Early Church fathers

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Pizza, beer and guys talking books: Lessons from the Hall of Men on the Kansas plains

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Pizza, beer and guys talking books: Lessons from the Hall of Men on the Kansas plains

WICHITA, Kan. — The Hall of Men fits the name, with meetings offering beer, cigars, an open bar, some kind of guy food (think pizza) and lots of chatter around a giant wooden table.

But then there are the evening prayers, icons, Bible readings and lectures about authors whose portraits hang in this “Christian speakeasy.” The names include C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, W.H. Auden, Dorothy Sayers, Fyodor Dostoevsky, J.R.R. Tolkien and many others. Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan are there, as well.

This group has met twice a month for a dozen years and most of the faithful are Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran, with plenty of evangelicals at special events. The authors honored are selected after an informal process that usually starts during fellowship before and after lectures, with men talking about books that have touched their lives.”

The whole thing is affected by having that bookstore right next door,” said Pastor Geoff Boyle, a Missouri-Synod Lutheran long active in the project. “The man behind the front counter is used to having these conversations and obviously knows all about the books the guys are talking about. The books are right there and, if they’re not, they will be soon.”

“That bookstore” is Eighth Day Books, which draws customers from across the nation to an old three-story house with 46,000 new and used books — 27,000 titles — shelved and stacked anywhere that will hold them, including the basement “Hobbit Hole” packed with children’s literature. The white-haired man behind the counter is owner Warren Farha, an Orthodox believer with family ties to Lebanon.

This isn’t a “Christian bookstore” complete with knick-knacks, inspirational posters and religious self-help books — but “Eighth Day” is a reference to the Resurrection of Jesus.

Farha created the store in 1988 and selects all the books, with the help of an ecumenical network woven into the Eighth Day Institute and its conferences, newsletters, podcasts and groups such as the Hall of Men and the Sisters of Sophia.

“My goal has always been to be fair to the great traditions,” said Farha, in his office in the bookstore’s attic. “We have classics in history, literature, poetry, church history, theology and philosophy – Christian writings through the ages. … I’m always listening to people who GET the template for what we’re doing here.

“Great books from different traditions are on the shelves right next to each other, even if they clash in ways that we need to discuss.”


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People have been asking: Is the COVID vaccine the Bible's sinister 'mark of the beast'?

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People have been asking: Is the COVID vaccine the Bible's sinister 'mark of the beast'?

THE QUESTION:

Is the COVID vaccine the biblical "mark of the beast"?

THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER:

Many odd anti-vaccination rumors with murky origins are floating around social media, alarming healthcare workers as they combat a virus that has killed 720,000 Americans and counting.

Take the "mark of the beast" claim. The Guy can confidently answer "no" to this question, based upon the strong consensus among Bible experts, both those who take the Bible portion at issue -- Revelation chapter 13 -- literally and those who follow symbolic interpretations.

The beast, identified with the famously sinister number "666" and the "mark," is found in the final book of the Bible, whose images have always been subject to a wide variety of fanciful interpretations. Over the centuries, some have identified the beast as the pope, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler and many other leaders.

Let's clear the ground just a bit.

There are five basic ways to understand the last 18 chapters of this "revelation of Jesus Christ" to "his servant John."

* A "preterist" says the imagery depicts past events that faced early Christians living under the Roman Empire.

* The "historical" school sees church scenarios across the centuries.

* A "futurist" insists these are literal events that still lie ahead of us.

* The "spiritual" school advocates a symbolic presentation of realities with no specific historical application, past, present, or future.


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Who decided which books to include in the New Testament, when, and why?

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Who decided which books to include in the New Testament, when, and why?

The Religion Guy observes that with “fake news” all over the news it’s wise to be aware of fake history.

Consider Dan Brown’s influential pop novel “The DaVinci Code.” Though the plot is fiction, readers may assume the book provides reliable historical background. Experts say that’s misleading, and one example is Brown’s version of how the New Testament came to be.

That’s a timely question due to an important new technical work on the subject, “The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity” by Edmon Gallagher and John Meade. “Canon” refers to recognized scriptures. Oxford University Press published this collection of ancient texts and analysis in Britain this month, with U.S. release due in January.

(The following relies on “The Formation of the New Testament” (1965) by Robert M. Grant of the University of Chicago, and “The Canon of the New Testament” (1987) by Bruce M. Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary, and covers only the New Testament, not the canon of the Hebrew Bible a.k.a. Old Testament.)

Brown is correct that many texts about Jesus were circulating during Christianity’s first few centuries, so decisions had to be made about which were authentic and recognized as scripture. Many Christian folk don’t realize how complex the process was.

By Brown’s account, the Roman Emperor Constantine was the power-broker who picked only Matthew, Mark, Luke and John out of some 80 Gospels in contention. Actually what Constantine did in A.D. 331 was commission Bishop Eusebius to have copyists produce 50 new copies of the Greek canon to replace Scriptures that had been destroyed during Rome’s previous anti-Christian purge. The 80 count is exaggerated, and most rejected writings did not resemble the genre of the favored four, which were not chosen by the emperor but church authorities.


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Jesus and the 'spirits in prison' -- Is this toughest passage in the New Testament?

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Jesus and the 'spirits in prison' -- Is this toughest passage in the New Testament?

JOEL’S QUESTION:

[Explanation:] The pastor of a New Jersey Protestant congregation sent in several “questions that have come up here.” One of them is how to understand the passage in the New Testament letter of 1st Peter about Jesus Christ preaching to “the spirits in prison.”

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The Bible’s major teachings are clear enough. But Joel and his parishioners shouldn’t be embarrassed if they’re confused about this particular New Testament head-scratcher. Even Martin Luther (who so energized Bible study 500 years ago by sparking the Protestant Reformation) said it’s “certainly a more obscure passage than any other in the New Testament. I still do now know for sure what the apostle means.” Robert Mounce, president of Whitworth University, agreed that this section is “widely recognized as perhaps the most difficult to understand in the New Testament.”

Here’s the text at issue: “Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah . .  .” (1 Peter 3:18-20a, RSV translation).

The following analysis relies especially on commentaries by Mounce, an American, the German exegete Leonhard Goppelt, and England’s J.N.D. Kelly. Scholars candidly admit that each explanation has problems. Among them:

(1) Between his death by crucifixion and bodily resurrection, Christ visited the realm of the dead and preached to Noah’s wicked contemporaries. That was the view of early church “Fathers,” notably Clement of Alexandria.


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More than an academic question: Was one of the New Testament apostles a woman?

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More than an academic question: Was one of the New Testament apostles a woman?

CLAUDE’S QUESTION:

How did you come to the conclusion that Junia / Junias in Romans 16:7 is an apostle?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Paul’s weighty New Testament letter to the Romans concludes with chapter 16’s greetings to various friends. Verse 7 applies the exalted label of “apostle” to Andronicus alongside someone named either “Junias” or “Junia.” Was that name, and thus the apostle, male or female?  What did the “apostle” title mean? And what does this tell us about gender roles in Christianity’s founding years?

Paul commends 8 or 9 women in the chapter, which was notably high regard in ancient patriarchal culture. He even listed the wife Prisca before husband Aquila in verse 3. Then verse 7 states this (in the wording of the Revised Standard Version translation):

“Greet Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners;they are men of note among the apostles, and they were in Christ before me.” (Most agree “kin” means the two prisoners were fellow Jews, not Paul’s blood relatives.)

Translation teams have reworked the RSV into the “ecumenical” New Revised Standard Version and the “evangelical” English Standard Version, and both changed the masculine name “Junias” to the feminine “Junia” while dropping “men.” The evangelicals’ popular New International Version and U.S. Catholicism’s official New American Bible (which never said “men”) originally used “Junias” but likewise switched to “Junia” in later editions.

What’s going on here?


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