How the Bible Demonstrates the Problem of Witness Testimony

The problem of witness testimony is of biblical proportions. Truly. We can see this in more than one place in the scriptures. There were at least two possible ways witness testimony was considered an essential activity in the commerce of ancient Judea, and there are two problems with testimony that bear a striking resemblance to the problems we still face today. Among the ways, testimony was considered vital can be seen in two examples in the New Testament.

In the first case, Jesus asserts that in the presence of two or more people gathered in his name, he is present (Matt 18:20). One may surmise that it was almost holy practice to have multiple witness attestation. We can look to the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus affirms that proper conduct among individuals who have a quarrel includes the intermediation of two or more witness to support or refute the credibility of a suspect’s charge (Matt 18:16).

A second case was that testimony later served an apologetic purpose and could be considered a kind of holy activity because witnesses were so vital in establishing the truth of a claim, even one claimed from heaven. Paul suggests that over 500 people who could testify to the veracity of Jesus’ resurrection were still living. (1 Corinthians 15:6) The apologetic of Jesus’ resurrection was therefore bolstered under these conditions because a witness was only as good as his word.

On the other end of the dynamic, the New Testament demonstrates two problems that continue to be of major concern for modern judiciaries. These are the number of witnesses and the memory of those witnesses. The first example comes from the crucifixion of Christ. It reads: So the crowd of people who stood by and heard it were saying that it had thundered; others were saying, "An angel has spoken to Him." (John 12:29) The nature of witness testimony is inconsistency.

Experts have long known that two people watching the same event transpire can conclude different accounts, sometimes radically different. This was made clear to me this past week as I watched the Michael Brown trial. Witness testimony has changed multiple times and in the collective of witnesses, no two testimonies are the same. These “small details” can affect larger ones, especially where the prosecution of details is concerned. Finally, there is the problem of memory. Consider the account attributed to Paul in the Book of Acts that changes. The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. (Acts 9:7) Now those who were with me saw a light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me. (Acts 22:9) In this case, Paul testifies first that the individuals at first heard a voice from heaven but later tells a crowd that they saw a light only.

All of this shows us that even among the most credible witnesses, small details can shift in one’s story over time. Even an author writing down his words is subject to this problem! And so such examples continue to show the problematic venture of infallibility and divine inspiration as it concerns good biblical exegesis. But I think this makes the biblical story more real to me. It remains a human compendium fraught with problems. We are linked not by its claim to heavenly living, but by its human character.

Free Will as a Moral Good and the Reality of Infant Baptism

Here's a thought, something I've been thinking about as I am considering theodicy in the context of the Holocaust. I put it out there for reflection, contemplation, and feedback.

The premise that free will is a moral good is a well-known feature in Western thinking about theodicy (the justification of God's action/inaction in the world). This is an important understanding in mainline Christianity, yet many Christians still baptize infants against their will claiming something to the effect that infants haven't yet the ability to decide for themselves.

If infants only have a kind of "potential" free will that hasn't yet manifest, so that forced baptism is not considered a violation of their actual free will, how is this qualitatively distinct from situations in which Christians do not support abortion because the fetus is a potential human? On the one hand, free will is denied when it is potential, but a fetus is not denied because its humanity is potential.

HIs Blood Be Upon Us - An Alternate Reading of Jewish Responsa

Recently as I worked on research relating to theological themes in the Holocaust, I came to an all-important verse used in the polemic literature against Jews. As I considered this question more broadly to the Jewish response to their own extermination, the reaction of the Jews clarified a bit and helped me think about the problem in a way that was more genuinely Jewish than Christian.

A typical Jewish response to Jesus that is exploited in the literature comes immediately prior to Jesus’ passion. As the Sanhedrin battled over the person of Jesus, the high priest Caiaphas is reported to have said: "You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” (John 11:50). And so through the lens of two thousand years of Christian exegesis, this verse has been interpreted as a way of punishing Jewish malevolence towards Christians. Most notoriously, it was impetus in charging the Jews with an admission of cowardice, as neglecting their own, and as a result setting the sword between Jews and Christians. Though ancients approximated this idea, it found violent new life beginning with Martin Luther, until it crested into an evil that was used as justification in the Holocaust for the extermination of 6 million Jews. An important reevaluation of this verse, however, is helpful in light of what I call a Jewish ethics of survival.

Unlike the theological interpretation that sees Jews as cowering in an antagonistic role, one possible alternate explanation was the Jews’ own keen awareness of their covenant with God, a point that had nothing to do with Jesus. In their own narrative framework, acts of disobedience had a way of punishing the entire people and putting everyone at risk. The placing of Jewish halakhic thinking above an ethics of survival may have been ideologically implausible given historical circumstances. When one considers that martyrdom among Jews for the sake of higher ideals was rare and was opposed by such figures as Maimonides during Almohad rule or by Buber who confronted Gandhi on non-violent resistance, dying for one’s ideals hardly ever became a single, solitary act by one pious Jew, but was an unwelcomed event often extended to all Jews in the form of massacres. The Jewish understanding that God is a god of history meant acting within history as a means of personal preservation that honored this covenant relationship.

Persisting in this covenant required living in this world. Life in the world to come is hardly emphasized in Jewish theology the way it has come to be understood in Christian theology and one might surmise this is a direct result of the Jews being a people constantly threatened by extinction so that life itself and the fight for life become
acts of faith.

The Changing Theology of the Eschatological Temple in Christianity

Recently I found an older book that I’m very much enjoying in Post-Apostolic studies.

John Chrysostom and the Jews by Robert L. Wilken talks about the life of the golden-mouthed pastor during his time in Antioch and his confrontations with the Jewish population. One of the more interesting claims by Wilken is the fact that Chrysostom saw the influence of Jews in the city as a pervasive threat.

Upon the arrival of Julian the Apostate in Christian history, the threat of his rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem threatened the theological equilibrium that occupied the world of Antiochian Christians; namely, that the destruction of the temple, which was predicted by Christ, was a direct result of the punishment orchestrated by God on the Jews who killed Christ. On page 130, he writes, “In the Christian mind, the attempt to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem was a profound attack on the truth of Christianity.”

It started me thinking about the reality of prophecy and contemporary Christians, where the keepers of the covenant tend to be the ones of Evangelical Fundamentalists who subscribe to dispensational theology.

While the majority of Christians do not work a literal third temple into their eschatologies, the dispensationalists who have made interpreting the mysterious apocalyptic literature of the New Testament a cottage industry (Jack van Impe, Hal Lindsay, John Hagee, or Tim LaHaye) have an entire narrative to go along with it. The past in which the rebuilding of the Temple was considered an act that could disprove the reality of the Christian witness was re-appropriated as an important plotline of the eschatological story. Now, the rebuilding of the Temple is seen as an act of spiritual defiance and apotheosis, not to disprove the Christian witness, but one that moves the action towards its final culminating act: the confrontation between Satan and God. In this temple, dispensationalists believe the anti-Christ sets himself up as God.

This engagement with 2 Thessalonians 2:4 is often melded as an appendage of the Revelation narrative. Since this epistle is spurious and considered one of the latest, it is interesting that the idea of God’s temple still gains traction, since its writing comes after the destruction of the second temple. Unlike the temple’s destruction claimed by Jesus, which is often accused of vaticinium ex eventu (or prophecy after the fact) since the temple was thought to have been destroyed before the writing of the gospel, 2 Thessalonians actually avoids this problem. So we are left to wonder, what this temple might be. Of course, because the identity of this mysterious temple is unresolved, it remains open season for biblical interpreters.

It’s always quite illuminating, but with every religion the theological outline though so unalterably God’s holy and unchanging revelation, shifts and changes based upon new information, new social situations, new conditions, and new attitudes.

Billboard Wars

There’s a war going on outside…

And it all started when a billboard went up on I-895 asking one simple question: Who is Jesus?

Soon after that, traveling down I-95 South through Baltimore, an even larger billboard had the words simply: “Got Jesus? Got Islam.” And so the gauntlet had been thrown down , now a full-blown billboard war of competing religious affinities is about to explode between South I-95 and North I-895.

Advocates for Jesus are from the Christian Aid Ministries, a group of self-described Amish, Mennonite, and Anabaptist groups that have a campaign according to their website to put up billboards in every state. Funny, however, the first two groups don’t get around to preach in urban areas much. I wonder if they’ll put their mouth where their sign is and come down to the Pulaski highway corridor and see what people think of their sign. Out of touch with culture, out of touch with people, and now out of touch with their own evangelism, it is this kind of vicarious evangelism always bugs me.

I have no idea who the Muslims are at this point, and quite frankly I don’t understand their sign, unless to say that there is a variation of Jesus (Isa) in their tradition as well. This sign did not go over well with the CAM group, at least I am speculating here, because a new sign has gone up. Where the old sign asked if you have Jesus, the new sign up today tells us bluntly “Jesus is the only way to life” showing a bloody depiction of Jesus on the cross. I can’t wait to see what’s next, but considering the very real problems and tensions in the world, with Palestinians and Israelis fighting again, seeing these kinds of doctrinal war distractions going on is a bit mind-numbing.

Some Descriptions of Biblical Authority

When one thinks of authority, all sorts of images come to mind. When one thinks of the authority of the scripture, there are usually three. I would call these the absolute authority model, the provisional authority model, and the limited-authority model. The absolute authority model is most commonly connected to passages like 1 Timothy 2:15 or Jesus’ proclamation that not one jot or tittle will pass from the law (Matthew 5:18) (although this is quite inexact because it attempts to retroactively include the New Testament. The idea that scripture is absolutely morally binding opens all kinds of issues, but those proponents who take up this view usually want to say something about the relationship between God and the text. Part of this is that the authority that one hears in the words of Moses, John the Baptist, Paul, or Jesus comes from God. But because we do not know for certain what was said, the only way to make such a claim stick is to consider the text authoritative. It is actually more important that the writers and not their subjects are inspired to speak authoritatively because these witnesses (whether to the subjects themselves or their stories) are what keep the book relevant. Fundamentalists and Evangelicals usually inhabit this world, which makes up roughly 15% of the entire Christian community, according to the most recent Pew Research Forum data. Those who find themselves in the provisional-authority tend to be liberals who want to remain in some way in touch with their religious communities or with Evangelicals who tend to be a bit more subversive. This model is best described as one in which the person who approaches the scripture does so not as supplicant but as part of the story. They tend to accept scripture as a sacred and holy manifestation of an encounter between God and his people, but the realities of its transmission history, the many typographical and contextual errors between manuscripts, the differing internal theologies of the Bible’s writers, and the differences in interpretations that form the bulk of philosophical and ideological disagreements in the communities place the bible in a very human context. Looking outward as well, those in such communities see the same patterns in other religious communities where divine inspiration and authority must be set in the context of very similar problems. This does not mean that the Bible’s authority is provisional in the sense that one deems when it is in his best interest to engage it or not, but rather that one engages it suggests that its authority is in the reception histories of the communities who participate. Authority is not about doling out commandments that one understands it is his obligation to receive, but about engaging them. The limited authority model is similar in some ways to the provisional authority model in that it also sees the human community as being the interpretative filter through which order is achieved. But the position here tends to completely filter out the divine and instead focuses on the ways the text has been transmitted as a human project barring any investigation of their faithfulness to the spirit of that encounter. This tends to be more classically liberal. This group is of course also squared out by the non-religionists who see all religious history as an imaginative hope and wish for life eternal. The authority is limited because although it is denied, it is still about the human community, a part of it that in the course of history and evolution still represents the community, for better or worse. It therefore acknowledges not its faithfulness to God but its faithfulness as a part of history to the genuine history of humanity.

A Few Observations on Tradition and Progress

I've been thinking a little bit about the interaction between tradition and progress. Although I don't like the word progress as it sounds mechanistic and artifical I think it best captures the move to more functional "open structures" in our theological relationships. By open structures, I want to suggest the application of our own values alongside others that are firmly in place yet open-sourced to constant modification. They remain ours yet everyone's. Of the two: some short observations: Tradition looks inward. It thrives on a principle of conservation. It holds back to ensure self-preservation. It breeds suspicion and fears anything that does not reflect its own energy. It feigns outwardness so long as there is nothing ventured. It sees covenant as doctrine instead of relationship. It loves itself in order to distinguish it from what it is not. It therefore requires the same love and when it does not receive it, it cannot initiate. It only reciprocates. Progress seeks its energy from the outside. It holds itself out and keeps nothing in. It makes itself vulnerable to others despite the danger of non-response because it recognizes the necessity and value of the object of its affection. It stipulates no condition, and it does not seek its own good but the good of others. It inheres self-giving and rejects self-preservation. It loves what is not itself in order to love itself.