what is tov?
and why should I care?
One of the things that I believe has done significant damage to the world is Christians taking the Bible passages out of context, especially when we weaponize them to cause harm to others. Whether that means keeping women in subordinate positions in the house or church, justifying racial injustice, marginalization of the LGBTQ+ community or just generally taking Christ’s name in vain by emphasizing judgment and sin over love and compassion. Misuses of the Bible on a grander scale have lead to the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, Salem witch trials, Holocaust, Christian Nationalism and persecution of non-Christian religions. This has to stop.
So to start, allow me to briefly introduce myself and my faith journey. I was raised in a conservative but divorced Christian home, my mom was a devout conservative Calvinist and my dad, a more liberal Presbyterian. I went to a Calvary Chapel high school and a Baptist university where I frequently defended tenants of Calvinism including total depravity, predestination, and penal substitutionary atonement (if you don’t know what that means, I’m sure we’ll get to it).
Over the past several years I’ve been rethinking a lot of what I believe and recently left a fundamentalist evangelical church after I could no longer support their stance on several secondary theological issues which they made primary to the faith. This made me start asking questions, deconstructing my faith, reading tons of books, and scholarly research around theology, the early church fathers, GrecoRoman time period, and Judaism. As a security engineer professionally, I also took this opportunity to read the source code of the Bible, as it were, and learned Hebrew and Greek (though I’m still very much a beginner).
The first thing God uses to describe his creation in the Genesis poem (Gen. 1) is tov (good). He uses this word at the end of each day and finally, after he made humanity, he calls his completed creation tov meh’ode (exceedingly good). Humanity is made in God’s image. We are very good. Christ showed us the true extent of what that means when he died on a cross for the sins of his enemies showing the epitome of sacrificial love. Yet the most hateful vitriol I see often on social media comes from Christians, and often toward other Christians.
As a security engineer, I’m often using a terminal, you know the black and green screen you see in all the cheesy hacker movies. In several operating systems there’s a special operator called the “pipe”, which is represented by a straight vertical bar “|”. This operator will take whatever the output of the program on the left and “pipe” it to the input of the program on the right.
I call this space tov | theology as a reminder of who we ALL are, image bearers of God, and that we should “pipe” that conscious awareness into every corner of our theology.
The Christian church has too often traded tov for power, and the tools to gain it are fear, guilt and shame. We seem to have missed Jesus’ warnings to the hypocrites and don’t realize that the only path to salvation is through trusting that Jesus is Lord and following his command to sacrificially love one another. As Jesus himself said in Mark 12:29-31:
“The most important [commandment],” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.
The apostle John goes further and shows that these two are inseparable in 1 John 4:19-21
We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.
My goal is to de-weaponize the Bible and read it in context. Through that, hopefully, we can find the tov at the heart of scripture again and learn to love one another as Christ first loved us.