Patient Endurance | SL 2.5 (February 2021)
In this newsletter
- Patient Endurance
- Work & Ministry Update
- Something Beautiful: Some Reading, Listening, and Watching
- A Moment of Exegetical Euphoria: Genesis 22, Testing & Faith
- Pray With Us
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Painting by my brother, Adam (2020); aeaston.com.
Patient Endurance
In the Kirk house we are feeling a strange pull between different emotions. Today is the due date for our third child. We are anxiously waiting for the moment when we call friends to come watch the girls and head to the hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne to meet our baby. At the same time, the monotony of a near total lockdown with the pandemic now slouching into its second year is finally starting to get to us. We read books, we go for walks, we try to entertain the girls and take care of ourselves. At the same time, I’ve made some real strides in terms of PhD progress and am more energized and hopeful for the whole thing than I have been in some time. At the same time, we’re itching to get off the bench in more ways than one. We feel sidelined by the pandemic and the lockdown but also by the PhD and a young-but-growing family. At the same time, Meghan is feeling pregnant, uncomfortable, and is ready to have a baby last week so she can heal and get healthy and regain some energy. And then we wake up and do it again.
In his newsletter, Alan Jacobs recently steered me toward a wonderful post by British Bible scholar at-large, Ian Paul:
> I received a gift today, in the form of a post by Ian Paul. That post is about the Greek word hypomone, which means “patient endurance,” “the capacity to hold out or bear up in the face of difficulty, patience, endurance, fortitude, steadfastness, perseverance.” The associated verb, hypomeno, means “to stay in a place beyond an expected point of time, remain/stay (behind), while others go away”; “to maintain a belief or course of action in the face of opposition, stand one’s ground, hold out, endure, remain instead of fleeing.”
> Love, St. Paul says, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” — panta hypomenei. That’s 1 Corinthians 13:7, and I think I’ll make it my verse for 2021. My prayer for myself is that I will have the patient endurance, this year, to maintain my beliefs, my core commitments, “in the face of opposition”; to stand firm and defend what I care most about “beyond an expected point of time … while others go away.” I declare 2021 The Year of Hypomone.
I’d say that’s about right. Let’s hypomone the days away.
Toward that end I stumbled on this little article about the theology of the routine. The author riffs on a G. K. Chesterton passage that I came across in teaching Ecclesiastes 1 last year. It is so good, I must share it again.
>The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
Painting by my brother, Adam (2020); aeaston.com.
You are Training Pastors to be Faithful to Scripture & Strengthening the Global Church
- I submitted proposals for three different papers and one session at various conferences set to take place over the Summer and Fall in England, Germany, and the US. These proposals are essentially summaries of yet-to-be-written chapters in my dissertation. This felt like a burst of productivity, I wanted to get it all in before the baby comes.
- I submitted a paper on textual criticism of Proverbs 30:1 to an academic journal. This would be my first solo-authored article—a big deal! (Textual criticism has to do with figuring out which text to read when the ancient manuscripts and translations do not agree with each other.)
- I mapped out a plan to finish my dissertation this year. Feeling good. I’ve crossed some real milestones and it is starting to feel doable.
- Term I has come to an end at William Tennent School of Theology. Now I am grading all the papers!
- Did I mention we’re having a baby?
Thank you. Your prayers and support empower everything we do.
Painting by my brother, Adam (2020); aeaston.com.
Some Reading, Listening, and Watching
Meghan is loving audio books at the moment. A few weeks back we rewatched Joe Wright’s gorgeous rendition of Pide & Prejudice, which I cannot recommend enough. Surely it is one of the most succesful modern adaptations of a classic novel. It is lush, evocative, rich, and fresh while still faithfully capturing the heart of the book. Now Meghan’s re-listening to Pride & Prejudice and loving it. We’ve discovered that there are more outlets for free audio books than we realized. If you have a library card, check out Hoopla, and many podcasts are now dedicated to producing readings of classics in the public domain. Even Spotify has significant collections. Make sure to look under podcasts for classic titles.
By far the most moving and riveting thing that we’ve read recently is Educated by Tara Westover. Westover’s memoir is about growing up with a fundamentalist Mormon father who was probably also bipolar. Due to various paranoid religious and political beliefs, her parents refused to educate their children beyond teaching them to read the Bible and refused any and all professional medical care. As the youngest of seven children, Tara seemed to get the worst of this. She didn’t step foot in a class room until she was 17, and never so much as took an Ibuprofen until well into college. Her older brother convinced her that if she taught herself Algebra and Trig and got a high enough score on the ACT she could get into college by bluffing the admissions board with stories about “home schooling.” Tara somehow managed this and just ten years later she earned her PhD from Cambridge in intellectual history. The heart-rending thing is she lost her family along the way in a swirl of deception, lies, and abuse. She describes from the inside just how compelling her father’s worldview and charismatic leadership was, how difficult it was even as a PhD student for her to break from certain aspects of it, and how most of her siblings never did. Somehow she manages to do this without anger (despite the fact that he repeatedly puts his entire family in life-threatening situations). You will not believe the number and severity of the injuries that they treat at home with herbs. Tara has manged to plumb the depths of her experience with honesty and honor in an astounding way.
I found it remarkably poignant that Tara is the same age as me and Meghan, b. Sept. ‘86. We are used to thinking of bizarre, heroic, or terrifying stories playing out in the deep past or perhaps overseas, but less often come face-to-face with someone living a radically different and deeply challenging life simultaneous with our suburban childhoods.
I have not done it justice. You should read her book.
Here’s Tara giving the commencement address at Northeastern University in 2019: The Un-Instagramable Self. It too is full of wisdom—and far be it from me not to encourage everyone to quit social media—plus, at the end she sings, which is a feature of the memoir moving to witness.
Since, as I mentioned, we are having a baby soon, I was drawn to this longer article by Ross Douthat, “The Case for One More Child: Why Large Families Will Save Humanity.” It was an excellent think piece exploring the declining birth rate in the West and our fundamental selfishness (everything Douthat writes is worth reading, and there are some nice tie-ins back to Westover’s commencement address!). As a companion piece to the article Plough Quarterly hosted a discussion on Zoom featuring, among others, Sarah Williams, who is perhaps my favorite professor I’ve ever had the pleasure of studying with.
Genesis 22, Testing, and Faith
(Part IV in The Theology of the Pentateuch)
Divine Child Abuse?
Gen 22:1–2
>1 After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 2 He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”
Perhaps you’ve grown too comfortable with the idea that God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son. If we come to the story fresh it is incomprehensible. There is no category for this other than psychopathy—what would you say about someone who told you God spoke to them and told them to kill their children?
For many readers willing to give Abraham the benefit of the doubt, blame falls on the kind of god that would command such a thing, using Isaac—a human child—as an instrument to make a religious point while putting Abraham through a ringer no parent should have to experience. How is this not abuse layered on abuse?
Was child sacrifice ever ‘normal’?
As modern people, we have no category for child sacrifice. Chilling as it may be, however, we must remember ancient cultures did. They imagined Child sacrifice as a desperate but sometimes necessary measure to ward off disaster or win special attention from the gods (Judg 11:29–40; 2 Kgs 3:26–27; 16:3; 17:17). In Abraham’s day child sacrifice was a live option.
This is not to say the Bible condones or encourages child sacrifice, on the contrary the Old Testament consistently condemns the practice (Lev 18:21; Deut 12:31; Jer 7:31; 19:5; Mic 6:6–8). And yet, the Old Testament precedent dedicates the firstborn to YHWH (Exod 13:12–13; 22:28–29 ; Lev 27:26; Num 3:13). Because of this, redemption is fundamental to Israel’s relationship with God. Through a substitute the first-born is redeemed so it can both be “sacrificed” to YHWH and go on living (Exodus 12:1–28; 13:15; 34:19–20; Num 8:16–19; 18:15; Luke 2:23). Scripture transforms sacrifice into a comprehensive metaphor for offering to the LORD your most valuable possession.
Isaac is not only Abraham’s dearly beloved son, he is also the fulfillment of a promise that embodies his entire relationship with God. Sacrificing Isaac would erase Abraham’s past and his future (Rutledge, 262). It would wipe out the evidence of God’s goodness and faithfulness. From Abraham’s perspective, YHWH’s rejection of child sacrifice through law and prophecy has not been established. Abraham is learning that YHWH is the God who provides a substitute, who does not actually demand that we sacrifice our children. In Genesis 22, child sacrifice is an incredibly potent way of testing both the struggle of faith and the character of God.
Testing & Faith
So what does it mean that God “tested” Abraham? For many people the idea that God tests human beings implies that he sets arbitrary or cruel challenges to toy with us—to weed out the weak in a sort of spiritual natural selection. On the other hand, it might imply that God doesn’t know the true nature of our faith. Both options are unsettling. But is this what Scripture means when it says God tests someone?
Consider the process of testing and its purpose in the paradigmatic passage:
Deut 8:2–3
>2 And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. 3 And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
Like a patient parent with a child, God takes his people through a (sometimes painful!) pattern again and again (for forty years!) that he might form humility in them. All the fiery serpents, the water from the rock, the manna, the great and terrifying wilderness, the Exodus itself, is to bring us to humble dependence on God—“to do you good in the end” (Deut 8:16).
In Scripture, testing is more like refining than evaluating (Prov 17:3). Testing does not connect to divine knowledge so much as to spiritual relationship. The word know in Hebrew is not fundamentally an intellectual term, but also encompasses intimate personal and relational knowledge (as in, “I know this town like the back of my hand,” or “Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived,” Gen 4:1).
As Walter Moberly argues, the testing and its outcome matter to God because it involves relationship and response. When the Angel of the LORD says “now I know that you fear God” (Gen 22:12), it shows the relationship between God and Abraham has been meaningfully deepened (105–07). Within the story Abraham expresses his fear of God through an eerie calm (vv. 5, 8) that witness to a deep confidence in God’s character (Heb 11:19). The orientation of Abraham’s heart is made visible by the fact that he has not withheld from God his most valuable, beloved, irreplaceable thing—Isaac. To say that Abraham fears God is the highest endorsement of the quality of his relationship with the LORD (Deut 10:12–13; Eccl 12:13; Heb 11:17–19).
This statue, known as the Ram in the Thicket, dates to 2,600 BC. In the 1920s it was discovered in the royal tombs of the city of Ur, Abraham’s home town (Gen 11:31). If that doesn’t blow your mind, I don’t know what will. You can read about it here and there is a sunning gallery of high-res images here.
The Theological Logic of Isaac’s Sacrifice
In the foreground, the narrative focuses on the quality and testing of Abraham’s faith. In the background, the story makes an equally emphatic point about God’s character—YHWH is supremely trustworthy because he provides (Gen 22:8, 14).
Abraham’s faith, then, can be read as a model for the Christian (Heb 11:17–19; Jas 2:18–24) and the ram becomes a type of Christ (John 1:29, 36; 1 Pet 1:19; Rev 5:12). This interpretation illustrates that God richly rewards faith. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his beloved son also pictures God the Father’s love (Rom 8:32; 4:20–25).
But on another interpretation, Abraham becomes a type of Christ through his self-annihilating obedience. With the command to sacrifice Isaac, God appears to turn against Abraham and take away his only hope. As Fleming Routledge says, “It is ‘the road out into Godforsakenness.’ Abraham is asked to burn up the charter of salvation, ‘leaving for himself nothing but death and hell’ ” (Rutledge, 262). This is Christ in Gethsemane, sweating blood that the cup might pass from him, and Christ on the cross crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
One detail of the text draws all these interpretations together: Where does it all take place? Where is Mount Moriah (Gen 22:1, 14)?
There is only one other place in all of Scripture where the name Moriah is used:
2 Chr 3:1
>Then Solomon began to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to David his father, at the place that David had appointed, on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite.
Walter Moberly draws out the significance, “Abraham is required to offer in sacrifice, in the place where the temple was to be built, that which would cost him everything” (131). This narrative about Abraham, the first narrative, chronologically speaking, to establish that God provides a substitute realized by human faith that redeems life, takes place on the very spot where perhaps 1,000 years later the temple would be built and perhaps 1,000 years after that Jesus would enter “the land of Moriah” to die. When the Christian confesses, “On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided,” that mountain is Golgotha and that provision is Christ. YHWH is the faithful father willing to sacrifice his beloved son (Matt 3:17; John 3:16). Christ is the faithful servant willing to abandon himself to Godforsakenness. The work of Christ is so all encompassing that he is the ram, he is Isaac, and in Gethsemane he is even Abraham walking into the dark by faith.
If we read Genesis 22 in isolation, we might imagine God a tyrant, but because we have the witness of the rest of Scripture Genesis 22 shows us that God never asks us to put up more than he himself has paid. Therefore, God calls us to emulate Abraham’s radical, sacrificial obedience because God in Christ has both walked this road before us and provided what he commands once and for all.
LORD, may we press into faith and find you faithful. Teach us to praise your provision when we don’t understand the path you are asking us to walk. Draw us into a deeper appreciation of the path to Godforsakenness that Christ has walked before us. Teach us to follow by faith. Refine us and deliver us from witholding that we might see your goodness.
Painting by my brother, Adam (2020); aeaston.com.
Pray With Us
- Pray with patient endurance for Corona to resolve and for leaders to handle the situation with wisdom. Corona has created new opportunities for ministry and shaken up a certain spiritual malaise, but we are eager to worship together, to leave the house, to see friends and engage in “normal” spiritual community, and to have opportunities for travel and ministry restored. I’m praying for wisdom and faithfulness to follow God as all of it goes on and on.
- Pray for my continued progress on the PhD, specifically, my goal is to finish a draft of the whole thing in 2021.
- Pray for us as we add to our little family. Next time I write you all we will have another baby. Pray for health and safety for Meghan and the baby. But especially pray that Rue and Willa will adjust well and that Meghan and I will have the patience, grace, and energy to care for three very small children in an ongoing lockdown.
Painting by my brother, Adam (2020); aeaston.com.
Notes:
- The G. K. Chesterton passage is from Orthodoxy; but I found it in Daniel J. Treier, Proverbs & Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011), 119.
- R. W. L. Moberly, The Bible, Theology, and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).