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An Ongoing Discussion about Christ and Culture in a Post-Postmodern Context.
or
Resurrection-Shaped Stories from the Emmaus Road.

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(about the book)
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- N.T. Wright

(about the blog)
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- Michael Spencer, a.k.a. The Internet Monk

Are We Called to be Traitors?

Are we called, by Christ, to be traitors?

The short answer is "Yes!" And the question to us, 21st century Christians, is this: Have we turned traitor to our central beliefs and causes by our discipleship? Or have we simply incorporated our former ways into this system called "Christianity?"

Just look at what Jesus called some folks to do, and try to grasp it from their perspective. He called people to turn from the core principals with which they had defined their entire lives. He called the religious leaders to rethink and reject the entire system of beliefs on which their lives were based. Saul of Tarsus turned traitor. As did Matthew the tax collector. Those who had committed their lives to be the heads of their families, to them he said they must now hate their families.

And a million other examples.

Jesus was executed for his message. As were most of the early disciples, and thousands of His followers in the first few centuries. Executed! Not embraced; not loved. Executed!!!

Look at it like this. And I've written of this before, but I think it's worth repeating. Even the most skeptical scholars would admit that there lived a man named Jesus in first century Palestine who went around Galilee asking people to metanoeíte kaí pisteúete en toó euangelíoo, “repent and believe the good news.” For countless centuries, this was translated in Latin as “do penance and believe the good news.” This translation colored the Church’s teachings, starting with requiring confessors to say penitential prayers and performing penitential acts of charity, and then spiraling out of control to where people could actually purchase a loved one’s entrance into heaven.

Martin Luther re-examined the meaning of metanoeíte and found that it did not mean “do penance” but had everything to do with a personal, spiritual turning away from sin, with a sinner saying “I’m sorry” to God and rejecting his or her previous sinful life. The consequences of this translation were, as we know, massive.

Luther was right, to a degree. We should be eternally grateful for his insight and his courage in shedding new light on this crucial term, the mistranslation of which had been the impetus for Church teachings that ranged from wrong yet harmless to fundamentally misguided and seriously detrimental. Metanoeíte does have an internal, spiritual component, and the Church and the world needed reminding of that. But does the personal, spiritual meaning catch the full gist of the word? Not if we go back and look at how it was used by others in the same part of the world during the same period of history and with the same cultural background as those to whom Jesus spoke.

The works of the Jewish historian Josephus are an immensely rich source for anyone who wants to understand the social and cultural context of second-temple Judaism, or life in the first-century Roman Empire, for that matter. Josephus offers information about individuals, groups, customs, and geographical places that were within precisely the same context as Jesus’ contemporaries. He is widely considered the most important extra-biblical source for studies of immediate post-temple Judaism and, thus, the context of early Christianity, not because of his political or theological perspective, but because of the social, cultural, geographical, and historical setting in which his works were written.

In his autobiography, Josephus describes a time when he was the leader of a small army, and another group had tried to kill him. Josephus captures the enemy leader and says to him these amazing words (astounding when viewed from a twenty-first-century Christian perspective, but probably not from a first-century Jewish one): metanoesein kai pistos emoi genesesthai, “repent and believe in me.” Josephus is not asking for a spiritual conversion, nor does he simply mean “turn away from your former erroneous beliefs and actions (i.e., “sins”) and you’ll be all right.” He is certainly not offering the brigand a new system of salvation, or telling him how he can go to heaven after he dies, or claiming some form of divinity. He was saying, “Forget about your former ways, your beliefs and principles, and the faith with which you once acted upon them, and follow my agenda.”

In other words, he was asking the rebel commander to turn traitor!!!

So the question, again. Have we, by our commitment to Jesus, turned traitor toward anything in our lives? Do we proclaim or do anything that may get us executed, or even fired from our jobs, thrown out of our social circles, expelled from school?

Or are we simply having nice, respectful conversations with people.

Are we doing something wrong?

Talk to me.

Grace and Peace,
Raffi


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2 Comments:

  1. Kent Pletcher said...
     

    Nice thread!

    The church today is definitely not turning traitor on the world (in the sense you use it here). In fact, we are wearing world camoflouge and blending in.

    Pray for a God-given reformation!

  2. Anonymous said...
     

    I wrote a comment that was so long it morphed into a post.

    Your post was very helpful thank you.

    Tim

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Parables of a Prodigal World by Raffi Shahinian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.