Category Archives: Religion and theology

Imago Dei

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Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

—Genesis 1:26-27 (ESV)

If you look to Catholic and Protestant theology to find out what it means that human beings are made in the image of God, you’ll find a lot of differing explanations, containing a lot of wisdom, but mostly missing the key fact: in the ancient world, the phrase “image of God” primarily meant a statue of a deity in a temple. Worship in those days focused on those images; where the image of a god or goddess was, that god or goddess was understood to be present in the image. As a consequence, people believed that if they created these images and built houses for them, brought sacrifices and observed the ceremonies faithfully, they could ensure that their gods would be with them—and that if they didn’t, their gods would abandon them.

Genesis 1-2 take a very different view. All creation is God’s temple, and Genesis 1 shows us God building it for himself; then he resolves to create his image—human beings—to place within that temple. In Genesis 2:7, we see him forming his image out of the dirt—perhaps out of the heavy clay by the river, much as the priests of Egypt made their idols; then, having breathed life into the first human being, God installs him in the temple, in the garden which he has created for the purpose. In presenting God’s creative work in this way, Genesis makes it clear that the pagans and their idols are merely a poor copy of the one true God.

This was, and remains, a dramatic challenge to the pagan worldview; and odd though it may sound, it’s not only a religious challenge, but also a political one. You see, theologically, the pagan nations around Israel understood that their chief god, whichever one that might be, ruled their nation; but as a practical matter, clearly it was the king who ruled. Thus, logically, it must be that the king ruled the nation as the representative of the god, and so they spoke of the king being the image of their god—the god’s physical representation who ruled on his behalf.

This is of course a profoundly elitist view—only the most powerful and important person in the nation was worthy of this label; everyone else was less important, second-class. Their gods and goddesses would smugly accept their worship, but disdained to identify themselves with such insignificant creatures. Out of this came the mindset that some human lives were more important than others, which as a practical matter meant that your life was only important to the degree that you were of use to the king. From that sort of perspective, our modern notions of equality and human rights would have seemed like ridiculous drivel; if the king is the image of the god and you aren’t, obviously the king is greater and you are lesser, and you don’t have rights, you’re just allowed to do whatever the king wants you to do.

That was pretty much the way ordinary people were seen by those who ruled the nations around Israel—they existed to serve their rulers in whatever way those rulers might desire; which is why Genesis was such a radical text. Its insistence that all people are made in the image of God blew that elitism away and replaced it with a very, very different view of humanity—rooted in an equally different view of God. This was a God who identified himself not only with the important people, but with all people, declaring that he had created all people in his image; this was a God who had created humanity not to be his slaves, serving his comfort and doing his dirty work (which was why the Babylonians, for instance, believed their high god Marduk had created humanity), but in order that he might love us and we might love him.

There’s an important lesson in this: no human life is worth less than another. That might seem too obvious to need saying, but in fact it needs frequent repetition; the idea that some lives are worth less than others is one which keeps cropping up all over the place. These days, we see it in, among other places, the euthanasia movement, and in some of the arguments made in favor of abortion. Princeton professor Peter Singer is the clearest example of this, arguing at every opportunity that some people’s lives are not worth living—and that their family members should be free to kill them if it seems preferable. Against this idea, in all its forms, stands Genesis (and indeed the whole of Scripture), which declares unequivocally that God has made all people in his image, and loves all whom he has made. It is not ours to regard anyone as less important, or less human, than anyone else, no matter what excuses we might offer; whenever we look at another human being, regardless of any other considerations, we see the image of God in them, and we must treat them accordingly, without exception.

(Adapted from “Toledot” and “In the Image of God”)

Making an idol of autonomy

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I first ran across this video and this song in a post on The Thinklings (which I can’t find now, not remembering the text of the post), and mercifully quickly forgot it. I happened, through a combination of circumstances, to hear it again last week, and now I have it stuck in my head. It’s aggravating, because this song annoys me from about every angle possible. It’s sappy and saccharine, for one thing, lyrically bad and musically sickly. It’s tendentious and presumptuous, in claiming “thus says the Lord” for a disputed theological position (I probably wouldn’t be quite as irritated were some idiot Calvinist to do the same in reverse, but it would be mighty close; that’s just inappropriate no matter who does it). It fails to take human sin seriously, portraying it as something we can simply choose not to do. (To some extent, that could be said to be true of Arminianism more generally, but this sort of naïvete about sin goes beyond Arminianism into the realm of caricature.)

And most significantly, because the author of this thing had the gall to write it as something spoken by God, its sickly-sweet sappiness is more than just an artistic failing, it’s a theological problem. This song abases God, portraying him as a moony lovesick teenager (with all the artistic capabilities and instincts pertaining thereunto), for the sake of feeding our own sense of self-importance. Even if I were an Arminian, this would drive me bats. We must be zealous for the glory and holiness of God; don’t trust anyone who isn’t. A God who is at our beck and call as this song portrays is a God made in our own image, to suit and serve our own desires . . . which is to say, a false god.

Anything that is not the gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone can become an idol.

To know nothing but the gospel

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I heard a sermon recently which infuriated me, and the less said about what, where, and why, the better. It sparked a number of reflections, though, on which I’ve been chewing in the time since, so it wasn’t a total loss. In particular, it provoked this thought: anything which is not the gospel can become an idol. Seriously, anything. Even good things, like love of country (as I’ve written more than once) or love of our family; even godly things, like faithfulness, or holy living, or salvation. Anything which is not the gospel—however close it might be to the gospel—can become an idol, because anything which is not the gospel can be made to be all about us, in one way or another. Only the gospel is purely about Jesus Christ; only the gospel focuses our attention entirely on him; only the gospel tells us that it isn’t about us, it’s all about God. It’s only by making our churches all about the gospel that we can keep them free of the idolatries that will otherwise, inevitably, seep in. Any other focus makes idolatry inevitable, because if we have the opportunity to make church all about us, we’ll take it. Every time.

Climategate and the fundamentalist spirit

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One of the most interesting stories of the past couple of months has been the whole Climategate scandal. I’m not going to dig that up and rehash the substance of it (though if you didn’t see Bill’s posts on the Thinklings about the lousy quality of the computer models behind the anthropogenic global-warming argument and the dubious nature of the standard assertions that the results of such models are truly properly peer-reviewed, you ought to), I just wanted to throw an observation out there. To wit, I recognized the spirit in those leaked e-mails, with their insistence that the theory must be right regardless of the data, and their willingness to adjust the facts as needed to fit the dogma: it’s the spirit of fundamentalism. It’s the exact same tone one meets in people arguing that the Earth must be only 6,000 years old and therefore, whatever facts that would seem to indicate otherwise must be incorrect.

Now, to call someone a fundamentalist doesn’t mean they’re wrong, by any means. I don’t happen to believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and I don’t happen to believe in AGW, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that one or both couldn’t be correct. But the spirit in which many who call themselves Christian fundamentalists argue (which is not, be it noted, equal with fundamentalism itself; one can hold to fundamentalist positions without this sort of attitude and approach) is one which is absolutely certain it has discovered the truth, unquestioningly convinced of its own rightness, and thus is committed to maintaining its position by whatever means necessary. This is the sort of spirit one also finds in Islamic fundamentalism—and it’s the spirit that’s in view as well in Michael Mann and the leaked CRU e-mails.

Again, that doesn’t mean their position is wrong; to argue that would be to commit the genetic fallacy. It does, however, give the lie to their claims that they alone are scientific and their opponents are anti-science. In truth, what we have here is a religious dispute, complete with threats by the high priests against the heretics; and the pretensions of those high priests to be above ideology, their insistence that they are disinterested seekers of the pure flame of fact, have been shown to be a sham. This will be, I think, the long-term effect of Climategate: it’s knocked AGW proponents off their pedestal, and I don’t think they’re going to be able to climb back up.

Reflecting

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As I noted last week, I’ve been sick, tired, and busy, which is a bad combination; at this point, there’s nothing for it but to punch through Christmas, and then I can take some time to rest and recharge. Thinking about it, though, I realized that that’s not the only issue: this interruption has knocked me off the discipline of writing. When I took up the thought of blogging as a spiritual discipline, that made a major difference in the frequency of my writing (as a look at the blog archive clearly shows), and I think it’s done me some good; and part of that has been the most basic part of the discipline, that of just sitting down and posting something, even if I don’t have anything particularly profound or significant to say. I’ve lost that in the last several weeks, and unfortunately, the last seven days of Advent aren’t a great time to recover it, especially with a wedding to do right after Christmas. That, I think, will need to be part of my more general recovery time through the Christmas season proper. That discipline has been too valuable for me—I don’t intend to let it go; and if it’s occasionally been valuable to others as well, then so much the more reason.

So, yes, I’m still around, still breathing, and still experiencing an occasional flash when one neuron is willing to talk to another; and while I can’t claim I’ll be back to normal posting frequency tomorrow, I fully intend to be soon. In the meantime, God’s richest blessings be upon you this Advent.

The pursuit of God

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I would be willing to bet that if you read the Bible much, you have a favorite part. For some, it will be the letters of Paul; others love the gospels best, for their stories of Jesus; and still others are drawn first to the Psalms. For my part, I love all those, and others, but I go first to the prophets, and especially to Isaiah. I’m not sure why that is, but I think our vacation to the canyonlands of Utah and Arizona a few years ago gave me an insight: like standing on the rim of Bryce Canyon or inside Double Arch, in the prophets I am captured by the power of God’s imagination, and the power with which it communicates his love and his beauty.

At the same time, though, reading the prophets can be more than a little frightening. I say this especially as a preacher, for anyone who stands to preach the Word is exercising a small part of the prophetic ministry and calling (which is one reason why preaching is such a dangerous act, at least for the preacher). The prophets are people who have been captured by God to a greater degree than almost anyone else, and in their impassioned calls to the people of God, we see the gulf between our sinfulness and God’s holiness more clearly than almost anywhere else. We also see, just as clearly, God’s absolute determination to cross that gulf with his love and redeem us despite ourselves, a determination which led to the birth of the Son of God, and his death on the cross.

And of all the prophets, I think we see most clearly the lengths to which God will go—and to which he will command his prophets to go—in Hosea. This is a deep and remarkable book, and a remarkable story. It begins with this command: “Go marry an adulterous woman and have children of adultery, for the land has been unfaithful to Yahweh.” So he goes and marries Gomer, and they have a son; and then she has two more children, and while we can’t be sure, the text suggests that maybe they weren’t Hosea’s. Things escalate, and she abandons her husband and children for her lovers; and in all this, God tells Hosea, the pain and hurt of the prophet’s experience, the betrayal he suffers, mirror God’s experience with Israel. Just as Hosea’s wife has gone chasing after other men—pretty much any man she thinks she can get something from, it sounds like—so Israel has gone chasing after other gods.

Now, we know how this sort of story ends—in divorce court—and that’s pretty much how it ended in Hosea’s day, too. But that’s not what happens here. Instead, we see Hosea’s determination to woo his wife back, to repair a relationship which had been, it would seem, irreparably shattered, and to rebuild their marriage into what it should have been; and through him, through this acted parable, this enacted prophecy, of the love of God, we see God’s determination to do the same with Israel. And so God tells Hosea, “Go love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as Yahweh loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods”; and so he does.

I have to wonder what Gomer thought of this. Here she’s run away from her husband, she’s living with her lover, and one day her husband shows up on the doorstep and says, “I’d like to buy my wife back.” And what does she hear from the guy? Protestations of love? Demands that Hosea leave and never come back? No, she hears, “Sure—how much?” That can’t have been good for her ego. But on the other hand—she’s left her husband, she’s shamed him before all his people, she’s run off to be with another man—and yet, despite all that, her husband not only still wants her back, he’s willing to pay a steep price to get her back. That had to have made her look at Hosea in a new way.

So what does she make of it all? How does she respond to this costly demonstration of her husband’s love? We don’t know. We know what Hosea tells her, but we don’t know how she responds—we don’t know what becomes of them. We’re given the assurance that at some point in the future, Israel will return to God, that that relationship will be restored; but whether the same applied to Gomer and Hosea, we aren’t told. We’re left hanging, the story unfinished, wondering what happened next.

Now, strange as that is, I think there’s good reason why Hosea’s story stops in the middle; and if you’ve been wondering why we’re talking about this on the first Sunday of Advent, here’s the reason. You see, Jesus does much the same thing in the story of the prodigal son and his brother—we’re left hanging at the end with the father’s appeal to his older son, with no hint given of the older son’s response. The reason for that was that the older son represented the Pharisees and their allies, and it was up to them to make that response. The story—the real story—wasn’t finished. In the same way here, the deeper story wasn’t finished; telling the end of Hosea and Gomer’s story would have given it a false sense of closure. But this way, we’re drawn in to try to finish the story ourselves.

That’s important, because the deeper story here is the story of Advent. Remember, the season of Advent is a season of waiting and preparation for the coming of Christ—preparation to celebrate his first coming, which we do on Christmas, and preparation for the time when he will come again. The cry of Advent is “Come, Lord Jesus! Come, O come, Immanuel! Come and buy us back, come and set us free!” And the message of Advent is that he did come and buy us back, at a far greater cost than just silver, barley, and wine—he bought us back and set us free at the cost of his own life; and having done so, he is coming again to take us home with him.

Now, we all know this, or at least, we’ve all heard it before; but I wonder if we’ve ever thought about what this really means for our lives. I hadn’t, until a colleague of mine gave me a copy of the book Furious Pursuit. I have a number of quibbles with the book, but I still highly recommend it, because the audacious truth at the center of this book is something we desperately need to hear: Christianity isn’t about us chasing God, it’s about God chasing us. It isn’t about us earning his love, it isn’t about us being good enough or obeying hard enough; to pull from another colleague of mine, from a sermon that nearly put me on the floor, “We hear God saying, Obey me, obey me, obey me, but that’s not right. Yes, God wants our obedience, but that comes later. What God is really saying is Trust me, trust me, trust me; and as we learn to trust, we learn to obey.” Christianity isn’t about you straining every muscle to hold on to God, it’s about the fact that God will never let you go—never—and that whether you run to him, run away, or just try to ignore him, he will never stop pursuing you, because he loves you.

That’s what Advent is about. It’s about a God who loves you so much, who loves all of us so much, that even though we had rejected him, he came down to this earth, looked the devil square in the eye, and said, “I’d like to buy my people back.” We were in rebellion, we had set ourselves against him as his enemies; despite all that, at the right time, he died for us, to repair a relationship which had been, it would seem, irreparably shattered. The Son of God traded in his throne and his crown for dirty straw and dirtier diapers; he gave up all the wealth of heaven for the poverty of homelessness; he set aside all the power and honor of deity to accept the powerlessness and shame of a criminal’s execution on a torture device. And he did it all for you.

What will you do?

“All to Jesus I surrender . . .”

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Let us look at our lives in the light of this experience and see whether we gladly glory in weakness, whether we take pleasure, as Paul did, in injuries, in necessities, in distresses. Yes, let us ask whether we have learned to regard a reproof, just or unjust, a reproach from friend or enemy, an injury, or trouble, or difficulty into which others bring us, as above all an opportunity of proving how Jesus is all to us, how our own pleasure or honor are nothing, and how humiliation is in very truth what we take pleasure in. It is indeed blessed, the deep happiness of heaven, to be so free from self that whatever is said of us or done to us is lost and swallowed up in the thought that Jesus is all.

 —Andrew Murray

Amen. May it be so.

HT: Ray Ortlund

One unique incomparable Savior

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 18
Q. And who is this mediator—
true God and at the same time
truly human and truly righteous?

A. Our Lord Jesus Christ,1

who was given us
to set us completely free
and to make us right with God.2

Note: mouse over footnotes for Scripture references (does not work in IE 6).

As Reformed Christians, we affirm that salvation is all of Christ and none of us, because no one but he could have accomplished it. He is unique, and not in any minor way; he is the only one who could encompass the work that needed to be done and the price that needed to be paid so that we might be saved, and no one else could even have begun to approach it. We don’t have to be worthy, we have no claim on pride in our own salvation, we cannot undo or lose this great gift—it is all of Christ, bestowed on us through his Holy Spirit by his incomparable grace and unfathomable love toward us who were his enemies, until he redeemed us despite ourselves and made us his friends.

The countercultural gospel of rest

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Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is in vain that you get up early
and go to bed late,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives sleep to those he loves.

—Psalm 127:1-2

One of the more memorable nights of my oldest daughter’s life (for me, at least) came when she was maybe a month or two old. It was right around 11 o’clock at night, and she needed her diaper changed—and when Sara got her cleaned up, we discovered that we were out of diapers. Now, we were in Surrey at the time—it’s one of the suburbs on the southern edge of the metro Vancouver area—and our local Safeway closed at 11 pm; the convenience stores were still open, but for some obscure reason they only sold size 3 diapers, which were way too big for her. Obviously, one of us needed to go out and try to find someplace that was still open that sold diapers in her size. I trust you don’t need me to tell you which one of us that was.

I spent a while hitting various big stores around southwestern Surrey, only to find that all had closed for the night. I could have headed north into the metro area, but I knew my odds wouldn’t be good, because Vancouver as a city doesn’t tend to stay open very late. So I headed south towards the border, for my home state of Washington, where even towns the size of Lynden, with 7,000 people, have grocery stores open 24/7. I drove down to Ferndale, north of Bellingham, walked into Haggen Foods, bought diapers, and drove home. If memory serves, I got back around 1 in the morning.

As I was driving around on my wild-goose chase—or should I call it a wild-diaper chase?—I was muttering imprecations under my breath about what kind of big city rolls up the sidewalks at 11 pm and what kind of country is this anyway? and other things of that sort. After all, I went to college in a town of around 50,000 people, and we had Meijer open ’round the clock—if you know the Midwest know Meijer, which has been out-Wal-Mart-ing Wal-Mart for a long time; for those of you who don’t, combine Wal-Mart and your typical big chain supermarket, then drop the prices—so why, if I was living in a metropolitan area of three million people, was I having to drive across the border to pick up a lousy package of diapers?

Now, you might be thinking that the fault was really ours, for not having another package of diapers on hand, and you’d certainly be right about that; as the saying goes, poor planning on our part didn’t constitute an emergency on anyone else’s. I felt pretty sheepish about that, which is one reason I was so irritated. In retrospect, though, I’m more interested in the expectations I had then, because I didn’t grow up with them. My hometown growing up wasn’t tiny, wasn’t an especially big town either; I was in high school when K-Mart came to town, and that was a big deal—and even then, while they were open later, they still closed at 9 pm. So I grew up with the idea that everything closes at night; the first time I ever heard the phrase “24/7” was in college. We just didn’t have that sort of economy.

In college, though, I discovered that I’m a night owl—and I discovered a world in which there are places open at 2 am where you can go to get food, or anything else; and I got used to that. I became accustomed to the idea (though I never would have put it this way) that there were people out there whose job was to stay up all night just in case I happened to want something. And I became an enabler, in a small way, of an economy in which people wind up doing just that: working at night, while the rest of the world sleeps, and sleeping during the day, while it works and plays, in order to make a living.

Now, it wasn’t news to me that some people work at night; my mother’s a nurse, and during our time in Texas she worked the night shift at the county hospital for a while. There are certainly some places—like hospitals—that really do need to stay open all night; if an appendix bursts or a baby needs to be born, you can’t very well say, “Hold that thought, and we’ll be with you at 9 am sharp.” But the idea that people need to stay up all night just so careless folk like me who don’t keep track of their supplies can buy a package of diapers at midnight—is that really reasonable?

From a human perspective, I don’t think it is; but from an economic perspective, if there are enough customers to keep the store profitable, the answer is “yes.” As a result, we’re increasingly moving to a 24/7 economy, one in which the rhythms of life as our ancestors knew it—work when it’s light, sleep when it’s dark, a day of rest each week, and so on—are being obliterated by the demands of making money; the net effect is that businesses stay open longer and longer hours just to keep up, and their workers perforce must do the same. It’s a treadmill, nothing more, and for many people, it defines their lives; after all, you have to do whatever it takes to make a living.

That leaves us with a lot of people who are, in effect, slaves to their work—their work runs their lives and determines their schedule. For many, it’s simply the need to make ends meet; we see a lot of that up here, where living is expensive and a lot of jobs don’t pay all that well, and so finding enough money to keep a roof over one’s head and food on the table becomes an overriding priority. Others have enough, but they want more than that—they want to keep up with the proverbial Joneses, and so they want the money to afford the kind of house, car, clothes, and lifestyle that Mr. and Mrs. Jones have. Then, of course, there are people who want to be important, for one reason or another; for them, it’s not so much the money that matters as the status, and perhaps the power and influence.

There are also people like a couple of friends of ours back in Washington, both engineers, who worked insanely hard; even after their first child was born, he was still regularly working 70- and 80-hour weeks. At one point, they were working different shifts and basically never saw each other awake, though I don’t remember how long that lasted. He would work those long weeks, then spend much of his weekend frantically enjoying himself on his mountain bike or snowmobile, depending on the season—he never skipped church, but church was about the only other thing he did, many weekends—and then it was back to work on Monday to do it all over again. He’s a devoted Christian, but that didn’t affect his view of work. Work was something you had to do in order to pay for the things you wanted to do, and so he got into that cycle of working long hours to afford a few hours of hard play to enable him to survive the long hours he was working to afford it.

Now, whatever the precise reward people have in mind, the bottom-line view in all these cases is the same, the one my friend articulated: work is something you have to do in order to get what you want, and however much it takes, that’s what you have to do. It’s up to us to make everything happen, to earn the blessings we want; it’s up to us to work hard enough and long enough and well enough to be a success, whatever we might define success to be. That’s the conventional wisdom.

God’s wisdom is another matter. The key to life, the psalmist tells us, isn’t how hard we work or what long hours we put in; all those short nights and long, anxious days, trying to keep up with the treadmill, are in vain, because we can’t make success happen on our own. We can’t build a good family, a good life, on our own; we can’t build a good nation, or keep it safe, on our own. Unless the Lord builds the house, unless the Lord guards the city—unless he builds our family, unless he builds our church—all our work is in vain. Ultimately, he’s the one who determines success, not us.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’re free not to work, which is how some have tried to take this psalm. Paul dealt with folks who took that position in his second letter to the church at Thessalonica; his response to them was, “Such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and earn their own living.” A couple verses before that, he laid down the law quite firmly: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” We all have our work to do, and the responsibility to support ourselves if we’re able to do so; the Scriptures are perfectly clear on that.

The point of this psalm, then, is not about whether we work, but how, and how we regard our work. Even as Christians, we tend to work as if we believe that our success depends on us and our effort and the time we put in, and that if we fail, it’s because we didn’t work hard enough or do our work well enough. In our work, we carry the weight of our lives on our shoulders—and we shouldn’t do that. That approach to our work creates anxiety and deprives us of rest; it also breeds pride, if we do well, or despair, if we don’t; and it makes work, rather than God, the true lord of our lives, setting our priorities and controlling our time. As such, if we take this approach to our work, if we view our work from the world’s perspective, it isolates us from God and cuts us off from his blessings, leaving us to carry our burdens alone.

By contrast, the psalmist says, if you aren’t doing the Lord’s work, it’s pointless, and if you are, you don’t need to work so hard; either way, there’s nothing to be said for letting work rule your life. Now, a lot of folks would disagree, and there’s certainly no denying that a lot of people who work hard for long hours are great successes by the world’s standards; but besides all the stuff, what do they have, really? They can’t have any assurance that their success will continue—especially in this economy, where so many former successes have cratered—so how can they have any peace? And are they as rich in relationships and integrity as they are in money? From the psalmist’s point of view, financial wealth without the rest is a bad bargain; and this psalm was written by King Solomon, who certainly knew whereof he spoke.

Those who build the house themselves, those who guard their little empires alone, must stay up late and rise early, for they can never relax their vigilance or let their effort slack; but those who trust in the Lord are free to sleep, for he gives sleep to those he loves. He may not give great financial success, but he gives enough; and along with it he gives peace, and rest, and assurance. The lives of those who pour themselves into their work are unbalanced, as the goods that work produces are overemphasized while others are neglected; in contrast, God offers us a balanced life, a life with time for both work and family, both work and rest.The best example of this is the Sabbath, the weekly day of rest, which was set aside in part for reasons of economic justice. Within the economy of Israel, the Sabbath—the Hebrew word is shabbat, which means “rest”—served (when honored) to ensure that masters didn’t work their laborers seven days a week, 354 days a year, but that they got the time off they needed. As the website Judaism 101 puts it in its entry on Shabbat,

In modern America, we take the five-day work-week so much for granted that we forget what a radical concept a day of rest was in ancient times. The weekly day of rest has no parallel in any other ancient civilization. In ancient times, leisure was for the wealthy and the ruling classes only, never for the serving or laboring classes. In addition, the very idea of rest each week was unimaginable.

It was unimaginable to the rest of the world because the rest of the world was ruled by money and its demands, which tends to be the world’s default position, but God knew what he was doing when he wrote that into his law; he knew we need a day set aside to rest and recharge our bodies, by not working, and our souls, by coming together as his people to pray and worship him. He knew that we need that to keep our lives balanced, and keep everything in its proper perspective. And of course, while we’re called to be in prayer all the time and to worship God with every part of our lives, with all he’s done for us, he deserves to have us gather once a week to worship him together.

From the world’s perspective, it makes no sense—if you want to make a living, if you want to keep up with the Joneses, if you want to have the money to live the life you want to live, if you want to be prepared when things go sour, you can’t afford to take days off!—but from the Christian perspective, it makes perfect sense, because we know what the world doesn’t: that God is in control, and that ultimately only his work, done his way, in accordance with his will, meets with final success; and that while the world goes on working 24/7, scrambling to stay one step ahead of the game, those who serve him can step back, confident in his care, take some time off, and rest, for he gives sleep to those he loves.

The prosperity gospel and the bursting of the American bubble

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The latest issue of The Atlantic has a big cover picture of a cross against a blue sky with a “Foreclosure” sign on it, and the lurid main headline, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” As is so often the case, the article in no way justifies the headline; it does, however, make a compelling case that a particularly pernicious American heresy, the so-called “prosperity gospel,” may have been a significant contributing factor.

Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”

THEOLOGICALLY, THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL has always infuriated many mainstream evangelical pastors. Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life outsold Osteen’s, told Time, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?” In 2005, a group of African American pastors met to denounce prosperity megapreachers for promoting a Jesus who is more like a “cosmic bellhop,” as one pastor put it, than the engaged Jesus of the civil-rights era who looked after the poor.

More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:

Narratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common . . . Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that state attorneys general had the authority to sue national banks for predatory lending. Even before that ruling, at least 17 lawsuits accusing various banks of treating racial minorities unfairly were already under way. . . . One theme emerging in these suits is how banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans.

The emphasis there is mine, of course. Read the whole thing; it makes me think that part of the crash this country suffered may well be God’s judgment on the idolatry of his people.