God's Response to Our Break with Him

With our ancestors Adam and Eve, we humans broke our relationship with God. When we did this, we created a situation unintended by God. Rather than living with him and one another in a relationship of truth, freedom, love, and vitality, we suddenly found ourselves the inescapable victims and unwitting collaborators of parasitic powers.

These parasitic powers, including the six gods of Olympianity, deceived us into defining the meaning of our lives in terms of politics, war, technology, sex, money, and consumption. These six gods then bullied and bribed us into treating other humans and the rest of creation simply as means of living meaningfully in those terms.

Delighting in the Biblical Narrative and Finding Our Place in It (Part 2)

In the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, we find a densely interconnected narrative which finds its source, center, and goal in Jesus. It speaks normatively about Yahweh—the one and only true god—and about our relationship with Yahweh from the beginning of our history together to its fulfillment in Christ’s glorious return. Our unimaginable privilege is to discern where, in this most meaningful of all narratives, our own little stories find their rightful place.

  
But this irreplaceable biblical narrative is not the only existing narrative. It isn’t even today’s dominant one in what’s left of Christendom. Today’s universally dominant narrative belongs to the six malicious yet conventional Olympian gods and their overwhelming yet fragile Global Technological System (GTS). Through the corporate media of the GTS, these parasitic gods daily seek to impose their Olympian worldview on every one of us and, at the same time, to weaken any affirmation of the biblical worldview. Most distressing is the fact that the gods, through their minions, have largely succeeded in getting even us Christians and our churches thinking their way. Now, rather than understanding the media and our world in biblical terms, we deconstruct the biblical narrative in Olympian terms.

The Challenge of Money in the Old Testament: Job

When we first meet Job, we find he is a most unusual person: one both righteous and rich. Satan, humankind’s constant accuser before Yahweh until Jesus Christ, told Yahweh that Job was not righteous for nothing. He said that Job was only right with Yahweh because Yahweh had made him rich. Satan was sure that if Job lost his wealth, he would curse Yahweh (Job 1:9-12).

     
In Money and Power (trans. LaVonne Neff, 1985), Jacques Ellul observes, “We often hear this idea from the poor, the unfortunate, laborers, employees, small businessmen: ‘Honesty and piety and justice are luxuries. When you have what you need to live well, then you can also afford to be religious and moral; but when you’re poor, you don’t have time for such frills.’ Job’s prologue…shows us that this popular attitude is a word from Satan, and those who promote it are Satan’s mouthpiece” (p. 39).

The Challenge of Money in the Old Testament: Abraham

[Yahweh] said to Abraham, “Leave your country, your relatives, and your father’s home, and go to a land that I am going to show you” (Genesis 12:1, Good News Translation).

     
According to the Old Testament, Yahweh created the heavens and the earth around 4000 BC. He created them to serve as the perfect context for his relationship of freedom and love with Adam and Eve (Genesis 1). Conversely, this relationship of freedom and love between Yahweh and humankind, and theirs with Yahweh, one another, and the rest of creation, was the purpose of creation (Genesis 2).

     
Sadly, this creation, fraught with meaning, did not last long. Adam and Eve foolishly chose to question Yahweh’s judgment about both creation and their relationship to him, one another, and the rest of creation. By doing so, they were overwhelmed and enslaved by powers of evil that Yahweh had rejected on their behalf (Genesis 3).

A Summary of Christ's Victory over All Powers of Evil

In The New Demons, Jacques Ellul points out the false gods we moderns adore. We have identified these conventional yet destructive gods as (1) Jupiter, god of politics; (2) Mars, god of war; (3) Vulcan, god of technology; (4) Venus, god of sex; (5) Pluto, god of money; and (6) Bacchus, god of consumption. But have Jacques and I been right in speaking of gods at all? Our last three essays have been summaries of New Testament passages to various powers of evil. Today we will attempt to express those summaries, and link them to previous meditations on biblical witnesses, in a short meaningful narrative which celebrates the victory of Jesus over all powers of evil.

Understanding Human Nature Using the Chalcedonian Formula

Today we will briefly discuss an understanding of human nature from a Chalcedonian, paradoxical, biblical point of view. Quickly, we may say that every human being has (1) a wholly Christian personality as well as a wholly Olympian personality, (2) without separating the two, (3) without mixing the two, and (4) keeping them rightly ordered.

Christian Witness to the City

Biblical witnesses to the city reveal different layers of its meaning to us. They reveal to us that it is a place we humans use to hide from Yahweh, a chaotic counter-creation to Yahweh’s good creation, our greatest monument to ourselves, our greatest work of devotion to the Olympian gods, and the place where the Olympian gods work on us most intensely.

Biblical witnesses to the city also reveal to us different ways in which Jesus may call us to respond creatively to these meanings today.

Sodom: The City Condemned

Then [Yahweh] said to Abraham, “There are terrible accusations against Sodom and Gomorrah, and their sin is very great. I must go down to find out whether or not the accusations I have heard are true” (Genesis 18:20-21).

The City: Abraham to Moses

When Yahweh created the heavens and the earth in 4004 BC, we human beings got to enjoy a few days of conviviality. Our rupture with Yahweh came quickly enough and with it began our first age, the Old Age of Dominant Powers of Evil; as well as our first historical period, the Age of Olympianity. That period witnessed our devotion to six false but compelling Olympian gods. It also saw the construction of our greatest monument to them: the city. Today’s Global Technological System (GTS) is simply that monument built to the greatest possible degree.

But Yahweh started a second historical period, the Age of Yahwism, in 1921 BC with his call of Abraham (Genesis 12:1-4).

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Søren Kierkegaard was born on May 5, 1813, in Copenhagen, into a middle-class family. His father prospered as a wool merchant and retired at 40 to devote himself to understanding the truth. He regularly invited professors, pastors, and writers to his house for lively intellectual discussions. Søren's brother Peter, older by seven years, later became a Lutheran bishop.

Rembrandt (1606-1669)

His life

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in Leiden on July 15, 1606 into a prosperous middle-class family. Because they lived in an unusually tolerant Holland, his Dutch Reformed father had been able to marry his Roman Catholic mother. While Christian, Rembrandt never participated in either tradition.

Dividing History into Periods: First and Second

We may divide the last 6,000 years of history into different periods using religion as our primary category. Today we will cover the beginning of history and its first two great periods.

4004 BC Creation
Following the Bible, we learn that Yahweh created Heaven and Earth, as well as Adam and Eve, in 4004 BC. Shortly after their creation, however, Adam and Eve broke their relationship with Yahweh, one another, and the rest of creation. With that fall from grace began our first period of human history: the Age of Olympianity.

God's People Gone Conventional (Ezekiel 22:23-31)

Yahweh created us in his image. He created us as creatures capable of sharing a relationship of freedom, truth, love, and vitality with him, one another, and the rest of creation.

When Adam and Eve ruptured this relationship with Yahweh, we humans lost that image. We became victims of parasitical powers who forced us to model their image. The six false gods of Olympianity did this by threatening us with insecurity, misery, guilt, insignificance, and meaninglessness. They also did this by falsely promising us security, happiness, justification, importance, and meaning in exchange for our loyalty.

Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews (4004-520 BC)

The Old Testament is a remarkable but frustrating collection of books. On one hand, the stories are remarkably historical in detail. On the other, coming up with a simple and clear chronology is challenging. What follows is a summary of the biblical chronology established by James Ussher (Annals of the World, 1658) which is simple, clear, and accurate enough to serve our purposes.

The words Hebrews, Israelites, and Jews have overlapping meanings. The term “Hebrew” applies primarily to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and members of their families and secondarily to their descendants. The term “Israelite” applies primarily to descendants of Jacob, renamed Israel later in life, until the conquest of the kingdom of Judah in 587 BC. After that, the term “Jew” applies to all people loyal to the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or connected in some meaningful way to those who are, until Jesus Christ.

Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon (3500-1700 BC)

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers both begin in the mountains of Anatolia and flow southeast about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) before emptying into the Persian Gulf. Tradition refers to this area as “Mesopotamia” which simply means “Between Rivers.”