Dead Man Blogging has a post wondering how we can mange to get along as Christians in the online world. He wonders how Romans 16:17-18; 2 Thessalonians 3:6; 1 Timothy 1:3-7; Titus 3:10-11 and Matthew 18:15-17 apply to those of us who know each other only by screen name and web address. It’s a great question, and one which we frequently fail at in real life, let alone in the anonymity of the web. From the content of his post and comment and the title of ‘Divisive Men’, he sound like one who has been hurt and does not know what to do next.
I’m relatively new to blogging, although I’ve been posting online at various forums for a while. It is my contention that technology does not change basic Christian principals but that the Christian principals must be applied to technology. In this case, the technology makes the possibility for hurt much more prominent. In real life, we can read each other’s body language and tone of voice. This communicates both ways, we understand the one speaking better and often the reactions to our words speak volumes about what was heard vs. what we meant. Online there is none of that, and often what we type is put out for all to see hastily and we don’t go back for several hours or days to see what was posted next.
I think there’s a more fundamental truth at work here that is deeper than how to blog like Christ. Christians tend to jump up and down over many things. Gay marriage, divorce, violence in movies, materialism, home schooling, creationism, abortion – we all have our pet peeves as disciples. I think that in our passion for these issues we often miss a big one; how we treat each other. In our jumping up and down we trample over those who disagree, sometimes non-christians, sometimes our own brothers. Didn’t Jesus say that we would be recognized by how we love, not our stand on the issues? (John 13:34-35) Look at 1 Corinthians 13:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

Prophecy, insight, knowledge, faith, generosity, and self sacrifice are all worthless without love. Love (patience, kindness, humility, politeness, selflessness, forgiveness) is perfection.
I think that Matthew 18:15-17 is the key verse here in dealing with these things in love. It is to me the foundational scripture on resolving conflict in the N.T. and ought to be the blueprint on it on our lives, including online. Notice how it is structured to protect the sinner from public disgrace. Privacy is paramount, giving the offender ample opportunity to repent before exposing him. Only the most determined to sin, after the confrontation of 3-4 men, will be challenged publicly. In the same way, if sinned against anywhere, including online, we must try to resolve those things privately first (by email) before chastising someone publicly in our own blog or the comments of another.

Speaking of the Thinklings, there was a post there that has stuck with me ever since I heard it. It was a light hearted post, but because of where I was spiritually at the time, it really hit home in a deep way. It was called Ewbu. When I first read it (back in November I guess!) my church as a whole and me personally were coming to the realization that we had put tried to put a narrow definition on discipleship and anyone out side that definition wasn’t ‘right’. It was a gut wrenching time of introspection and a real challenging to my faith. As I came to grips with the broader realm of discipleship and ways of looking at the world, I came across ewbu, or ‘Everybody’s Weird But Us.’ In a light hearted post, bird at Thinklings drove home the very real idea that we all see the world differently, but that’s almost always OK. In fact, I’ve learned that embracing someone else’s ‘weirdness’ helps me grow. As my friend VirusDoc put it once:

Perhaps this god is best viewed as a sort of mosaic–each individual can perceive only a single tile, and maybe the vaguest outline of the tiles near it. To see the whole picture, you have to get together, compare notes, and piece it into a whole. Maybe, from that perspective, He is not hidden at all. He is just larger than any of our singular fields of view.

The way to get that wider view is to seriously consider others viewpoints without judgement.

Gary at Country Keepers had an intersting post the other day on gay marriage. Gary takes on an article at a pro gay marriage site by someone who claims to be a Christian. While I agree with Gary’s conclusions on the relevance of scripture despite technological advances, I’m not sure I’m with him on how he gets there. But that’s a post for another day. What I’d really like to talk about is the article that Gary refers to. It’s a great example, I think, of the power of what I call Intellectual Inertia.
What I mean by that is we all have convictions and opinions on a variety of things. What comes with that is the desire to believe that we are right in our opinions, intellectual inertia. That’s why once we buy something, it’s the best one available, no matter how good it actually is. If we really want something, we can convince ourselves that we can afford it whether we can or not. A few months before we bought our house, we signed a contract for a new house with a local builder. We had it all worked out; it would be fine even though it was $35,000 more than the house we ultimately bought. We would have been in deep financial doo-doo if it weren’t for some very good, and very persistent, friends who worked through the numbers repeatedly until we ‘got it’. The desire to believe was powerful and blinding.
This desire can apply to our faith as well. We want to believe that our church is the right church and we have a lock on what the Bible says on a subject. But before you spout your opinions or even before you look up the scriptures, ask your self, “What do I want to believe about this?” Be honest, because only when you’ve identified your bias can you begin to honestly read the scriptures to discover the truth. As Jesus said over and over and over and over, “he who has ears, let him hear.” The challenge is to have ears that truly hear and eyes that truly see.
Let’s take the article in question. The writer’s main point is that the current definition of ‘Biblical Marriage’ is contrived to match what is acceptable by modern society and that actual, Biblical Marriage is something that society would reject. He set out to study what biblical marriage really was and came up with the following 12 Biblical ‘Principals’ of marriage:

1 – Marriage consists of one man and one or more women
2 – Nothing prevents a man from taking on concubines in addition to the wife or wives he may already have
3 – A man might chose any woman he wants for his wife – Provided only that she is not already another man’s wife or his [half-]sister, nor the mother or the sister of a woman who is already his wife. The concept of a woman giving her consent to being married is foreign to the Biblical mindset.
4 – If a woman cannot be proven to be a virgin at the time of marriage, she shall be stoned
5 РA rapist must marry his victim РUnless she was already a fianc̩, in which case he should be put to death if he raped her in the country, but both of them killed if he raped her in town
6 – If a man dies childless, his brother must marry the widow
7 – Women marry the man of their father’s choosing
8 – Women are the property of their father until married and their husband after that
9 – The value of a woman might be approximately seven years’ work
10 – Inter-faith marriages are prohibited
11 – Divorce is forbidden
12 – Better to not get married at all – Although marriage is not a sin

To call these Biblical ‘principals’ is a stretch of the term in the very least. Some of them are actual principals, or teachings, of the Bible (#4, #5, #6, #10 and #11, although only #11 is a New testament teaching.) Some are examples of bad, although technically acceptable, ideas (the bigamy mentioned in #1) or just plain sin (#2 – As far as I can tell, God never sanctioned concubines, which would seem to be adultery, although many prominent men of the Bible had them.) Many are examples of differences in the culture of the day and now (#2, #3, #6, #7, #8 and #10). Others are simply his attempt to show that the Bible does not hold marriage in the high regard that it is usually portrayed. (#1 – I don’t think a marriage can be between a single man and multiple women, although a man may have many marriages. I don’t think that women were banned from polygamy, they were just smarter. #9 – At least he put the word ‘might’ in there.) The facts of the Bible show marriage always to be between one man and one woman, sometimes men have multiple marriages and in the past those marriages have been arranged, but that is not a Biblical requirement.
It seems that Mr. Roste went into this study with an end in minds and therefore the truth of the scriptures was of no use to him. What scares me about this is not that there are others like him willing to make the Bible say what they want. No what scares me is that I can be just like him. I get attached to these ideas and I believe that I am right and then I go out looking for scripture to back me up, not really asking the questions that lead to truth but only those that lead to the conclusion that I’ve already made. It scares me because our Lord warns us where that road of pride ultimately leads:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ – Matthew 7:21-23

So I’ve learned to question everything, especially my own motives.

VirusDoc has a post today on the California supreme court decision that catholic charities must include birth control in the health insurance coverage for employees. There are a couple of things that bother me about this story.
The first is the Catholic Charities stance of not allowing birth control prescriptions to be covered under their health plans. Are all of their employees Catholic, or are even all Catholics of the same mind in this? I would imagine not, so they are forcing their agenda on people of other faiths or opinions. The argument goes, and Eric made it in his blog, that they believe it to be offensive to God and it offends them to pay for someone else to use birth control. I find this kind of stance to be unjustifiable. No where in scripture can you point to where God says, unequivocally, that birth control is sin. Can you make an argument for it? Sure. Can you defend a position against birth control with scripture? Yep. But I can defend my position that there is no law against it with scriptures as well. So who’s right? I would say that if it’s important to you and you have deep convictions about it, by all means don’t do it. In fact, the Bible does teach that it would be sin for you to violate your conscience (Romans 14). but in the same chapter it teaches that for you to bind your opinion on me, on disputable matters, would be sin as well. What bothers me here is not that Catholics (assuming they are all of one mind on this) believe that birth control is a sin, it’s that they teach it as factual and force that opinion on others. This goes against the scriptures, Romans 14 specifically, and the spirit of love and freedom that is the New Testament message.
The second thing that bothers me is the idea that birth control is a right, and therefore must be guaranteed in legislation. VirusDoc writes:

The other aspect of this story that I find interesting is that the CA courts seem to be coming from the standpoint that contraceptives are a fundamental human right and a medical necessity. I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, but I’ve started examining the assumptions behind our country’s widespread use of contraceptives a little more carefully since I started exploring Catholicism.
Is birth control really a fundamental human right? Is it really medically necessary?

Perhaps I should clarify my trouble with this. I think that birth control is a fundamental right. We have the right to choose when we have a baby. But we have the most reliable means in and among our selves – abstinence. We don’t need pills, surgery or condoms (BTW – What to Catholics think about condoms?) to control our procreation, they only make it easier. Frankly, the Catholic endorsed rhythm method is reasonably reliable, if you’re disciplined (potentially big if). So to me the right to birth control has nothing to do with health insurance, you can have one without the other.

One more link from Douglas Jacoby before I call it a night. He had a strong recommendation for an Apologetics site. www.DoesGodExist.org is run by his friend John Clayton:

John Clayton is a member of the Church of Christ in South Bend, Indiana. He is also a scientist and former second-generation atheist, came to believe in God while attempting to prove that the Bible contradicts known scientific facts. Instead of disproving the Bible, he found it to be absolutely reliable. An award-winning science teacher, Clayton has earned national prominence for his knowledge and skill in dealing with matters of faith and science.

Good article about using greek in our Bible studies at DouglasJacoby.com. He advocates a rather high level of study for those who want to read adn study the Bible in the original Greek, and for good reason:

It is simply not realistic that a Greek scholar will be produced through dabbling, any more than that one can determine the answer to a calculus problem without having gone through the prerequisite steps: basic arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, analytic geometry, derivation and integration. Does this seem right?
As one preacher quipped, “I know just enough Greek to be dangerous.” As Alexander Pope quipped, “A little learning is a dang’rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain; And drinkly largely sobers us again.” Pope is right; and the languages of sacred scripture are not fit subjects for dabbling. In other words, if we are going to learn Greek, let’s “drink largely”—go for it!—aiming for excellence.

I’ve often grown weary of those who insist on using the Greek often in their quoting and teaching of scripture. As if God was not capable of providing us with a suitable translation of scripure in English, and we must understand the original language to understand the Bible. Certainly there are pitfalls in any translation, but it seems that the core of Christianity and the heart of God is clear.