Last week, I wrote about how my Hebrew Bible professor’s lecture on the Book of Isaiah caused an uproar in our class. She boldly told a room full of young, mostly conservative seminarians that the Immanuel prophecy should not be interpreted as a foretelling of Jesus’ birth. There was a great deal of pushback from the students during her lecture, with some of them even accusing her of being a “heretic” after class.
This week, my professor opened her lecture by explaining her position on the scriptures. “Yes, we should love our tradition, but it would be wrong to ignore sound scholarly criticism…” She talked about how we’re all called to struggle in the tension between faith and reason. It was convincing. And I’m glad she began that way because it gave her some traction with her skeptical hearers as she moved into the next phase of her Isaiah lectures, which included an exploration of Isaiah 9:6-7:
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever. The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this. (Emphasis mine.)
I am basically transcribing my class notes into this blog post, but here’s how she explained the parts of this prophecy that are shown in bold:
A child is born: When we hear “a child is born,” we automatically assume these words were uttered in anticipation of a future event with an unknown date of fulfillment. However, the language in this text reveals that this child was ALREADY born, hence the word “is” in the phrase “a child is born.” (H/T to Thom Stark who pointed out the same thing in the comments section of my post about the virgin birth…) The child in this prophecy is probably King Hezekiah. He was born during the time of the prophetic utterance and he was someone the hopeful Israelites believed would usher in a time of peace. The words “Unto us…” highlight their view that this king would be a gift to them after many years of turmoil.
A son is given: It’s hard for us to escape the theological baggage surrounding the word “son,” but the word “son” was not meant to carry any special significance in its original context. It was meant to clarify the nature of the word “child” by communicating the gender of the baby in question. A similar sentence would be: “Bring me the bag in my bedroom– Yes, the suitcase in the closet.” Suitcase is just a clarification of the word bag.
And he will be called wonderful counselor, mighty god, everlasting father, prince of peace: I have removed the capitalization of the first letters in these terms for a specific reason. We (Christian translators) capitalize certain letters in our Old Testament texts because of our theological assumptions about their meanings. But these words represent an ancient tradition in which new kings were given glorious titles in anticipation of their great works. For instance, a certain pharaoh in Egypt was famously given 115 new names at his coronation… (Sorry, I didn’t get the pharaoh’s name. My professor talks at the speed of light. lol) As for the reference to “god”, pharaohs and kings were often regarded as gods by their citizenry. There were even “virgin birth” legends surrounding some of them, but I won’t go down that road today.
He will reign on David’s throne… and over his kingdom… forever: The explanation of this section was the subject of four lectures last semester… Here’s the reader’s digest version: There are two conflicting traditions surrounding the Davidic line. In the first tradition, God promised David that one of his descendants would always be king. When the Davidic line was overthrown, ancient Israel made sense of it by developing a second tradition: The second tradition says that because David screwed up, God allowed people other than David’s descendants to become king. So, these verses about “David’s throne/forever” were designed to give the Israelites hope that someone from Davidic line would return to the throne.
A Few Closing Comments from Me:
In the comments section of my first post I explained that I think it’s OK to reuse these prophecies, but I also think we should explain their original contexts to our congregations. I think it’s dishonest to tell people that these words were solely about Jesus when they obviously were not… I believe in giving people ALL of the information and allowing them to draw their own conclusions.
If Jesus is the “Word” in the sense that he’s the “scriptures in motion,” then we must understand the scriptures to have very human elements just as Jesus had very human elements. I think most Christians are afraid of scholarly criticism because it humanizes Jesus… This fear has turned Christianity into a faith filled with people who [in my best Jack Nicholson voice] “can’t handle the truth”. We must overcome this– particularly as our information-driven society is becoming more and more suspicious of claims made by Jesus-based religions. I really do view this as the church’s future mandate. Either we’ll rise to the occasion, or we’ll eventually go the way of the dodo. Don’t believe this can happen? Ask Europe. The ball is in our court.
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Note: I had originally included a video about the decline of religion in Europe at the end of this post. The first 80% of the video offered a great intro to the changes in Europe’s religious landscape, but I somehow missed that the last 90 seconds of the video was a warning against Islamic growth in Europe. I obviously would never support such bigotry… In fact, I thought I was posting a news broadcast. Thanks to David for drawing my attention to the message at the end of the video and I apologize to anyone I offended.
Thanks, Crystal, for this post. I found both this one and the last one very informative. Keep on posting about the things you're learning at seminary, so that people like me can keep learning interesting things! I've often wondered about the various prophecies ascribed to Jesus, as there are plenty that don't really seem to fit, as well as plenty of other Hebrew prophecies that don't seem to fit in with Christianity in general.
The video you embedded at the end of your post really rubbed me up the wrong way though. Some of the premises and conclusions those people stated were startlingly inaccurate.
Europe's culture is dying? Europe today is a vibrant, harmonious, and safe place to live. Arguably more so than in any of the many centuries that it was predominantly Christian. What period exactly would these people like Europe to return to? The witch burnings and Crusades of the Middle Ages, or the colonisation, slavery and religious wars of the 'Enlightenment period'?
Europe itself is dying because people aren't having enough babies? Nonsense. Most European countries have a stable population rate. Some in the East are slightly growing, while some in the West are slightly shrinking – but overall, the population is not changing much at all. The population of Poland (the centre-most European country) for example has been at about 38,000,000 since the 1980s. The reasons for this are many, and have little (if anything) to do with religion. Women are equal, working members of the workforce, contraception is more accepted, families no longer depend on children for livelihood like they did on in peasant days or in the days before social security, infant mortality is very low, etc. etc. To suggest that birth rates are somehow bound with how religious one is is pure fiction, unless there's some eleventh commandment “thou shalt breed relentlessly” that I'm not aware of. And thank God for the Europeans' stabilsing populations. Their carbon footprint is huge, they have wiped out almost all of their primeval forests, killed off many of their animal species, and have filled almost every square metre of their relatively small continent (in the case of the Netherlands, they've even forcefully made land where previously there was just sea). The last thing Europe, or indeed the world, needs is for Europeans to multiply any further.
Europe is in danger of 'Islamification'? What the hell? First of all, why on earth would the secular atheists of Europe, who are hostile to one monotheistic religion (Christianity), which they see as archaic, authoritarian and morally restritive, embrace its sister monotheistic religion (Islam), which most would also see as archaic, authoritarian and morally restrictive? It just doesn't make any sense, unless you happen to be an Islamophobe, that is.
Furthermore, anyone who makes such a claim knows very little about European history. There have been various waves of Muslim migration into Europe over the centuries, from Tartars in Poland to Moors in Spain, and none have resulted in 'Islamicisation'. In fact, even after 500(!) years of Ottoman rule in Southeastern Europe, the only country in modern Europe that has been significantly Islamicised is the tiny nation of Bosnia Hercegovina. If only Christianity had such a record of gentlesness in regard to non-Christian nations! What did sour European-Muslim relations however was when bigotry and xenophobia in Europe hit a critical mass and Europeans started brutally expelling the Muslims en masse (eg. the Spanish Inquisition). While large-scale Islamicisation is mere fantasy, such an Islamophobic expulsion, if anything, is actually likely to happen again in Europe, unfortunately.
I know that you wouldn't agree with some of the speakers in the video, Crystal, and that you were showing it mainly as an aid to demonstrate the overwhelmingly secular tendencies of European societies, but I found it hard to let this one go without giving my 2 cents.
David– thank you. I wanted to hold off on posting your comment until I could watch the video again for myself. I didn't see the elements you named when I watched it the first time. In fact, I'm not sure what I was doing in the last 90 seconds of the video when those sentiments were expressed, but I would never have used this video had I known this was their angle. I decided to delete the video because while it does discuss the rapid decline of Christianity in Europe, I do agree, the whole thing about babies and Islam were not cool at all.
Again, I didn't know that was how the video ended. (I wonder if I was multi-tasking when I first watched it and maybe walked away from it at the end.)
My sincere apologies to anyone who was offended by the film.
I'm certain I do that all the time, Crystal: link to a website or video that I've only partially read/watched. It's the go-go-go nature of the internet – it makes skim-readers of us all.
Still, although I didn't like their angle, I thought the video had some good points and was relevant enough for your purposes in this post. I don't think you necessarily had to remove it.
I can sort of understand your position here, but would like to offer an alternative for your consideration.
In the Christian bible, we are introduced to “the Beast,” whose number is Six hundred and sixty-six. The only other place in scripture where 666 is found is in a narrative in the Hebrew bible concerning Solomon (David's son). His annual tribute was 666 talents of gold. I think this is significant.
We are also introduced in this same section of the Christian bible to a 1,000 reign…at the end of which “satan” is defeated. Although much of Christendom (the evangelical part any who)believes that the millennium is future to us, Dr. Scott Hahn (no liberal scholar to be sure) believes (and so do I, and long before I found out that Dr. Hahn did) that the 1,000 years represented the time from Solomon to Christ. IOW, the author of the Revelation, in using the 1,000 year reign was referring not to something future to them (nor us) but to the time from David's death until Christ's ascension to the throne in heaven – the true throne of David. Those scriptures show that Jesus Christ was the True Heir of David's throne (given the nations/tribes/ethnos as an inheritance), and not Solomon, who instead was the Beast, whose “image” (icon) was overthrown (in the destruction of Jerusalem). “Satan,” the enemy of God (that's all the word satan means is enemy) was overthrown…in the destruction of Jerusalem (the Christian bible tells us that the Jewish religious leadership were God's enemies – satan). The mark of the beast was circumcision. The seal of God was the spirit of God, circumcision of the heart, not the flesh.
I don't have time to go further into it, but basically it means that Jesus' reign extended from the time of David until he turned the kingdom over to the Father in AD70, at the destruction of the old covenant Kosmos/world/order.
Hope I've been clear.
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