Manifesto

As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motion of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. –Wendell Berry

Jesus Called a Woman a Dog?

It is true, Jesus strayed from character and degraded a Canaanite woman (in need) simply because she was not a Jew; however, I think we need to pay more attention to the events that led to this point.  Some people uncomfortably read past this not sure what to think about Jesus’ behavior, but in recapturing this busy scene I think we will see that this was not just another moment of resolute faith on someone’s part, but this is also a crucial moment for the disciples and a playful moment for Jesus.

Starting from the top of Matthew 15, the Pharisees confront Jesus about his disciple’s violation of Jewish purity codes because they did not wash before eating bread.  Jesus uses this moment to expose something in them. They were clearly concerned with purity when it came to their “holy” appearance, but they did not care about observing more important parts of law. He uses the example of loving your father and mother which they say they do, but then notoriously use excuses to neglect their needs (15:1-11).

At this point, the disciples approach Jesus and say, "Hey Jesus, you kind of upset the Pharisees with what you said", but Jesus only reply is that they were not the holy religious leaders they claimed to be.  Peter then asks Jesus to explain the parable to them, but Jesus says this was not exactly a mysterious story so how is it you don’t get it?  Yet, Jesus obliges them and says, as plainly as possible, what goes in your mouth does not matter, but it is the things you say and do that are direct reflections of what kind of person you really are on the inside.

It was only after this that they then came across the Syrophoenician (Canaanite) woman whose daughter was possessed. Notice that even in a time when there were cultural observances prohibiting a Canaanite woman from talking to a Jewish man, she obviously had heard enough about Jesus’ character that she was willing to risk it and plead for her daughter.  To our surprise Jesus first ignores her, but if we pay attention I think he is testing his disciples.  In fact the bigger shock should be that even after Jesus's explanation that what is in their heart is what defiles them, they say, "Jesus send her away so we don’t have to hear her incessant crying!"  Wow, way to step-up fellas…

Now, in the following lines it turns comedic so try imposing a sarcastic tone with what Jesus says.  Clearly ‘“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’  But she came and began to bow down before Him, saying, “Lord, help me!”  And He answered and said, ‘It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”’ But then she seems to catch on to the playfulness and quips back with, “Yes, Lord; but even the dogs feed on the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus dropping pretenses says, “O woman, your faith is great!”(15:21-28).[1]  

It seems to me Jesus was possibly flaunting stereotypes and self-righteous behavior to exploit the defiling thoughts of contempt his followers had for the Canaanites, or women, or even both.  Nevertheless, because this is text and we cannot hear the author’s inflections or naturally pick up on good-natured teasing in first-century lit., we must watch-out for these moments. Life is happening in these stories and it is anything but void of changing temperaments, demeanor and relationships. 

[1] Note that Mark has almost this exact same story, minus the disciples, but he seems to be doing something similar in a more subtle fashion 

Biblical Justice is Restorative Justice (Prt 2)

In my last post I made the point that law in the Bible was always a flexible feature because it was meant to stand in support of a people who were continually changing. Therefore, when there was a violation of a law it was a violation against a person more than an arbitrary breaking of rules. The function of justice was then to make it right.[1] 

Restorative Justice

This gives way to the needed alternative to retributive justice as it only seeks to assign guilt, inflict pain one “deserves” (which is measured by the process) and define the offense based solely on the law broken.[2]  The alternative is restorative justice which centers on the victim’s needs and asks the offender to face what they caused.  This comes by asking:

1.      Who has been hurt?

2.      What are their needs?

3.      Whose obligations are these?

4.      What are the causes?

5.      Who has a stake in the situation (primary is victim, but secondary can include family and community)?

6.      What is the appropriate process to involve stakeholders in an effort to address causes and put things right?[3]

I also recall Zehr pointing out that this model has to be flexible enough to know that it is not always good idea to reunite victim and offender especially when the victim is not comfortable with it, or if the offender is completely uncooperative.   

            However, this raises the question what is it that is inherently wrong with the prison system as punishment? When the crime is violent in nature, confinement is often necessary. Yet, Zehr also points out, the prison system and the distorted worldview of domination that exists on its inside only reinforces the mindset that put them there in the first place and it never holds them accountable to see the people and harm they caused.  Moreover, anybody who has spent significant time in prison will tell you they can come to exist within the prison system as-well-as they do on the outside and sometimes better which makes the punishment of little threat.[4]  But, like I said, I see little alternative for those who are not “mentally ill” and only succumb to violence as means to get their way.  Alternatively, community conferencing for offenders has been a surprisingly effective solution even within the prison system.  This is where they are given the opportunity to talk with mediators and the victim(s) and/or family members which make them face questions from the victim’s side like “why them”, “for what purpose” and so on. 

These meetings are often harder for the offender than just sitting in a cell, and yet it has also contributed to a large decrease in repeat offenders.  When the victim can ask questions and get answers, and also when the offender faces what they caused and in some cases can help make things right, or at least offer a symbolic gesture of remorse and compensation, it re-empowers both in a positive way.  It offers a little bit of control back to the victim who had it stolen and it empowers the offender to be part of the rebuilding process. Though many assume they are getting off easy, they are not.  They are having to make new choices in contrast to their toxic behavior that not only devastates people and community, but reveal the obligations to persons injured they would otherwise be shielded from.  Through this process many victims feel justice has been served even more so than in the criminal justice process. While I leave a lot out, this is the essence of restorative justice.

Biblical Justice

So to bring this back together with the first part I want to say this is Biblical.  What I see is the overall narrative of God’s reconciliation and restoration within the setting of broken covenant.  Covenant, Zehr reminds us, is an agreement between two parties that implies personal relationship with reciprocal responsibilities and mutual commitments.[5]  This is something that exists, to greater and lesser degrees, within all societies and communities simply because we are relational creatures.  The difference is God refuses to play the game of scapegoats, marginalization and elimination.  Think of how we brand ex-cons as criminals and refuse to see past that; when that is all you are defined as what else can a person do but embrace it, but God says no to that.  God confronts Adam and Eve, Cain, Moses, David and Israel, but does not destroy them.  God does allow Israel to finally be exiled, but even then he goes with her so to enable the correction process instead of throwing the clay out altogether and labeling her hopeless (Jer. 18:1-11; Rom. 9).  His request was always that we begin by taking responsibility for the other (Lev. 19:18; Deut. 14:29; Lk. 10:27). 

Jesus further rejects our one-sided thinking and expulsion toward another when he comes as the physician/reconciler not as judge or attorney, prosecuting or defending (Mk. 2:16-17).  Jesus does the work of making the sinner face that dark part of the self and does not lessen the offense, but he does not leave them there either.  Though no one can take back the offense they committed Jesus permits them to cut ties with it and work to help make things right in the earth under a new covenant and relationship with God and neighbor  (Mt. 19:16-22; Lk. 19:1-10; Jn. 8:1-11).    

God and human has been the victim of human harm and yet scripture tells of God entering in to make it right rather than destroying it.  To then bear witness to God’s act we are asked to participate in it, so I believe more Christians would do well to understand and enact restorative justice where it is possible.  While I have no interaction with law and courts, I did realize I disciplined my children in a way that looked like punitive justice by grounding, or taking away possessions or spanking as punishment. This only created children who obeyed out of fear of punishment not out of responsibility to do what was right because they understood the damage.  I have had infinitely better results (though I have had to get creative) when I hold them accountable and enable them to see what they did and make it right. The big take away here is not that I am now a superior parent (because I certainly still have lots to learn and still fail) but start where you can (home, schools, workplace etc…).

To me this is how we can thwart the tendency to interpret God based on our own criminal justice system in judgment, punishment and penal atonement theories and finally allow God to form our lens in a modern age for the return of shalom.        

 

   

[1] Something also to keep in mind, since we tend to link “justice” with “punishment”, is that the Hebrew word for “punish”, rsy (yasar), means “to teach” and “to discipline”, but it does not mean “to hurt” or “to injure” (those got their own word).  See William L Holladay. A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B Eerdmans Publishing 1988), 137.

[2] Howard Zehr. Changing Lenses: Restorative Justive for Our Times (Harrisonburg, VA:  Herald Press 2015), 69.

[3] Ibid, 237.

[4] Ibid, 40-45.

[5] Ibid, 136.

Biblical Justice is Restorative Justice (Prt 1)

We Christians spend a lot of time talking about justice and working toward justice.  Yet, if I were to ask most westerners what “justice” in the Biblical sense meant I imagine many might reflect our societies’ picture of criminal justice or perhaps just limit it to someone who gets their just desserts.  Such a portrait of justice will look like fire and brimstone and vengeful-retribution against the guilty.  Not only is this wrong, but I think it is important we get this right if we are going to be a community that works toward peace not least of all through justice. 

            The retributive model of justice that the US holds (as-well-as that imposed on Biblical text) actually comes from the Greco-Roman justice. This justice is represented by the Justitia statue.  It is a statue of a woman who while blindfolded holds the balancing scales of justice in one hand and a sword in the other.  She is supposed to represent an objective ruler who does not judge based on fear or favor, but rather seeks to weigh evidence thereby justly taking sides and using the authority of the sword to retributively give someone the due punishment for their offense.

            Why would we let someone detached from the situation decide our fate you may ask (well you should have), because we have exchanged actual care for the victims with a new centerpiece.  As Howard Zehr points out, the ideology supporting criminal justice believes that crime is a violation of the State and its laws (the new centerpiece) and that violation creates guilt. Subsequently, justice demands that the state determine who is guilty and then impose painful punishment so that they get what they deserve.[1]  Zehr says this in turn creates three main questions for dealing with crime:

1.      What laws have been broken?

2.      Who did it?

3.      What do they deserve?[2]

This is an inflexible system that we believe offenders must go through so that justice can be determined and served through inflicting pain as punishment. 

Now this is not to say that criminal justice is useless and we do not need it.  Zehr also makes the point (although I don’t remember where), when no one wants to be honest and truth need be brought to light criminal justice is very good at getting to the bottom of the issue. While it perhaps should not be the central form of justice, legal professionals who know how to do this are needed and helpful.  But, this should never be allowed to create focus more concerned with “rules” that have been broken than people involved.

Before looking at Biblical justice it first helps to understand Biblical laws.  We tend to reduce the laws to a lot of static “Thou shalt nots” that God uses for earning salvation and maximizing his authority and making his followers moral superiors over everyone else. To add to the problem, these laws are also inconsistent throughout its development in the Pentateuch, so God’s static laws seem untrustworthy. What gives?

I believe Jesus summed it up when he said God made the Sabbath for humankind not humankind for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27).  This applies to all of the laws because the laws were always meant to stand in service of creation and not the other way around.  To utilize Terence Fretheim’s work, the law was a gracious gift that intersects with lives being lived in the Biblical stories and thus each law is meeting specific creational and human needs, namely life (Deut. 6:24).[3]  It is precisely because of this that the law can never be a static thing, but it must be as dynamic as the organic life it supports and serves, meaning that it is always open-ended.

What does the law’s open-ended development through the Bible mean?  In its simplest terms, as people change so do their circumstances and their needs. Subsequently, it becomes a testimony of unrest in the law for it to be flexible enough for continual revision so to “link law with life in new times and in new places.”[4]  From the Christian standpoint Jesus both revises and improves on Jewish law every time he says “you have heard it said… But I say…” (See Matthew 5-6 or 19:7-8) or pay attention to all the times Jesus violates purity codes for the sake of mercy.

So, I am going to end this part with this, if Biblical laws are standing in support of people (not for lording over one another) then justice seeks to make it right when they have been broken.  When the law that serves the person has been broken the central violation is of a person not just some law.

[1] Howard Zehr. The Little Book of Restorative Justice (Intercourse, PA: Good Books 2002), 21.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Terence Fretheim. God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2005), 149.

[4] ibid, 153.

Christians and Gun Control

Guns need a license to bear Chuck Norris

I recently heard (or read) a lady say that she would like to hear more Christian voices on the topic of gun control. Apparently after searching online for Christian views on gun control it only yielded voices of those who want to protect their rights to own weapons. Since I was already planning on making some of my upcoming posts about restorative-justice, I thought gun control might actually be a great intro to that series, though they may not seem congruent at first. Nevertheless, here it goes. 

If we are honest about the Christian gun control view that this search revealed we are actually seeing the Republican political stance to protect the American Amendments which is not inherently a discussion on “Christian” views toward gun control.  Before I offer any critiques on the political conservatives, however, I would like to point out that I do agree with part of their argument. 

As most of this debate has stemmed from the US’s mass shootings, one evident aspect in many of these cases is that the situations have less to do with weapons of choice and more to do with mental health and our lack of healthcare towards it. Most of our mass shootings were committed by mentally ill people so to only focus on guns misses the deeper problem and I could not agree more. Now I have yet to see many Republicans go beyond using it as an argumentative tool (for keeping weapons) and actually work toward or even propose ideas to better our mental healthcare, but as far as I am concerned peoples and communities with a vested interest need not wait for them.

 

With that said the other popular argument from Republicans for keeping weapons is centered on the misnomer that the only way to stop a “bad guy” with a gun is to make sure the “good guy” has a gun.  Aside from the fact that they just reduced many mentally ill from the first part of their argument to that of a wild-west villain, now they are personal arbiters of who the good vs bad gunslingers are. 

My critique is that neither part of the argument is based on the interest of needs (though many will try and say it is) so much as just keeping weapons available in major part for financial gain. It is nearly a $15 billion dollar industry that American citizens contribute a large percentage to.[1]  Of course the average citizen is convinced they will have personal security and hold all the cards during moments of surprise, but I’m not sure they understand how surprise tactics work. You will almost never be in total control of the situation even with weapon in hand.  My bigger point is when people see mass shootings they are understandably struck by fear and the reflexive action is toward self-protection. But, guns seem like the logical response because, I think, we just don’t know what else to do.  We are caught in the binary (either/or) trap of kill or be killed.

Perhaps we do not know what else to do simply because it is never encouraged or brought to our attention that we can practice other responses.  My logic is this, if somebody wants to be good at war, or mirror the offensive action of a shooter in an equally devastating manner, then you put in a lot of time, energy and money into becoming good weapon owners.  Case and point, US military has a $601 billion budget[2] and puts in lots of time, training and expertise into violating privacy and making war.  It is more than they do for hunger ($167.5 billion dollar problem)[3] and it shows. We have sustained a war for the last 14 years and there are still unfed people in the US. 

Christians, however, are not called to vengeance or violence (Rom.12:14-21), that is the beast’s job (Rev. 13:5-7), but we are called to make shalom (Matt, 5:9).  We should invest a large amount of time and energy into learning how to do that.  Wendell Berry made a similar point when he suggested this: “What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness… And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.”[4]   Therefore, it is up to those who see past illusions of wealth to create rhythms and investments that actually build something of worth.

What does that look like? As I said before, it is a vision of building shalom and also creating sanctuary, so it will look like faithfulness with what does matter: you, me, the other and creation.  Whether guns are legal, the real question is will owning one contribute to this? I don’t believe Christians can say yes.  Certainly we will have to consider responses to unintended brazen attacks especially when we take killing responses off the table (and I will propose more concrete ideas in a coming post about it). Nevertheless, this decision will be best formed by each community. If you want to search out for yourself what can be done, look up all the work that has been done in the areas of conflict transformation and de-escalation, strategic peacebuilding and restorative justice, just to name a few.  

It still stands that the Church is to be a people who clothe ourselves in compassion, kindness, gentleness and patience (Col. 3:12) and realize no one is disposable.  We carry the responsibility to create healthy communities with seriousness. This is a community that:

1. Actively pursues peace processes amid initial conflict (not only after escalation);

2. Invests in the development of others now (not arming up for when our failure takes its toll);

3. Creates broad social plans that reinforce community (within the social, educational, business, judicial, medical and so on).

We will also need to address areas of discontent of those who have existed on the fringes of communities and require their voice back.  From my standpoint gun ownership at best must be reserved  for those who just like shooting at targets or who hunt out of pure necessity. This certainly is not good Republican thinking, or Democratic thinking, or American thinking, but it is the thinking of someone who wants to follow Jesus.  

[1] Catey Hill 10 Things the gun industry won’t tell you Retrieved From http://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-things-the-gun-industry-wont-tell-you-2014-03-07

[2] Gould &Bender  http://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-us-military-spends-its-billions-2015-8

[3] CFAP. Hunger in America Retrieved From https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/report/2011/10/05/10504/hunger-in-america/

[4] Wendell Berry. Thoughts in the Presence of Fear Retrieved From https://orionmagazine.org/article/thoughts-in-the-presence-of-fear/

Anxiety, Panic Attacks & Suffering Well

I recently heard a quote by Carl Jung saying that neurosis is caused by the avoidance of legitimate suffering and he is right.  For those who don’t know neurosis is a mental disorder that appears from stress. It can come out as depression, anxiety, o.c.d. or hypochondria because for some reason one’s ability to cope with stress is damaged.  As I personally have dealt with anxiety/panic disorder for most of my life, and for many years have been debilitated by it, this got me thinking.  I don’t suffer well and I’ll bet neither does most of my culture, which may be clear in the rise of neurosis cases.

At the core of our consumer mentality are a people who prescribe for themselves “happiness” as a distraction from the things we cannot control.  This is not meant to tear down genuine happiness, but when we ignore everything else for the sake of self-fulfilled pleasure it creates more problems.  Look at what thrives; lots of distractions in the form of entertainment, social media, food, drugs (both pharmaceutical and recreational) and listening to health & wealth televangelists and/or positive thinking gurus. Then we hold this as the high-ideal for happiness, but it’s all shallow and vapid at best.

As a side note, I believe it has also crossed over into how we comfort one another when somebody is genuinely hurting from depression, grief, relational issues and so forth.  We go right for the comfort/hope without addressing the damage. Distractive words of cheer and happiness are offered far quicker than helpful notes of truth, solidarity and a willingness to allow them to go, and ourselves to go with them, into the pain and tears.  We need to be allowed to feel the pain and the loss before we can adequately accept it and transform it into something healthier.  So, despite common belief it is okay to say it is not okay.  That is not a lack of faith.  

  

            As for anxiety and panic attacks, the reality is (like grief, conflict, and most discomforts out of our control) avoidance and quick-fixes only make it worse and stop us from moving forward.  When we can begin to enter into the situations that trigger such panic-ridden thoughts and feelings (and may I recommend small steps, don’t set-up for failure) we can finally begin to face it and suffer well. We let those thoughts and feelings come and pass, and they do pass.  More to the amazement is when they diminish and not because you have found a new distraction, but because you stopped avoiding the component of fear and created a new pattern where the scary “what if” thoughts no longer hold the power. 

With this said, over the years I have heard a lot of fellow Christians dwell on the fear aspect of it and say that fear is not from God so it is the Devil tormenting you and by your faith God will deliver you from this.  Let me say I do believe that fear is not from God and I do believe that God is the best person to be a part of your overcoming process and I believe this is not the way things are supposed to be. But, blaming the Devil alone only detracts from the fact that it is we (in the moment when our brain triggers a false “fight or flight” feeling from stress) take the bait and run from it. In neurosis our part in it is evident and what is worse is no real threat is at hand.

However, as you work through this in a healthy manner of accepting the feelings, lack of control and continuing forward, I cannot help but think you will also develop the God-given tools to face legitimate suffering and even one’s own finiteness.  The good news is God also has no intention of our staying in such a place either but only asks that we be willing to confront its existence by accepting the anguish because from that place he can bring a new beginning (Lk. 1:78-79).  So in retrospect God will deliver us, but it will not be from it so much as through it. 

Predestined for Freewill Prt. 2

Well it only took a couple of weeks, but I finally got around to finishing the last part to this.  So rather than looking at many scriptures, I want to focus on the most common rebuttal (from Christians) to my freewill case and that comes at the expense of Romans 9.  This chapter is usually pivotal in the Calvinistic argument.  However, I believe if we can see that it cannot be read deterministically it will show that we will also need to give fresh interpretations to other “seemingly” deterministic verses.  This is especially true given that each Biblical book carries its own genre, themes and outworking of its issues.    

With that said when the average person arrives at deterministic resolutions for this chapter I am not entirely surprised because the imagery the text creates can feel like an outworking of the deterministic language Western philosophy has interjected into our social thought.  We will naturally then give it a straightforward modern reading, but there is a good possibility Paul was not thinking in such philosophical terms (in fact I’m convinced of it).  I will go further and say most first-century Jews were probably not entertaining the Stoic’s philosophical ideas (deterministic or otherwise) except to challenge it. Nevertheless, here is the bulk of this contentious chapter to see what I mean:

Romans 9

Rom. 9:9, For this is what the promise said, “About this time I will return and Sarah shall have a son.” 10 Nor is that all; something similar happened to Rebecca when she had conceived children by one husband, our ancestor Isaac. 11 Even before they had been born or had done anything good or bad (so that God’s purpose of election might continue, 12 not by works but by his call) she was told, “The elder shall serve the younger.” 13 As it is written.“I have loved Jacob, but I have hated Esau.” 14 What then are we to say? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! 15 For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”16 So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. 17 For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.” 18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.

19. You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” 20. On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? 21. Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? 22. What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? 23. And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, 24. even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles (NRSV).

Well, this would seem to complicate the persuasion of my last post, except that Romans 8:29 shows Paul saying salvation is for everyone.  So did Paul contradict himself?  The simple answer is no, but here’s why. 

            Divine-determinism might be the case if Romans 9 was Paul directly responding to a question about individual salvation (specifically how God chooses who he is going to save or not save), but he is not.  He is actually answering the question did God make a blunder by “choosing” Israel as his people (Rom. 9:6)?  Paul is helping the Jewish sect of his Roman audience come to a better understanding of their identity since he just lamented over the Jewish rejection of the Messiah (9:1-3) and had already made the points that Israel had failed her task, yet God’s promised faithfulness was not reliant on Jewish nationality or obedience to the Torah (Rom. 2-3).  Salvation was inclusive for all nations on the basis of faith (Rom. 3-4), so where does that leave the Jews to whom adoption, covenants, giving of the law and promises had belonged (Rom. 9:1-5)?  Suddenly we have moved from questions of determinism to more difficult and dangerous questions which have been used to justify the spread anti-Semitism. 

            However, contrary to misinterpretations Paul does in fact affirm God’s choosing the Jews and that Jesus is both Israel’s Messiah and the pinnacle of God’s promises (Note that the veracity of the Messiah depends on the Jews having been chosen in the first place). To add to this picture, Tom Wright says:

The whole letter (Romans) is about the way God is fulfilling his ancient promises in and through Jesus, and what this will mean in practice… The Messiah is from the Jewish people ‘according to the flesh’ in his flesh-and-blood identity. But he is also the Lord of all: the incarnate God who claims the allegiance of people of every race and nation. That is the point of tension, the fault line which Paul’s argument will now straddle. The Jews really are the people of the Messiah, but they are that ‘according to the flesh’. The Messiah really does belong to them, but only in the ‘fleshly’ sense; and he also belongs to the whole world as its rightful Lord.[1]

 It takes Paul every bit of chapters 9, 10 and 11 to draw this out, thus chapter 9 is only the beginning of that answer (also meaning that I will not be answering it in full).  I will attempt to offer a sound and succinct explanation of chapter 9 though. 

Setting Interpretive Scenes

We must go into it knowing a couple of things: first, no matter what nation God chose for the task of defeating evil (Rom. 10:4) he could only select a group of people who were (themselves) part of the problem (Rom. 3:23).  So “moral-champion” was not a criterion for God’s selective process (in fact a manipulative backstabbing guy like Jacob proves this, Gen. 27). 

Second, when Paul says God loved Jacob but hated Esau that was hyperbolic language meaning to prefer one over the other.  In this case it was to prefer to continue down One Jewish bloodline over the other (as they were both Isaac’s children). Perhaps Jacob had a tenacity that Esau did not, but whatever the reason it was because God had everybody’s interest at heart in how to continue forward.  Moreover, this forward progression is for the eventuality of the Messiah who will, as Paul suggests, carry the faithfulness of an entire nation all by himself. 

            Now, let’s talk about potters and their clay.  Most people take the potter/clay reference to mean that God is the potter and we are lifeless lumps of clay just here to be molded into whatever God decides.   Yet, all it takes is watching a potter working with clay to see that the potter spends just as much time responding to what the clay is doing as the clay does to what the potter is doing.  Paul’s point is similar here.  He is referencing the Hebrew Scriptures that critiqued Israel’s behavior (Isa. 29:16; 45:9).  To quote Wright again, these prophets “tell of a stage in Israel’s history when God was struggling with a rebellious Israel, like a potter working with clay that simply wouldn’t go into the right shape.  The image of potter and clay was not designed to speak in general terms about human beings as lifeless lumps of clay… it was designed speak very specifically about God’s purpose in choosing and calling Israel and what would happen if Israel, like a lump of clay, failed to respond to the gentle moulding of his hands.”[2] 

            This meaning that God was going to have to move forward in some way, but the question was would it be with his original plan or would it mean throwing out the misshapen clay?  As Jeremiah suggests, and Paul reiterates, God can and will reshape the clay (Jeremiah 18:1-6), but it will take wilderness/exile to do it.  More to Paul’s point, God will be faithful to his original plan even when humans are not.  Hence the Exodus 33 reference when Pharaoh (the anti-creational force) opposes God’s choosing Israel for the vocational task of moving creation forward even in the face of opposition (and even when the rebellion came from Israel herself making golden calves) God will still move forward. This is also the point behind Paul’s contentious “what if” questions (Rom. 9:22-24).  They are hypothetical, but aim to make the point that it is God’s right and his choice to choose who he wants to choose. He drastically shows it by calling the Gentiles to share as full and equal members in this.  Now both Jew and Gentile are to be vessels of mercy in the sense that we are agents of mercy rather than mere receivers of it.[3]

Now Pull it Together

In conclusion, Paul will reinforce this as he continues with his use of Hosea and Isaiah to show that even while they were not acting as “God’s beloved people” God promised he would bring them through times of judgment and yet again call them “his people” (9:25-29).  Once more God’s faithfulness is the focal point in Paul’s thinking. 

            Now that we are completely off track of determinism (and for good reason) we can see that Paul needs to be allowed to speak for Paul and Romans 9 stands at a far distance from our contemporary debates.  By the end, the theological doctrine gleaned is not that God has orchestrated a predetermined creation, but rather that God is always faithful to his promises to the Jews, the Gentiles and to all of creation.  Any failure in God’s thwarted work thus only belongs to unfaithful agents responsible in helping to carry it forward (i.e. us). Yet, God thankfully does not give up, but makes a way to carry it all forward.   Notice the correlation between an exiled Israel and our Messiah exiled to the cross.  Now we too can enter into the exile of the cross (Matt. 16:24) in faithful response to our Potter who responds gently and faithfully to us.

[1] N.T. Wright. Paul for Everyone: Romans Part 2 (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press 2004), 5.

[2] Ibid, 13.

[3] Ibid, 16.