Bible study group was advertised on facebook. Faye and I went together. Here is my account of the evening.
Maciek’s Account
Bible study is being run by Andrew. He’s a very tall, thin and relatively young guy. Maybe in his late twenties. He has a wife who’s tall, thin and about the same age. Together they have a daughter who’s maybe two.
Andrew is doing a Master’s of Theology. Presumably he’s doing it by correspondence, since he lives out here at the edge of the world with us.
The theologians I’ve met in the past have also been scientists or scholars. They’ve been very bright people, very well versed in history and have had a fairly modern view of their faith. They’ve generally seen no contradiction between their religious beliefs and science, usually seeing God as a first-mover, and perhaps occasional intervener. I get the impression that Andrew is different. He’s a Pentecostal and so, perhaps, a biblical literalist. Reconciling that with serious historical study must be quite difficult. I was interested to talk to him.
Maciek’s boring thoughts on the actual bible content we studied
Our study session was meant to be about the biblical book: “Galatians”. Faye has a very well annotated study bible and so I read Galatians before going. It wasn’t very long. It’s a letter written by Paul to an early group of non-Jewish Christians (the Galatians) to influence the details of their religious conversion. Paul was, arguably, the primary powerhouse behind the explosive spread of early Christianity. He persuaded the early Christian community, previously all Jews, to spread their message to gentiles (that is, non-Jews), and then went about converting many gentile communities himself.
Paul had previously converted the Galatians to his own sect: the early Christians who then numbered perhaps a few hundred. He later discovered that a competing sect, the “Judaizers” had been influencing them since his departure. A particular sticking point was that the Judaizers insisted on new converts following all the traditional Jewish laws, including getting circumcised. Paul, meanwhile, thought they could do away with all that and merely focus on being good people and believing in Jesus Christ. This relaxing of the religious restrictions was also, arguably, one of the most important factors in rapidly spreading this young sect and leading to Christianity’s massive historical impacts.
Paul’s letter is, at times, a pretty scathing attack on his opponents. At one point he says:
“As for those agitators, I wish they would go all the way and emasculate themselves!” (Gal 5:12)
Other interesting snippets include his insistence that even if “angels from heaven” should contradict his teachings that they’d be lying.
My own background is in studying game theory and history of cooperation and conflict. So, I read this as the dynamics of a splinter group of mutual cooperators emerging in a defector-rich, uncooperative environment. Challenges they’d face, in theory, would include a) maintaining cooperation even when it’s costly, b) identifying each other and excluding defectors, c) maintaining internal cohesion and preventing less-cooperative internal factions from sapping the collective benefits. So, to me, it was interesting that Paul insisted that these early Christians: “do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.” and that among the behaviours to be avoided he lists not only “idolatry” and “selfish ambition“, but also “dissension” and “factions”. There’s a bunch of interesting historical scholarship on this period and I’m reading about it now.
Maciek’s recollections of the event
We arrived on time at Andrew’s house, at 6:30pm on a Monday night, just as the Pentecostal minister and his wife were arriving. One of our neighbours was there too and her husband arrived later. Andrew’s wife brought us all tea, and though his daughter was nowhere to be seen the living room was dominated by a giant fort with her name on it made of cardboard shipping boxes.
Andrew said a prayer to get started, asking for divine help in better understanding the bible. We then went around and each read a sentence or two till we have gotten through just the first section of Galatians.
We then went back to go through those sentences in detail. In the hour and half we were there, we covered just two sentences. I take partial responsibility for that. I hammered the poor guy with constant questions.
The first line says that Paul is an apostle, so we went over other passages that covered what an apostle is.
“Wait, so they prayed and then drew lots to pick a new apostle? Isn’t that divination?”
“What do you mean that what an apostle writes is scripture? Does that word connote infallibility? Is that like Catholics consider the pope infallible?”
“What exactly is this holy spirit anyway? Did they just invent that or was it an earlier idea?”
By the end, once we’d tortured our way through just two sentences, everyone was still insisting that asking questions was a good thing, but that’s something I suspect they didn’t truly believe in their hearts.
Still, I feel like I learned a bunch and was inspired to do more reading about the early spread of Christianity. It also gave Faye and me a lot of interesting things to talk about on our walk home.
Faye’s Account
It’s like a book club… where you only talk about one book.