Author Archives: Clarke Morledge

About Clarke Morledge

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Clarke Morledge -- Computer Network Engineer, College of William and Mary... I hiked the Mount of the Holy Cross, one of the famous Colorado Fourteeners, with some friends in July, 2012. My buddy, Mike Scott, snapped this photo of me on the summit.
July 19, 2024

A Jewish Paul, Matthew Thiessen Makes Paul Weird Again

By Clarke Morledge

Can we please make Paul weird again?

Many of us know the standard story of Paul. At one time, Paul (then Saul) was the most feared opponent of the fledgling Christian movement, bent on destroying such a pernicious heresy. The followers of Jesus had foolishly embraced the idea of a crucified now-risen Messiah, and Paul was dedicated to stamp the movement out.

God soon stopped Paul on the road to Damascus. Confronted by the Risen Jesus himself, Paul realized that he had been championing the very wrong side. Shortly thereafter, Paul reversed his course entirely, proclaiming the Resurrection of Jesus. It took some time for the other Christian leaders to fully trust him, but Paul was eventually to become the great apostle to the Gentiles. Paul had rejected the Jewish commitment to the Law of Moses, with all of its “works-righteousness.” Instead, Paul embraced and proclaimed a message of faith, that of having trust in the Risen Messiah. In contrast with those unbelieving Jews obsessed with trying to earn their own salvation, Paul’s new gospel was a message of grace towards those who believe, receiving a salvation that could never be earned by human effort alone.

While much of this story has staying power, it has a serious weakness when it comes to analyzing the following question: When Paul became a Christian, did he really cease to be a Jew?

Such is the question at the very heart of Matthew Thiessen’s A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles.

A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. Matthew Thiessen makes Paul weird again.

 

What Was At the Heart of Paul’s Message?

Matthew Thiessen acknowledges many of the virtues associated with the standard story of Paul, but he contends that this standard story begins to break down when trying to consider Paul’s real relationship to Judaism as a professing Christian. In essence, Thiessen maintains that Paul never ceased being a Jew when he became a follower of Jesus. Instead, he became a very particular kind of Jew. While this may sound weird to Bible readers today, this is the very point Thiessen is trying to make: We need to make Paul weird again.

Matthew Thiessen is a New Testament professor at McMaster University, in Canada. Coming from a Mennonite background, he is part of an intellectual movement to try to rethink and recover who the real Paul the Apostle was. Sadly, layers of anti-Jewish sentiment following the break between Judaism and Christianity in the early church period have distorted the historical picture we have of Paul. While Jesus is surely the founder of the Christian faith, Paul is indeed his greatest and most influential interpreter. Agree or disagree with Matthew Thiessen on particular matters, one thing Thiessen says sticks out for sure is this: Paul is indeed weird. We would do well to remember this.

What? Paul remained a Jew, while still becoming a Christian? I have to admit, this did sound pretty weird when I first heard this. But Thiessen makes a compelling case for Paul’s weirdness. Some of Paul’s weirdness goes against the norm of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic people today (WEIRD!), as Jonathan Haidt popularized in his absolutely brilliant The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. But perhaps that is a point as to why thinking about Paul’s weirdness is so important. It shows us just how “weird” we are today, and perhaps why our weirdness gets in the way of situating Paul in his original first century context as a Jewish follower of the Risen Messiah.

In A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles, Thiessen offers a succinct overview of the history of Pauline studies over the past few hundred years. First, the traditional reading reflected in the standard story above stems from Martin Luther and other leading Protestant Reformers. In this traditional reading, the main problem faced by Paul was legalism, the attempt to earn one’s salvation through good works. Paul linked this legalism with Judaism itself, and rejected it for the message of grace found by having faith in Christ, superseding Judaism as a whole.

What many Christians do not realize is that a reexamination of this standard story has occupied the attention of New Testament scholars for at least a good forty years now, among both non-evangelical and evangelical scholars. In the world of academic scholarship, it seems like a new study with new insights into the Apostle Paul gets published about once a month.

The thrust of this new line of scholarly research is known as the “New Perspective on Paul” founded by the late E.P Sanders, but popularized the most by writers like N.T. Wright and James D.G. Dunn. Unlike the traditional view, the “New Perspective on Paul” says Paul was not concerned about legalism and correcting it with the “imputed righteousness” of Christ championed by Martin Luther (which is N.T. Wright’s way of saying it). Instead, with the “New Perspective on Paul,” the problem faced by Paul was ethnocentrism. To borrow from N.T. Wright at times, the message of Paul was about “grace, not race.” The Judaizers of Paul’s day wanted gentiles to become Jews by embracing circumcision and the rest of Torah law. But Paul insisted that the death and resurrection of Christ is what makes people right before God and joined together as God’s people, not the ethnically cultural customs  which have been part of keeping the Torah.

Thieseen observes yet a third way of looking at Paul, having its origins in the “apocalyptic” theology of the early 20th century German scholar-turned-missionary doctor, Albert Schweitzer. In this apocalyptic view, the coming of Jesus ushers in a radical break with the Jewish past. Schweitzer had written about the “mysticism” of the Apostle Paul, with all of Paul’s statements about being “in Christ,” and Schweitzer’s followers like the 20th century German theologian Ernst Käsemann, have suggested that the death and resurrection of Jesus relativizes the Torah completely. All of the old structures of order: Jew and Gentile, male and female, and slave and free, have been dissolved (Galatians 3:28).

Thiessen acknowledges that each of these three views have certain strengths to them, but they also fall short in other ways. For example, Paul is clearly teaching that one can not earn one’s salvation by works, so Luther was absolutely right here. But the New Perspective on Paul offers an important corrective by showing that at least some, if not most forms of ancient Judaism were not promoting a works-based righteousness. For example, the Old Testament announces that “there is no one who does not sin” (2 Chronicles 6:36 ESV), and “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins” (Ecclesiastes 7:20 ESV). This hardly coheres with the standard, old Protestant view that all Old Testament Jews believed that you could simply earn your own salvation on the basis of performing good works. Even Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, received God’s favor due to an act of God’s graciousness, and not by superior Law-keeping.

This Old Testament theme of grace is echoed in the Paul of the New Testament: “Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified” (Galatians 2:16 ESV). Everyone from the Old Testament Jew to the New Testament Gentile stands in need of God’s grace.

But according to Thiessen, the New Perspective on Paul has faulted by insisting that Paul’s problem with the Jewish resistance to the Christ message was ethnocentrism. For Paul himself could also be accused of ethnocentrism, just as anyone else could: Paul’s message was “first to the Jew, then to the Gentile” (Romans 1:16 NIV). Why put the Jew first? Was Paul placing the Jew as being more important or superior to the gentile?

Thiessen’s critique continues with another target: While the “apocalyptic” view rightly announces a radical proclamation of something new, that view tends to suggest a break with Judaism that Paul never really had. Paul believed that the Mosaic Law had its goal and purpose fulfilled in the coming of Christ: “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Romans 10:4 ESV).

Instead, what Matthew Thiessen proposes is yet a fourth view that might be called “Paul within Judaism,” though Thiessen is not wholly satisfied with that description. Nevertheless, it is a label that a scholar such as Paula Fredriksen agreeably aligns with, in her Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle. First and foremost, this “Paul within Judaism” view acknowledges that the Judaism of the Second Temple period, to which the Apostle Paul lived in, was not some monolithic belief system. Someone who was Jewish in Paul’s (and Jesus’) day could have held beliefs that sharply differed from another Jew. For example, even Acts 23:8 tells us that the Sadducees and the Pharisees held contradictory views about a future resurrection, the Sadducess being dismissive of such an idea whereas the Pharisees embraced it. It is better to think in terms of multiple “Judaisms” of Paul’s day as opposed to a single “Judaism.”

“Paul was one ancient Jew living and thinking and acting within a diverse Jewish world that sought to be faithful to Israel’s God and Israel’s law“(Thiessen, p. 8).

Yet what makes Paul so important is that Paul is the most prolific and deepest thinker we encounter when reading the pages of the New Testament. But to miss the essential Jewishness of the Apostle Paul is to completely miss the message from him we read about in the New Testament.

Paul’s Unique Contribution to New Testament Christianity

Along the way in reading A Jewish Paul, we learn that:

“…It is simply wrong to believe that all or even most Second Temple Jews thought that gentiles needed to become Jews. Such a commonly held view is the result of Christian interpreters who have reconfigured Judaism into the image, albeit inevitably an inferior image, of Christianity” (Thiessen, p. 18).

Yet Thiessen’s contention is contrasted with the very mission of Paul to be Christ’s apostle to the Gentiles, compelling Paul to travel across the Roman empire to share the Good News with all he encountered. While most Jews did not “evangelize” their faith, Paul in his own understanding of Judaism was exactly opposite, a feature of Paul’s ministry which Thiessen acknowledges.

Paul did not in any way think that Judaism was somehow deficient as a whole. Rather he specifically came to believe that Jesus Christ was the once dead but now Risen Messiah, and that gentiles can be brought into the community of God’s people by having faith in Jesus.

Some might argue against Thiessen that Paul spoke of his “previous way of life in Judaism” (Galatians 1:13-14 ESV), suggesting that Paul had given up his Jewish way of life. However, later in Galatians 2:15 Paul tells his readers that he is very much still a Jew, and in Romans 11:1 and Philippians 3:5, he embraces his Benjamite identity. Therefore, it is better to think of Galatians 1:13-14 as saying that Paul gave up one form of Judaism for yet another form of Judaism (Thiessen, p. 41 and pp. 54ff).

It might be fair to say then that Paul’s “conversion” to Christianity was not a “conversion” away from Judaism. Rather, Paul was converted from one form of Judaism to a different, particular Jewish vision of acknowledging Jesus as God’s promised Messiah.

Paul is not against circumcision per se, for he does not believe the Jewish Christians need to have the marks of circumcision removed. But he is emphatic on insisting that gentile Christians not be required to undergo circumcision in order to become followers of the Messiah.

To demonstrate Paul’s very point, it is crucial to understand how the Book of Acts functions in its placement within the New Testament.  Sandwiched between the Gospels and Paul’s letters, Acts shows the reader that Paul was very much still a Torah-observant Jew (Acts 21:23–24; 25:8; 28:17), getting along well with other apostles, like Peter. But even in Acts, Paul preaches that complete Torah observance was not required for the Gentile follower of Jesus (Acts 13:38-39). It was this insistence that circumcision be not required of the believing gentile which stirred up Paul’s opponents within the Jesus movement in Jerusalem. For there is nothing in the story of Jesus from his earthly ministry prior to his Resurrection, as we find in the Gospels, which would indicate that Jesus had removed the circumcision requirement from the gentiles. We only get that from the post-Resurrection story of the apostle Paul.

So, it would be too strong to say that Paul was the founder of Christianity. Jesus himself took that role. But it was through Paul’s unique calling, as the apostle to the gentiles, that Christianity became a universalizing faith, intended for everyone, and not just one particular group of people.

Christians who contend that they “love Jesus” while “having problems with the Apostle Paul,” need to seriously rethink such an attitude. For while Paul does believe that he got his message straight from the Risen Jesus, nevertheless, if it were not for Paul, Christianity probably would never have made the in-roads which it did into the gentile world.

If all we had was the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels, we would never have had a Christian message with the universal impact it had. While Paul does not go as far some would like in stimulating social change, we might never have had the eradication of racial-based slavery without Paul, nor the reconfiguring of roles for women in leadership without Paul, in the Western world. Why Jesus waited to impart through the Holy Spirit the full Gospel message until after the Ascension, perhaps somewhere on that road to Damascus, so that Paul could unpack it all out for us, is a question I hope to to get answered some day. Without Paul, Christianity might have remained a peculiar Jewish sect, where the only Jesus followers would be those who accepted circumcision, and other distinctives of the Law of Moses.

Rethinking Paul’s Message in Light of His Jewishness

Much of contemporary New Testament scholarship has tried to show that the narrative of Paul’s life, as told through his letters, conflicts with the narrative of Paul given to us in the Book of Acts. This has led many scholars to dismiss the historical reliability of Acts. But Thiessen argues that much of this conflict comes from misunderstanding Paul from his own letters (Thiessen, pp. 27ff).

Thiessen suggests that part of our misunderstanding about Paul comes from misleading ways of reading the book of Romans. For example, many Bible translations of Romans 1:18-32 employ subtitles like the ESV’s “God’s Wrath on Unrighteousness” or the NIV’s “God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity.”   Only a few translations, like the CSB, with “The Guilt of the Gentile World,” more accurately convey the intent of  Paul’s message.  The primary thrust of Romans 1:18-32 is to critique the sin of idolatry and its consequences in the gentile world, problems that do not normally appear in the Jewish world.

Much of Paul’s writing is focused on how his message of inclusion regarding the gentile believers meshes together with honoring circumcision among believing Jewish followers of Jesus. In contrast, Thiessen refutes someone like N.T. Wright, who redefines circumcision as taught in 1 Corinthians 7:19 as something “spiritual,” and therefore physical circumcision is no longer important to Paul, for the Jewish Christian. Thiessen suggests that this spiritualizing of circumcision would be akin to a Christian today rejecting baptism or communion as unnecessary, and that we should only listen to God’s words instead (Thiessen, p. 31).

While Paul has the gentile in mind in Romans 1:18-32, Paul has the Jewish Christian in mind in Romans 2.  Nevertheless, some Bible translations tend to miss this focus, as did the older NRSV in Romans 2:28-29:

“For a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. Rather, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart—it is spiritual and not literal. Such a person receives praise not from others but from God.”

(The new NRSVue translation fixes this). Thiessen notes that this older translation is misleading as there is no mention of “true” or “real” in the original Greek. Instead, Thiessen offers this alternative translation:

For it is not the visible Jew, nor is it the visible in-flesh circumcision, but the hidden Jew, and the circumcision of the heart by the pneuma [spirit], not the letter, whose praise is from God, not from a human.

Paul still acknowledges the importance of physical circumcision for the Jewish Christian. Paul’s inward “circumcision of the heart” in no way invalidates the outward circumcision of the Jew. God’s desire was for the Jew to be both outwardly circumcised and inwardly circumcised in the heart (Thiessen, p. 91).

Rethinking the “Allegory” of Galatians 4:21-31

Paul’s use of the “allegory” of Abraham’s son Ishmael versus his son Isaac, in Galatians 4:21-31 can be puzzling. For years, I have thought that in this passage Paul is treating the story about Ishmael and Isaac as an allegory that actually flips the roles around filled by Ishmael and Isaac.  Ishmael represents the Jews who rejected Jesus, whereas Isaac represents Christian believers.  In other words, the descendants of Abraham through Isaac, the Old Testament Jews, have now become the Ishmaelites, separated from the promise of God.  In turn the Ishmaelites, those who embrace Jesus, including the gentiles, have now become the inheritors of the promise given through Abraham’s son, Isaac.

But there are several problems with this interpretation according to Thiessen. First, Matthew Thiessen notes that Paul is not simply treating or interpreting the Genesis narrative regarding Ishmael and Isaac as an allegory. Rather, the Genesis story IS an allegory, according to Paul.  Some translations, such as the ESV, take the wrong approach at translating Galatians 4:24:

Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar.

In contrast, the NASB 2020 is more direct:

This is speaking allegorically….

Or better the NRSVue:

Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery

The implications of this claim by Thiessen go beyond what he comments on in A Jewish Paul. But the lesson for how Paul reads the Old Testament is evident: “The trick, then, was to learn to recognize which texts were originally allegorical and then to figure out how to read them accurately” (Thiessen, p. 95).

However, the clarifying insight in A Jewish Paul suggests that my old way of reading Galatians completely misses the original context of the letter, which is about Paul’s efforts to encourage his gentile followers of Jesus to not fall into the trap a listening to the Judaizers who want these gentile Christians to undergo circumcision to become fully Jewish. In the allegory, we learn that both Ishmael and Isaac undergo circumcision.  However, only Isaac is the one who receives the promise. The covenant will be fulfilled through the line of Isaac, and not Ishmael. Isaac is circumcised correctly, whereas Ishmael was not, an idea that Theissen draws from the apocryphal Book of Jubilees, a popular Jewish text from the Second Temple period (Theissen, p. 97). Therefore, in and of itself, circumcision itself does not guarantee membership within the covenant people. The very fact that in the Genesis narrative that Hagar and her son Ishmael are eventually expelled from Abraham’s household demonstrates the failure of circumcision done for the wrong reasons.

Paul does not want the gentile Christians in Galatia to follow along the Ishmaelite path, for to do so would be accepting a false gospel, and lead to spiritual peril. Much of this explains why Paul encouraged Timothy to get circumcised, though having a gentile father, was also born of a Jewish mother (Acts 16:3), while explicitly rejecting the idea that Titus, a pure gentile, should get circumcised (Galatians 2:3-5).

The correct interpretation of Galatians 4:21-31 then is as follows:

“You gentile men want to keep the law, but you haven’t read it carefully enough. You want to be Abraham’s sons through circumcision. But Abraham had two circumcised sons: Ishmael (a slave) and Isaac (an heir). By undergoing adult circumcision, you imitate Ishmael, not Isaac. Consequently, you will share in Ishmael’s fate. You, like Ishmael, will not inherit. Instead, you will be cast out of Abraham’s house altogether. Only those who are like Isaac, born according to the pneuma [spirit] and promise, will inherit” (Thiessen, p. 98).

While this does not solve the gentile problem of how gentiles can become inheritors of the promise, it does show that “gentile circumcision is nothing more than a cosmetic effort to look like Abraham, but it is one that results only in a superficial, fleshly connection, something too tenuous to be of eschatological, and therefore lasting, value” (Thiessen, p.99).

For me, this insight alone is worth the price of A Jewish Paul.

Stay Tuned for Part Two of This Book Review:  Pneumatic Gene Therapy?

However, the best and most provocative part of A Jewish Paul comes towards the second half of the book. This is where Matthew Thiessen dives into a core idea in Paul’s thinking, which Thiessen cleverly calls “pneumatic gene therapy.” The concept is so intriguing that it is best to cover this in a separate blog post, where I will also give some critique, pushback, and summary conclusions to A Jewish Paul.  Stay tuned!

Link to next blog post.

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July 5, 2024

Jesus, Contradicted, by Michael Licona. A Veracity Book Review.

By Clarke Morledge

Have you ever been troubled by what might appear to be contradictions between the four Gospel accounts? If so, then Dr. Michael Licona’s Jesus, Contradicted will help you to tame the doubts in your mind, and have a fresh look at the trustworthiness and reliability of the Bible.

I know because I have been there. Having not grown up in an evangelical church, I never heard of the concept of “biblical inerrancy” until my years in college in the 1980s. Growing up in a liberal mainline church instead, the Bible only had a secondary role in spiritual formation. As a teenager though, I read through all of the New Testament (except for Revelation), and I was wrestling through the things I read in the Bible. One of the first things I noticed is that there are differences between the four Gospels and how they report various speeches and events.

The idea that there were differences in the Gospels really did not bother me. If anything, the differences in the Gospels only intrigued me to look more closely at the New Testament. As Christian apologist and former cold-case detective J. Warner Wallace has said, the very fact that the Gospels DO have differences lends credibility to the authenticity of their accounts. For if all four Gospels said exactly the same thing, this would be evidence of collusion, which would raise suspicions about the integrity of the New Testament. Instead, because there were opportunities to smooth out the differences and the Gospel writers did not do so, this gives us greater confidence in the truthfulness of the Christian story.

But apparently, not every Christian is convinced that having differences in the Gospel is a good thing. Some argue that we should do whatever we can to harmonize the Gospels, even if some of those harmonizations come across as unconvincing, embarrassingly ad-hoc, otherwise severely strained.

Mike Licona, a New Testament scholar, is one of most able defenders of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, having debated Bart Ehrman, the world’s most well-known skeptic, on several occasions. Now, Michael Licona is arguing for a more robust view of biblical inerrancy, in Jesus, Contradicted: : Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently

 

My Faith Crisis Over Inerrancy

Michael Licona, author of Jesus, Contradicted: Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently, has struck a chord with me. But I need to set up the story a bit more before I offer a review of this new book.

In the mid-1970’s, Harold Lindsell, who had been a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, had popularized an idea to try to resolve the apparent contradictions in the various accounts of Peter’s denials of Jesus, on the night Jesus was handed over to the authorities to face trial and eventually to be crucified. Mark 14:72 and Luke 22:61 has Jesus saying that a cock would crow twice after Peter denies Jesus three times. But in Matthew 26:74-75 and John 18:27, a cock crows once after Peter denied Jesus three times. Matthew has Jesus predicting one cock crow, while John says nothing about Jesus predicting anything about a cock crowing.

Lindsell’s solution was to say that Peter denied Jesus a total of six times: three times before the first cock crowed, and then three more times before the second cock crowed. Other strict inerrantists arrive at similar conclusions, arguing that Jesus’ differing prophecies in all four Gospels must align together in all incidental details.

While this type of harmonization sort of “works,” it still really confused me. After all, all four Gospels explicitly state that Peter denied Jesus three times, not six times as Lindsell’s “inerrantist” interpretation suggested. I reasoned that if this type of convoluted logic is required to make sense of “biblical inerrancy,” then I simply could not accept it. I really wanted the Bible to be “inerrant,” but as a mathematics major in college I just could not force my mind to accept the idea that 3 equals 6.

I pretty much shoved the idea off of my mind, visiting it every once in a while, but I just could not get past the problem. It was not until I read Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy ( introduced and reviewed here on Veracity,) a multi-views book highlighting the perspectives of five different biblical scholars holding separate and distinct definitions of what constituted “biblical inerrancy,” that I finally had some peace about the matter. Not every proponent of “biblical inerrancy” holds to the rather strict version championed by Harold Lindsell.

This was quite a relief. I could now hold to a version of “biblical inerrancy.” My problem was that I still was not sure what that version of “biblical inerrancy” really looked like.

A few years ago, I got a copy of Michael Licona’s book Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?, oriented towards scholars, to try to help me. So far, I have only gotten part of the way through it until Dr. Licona came out with a shorter, more accessible revision of the book this year, Jesus Contradicted: Why the Gospels Tell the Same Story Differently. I am so glad I read this new book!

Jesus, Contradicted: Why The Gospels Tell The Same Story Differently, by Michael Licona, offers a more evidenced-based approach to handling differences in the Gospels, without resorting to tortured harmonization efforts concerning incidental details.

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June 28, 2024

The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt. A Review

By Clarke Morledge

I could see this coming at least 17 years ago…. Well, sort of. When Steve Jobs announced Apple’s bombshell product, the iPhone, in 2007, I knew this would change the way people lived their lives. What I did not know was just how detrimental smartphones would become for children’s mental health… and finally, just as of June, 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General has issued a warning about the indiscriminate use of social media among children and teens.

 

I have worked in the Information Technology industry for about 39 years, and the pace of technology change has been breathtaking. “Overwhelming” is another word to describe it. But the smartphone revolution has probably had the most profound impact of anything in our information age.

I must confess that I have been part of the problem. The Internet revolution has changed the way we as humans exchange information, and get things done. Expedia makes travel easier. I like my Amazon Prime. Who needs physical road maps when you have Google or Apple Maps on your phone?

But Internet technology has also transformed how we handle relationships, and this impacts our mental health. Though I had been building computer networks during my entire professional career, it took me a while to get my first smartphone, probably about twelve years ago. I was hesitant to get one since my trusty flip phone served me quite well.

A Confession to Make

However, my first experience with a smartphone got me sucked in. It was cool. Everything was at my fingertips.

I remember bringing that smartphone into a church worship service, looking up a song lyric as our church had run out of paper bulletins to hand out to people, so that they could follow along with the service. How convenient it was to have everything I needed in my hand on this backlit screen! I had that song lyric on my phone screen, while the choir was singing a rather somber melody while the lights dimmed within the sanctuary..

Nevertheless, I was absolutely clueless as to how distracting my shiny smartphone was to other worshippers. Finally, the lady next to me kindly asked me to turn off my phone as my screen was flashing in her eyes. To my embarrassment, I shut my phone down. But it did get me thinking. I was part of the smartphone misuse problem, and was not even fully aware of it, until someone pointed it out to me.

Over the years, I must admit that the “Like” button on so many social media apps produced some of my own anxiety. But I was an adult, so I pretty much knew how to handle it. Yet the story is quite different for children.

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, who had previously authored The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics, makes the case that our phone-based culture has been responsible, at least in large part, for the tremendous rise in teenage and preteen mental health issues.

Jonathan Haidt teaches at New York University, where his research is on morality. His earlier book, The Righteous Mind, was perhaps the most important book I read during the decade of the 2010s (Read my review on Veracity). Though a secular Jew who considers himself as an atheist, Haidt has a very generous appreciation towards the Christian faith, as you might discover below. This new book, The Anxious Generation, has plenty of research analysis like The Righteous Mind, but it is also a plea for a return to sanity in how we as a culture, Christians included, need to rethink our usage of the Internet.  In this new book, Haidt says: “Social media use does not just correlate with mental illness; it causes it.”

I think he is right.

How We Lost a Generation of Children to Social Media

What I could not figure out is that even twelve years ago friends in my church were buying these smartphone devices for their preteen and teenage children. Why were they being so willing to buy in so quickly into the smartphone craze? As a technology advocate who worked in the information technology industry, I should have spoken up more. But to my chagrin now, I kept far too quiet.

We as Christians talk about training up our children in the ways of the Lord, offering guard rails to children, incrementally exposing them to things they must deal with as an adult, and resisting peer pressure. For the most part, conservative Christians broadly speaking have done fairly well at that.

But when it came to technology, Christians, just like most other people, have taken nearly all of it in with very few guard rails. Now as these kids have become college students and even young adults, some of these kids and former-kids show signs of severe anxiety and depression which many of us never saw so much in previous generations.

Haidt likens this to a grand scientific experiment where a whole generation of parents sent their children off to live on Mars, despite the fact that Mars is a very dangerous place for even adults to be. Little did we all know that the use of smartphone technology itself, not simply visiting certain websites, would become a problem.

My liberal-mainline-Christian Episcopalian parents had enough concern to keep me away from adult bookstores when I was a kid. But even in the most conservative Christian households today, for the past decade, children have been given hand-held devices which enable unfettered access to adult-only explicitly sexual content that I never would have dreamed of having access to in the 1970s. Nevermind the exposure to worldviews that seek to undermine one’s Christian faith and witness. Even up through the 1980s, one would need to go visit your local library in order to fact-check a sermon. Now on a smartphone, you can fact-check a sermon in under 30 seconds. Furthermore, who knows if the “fact-checking” online via the Internet is going to be accurate?

The sad truth is that smartphones are difficult enough for adults to control. Use of them can be quite addictive, despite how useful they can be in making telephone calls, listening to audiobooks (something I do quite a lot), and in checking my email. What I try to resist as much as possible are social media apps. But it even becomes more difficult when employers essentially require you to be less than a step away from your cell phone.

So far, I have resisted the urge to sign up for Facebook, despite how useful Facebook Marketplace is for selling things online. I stay away completely from Tik Tok and Instagram. But the story is different for teens and preteens, and the scientific results that Haidt reports are startling. High-tech social media companies have exploited the psychology of adolescents, such that they get hooked on social media via their smartphones. The impact is worse for girls than boys, but girls and boys suffer from a highly sensitive “Defense Mode,” as Haidt calls it, in that smartphone usage, which can easily surpass the hourly usage of watching television that kids like me in the 1970s experienced, just has skyrocketed since the early 2010s.

As a result, kids are stressed out. Many find it difficult to have face-to-face conversations with physically present human beings. Depression and anxiety disorders have practically become the norm among many teenagers. Anxiety has become the worst, with a 134% percent increase of diagnosed anxiety disorders among college students since 2008. Then there are also increases in ADHD, bipolar, anorexia, substance abuse, and schizophrenia.

Boys Versus Girls

The differences in how social media impacts girls versus boys is disturbing. Girls suffer the most. Girls who become exposed to social media apps that are highly visual, like Instagram, end up comparing themselves with other girls in terms of physical beauty. Cyber-bullying is particularly bad for girls, as shaming girls on the basis of their looks is so easily done on social media. Young teenage girls who aspire to become “influencers” are particularly vulnerable to exploitation from adult men and even otherwise supposedly “reputable” corporations.

Boys on the other hand, while less impacted in general than girls, suffer from social media in other detrimental ways. Boys tend to delay launching into the adult world more than girls, and they tend to isolate themselves more. Boys are less likely to succeed academically when compared to girls. Such problems are exacerbated among boys who lack respected male role models in their life, whom they can emulate. Haidt does not report any such particular findings with respect to role models for young girls.

(Churches which seek to diminish the role of adult male leaders who interact with boys would do well to take note of this report of the scientific data. The bottom line: young boys need to see positive male role models in positions of leadership in order for them to succeed in making it successfully to adulthood).

Even in Christian households, with mature Christian parents, the plague of teenage anxiety has stunted growth and made it even more difficult to pass on the faith to that next generation. As a Christian, this has really puzzled me, as many Christian parents have been quite diligent with policing how their kids spend time with others, enforcing curfews, and the like. But when it comes to smartphone usage, setting enforceable limits has become a fantasy for many families.

It is important to say that it would be wrong to blame parents as wholly responsible. Christian leaders, social media companies, and a whole host of other players alongside parents have made it difficult to figure out how to navigate the smartphone revolution. Even when efforts to rein in smartphone usage are attempted by parents, they often do not work as well as hoped. The addictive power of social media among young people makes it difficult for parents to effectively limit use of such technology, once kids get their hands on smartphone devices at an early age. GenZ, young people who were born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, have had the greatest risk, and now even younger kids are vulnerable. Reliance on communications technology during the COVID epidemic just made matters worse. Haidt shares all of the relevant statistics to show just how severe the problem is.

And it is really bad.

Other Factors, Plus the Specific Features of Social Media Which Harm Children

In fairness, Haidt does not blame everything on smartphones. Overprotective parenting, otherwise known as “helicopter” parenting, has ironically played its own role. In Haidt’s argument, children need to be gradually exposed to challenging situations in order to gain better resilience. Parents who keep their kids indoors too much are taking away from their child’s ability to go into “Discover Mode,” where they can learn to adapt to new situations, where the risk for hurting themselves is still present, but that the risk factor is not extreme.

Kids need time to play, and interact with other kids on a physically present basis. Neighbors need to stop freaking out whenever they see a child out on their own without their parents present, fearing that some parent MUST be neglecting their child and exposing them to potentially dangerous, physically-present strangers. Kids need to be allowed to explore the outside world, at age appropriate times, without their parents hovering over them. Otherwise, kids will be all too glad to hide in their bedroom to binge out on Instagram videos, etc., hoping that their friends, and even perfect strangers online might click that “Like” button, and give them that dopamine rush, which serves as the hook for how social media companies can lure young people into their orbit.

As Haidt puts it, social media for young people before their brains have matured has devastating effects. Young people can have their brains rewired by their smartphones to be on a chronic “Defense Mode” almost all of the time. We all need to have a healthy “Defense Mode” in order to handle acute, short lived threats. But exposure virtually to the following combination characteristic of social media has a detrimental impact on mental health:

  • Asynchronous as opposed to synchronous interactions with others
  • Disembodied versus embodied interactions with others
  • One-to-many interactions versus one-on-one interactions
  • Joining communities with a low-bar to entry versus a high-bar to entry

All of these factors have coalesced together work to give young people an oversensitive, chronic “Defense Mode” that can cripple a young person’s ability to successfully navigate relationships in the real world. Frankly, it can probably also have a negative impact on adults, too!

What Can Be Done About the Anxiety Crisis Among Children and Teenagers

Haidt gives us all of the bad news, but he does offer some solutions for resolving this teenage anxiety crisis:

  • No smartphone before high school (flip-phones are okay, with limited applications)
  • No social media before the age of 16
  • Phone-free schools.
  • Allow for more unsupervised play and childhood independence

Some critics of Haidt’s proposals have complained that they are too draconian. But Haidt is not a Luddite. Instead, he favors rites of passage in terms of how kids get exposed to such technology, so that they can incrementally adjust to them at age appropriate times.

Even some of the founders of the Internet revolution, like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs, were vigilant in limiting screen time for their kids. Gates did not allow his kids to get cell phones until they turned 14. Steve Jobs would not allow his kids at home to use iPhones or iPads until he died in 2012. The oldest teenager in that family at home was 17 at the time and the youngest was 14. Haidt’s proposals are anything but draconian.

The current age for Internet “adulthood” is 13 years old, younger than Haidt’s recommended age of 16, and that age limit is rarely, if ever, enforced by social media companies. Some balk at the idea of setting age limits for social media, citing the argument that some kids mature faster than others. But we do not that with setting age limits on obtaining a driver’s license, or obtaining alcohol.

Much of the challenges parents face in enforcing their rules for their own kids is because not every parent holds to the same rules. Being a part of a community with shared values makes it much easier to enforce restrictions on children. Family small groups, home schooling groups, and neighborhood associations can all help to keep peer pressure off of both children and parents to lower the age for initiation into the world of social media before young people are ready for it. So if the social group you and/or your kids belong to do not share the same values about limiting smartphone and social media usage, and they are not open to change, then perhaps it might be time to look for a different community which does share your values.  Or at the very least, look to be a part of a community with a critical mass of people who do share your values, such that neither you nor your children will feel socially ostracized for not “fitting in” to an unhealthy norm.

Christian parents in particular should seriously consider these solutions, if they are really serious about trying to pass their faith onto the next generation…. not just for simply mental health reasons. Interestingly, Jonathan Haidt is a secularized Jew, but he advocates for faith communities to offer substitutes for the lure of social media by offering better rites of passage for the journey from childhood to adulthood. Haidt dedicates an entire chapter on the important role that religious communities can play in pushing back against the damaging effects of social media among young people.

Local churches might consider implementing such rites of passage for their youth groups. What would it look like if parents in a Christian community were all committed to having 16th birthday parties where families could celebrate their kids getting their first social media accounts? Perhaps Christians can lead the way in setting good examples for how to raise resilient children, in a world where Christian values seem to be declining among the younger generations.

I am not sure if The Anxious Generation is the best book I have read this year, but it is undoubtedly the most IMPORTANT book I have read within the last two or three years. I listened to it as an audiobook on Audible and I highly recommend that you and everyone you know gets the book and reads it.

It is one thing when you hear a preacher decrying the corrosive impact of the world infecting the minds of children. One could easily dismiss such teaching as mere legalism. But when a secular Jewish intellectual who does not believe in God, like Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation, is telling us the same thing, we would do well to heed the message.

 

Russell Moore has an interview with Jonathan Haidt, sponsored by Christianity Today magazine. Some good news from the Russell Moore interview, based on research done by Haidt after the book was released, is that children in conservative Christian churches have done better during the last 15 or so years of the social media-induced mental health crisis than children from liberal Christian and secular environments. Below is another interview, focusing on the mental health issues from a more secular perspective.

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June 14, 2024

2 Corinthians 5:21 — The Heart of the Gospel Message, or A Defense of Paul’s Apostolic Ministry?

By Clarke Morledge

2 Corinthians 5:21 is one of most memorable verses in the Bible. In the NIV translation, it reads: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

But it is also one of the most controversial verses in the Bible. Who knew?!

For Martin Luther, the greatest voice of the Protestant Reformation, 2 Corinthians 5:21 succinctly summarizes the heart of the Gospel message, that a “great exchange” has taken place:

“That is the mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners: wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christ’s and the righteousness of Christ not Christ’s but ours. He has emptied Himself of His righteousness that He might clothe us with it, and fill us with it. And He has taken our evils upon Himself that He might deliver us from them… in the same manner as He grieved and suffered in our sins, and was confounded, in the same manner we rejoice and glory in His righteousness”  (Martin Luther, Werke (Weimar, 1883), 5: 608).

Many Protestant theologians argue that 2 Corinthians 5:21 best articulates the concept of imputation, which describes the mechanics of how the doctrine of justification by faith “works” (no pun intended). To “impute” something in common everyday English usage often has a purely negative connotation, as in “to impute guilt to somebody,” but in Christian theology, there is a lot more going with “imputation.” This theological concept of “imputation” comes from a bank accounting metaphor, as in to “credit” something to someone’s bank account. Essentially, every human being has a debt that we can not pay on our own, because of sin. The good news of the Gospel suggests that Christ has paid that debt by means of a credit to our spiritual banking account.

2 Corinthians 5:21 has what has been described as a “double imputation.” First, it says that Christ who had no sin had sin imputed (or credited) to him, when Jesus died on the cross. Secondly, the work of Christ then results in imputing the righteousness of Christ to the believer. As a result, a believer in Jesus, who is guilty of sin, has the verdict of guilt exchanged with the very righteousness of Christ, a verdict of “paid in full,” something we do not deserve. In other words, because of this “great exchange,” when God looks at a believer in Jesus, God no longer sees our sin, but rather God sees the righteousness of Christ instead. This is the heart of the Gospel message.

However, not everyone agrees that this concept of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is being taught in 2 Corinthians 5:21. This is “fightin’ words” in some circles as 2 Corinthians 5:21 is often regarded as THE definitive, “go-to” verse teaching the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, more than any other verse in the New Testament. Christians who look to great historical figures of the Reformation, like Martin Luther and John Calvin, cling to this understanding of 2 Cornthians 5:21 as foundational to our understanding of salvation. Others however are convinced there is no concept of imputation to “go-to” in 2 Corinthians 5:21.

Herein lies the focus of the controversy.

Are you ready to rumble???  Reformed theologian Wayne Grudem is: …. (Read on to learn more about the controversy)


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June 7, 2024

The New Perspective on Paul, by Kent L. Yinger. What’s the Fuss All About?

By Clarke Morledge

Has a new generation of scholars tried to overthrow the Apostle Paul’s teaching of justification by faith, by saying that Protestant luminaries like Martin Luther are wrong? Have these scholars denied the Gospel? Or have they recovered a crucial insight into Paul’s letters that has been there all along, hiding in plain sight?

If you have ever contemplated such questions, then chances are that you have heard something about the so-called “New Perspective on Paul.” Some think that the “New Perspective on Paul” is a recovery of what Paul originally taught in his New Testament letters. Others think that the “New Perspective of Paul” is suspect and even dangerous, if not downright heretical. The real answer is probably somewhere in between the extremes, but trying to figure out where to land on this controversy can be difficult to navigate for the average church-goer.

The most well-known popularizer of this “New Perspective on Paul,” otherwise known as the “NPP” is none other than world’s best known New Testament scholar, Nicholas Thomas Wright, or “N.T. Wright” as he is often called. N.T. Wright became famous within evangelical circles particularly in the 1990s, by taking on the radical scholars of the infamous “Jesus Seminar.” The critical scholars of the Jesus Seminar would take different colored slips of paper and vote on which sayings in the Gospels actually go back to the historical Jesus, and which ones were fictions simply placed on the mouth of Jesus by the early church.

Did the early church fabricate sayings from Jesus, thereby misrepresenting his actual message?  N.T. Wright vigorously championed the idea that the Jesus of the Gospels is indeed the real Jesus, thereby strengthening the faith of evangelicals faced with such challenging questions. While not all sayings of Jesus in the New Testament were strictly verbatim records, these sayings nevertheless faithfully represented what Jesus actually taught. Any skeptic who wanted to cut the historical Jesus down to size had to contend with the sharp pen of N.T. Wright., as he eviscerated arguments against historic Christian orthodoxy right and left.

Since then, N.T. Wright has been a theological hero to many. I personally devoured Wright’s book in dialogue with the liberal Protestant scholar, the late Marcus Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions when it was published, as Wright championed the historic, bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ! Wright also defends the virgin birth, Jesus’ divinity, and Christ’s atonement for sins…. all doctrines that Marcus Borg finds incredible to believe. That book is a classic!!

But when it came to the Apostle Paul, a number of evangelicals began to have their doubts about N.T. Wright. It was Wright’s What Saint Paul Really Said that shook everyone up. For example, N.T. Wright was saying that Paul never taught the imputation of Christ’s righteousness for the salvation of the believer. Essay after essay from Reformed pastors poured out over the Internet, issuing dire warnings to the faithful who had fallen in love with the jovial bearded Anglican bishop. Was this British evangelical scholar’s enthusiasm for the NPP causing him to lose sight of the Gospel?

A younger generation of evangelicals took up N.T. Wright’s arguments with great enthusiasm, much to the consternation of the “old guard,” who were concerned that Wright’s influence was weakening the resolve of the church to uphold the faith once delivered to the saints.  Like teenagers pushing the limits on their curfew  imposed  by their parents, N.T. Wright emboldened a kind of respectable rebellion among younger evangelicals, tired of the same-old same-old. In a culture which tends to favor the “new and glitzy” versus the “tried and true,” the concerns of the “old guard” are not without merit. Yet to these younger evangelicals, the “old-guard” came across sometimes as sweet yet curmudgeonly grandparents complaining about the clothes young people are wearing these days.

But was N.T. Wright making any sense to anyone? Was he really throwing a knife-edge at the heart of the Gospel, as his critics claimed?

In response, the well-known Minneapolis pastor and Bible teacher, John Piper, wrote a whole book expressing his alarm and dissatisfaction with the teaching of Wright’s (and others), The Future of Justification: A Response to N T. Wright (2007). Wright responded with a book of his own, Justification: God’s Plan, Paul’s Vision (2009). So was Piper misreading N.T. Wright, or was Piper’s critique correct? Or to play on the name of the British scholar, was he N.T. Wright or N.T. “Wrong?”

N.T. Wright and his array of bookshelves, loose papers, and slightly tilted lampshades. This reflects my own study environment, but my wife would not approve of Wright’s untidy library…..On the other hand, N.T. Wright is a bit of a theological book nerd. What else would you expect?

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