We are back to mercilessly long diatribes, as Dean now (justifying his
excess verbosity by appealing to our alleged inability to “face up” to Biblical
challenges) abuses Matthew 11:12 ... “from
the days of John the Baptist until NOW, the kingdom of heaven suffereth
violence, and THE VIOLENT TAKE IT BY FORCE”, by saying that this means:
“BUT NOW, the
right and the power to speak and act for God are obtained by the violent. By
saying that the violent take the kingdom of heaven BY FORCE, Jesus denies that
Divine authority, power, and confirmation, will EVER be awarded to those make
some sort of PASSIVE CONCESSION to Christian Doctrine or the need to believe in
God”.
Not quite. Bivin and Blizzard (Understanding the Difficult Words of
Jesus, 123ff) explain that this relates to a rabbinic midrashic exegesis of
Micah 2:12-13:
“I will surely assemble, O Jacob, all of thee; I will surely gather the
remnant of Israel; I will put them together as the sheep of Bozrah, as the
flock in the midst of their fold: they shall make great noise by reason of the
multitude of men. The breaker is come up before them: they have broken up, and
have passed through the gate, and are gone out by it: and their king shall pass
before them, and the LORD on the head of them”.
The picture is of a shepherd penning his sheep for the night, blocking
the exit with stones, which in the morning he opens by tossing some of the
stones aside. The sheep are anxious to get out, pushing and shoving and
breaking the hole open even more. Rabbinic midrash interpreted the shepherd as
Elijah and the king as the Messiah. “Suffereth violence” here means “breaking
forth” and “the violent take it by force” means “those who are breaking out,
break out by means of it”. The verse is therefore saying in essence that John opened
the breach and now Jesus the king is leading the people, the sheep, through it.
There is nothing to do here with “passive” acceptance of the Gospel.
[Even if you don’t accept the explanation of Bivin and Blizzard, be
aware that Matthew 11:12 is usually abused by Charismatics and Pentecostals
like Dean to teach that a Christian must seek an extra “special anointing” —a second Spirit baptism, so to speak.]
If any point is worth taking from Dean, it is indeed summed up in the
idea that one who truly believes will also truly serve; faith without works is
dead, being the simple way to put it. Regrettably Dean spoils this insight with
a peculiar idea that all of us must make the same impact as the “heros” (sic) of the Bible, which stands
rather against the idea that in the Body of Christ, there are members suited
for different purposes at different levels. Dean also seems to think that we
are plagued with “willingness to accept
tragedies, failures, and losses that are only supposed to happen to the wicked”,
but we are not sure who other than Dean has this problem. Quoting the
proverbial Psalms 91:10 does not exclude us from such; if it did, one wonders
how Dean reconciles this with the indications (as he agrees) that with
faithfulness comes persecution. Dean also could stand to be informed by the
relationship of faith and works; even as Dean rails against Protestants for
minimizing works, and Charismatics for turning “faith” into a magic word, he gives no answer, supposing in
ignorance that “the Bible does not supply
us with a synthesis of these things”.
The background and context that Dean is oblivious to does so, in fact. Dean
also badly misinterprets Luke 6:30 the same way
anti-missionaries do, and while making much of Jesus' command to give all one
has to be his disciples, fails to note that Abraham (a wealthy tribal
chieftain) and Zacchaeus and Nicodemus apparently did not simply give all their
wealth away, which makes it clear that the command is to consider what you have
as though it were not yours, rather than that we are to give it away
indiscriminately.
Dean's next concern is to “comfort” those who are worried about their
past failures. He is certainly right that failures are not reasons to “lower our expectations, or compromise our
confession”. The advice to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and press
ahead in Christ is sound. Where Dean misses as usual is his apparent confusion
of salvation and reward. Paul speaks of those who will be saved but whose works
will be burned up, and who will enter eternity smelling of smoke but still
alive. (Though oddly, contrary to his earlier verbiage, in this chapter Dean
seems less inclined to say that those in the weak condition he describes are
damned!) Jesus speaks of those given ten and five cities, having been given ten
and five coins. Does this not tell us that some will not have as grand roles as
others, and that their salvation is not dependent on it? By no means is this to
be understood as an excuse for an underachiever; the fate of the man with one
coin tells us as much, and tells us such a person is not loyal to our Lord to
begin with. But it does tell us that Dean's “you
can always do more” is a misplaced sentiment without ground in the concept
of the Body of Christ with its many functions. If we wish to press the analogy,
the body has hands and feet that are most active; but it also has buttocks and
toenails whose purpose is to sit by until such time as they are needed. Dean is
right that some accept a Gospel of Resignation, but his claims of membership in
this category are suspiciously expansive to include anyone not up to his own
standard rather than those up to the Biblical measure illustrated by such
parables as the master with the five, ten, and one coins.
Though he never gets to the point of stating it clearly, Dean also seems
to offer the impression that diseases, accidents, etc. will never impress
themselves upon the faithful person. I think he does not state it clearly
because he knows that not even the apostles were exempt from persecution and
sickness. Dean's commentary maintains this tension and never resolves it. Nor
do we hear that Dean's life is sickness- or accident-free, which one would take
as some evidence of his cause; indeed he admits such times. The rub will be
that under Dean's paradigm, there is no falsifying his thesis; for any sickness
with be taken as evidence of unfaithfulness, even if we can't figure out what
it was —and in the Bible, the persons best known for taking this position are
Job's loudmouthed friends who ended up being put in their place by Yahweh. And Dean
is also forced to admit that even the most faithful may have “temporary” setbacks, and thus he molds
the data to fit his thesis rather than abandoning the thesis in the face of
plainly contrary data. In the meantime those “unfaithful” by Dean's view whose prayers were answered are
considered to have just “appeared” to
have had their request granted. In the end Dean cannot resolve the paradox of “unanswered” prayers by the faithful
except by decontexualizing. His abuse of the relevant verses is answered here. As for Dean, what we see
suggests that he will never abandon the paradigm because of contrary data:
“Even now, as I
write this; I am in critical danger. Any moment now my creditors are likely to
show up with the truck and start cleaning out the house. I believe GOD TOLD ME
to leave my job, and devote myself to writing this book. There are children in
this house, that look to me for their food and shelter. You have NO IDEA. . . BUT,
even if the worst happens to ME, I will not go back on anything you have read
here”.
Dean is certainly an example of the bills of the church come due, for
not teaching contextualization of the Word.