Who Is Our Neighbor, the One We Are to Love?

Though there are almost no Samaritans left in the world today, there are many people we may be tempted to despise and reject.  I am thinking of people of another race, color, or culture; homosexual persons who are victims of homophobia; or people of another faith, such as Muslims.  Jesus's parable challenges us to overcome all such racial, social, sexual, and religious prejudices.  I am not suggesting that we compromise our Christian beliefs and morals, but rather that we do not allow these to impede our active love for our neighbor.  That is what "go and do likewise'" (v. 37) will mean for us.

-Stott, "The Parable of the Good Samaritan," which Jesus tells in Luke 10: 30 through 37, and is today's reading in Through the Bible Through the Year.

All of this catches my attention, together with the whole of Stott's little essay and, of course, the Parable itself.  But what snags me most deeply during this reading is the phrase "active love."

Tough Love from St. Paul about Taking Care of One's Family

If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

-1Timothy 5:8, and cited in today's reading in Stott's Through the Bible, Through the Year, at page 91.

I see this ethic applied among all classes of people, notably (at least to me) among the immigrant families here in Miami.

At the recent Annual Dinner hosted by Heartbeat of Miami, we heard a testimony from a young woman who, with the help of her mother at age 16, fled sexual abuse in Nicaragua from a man who threatened to kill her and her parents if she told them and the authorities about the abuse.  She came to the US in the way many of the Central American children come here that we read about:  She made the journey across Mexico, waded the Rio Bravo, was taken into custody by INS, but had an aunt in Miami who would take her in.  Say what you will about the government authorities, they gave the young woman bus fare and she finally arrived here, to be sheltered by her kinswoman and, from there, introduced to the Christian community that works with Heartbeat, her larger family.  Unknown to herself at the time that she fled her country, the man in Nicaragua had impregnated her.

When the INS gave her a physical examination, they discovered her pregnancy and a social worker advised her to get an abortion, telling her "Every time you look at that baby's face, you will see the evil that has been done to you."   The young woman refused.  Heartbeat helped her.  She said at the Heartbeat Dinner that when she looks into the face of her baby, now 2 years old and there with us at the dinner, she sees the face of Jesus.

"Judaizers:" Where did that term come from?

The problem was that "the Galatian converts," Stott writes, "who had received [from the Apostle Paul] this gospel of grace , were now turning away to another gospel, a gospel of works.  The false teachers were evidently 'Judaizers', whose 'gospel' is summarized in Acts 15:1: 'Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.' "  Stott, The Message of Galatians (IVP 1968) at p. 22.

I wanted to track down the verb "Judaize" and focus on it as part of the lesson.  So I looked in my Strong's to see where Judaize appears in the KJV.  Nowhere.  So then, to my NIV concordance.  Not there either.  Then on to Biblegatway.com where I did a search for that word through the various English translations available at that helpful site.  I could not turn up a scripture reference where the word is used.  The word is not new to me.  I have known and understood that word for over 50 years, it is commonly used to describe the source of the problem that the reader encounters in Galatians and elsewhere in the NT, but  the word itself did not seem to be in the Bible.  Where did it come from.

I have The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971).  The editors approach to a given word is to identify the earliest written English source of its use, to provide a context-giving sentence fragment from that source that includes the word, then to follow with the next oldest source and fragment, and to the next, and so on.  (For a great read on the development of the OED see Winchester's  The Professor and the Madman.) 

Here is the OED's definition of Judaize and the earliest source and fragment for that definition:

To play the Jew; to follow Jewish customs or religious rites; to follow Jewish practice.  1582 N.T. (Rhem.) Gal. ii: 14. How doest thou compel the Gentiles to Iudaize?

A Judaizer, then, is someone who would force a Gentile to follow Jewish practice.  In the context of Galatians, the Judaizers were Jewish Christians who would compel Gentile Christians to follow Jewish customs.  Well, I knew that.  But what of that source, "Rhem."?

I recognized that word Rhem.  It refers to the Rheims-Douay Bible (1582-1610).  We Protestants are all about our English language Bibles, and fail to acknowledge that making the Bible accessible in English was part of the Counter-Reformation as well.  Bruce Metzger, in his The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions, writes that English Catholics, fleeing persecution by Queen Elizabeth, found refuge in Flanders.  In 1568, they established a seminary in Douay, where scholars "undertook, for the first time in the history of the Roman Church, to replace the available Anglican and Genevan Bibles - unacceptable from their point of view - with an English version of their own.  This project . . . was completed at Rheims in France to which city the college had transferred itself in 1578  .  .  .  "  (Metzger at pp. 67-68) Rhem., then, refers to the Rheims-Douay NT of 1592.

Metzger writes that the translation was made "not from the original languages but from the Latin Vulgate [and] was painstaking and reached a high standard of consistency, but was often too literal to be used in public worship.  There was a strong tendency to retain technical words  .  .   ."  Ah, like Judaize.

I think it ironic that Stott, an Anglican priest, adopts "Judaizers" as a term of art for the people troubling the Galatian Christians.  That word comes from the first Roman Catholic, English version of the Bible.  It was translated by scholars fleeing persecution because they were Roman Catholic, persecution by Queen Elizabeth, the head of the Anglican Church.   How many Protestants, who might look at Galatians narrowly as a sort of rebuke of the Roman Church, use that word, ignorant of its source?

Studying Galatians

In the adult Sunday School class that I teach, we have been using as our texts the small books written by N.T. Wright in the Paul for Everyone series, following the lead of Macon and Walter when they taught their Sunday School class at West Lake.  They started with Wright's study on Romans, and we followed, then to the Gospel of John, and now to Galatians.  With each of these studies, I used other commentaries and texts. I have been able  to acquire most of these other books in used editions at a reasonable cost through either  half.com and abebooks.com.  I buy the N.T. Wright texts new from Amazon, however.  At the end of a study, most of the students will give the Wright texts back to me, and I put them on half.com and recover about 40% of their cost.

To supplement the Galatians study, I am using Stott's The Message of Galatians in The Bible Speaks Today series published by Intervarsity Press.  I would use a Stott study as the main text, in preference to Wright's, in every case, but the IVP editions are more expensive than the Wright texts, and many of the people in the class pay for their class text.  Furthermore, Stott doesn't necessarily have a study for each book in the NT.

I am also using Luther's Commentary of the Epistle to the Galatians, which, according to Stott who quotes often from this commentary, is based on lectures delivered by Luther in 1531.  Amazon publishes a Kindle edition of this commentary and charges nothing for it.  I also have John Brown's An Exposition of Galatians, which Stott also cites from time to time.  John Brown was a Scottish minister, born in 1784, who "entered the University of Edinburgh at the age of 13, and in three session in the Arts faculty, gained such a command of Latin as to read it in like his mother tongue," according to the introduction in the reprint edition of this commentary published by Sovereign Grace Publishers in 1970.

Reading Stott

Finished Basic Christian: the Inside Story of John Stott, the Stott bio. (Thanks, Macon!)

Picked up Stott's Through the Bible Through the Year, and am making it the center of my daily devotional. Also picked up his Why I Am a Christian, to see if it would be a good one to give to non-Christian friends (or do you think Basic Christianity would be better?). Also picked up The Living Church - Convictions of a Lifelong Pastor.

I like Stott's habit of an after lunch nap, his "horizontal half hour" or "HHH" and his one day a month getaway to think things over.

He got in trouble with other Evangelicals for his view of annihilation. I've thought about the issue for years, and I like his position. The link is to the Wikipedia article on "annihilationism." Here's a quote from the wiki article:

Stott first publicly commented on the issue of whether hell is eternal in the 1988 book Essentials: A liberal-evangelical dialogue with liberal David Edwards.[13] However in 1993 he said he had held this view for around fifty years.[14] Stott wrote, "Well, emotionally, I find the concept intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterising their feelings or cracking under the strain."[15]

Yet he considers emotions unreliable, and affords supreme authority to the Bible.[16] Stott supports annihilation, yet cautions, "I do not dogmatise about the position to which I have come. I hold it tentatively... I believe that the ultimate annihilation of the wicked should at least be accepted as a legitimate, biblically founded alternative to their eternal conscious torment."[17]

(The footnotes in the wiki quote refer to Edwards and Stott, Essentials: a Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue.)

Freedom from Our Own Miserable Subjectivity

The truth of God is neither what you or I think, nor what the Church teaches, but what the Spirit says to the Church through the Word. And since churches and individuals err when they are not "governed with the Spirit and the Word of God", the greatest need of the Church in this as in every age is humbly to submit to the authority of the Word and prayerfully to seek the illumination of the Spirit.

I am conscious that some of you may think this places unacceptable constraint on academic freedom, or to verge simply upon a blind obscurantism. But is not this submission of our minds to the mind of Christ an intellectual imprisonment? No more so than the submission of our wills to the will of Christ is moral bondage. Certainly it is a surrender of liberty, for no Christian can be a "free thinker". Yet it is this kind of surrender which is true freedom - freedom from our own miserable subjectivity, and freedom from bondage to the current whims and fancies of the world. Is it stunting to spiritual growth? No, it is essential to it, for Christian growth is nothing if it is not growth into Christ as Lord and Head.

-John Stott, as quoted in Steer, Basic Christian - The Inside Story of John Stott, (IVP 2010) at page 157.

Arnold Stott's Healthy Journey

On our recent trip to Austin, Macon gave me a copy of Basic Christian - the Inside Story of John Stott, published by InterVarsity Press and written by Roger Steer. Part of this biography describes the fascinating and difficult relationship that developed between John Stott and his father, General Arnold Stott, during WWII. John's desire was to pursue theological studies during the war and his father's desire, equally fervent, was that John defer those studies and take his place in the Armed Forces to fight England's enemies, as most of John's peers were doing. It is a credit to both men that their relationship during this period, while very heavily strained, more than survived, because John pursued those studies, treating his father firmly but with the utmost respect, and his father, very grudgingly at times, continued to supply him with the financial means to do so.

John's single mindedness about God's call on his life, his discipline, and great gifts, resulted in John becoming,at the age of 29, Rector of All Soul's Church in London, not long after the war ended. At a reception after John's installation, Steer, the biographer, describes a scene between John's father and Eric Nash, the minister who brought John to Christ when John was a teenager and attended one of Nash's summer camps. (In a way, then, Nash was John's spiritual father.) Rev. Nash's nickname was Bash, and John's parents knew well who he was, particularly how deeply Bash had influenced John.

Bash found John's father standing [at the reception] smoking a cigarette and (as Bash later told John) 'looking very proud of you and yet out of his depth by turns'.

'Good evening, Sir Arnold,' said Bash cheerfully.

Arnold slowly turned his head towards the speaker. There was a long pause.

'Who are you?' Arnold growled.

'I'm Nash, John's friend. We met in 1940. Do you recall me?'

There was another long pause. 'Yes, I do. What are you doing?'

'Oh, youth work,' Bash replied. 'You must be a proud man tonight, Sir Arnold. Wasn't it to be the Foreign Office for John, in those pre-war days?'

Arnold looked sour, almost startled, and puffed his cigarette. 'I was never against this. I only wanted no hasty decisions.'

'You've hardly a grey hair,' said Bash. 'You wear very well.'

I'm thin,' replied Arnold solemnly. 'You see?' he concluded and managed a smile.

Lilly [John's mother] arrived, beaming all over her face. 'I must shake hands with dear Bash again!'