because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you. 54 Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, 55 and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities. 56 The most gentle and sensitive woman among you—so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot—will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter 57 the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For in her dire need she intends to eat them secretly because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of your cities.

58 If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law, which are written in this book, and do not revere this glorious and awesome name—the Lord your God— 59 the Lord will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses. 60 He will bring on you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you. 61 The Lord will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disaster not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed. 62 You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the Lord your God. 63 Just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess.

64 Then the Lord will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods—gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your ancestors have known. 65 Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. 66 You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life. 67 In the morning you will say, “If only it were evening!” and in the evening, “If only it were morning!”—because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sights that your eyes will see. 68 The Lord will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should never make again. There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.

So... the context for the verse is a judgment from God akin to those outlined in the books of the prophets. It's a warning to follow God or face punishment. Part of that punishment will be political defeat and having strangers take over your power and leave you powerless. This is all God's doing, not the work of foreigners. The foreigners are only the tool used by God to punish the Jews for disobedience. 

Therefore, using this verse to warn against foreigners and intimating that it is their nature and character to take over is not only bad biblical study, but it is also revealing your willingness to prooftext scripture in order to back up your political/cultural/sociological beliefs. So, to be fair, it's also bad Christianity. 

If anything, it is a warning to obey God, not to fear foreigners. "The Lord will send on you curses..." (from bad crops to rape to theft to all kinds of things) In other words, fear God, not the foreigner. 

Now, all this applies and matters only to those who believe in Christianity, so if you are not a believer, I'm well aware of the insider-ness of these arguments. But for those who do believe, the point is you need to do their homework better to understand what your references are actually saying. 

Now... why God would include/allow things like rape and worshipping other gods as part of a punishment is another discussion altogether. ;) 

#DoBetter #BeBetter

Deconstruction and Orthodoxy

Shared this meme on Facebook earlier today and it let to a nice little conversation with a friend. This friend and I sit on differing sides of many theology issues now, but he's dear to me and crucial (whether he would want to embrace that or not) for my own strength to dig deeper into scripture and eventually deconstruct and end up in a Christian Progressivism. 

Several of my friends online responded and shared their journeys. 

Friend: What I find interesting in these comments however, is the way Paul's work is often ignored. We literally have a large portion of the NT written to church leaders who managed their churches in bad ways. This is nothing new. But I also believe much of the motivation behind deconstruction is also a wilful dismissal of Scripture people don't like because it doesn't fit within a contextual understanding of modern culture and appetites for what is considered "good". But that's a discussion for another day.

Me: Can't argue with that much except to reframe that same idea on the other foot, so to speak. I think one of the things driving folks away from evangelicalism is the church's willful dismissal of Scripture that doesn't fit its American nationalist and capitalistic (read greed in many cases) and theologically conservative political understanding of modern American culture and appetites for what is considered "good." But, as you say, that's a discussion for another day.

For me, I find it easier to follow and understand the words of Paul best after I focus on having the character of Christ first and foremost. Let him who has ears to hear live the beatitudes and then find their character in the fruit of the Spirit.

Friend: I get that. And it's much better to exemplify the character of Christ when you are in community with people of all opinions, political persuasions, churched and unchurched alike. I teach Sunday School, I am reformed, and I am an inerrantist. But I also know my job is to love and serve people, and it is the Holy Spirit's job to convict people of sin. Not mine. I do not want to be held accountable to that. I'm am unqualified for that work, and happy to not have that burden put upon me.

Me: Sadly, what I see in a lot (maybe most in my experience) is a homogenous opinion.

And then further down in the discussion...

Me: I haven't deconstructed away from my faith, just away from a certain understanding and practice of it. The biggest issue with that is that most churches in my area aren't welcoming to people who don't follow that particular understanding, and believe them tantamount to heretics if their search through Scripture leads them toward a more Progressive understanding of faith.

Friend: At what point are going to have a transparent discussion where "particular understandings" begin to stand in opposition to orthodoxy? Forget about disagreements on morality for a moment... we're talking about severe disagreements re: affirmation of the virgin birth, understanding of what is sin, effectiveness and experience of atonement, and the standard from which this is derived in Scripture. Because the minute you begin to accept that some Scripture is wrong or "in error" you've begun to lean on something outside of Scripture to become the benchmark of truth, either willingly or unwillingly. The essential idea of "progression" is change... and what is never answered is, in regards to Christianity, to the progressive, what is changing? Is it God? Is that the world is changing and the church needs to change along with it? I would love an explanation that fits within orthodoxy, rather than in direct opposition to it? Or maybe the idea of orthodoxy itself and the rejection of it is the catalyst to deconstruction? And if that's the case, then that just sounds like chaos to me... which is more a declaration of my own lack of imagination in this regard.

Me: I prefer the term "mystery" to "chaos." 😉

And there are times when orthodoxy itself is locked into erroneous understandings of the scripture it looks to. Salem witch trials. Defending slavery. The time of the reformers who needed to be an affront to their contemporary orthodoxy in order to explore the mystery that would lead them to a more accurate/better/spirit-filled (choose your adjective) understanding and create a new orthodoxy.

When orthodoxy becomes locked in stone and cannot be challenged, it can become its own type of prison to the work of the Spirit. Who's to say the orthodoxy of Luther and Calvin is the same as the orthodoxy of the modern American church? There are certainly differences where they would be considered wrong for their more God-focused ideas on the irrevocable calling or unlosable salvation. Does that make modern churches that don't hold those tenets unorthodox or does that make the reformers unorthodox? Both look to Scripture to build their theology. Or that the orthodoxy espoused by Sproul and Ravi Zacharias are going to be the end-all, be-all orthodoxy of 100 years from now? Lots of things have changed the way we interpret Scripture, from culture to science to politics (English kings, most notoriously), and we will continue to do so.

I submit that one can hold Scripture up to scrutiny and being "God-breathed" but not be bound to current or even older or newer interpretations of it based on the work of the Spirit and the increasing knowledge we attain through science and life.

Music Fest

My old bands, 22FIVE and Reign are now re-uploaded with fixed recordings on your favorite streaming music platforms. Take a listen:

22FIVE:
Apple Music

Spotify
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Reign:
Apple Music
Spotify
Amazon Music