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Obedience And Church Authority: The Problem Of The Book Of Hebrews

by William D. Meyer

William Meyer is currently a M.Div. student at ATS, is a lay-person of a year old congregation of the Worldwide Church of God in Geneva, OH. There have been recent major theological shifts in this denomination toward a more Evangelical stance, ed.

The book of Hebrews - with its strong theme of a priesthood of all believers, where each Christian comes boldly through the curtain into the very presence of God in the heavenly Holy of Holies (Heb 10:19–22; 9: 1–3) with no other mediator than Jesus Christ himself (Heb 8:6; 9:15; 12:24) - is certainly antithetical to notions of hierarchy in the church. The lay recipients of the book of Hebrews are urged, at the conclusion of the book (Heb 13:14–15), to offer the sacrifices of the new Christian priesthood continually. These priestly sacrifices of the Christian laity, praise to God, confession of his name, doing good and sharing what we have, are pleasing to God. The Christian priesthood in Hebrews is in no sense limited to a special, separate class of church leaders. Hebrews also emphasizes the superiority of the new universal priesthood in the new covenant to the old hereditary, exclusive priesthood of the tabernacle in the old covenant, the central rituals of which, ordinary people who were not priests or prophets dared not take to themselves (Lev 22:10; 1 Sam 13:8–14). Heb 13:10 assures the church’s new, better priesthood, “We have an altar from which those who officiate in the tent have no right to eat.”

However, within its first few centuries, especially after Constantine, the church began developing a clerical priesthood and a new sacrificial system that resembled that of the old covenant, Aaronic priesthood. A synagogue model of worship was replaced by a temple model. Communion evolved over the centuries into the sacrifice of the Mass, with the clerical priesthood alone qualified to administer it.[1] The gap between the clergy and laity widened.

Presbyterian pastor Greg Ogden, in his call for returning the ministry of the church to the laity, observes that even the Protestant Reformation failed to fully obliterate this gap.

We live in the generation when the unfinished business of the Reformation may at last be completed. Nearly five hundred years ago, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others unleashed a revolution that promised to liberate the church from a hier-archial priesthood by rediscovering “the priesthood of all beievers.” But the Reformation never fully delivered on its promise. 

The unfinished business and the unkept promise that has the power to unleash a grass-roots revolution is the logical corollary to the priesthood of all believers. For not only are all believers priests before God, we also are all priests to each other and in the world.[2]

Ogden, with my agreement, believes that one of the primary obstacles to church renewal and reform today is maintaining hierarchies that leave the people of God in a subservient position to other women and men: the official, ordained church leadership.

If in fact Robert Munger is correct that the clergy-laity bifurcation is the “greatest single bottleneck to the renewal and outreach of the church,” then we must begin to take drastic steps. John Stott is more direct: “I do not hesitate to say that to interpret the church in terms of a privileged caste or a hierarchical structure is to destroy the New Testament doctrine of the church.”[3]

But many Christian denominations of long and not-so-long standing obviously do interpret the church in terms of a hierarchical structure. Indeed, there is a worrisome trend among some conservative American churches to aggressively emphasize church authority with terms and concepts like shepherding, discipling and headship. And in these contexts, church authority generally means male authority, both in the church and the home.[4]

Before we can take such drastic steps in dismantling the sinful structures of church hierarchies, both Ogden and I face an exegetical problem. The problem is simply this: the book of Hebrews at first blush does not seem to be as clearly or completely anti-authoritarian as we might think or wish. Yes, we can certainly clearly follow the development of its author’s arguments against the old covenant priestly system, which held the people of God at a great distance from God himself (Heb 7:18–19; 10:1–11) in Hebrews chapters 1 through 12. But then we come to chapter 13. Here we find the only passage in the New Testament that explicitly calls for obedience of the people of God to church leaders.[5] Heb 13:17–19 (NRSV) states:

Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls and will give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with sighing, for that would be harmful to you. 

Pray for us; we are sure that we have a clear conscience, desiring to act honorably in all things. I urge you all the more to do this, so that I may be restored to you soon.

So we have an exegetical and practical problem as we consider reforming the church. This passage, if taken in isolation, seems to contradict the antihierarchical implications of the rest of the Book of Hebrews. It certainly would contradict Ogden’s thesis and create real difficulties for church reform efforts that would close the clergy-laity gap.

Earlier in the same chapter, Heb 13:7–9 uses similar leadership language to urge:

Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings; for it is well for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by regulations about food, which have not benefited those who observe them.

The problem then is this: Does Heb 13:17 contradict the anti-hierarchical implications in the extensive discussions about the priesthood of all believers and about the high priesthood and superiority of Jesus elsewhere in Hebrews? What exactly did the author of Hebrews have in mind in Heb 13:17? How does it fit into the message of the book as a whole? How does it relate to other New Testament voices? And what are its implications for the church today, especially an American church of many denominations reluctantly coming to terms with the rough-and-tumble reality of a post-Constantinian existence where it can no longer count on even tacit support from the state or the majority of citizens? What are its implications at a time when the traditional structure of church government itself seems to be a major obstacle and bottleneck to preaching the good news to the entire world?

A Contextual Solution

It is my belief that the intended meaning of Heb 13:17 (and 13:7) can best be understood by placing it in the context of the larger pericope and the entire book of Hebrews. To approach either of these passages in isolation from these larger contexts is to duplicate the error of many Sabbatarians who consider Heb 4:9 (“So then, a Sabbath rest still remains for the people of God”) in isolation, apart from the message of the entire book.[6]

By taking it out of context, Sabbatarians conclude, “Obviously there is still a purpose for the weekly Sabbath. As Hebrews 4:9 says, ‘There remains a keeping of the Sabbath for the people of God.’ Observance of the seventh-day Sabbath as a command of God is therefore a fundamental teaching of both the New and Old Testaments.”[7] But the Sabbatarian, proof-text treatment of this passage errs by either ignoring or glossing over the larger context of Hebrews, which asserts that the new covenant is superior to the old (Heb 7:22; 8:6–9), that the old is obsolete and will soon disappear (Heb 8:13), and that the law is merely a shadow of better things to come and “not the true form of these realities” (Heb 10:1).

The Sabbatarian error in this example is fairly obvious. But in order for us not to commit a similar error with Hebrews 13:17, we must also avoid dealing with this one verse in isolation. Instead, we must view it within its immediate context, then within the framework of the entire document and then in the context of the entire New Testament. Only then can we expect to extract the meaning intended by the author for the original audience and the application intended by God for us today. Otherwise, we run the risk of imposing on it a meaning of our own, with equally dangerous consequences for our application today.

I will attempt to show that the context demands we view Hebrews 13:7 in terms of: (1) a Christian community under strong external pressure to compromise with the world and leave Christ, (2) where its old, established, graybeard leadership has been removed by death, (3) where a relatively junior, new leadership is (4) attempting to hold the community together against the pressure of loss of standing in the external, secular society and to combat the internal threat of Hebraic, old covenant-style doctrinal innovations, and where (5) obedience is correctly conditioned upon preaching the unchanging word of Christ, upon living the faith and upon accountability.

Therefore, if this picture is correct, the message of Hebrews 13:17 is essentially a call to Christian community solidarity, not the Kadavergehorsamkeit[8] of authoritarian denominations, where the leadership’s word is law. (Our own 20th century has certainly suffered as have few others from the curse of leadership[9] and ideologies of blind obedience, which insist that Füehrerworte haben Gesetzkraft.[10] ) The author of Hebrews has in mind neither an ecclesiofascist[11] approach, in which the individual’s personal prompting by the Holy Spirit is completely subordinated to the will and judgment of the leadership, nor a hierarchy.[12] This then contradicts the approach of Ignatius of Loyola, and his modern fellow travelers, whether Catholic or Protestant, in his spiritual exercises:

In order to have the proper attitude of mind in the Church Militant we should observe the following rules: 

1. Putting aside all private judgment, we should keep our minds prepared and ready to obey promptly and in all things the true spouse of Christ our Lord, our Holy Mother, the hierarchial Church. 

9. Finally, to praise all the precepts of the Church, holding ourselves ready at all times to find reasons for their defense, and never offending against them...[13]

As we shall see, Christ’s Word is law in Hebrews, not the human church leader’s and certainly not the hierarchical church’s. Nor is there any explicit mention in Hebrews of how the leadership is to be selected, maintained or removed nor whether its polity is episcopal, presbyterian or congregational. Nor is the obedience called for in any sense unconditional.

Exegesis

Now we turn to establishing the context of our passage. “Of...importance for the overall presentation of the document are some clues concerning the social situation of the audience. The community has already experienced some suffering for their commitment to the Messiah (Heb 10:32–35; 12:3–13) and can look forward to more (Heb 13:13–14).”[14] Because the Christian recipients of the book of Hebrews in becoming Christian had abandoned the patron-client relationships and ceased to embody the central values of piety toward the gods and the emperor that held together the Greco-Roman world socially, religiously and politically, they had lost both status and protection.[15]

In Hebrews 10, the picture is drawn of a church that has suffered “abuse and persecution” (v. 33) in “earlier days” (v. 32). Some members had been imprisoned, and some had their goods plundered (v. 34). But now the immediate threat was that some members, after apparently being worn down by years of external pressure, were shrinking back from Christianity (v. 38) by neglecting to meet together (v. 25) and ultimately exiting the community and going back into the world (v. 39). For Hebrews’ author, this amounted to spurning the Son of God and outraging the Spirit of grace (v. 29). To cope with this pressure to give up their Christianity, which had cost them social place and grace and therefore protection in their society, the author of Hebrews praises the heroes and heroines of faith who also were rejected by their societies and suffered because of it. Hebrews 11:36–39 inverts society’s values and makes what is despised by society honorable before God. deSilva comments:

This set of examples encourages the addressees once more to accept having no place in society (in effect, ‘wandering about in deserts and hills and caves’) and to accept the negative judgment of the public court of opinion (even its physical abuse) rather than shrink back from such disgraces and lose the greater reward.[16]

Standing Firm

In fact, this theme of standing firm with Jesus despite society’s rejections is repeated in Hebrews 13, which modern scholars view, for reasons of both rhetorical structure and distinctive literary style of the writer, as an authentic part of the book of Hebrews,[17] rather than as a later addition. At the center of the inclusio formed by the parallel leader-language of Hebrews 13:7 and Hebrews 13:17, “the frame for the explanatory parenesis in 13:10–16”,[18] we are reminded that just as Jesus suffered outside the city gates, we Christians must also go outside the camp with him and “bear the abuse he endured.” Harold W. Attridge informs us: “The boundaries of the section, which have been analyzed in a variety of ways, are indicated by an inclusion formed by the references to leaders past (v. 7) and present (v. 17).”[19] At the very center of this larger unit is the author’s clear call for solidarity with the suffering and social rejection that Jesus Christ endured. Therefore it is also a call for solidarity within the Christian community and acceptance of the suffering and social rejection that is often a part of the Christian walk, especially in the first century patronal society.[20] This call for solidarity with the suffering of Christ and therefore the suffering of the church must then influence how we view the leadership references in Hebrews 13:7, 17.

A secondary concern of these leadership passages has to do with doctrinal novelties, an internal rather than an external threat. But following the theme of the entire book, the superiority of the new covenant to the old, and therefore the obsolescence and immanent disappearance (Heb 8:13; 9:9–10) of the jurisdiction of Torah, Hebrews 13:7 reads into a discussion of strange new teachings about food rules. These threaten the community’s understanding of grace. And the community is reminded of the unchangeableness of Christ in the face of these new teachings about food rules. Hebrews 13:8–10 reads:

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings; for it is well for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by regulations about food, which have not benefited those who observe them. We have an altar from which those who officiate in the tent have no right to eat.

Ideas about Hebraic food rules, probably similar to the circumcision party’s arguments that Paul contended with in Galatians, had probably begun to influence the Christian audience of the book of Hebrews. So the author is saying, in essence, remember your former leaders, their lives, their example and their theology. Christ doesn’t change, therefore you shouldn’t follow new teachings about old Hebraic food rules, which threaten your understanding of grace. What you now have, rather than being inferior to the Torah covenant, Torah priesthood and Torah food rules, is actually superior. The priests of the Torah are actually unqualified to eat from our altar.

(It must be acknowledged, however, that the logic of the author of Hebrews would break down if we extend it too far here. He[21] is apparently using the unchangeableness of Christ to argue against the introduction into the Christian community of new teachings about Hebraic food rules. But the major thrust of the book has been that the new covenant has changed, indeed replaced, the old. So this point about the unchanging Christ would be very out of place earlier, if, for instance, it were to be connected to Hebrews 8:13. But in connection with doctrinal innovations within the Christian tradition, especially if one holds that a gentile rather than Jewish audience is in mind, despite the title that was attached decades later, arguing about the unchangeableness of Christ does make sense.)

The clear indication in Hebrews 13:7–10 that the leadership the community is called to remember and imitate is dead should also influence our reading of the call to obedience in Hebrews 13:17. The call to “remember the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” would be both very peculiar and very risky if the author were speaking of present, living leaders, who, after all, could still go astray, especially in the unsettled atmosphere of the marginalized and persecuted first century church.

William L. Lane flatly states, “The former leaders are dead.”[22] Paul Ellingworth comments: “All that the present verse tells us about these former leaders is (1) that they exercised a ministry of the word; (2) that they were personally known to at least some of the addressees; and (3) that they have died.”[23] We don’t know how they died. Martyrdom, though possible,[24] seems improbable, given the statement in Hebrews 12:4, “In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” It is unlikely that the author is simply stating the obvious: that those alive to hear his message are not yet dead.

Conditional Authority

It is appropriate to note that the leadership of the now dead graybeards, and apparently also the present, more junior leadership in mind in verse 17, was connected to their speaking the word of God and their way of life. If we follow the logic of verse 7, leadership, for the author of Hebrews, was conditioned on both faithfully speaking God’s word and faithfully living the Christian life. There is no hint here of a hierarchy or of the investing of leadership and authority in either the person or the office of the leader. Leaders here are those who speak faithfully and who live faithfully. This seems to be a leadership of function, not the sort of leadership of form and office that evolved in the church in later centuries. And we need to connect these notions of obedience to leadership with the stress on the community from external societal pressure and the need for internal community solidarity in the face of that pressure.

The call in Hebrews to obedience to church leaders came at a time of crisis. It was aimed at dealing with a crisis, not at articulating a duty to obey authoritarian bishops. Attridge observes:

Little can be inferred from the term itself [used for “leader” in v. 7] about the precise status and function of the leaders in question. They are certainly unlikely to have been monarchical bishops, and some sort of presbyterial group is probably involved. Their most important characteristic was that they “spoke to you the word of God.”[25]

Interestingly, we see the same crisis pattern in the historical church’s first recorded calls for obedience to bishops. Ignatius of Antioch’s letters were the opening wedge of the evolution of the episcopal hierarchy within the church. After Ignatius had been arrested, he was sent to Rome, where he expected to be put to death. On the way, he wrote several letters to the churches in Asia and Rome. In them, he stressed obedience to bishops. But this again was Christianity under fire.[26] Ignatius, in his early calls for obedience, had in mind the survival and unity of the Christian community.[27] Though the obedience portions of his letters have been used since to support the hierarchy that fully developed much later, they seem to have been primarily intended as calls to solidarity within the community during a time of crisis when he and other leaders were likely to lose their lives.

So for Ignatius, there would be a need to encourage the Christians to follow the younger, less experienced leadership that would emerge after he and the other graybreads had been put to death or otherwise removed. This mirrors the biblical letter to the Hebrews, where the author seems to have had solidarity rather than hierarchy in mind in Hebrews 13:7–17. Lane, quoting Laub, insists, “there is no reference in verse 17 to a hierarchical structure of the community and of jurisdiction.”[28] A younger and relatively untried leadership, probably also including the author,[29] since he requests prayer in Hebrews 13:18 for himself?[30] seems to be in mind in Hebrews 13:17. In Ignatius’ letter to the Magnesians (chapter vi), he insisted:

I exhort you to study to do all things with a divine harmony, while your bishop presides in the place of God, and your presbyters in the place of the assembly of the apostles, along with your deacons, [emphasis mine]

Though hierarchy apparently was not so much Ignatius’ goal as harmony, the unfortunate trend toward obedience to hierarchy in the church was clearly underway in Ignatius’ letters. In chapter xiii, he wrote “Be ye subject to the bishop, and to one another, as Jesus Christ to the Father, that there may be a unity according to God among you.” In the same letter (chapter ii), Ignatius praises the deacon Sotio, “insomuch as he, by the grace of God, is subject to the bishop and presbytery, in the law of God.” To the Ephesians (chapter xx), he wrote:

Stand fast, brethren, in the faith of Jesus Christ...being under the guidance of the Comforter, in obedience to the bishop and the presbytery with an undivided mind...

However, Ignatius was not describing the contemporary existence of the kind of monarchical episcopate that emerged in later centuries.[31] Assuming that the leaders in Hebrews 13:7, 17 held the office of bishop is unwise. Ellingworth and Eugene A. Nida, commenting about translation questions, caution, “We do not know the names or precise functions of the leaders, and therefore specific titles such as ‘bishop’ should be avoided.”[32] George W. Buchanan in his comments on Hebrews 13:7–17 also states that exactly what office these former and present leaders held is uncertain. “There is no specification of a distinct office which these leaders filled, such as bishops or deacons. It evidently referred to all leaders who ‘spoke...the word of God.’”[33]

Obedience would seem to be conditional, limited to the extent to which the leaders were in fact themselves correctly teaching and obeying the word of God. Lane, again quoting Laub, says, “The authority of the leaders is not officially bestowed but derives directly from the authority inherent in the word of preaching.[34]Leadership of the house churches was a form of service worthy of honor. These Christians should be shown the deference that their leadership plainly deserved.”[35]

The authority belonged to God, not intrinsically to the human leader. Therefore, we should conclude that the duty of obedience attaches absolutely only to God and only conditionally to human church leaders. Peter makes a similar observation when confronted by the demand of the Sanhedrin to stop preaching Christ in Acts 4:19 and 5:29. So the textual references to the former leadership seem to indicate not an unconditional obedience to a non-accountable leadership, but just the opposite. In fact, Hebrews 13:17 uses explicit accountability language: “Obey your leaders...for they...will give an account.” Though the author undoubtedly has in mind giving an account to God, there is no explicit or implicit limitation that I can see to prevent the leaders from also being accountable to the Christian community itself. All the text says is, “...they...will give an account.” It doesn’t say to whom.[36] Lane feels strongly that the grammar requires this clause to be translated, not so much that the leaders must give an account but that they intend or want to give an account.[37]

If so, this only strengthens the case for accountability being an essential part of Christian leadership. And with priesthood of all believers being one of the strong themes of the entire book of Hebrews, it does not seem to be a stretch to conclude that this accountability to God would also include an accountability to his universal priesthood, who go boldly and confidently (Heb 10:19) with Jesus behind the curtain (Heb 9:3; 6:19, 20) into the very presence of God (Heb 12:18–24; 10:21, 22) in the heavenly Holy of Holies.

A picture emerges of a Christian leadership that is accountable and whose authority springs not from the leaders’ persons or offices but from the conduct of their lives and their correct proclamation of the unchanging Christian message. John Calvin also understood Heb 13:7 as only requiring conditional obedience to “holy and faithful bishops,” not “pretending bishops...murderers of souls and ravening wolves.”

He felt the passage requires individual believers to exercise discretion and judgment about church leaders:

I shall say no more to describe them, but for the present I make this one comment that while we are bidden to obey our pastors we must carefully and shrewdly distinguish those who are true and faithful rulers, because if we give this honour indiscriminately to anyone we like, wrong will be done to the good, and moreover the reason added here that they are worthy of honour because they watch for our souls will have no force. For the Pope and his like to draw support from this evidence it is necessary first of all for all of them to prove that they are among those who watch for our salvation.[38]

The leadership pictured in Heb 13:7–17 is engaged in combating twin threats to the solidarity and integrity of the church. The primary threat is from the outside world, which has marginalized the Christian community and which tempts many individual Christians to give up on God’s grace and return to the physically more rewarding life of conformity to the world and the political good grace of the patron-client social system of the ancient Mediterranean world.[39] The community has been warned in the climax of chapter 12 not to repeat the mistake of Esau, who gave up the birthright promise of God in exchange for a single physical meal (12:16, 17). The secondary threat appeared to be from a group that was introducing teachings that promoted Hebraic food taboos and therefore also threatened the community’s understanding of God’s grace.

The author of Hebrews is not calling for monarchical episcopate, absolute obedience or the ecclesiofascist approach of Ignatius of Loyola (with apologies to Ignatius of Antioch), or of denominations, old and new, that share such authoritarian views. Instead, a very reasonable picture is drawn of a universal priesthood, with a functional leadership that is accountable and whose authority is conditioned upon both its correct teaching of God’s word and actually living an obedient life of faith personally. Additionally, as we see in Heb 13:15–16, the universal Christian priesthood, made up of the entire people of God, also correctly confesses God’s name as an essential part of its sacrificial life. So the differentiation between the entire, universal Christian priesthood and its leadership is narrow and functional. Both confess and proclaim God’s word. Both are accountable (Heb 4:12–13; 13:17). Both must live the life of faith. And both go directly to God in a priesthood with no mediator other than Jesus (Heb 10:19–22; 8:1–6).

Other New Testament Voices

As we saw earlier, Peter and John proclaimed a similar view of religious authority that subordinated obedience to religious leaders to their proclamation of God’s message. Acts 4:19–20 shows these two apostles defying the constituted religious leaders of the Jewish people, whom Jesus himself had told the people to obey because they sat in Moses seat (Matt 23:2), because the leaders demanded that Christ not be preached:

But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in God’s sight to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard.”

And as the confrontation between the gospel and religious leaders continued, the apostles’ message about where the duty of religious obedience intrinsically attached became even more explicit in Acts 5:29–32:

But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than any human authority. The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.”

This is an interesting passage because it contains an implicit Trinitarian formula that seditiously challenged conventional notions about religious leadership and obedience. Peter appeals to God as supreme authority. He appeals to Jesus as the ultimate religious leader. And he appeals to the witness of the Holy Spirit, combined with the actual religious experience of the apostles. This creates a very credible personal witness and ad hoc authority that supersedes that of the constituted, official religious hierarchy. It logically follows from this revolutionary statement that Christians no longer actually need to obey the constituted Jewish leaders, though Peter did not explicitly challenge the right of the Sanhedrin to exist. Nevertheless, in practice, a leadership that no longer need be obeyed ceases to have authority.

We should look carefully at all presentations in the New Testament that have to do with authority, especially confrontations between the emerging church and the established religious leaders, since this was one of the questions that would have been very important not only for the authors of the New Testament accounts, but also for the later church leaders who decided what would be included in the canon and what would not. Robert W. Funk, one of the guiding lights of the Jesus Seminar, certainly makes the point that institutional leadership groups rarely compile a literature that limits their power. But, in my opinion, he pushes the point a bit too far when he writes:

The canon of the New Testament was developed, along with the creeds, as a way of excluding political enemies, so regarded because they deviated from institutional opinion or practice: the primary interest was to build a fence around right doctrine and hierarchic privilege. This also had the effect of consolidating ecclesiastical power.[40]

So inclusion of this kind of anti-authoritarian material in the canon is certainly not accidental. If the function of the canon was actually to uphold hierarchic privilege, we would not expect to find these texts in the canon. And inclusion of texts that contradict what Funk sees as the self-interest of later church leaders does more than just command our attention. Such inclusion brings with it a powerful argument for self-authentication of such texts and canons. According to Luke T. Johnson, one of the themes of the book of Acts is the shift in religious authority away from the Sanhedrin, the constituted, official religious leadership that even Jesus acknowledged in certain matters, but which got in the way of the will of God and the proclamation of God’s authentic message. Instead, authority moves toward the rag-tag band of apostles, the new, upstart band of Jesus’ followers, who actually did the will of God and proclaimed God’s authentic message.

Despite receiving a beating, therefore, the apostles continue to preach Jesus as the Messiah (Acts 5:42). Luke has made his essential point clear. Whatever political manipulations might still be available to the Sanhedrin, effective religious authority over Israel, considered as God’s people, has passed to the apostles. They rule over the Twelve Tribes of the restored Israel in Jerusalem.[41]

So authentic religious authority passes from the person and office of the constituted leaders to the actual proclamation of God’s word, the good news of Jesus Christ. And it descends onto a rag-tag functional leadership of Jesus’ provincial followers, more or less making up the rules as they went along, guided by God’s Spirit and validated by miracles and power from God. Luke, in Acts, informs us that the medium won’t be allowed to overpower the message. But the message will overpower the medium, in this case the sitting religious establishment. It is as if today, as well, the New Testament’s essential instruction to church leaders is proclaim the message to the world: point people to Jesus Christ and then get out of the way.

The key today, as well, is proclamation, not ordination.

Though Heb 13:17 is the only New Testament passage that explicitly calls for obedience to church leaders, there are a number of other New Testament passages that discuss obedience. Most significant obedience passages that would have a bearing on our understanding of church leadership, outside of Acts, are in 1 Peter or in the Pauline corpus. Most usages in both 1 Peter and Paul[42] refer to being obedient to the faith (Rom 1:5; 16:26); obeying the truth, the gospel or the word (Rom 2:8; 2 Cor 9:13; 2 Thes 1:8; 1 Pet 4:17; 3:1); or obeying God or Christ (2 Cor 10:5, 1 Pet 3:20). There are also passages involving the obedience of children, slaves and wives.

In a number of other passages, Paul calls on believers to imitate him (1 Cor 4:16; Phil 3:17; 1 Thes 1:6), but he generally does not mention obedience in them. An exception is 2 Thessalonians 3:7, 9, 14, 15, which we will discuss later. In the most important of these imitation passages, 1 Corinthians 11:1, Paul calls for the imitation of his example as he models Christ in his life. He does not call for direct obedience to his personal authority. This is a conditional, dependent leadership that leans heavily for validation upon the personal example of an authentic, Christ-like life of faith.

However, we should also look at 1 Peter 5:5–6:

In the same way, you who are younger must accept the authority of the elders. And all of you must clothe yourselves with humility in your dealings with one another, for “God opposes the proud,  but give grace to the humble.” Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time.

This passage is preceded in 1 Peter 5:1–4 by instructions to church elders, who are clearly church leaders and are warned by Peter not to lord it over their charges. However, there is clearly a shift in verse 5, and there is no reason to assume that the elders of verse 5 are the official church elders of verse 1. In fact, the contrast in verse 5 between the younger and the older makes the explanation of the HarperCollins Study Bible on this verse, that “the younger are an age group; the elders are officials who are also older”, seem very contrived, awkward and artificial. Unanswered by those who read verse 5 hierarchically is why Peter would limit this submission to church leaders only to young men. Why not other men? And women? The call to mutual humility in the same verse also strengthens the case for a plain-meaning interpretation. What is being called for in verse 5 seems to be nothing more than deference by the young to the natural authority of age, and mutual humility between both age groups.

In the Pauline corpus, two passages on obedience bear examination. The first is Titus 3:1–2:

Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show every courtesy to everyone.

This passage, which reads like a civic virtue list, contains no explicit or implicit references to obeying religious leaders. It merely says to obey the government and what are almost certainly governmental authorities. Beyond that, one should basically work hard and stay out of trouble, good advice all around, in any age.

The second Pauline passage to examine is 2 Thessalonians 3:14–15: Take note of those who do not obey what we say in this letter; have nothing to do with them, so that they may be ashamed. Do not regard them as enemies, but warn them as believers.

This passage is more explicit about obeying Paul’s instructions, specifically the instructions in this letter. But here again, these verses are preceded by exhortations to civic virtues. And in 2 Thessalonians 3:6, Paul indicates his instructions came from Jesus Christ, in his name. The specific instructions have to do with loafers accepting the hospitality of other Christians without working for a living. So Paul lays it on heavy in verses 10 and 12: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat,” and, “Now such persons we exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and earn their own living.”

So Paul is emphasizing, consistent with Acts, the authority of God. The teaching from Christ has authority, but there is no indication here, despite forceful obedience language, that Paul invests religious authority in the person of a church leader or in the office of the leader itself. Paul makes an accounting to his audience of the source of his message, to whom Paul presumably is also personally accountable.

Personal Conclusions

The consistent message of the New Testament is antagonistic to notions of absolute obedience to hierarchical church authority. Paul and Peter and the author of Hebrews invest authority in the proclamation of God’s word. None of these New Testament voices, despite what we would expect following Funk’s reasoning about institutional self-interest, invests religious authority in the person of the leader or in the office itself.

So we return, after examining both the Heb 13:17 obedience passage and other New Testament voices, to the understanding that authentic leadership in the modern, post-Constantinian Christian church is invested in faithful proclamation, not mere ordination. The author of Hebrew does indeed call us to obedience to legitimate church leadership, even if green and untested, in the call to solidarity inside the Christian community. But there is no hint I could detect in Hebrews that the leadership must be male or ordained. However, Heb 13:17 does indicate that the authentic leader must be faithfully proclaiming God’s word, living the faith, and be accountable. In a nutshell, authentic leadership, deserving of obedience, must be a God-led leadership.

Even if it is female or unordained,[43] we Christians, who today are grappling with bottlenecks and obstacles to evangelism that emerge from the traditional structures of church government itself, must obey that God-led leadership, if this view of Heb 13:17 is correct. We must obey what is of God.

And if God is using rag-tag elements within the church today, then that is where our loyalty and attention should be. However, this does not mean disrespect to established graybeard leaders also being used by God to faithfully proclaim his message. It just means, in the context of our own lives, our own personal circles of influence and our own church congregations, that we must find and follow where God leads and whom God leads. We certainly should not be in opposition to God’s lead in these matters. Otherwise we could find ourselves guilty of blaspheming the work of the Holy Spirit, not something we want to do.

It is also obvious that we must exercise our own minds in all this. We must be discerning and accept some risks. Guided by the Holy Spirit, we must take personal responsibility for our own decisions and judgments in determining where and whom God is leading. Essentially, this means being cautious about carelessly following persuasive people who boldly say, “God told me,” or “God has revealed to me,” or “God’s Spirit is leading me to see” without testing what they say against the Scriptures, competent scholarship, reason and our own Christian experience. But then where we do determine that we see God’s lead, there we need to follow.

In addition, the sinful structures of existing authoritarian hierarchies, contradicting or thwarting this accountable, proclamation-based, honest-living, God-led, functional leadership within the priesthood of all believers, deserve our attention and action. Such sinful structures must be resolutely but carefully dismantled, with brotherly concern and God’s Holy Spirit guiding the demolition and reconstruction process. Demolition, after all, is a drastic step, even if it is a careful demolition.

Even though all this may seem radical, I believe these personal conclusions to be thoroughly and conservatively grounded in the message of Hebrews and the rest of the New Testament. So it is my wish for God to help us all seek and see and obey his will on these important Christian leadership questions. May God help us pursue his will and not our own.

Notes

1. Greg Ogden, The New Reformation: Returning the Ministry to the People of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 79–82, writes that one of the implications of the priesthood of all believers is that the laity should independently be able to celebrate Communion. He further notes that Paul’s discussion of abuses at Communion in 1 Corinthians 11, does not involve an institutional or legislative remedy and that this is “immediately followed by a discussion of spiritual gifts”: in 1 Cor 12. “Nowhere does Paul mention a charism given to persons having a special call to protect this meal.”
2. Ibid, 11–12.
3. Ibid, 72.
4. Ron Burks and Vicki Burks, Damaged Disciples: Casualties of Authoritarian Churches and the Shepherding Movement (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 76–131.
5. There are, however, other New Testament passages that may implicitly support certain notions of church authority and that are often so cited by those who wish to bolster their own claims of authority. We will discuss some of these other voices at the end of this paper.
6. Samuele Bacchiocchi, The Sabbath in the New Testament: Answers to Questions (Berrien Springs: Biblical Perspectives, 1990), 36–37, 72–78, 172–175. Bacchiocchi (professor of Church History and Theology at the Seventh-day Adventists’ Andrews University) teaches that the book of Hebrews emphasizes both discontinuity and continuity with the past. He presents Heb 4:9 as a continuity passage (36–38) to overcome the larger discontinuity of the rest of Hebrews. Thus, he attempts to uphold a requirement for Christians to keep the Sabbath today. But in so doing, he ignores the fact that the immediate pericope is really discussing entry of Israel under Joshua into the rest of the promised land and not Israel’s observance or non-observance of the literal, weekly Sabbath.
7. Larry Walker, “The Rest of the Story: The Story of Rest,” The Good News Expanded Edition 1. no. 4, (July/August 1996), E5. The Good News is published by the United Church of God, a large Worldwide Church of God breakaway group that separated in 1995 over its leaders’ defense of Sabbatarianism.
8. Blind, slavish, obedience, a now discredited Prussian military virtue, which sadly still manifests itself in many other cultures and in some parts of the Christian church. Literally, it is “cadaver-like obedience.” The best visual example of this kind of “stiff’ obedience and rigidity is to be found at Buckingham Palace, where the immobile, rigid guards, if they faint, are supposed to faint at attention.
9. Robert Kelley, The Power of Followership: How to Create Leaders People Want to Follow and Followers Who Lead Themselves (New York: Doubleday, 1992), explores the 20th century American myth of leadership and the conformism it creates.
10. The leader’s words have the force of law,” Adolph Eichmann’s principle. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), 166. Todorov comments further: “In the totalitarian ethic, loyalty to the leader is the fundamental obligation. The cults of both Stalin and Hitler are notorious in this respect. The motto [Heinrich] Himmler chose for the SS, for example, proclaimed, “Meine Ehre heisst Treue,” “my honor is called loyalty,” a phrase from one of Hitler’s speeches indicative of the special place this quality occupies in Nazi thought. Loyalty toward others engaged in the same struggle and blind submission to the leader go hand in hand” (189).
11. This coined word clearly has some sting, and it is not accidental. I believe religious people need to acknowledge the similarities between authoritarian church polities that often seem to be accepted and even respected, and authoritarian political systems that are abhorrent to most moral human beings. In both, there is great emphasis on the role of the leader and on the need for the masses to submit. Terminology is needed that will draw our attention to these similarities and prompt and provoke us to Christian action toward love and good works (Heb 10:24). My aim is deliberately provocative, with the cautious hope that love and good works will result when our thinking on these important questions is developed and clarified. If we sanitize authoritarian church polities with hoary terms like “episcopal,” our thinking will be much more fuzzy. And we will be much less likely to confront our sins in these areas and take needed corrective action to alter the sinful structures of such polities. However, to be fair to the current denominational leadership of the Worldwide Church of God, there is widespread, top-level embarrassment about its continuing with the authoritarian, pastor-general polity established by founder Herbert W. Armstrong. (This form of government is essentially papal, but now without a WCG theology to legitimate it.) Ogden’s The New Reformation, with its radical recommendations for lay leadership and non-hierarchical polity, has been recommended to the WCG ministry and membership by the WCG’s current pastor general, Joseph Tkach Jr. So something is clearly afoot. Change of some sort is a foregone conclusion. But, despite these very hopeful and encouraging beginnings, the church membership has not been engaged in any meaningful way, so far, in discussions about what the inevitable changes in church polity should be. The assumption apparently continues to be that changes, even healthy democratic and congregational changes, will be imposed from above. This clearly reveals the durability of the problems and mindset perpetuated by authoritarian church polity.
12. Franz Laub, “Verküendigung and Gemeindeampt: Die Autoritäet...Hebr 13, 7. 17.24.” Studienzum Neuen Testament und Seiner Umwelt, Series A 196. no. 90 (1981–1982), 189.
13. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. Anthony Mottola (Garden City: Image, 1964), 139–140.
14. Luke T. Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 414.
15. David A. deSilva, “Despising Shame: A Cultural-Anthropological Investigation of the Epistle to the Hebrews,” Journal of Biblical Literature 113 (1994), 439–442. Though the evidence is not beyond dispute, I believe, with deSilva, that it points more toward a gentile than a Jewish audience. For instance, the basic doctrines of Heb 6:1–2 make little sense if a Jewish audience were in mind, since all of the listed doctrines are basic concepts of Pharisaic Judaism and lack specific Christological content as presented here. These doctrines do, however, make sense as “basics” if a gentile audience were in mind by the author of Hebrews.
16. Ibid., 451.
17. William L. Lane, Hebrews 9–13 (WBC 47B; Dallas: Word, 1991), 496–497.
18. Ibid., 502.
19. Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989), 390–391.
20. David A. deSilva, “Exchanging Favor for Wrath: Apostasy in Hebrews and Patron-Client Relationships,” Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (1996), 92–95.
21. The choice of personal pronoun is arbitrary. The use here of “he” should not be interpreted as a ruling out of the possibility of a female author.
22. Lane, 527.
23. Paul Ellingworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews: A Commentary on the Greek Text, (NIGTC, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 702.
24. Otto Michel writes that martyrdom is at least possible for the former leaders. It is also quite possible to conjecture that the church leaders were martyrs, but then their deaths are classified as the faithful witness to their lives. Otto Michel, Kritisch-Exegetischer Kommentar über das Neue Testament Begründet von Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer, 12th ed., vol. 13, Der Brief an die Hebräer (Göttingen: Vandenhöeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 490.
25. Attridge, ibid.
26. Caution is to be exercised today in extrapolating these emergency remedies for emergency conditions into general principles for all times and all situations. One need only reflect on the tactics of authoritarian political leaders in our century who seized upon real or imagined emergencies to suspend constitutional liberties permanently to see the danger of applying Ignatius’ calls to solidarity and obedience as he was marching to martyrdom too literally and universally to our situation today.
27. Cyril Charles Richardson, The Christianity of Ignatius of Antioch (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 33. “What the saint is always at pains to stress is the harmony and unity of the Church, that is founded upon obedience to the ecclesiastical authorities...”
28. Lane, 555.
29. Attridge, 402.
30. F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, revised ed. (NICNT, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 386.
31. Christine Trevett, A Study of Ignatius of Antioch in Syria and Asia, Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 29 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1992), 83. She comments, “Full-blown monarchical episcopacy, I think, was not what was at stake in these Asian churches, though the far-sighted and forward-looking Ignatius may well have envisioned such an animal.”
32. Paul Ellingworth and Eugene A. Nida, A Translator’s Handbook on the Letter to the Hebrews (London: United Bible Societies, 1983), 325.
33. George Wesley Buchanan, To the Hebrews: Translation, Comment and Conclusions (Anchor Bible; Garden City: Doubleday, 1972), 233.
34. Franz Laub, “Verküendigung und Gemeindeamt: Die Autoritäet...Hebr 13, 7.17.24, “ Studien zum Neuen Testament und Seiner Umwelt, Series A 196. no. 90 (1981–1982), 190.
35. Lane, ibid.
36. In Hebrews 4:12–13, account is to be given to God.
37. Lane, ibid.
38. John Calvin, The Epistle of Paul The Apostle to the Hebrews and The First and Second Epistles of St. Peter, trans. William B. Johnston (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963), 213.
39. David A. deSilva, “Exchanging Favor for Wrath: Apostasy in Hebrews and Patron-Client Relationships,” Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (1996), 92–95.
40. Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millenium (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 117.
41. Johnson, 227.
42. Because I don’t think it is truly relevant to the topic at hand, I’ve avoided tackling the question of authorship. When I refer to Paul as an author, I should be understood as loosely referring to the Pauline corpus, regardless of authorship.
43. Earl Kent Brown, Women of Mr. Wesley’s Methodism (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1983), 7–12. John Wesley taught that God authenticated the leadership he backed by its fruits. And Wesley concluded that God had “taken ownership: of the preaching of a number of unordained lay men and women and that he could do no less.

Dr.Kynan Bridges PROPHETIC Word: The WAR Has Begun - Message (May 15, 2021)

Divorce And Violence: Synonymous Parallelism In Malachi 2:16

by Elaine A. Heath

Elaine Heath (M.Div. - ATS, 1995) is a United Methodist pastor in eastern Ohio and a Ph.D. student in theology at Duquesne University.

Is the Bible silent about divorce in the case of domestic violence? Christian commentators traditionally have argued that the Bible forbids all divorce or only permits it in the case of sexual infidelity. Yet I believe that the Old Testament verse most often cited to unilaterally forbid divorce, Malachi 2:16, actually champions hope and justice for victims of domestic violence. When read in its original historic and literary contexts and in light of the overarching biblical message of redemption, Malachi 2:16 presents domestic violence as a form of covenant-breaking equal to divorce. Moreover, this text asserts what abuse survivors know too well—that abuse divorces them from their abusive spouse. Abuse of all kinds[1] is an ongoing abandonment and betrayal by the abusive partner. What the church needs to hear and to tell those who are broken by domestic violence, is that God hates domestic violence as much as he hates divorce. Furthermore, when wounded Christians face a choice between divorce or continued victimization at the hands of an unrepentant, violent spouse, they need to know that God is their helper in the painful, life-saving process of ending the marriage. God’s judgment rests against the oppressor and on behalf of the oppressed in such a case.

What, then, are we to make of the usual interpretations given to Malachi 2:16 from the average pulpit or book on Christian marriage? The major culprits are interpretive bias and lack of scholarship.

Historical and Literary Contexts

The isolated use of Malachi 2:16 to forbid, encourage, or merely permit divorce (three primary scholarly interpretations of this text)[2] is problematic at best, for the pericope as a whole (2:10–16) is fraught with textual, grammatical, and syntactical difficulties in Hebrew. Even when using the best critical tools, scholars disagree sharply as to Malachi’s intent. Joyce Baldwin, for example, cites the text as being unequivocally against divorce.[3] F.F. Hvidberg dismisses verses 15–16 as “being completely unintelligible.”[4] Gordon Paul Hugenberger sees the prohibition being only against divorce motivated by aversion.[5] Then there are some who view the whole passage figuratively, saying it has nothing to do with literal marriage but with post-exilic syncretism.[6] What I seek to demonstrate is that despite its ambiguities this text is intelligible and that it has an important message for the church today, one which has not been heard from many pulpits. With that let us turn to the historic and literary contexts of Malachi, then we shall consider v. 16 in detail.

Historical Context

Malachi, whose name simply means “my messenger,” is believed to have lived in post-exilic Jerusalem around the same time as Ezra-Nehemiah, between 468-433 B.C. Nothing is known about Malachi, although Jewish tradition has it that he was from Sopha (an unknown location) and that from childhood onward he was an attractive, blameless fellow whose prophetic words were repeated by an affirming angel.[7]

Having returned from Babylon the Hebrews found their homeland in ruins. Eager to rebuild and to secure their holdings many Jews intermarried with indigenous pagan women (2:11). As Efird points out, “this was a very pragmatic course of action because these families would have connections and resources so as to aid the Jewish community in its struggle for survival.”[8] In so doing they introduced syncretism into Jewish worship, bringing upon themselves the judgment of Yahweh. “God expected them to honor and fear him as a suzerain party to a covenant is feared and honored (1:6–2:9).”[9] At the time Malachi writes the people are trapped in a morass of priestly corruption, oppressive labor practices, economic and social injustices that feed poverty, marital breakdown, violence, and widespread sexual immorality (3:5). These conditions have come about because the people, led by errant priests, have broken the Deuteronomic covenant.[10]

Literary Context

Covenant is the primary literary theme in Malachi. Of the 55 verses in Malachi, 47 record God speaking to Israel directly concerning covenant issues. God is the initiator of the covenant and is the key figure in Malachi. By breaking the covenant the priests and those who follow them have made faith hard for everyone:

The atrophy of human love in the community (2:13–16) has undermined confidence in the divine love, and there is no appreciation of the providential overruling of God which has made possible the return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple.[11]

Malachi is written as a series of six disputations between the prophet and Yahweh, preceded by a superscription and concluding with two appendices. The short sentences and direct style give credence to the text as the actual spoken words of Malachi rather than a heavily edited written version.[12] Malachi 2:16 is part of the third disputation concerning marital faithlessness, both figurative (2:11) and literal (2:14–16). The violence done to Israel’s spirituality by her infidelity to Yahweh is mirrored in the marital infidelity and violence prevalent in the land. Malachi is written exclusively to the people of God, calling them to repentance and the blessings that will follow.

2:16 Translation with Grammatical and Syntactical Issues

From the first phrase (kî sānē shallah) this verse poses multiple challenges for translators. Both the initial particle and the subject of the verb are ambiguous. Let us begin with a rather wooden translation of the Hebrew Masoretic Text: “For he hates one who puts away [or ‘you’ who put away]” says Yahweh the God of Israel, “and one who covers his garment with violence” says Yahweh of the hosts. “So watch yourselves in your spirit and do not act treacherously.”

In this case I have translated kî as a causal subordinating conjunction,[13] as have the translators of the NRSV. The NIV implies such a rendering but leaves the particle untranslated. It is important to note, however, that kî may also be read as a conditional particle,[14] in which case the subject of ‘he hates’ is the divorcing man rather than Yahweh: “If one hates and divorces, says Yahweh, God of Israel, he covers his garment with violence, says Yahweh of hosts.”[15] This rendering is upheld by the Septuagint, Vulgate, Targum, Talmud, and 4QX11a, as well as the NEB.[16] Known as the “traditional Jewish interpretation,” this reading encourages divorce when the divorcing man hates his wife.[17] I have chosen to translate the particle as a causal subordinating conjunction because the sense of the immediate passage as well as Malachi’s message as a whole support the idea of Yahweh’s judgment against covenant-breaking.

There is also the difficulty of the awkward grammatical construction of sānēʾ, which is a Qal participle third masculine singular—”he” or “one.” Who is hating—Yahweh or the divorcing man? The meaning of the passage is entirely different depending on who is the subject. Hugenberger, among others, argues that the usual rendering “I hate” requires excessive emendation, therefore translations such as the NRSV are in error.[18] Smith, however, defines the correct reading as sn’ty ‘I hated’, in keeping with Baldwin and several others.[19] While Hugenberger’s thesis is attractive and well-reasoned, I am inclined to accept Yahweh as the subject since Yahweh is the one who is bringing judgment against Israel for her infidelities. He is the subject of the verb in several other instances.[20]

A third, less critical ambiguity exists in the verb shalah which may be parsed either as a Piel second masculine singular imperative, Piel infinitive construct, or Piel infinitive absolute, though the latter is the only form making grammatical sense in the context.

Word Study and Literary Devices

With Yahweh saying “I hate divorcing” then, let us turn to the second half of the sentence that is rarely ever mentioned from pulpits or in books on Christian marriage: “...and one who covers his garment with violence.” First we will consider the options in meaning for the first part of the clause, then take a closer look at ‘violence’ (hms). Finally we will consider the possibility that this phrase is an example of synonymous parallelism, a favorite Hebraic literary device, one which profoundly influences the meaning of Yahweh’s indictment.

The idea of a garment being covered with violence is repeated in the final verb of v. 16, ‘be faithless’ (NRSV; ‘ break faith’, NIV). Taken from the root bgd (‘garment’), this word became a euphemism for “acts that were improper within the setting of a community composed of equal partners in covenant with God. Cheating, swindling the gullible, defrauding the poor or helpless members of society, etc.—all were called begeding.”[21] It is a key word in this pericope, occurring five times (2:10, 11, 14, 15, 16), underscoring the faithlessness and treachery of the people. Note that bgd also ties in with hamas, “violence,” so that the concept of being a violent, treacherous spouse is stated with three words in v. 16: divorce, violence, and “begeding.”

The meaning of “covering his garment with violence” has generated much debate in scholarly circles. There are three basic approaches to interpretation. First there is the idea proposed by those who interpret the entire passage metaphorically, who see it as a reference to the temple cultus, with priests splashing sacrificial blood on their clothing yet being unworthy supplicants because of their faithless lives.[22]

The older, more traditional view is that this is “simply another instance of the pervasive biblical image of clothes as the outward expression of the inner state of a man” (Ps. 73:6; Is. 59:6).[23]

Finally there is the most well-accepted modern proposition, reflected in a footnote of the NIV, that the term refers to the wife. This interpretation is based primarily on the Hebrew custom of a man placing his garment over a woman as part of the marriage rite (Deut 22:30; Ruth 3:9; Ezek 16:8). This is also the interpretation that I propose, so that the first sentence of v. 16 should read: “ ‘For I hate the one who divorces’ says Yahweh the God of Israel, ‘and the one who covers his wife with violence’ says Yahweh of the hosts.”

The word for violence, hamas, appears 58 times in the OT. In ten of the usages the word means verbal violence through slander, false testimony, false accusations and blaming, deceitful speech, and abusive language (Deut 19:16; Ps 27:12, 140:11; Prov 10:11). Twelve times the word refers to institutionalized violence in the forms of unjust government, oppressive labor practices, and household strife (Jer 51:35, 46; Ezek 7:11; Hab 1:9; 2:8; Zeph 1:9). In at least three cases violence is some form of economic exploitation (Ezek 28:16; Amos 3:10; Hab 2:8). Habakkuk 2:8 is a litany against the violence which destroys people groups, murders, damages the earth, and ruins cities. The remaining OT usages of hamas signify physical brutality or generally destructive behavior or people (the violent). When God sent the flood (Gen 6:11, 13) it was because the earth was filled with hamas. God hates violence. God’s judgment falls against the violent.

In light of all this evidence, then, we may justifiably posit that Malachi 2:16 links divorce with domestic violence (“one who covers his wife with violence”). This verse is an example of synonymous parallelism, a pervasive Semitic literary device in which one idea is expressed in two ways for emphatic purposes.[24] In this verse we see divorce and a man covering his wife with violence as synonymous. God hates both. God’s judgment is against the violent spouse.

Malachi 2:16, Deuteronomy, and Ezra

Those who attempt to use Malachi 2:16 to forbid divorce unilaterally need to reconsider their position in light of Deuteronomy 24:1–4 and Ezra 9–10, one of which assumes divorce and permits it, the other being a command from Yahweh for Hebrew men to divorce their pagan wives (a command, not insignificantly, which came at about the same time and place as Malachi’s prophecy). If God is unequivocally opposed to divorce, how are we to reconcile these verses?

The first passage neither condemns nor endorses divorce—it simply assumes that divorce happens. The prohibition of Deut. 24:1–4 is against a woman remarrying her first husband after having been married to a second husband who either dies or divorces her “because he dislikes her.” While it is unclear from the immediate text exactly why the remarriage to the first husband is an abomination to God, there is good reason to believe that God is protecting the woman through this law. Hugenberger argues convincingly that the casuistic law in Deuteronomy 24:1–4 was actually a prevention of economic exploitation of the woman since she would come out of the second marriage with a financial settlement because of the motive for the divorce (dislike), or she would have the inheritance of the second husband if he died. In that case remarriage to the first husband would allow him to hurt the woman twice—first by rejecting her and keeping her dowry (since his motive for divorce was “indecency,” which permitted him to keep her dowry), and second by taking control of the economic resources she gained from her second marriage.[25] Hugenberger goes on to say that “the implied financial penalty on the second husband who divorces in Deut. 24:3 in reality reflects a disapprobation of divorce when grounded in mere aversion similar to what is attested in Mal. 2:16.”[26]

Evangelical sociologist and feminist Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen provides a fresh perspective on OT law which is very apt in relation to Mai. 2:16 and God’s condemnation of the husband who divorces his wife wrongfully or who covers his wife with violence:

Contemporary feminists are right to be critical of theorists and theologians who exempt domestic life from the requirements of justice...However, taken as a whole the laws of the Old Testament existed less to protect the privileges of the strong than to guarantee justice for the weak, among whom women and children (and especially widows and orphans) are regularly included.[27]

Conclusion

Yahweh’s message to Israel through Malachi is powerfully applicable to the church today. To break a covenant is to commit violence. In the context of verses 10–16 as well as Deuteronomy 24:1–4 divorce motivated by greed (economic and otherwise) is a form of violence and is reprehensible to God. Domestic violence in all its forms—physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual—is a lifestyle of covenant-breaking, of infidelity in what should be the most sacred of human relationships.

Richard Foster writes with a prophetic and compassionate voice to a church that for too long has at best ignored and at worst perpetrated domestic violence with its inadequate exegesis of Malachi 2:16:

But we live in a fallen world, and there are times when, despite all our efforts, the marriage enters the valley of the shadow of death. Every resource has been used. Every possible way to bring healing and wholeness has been tried. Still the marriage is immersed in destruction and bitterness. When such is the case, the law of love (agape) dictates that there should be a divorce... When it is clear that the continuation of the marriage is substantially more destructive than a divorce, then the marriage should end.[28]

God does hate divorce because divorce is the death of a relationship, the death of what should be the source of life and joy and freedom. Yet God hates violence even more than divorce, for violence kills both the relationship and the individuals. When faced with the choice of remaining in an abusive marriage out of fear of God’s judgment, or of ending the marriage in order to end the abuse, Christians need to be assured that God is on the side of the oppressed. God’s strength, healing, and love are promised to all who turn to him for refuge. Malachi 2:16 is more than a condemnation of marital infidelity. It is a message of consolation for those coming out of the bondage of domestic violence. God is on the side of the oppressed.

Notes

1. When speaking of abuse and domestic violence I am referring to all forms of abuse—physical, emotional, sexual, economic, and spiritual. While most contemporary literature dealing with domestic violence (battering) in the church limits the discussion primarily to physical abuse, the reality is that some of the most damaging abuse is emotional. Verbal assault through ridicule and threatening language, manipulation through emotional distancing, unmerited accusations, jealousy, and suspicion, and other forms of emotional abuse are devastating. Sexual abuse in the form of marital rape and other practices must be acknowledged for the soul-destroying violence that it is. Nor can we ignore the degrading effects of economic abuse where the controlling spouse uses economic oppression to control and dehumanize his or her partner and children. As we shall see in the discussion of hms ‘violence’, the Hebraic view of violence (and of covenant and fidelity) is profoundly holistic, incorporating all aspects of life.
2. Gordon Paul Hugenberger, Marriage as a Covenant: A Study of Biblical Law and Ethics Governing Marriage Developed from the Perspective of Malachi, VTS 52 (Brill: Leiden, 1994), 51.
3. Joyce Baldwin, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi (London/Downers Grove: Inter Varsity, 1972), 241.
4. Hugenberger, 52.
5. Ibid., 51.
6. Ralph L. Smith, Micah-Malachi (Waco: Word Books, 1984), 325.
7. Smith, 297.
8. James M. Efird, Marriage and Divorce (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1985), 41.
9. Ibid., 300.
10. Deuteronomy 28–29.
11. Baldwin, 221–2.
12. Ibid., 213-14.
13. Ronald J. Williams, Hebrew Syntax: An Outline (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1976), 72.
14. Ibid.
15. Hugenberger, 67. This translation is Hugenberger’s, whose approach to the text is that it is an apodosis, forming the basis for his argument that the passage prohibits only divorce motivated by aversion.
16. Hugenberger, 57–8.
17. Ibid, 70..
18. Ibid.
19. Smith, 320.
20. Deut 12:31 (abomination), 16:22 (idols); Isa 61:8 (robbery and inquity); Prov 6:16 (six/seven evil things).
21. Smith, 321.
22. Hugenberger, 74.
23. Ibid.
24. W. Randolph Tate, Biblical Interpretation (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1991), 98.
25. Hugenberger, 79–80.
26. Ibid., 81.
27. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, ed., After Eden: Facing the Challenge of Gender Reconciliation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 427.
28. Richard J. Foster, Money, Sex, and Power (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 145.

The Postmodern Phenomena of New Age Spirituality: Examples in Popular Literature

by Mark Bair

Mark Bair (M.A., ATS) is a pastor for Xenos Christian Fellowship in Cincinnati, OH.

This paper is an attempt to better understand the new brand of spirituality that is being written about on a popular level today. My concern is that we better understand it so that we can both avoid deception in the church and communicate the Christian gospel more clearly in the present context. I believe we need updated apologetics rather than update theology for the 1990’s, as some have suggested. The first step in improving our apologetics is trying to decipher what form the “fortresses raised up against the knowledge of God” are presently taking. As Francis Shaeffer said before there even was a term “New Age:”

If a man goes overseas for any length of time we would expect him to learn the language of the country to which he is going. More than this is needed, however, if he is really going to communicate with the people among whom he is living. He must learn about another language—that of the thought forms of the people to whom he speaks. Only so will be have real communication with them. So it is with the Christian church. Its responsibility is not only to hold to the basic, scriptural principals of the Christian faith, but to communicate these unchanging truths ‘into’ the generation in which it is living. 

Every generation of Christians has the problem of learning how to speak meaningfully to its own age. It cannot be solved without an understanding of the changing existential situation which it faces. If we are to communicate the Christian faith effectively, therefore, we must know and understand the thought-forms of our own generation.[1]

In order to aid the reader in the task of understanding our generation, this paper will examine contemporary authors who represent spiritual ideas that are counterfeits of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The reader I have in mind is the concerned Christian worker who has a general awareness of the so-called New Age Movement, but is perhaps unaware of actual proponents of these ideas and how they are introducing them. Before I get to those specific ideas, I want to look at some introductory and background issues.

First of all, how should we categorize? While the term “New Age Movement” can be helpful for generalizing about a broad set of trends, it can also be misleading. For one thing, the term “movement” implies a somewhat monolithic ideology and organization. For some it may conjure up the image of a political movement. But that would miss its subtlety. However we understand the New Age Movement, it is certainly neither a monolithic ideology nor a centrally organized entity. As a Time article noted in December 1987, it is a shifting kaleidoscope of “beliefs, fads, and rituals.” For these reasons, it can be hard to generalize about. Russell Chandler observes:

By and large, New Age is a modern revival of ancient religious traditions, along with a potpourri of influences: Eastern mysticism, modern philosophy and psychology, science and science fiction, and the counterculture of the ‘50s and ‘60s...Also contributing to the New Age way of thinking is Chinese Taoism, which believes that there is a single principal underlying everything (the Tao), Ancient Gnosticism and its doctrine of enlightenment is also an influence, as well as strands of Neoplatonism, medieval witchcraft, Greek mythology, and Native American thought.[2]

While I believe this observation is true, it in no way describes any one person. All these elements have their adherents, but most people would not hold to all of them. For the mainstream American, a lot of items on that list would be considered weird. So the problem with the term “New Age” is that it tends to bring to mind people like Shirley MacLaine and “gurus” like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Elizebeth Clare Prophet, and Maharaj Ji. One might also think of Krishna, TM, Scientology, EST, Unification Church, and Christian Science. And of course all these are dangerous. Undoubtedly they have a combined total of millions.

However, I think that perhaps far more people are coming under a more subtle but equally deceptive set of ideas I will refer to as the “New Spirituality.” The people who come under its influence would probably think of the people and gurus mentioned above as extremists. I see both the larger New Age Movement with its bizarre expressions, as well as the New Spirituality as inevitable outgrowths of the loss of objectivity and cultural authority on Western culture. If any one statement expresses my observation it is: if nothing is true, then everything is true. In other words, if nothing is true in the objective sense, then anything is possible in the subjective sense. Anything can be true for me. Os Guinness observed that “America is moving fast from the old idea that everything means something to the new idea that nothing means anything.”[3] What he means is nothing means anything to everybody. There is no perceived universal truth that applies to all people. In his monumental work Dust of Death, Guinness illustrates what happens when real objective truth is lost:

Early hunters on safari in Africa used to build their fires high at night to keep away wild animals. But when the fires burned low in the early hours of the morning, the hunters would see all around them the approaching outlined shapes of animals and a ring of encircling eyes in the darkness. 

As we have witnessed the erosion and breakdown of the Christian culture of the west, so we have seen the vacuum filled by an upsurge of ideas that would have been unthinkable when the fires of Christian culture were high.[4]

The effect of modernity and secularization has not been to rid society of religion, but actually to spawn a more religious and superstitious culture. How did this development take place? Let’s take a look at the historical background to Postmodernism.

The Shift from Modern to Postmodern

Increasingly, authors both secular and Christian are referring to our times as Postmodern. Not all agree on what it means or if it is an entirely positive or negative development. Yet, few would argue that a fundamental change in outlook is not impacting the culture at large, including the church. Some theologians are even suggesting that the concept of God be changed to fit the Postmodern outlook. Let’s look at a couple of assessments.

John Polkinghorne calls the intellectual setting today the “Post-Enlightenment World.” He describes the course of intellectual history since the Enlightenment:

The thinkers of the Enlightenment sought by cold clear reason to comprehend an objective world to determinate order. They saw themselves as self-sufficient and were confident of their powers and human perfectibility...The Enlightenment attitude had done its acid work and many people’s faith dissolved away. By a curious irony, as the nineteenth century came to a close, the method and view of the Enlightenment were themselves beginning to dissolve in their turn. We now live in a post-Enlightenment age. The essential character of Enlightenment thinking was to allow the clear light of reason to play upon an objective and determinate world. Scarcely a feature of that description now survives intact. 

At the same time as the human psyche has revealed its shadowy and elusive depths, the physical world has denied determinate objectivity at its basic roots. Heisenberg tells us concerning electrons and other elementary particles that if we know what they are doing we do not know where they are, and if we know where they are we do not know what they are doing. His uncertainty principal proclaims the unpicturabiltiy of the quantum world...The world known to the twentieth century is a good deal curiouser and more shadowy than the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could have conceived.[5]

Polkinghorne is critical of the wholesale abandonment of reason that so many are displaying these days: “Our century has seen a recurrent cult of the absurd which is destructive of true reasoning. To acknowledge the limits of rationality, objectivity, and determinism is not to relinquish a belief in reason, a respect for reality or a search for order.”[6]

Frederick Burnham notes the results on the certainty of our knowledge:

Revelations in twentieth century physics have totally undermined the epistemological pride of Victorian science and brought the old era to a close. In the post-modern world of quantum phenomena, the foundation of reality is elusive and indeterminate. Scientific language can no longer be viewed as a set of universal, objective facts, but rather as a set of research traditions, which, like religious language, is born out of a particular community of inquirers. The cultural hegemony of science has ended. The fundamental characteristic of the new postmodern era is epistemological relativism.[7]

I believe that this kind of relativism about what can be known is the perfect soil for New Age Spirituality, as it appears among the radical fringe as well as in the more mainstream expressions. Once certainty is lost, anything is thinkable. To be shocked by New Age thought is to not understand that it flows directly from this void of authority and meaning. Furthermore, the barren dessert of atheistic materialism that prevailed for the first half of this century was hard to live with. Gene Edward Veith describes the revolt against materialism:

The twentieth century saw a new worldview, one which accepted the bleak facts of materialism, while offering meaning for the individual. This worldview is existentialism. According to existentialism, there is no inherent meaning or purpose in life. The objective real is absurd, void of any human significance. Meaning is not to be discovered in the objective world; rather meaning is a purely human phenomena. While there is no readymade meaning in life, individuals can create meaning for themselves. This meaning, however, has no validity for anyone else. No one can provide a meaning for anyone else. Everyone must create their own meaning, but it must remain private, personal, and unconnected to any sort of objective truth ...Existentialism, then provides the rationale for contemporary relativism. Religion becomes a purely private affair, which cannot be “imposed.” The content of one’s meaning makes no difference, only the personal commitment. 

Today, existentialism is no longer the province of the avante garde French novelists in cafes. It is entered popular culture. It has become the philosophy of soap operas and talk shows. Its tenants shape political discourse and are transforming the legal system. Existentialism is the philosophical basis for Post-modernism.[8]

There are many existentialists today who have never heard of the term. They just live it out. Lesslie Newbigin shares Peter Berger’s astute observation about the social outcome of existentialism in contemporary life:

...the distinctive fact about the Modern West from all pre-modern cultures is that there is no generally acknowledged “plausibility structure,” the acceptance of which is taken for granted without argument, and dissent from which is regarded as heresy. A “plausibility structure” is a social structure of ideas and practices which creates the conditions which determine whether a belief is plausible. To hold beliefs outside this plausibility structure is to be a heretic in the original sense of the word haeresis, that is to say, one who makes his own decisions. 

In pre-modern cultures there is a stable plausibility structure and only the rare individual questions it. It is just “how things are and have always been.” In modern societies, by contrast, we are required to make our own decisions, for there is no accepted plausibility structure. Each one has to have faith of his own. We are all required, in the original sense, to be heretics.[9]

It is in a real sense then, that everyone is “in their own world.” At least their own intellectual world. Postmodern spirituality then is a spirituality without truth. Like a cafeteria with its array of “choices” the New Spirituality is chosen on aesthetic grounds. Veith notes the contrast between a modern and a postmodern outlook, with its resulting spiritual consequences:

Modernists did not believe the bible is true. Postmodernists have cast out the category of truth altogether. In doing so, they have opened up a Pandora’s box of New Age religions, syncretism, and moral chaos.[10]

Thinking Broadly

Before we look at examples of the New Spirituality, I want to paint the big picture of the larger New Age phenomena. Most of what we will see is rooted in a pantheistic[11] framework. However, as James Sire perceives, New Age thought shares in at least three world views:

“like naturalism, New Age thought denies the existence of a transcendent God. There is no Lord of the Universe unless it be each of us...It also borrows from naturalism the hope of evolutionary change. We are poised on the brink of a new being...Like both theism and naturalism, and unlike Eastern pantheistic monism, the New Age places great value on the individual person...[12]

Yet the New Age shares with the East in its mystical experience orientation, which rejects reason as a guide to ultimate reality. Sire also sees in New Age thinking some animistic strands.[13] Animism is the orientation of the so-called “primal” or pagan religions, which see the universe as inhabited by countless spiritual beings. These spirits range from vicious to kind. To get by, people have to placate the evil spirits and woo the good spirits. To our aid come the witch doctors and shamans who attempt to control the spirit world. I would not be surprised if, in the coming years, animism becomes the dominant way of thought in the New Age Movement. I say so because pantheism is too abstract for the average person. In addition, human beings are incurably religious, preferring ritual’s concreteness to the abstractions of philosophy. So, New Age thought is a loose worldview with roots in three other worldviews—Naturalism, Pantheism, Animism. The vocabulary of Christian theism is often borrowed and reinterpreted. Groothuis gives us a broad conceptual framework for understanding much of the New Spirituality. His chart will help us navigate our way through the mist of the New Spirituality without wrecking our boat on the shoals.

As is evident from the chart on the following pages, the New Age concept of God is essentially pantheistic. While borrowing heavily from Christian vocabulary, “God” tends to be portrayed as an impersonal force or energy. “But,” as Chandler notes, “the God of the New Age is nobody special. He—or rather, it—is everything. There is nothing that isn’t God.”[14] To give it all the feel of a “hip” Christianity, Jesus can be fit in this scenario. Chandler says, “He is one of the enlightened masters who was conscious of his divinity. Not that he was unique, he just saw what was true of all of us. Humanity’s problem is that problem is that we lack the perception of ourselves as God.”[15] Let’s turn to some of today’s popular spiritual writers, the prophets and priestesses of the present darkness.

Popular Spokesperson

The authors here represent the “diffuse sentiment” we could call the New Spirituality. What they teach is appealing to many people because it says what we want to hear. Veith says of postmodern spirituality:

Today religion is not seen as a set of beliefs about what is real and what is not. Rather, religion is a preference, a choice. We believe in what we like. We believe in what we want.[16]

The people I chose as representatives of the New Spirituality are fairly mainstream. They are all best-selling authors and I found their books outside the New Age section of the bookstore and the Public Library. Unlike Shirley MacLaine, who is snickered at by many, these authors command respect by many in the medical and scientific communities.

Comparison chart of Humanist, New Age and Christian World View:[17]

	Naturalism/Humanism	New Age	Christian Theism
Nature of God	Universe is self-existent; God is superstition	God is the world; pantheism; God is impersonal/amoral	Creator/creation distinction; God is personal/moral
Nature of the World	Matter/energy	Spirit/consciousness	Matter & Spirit
Basis for Knowledge	Reason & science; Observable phenomena	The truth is within; Intuition	God’s Revelation
Ethics	Autonomous & Situational (relative)	Autonomous & Situational (relative)	Based on God’s character (absolute)
Nature of Humans	Evolved animal	Spiritual being, a sleeping god	Made in the image of God, but now fallen
Human Problem	Superstition, ignorance	Ignorance of true potential	Alienated or separated from God, a moral problem
The Answer to Problems	Reason & technology	Change in consciousness	Faith in Christ’s work on our behalf
Death	End of existence	Illusion; entrance to next life	Entrance to either eternal heaven or hell
View of Religion	Superstition with some good moral teaching	All point to the one; (syncretism)	Not all from God; teach different things
View of Jesus Christ	Moral teacher	One of many avatars (periodic manifestations of God-guru)	The unique God-Man, only Lord & Savior

M. Scott Peck, M.D.

Peck is a Harvard-educated psychotherapist whose book, The Road Less Traveled, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for over ten years. It was holding #2 on the paperback list as of May 8, 1994. More than a few people I have talked to were confused as to whether Peck was writing from a Christian position. Some assumed that he was because his books are sold in some Christian bookstores. For this reason, I will quote somewhat extensively from Peck. What emerges from a careful reading is not Biblical theology.

In the introduction to A Road Less Traveled, Peck says he makes “no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and mental growth.” To Peck, “They are one and the same.”[18] While from a Biblical perspective we would expect spiritual growth to produce mental growth, mental growth could take place without anything positively spiritual resulting. As Paul said to Timothy, some people are “always learning but never coming to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). The human mind is not God’s Spirit. The sinful mind is hostile to God and does not submit to the law of God (Rom. 8:7).

Peck believes that most people suffer from a tendency ‘to define religion too narrowly.” What he means by that is people who would criticize non-Christian religions like Buddhism or Unitarianism. We should not, according to Peck view religion as “something monolithic.” His path of spiritual growth is described:

We begin by distrusting what we already believe, by actively seeking the threatening and the unfamiliar, by deliberately challenging the validity of what we have previously been taught and hold dear. The path of holiness lies through questioning everything [italics his]...We begin by replacing the religion of our parents with the religion of science. We must rebel against and reject the religion of our parents, for inevitably their world view will be narrower than that which we are capable, if we take full advantage of our personal experience, including our adult experience and the experience of an additional generation of human history. There is no such thing as hand-me-down religion. To be vital, our religion must be a wholly personal one, forged entirely through the fire of questioning and doubting in the crucible of our own experience of reality.[19]

While it certainly is true that each person has to come to their own conclusion about the truth and they must internalize their own convictions, this process builds on certain sources of information and traditions that are external to the person (religious writings, human authorities, peer pressures, etc.). Some presuppositions or “givens” must be chosen. Even Peck’s idea of questioning everything is a presupposition namely that not questioning everything is a weakness or barrier to truth. Peck seems to think we can perform demolition on all traditional sources to truth (which would include the Bible) and still have something left to build with. He also assumes that one’s parent’s religious views are “inevitably narrower.” This idea assumes that each generation improves in its insight, which is part of Peck’s evolutionary optimism.

In Scripture, this is simply not the case. In 2 Tim. 1:5, Paul says, “I have been reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice, and I am persuaded, now lives in you also.” In 3:14, 15 he is further told, “continue in what you learned, knowing from who you have learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy scriptures, which are able to make you wise unto salvation...” Timothy did not have to go out and find a different religion than his parents or his parents’ parents. To be sure, a parent’s faith is not passed on automatically, but it can be explained. A son or daughter can be persuaded of the truthfulness of his/her parents’ worldview. It seems to me that Peck is advocating the kind of deconstruction of authority that made the counterculture of the sixties so tumultuous. All we have left after this demolition is “truth in one’s own head.”

As we go beyond the religion of our parents and then beyond the religion of science, we come to own our fresh idea of God:

The God that comes before skepticism may bear little resemblance to the God that comes after. As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, there is no single monolithic religion. There are many religions, and perhaps many levels to belief. Some religions may be unhealthy for some people; others may be healthy.[20]

That it “bears little resemblance” is an understatement. What a tragic description of what happens to a naive Christian who becomes “captured by philosophy and empty deception” (Col. 2:8). If Peck’s denial of a “single monolithic religion” is not a direct swipe at Christianity, I don’t know what is. It seems that Peck has a pragmatic criteria of truth. If it “works,” i.e. if it is “healthy”, that’s what matters.

The God that comes after skepticism for Peck is a pantheistic “deity.” He packages his version of pantheism as a bold idea for the inner directed man:

Why does God want us to grow? What is it that God wants of us?...For no matter how much we may like to pussyfoot around it, all of us who postulate a loving God and really think about it, eventually come to a single terrifying idea: God wants us to become Himself (or Herself or Itself). We are growing toward godhood. God is the goal of evolution. It is God who is the source of the evolutionary force and God who is the destination ...It is the single most demanding idea in the history of mankind...It is one things to believe in a nice old God who will take good care of us from a lofty position of power which we ourselves could never attain. It is quite another to believe in a God who has it in mind for us precisely that we should attain His position, His power, His wisdom, His identity.[21]

Peck tries to make the world’s oldest and easiest form of spirituality sound difficult and challenging, while painting the surrender of our proud autonomy as childish dependence. Our problem, according to Peck, is that we shy away from becoming God. Most people are too lazy and passive to seek godhood. He goes on to say:

Were we to believe it possible for man to become God, this belief by its very nature would place upon us an obligation to attain the possible. But we don’t want this obligation, we don’t want to have to work that hard. We don’t want God’s responsibility. As long as we can believe that godhood is an impossible attainment for ourselves, we don’t have to worry about our spiritual growth; we don’t have to push ourselves to higher and higher levels of consciousness and loving activity, we can just relax and be human.[22]

Only a lazy wimp would not want to be God! So it will have to be the few and the proud who are willing to take on this noble task of sacrifice. The “hard work” that Peck says we are too lazy to do is to listen to the god within:

In debating the wisdom of a proposed course of action, human beings routinely fail to obtain God’s side of the issue. They fail to consult the God within them, the knowledge of rightness which inherently resides in the minds of all mankind. We make this failure because we are lazy.[23]

Lest we be still unconvinced of Peck’s pantheism, note how he explains the evolution of consciousness:

I know of no hypothesis as satisfactory as the postulation of a God who is intimately associated with us—so intimately that He is part of us. If you want to know the closet place to look for grace, it is within your self. If you desire wisdom greater than you own, you can find it inside you. What this suggests is that the interface between man and God is at least in part the interface between our unconscious and our conscious. To put it plainly, our unconscious is God. God within us. We were part of God all the time. God has been with us all along, is now, and always with be.[24]

When all is said and done, Peck’s version of spirituality is a rehash of eastern pantheism with a Western individualistic flavor. He does not paint the image of absorption into God. Rather, God is absorbed into you. The human individual retains herself. Much of the book preaches a “pick yourself up from your own bootstraps” mentality with the ear-tickling “psycho-spiritual” theology that was cited above.

Deepak Chopra

If Peck is the therapeutic high priest of the new spirituality, Deepak Chopra is the “surgeon general” of alternative healing. Chopra is also a best-selling author (he has written fourteen books) and physician. He was born and raised in India, but now lives and works in the Boston area. He established the American Association of Ayurvedic (a branch of Hinduism) Medicine. In 1992 he was appointed to the National Institutes of Health and hoc panel on alternative medicine. Chopra is truly a modern guru, combining most skillfully the ideas of the East and the West—Hinduism and science, materialism and spiritualism. He has been written about in Money, People Weekly, and Psychology Today, as well as having had articles published by The Journal of American Medical Association. Money called Chopra a “financial spiritualist.”[25] While Hare Krishnas and the Guru Maharaj Ji may frighten off most westerners, Chopra appeals directly to what we want most in America: health and wealth. His book Creating Affluence is a daily reader on how to get rich by changing your perception of reality. Chopra advises that its contents be “metabolized” in the consciousness of the reader by reading it over and over. He holds out a bold promise:

All of material creation, everything that we can see, hear, taste, or smell is made from the same stuff and comes from the same source. Experiential knowledge of this fact gives us the ability to fulfill any desire we have, acquire any material object we want, and experience happiness to any extent we aspire. 

Before we go into these principals, I would like to discuss what science, and particularly physics, has to say about the nature of the universe we live in...According to quantum field theorists, all material things—whether they are automobiles, human bodies, or dollar bills—are made up of atoms. These atoms are made up of subatomic particles which, in turn, are fluctuations of energy and information in huge void of energy and information...the basic conclusion of quantum field theorists is that the raw material of the world is non-material; the essential stuff of the universe is non-stuff...And this is the overthrow of the superstition of materialism.[26]

Like many of the proponents of the new spirituality, Chopra wants to ground his views in science. The highly disputed field of quantum physics is a favorite “proof” for pantheism by many today. This is a big change from some of the earlier pantheistic prophets who were anti-science. Chopra shows great cleverness as he smuggles in ancient Hindu pantheism in the guise of science and economic strategy. Not only can we be wealthy with a change of perception, but we can also be healthy—even immortal if we learn how to think right, hi his very popular Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old, Chopra avoids subtlety altogether. He immediately sets out to break our confidence in conventional reason, the western way of perceiving reality:

I would like you to join me on a journey of discovery. We will explore a place where the rules of everyday existence do not apply. These rules explicitly state that to grow old, become frail, and die is the ultimate destiny of all...However, I want you to suspend your assumptions about what we call reality so that we can become pioneers in a land where youthful vigor, renewal, joy, fulfillment and timelessness are the common experience of everyday life, where old age, senility, infirmity and death do not exist and are not even entertained as a possibility. 

If there is such a place, what is preventing us from going there? It is our conditioning, our current collective worldview that we were taught by our parents, teachers, and society. This way of seeing things—the old paradigm—has been aptly called “the hypnosis of social conditioning,” an induced fiction in which we have collectively agreed to participate.[27]

Like most pantheisms, Chopra’s claims that what our senses tell us is inadequate and often deceptive. Chopra goes on to ask us to discard conventional western assumptions in favor of a “new paradigm.” I have included his assumptions verbatim because they so capture the essence of New Age pantheism.

...In order to create the experience of ageless body and timeless mind, which is the promise of this book, you must discard ten assumptions about who you are and what the true nature of body and mind is. These assumptions are the bedrock of our shared worldview. They are:

OLD PARADIGM	NEW PARADIGM
1. There is an objective world independent of the observer, & our bodies are an aspect of this objective world.	1. The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.
2. The body is composed of clumps of matter separated from one another in time & space.	2. In their essential state, our bodies are composed of energy & information, not solid matter. This energy & information is an outcropping of infinite fields of energy & information spanning the universe.
3. Mind & body are independent from each other.	3. The mind & body are inseparably one.
4. Materialism is primary, consciousness is secondary. In other words, we are physical machines that learned to think.	4. The bio-chemistry of the body; is a product of awareness. Beliefs, thoughts & emotions create the chemical reactions that uphold life in every cell.
5. Human awareness can be completely explained as a product of bio-chemistry.	5. Perception appears to be automatic, but is in fact learned. The world you live in, including the experience of your body, is completely dictated by how you learned to perceive it. If you change your perception, you change the experience of your body & your world.
6. As individuals, we are disconnected, self contained entities.	6. Impulses of intelligence create your body in new forms every second.
7. Our perception of the word is automatic & gives us an accurate picture of the way things really are.	7. Although each person seems separate & independent, all of us are connected to patterns of intelligence that govern the whole cosmos. Our bodies are part of a universal body, our minds an aspect of a universal mind.
8. Our true nature is totally defined by the body, ego, & personality. We are wisps of memories & desires enclosed in flesh & bones.	8. Time does not exist as an absolute, but only eternity. What we call linear time is a reflection of how we perceive change. If we could perceive the changeless, time would cease to exist as we know it. We can learn to start metabolizing non-change, eternity, the absolute. By doing that, we will be ready to create the physiology of immortality.
9. Time exists as an absolute, & we are captives of that absolute. No one escapes the ravages of time.	9. Each of us inhabits a reality lying beyond all change.
10. Suffering is necessary—it is part of reality. We are inevitable victims of sickness, aging and death.	10. We are not victims of aging, sickness & death. These are part of the scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. The seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

 Now that’s a heavy assault! And he does it, not in an appendix buried at the end of the book, but right at the beginning! Apparently that is not scaring readers off. Notice how Chopra has said the same things that eastern religion has taught without it sounding religious. The word “god” is not used at all in this chart.

No wonder Chandler views the area of holistic health as perhaps the major carrier of the New Age: “The market for the products, as well as the techniques of chiropractic and massage, is likely to endure and grow as more and more Americans become concerned about self-care, wellness, and ever-rising costs of professional health systems.”[28]

Marianne Williamson

Another avenue of expose to the new spirituality is the recovery movement. Marianne Williamson’s experience mirrors that of many other baby-boomers who grew up with a sense of estrangement from their parents’ traditional values and religion. Her book A Return to Love reached #1 on the best-seller list in 1993. This title is stocked not in the New Age section, but in psychology/self improvement. Through her lectures and writing, Williamson has popularized the ultra New Age A Course in Miracles, a kind of pantheistic “bible,” which Opra Winfrey has praised on her show.

Like many who teach concepts of New Spirituality, Williamson believes we need a higher form of “consciousness or knowledge” that is different from cognitive understanding:

“Love isn’t seen with the physical eyes or heard with the physical ears. The physical senses don’t perceive it; it’s perceived through a different kind of vision...Regardless of what it’s called, love requires a different kind of “seeing” than we are used to—a different kind of knowing or thinking. Love is the intuitive knowledge of our hearts..”[29]

Like Chopra, Williamson wants to bypass the limits of logic and linear thinking. For her, God is defined as “the love within us..He is the energy, the thought of unconditional love. He cannot think with anger or judgment.”[30] This is one of the features of the New Spirituality—an impersonal god with the personal characteristic of love. It is hard to see how a “being” that is not distinct from yourself can love you. Yet, the comforting thing for so many is that the “God” of the new spirituality has no wrath and does not punish. All of such negative thoughts are seen as human projections. As for negative or hostile human emotions, they are simply explained away rather being explained by her system:

Anything that isn’t love is an illusion...When we think with love we are literally co-creating with God. And when we are not thinking with love—since only love is real—then we’re actually not thinking at all. We’re hallucinating...sin is defined as ‘loveless perception’...Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of Hell.[31]

Like all pantheistic notions, this one has no way to explain why there is evil and suffering in the world. Simply passing it off as a problem of perception only implicates God as a lousy creator, since there is no Fall to explain how this problem began in the first place. For Williamson, our real problem is not sin in the sense of evil or depravity, but fear. Here we have one more version of “we’re basically good people who are sad and hurt.” Or as someone said, “Hurt people hurt people.” It is no doubt true that unresolved pain is usually taken out on others. However, that does not have explanatory power concerning the cause of all evil behavior.

Williamson tries to align herself with Jesus:

The concept of a divine, or ‘Christ’ mind, is the idea that, at our core, we are not just identical, but actually the same being. ‘There is only one begotten Son’ doesn’t mean that someone else was it, and we’re not. It means we’re all it. There is only one of us here...The word Christ is a psychological term ...Christ refers to the common thread of divine love that is the core and essence of every human mind.[32]

Williamson’s pantheism and syncretism show themselves most strongly here. The exclusive claim for Jesus is turned into a basis of a universally inclusive pluralism. I find it hard to shake off the question, “why do so many people who have love at their core seem to bear the fruit of hatred and violence?” What is the source of human problems? It is amazing how many books get published that are simply expanding on the Beatles’ song, All You Need is Love. It is a great idea, but in the twenty-seven years since that song hit the airwaves, no one has been able to make it work apart from Jesus Christ.

Betty Jean Eadie

Eadie’s book, Embraced by the Light was at #1 for the week of May 8. She makes no attempt to be scientific, but the book is representative of what many Americans are willing to believe. As I read the book, it became obvious why this book is so popular. It affirms virtually everything the average American would want to hear, while having not a shred of material that would offend. If ever there was a book that could be the spiritual undergirding for political correctness, this is it. What is the basis of its legitimacy? The experience of being temporarily dead, of course. Eadie claims to have had an encounter with angels and Jesus himself while her physical body lay dead in a hospital room. She describes her experience in vivid imagery:

I felt a surge of energy...and my spirit was suddenly drawn out through my chest and pulled upward, as if by a giant magnet... I was above the bed, hovering near the ceiling...My new body was weightless and extremely mobile...Before I could move, three men suddenly appeared at my side...A kind of glow emanated from them...I sensed in them great spirituality, knowledge, and wisdom...I began to think of them as monks—mostly because of the robes—and I knew I could trust them...They had been with me for “eternities”, they said... The fact of pre-earth life crystallized in my mind...[33]

Notice that Eadie perceived things non-cognitively. Like others we have seen, she places a premium on this “higher mode” of understanding. The implication is that if something is really important or true it will have to come to you by bypassing your mind. Notice also her basis for trusting the spirit beings. She “sensed” it. It was not by evaluating the content of their claims. I shiver as I recall Paul’s warning to the Galatians, “if we or even an angel from heaven proclaims a gospel contrary let them be accursed” (Gal. 1:8). The beauty of their being tells us nothing about whether they are benevolent or malevolent spirits (2 Cor. 11:14). Eadie’s Mormon leanings stand out as well with her claim to have an eternal spirit that had known these beings from before her entrance into her mortal body (“pre-earth life”). she goes on to describe some more non-verbal intuitive communication:

They somehow communicated a feeling of peace and told me not to worry, that everything would be all right. As this feeling came in me, I sensed their deep love and concern. These feelings and other thoughts were communicated to me from spirit to spirit—from intelligence to intelligence. At first, I thought they were using their mouths, but this was because I was used to people “speaking.” They communicated much more rapidly and completely, in a manner they referred to as “pure knowledge.” The closet word we have in English to define it is telepathy, but even that does not describe the full process. I felt their emotions and intents. I felt their love. I experienced their feelings.[34] [emphasis mine]

Eadie displays the frightening faith in the authority of feelings that has so engulfed our culture. If you feel love, how could it be questioned? Like Deepak Chopra, Eadie also has her own version of creating your own reality. She believes that “Simply by thinking positive thoughts and speaking positive words we attract positive energy...We can create our own surroundings by the thoughts we think...” Then, in an incredible example of reality turned on its head she says, “I understood that life is lived most fully in the imagination—that, ironically, imagination is the key to reality.”[35] One may wonder, was her near death experience imagination or reality? In another example of her distrust of reason she shares her interpretation of 2 Cor. 5:7:

We are to live by faith, not by sight. Sight is involved with the cognitive, the analytical mind. It rationalizes and justifies. Faith is governed by the spirit. The spirit is emotional, accepting, and internalizes... the spirit is mystery to most people. I saw that it functions, generally, without the mind even being aware of it.[36]

As she goes on describing her experience, Eadie reveals a pantheistic flavor:

As I approached it [the light], I saw the figure of a man standing in it...I felt his light blending in to mine, literally, and I felt my light being drawn to his...It is hard to tell where one light ends and the other begins; they just become one light...As our lights merged, I felt as if I had stepped into his countenance, and I felt an utter explosion of love.[37]

In an even more disturbing example of contentless, experience-centered religion, she recounts:

As I approached the water, I noticed a rose near me that seemed to stand out from the other flowers...It was gently swaying to feint music, and singing praises to the Lord with sweet tones of its own. I realized I could actually see it growing...I wanted to experience its life, to step into it and feel its spirit. As this thought came to me, I seemed to be able to see down into it...But it was much more than a visual experience. I felt the rose’s presence around me, as if I were actually inside the flower. I experienced it as if I were the flower...My joy was absolutely full again! I felt God in the plant, in me, his love pouring into us. We were all one! I will never forget the rose that I was.[38]

Eadie even was “informed” in heaven about the abortion issue. Notice how it attempts to placate both sides of the battle:

I learned that spirits can choose to enter their mother’s body at any stage of her pregnancy. Once there, they immediately begin experiencing mortality. Abortion, I was told, is contrary to that which is natural. The spirit coming into the body feels a sense of rejection and sorrow... But the spirit also feels compassion for its mother, knowing that she made a decision based on the knowledge she had.[39]

The popularity of Eadie’s book is a chilling example of the epistemological relativism discussed earlier. If nothing is true, then everything is true. At the end of the book, Eadie says she feels no need to give evidence for the tale. The authority is in the experience. If Eadie is believable, who will be branded a heretic?

A Christian response to the New Spirituality is desperately needed in our day. People are naively falling prey to the promises of these false prophets. A strategy for discipleship and apologetics for the 1990’s is beyond the scope of this writing. My desire here was simply to acquaint the Christian reader with the various “roach hotels” of the New Spirituality so that s/he would be moved to be a better herald of the truth and shepherd of the flock. Sire captures the insidious nature of New Age deception:

The danger of self deception, the certainty of self deception is the great weakness. No theist or naturalist—no one at all—can deny the “experience” of perceiving oneself to be a god, a spirit, a devil or a cockroach. For many people give such reports. But as long as self is king, so long as imagination is presupposed to be reality, so long as seeing is being, the imagining, seeing self remains securely locked in its private universe—the only one there is. So long as the self likes what it imagines and is truly in control of what it imagines, others on the “outside” have nothing to offer.[40]

My plea to the reader is not to shrink from the challenge of bringing these deeply deceived men and women of our day to the kingdom the living God. We cannot afford to let laughter, contempt or fear be our apologetic.

Bibliography

• Burnham, Frederick B., Ed. Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.
• Chandler, Russell. Understanding the New Age. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991, 1993.
• Chopra, Deepak, M.D. Creating Affluence: Wealth Consciousness in the Field of All Possibilities. San Rafael, CA: New World Library, 1993.
• ____. Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old. New York: Harmony Books, 1993.
• Clark, David K. and Geisler, Norman L. Apologetics in the New Age. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1990.
• Eadie, Betty J. Embraced by the Light. Placerville, CA: Gold Leaf Press, 1992.
• Groothuis, Douglas. Unmasking the New Age. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986.
• Guinness, Os. The American Hour. New York: Free Press, 1993.
• Peck, M. Scott. The Road Less Traveled. New York: Touchstone Books, 1978.
• Polkinghorne, John. One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
• Sire, James. The Universe Next Door. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988.
• Veith, Gene Edward. Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1994.
• Williamson, Marianne. A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principals of A COURSE IN MIRACLES. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Notes

1. Francis A. Shaeffer, Escape from Reason, (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity, 1968) 7.
2. Russell Chandler, Understanding the New Age (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991, 1993) 43, 45.
3. Os Guinness, The American Hour (New York: Free Press, 1993) 70.
4. Ibid., The Dust of Death (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994) 276.
5. John Polkinghorne, One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) p. 4,5.
6. Ibid., 5
7. Frederick B. Burnham, ed., Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989) ix, x.
8. Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1994) 37, 38.
9. Lesslie Newbigin, “Can the West be Converted?” International Bulletin of Missionary Research January 1987, 2.
10. Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times. 193.
11. Geisler and Clark say this about pantheism: “Pantheism etymologically means ‘All is God.’ The word was first used by John Toland, an Irish deist, in 1705. The world view is based on key idea that all of reality is one. (This is called ‘monism’.) Anything real is interrelated with everything else that is real. There may be forms or levels of reality, but in the final analysis, all reality is unified ontologically, that is, in its being. No qualitative distinctions can differentiate real things. There is no definite contrast between an eternal Creator and a temporal creature. The ultimate reality, God, alone is real. Insofar as you and I are real, you and I are part of God.” Norman L. Geisler and David C. Clark, Apologetics in the New Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1990) 8. The authors go on to discuss five different variations of pantheism. It is important to keep in mind that, while pantheism can be generalized about, it has quite diverse expressions around the world. There is not one simple form of “eastern thought.”
12. James Sire, The Universe Next Door (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988) 165, 166.
13. Ibid., 166.
14. Russell Chandler, Understanding the New Age. 29.
15. Ibid., 34.
16. Adapted from Douglas Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986) 167.
17. Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times, 193.
18. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (New York: Touchstone Books, 1978) 11.
19. Ibid., 194.
20. Ibid., 224.
21. Ibid., 269, 270.
22. Ibid., 270.
23. Ibid., 273.
24. Ibid., 281.
25. Elizabeth MacDonald, Money Newsline, Money December 1993, 20.
26. Deepak Chopra, Creating Affluence: Wealth Consciousness in the Field of All Possibilities (San Rafael, CA: New World Library, 1993) 18, 19.
27. Deepak Chopra, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old (New York: Harmony Books, 1993) 3.
28. Russell Chandler, Understanding the New Age (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991, 1993) 158.
29. Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principals of A COURSE IN MIRACLES (New York: HarperCollins, 1992) xix.
30. Ibid., 17, 18.
31. Ibid., 21.
32. Ibid., 29.
33. Betty J. Eadie, Embraced by the Light (Placerville, CA: Gold Leaf Press, 1992) 29-31.
34. Ibid., 32.
35. Ibid., 58, 59.
36. Ibid., 65, 66.
37. Ibid., 41.
38. Ibid., 80, 81.
39. Ibid., 95.
40. James Sire, The Universe Next Door. 171.