What Must I Do To Be Saved?

Once upon a time I believed that the Bible was "given by inspiration of God" and was without error. I came by this opinion by way of a religious group that taught that any apparent errors could be reconciled, harmonized and, in effect, explained away. Before my involvement with this group, I, like most Christians, read the Bible and believed that it proceeded from God, but I was kind of fuzzy about the details. Contradictions between different sections of the Bible didn't bother me because I didn't notice them. When, during my freshman year in college, I became involved with a fundamentalist group I had many of these "apparent" contradictions pointed out to me and was shocked that the church that I grew up in didn't address them. In some instances these contradictions and discrepancies were minor - mere curiosities, but others reflected serious doctrinal issues. The method that my group used to reconcile these problematic sections was to presume that the Bible, in it's original texts, was without error, and that any apparent errors were the results of mistranslations or misunderstandings. Therefore it was incumbent upon us to resolve these apparent contradictions in order to determine what the Bible really said. Some of the solutions used to show that these apparent contradictions were pretty simple and were just a matter of a word or phrase having a different modern meaning than the older one. Some could be resolved by showing that a translation was inaccurate. Often though, the way to make it all fit together involved stretching and twisting word meanings and context to the point of ridiculousness. Two related examples are the number of others crucified with Jesus and the  number of times Peter denied him.

In every place that the number of criminals crucified with Jesus is mentioned the number is always two. Nowhere does that number vary, nor is there any suggestion that the two are part of a larger number. Read any Gospel, or read them all, and the conclusion that you'll come to is that only two men were crucified with Jesus. However, what each gospel says about these two men is different from Gospel to Gospel. In one Gospel they both mouth off to Jesus, while in another, one reviles him while the second reproves the mouthy one. In one Gospel they are crucified at the same time, in another afterward. The contradictions, while insignificant, must be harmonized if we are to maintain inerrant status. One way that this is done is to suggest that there were not two, but four others, assigning the conflicting statements and arrival times to two different sets of two criminals. Any contradictions and inconsistencies explained by assuming that the differing words, arrival times etc. are referring to these different pairs. With Peter's denials, a similar problem arises; in every section where his denials are listed, he does so three times, and three times only. There is no suggestion that we are focusing on three of many more. However, each of the gospels presents a different chronology and different people whom Peter denies Jesus to, different Jewish leaders who Jesus is in front of when the denials take place, different numbers of roosters crowing. List the incidents of denial from each gospel side-by-side and you can come up with six distinct occurrences of denial. The problem with this is that now you have created a fifth gospel, since none of the extant gospels say anything about six denials. There are other examples, including when Judas killed himself and how he did it. There are numerous examples of this, which I am not going to spend the time to document. There are many scholarly sources for this information, and just as many places where various Christians make the case that the contradictions can be reconciled. The fact that contradictions exist isn't arguable, however the manner in which one chooses to deal with the contradictions are the foundations upon which new denominations are born.

If you're not of the opinion that the bible is without error or contradiction, then you're not spending any time trying to jam it all together, you don't have a problem. You might even decide that the contradictions are minor matters that don't really effect the heart of what it means to be a Christian. But what if there are contradictions regarding one of the the core doctrines of Christianity? No, not the Trinity, although that's a big subject; no, I'm talking about salvation and how you get it.

Growing up I never really heard anyone used the word "saved". Mainly we talked about "going to Heaven" upon death and what you had to do to get there. If I remember correctly, this mainly hinged upon "living a good life" and perhaps getting baptized in "the church". Sacraments may have figured into it as well. When I got involved in another religious group when I was about twenty, there was a greater emphasis on salvation. No actions, other than "confessing Jesus as Lord" and believing that God raised him from the dead was required to be "saved". We find this in one of the epistles and in at least one place in the Acts of the Apostles. However Jesus himself seems more action oriented, requiring selling ones goods and abandoning ones parents among other things, in order to achieve salvation: entering the Kingdom. Even among the statements about salvation by faith alone there seems to be some inconsistency about how you get faith. Is it simply believing something? Or is it something God gives you? Where it is defined, the Bible seems to say that faith is something that God gives you, but it also seems to condemn those who do not believe. How can God condemn someone for not having something that only he can give? But the bigger contradiction is whether it is faith that gets you saved or works. The Bible says faith in some places and works in others. Some places it says both. And somewhere in the middle is repentance. Can you do the works but not repent? Can you repent without works or faith? Using the contradiction-resolving method mentioned above, an inerrantist will cut and paste and twist and shout the conflicting verses into some kind of harmony. Most Christians will say that they don't care or pick one version and ignore the rest.

Then there's the question of what are we being saved from? There are a small number of verses that appear to support the position that all will be saved, but most indicate that some will be saved and some will not. Some sections of the bible suggest that upon death a person goes to either Heaven or Hell, other reject that in favor of a sleep-like state that will end upon a resurrection when all will be judged and either go to heaven (or live on Earth in paradise) or to Hell (or just cease existing). So I guess the simplest answer to "from what" is saved from either eternal torment (Hell) or eternal death - annihilation. Wow! What would you choose?

One big disconnect in determining the how of salvation is the role that the death of Jesus played in salvation. In the Gospel of Mark, for instance, Jesus' death is an atonement for sins. This fits into the Jewish sacrificial system. In the Old Testament there was a vast system of rituals, including sacrifices, that were meant to atone for sins, individually and as a people. Jesus' death as atonement and its connection with the tearing of the veil of the temple, indicate that the Old Testament sacrifices are no longer valid and that everyone has access to God. Luke, on the other hand does not portray Jesus' death as an atonement for sin, but as typical of the Jewish treatment of the prophets; therefore Jesus' death was proof that he was the prophet of God. The Acts of the Apostles (written by the author of the Gospel of Luke) never mentions the death of Jesus as an atonement, but that his death drives people to repentance as they realize that, due to the subsequent resurrection, he was the Son of God. Repentance then becomes an occasion for forgiveness. The difference between the two views is that with an atonement ones debts (accumulated by sinning) are taken away without any action by the sinner, while forgiveness in this context requires repentance, a declaration that one is sorry for previous sins and intends to cease sinning. One could find many differences of detail among the Gospel writers, but the fundamental difference in what Jesus' death actually accomplished is a big one.

We can find other differences between the Gospel writers in general and Paul. There is no question that Paul's writings are different in style than the Gospels. The Gospels are narratives, they tell a story; the doctrinal views of Jesus and his mission are embedded in the narrative. In Paul's writing he is either writing to address deviations from what he has previously taught (I & II Corinthians) or setting forth a Doctrinal treatise (Romans). In the Gospels, whatever the meaning of Jesus' death for the individual evangelist, it's the message that Jesus teaches that is paramount. He can be referred to as an apocalyptic prophet, preparing people for the end of the age when the Kingdom of God will be ushered in. His moral and ethical pronouncements are intended to get people ready for the change so that they will be found worthy to enter into this new kingdom. For Paul, it the sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection that is important. There is a sharp difference between what Paul teaches and what Jesus taught (or what his biographers say he taught).

Like anything else there are a variety of ways that people use to reconcile this. The most common way is to ignore it all. Another way is to pick one view and ignore the rest, that's probably the most common. Then there's theological justification for it - the most common one of these is dispensationalism. This is a school of theology where all of history is divided into various (usually seven) "dispensations" or "administrations". In this theological system, God has different rules for how he runs things in the world, the consequences for breaking the rules, and just about anything you can think of. Not only does this eliminate the need to reconcile the vast differences between how God acts in the Old Testament and how Jesus and Paul say he acts in the New, but we can oh-so-conveniently put Jesus and the Gospels in a different dispensation and stop worrying about Jesus and Paul disagreeing with one another.

Recently I got in an argument with a guy who insisted that he could determine who was a "true" Christian and who wasn't, not because he was judging or setting up standards, but because God had done so. My point that there are many differing opinions regarding what makes a Christian a Christian. His position was that opinions didn't matter, that the Bible had a standard and that those who didn't adhere to the standard weren't Christians. Period. What he wasn't seeing was that the Bible didn't have a standard; it had several conflicting standards and that different Christians focused on different parts of the bible, ignoring some and elevating others, or mashing them together to support their ideas.

That is one of the reasons that I am no longer a Christian. Rather than being a "rule book" that contains a "plan for salvation" it is rather a collection of sometimes competing visions of who Jesus was, what his teachings meant, why he died and what the meaning of it all is. I'm not trying to convince Christians to be non-Christians or to argue to Christians why they should stop believing the Bible or in God, but to explain why I am no longer a Bible-believer, no longer a Christian and why I've already considered the arguments, in fact once made those arguments myself, and found them, for me, to be wanting.

Government Involvement: Free Trade

Should government be involved in regulating business? In regulating our personal behavior? Before you say "yes" or "no", take a minute to think about the consequences. One example of government regulating business (or interfering in it, to look at it from the other side) is in the category of trade.

The history of international/global businesses exchanges includes numerous "trade barriers". These often take the form of tariffs. A tariff is a tax on imported goods that is designed to give preferential treatment to domestically produced goods. For example: American-produced widgets are sold at $10/dozen. Mexican-produced widgets are sold at $5/dozen due to lower labor and production costs. Now, all other things being equal, most American consumers are going to buy the Mexican widgets because they're half the price of the American widgets, notwithstanding pious pronouncements of "buy American". In order to retain their business, their are two main options; the first is for the American widget company to lower their prices, either by becoming more efficient, accepting a lower profit margin or by finding cheaper sources of supplies, like the metal needed to manufacture their widgets. The other is to get the government involved so that Congress imposes a $5/dozen tariff on Mexican widgets in order to preserve the American jobs. Of course, price alone isn't what motivates consumers, if the quality of the American widgets is noticeably superior, then buyers might accept a higher price. We Americans often tell ourselves that we support American jobs and that given the choice we'd buy American. But the facts suggest otherwise. Wal-Mart is a relevant example. When Wal-Mart began expanding it's business by offering groceries in its stores, there were protests all around the country, Wal-Mart was driving many local stores out of business, and people shouted at their local representatives to keep Wal-Mart out of their towns. But what happened once the Wal-Marts opened? That's right, they had no shortage of customers because Wal-Mart usually offered the lowest prices without a discernible drop in quality.

It's easy to see why the option of government intervention is more attractive. It's hard to get more productive. Push people to do more work for the same money and you'll likely lose your best employees, try to lowball your suppliers and you'll find that they have the same problems that you do and there's only so low that they'll go. So industries hire lobbyists to get their Representatives in Congress to impose tariffs. Make it more expensive for foreign-made goods and price-conscious consumers will go with the American products.

Of course we tell ourselves that it's unfair to compete with that cheap Mexican labor - and they don't have all the government regulation that we have that drives up costs, but there are other reasons for tariffs. Perhaps Canadian widgets are also $10/dozen, but are of a higher quality. With the price of both options equal, consumers will go for the higher quality.  So Congress might impose a $2.50/dozen tariff on Canadian widgets in order to, once again, preserve American jobs. Sometimes tariffs are imposed to punish a country that is doing things that we don't like. Other barriers to free trade might include a ban on imports of certain products due to health or safety concerns. Other less obvious barriers could include tax incentives or government subsidies. In theory, the goal of Free Trade is a so-called level playing field for all participants, which requires eliminating barriers to trade, such as tariffs.

Of course tariffs and other barriers work two ways. While we may set up tariffs to benefit American businesses, other countries can do the same to us, blocking American businesses. If trade barriers are eliminated, we may benefit in some respects by having foreign markets open to American businesses, there will also be harmful consequences, as American companies, subject to health and safety regulations, are forced to compete with foreign companies who pay their workers much less and have significantly lower production costs. An additional harmful consequence occurs when American companies move their production facilities to other countries to take advantage of those same lower wage and production costs, in the process eliminating American jobs.

So what do we do? Should we eliminate restrictive regulations and the minimum wage and gut the remaining unions so that corporations won't decamp to other countries? Some big business owners would advocate exactly that. Some businesses would characterize the 40-hour work week and the minimum wage as restrictive, as well as basic safety requirements. Workers in these same industries are surely not interested in taking pay cuts to keep their businesses at home, nor in working in a lethal environment.

So we have a paradox. Many blue-collar workers seem to buy into the libertarian position that a government governs best that governs least. They want the government to keep its hands off their lives, yet they want the government to intervene when it benefits them. NAFTA and TPP are examples of the government not interfering - eliminating regulations to open things up. These agreements inarguably have negative aspects, but they are most definitely an example of government not interfering.

In this year's presidential campaign both candidates seem to be against free trade agreements such as NAFTA and TPP. Trump being the more vocal of the two main candidates. Much is made of a manufacturing plant closing, or layoffs, or jobs moving to Mexico or other countries. This is bad for those who are losing their jobs, but is it representative of what's happening overall in the economy? can it be attributed to free trade? Look, for example, at the Carrier plant in Illinois, relocating it's manufacturing to Mexico, resulting in the loss of many jobs in Illinois. Carrier Corporation has been demonized by Trump, who singled them out and threatened a specific tariff on that particular company if they moved to Mexico. If there was no NAFTA would Carrier have moved to Mexico? That's impossible to say for sure, but one thing is certain: companies do not continue to operate at a loss simply in order to provide jobs for their workers. In all likelihood, Carrier would have moved somewhere, and would not have jeopardized their business by continuing to lose money.  

So what are political candidates, especially Trump, saying when they promise to protect American jobs? Are they saying that they will force companies to operate at a loss? That they will pile on more regulation? If so, that sounds suspiciously like socialism, which everybody seems to be against. Or how about the coal industry? Trump says that he will "bring back coal". But the coal industry isn't faltering because President Obama or anyone else is trying to "kill" it. It's losing market share to other types of energy, including natural gas, which has become very cheap due to hydraulic fracturing. Will Trump slap a high tax on natural gas in order to save the coal industry? I hear buggy whip manufacturers are staging a comeback as well.

Free trade is a complex issue. There are winners and losers, there are pros and cons. Demagoguery, however, doesn't require facts.

Consultants

The definition of "consultant", according to some, is someone who knows what you do, but lives over 100  miles away. Several of the companies that I have worked for over the years have hired consultants for various purposes. This has always mystified me - wouldn't the top executives of a company be the ones responsible for coming up with ideas to make the company more profitable or efficient? Granted, in some instances it is necessary to bring in someone who has technical expertise in a given area, or to educate employees in a new piece of equipment or technology. But often, it's just someone giving their own opinion of how something should work. In discussing consultants, I'm not referring to speakers who do one-time presentations at conventions, but those ongoing relationships that seem to benefit the consultant more than the consultee.

Years ago the newspaper company that I worked for decided to implement a process whereby employees could come up with ideas, from the bottom up, and actually implement those ideas. It sounded good. In theory. The process started with a weekend seminar at Mahoney State Park where employees from all of the paper's divisions and from all levels of responsibility met to put together a plan to produce this process whereby grass-roots ideas would percolate upward. We were facilitated by a consultant whose name I can no longer recall and several employees of a newspaper in Ohio who had implemented a similar program. The details of that weekend are fuzzy, but what we came up with was a complicated plan to affect change. Anyone with an idea could bring together three other employees as a change committee. These four people had to be from four different parts of the company and would be charged with doing the research needed to figure out what was required to put their idea into action. There was also a team of "coaches", usually employees who had been through this weekend intensive seminar, who would guide the teams of four and help them in the process. There may have also been a committee to screen the ideas and decide which ones would be put into practise. Some of you may have already spotted the problem: we had built a parallel, albeit temporary, bureaucracy, completely independent of the established chain of command. This shadow structure was given the authority to make decisions and implement changes in areas in which there were already managers who were being paid to take care of these things. After about two years of paying exorbitant consulting fees, the program disappeared.

The next useless consultant story involved the company that I most recently worked for, a locally owned grocery chain. This company operated two main types of stores: "conventional" stores and a type of store alternatively referred to as "low price", "price impact" or "box store". The so-called leaders of the company thought that they were losing sight of what their low-price stores were supposed to be about, so they brought in a man who had operated a chain of box stores on the West Coast. On his arrival in Lincoln, this consultant went on a tour of all of the company's box stores. The consultant, whom we'll call Dwayne Loomis, looked somewhat like Levon Helm and talked like your worst stereotype of a backwoods Southern redneck. Dwayne roared through all the store, insulting store managers and employees, using his favorite expression: "chicken-shit"  to describe displays. The whole time a member of the executive committee was at his side as he demeaned managers and treated them with extreme disrespect. Finally we had a big meeting at the central office as Mr. Loomis regaled us with stories about how successful his stores in California were,and how well he competed against Wal-Mart. Some of his stories just didn't ring true and one manager started asking pointed questions, poking holes in his claims, until eventually Loomis backed down from most of his claims. The company put a lot of his ideas into practice, butr within six months had reverted back to the old ways.

Another consultant was one that I mentioned in the "Sexual Harassment" post. This consultant was another one who spent most of his time insulting employees and managers while members of the executive committee stood by and let it happen. He also used many ideas that, minimally altered, were stolen from another consultant whom he had worked for ten years previously. He had meetings, and then meetings about the meetings. Every meeting was ended with a recap and then, on Friday, a recap of all the other recaps. It took a full year for the first work group to launch their one idea: changing the recipe of the dough used to make hard rolls. It became obvious to many people that any consultant that this company hired was being hired to tell us how stupid that we were and that they would stay on long past the point of being useful.

The final consultant is one with whom I have had personal, face-to-face conflicts with. This particular consultant sucks companies in primarily because he is a very effective public speaker. He is animated and dynamic and has a great memory for faces and names. One trick that he pulled at a three-day seminar of his that I attended was to point to me at the end of Day Three and accurately recall where I had been sitting at each session. Most people, after sitting through one of his presentations come away favorably impressed, and go back to their businesses with some usable ideas; I know that I did. The problem with Harold (and that's his real name) is that he never, ever comes up with new information. If you've heard him once, you've heard all that you'll ever hear. He will give new titles to old material and is very good at identifying the trends in the grocery business and assembling his old material in a way that applies to the new topic. Despite the dearth of anything new, my former company kept bringing him back. A few years ago, he was brought in to facilitate a strategic planning meeting. I wasn't present at the meeting, but second-hand accounts from those who were present indicate that once again, old material was recycled. What he accomplished was to set up seven committees to come up with ideas and programs in seven categories in the company. people in the company did all the work and he still got paid. My own run-in with Harold occurred at a staff meeting at my own store. After I had run through all the agenda items, Harold asked for ten minutes, which I gave him (it turned into 25). He used his time, after a quick acknowledgement of what I did right (in his opinion) to tear apart virtually every aspect of how I ran the meeting. The managers in attendance were stunned. I left, pretty angry, not only at how I was treated, but at how my immediate supervisor, the VP of Operations, sat by and let it happen. When I returned from lunch an hour later I was accosted in the aisle by Harold and by the VP and asked why I was so angry. He was confrontational and insulting and continued this behavior after I asked that we take this discussion of the sales floor. He accused me of lying. Eventually, after the VP intervened, he apologized. However he used this incident at the Strategic Planning meeting the next day to brag about how humble he was, although he managed to attack and insult another store director soon after.

Nothing that any of these consultants had to say contributed anything solid and measurable to the company, all of them (except the first one mentioned, at the newspaper) were demeaning and insulting and dragged things out in order to get the biggest paycheck. Meanwhile, executives who were supposed to be coming up with ways to improve the company relied on these outsiders. Consultants, at least those that I have come on contact with, are pretty useless!

Do Businesses REALLY Care About Sexual Harassment?

Maybe some do. Indisputably some do not. Even for those that do, or say that they do, care, why is it an issue? Is it because sexual harassment is wrong? Or is it merely because allowing it will get you sued? Consider for a moment that for most of the history of our nation, sexual harassment was perfectly legal, as was discrimination based on gender, race, religion, etc. Not enough people thought that it was wrong before it was made illegal, and in my opinion, many people still think it isn't wrong, and it's only the threat of legal action that prevents them from engaging in it. Let me give you an example from my own work history. For just shy of seventeen years I worked for a locally-owned business here in Lincoln. the company had a very clear policy prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace, and had on several occasions that I was aware of, and probably many more that I was not aware of, fired people for engaging in actions interpreted as sexual harassment. The big question in my mind, in light of two incidents that I will get to in a moment, was "Why? - why did they take such a hard line? Was it because they believed that sexual harassment was wrong, or because they feared legal action?

Some years ago, there was a young woman who was employed at one of my former company's locations. At the time, she was a senior in high school. The company also at this time utilized another local company for HVAC repairs and maintenance of equipment at all of their Lincoln locations. One of the employees of this HVAC company made a habit of making sexually suggestive comments to the women employees while he was at the location on service calls. He targeted the young woman mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, making frequent lewd suggestions and commenting on her anatomy. She complained to the store director who immediately complained to the HVAC company which immediately fired the harasser. The executive committee of my former company was informed of all of this. Sounds like a quick and happy ending, doesn't it? Well, read on.

This fired employee, who we will refer to as Don Madison, was an experienced HVAC man who, soon after being fired from his old company, started his own HVAC company, Madison Heating & Air. Through a friend who worked for my old company, he obtained copies of bills from his old company (which we will refer to as ABC Maintenance) and approached the executive committee of my former company, claimed that ABC was overcharging for their services and suggested that he be given some of ABC's business. Despite being reminded by the store director who had received the original complaint of Don Madison's history, the executive committee of my former company started giving Madison business for repairs and maintenance for about half of their locations in Lincoln, as well as remodels in two of the locations. Several store directors, as well as co-workers of the young woman who had made the harassment complaint made complaint to the executive committee on numerous occasions. Madison continued to do business with my former company until his incompetence forced the company to end his contract.

In this case, my former company was in no danger of legal action. The harasser did not work for them and the complainant no longer worked for the company. They were in the clear and could continue to do business with a man who had sexually harassed one their employees, until the bottom line caused them to break off ties. I think the word "disgraceful" would not be out of line.

Another example was not quite as egregious, but indicates the pattern nonetheless.

My former company was very fond of hiring consultants; apparently the highly-paid executives were incapable of coming up with ideas of their own. One consultant had a program that was supposed to provide a framework for evaluating products and services in the various departments and included ways to get back to basics and build upon those basics. (I'll probably be writing another post about the foolishness of hiring consultants, but we're talking about sexual harassment here).

This particular consultant, on several occasions, was heard to make sexual statements to woman employees. One store director, who was present when one of these remarks was made, complained vociferously, but was ignored. Again, there was no danger of legal action, so the problem was ignored.

Do I think that my former company was unique in it's apathy in the face of sexual harassment? Sadly, I think that it is typical. But a company that throws the term "family" around when describing their employees, and has as one of its core values that they value their people, and another that they do things right, would in fact, do the right thing, not only to protect themselves legally, but because they truly care about their employees, because it's right.