Matt’s Marvelous Mailbag seeks to provide marginally adequate answers to much better questions about politics, economics, social life, theology, or any potpourri you see fit to have answered. Send questions to mailbag.bereans@gmail.com.

Well, I feel honored to christen the Bereans Mailbag and send it off on its maiden voyage to explore the deep recesses of America’s brooding subconscious, so I won’t waste time with much more explanation.  It’s a mailbag.  You ask questions, and I pretend to answer them.  So, let’s get to it shall we?

Q: Sherry asks: “Andy Stanley has a new book out titled Irresistable. Recently I was reading a review of it and saw this quote from Stanley – ‘The Ten Commandments have no authority over you.  None.  To be clear: Thou shalt not obey the Ten Commandments.’  I gather from the subtitle that he is arguing for more New Testament teaching, more love, and less Old Testament stories. What do you think about encouraging or following this sort of shift in biblical teaching in today’s world?

A: Some context about Andy Stanley will probably help to frame the issue here.  Many people have accused Stanley of being a heretic for how he goes about his deliverance of the gospel.  That’s a touch too far for me; I prefer to reserve my ‘heretic’ label for more flagrant violations, for example: “God has twenty parts: the Father, Brother, Mother, Daughter, Cousin, Weird Uncle, Crazy Aunt…” Ding, ding, ding; you have a heretic.  Andy Stanley, to many Protestants, is more like what Pope Francis is to most traditional Catholics (read: a headache).  He won’t be winning any 5-Point Calvinist awards in the near future, but I would not label him a heretic.  So, with that in mind, I’ll give Stanley the benefit of presuming his mission is more preaching of the gospel and removing what he sees as barriers people experience on their path to Christ.  The Old Testament can get dicey at points (ever read Judges?), and it’s obvious that we are no longer under Mosaic Law as Israel would have been in their day.  Take both of those points, and you could end up in Stanley’s position where he says, “Meh, the OT isn’t applicable to Christians anymore, so let’s just focus on Christ, the Resurrection, and the New Testament and not worry about the Old Testament.”  Fair enough, but here’s where I raise my points of contention:

First, I’m not sure why Stanley would use the Ten Commandments as his example for why we should unhitch from the Old Testament.  Those are good ways to live regardless of how seriously you take the Old Testament.  Anyone object to not murdering, stealing, and defacing the bonds of marriage?  Again, his larger point is probably about what I said above, but this still seems like he’s just pushing the example too far here.  The Ten Commandments may not be explicitly repeated word-for-word in the New Testament, but its principles certainly are.

Second, I think Stanley has good intentions, but he’s actually doing us a disservice by trying to disconnect from the Old Testament.  To start with, the New Testament is absolutely dripping with Old Testament hyperlinks.  Seriously, go look at any decent study Bible and start tracking how many times the authors are calling back to some Old Testament passage, metaphor, principle, etc.  Separating the Old and New Testaments is a real kneecapper of a process to go through.  It’s like watching the final season of a TV show without taking the past seven into account and then wondering why nothing makes sense.  Well of course it doesn’t, knucklehead.  There’s seven seasons of context you have no grasp of yet.  Same thing applies to the New Testament.  It’s a continuance of the whole Biblical story that’s been going on for several hundred pages, and you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you know nothing of what happened on pp. 1-1000 and go straight to pg. 1001.  I mean, Matthew starts with a genealogy for crying out loud.  Good luck making sense of that unless you realize the earth-shattering OT covenant implications that Matthew is making.  I’ll take this opportunity to make a rather shameless plug for the Bible Project and their “Read Scripture” app.  They do a tremendous job of tracing the Biblical story through both Testaments and showing how it leads to Jesus in a far richer way than Stanley will ever be able to do by unhitching from the OT.

Also, just one more minor point.  A lot of people raise protests about reading the OT because of all the ‘unpalatables’ they find.  Well, I hate to break it to you, but the OT was written in an Ancient Near East context because….it was the Ancient Near East.  God relates to people in their time, and he ordained that scripture would be written in that context, knowing fully well what the pros and cons would be.  So, if you read either testament in a modern context, then yes you will be rather confused.  Try studying it in its context, and you’ll be the better for it.  As Michael Heiser from Logos says, “There is no better way to cultivate spiritual growth than deep Biblical studying.”

Q: Sam asks: Why did Trump tweet about the World Series?

A: No clue, but I suspect it has something to do with the Russia probe in some wild, roundabout way.

Q: Sam also asks: What is the best way to unify the country / why are we so polarized?

A: I’m actually going to punt to my good friend, Stan Schwartz, on this one.  He has an excellent piece over at the New Herald which basically outlines the problem.  In a nutshell, we are directionless.  See the link: https://the-new-herald.com/2018/06/10/rediscovering-virtue-and-direction/

Q: Jordan asks: How did tensions rise up so quickly in the past two years?

A: Well, my dear brother (no, seriously, this is actually my blood-relation brother asking.  He’s in Lithuania right now, BTW, which is awesome.  Hi Jordan!), it hasn’t been just the past two years realistically.  Stan’s piece above sort of addresses this in a tangential way, and there are so many things I could list here.  I think one particular reason is due to several years of the cultural elite of the country telling about 1/3 of the country that they didn’t matter in any way, shape, or form.  Trump isn’t the cause of our tensions; he’s the necessary result when that third is relentlessly pushed around, talked down to, made fun of, and belittled for decades on end.  You and I actually have a good example of this in our own lives.  Remember when we were really young, and I used to push you off the chair whenever you tried to get up on it?  Well, it was all fun and games for me until one day you smacked me across the face with your sippy cup.  But, honestly, what should I have expected?  I pushed you off the chair for weeks, so it was logical that you would resort to bludgeoning me with plastic molding.  Just draw the parallel from the playbox to politics.  When the elite keep slapping that 1/3 in the face while chanting, “Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself,” it seems a little ignorant of them to shed tears of shock when that 1/3 swings a baseball bat at them.  It doesn’t justify either side, but it helps to explain it.  Again, I would check out Stan’s post at the New Herald.

Q: Jordan also asks: Which was worse.  Episode I or Episode VIII?

A: Hands down, Episode VIII for two reasons.  First, I grew up with Episode I, and yeah it was kind of corny, but I wasn’t old enough to have my sensibilities offended by its presence.  I was for Episode VIII.  Second, Episode I may have been dumb, but Episode VIII was an insult to the whole mythos and tradition of Star Wars, and I will gladly keep the court jester over the Jacobin revolutionary.

Q: Heinrich von Deutsch, Junker asks: “For Christians who found ourselves with what we considered an unpleasant choice between two very bad presidential candidates last election, is there any way we can be promoting one of the nascent parties, such as the Constitution Party, or even starting a new third party, with more explicit Christian ties?”

A: Interesting question, Heinrich.  I’m much more a pragmatist when it comes to issues of political parties.  We have the primaries to do our best in sorting out which candidate will best balance the tension between holding our values and being electable, and, after that, it’s best to go with the electable candidate who best approximates your values.  In most cases, that basically means that you can vote Democrat or Republican if you want it to matter.  Is it optimal?  No, but it is reality, however harsh it may be.  I’m not going to say we shouldn’t raise up a new or nascent party, but it would have to be a concerted effort in mobilization to get that to work, and I’m not sure we could manage that or accept the short-term consequence of likely losing a few elections.  Realistically, you’d probably split the Republican vote more than anything, and the Democrats would clean house for a while at least.

On a larger note, however, I’m not sure that we really need to raise up an explicitly Christian party because the Christian mission is not aimed for this present world.  We’re marching towards New Jerusalem, not Washington D.C.  That being said, I don’t oppose Christian involvement in politics; in fact, I welcome it, and I think we need a good deal more of it.  If we Christians can lead people to the virtue and life-changing power of the Gospel, we won’t have much need for an explicitly political party; the problem will self-correct.  For now, let’s work within the framework that we have, and, if you truly can’t stand either electable candidate, don’t vote.  Honestly, I do think there’s a good deal of martyrdom that we put on our vote, and it really needn’t be that way, especially for Christians who are definitionally ‘exiles’ waiting to return home.  In the meantime, celebrate the good, condemn the bad, and eat more meals with friends.  You’ll find life simpler, happier, and better as a result.

Q: Heinrich also asks, “As a Berean confronting cultural barbarism, what is your opinion on ghost/horror stories and movies, i.e., what’s your personal appreciation or feeling for any particular iterations of scary media, and how do you fit this into your overall Christian worldview?”

A: Well, I’m personally not a fan of most of those because they’re generally just cheap productions meant to produce jump scares or gross people out.  That being said, I do appreciate stories/movies that understand how to build legitimate tension and sustained dread; that takes both a healthy imagination and a fair amount of skill to produce.  The Shining is a good example of this.  It’s not a “jump out of your seat” type of movie, but it is undeniably scary as it traces the devolution of a man.  The horror isn’t in making my corpuscles contract; it’s in progressively revealing the depravity and madness that mankind can fall into by connecting it to some otherwordly, mysterious apparition that is driving his downfall.  More than that, it’s equally terrifying to realize that he cannot fight back against it, and he has no means of escape.  You can sort of see the applicability to the Christian worldview when you take Paul’s account that Christians are not fighting against flesh and blood but rather the spiritual forces of darkness in high places.  The difference, of course, is that we win in the end; it’s still terrifying though to imagine a world (i.e. – Shining) where we can’t win.  Anyway, sorry if this isn’t much of an answer; I’m just not a big fan of most horror stories in general.  Exceptions are made on a case-by-case basis.

Also, Heinrich, you seem familiar to me…..this wouldn’t happen to be you would it?

Ok, folks, that’s all for this week.  Keep sending the questions in to mailbag.bereans@gmail.com.  Answers will magically appear on Monday or sooner if the question is particularly pressing.