The Gongshow

I have an mp3 player that is about four years old. Its capacity is 64mb (less than 1/10th the capacity of the smallest iPod you can now buy). The battery ‘hatch’ is broken and has to be held shut with a rubber band when in operation. Last night, I was using this device to listen to a sermon I downloaded from the website of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Rob Bell was sick, so Doug Pagitt covered for him. His sermon was on Acts 11.

Doug Pagitt contributed to Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches and is the pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis. He is also the author of Preaching Reimagined and other books.

After listening to the audio I couldn’t sleep, knowing what a gongshow of a sermon I had just heard. I wonder if Pagitt, at around the 27-minute mark, starts testing the congregation’s reasoning abilities by serving up a textbook example of isegesis. His teaching is not a proposal – not a “I think that maybe what the big deal was in this chapter was…” – but a declaration “this is what was going on in Acts 11.” Before you read any further, watch the discussion between John MacArthur and Doug Pagitt on CNN two weeks ago for some ‘context,’ and then read this analysis of the event by Phil Johnson, which includes a transcript of an email sent by Pagitt to a viewer.

Listen up: Pagitt thinks that the big deal in Acts 11 is not primarily Jewish-Gentile boundary markers like circumcision and Kosher regulations, but theological presuppositions, primarily; that Jews consider God to be the “down and in” and Greeks consider God to the “up and out.”

If you don’t agree with my summary of his argument, listen to the .mp3 and get a hold of me. MHBC should have the file available online for the next 12 weeks.

The big deal is (supposedly) not that the Jewish Christians aren’t sure whether Gentiles can receive the Spirit apart from adopting the covenant boundary markers; the big deal is that Jewish Christians don’t think the Gospel can be described in Greek categories. Pagitt says:

“These Greeks would not think about God as the down and in God, they would think about God as the up and out God. So when the story starts to spread to the Greeks, they start to tell the same Jesus story from a different starting point. They tell the Jesus story from a different set of assumptions. They tell the Jesus story having a different set of things that they know to be true about God. So in Antioch, you have these who believe that God is ‘up and out’ – that God exists in the heavens and that the heavens and the earth are distant and separated – in fact the fabric of the earth is nothing like the fabric of heaven, and God can only interact with the earth through a series of emanations that would allow God not to be polluted by the darkness of the earth. Well that’s not a Jewish story! The Jewish story has the ‘down and in God,’ the Jewish story has a God that says ‘Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool,’ and the two are as connected as connected can be.”

Wait – are you sure about that? Be careful to read Pagitt’s sentences in context here - I might be talking about old news in the blogosphere, but, agree or disagree with him, love him or hate him, Mark Driscoll helpfully pointed out ten days ago Pagitt’s sentence in Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches, where the pastor claimed that the “idea that there is a necessary distinction of matter from spirit or creation from creator is being reconsidered.”

Is it really true? Pagitt’s caricature of the Greek mind, that is. Is it true that, for the Greeks, “God can only interact with the earth through a series of emanations that would allow God not to be polluted by the darkness of the earth?” Really? You honestly think this is representative of the entire Greek mindset, Doug? The mythological gods of the Greeks lived on Mount Olympus. A literal geographical location, right? Zeus, Hermes, Dionysus? I mean, I’m no expert on Greek mythology, but are we tracking here?

Enough about mythology; you think that this caricature is the best way to describe Plato’s concept of the forms?

Moving into the first century, is it safe to say that what you’re describing as the Jewish God, the ‘down and in’ God is closer to the worldview of the Stoic philosophers that Paul encountered on Mars Hill in Acts 17? When Paul encountered the Stoics, he didn’t high-five them and say, “Hey, you guys are practically thinking in Jewish categories!” The following quote is from a textbook I used in my undergraduate degree, in an introductory History class (Western Civilization):

“[The Stoics] believed that humans must live in harmony within themselves and in harmony with nature; for the Stoics, god and nature were the same. The guiding principle in nature was divine reason (Logos), or fire. Every human had a spark of this divinity, and after death it returned to the eternal divine spirit.”
Kagan, Ozment & Turner. The Western Heritage, seventh edition. (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2001), pg. 103

Another quote from a more recent volume is especially explicit:

“…those who followed the Stoic view of Philosophy had what we might call a pantheistic understanding of the divine, seeing the divine as in a sense the ‘soul’ of the universe. For example, the poet Manilius, who composed a heavily Stoic-influenced verse treatise on astronomy and astrology, introduces his discussion of the zodiac in the following way: ‘I shall sing of god, silent-minded monarch of nature, who, permeating sky and land and sea, controls with uniform compact the mighty structure; how the entire universe is alive in the mutual concord of its elements and is driven by the pulse of reason, since a single spirit dwells in all its parts and, speeding through all things, nourishes the world and shapes it like a living creature’” (emphasis mine)
James B. Rives. Religion in the Roman Empire. (Blackwell: 2007), pg. 20-21

I find Pagitt’s presentation of Greek vs Jewish thought overly simplistic, highly reductionistic and historically inaccurate. Did I mention that boundary markers are not theological presuppositions? But the beat goes on. Pagitt later says:

“But this problem hasn’t expired one bit. I was in a conversation just last week with a pastor who said ‘as Christians, we don’t follow the God in us, we follow the God above us.’ And the beat goes on, as the great poet Sonny Bono once said; it just keeps going – the story that is told so often in our world is the story of the Greek ‘up and out’ God – and then there’s been the development of all kinds of theology throughout the centuries, to help explain how that story can actually connect to the Jesus story – and it takes a little bit of work, and it takes a few adapters. You have to have theology that would function and connect the Greek story to the Biblical story and you do it through a series of adapters called theology.”

And; of course, that pastor was wrong. Because Pagitt is right. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that the pastor Pagitt was referring to was John MacArthur in the CNN discussion on Yoga. And, if you’ve read the email where Pagitt effectively cut himself off from orthodoxy, claiming that John MacArthur preaches a perverted Gospel, you can see where this is all heading. But maybe I’m wrong in my assessment. Maybe when he said “perversion,” he meant MacArthur’s Calvinism. John Wesley did claim that Whitefield’s God was worse than the devil. Maybe he only meant MacArthur’s premillenialism. Maybe Pagitt only meant MacArthur’s ecclesiology. But somehow I doubt it. Regardless, what Pagitt says about MacArthur doesn’t matter. What I really take issue with is Pagitt’s teaching that Jewish theological presuppositions in the first century were Eastern, not Western - more similar to a Hindu worldview than a Greek one.

Primarily, Jewish thought was semitic. Neither Eastern nor Western. I admit that it is wrong to try and force Enlightenment categories onto Christianity, but the proper response to this wrong turn is not to turn around 180° and go East, it’s to head back to Judaea. If it is the case that Judaism is an “Eastern Religion,” I’d appreciate finding out how Pagitt understands narratives and texts like Exodus 19, Psalm 53, 80, 121, all of Second Isaiah, especially Isaiah 51.6, but honestly; what about Romans 1? What about John 3.5-13, 1 Cor 15.50-58? What about the entire Tanakh Tabernacle/Temple system? Leviticus? Did I mention Romans 1? Exodus 19? Now that’s a Jewish story.

Okay; let’s dance Doug. If Jewish thought, being supposedly Eastern, is a ‘down and in God,’ is Islam also a ‘down and in God?’ I can’t imagine anyone responding in the affirmative, unless; possibly, they considered Sufism to be representative of the original Islamic religion preached by Mohammed and taught in Qu’ran and Sunnah. Honestly, you’d have to engage in some heavy historical revisionism if you wanted to pull that one off.

As always, if you think I’ve misread something, mis-transcribed Pagitt’s sermon, missed the boat entirely, or completely have no idea what I’m talking about, please let me know. Peace

P.S.: Whenever I use the term Second Isaiah, I only use it as a reference to chapters 40-66 of Isaiah, and I do not use it in reference to a later post-exilic redactor or second author.

~ by Tyler on October 1, 2007.