The Conditionalist Voice (Genesis to Psalms)
Rev. Jefferson Vann
The Conditionalist Voice (Genesis to Psalms)
In The Conditionalist Voice (Genesis to Psalms), Jefferson Vann reviews the teaching of these Scriptures concerning human nature and destiny.
My congregation has bravely decided to do something new. I challenged them to join me in an eighteen-month experiment. We started on 1 January this year. Every day, we would read two chapters from the Bible, beginning in Genesis. Reading the Scriptures systematically, we hoped to gain a sense of how God has chosen to communicate His word to us, and perhaps open our minds to go beyond what “everybody knows” about the Bible.
As we progressed in our habitual reading, we moved past the easy passages – those we are all familiar with, having heard the stories from our Sunday School teachers for years. About midway through Exodus, we started to get lost in the wilderness with the wayward Israelites. They wandered because of their rebellion. We wondered what was going on because we had started reading this epic story, but then the genre changed. We began encountering all these old laws and regulations concerning a Tabernacle that we had never seen and no longer existed.
By March, we had reached the book of Numbers and finally returned to the story. Yes, the people were still wandering, but God was teaching them how to live dependently on Him. Those who rebelled, he punished with destruction. Those who repented, he restored. A Promised Land awaited those who put their trust in and were faithful to their Almighty invisible God.
By April, we were finishing Moses’ recap of his experiences and the things he learned in Deuteronomy. We quickly ran through the stories of the conquest and the judges that month, and began reading about Samuel. The Kings and Chronicles got us into July. In August, we plowed through the book of Job. It was challenging to read because it was full of arguments about Job’s guilt and his need to repent. But we knew the arguments were faulty, because we had already learned that God allowed Job to suffer not because of his sin, but because of Satan’s challenge.
We shifted genres again in Psalms, spending seventy-five days listening to God’s people pray and praise, reading Psalms of Lament and Psalms of Ascent. We are now midway through our English Bibles. Reflecting on the achievement, I thought it might be a good idea to sort out the theology that we have learned from these ancient texts.
God and humanity
The most consistent lesson we have learned about God is that He is a constant presence, whereas ours is fleeting. Adam and Eve came and went in five chapters. They had an opportunity to gain immortality in Eden, but rebelled against their creator and thus lost that opportunity. They were banished from Paradise and the permanent life it offered (symbolized by the tree of life. All the Old Testament authors spoke with a single voice when they praised God for his permanence while lamenting humanity’s temporary nature.
The people of God
From the patriarchs to the Israelites, God’s people are shown in their raw, unfiltered state. The mistakes and acts of rebellion of even the most heroic people show that God is not looking for perfection in us. He is seeking faith and trust in those who claim to follow in his name. Their faithfulness is demonstrated by the sacrifices and offerings they make to God. He reconciles them and atones for their sin based on the shed blood of animals, but these acts of devotion speak of a fulfillment far into the future.
The kingdom of God
Initially, God is reluctant to establish a monarchy among the Israelites. The first king to be anointed – Saul – shows how dangerous it is to invest authority in a mere human. However, despite his failings and their consequences, David shows promise for the monarchy. The divided kingdom led to a dark time for the nation. Out of that darkness emerged a faith in a new type of kingdom that would be ushered in with the coming Messiah.
By the time we finish the Psalms, none of the major themes of the Bible has been fully fleshed out. We should not be surprised. After all, we don’t call it the Old Testament for nothing. However, throughout these books, we find hints and promises of a coming Savior. We expect this coming Messiah to crush the serpent’s head and bring God’s word to his people while serving them, as Moses did.
In addition to these prophecies about the coming Messiah, we also see hints throughout this corpus of a resolution to the problem of mortality. Job spoke of a future Redeemer who would rescue his corpse from the dust. David spoke of being rescued from Sheol – the state of death. These hints are merely appetizers in the menu of God’s word. They don’t stop our hunger for permanence. But we will take them just the same.
Revealing Words
We hear the voice of conditionalism loudest when we stop to analyze the words used to describe human nature and destiny. Many of these words have been called on for centuries by theologians to defend the pagan doctrine of innate immortality. However, when we examine the words in the illuminating light of how they were actually used in these texts, we find that they do not teach that humans are immortal by nature. The word רוּחַ, which we have been told expresses a spiritual nature similar to God’s, denotes the breath that God gave us when He created us. It turns out that we share that breath with the animals.
The word נֶפֶשׁ, which we were told is a kind of ghost inside us, that can never die, turns out to be something that animals have as well. It originally meant throat, and was used as a metonymy for the whole person as a living being. The word "throat" was used because it is so closely connected to the apparatus for breathing, eating, and living. The point was not that we are different from the animals. The fact is that we currently share their mortality. We are souls, but we are not immortal souls.
The theologians have also told us that good people go to heaven when they die, but bad people go to שְׁאוֹל. They got that one wrong, too. Sheol is not a burning hole in the center of the Earth. It is a hole, though. It is a dark, silent hole that everyone goes to when they die, the good, the bad, and the ugly. It turns out that none of us will be able to avoid Sheol. The Old Testament hope is to be rescued from that unconscious state of death through resurrection. Spoilers – that is the New Testament hope as well.
The conditionalist voice appears to be prominent in the ancient texts. Theologians have spent more time corrupting the teachings of the New Testament than they have spent on these texts. Perhaps they thought nobody would pay much attention to these ancient books. Theologians should have studied these books more. They are the ideological foundation of the New Testament. They are the Bible that Jesus and the Apostles read.