Saving the Jefferson Bible

In my message yesterday I was talking about how I have come to understand the stories of Jesus the healer and exorcist. I mentioned that there was a time when I practiced the Thomas Jefferson method of reading the Bible. I cut out - figuratively - all the stories I didn't like. I just ignored them.

Jefferson, of course, literally cut them out. Or more precisely he cut out the passages of the Bible he did like and created his own private Bible. This morning I saw a Washington Post article reprinted in the Star Tribune about Smithsonian Institution attempts to save the Bible, which is apparently falling apart:

For more than 116 years, the Jefferson Bible, as it is known, has been one of the iconic possessions of the Smithsonian Institution. Now a group of conservators and curators has removed the 86 pages from the original binding and is examining every inch to stabilize its condition, study its words and craftsmanship, and guarantee that future generations can learn more about the artifact and the man.

The pages, with verses glued on each side, are brittle and stiff -- 90 percent show some damage. Jefferson used a mix of animal glue and starch as an adhesive. The handsewn binding is tight, making the spine rigid.

On one table in the basement workshop, Jefferson's title page for "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth" is elaborately written in his clear hand.

"There are 12 different types of paper and seven different types of ink," said Janice Stagnitto Ellis, the museum's paper conservator. "We took tiny samples of ink from the ruled line. The paper fibers are weak."

Jefferson was meticulous, she said, leaving precise gaps in each book as he removed the verses that supported his religious and moral beliefs. He used two English texts, as well as two French and two Greek and Latin, arranging his selections in chronological order over four columns.

He was also an editor. "Apparently he didn't like the construction here of 'for as in a day,' so he edited out the 'as,'" explained Ellis, pointing with a silver micro-spatula to the little square where he had eliminated the word.

"This is a private document he created for himself," said Harry Rubenstein, the chair of the museum's political history division. "He never sold it because he didn't want it to be public. He wanted to avoid bringing back the arguments that he was anti-Christian."

Jesus the Village Organizer

I am about half-way through reading Richard Horsley's latest book Jesus and the Powers: Conflict, Covenant and the Hope of the Poor. Horsley does a masterful job of spelling out the economic/political/religious milieu of Jesus. He provides a forceful reminder of the fact that the Temple in Jesus' day (and previously) was very much under the control of the Roman occupiers who supported the king who built and maintained it and appointed the high priests who ran it. Taxes were collected in the temple for the empire. The Temple was indeed much more than a house of God.

Horsley depicts the scribes and the Pharisees as the intellectuals very much caught in the middle. Their livelihood depended on their service to the Roman-appointed leadership. But they were also keeping alive a religious tradition that breathed through and through with a message of liberation from oppression. They very much feared the results of active resistance and so for the most part collaborated to help put it down, but they also occasionally were moved to actual resistance as when students of the teachers Judas son of Sariphaeus and Matthias son of Margalothus tore down Herod's imperial eagle after his death. (909 Kindle)

Meanwhile out in the villages of Galilee and Judea the peasants attempted to eke out an existence that was made more and more desperate by the forced taxation that supported the temple and the Hellenization projects of Herod. Most couldn't read but they kept alive the ancient remembered traditions of resistance and liberation:

The Village communities in which the Galilean and Judean peasants lived provided the sequestered sites in which they could cultivate their popular tradition and develop their "raw" resentment into a "cooked" discourse of their desire for dignity and hopes for deliverance. It was in the "hidden transcript" of the continuing cultivation of popular Israelite tradition in the village communities that past deliverance was remembered, and hopes for a better life nurtured. This was the fertile soil from which movements could grow... (1005 Kindle)

In a period of time that spanned more than a century before and after the time of Jesus a series of peasant-led resistant movements, some messianic and some prophetic, came out of the villages and succeeded for varying periods of time in taking back village life from the Romans and their wealthy Jewish client leaders. Each, however, was eventually crushed by the overwhelming force and brutality of the Roman legions.

The Jesus movement was one of these peasant-led movements. Horsley says it differed from the other resistance movements in this way:

Yet there was a significant difference between Jesus and his movement and the (other) popular prophetic movements. Both drew on the popular memory of Moses (and Joshua or Elijah). But, whereas the other prophets led their followers out of their villages and into the wilderness or up to the Mount of Olives in anticipation of God's new acts of deliverance, Jesus focused his mission on village communities and their concerns. Throughout Mark's narrative of Jesus mission in Galilee and beyond, Jesus works in villages and synagogues (which were village assemblies, not buildings.) (1149 Kindle)

Jesus sent his envoys out to work in the villages. His renewal movement was about reclaiming covenant relations, social and economic, among the people living there. He knew well the indignities of village life under Roman role. His healing acts symbolized this:

This is perhaps nowhere more vividly expressed than in the two interwoven episodes of the twelve-year-old woman and the woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years (Mark 5:21-43). Both women are representative of the people, as symbolized by the "twelve." In both, the power of life is ebbing away. The lifeblood of the older woman had been steadily drained from her. The younger woman, just at the age when she should be married and being reproducing life in Israel, was "at the point of death." These are the representative figures of Israel in the Galilean villages where crowds eagerly greet Jesus. (1215 Kindle)

Significantly, Horsley notes in these stories that the initiative to be healed comes from the people themselves and healing takes place in an interaction between Jesus and the people who respond to his message of hope and his genuine authority but are not merely passive recipients of Jesus power.

Interesting read so far... I see Horsley making his own way here rejecting both the wisdom Jesus who left us memorable and timeless parables and aphorisms and the failed apocalyptic prophet whose martyrdom spawned a movement. Jesus, in Horsley's treatment, created an indigenous kingdom movement that spoke to concerns of peasant/village life.

Horsley is great in the book's beginning describing the history of Israel's formation in reaction to a repeated history of imperial rule from external (Babylon, Egypt, etc.) and internal (David, Solomon, etc.) powers. As I mentioned earlier I found his treatment of the function of the temple as a seat and symbol of that imperial power to be particularly enlightening.

Abundant Life Here and Now

I am currently reading Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love for This World for Crucifixion and Empire by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker. The authors begin with the observation that images of the crucified Christ don't appear in early Christian art for nearly a thousand years after the time of Jesus; then they become predominant. Why is this? What changes within Christianity bring it about?

The first Christian art from the catacombs through the building of worship spaces emphasized the restoration of paradise on earth as a result of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Images of loaves and fishes, water and wine, the rivers of life, trees and animals were used in Christian art to created the sensation of paradise restored. In the same way icons brought the heavenly paradise down to earth for those who touched and prayed to them. To become a Christian brought not only the promise of a future paradise but life in paradise now as part of a community that was attuned through spiritual disciplines to see and participate in paradise and to make it a reality through the practice of what the authors call ethical grace.

They suggest that this same spirit animates much of the New Testament. For example here is what they have to say about John 3:16:

Today this passage is invariably interpreted to mean that God placed Jesus in the world to die on the cross, but at no point does this story mention death. It does not use the Greek word paradidomai, the word that John's Gospel specifically uses to describe the action of those who "gave" or "handed over" Jesus to be crucified. John 19:16 makes it clear that Pilate, not God, "handed him over to them to be crucified." Jesus' words to Nicodemus are about birth and life, not death and afterlife. They reiterate the themes of Creation and the power to be born of God that we spoke of in Chapter 1. God loves the world, the kosmos, and loves the Son, to who he gives "the Spirit without measure" (John 3:34).

In John's Gospel Jesus incarnates wisdom, turns water into wine, feeds the multitudes, demonstrating in various ways that he has come to restore paradise, abundant life, to this life.

Unfortunately, the authors say, paradise is eventually replaced with images of the suffering and tortured Jesus. When and why that happens in a future post.

The thesis of this book reminds me of my trip to Rome several years ago. As we visited the catacombs and churches and the Vatican Art Museum to see early Christian art our guide, Grady Snyder, kept asking us "what are you not seeing here?" There were no crosses anywhere to be found. The promise of new life not a focus on Jesus' suffering and death was what attracted converts to Christianity.

It seems to me that this is or should be one of the predominant themes of progressive Christianity. I think we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

On Being a Good Example

Yesterday I started reading Philip Gulley's If the Church Were Christian: Rediscovering the Values of Jesus. In his opening chapter he tells the story of being a young person in church hearing a preacher say "Some people will tell you Jesus is only an example for how we should live. But anyone can be an example."

Thirty years later Gulley says he knows better than ever that this isn't true. Living the kind of virtuous life that makes one a worthy example for others to follow is very difficult. To say that it somehow diminishes the story of Jesus if he is 'only' a moral example is to ignore the simple fact that we rarely encounter individuals who so embody the qualities associated with Godly virtue. In our lifetimes we are fortunate if we come under the influence of a few who come close.

If Jesus was one of these rare individuals - and I suspect he was - it is not hard to understand why he would have attracted both followers and enemies. Authentic individuals who actually live by the highest values attract company. We want to be in their presence. We want to learn from them. We want to be like them.

They also attract enemies because they have authentic power, not supernatural power or power obtained through violence, wealth or stealth, but the kind of power that comes naturally from becoming during their life-times a brighter and clearer light, the kind of light that stands in sharp contrast to and exposes the corruption and dishonesty and violence that so often are the tools of those who are in power.

It has been my experience that taking Jesus off the Only Son of God pedestal and making him fully human actually makes it much for difficult to be a follower. What we are being called to do as followers is not to believe in him but to live as he lived. Imagine what the world would be like if Christians simply lived more simply, or forswore the use of violence of any kind. The world as we know it today would truly be turned upside down. We would say the kingdom of God has come on earth.

Am I asking too much? The world is fallen and we need the grace of God to save us? Then we are looking for the easy way out - or up. Making Jesus into our ticket to heaven is cheap grace. Letting him be an uncommonly virtuous son of God who challenges the rest of us sons and daughters of God by word and example to live as he lived calls us to a lifetime of growth and transformation.

Oh, that Jesus would 'just' be an example that we spent our lifetimes emulating.

Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up

Was Jesus a cynic-like sage or an apocalyptic prophet? Crossan or Allison? Maybe he was both. Adam Gopnik offers this analogy in an article in The New Yorker What Did Jesus Do?:

And yet a single figure who “projects” two personae at the same time, or in close sequence, one dark and one dreamy, is a commonplace among charismatic prophets. That’s what a charismatic prophet is: someone whose aura of personal conviction manages to reconcile a hard doctrine with a humane manner. The leaders of the African-American community before the civil-rights era, for instance, had to be both prophets and political agitators to an oppressed and persecuted people in a way not unlike that of the real Jesus (and all the other forgotten zealots and rabbis whom the first-century Jewish historian Josephus names and sighs over). They, too, tended to oscillate between the comforting and the catastrophic. Malcolm X was the very model of a modern apocalyptic prophet-politician, unambiguously preaching violence and a doctrine of millennial revenge, all fuelled by a set of cult beliefs—a hovering U.F.O., a strange racial myth. But Malcolm was also a community builder, a moral reformer (genuinely distraught over the sexual sins of his leader), who refused to carry weapons, and who ended, within the constraints of his faith, as some kind of universalist. When he was martyred, he was called a prophet of hate; within three decades of his death—about the time that separates the Gospels from Jesus—he could be the cover subject of a liberal humanist magazine like this one. One can even see how martyrdom and “beatification” draws out more personal detail, almost perfectly on schedule: Alex Haley, Malcolm’s Paul, is long on doctrine and short on details; thirty years on, Spike Lee, his Mark, has a full role for a wife and children, and a universalist message that manages to blend Malcolm into Mandela. (As if to prove this point, just the other week came news of suppressed chapters of Haley’s “Autobiography,” which, according to Malcolm’s daughter, “showed too much of my father’s humanity.”)

The whole article is a good read.

Cheater's Bible

Today I received via UPS a copy of The UBS Greek New Testament: A Reader's (or cheater's) Edition. It has a translation of all vocabulary words occurring 30 times or less in the NT at the bottom of the page. It's great for someone like me who isn't working in the Greek NT every day but has a decent handle on the vocabulary and grammar. What I don't know or remember is right there on the page.

Everyday Miracles

My newsletter article this week:

I don't often make note of the feast days of Catholic Saints, but September 25 was the feast day of Saint Finbar, an Irish monk who lived as a hermit on a small island at Lough Eiroe, off southern Ireland. According to Catholic tradition, many miracles were attributed to St. Finbar upon his death in 633, among them the sun not setting for two weeks. Finbar's hermitage locale remains a pilgrimage destination to this day.

Finbar's own Christianity, though, was apparently rooted as much in local druidic tradition as Catholic teaching, and was likely grounded not in supernatural miracle but in the everyday miracles of the natural world: "the early Irish texts suggest a God who is immanent in every part of creation -- in Sun, Moon, stars, wind and wave -- indeed , inseparable from the creation, even as the unutterable mystery of the universe confounds our understanding and perception."

I have recently been re-reading Elaine Pagels' book Beyond Belief. Pagels is one of several scholars who think that the Gospel of John was written in conversation with the Gospel of Thomas, or perhaps to correct and combat the teachings of the community of Thomas. Whether Pagels is right about this is a matter of much dispute among scholars and is as we are fond of saying these days "above my pay grade" to know.

What is indisputable, though, is that the message of the Gospel of John that Jesus is God, and that Jesus came to save us, and that we are in need of salvation, and that this salvation is not possible apart from believing in Jesus became the orthodox position within Christianity and was eventually incorporated into the creeds and remains an essential element of Christian teaching to this day. Pagel's book tells the story of how this came to be.

The notion that God is within us, that we don't need salvation so much as illumination, as taught by the Jesus found in the Gospel of Thomas, isn't orthodox. The orthodox position holds that we can't save ourselves or help ourselves because all vestiges of the immanence of God within us were obliterated by original sin and now we need divine help from the outside.

I don't agree with this for a moment. Neither did Finbar, and neither did a host of Christian mystics who would follow through the centuries and keep alive within Christianity the notion that the divine spark is present in each of us and in every tree, flower, wisp of wind, and ray of the sun.

We don't need Jesus to save us. We do need to be reminded from time to time, though, that the divine spark is there within us and around us. If we listen. If we are attentive. What we can learn from Jesus is that there is a way of living that puts us in touch with the God within and around us.

For many Christians, of course, it is the miracles of Jesus and the miracle of his resurrection that make the difference, just as it was the miracles attributed to Finbar that made him worthy of being a Catholic saint. But I will settle for the everyday miracles of friends and community and the beauty that is everywhere we look, if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

My Amazon Order Has Shipped

But I didn't order anything through Amazon. But wait, way back in September of last year I ordered The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context. That was so long ago I wonder if it can still be relevant!

Holy Week Thoughts

My newsletter article this week:

For Western Christians Holy Week is upon us. It begins this Sunday with Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday celebrates the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem followed by a week of drama that culminates in his betrayal, arrest, trial, execution, and resurrection on Easter Sunday. Even as a progressive Christian who doesn't take literally the details of the story, I look forward each year to retelling and re-imagining the Holy Week narrative.

Over the years my thinking about this week and the specifics of Jesus' last days has been in flux? Did he really ride a donkey into the city, replaying the story from the prophetic book Zechariah? Was he making a messianic claim? Did he provoke a "fight" in the Temple? Was he trying to get himself killed in the hopes that God would intervene? Was there really a Judas who betrayed him? Was there anyone there at the foot of the cross? Was there anyone to bury him after he died? Three days in the tomb is symbolic, but how long was it really before some of his followers began to proclaim his resurrection?

So many questions that I don't know the answer to. And so many different opinions and theories from the bible itself as well as biblical scholars and everyday Christians. I don't know what I believe about the details of Jesus' last days. But I do have a pretty good idea why he ended up on a cross. First let me say that I don't buy the traditional explanation. The traditional explanation is that his death was part of God's plan. To pay the price for our sin, or to be lifted up in glory fully revealed as the Son of God. There are actually more than a few biblical and theological explanations of how his death was a necessary part of God's plan for the world.

I don't think it was part of God's plan. I don't think his death was necessary, for him or for us. I do think it was almost inevitable and not at all surprising, given the times he lived in and the way the Romans had little tolerance for dissent of any kind and the way they made frequent use of crucifixion to punish trouble-makers and set a public example.

I also think there was something about Jesus himself that made his untimely death almost inevitable and not at all surprising. Christian theology says that Jesus was fully God and fully human. What I think this means is that Jesus was more fully human than most of us and therefore he looked more God-like in the eyes of some of those who saw him.

I don't think that Jesus was born divine. Or more precisely, I think we are all born divine. We are all born with the spark of the divine in us. I think that Jesus may well have been born gifted (or haunted) with a spiritual restlessness. I suspect that he became a serious spiritual seeker. He didn't suddenly emerge on the scene inspired at 30. He spent his young life "in the wilderness" metaphorically, learning to know himself and digging deeper into the spiritual traditions of his day. It seems almost certain that he also spent some time in the wilderness literally as a disciple of John the Baptist. This would have been part of his vision quest.

However it happened - and we really don't know any details of his young life - he emerged publicly on the scene as a deeply spiritual person, more fully human. In one sense, of course, you are either human or you are not. But when we grow spiritually and emotionally we become more fully human, we tap more deeply into our capacity to be spiritually awake, emotionally intelligent. It is always in there in all of us, but we don't all grow at the same rate. And to be honest some of us are so scarred and beaten down and cynical that we become less human as time goes on.

Jesus became more fully human. He likely knew himself deeply; he faced his demons. He knew his spiritual tradition more deeply, remembering always that he was always fully Jewish. He was full of compassion for the suffering of his people; he wanted them to be liberated from their bondage the way he was liberated. He had found a way of navigating his spiritually hungry, poverty-stricken, sometimes brutal world; it was a way that offered healing and hope. It was a spiritual path, and he began to share it with family, friends, and strangers.

What could be dangerous about that? How could that possibly get you killed? When the system is sick, there is nothing more dangerous than a healthy person. While some will be attracted to the "light" and want to learn and feed off of it's warmth, those who profit emotionally or financially or politically off of the way things are now will be threatened. They will want to fix or remove the "problem." By definition, any people occupied by a foreign power is a "sick" system.

The Bible says that even his own family thought he was crazy, at least for a time. As his traveling entourage moved from town to town he attracted curiosity, followers, and opposition. His open table and public acts of healing threatened the boundaries and rules of the cultural and religious establishment. His peaceful non-resistance to the violence of Roman rule threatened the political powers. If, as the scriptures tell us, his journeying took him to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover he was being watched carefully. It wouldn't have taken much provocation during the already highly charged Passover celebration (a celebration, after all, all about liberation from oppressive political rule) to get him arrested, quickly tried, and hung on a cross. If he engaged in a symbolic act of protest at the Temple as scripture reports, that would have been enough to seal his death warrant.

It might have been the end of the Jesus story, too. It wasn't, but that is a subject for another post. Let me end this one by reiterating that I believe the path that Jesus found for himself and shared with others was a path of healing and hope. It was both an inward journey that led to a deeper, more fully human person. And it was an outward journey that led to more fully human and just communities. It was personal and it was political. It was liberating and it was dangerous. It was then, and it is now.

Why Didn't They Teach Us That in Church?

Quote from theolophiliacs:

I had always heard that people go off to the scary public universities and fall away from faith. The blame was always left at the feet of the Universities. I wonder if maybe we should be looking closer to home. Our catechism classes and Bible study’s need to be able to account for the advances in Scholarship and we need to openly discuss critiques of the Christian faith so that our kids can have a bit of preparation for life beyond the quaint Pizza and Soda parties of Youth Group.

The most spiritually liberating courses I took at Penn State were the religious studies classes I took my junior and senior year. Here were professors raising the faith questions I had been struggling with for 10 years. Studying the Bible through the lens of critical scholarship - I didn't even know there was such a thing until I went to college. Reading Bultmann and Tillich, and taking my first class in world religions. Then there was Rienhold Niebuhr, whose writings just blew me away. My spiritual quest was reborn in college.

Why didn't they teach us any of that in church? I am not making the same mistake.

Grieving Over a Lost Jesus

I have been somewhat quiet in the blogosphere recently, in part because I have been preoccupied with my wife's job loss and then transfer, fortunately, to a new position in her company. I have also been busy with church stuff.

But I have also been digesting a number of the blogging posts recently on the state of the Jesus Seminar and what is being called the new Jesus Project. The Jesus Seminar is familiar to everyone in my congregation as I have been talking about it and reading books by its authors with groups for 15 years. You can read some about the Jesus Project here, and by following some of the links there.

I have been particularly struck in recent days by a series of posts by April DeConick entitled The Jesus Seminar Jesus is Bankrupt. What DeConick does in these posts is take on the method used by the scholars of the Jesus Seminar to paint its picture(s) of Jesus and suggest that while the method has value, it doesn't necessarily lead us to the historical Jesus.

I enourage you to read DeConick's posts for a good short summary of the scholarly method employed by most biblical scholars and her critique of it's assumptions. If you read through some of the other links mentioned above you can see some of the other critique of the work of the Jesus Seminar.

I have to say that I find myself entering a state of grief over the Jesus Seminar and its apparent demise. I have always been aware of the criticisms that the Jesus Seminar set out to find the historical Jesus and instead found a cool California Jesus. I began to read some of Dale Allison's writings a few years ago and found his arguments for an apocalyptic Jesus strong and at least worth considering. It has also been obvious for a number of years that the scholars of the Jesus Seminar themselves essentially changed the subject of their inquiry and moved onto early Christian origins, either because they had run into a dead end or knew that there were problems with their Jesus.

But for at least 20 years my thinking, preaching, teaching, and faith have been informed and inspired by the work of Jesus Seminar. There was a time when I looked forward to every book that came out by Crossan and Funk and Borg and others. The Jesus Seminar Jesus was very much alive for me. And now I feel like he is dying again.

It's probably a healthy thing, but I am not too happy about it right now.

American Evangelicals Are Different

Michael Bird is an Australian-born evangelical who teaches New Testament in Scotland. He talks about the difference between evangelicals in America and around the world:

...my dear friends in North America have to learn that outside of North America the things that they regard as badges of evangelicalism may not necessarily be badges elsewhere. For example, nowhere outside of the USA is "inerrancy" the single defining issue for evangelicals. The UCCF statement of faith in the UK refers to the Scriptures as "infallible" not inerrant. At the GAFCON meeting in Jerusalem where an international group of Evangelical Anglicans met together, their statement of faith referred to the "sufficiency" of the Scriptures, but there was no reference to inerrancy or infallibility. Ironically, these are people who are besieged by real liberals (not N.T. Wright, Peter Enns, Norman Shepherd, or those Federal Vision chaps, I mean real liberals!) and they do not associate an orthodox view of Scripture with pledging one's allegiance to the Chicago Statement or to B.B. Warfield. Now, if you ask the average non-American evangelical what they believe about Scripture, I think you'll find that they regard it as "true and trustworthy" in every meaningful sense, but without necessarily resorting to the well-worn mantra of the "inerrant autographa" (though I imagine that they might just as well affirm it even if it's not their default setting). In other words, American evangelicals (reformed or otherwise) need to try understand themselves as being one small fish in a much bigger ocean and not expect non-Americans to line up with their own parochial theological proclivities. Moreover, there are also some things about North American evangelicals that Christians outside of North American cannot comprehend: 1. Only north american evangelicals oppose measures to stem global warming, 2. Only north american evangelicals oppose universal health care, and 3. Only north american evangelicals support the Iraq War. Now, to Christians in the rest of the world this is somewhere between strange, funny, and frightening. Why is it that only north american evangelicals support these things? Are the rest of us stupid? It makes many of us suspicious that our North American evangelical friends have merged their theology with GOP economic policy, raised patriotism to an almost idolatrous level, and have a naive belief in the divinely given right of American hegemony. North Americans would do well to take the North-Americanism out of their evangelicalism and try to see Jesus through the eyes of Christians in other lands.

The Newsweek Kerfluffle

I haven't commented yet on the recent cover-story Newsweek article that is causing so much stir among those who blog and write about religion. Over at Beliefnet, Tony Jones provides a good rundown of the varied responses. The Newsweek article by Lisa Miller signals a changing focus for Newsweek, as it moves intentionally to become more of a partisan opinion magazine. Hence, article is italicized since Miller's piece isn't really reporting; it's commentary.

This change is signaled by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham who essentially says in his defense of Miller: "bring it on." I guess time will tell whether this strategy will work for Newsweek. It certainly has lit up the blogosphere.

I was intrigued by the response of Darrell Bock to Meacham's piece. Bock is Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. Bock tells us in his blog post that he wants to tackle the substance of this comment by Meacham:

Briefly put, the Judeo-Christian religious case for supporting gay marriage begins with the recognition that sexual orientation is not a choice—a matter of behavior—but is as intrinsic to a person's makeup as skin color. The analogy with race is apt, for Christians in particular long cited scriptural authority to justify and perpetuate slavery with the same certitude that some now use to point to certain passages in the Bible to condemn homosexuality and to deny the sacrament of marriage to homosexuals. This argument from Scripture is difficult to take seriously—though many, many people do—since the passages in question are part and parcel of texts that, with equal ferocity, forbid particular haircuts. The Devil, as Shakespeare once noted, can cite Scripture for his purpose, and the texts have been ready sources for those seeking to promote anti-Semitism and limit the human rights of women, among other things that few people in the first decade of the 21st century would think reasonable.

Bock responds:

By lumping the issue of slavery, sexuality and gender into parallels with race and gender, not to mention hair cuts, he suggests that just reading the Bible at the surface is not good enough. This linkage is not new and evangelicals have noted the hermeneutical questions tied to it for some time. In 2001, William Webb wrote Slaves, Women, and Homosexuals with an eye directly on this supposed equation (and overgeneralization). He argued that these three issues are not handled nor are they to be read as being hermeneutically equivalent because of the manner each issue is handled within Scripture. Yes, some have handled them the same, but a careful reading shows that the grounding for slavery did not appeal to the same types of arguments as discussions did on the role of women and homosexuality. Even more, by far the strongest arguments and statements are made about homosexuality in comparison to the topics of either slavery or women.

I haven't read Webb's book so I can't comment on it. But to Bock's statement that the strongest arguments and statements are made about homosexuality, I would simply respond that this may be true and they may still be wrong. Shouting louder or holding the strongest convictions does not make one right. It remains the case the Biblical writers did not know what we know about sexual orientation. "Exchanging natural relations for unnatural" implies a choice. Homosexual orientation is not a choice.

It is worth noting that Bock does not directly address his views on the issue of sexual orientation here. In fact, it appears that Bock doesn't want to go down this road at all. He seems to say that sexual orientation as we understand it is not even addressed in the Bible:

I am not sure if Meacham’s starting point reflects a Judeo-Christian religious case beginning point or a modern starting point. Where is the case that from a Judeo-Christian perspective sexual orientation is intrinsic to a person’s makeup? Where is the religious text that says this?

The Bible, Bock says, addresses the issue of sexuality in terms of its functional role in a divinely ordered society where male and female are created in order to make a family. The biblical writers are concerned with survival of the species. What is the best environment for raising children?

The desire to pursue a virtuous society, which I think is a goal all good people should have, should not play favorites in dealing with questions where virtue may be distorted or lacking. And that is precisely the debate that needs to take place in our treatment of this issue. We should be concerned not merely with what makes for freedom, but what societal structures make for a more healthy society, and for a beneficial environment for our children.

Is the starting point for this discussion one that simply says that sexual orientation is a given for all who welcome this route for sexual orientation, or is this discussion far more complex, with this appeal being too facile. Why not suggest another starting point? That the divinely created world is filled with the intended diversity of male and female, which in combination makes up humanity in the image of God. So this cooperation is part of what God intended by marriage, since the core marriage text of Scripture does speak of a man and a woman being brought together. Surely if God exists and speaks (something that is a given within the Judeo-Christian tradition), he could have made it more clear that gender does not matter when it comes to marriage—and there is no such text anywhere...

Regarding the goal of creating a healthy society for adults and children I couldn't agree more. That is what we all want. So, show me the evidence that gay marriage is unhealthy for society or that raising children in homes where there are two fathers or two mothers harms the children. David Brooks has made this argument more than once. If the goal is to provide a healthy social fabric for adults and for children, then we should be embracing, in fact, insisting on gay marriage.

Regarding Bock's comment that surely God "could have been more clear" if gender didn't matter in marriage, the obvious response would seem to be that surely God could also have been more clear if God didn't think slavery was such a hot idea. Why did it take Christians nearly two thousand years to figure out that slavery and racial discrimination is not part of God's intent for the way we treat one another? Was God unsure? Were we still in an experimental phase when the Bible was written? Was God playing favorites then? No slavery for the Israelites but it wasn't such a big deal in the rest of society? Surely God could have been more clear about this rather important human issue if slavery is the great moral evil we all know it to be today.

Bock makes it clear, like many evangelicals, that he doesn't appreciate the link liberals often make between biblical writings on slavery and on homosexuality. So, why is it that liberal Christians like me always want to link the slavery issue with homosexuality when we talk about Bible texts? Because everyone agrees today that slavery is immoral. There is no debate. But there is also no debating the fact that the Bible isn't very good on the issue of slavery. There is no blanket condemnation of slavery; in one form or another it was part of the fabric of life in the ancient world. And slavery is one issue where the New Testament doesn't correct the Old Testament. Jesus doesn't speak to it and Paul accepts it as a continuing reality in Roman society.

The Bible writers, including Paul, were wrong on the issue of slavery. It is perfectly clear to us today that slavery is not part of God's will for us. It is perfectly clear that on this great moral issue the Biblical writers were caught in their historical context. To understand the Bible on the issue of slavery you have to read it in its historical context. You can say that God's intent was clear. In fact it was signaled very early in the story of Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt. "Let my people go." But the biblical writers were never able to clearly see and say that when God said this God meant all of God's people.

So learning to read the Bible on slavery is a non-threatening (for us) object lesson on the skills we need to bring to bear when we engage in biblical interpretation. But once you go down this road with a moral issue like slavery, you realize that you also need to go down the same road with moral issues like homosexuality and the status of women in church and society. If the biblical writers could be wrong about slavery, and it took Christians so long to figure it out, could they also have been wrong about homosexuality? About women? The answer is yes.

The Face of Jesus

I received an email inquiry asking me what Jesus looked like. I remembered that several years ago a magazine had done an article about this and posted a picture. I couldn't remember off-hand what magazine it was, but a Google search took me to Popular Mechanics, of all places, and there it was. The article is here.

Where is the blond hair and blue eyes?

Buddhist Origins of Christianity - Jesus of the Gaps

I have recently been reading The Wisdom Jesus by Cynthia Bourgeault. There is much that I like about Bourgeault's attempt to bring out the wisdom aspect of Jesus' teachings and to place it in the context of wisdom teachings from the east and west. For me this is the most meaningful way to understand the message and the life of Jesus.

But I don't think it helps the argument to try and fill in the gaps of our unknowing with speculation that we find attractive. Here is Bourgeault on the significance of Jesus growing up in Galilee:

We tend to think of Jerusalem as the cultural center and that going up to Jerusalem from the Galilean lands was like going from Appalachia to New York City. But in point of fact, it was the other way around. Far from being a cultural backwater, Galilee was actually the more cosmopolitan environment because it lay on the Silk Road, that great viaduct of human commerce which from time immemorial has connected the lands of the Mediterranean with the lands and culture of Central Asia and China. The Silk Road went right through the city of Capernaum, where Jesus did a lot of his learning and his teaching. It was an environment in which he would have been fully exposed to a variety of ideas that could be seen as the New Age of his time. And Jesus evidently soaked up spiritual teaching like a sponge. While he was definitely his own person, he was not operating in a cultural vacuum. hes teachings show clear areas of overlap with the great stream of sophia perennis flowing through other spiritual traditions, particularly Buddhism and Persian light mysticism.

He also likely spoke multiple languages and spent time with the Essenes. The passage above is footnoted with a reference to a friend of Bourgeault's who has not yet published his findings.

Here is Crossan and Reed (Excavating Jesus) on Capernaum:

First-century Capernaum was a modest Jewish village on the periphery of Antipas's territory relying chiefly on agriculture and fishing. An oppressive heat hovers over Capernaum during the long summers, and fields nearby are rocky and difficult to work, and in Jesus's day it was off any major trade route...

There were maybe 1000 residents and there has been no archaeological evidence of pagan artifacts or any evidence of eastern influence dating from the time of Jesus.

Who you gonna believe? This is not to say that Jesus could not have had encounters with ideas outside the world of the Judaism of his day. There were Roman built cities in Galilee where there would have been more cross-cultural exposure possible. But we don't know if Jesus visited Tiberias or Sepphoris; they are not even mentioned in the gospels.

It doesn't do the wisdom Jesus any favors by filling in the gaps of our unknowing with stories about Jesus that fit nicely with our picture of the "dream Jesus." It is enough to allow him to be a brilliant and visionary man fully immersed in his own Jewish culture, which has its own rich wisdom tradition. Future archaeological or textual discoveries may very-well reveal that he spoke five languages fluently, travelled to India on a spiritual pilgrimage and spent time with the Essenes. Until then, it is more than enough to try and plumb the depths of the wisdom of Jesus that we can speak of with some certainty.

Bourgeault's book is actually my second encounter with a Buddhist-inspired Jesus in the last week. Last weekend I attended the Progressive Brethren Summit in Indianapolis (with ProgressiveChurchLady and 200 other progressive Brethren). The keynote speaker was Robert Miller of the Jesus Seminar. He spoke on the parables and the wisdom Jesus and was very good. But I attended a workshop led by a person who used one book as his source (I don't remember the book) to make the case that Jesus was heavily influenced by Buddhist teachings. The workshop leader had the misfortune to have Robert Miller sitting in on for the session. Miller gave a civil but direct point-by-point rebuttal at the end of the workshop, and urged us all to stick to the facts about Jesus as we can discover them, and a method of finding those facts that has intellectual and scholarly integrity.

Words of wisdom.

10/12/1492

Today is a holiday in America. Columbus Day was declared a holiday to mark the date when Christopher Columbus "discovered" America. Of course we all know that this isn't politically correct, because there were Americans native to this land long before Columbus arrived in 1492, but nonetheless, we still observe it.

Today at LiberalChurch, member Paul Larson delivered a message about "Discovery". He asked us to think back to our first "discoveries" as children about our parents, family, and friends. He asked us to recall as some of our vivid childhood memories and then asked us to determine what it was we discovered about ourselves and those around us. He suggested that perhaps these discoveries are the things that keep the memories vibrant in our minds today after many years. Paul reflected on three distinct memories from his childhood and explained what he learned from each of these experiences as a child to the 50+ in attendance for worship this morning.

At the end of the service the 2009 Stewardship Campaign: Living More Simply, Living More Deeply, In God's Love, was launched with the viewing of a new video by Vicky Goplin and the distribution of the Stewardship Folders which will circulate among our households over the next 3 weeks.

Following worship, a group of 5-6 people worked outside to chip/shread dead tree material from summer storms. Vicky Goplin lead a group of over 12 adults and children in a game/song where we passed cups around and answered questions. Vicky explained to the group gathered the Bible had been written in Greek and Hebrew and that certain words used in the Bible at the time they were written have come to mean very different things today. She gave us the example of obey and honor. We talked about the well known passage where children are instructed to "honor their father and mother". To end the lesson we did an exercise where we broke into 2 groups with adults in one group and children in the other and then shared our responses with each other to see if we could discover new things about each other.

Happy October 12, 2008! Celebrate the day that we have each been given!

History According to the Bible

I spend a fair amount of time in Sunday messages putting scriptures in their historical context. One of my standard explanations regarding the reading of the Bible as history is that you have to judge the writers of scripture within the context of what passed for the writing of history in their day. There was no historical critical method then; it was not unusual for writers to write "lives" in the manner of the gospels that were a mix of theology and history, with theology given priority over history; it was not unheard of for writers to write in the name of others (pseudepigraphy) as some of the writers of the NT epistles did; in the pre-scientific world it was not uncommon to resort to miraculous explanations, etc.

Apparently this is not quite true. Via April DeConick I read this article by NT scholar Gerd Ludemann on the historical accuracy of Luke-Acts,. Luke-Acts is a prime example of the kind of biblical writing that needs explaining because there is a plain-for-all-to-see theological agenda in this two-part history of the early Christian movement. And there are obvious discrepancies between Luke and the other gospels and between what Acts says about Paul and what Paul says about Paul. Luke clearly changes his telling of the early Christian story to fit his theological agenda.

But didn't everyone do this back then? Here is Ludemann:

A number of Greek and Roman historians engaged in an ongoing discourse about historical truth, including the issues of intellectual deception and falsification. Moreover, those of the Greek and Roman intelligentsia, though lacking the sophistication of modern critics, had developed clear criteria by which to uncover fraud.

Plagiarism and pseudepigraphy happened; but they were not considered acceptable by everyone. It was the constant task of librarians, Ludemann points out, to uncover fraud. There were historical writers who tried to pay attention to verifiable facts in a manner akin to the writing of modern history. (And yes, I know, that all history writing has a bias.) There were pre-modern histories that did not take for granted miracles; ancients could be as skeptical as moderns regarding explanations of events that resorted to supernatural intervention. Apparently not everyone was doing it.

But the biblical writers were. I don't know how much difference this makes in the way I approach the teaching of scripture. It still needs to be understood in context and it still needs to be seen as a form of story-telling that takes historical events and weaves them into a story that has a primarily theological and apologetic purpose. But I won't be able to say anymore that everyone else was doing it too.

Bible Reading Marathon in Rome

"In the beginning" (but in Italian) read the Pope yesterday at the start of a week long Bible reading marathon from the Vatican. You can watch live the continuous stream of multifaith readers in Vatican t.v. Even if you don't understand a word that is being read, Italian sounds like music to the ears anyway. It's almost like a meditation chant.

The Real Jesus

James Carse, in the Religious Case Against Belief, provides an overview of the 2000 year old attempt to capture the essence of Jesus through creeds, theologies, and historical quests. Here is his 20th century list:

... a world-reforming messenger of the kingdom of God, which he was determined to translate into something resembling a nineteenth-century socialist utopia; a divinely appointed son of the god, who, some six thousand years ago, fashioned the earth in six days then all but destroyed it fifteen hundred years later in a worldwide flood resulting in such phenomena as the Grand Canyon; a mysterious Galilean preacher whose proclamation to the world (or kerygma), although encased in mythic thinking we know now to be false, still causes us to confront our own inauthenticity; a pop icon and rock music sensation as "Superstar"; a pure-blooded and exemplary Aryan, first member of the Master Race; a messiah who magically transports himself to the Americas after his resurrection in Jerusalem, speaking a language and describing a holy life only vaguely resembling the gospels of the New Testament; a black man who has "the blood of all races in his veins"; a fun-loving, partygoing preacher of joy who happens also to be a paragon of efficient business discipline, a master advertiser, and in effect the founder of the modern corporation; the representative in relatively modern history of an omnipotent but secret craftsman who billions of years ago assembled a universe that has been evolving since in a process of clockwork perfection; an agent of God whose life on earth, dedicated to the salvation of the human race from sin, was only partly successful and who must therefore return to call his faithful children home in a dramatic event referred to as the "rapture"; an obscure itinerant preacher and wonderworker who once lived in Galilee, something of a commercial and cultural crossroad, preaching a message not particularly distinct from the Judaism in which he was raised, whose reported resurrection is most certainly fictional; a blondish long-haired and non-Semite staring at us slightly off camera, a bit sad-faced but unmarked by suffering, and dressed in elegant and freshly laundered robes; an enigmatic figure who, according to the best current scholarship, is properly to be understood as a "Jewish peasant Cynic"; a singing, dancing incarnation of ecstasy; a man of the people who confronts the political, social, economic, racial, and sexual policies of a repressive capitalist culture; a merciless military commander whose army crushes the forces of Satan on the plains of Israel (known also as Armadeddon), then casts the losing generals into a blazing hole that opens just after he rejects their pleas for mercy; a private voice guiding elected leaders responsible for America's salvific mission to the nondemocratic world. This is not to mention more trivial suggestions that we consider Jesus as a shaman, user of hallucinogenic mushrooms, homosexual, Maoist, father of secret children, Roman spy, pharisee, dupe of political powers, extraordinary athlete, carpenter on a year's sabbatical, member of the Essene cult, protomystic, Egyptian, spirit traveler to India, psychic, one's favorite philosopher, deluded victim of a messianic complex, avatar of Krishna, and just plain fictional, nothing more than an imagined character in a children's story.

He finishes this list off by noting that the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth wrote more than 10,000 pages of books and articles in attempt to capture the essence of Jesus. For some reason not everyone found his answer satisfactory.

So, then, can we find the real Jesus?

The question answers itself...

What does it mean then to "believe" in Jesus, or "believe" that Jesus was God... It means at the very least that we have to hide from ourselves how much we do not know; we have to call in our selected Jesus and close the door against the clamorous horde of alternative Jesuses surrounding our enclosure.

But the quest continues. There is something about the man that compels us to keep looking; there is something yet to be resolved. Recognizing this fact gets us closer to understanding the genius of religion: its ability to continue to generate over decades and then centuries fresh thinking, new approaches, renewed spirituality. It is what we have yet to know about it that is the source of its strength:

It is ignorance and not belief that is the source of the faith's vitality. What remains unsaid, even unthinkable, and what still inspires disagreement, is far more powerful than what is known and intelligible.

To reference a previous post, every belief system is an attempt to nail down the details of Jesus, or the Buddha, or Muhammed. But every belief system is bound to fail because it won't answer every question or solve every problem or translate into another generation or age. We are bound to try to find a belief system that works for us, but if we are wise we will continue to listen to the voices of those who are living out of different belief systems and we will recognize the limits of our own. We will be faithful to what we "know" to be true but we will keep our eyes and ears open for that new horizon that is continually unfolding before us.

Religion versus Belief

James Carse is from New York University where he directed the Religious Studies Program for 30 years. He has a new book out, The Religious Case Against Belief. He is featured in a recent Salon interview where he talks about the difference between belief and religion:

It's an odd thing. Scholars of religion are perfectly aware that belief and religion don't perfectly overlap. It's not that they're completely indifferent to each other, but you can be religious without being a believer. And you can be a believer who's not religious. Let's say you want to know what it means to be Jewish. So you draw up a list of beliefs that you think Jews hold. You go down that list and say, "I think I believe all of these." But does that make you a Jew? Obviously not. Being Jewish is far more and far richer than agreeing to a certain list of beliefs. Now, it is the case that Christians in particular are interested in proper belief and what they call orthodoxy. However, there's a very uneven track of orthodoxy when you look at the history of Christianity. It's not at all clear what exactly one should believe.

Carse argues that belief systems can be found within all major religions, but don't need to be religiously based. Nazism and Marxism are examples of belief systems without religious roots. They share with religiously based belief systems the same tenets. From his book:

Well-developed belief systems have the capacity to account for and explain any issue or question that might arise. They present themselves as thoroughly rational and comprehensible, while answering to a final authority, whether that be a person or a text or an institution. But they are not only large intellectual schemes. They often have distinctive historical narratives, an extensive mythology, a pronounced sense of community, a pantheon of heroes and martyrs, an array of symbols, scripted rituals, sacred geographical sites and monuments. On top of all this is an absolute certainty in the truth of their beliefs. What is more, they see themselves surrounded by treacherous unbelievers who wish nothing more but their demise. (pp. 32-33)

A religion like Christianity can can spin off and sustain multiple belief systems, like Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodox, Fundamentalism, etc. Belief systems are usually born in conflict and depend on its continuing presence to fan the flames of adherents.

Religion, by contrast is "in its purest form a vast work of poetry." (p. 111) A religion like Christianity resists all attempts by its various belief systems to pin it down to any doctrines or essentials. The Christian scripture is a model religious text. It is a "glorious confusion" that invites continuous interpretation. The search for the real Jesus within the text has been going on for two thousand years:

Altogether the effort must be seen as an extraordinary work of the imagination, a long creative train of innovations, or successive visions... To the present day, novel readings of the text have outrun all attempts to channel or contain them. (p. 119)

Hence, religion, like poetry, is not definitive but generative. It continually leads beyond itself to what is not yet known.

Carse makes some distinctions that I find helpful. He distinguishes three kinds of ignorance. There is "ordinary ignorance" which is simply a lack of knowledge that can be rectified with learning. There is "willful ignorence" which is choosing not to know things that make us uncomfortable or don't fit within our belief systems. We know that someone is unhappy with us but pretend that there is nothing wrong. Belief systems and willful ignorance usually walk hand in hand. Creationists simply ignore the evidence that the earth is older than 10,000 years.

There is a third kind of ignorance that is a "higher ignorance." Higher ignorance comes as a result of long reflection and continuing self-examination. No matter how much knowledge one accumulates, there is a recognition that our knowledge falls short of "the" truth. Religion invites us to grow into this "higher ignorance."

Related to this is Carse's distinction between boundaries and horizons. Boundaries mark the borders of what is true and what is safe. On the inside we are protected; on the outside there is danger and chaos. Belief systems attempt to create clear boundaries. Horizons, on the other hand, do not have a fixed outer edge:

It is not a line drawn by someone else, but the limit of one's own vision. If we walk to the point where our vision was thought to end, the horizon will only have extended itself... Every step taken alters the horizon, changes the field of vision, causing us to see what had been thus far circumscribed as something quite different. (p. 80)

Boundaries and horizons are not incompatable. There are healthy belief systems with fuzzy edges. But there is always a tendency within belief systems to build fences and scare people away from exploring the dangerous borders.

Carse thinks that much of the strife in our world is caused by true believers living out of their unhealthy belief systems, willing to kill in the name of God or the Motherland or the Will of the People. He is out to rescue religion from its true believers.

Along the way he takes a few pot-shots at the new Atheists whose books are selling so well these days. From the Salon interview:

To be an atheist is not to be stunned by the mystery of things or to walk around in wonder about the universe. That's a mode of being that has nothing to do with belief. So I have very little in common with them.

This comment caught the attention of Jason Rosenhouse at his EvolutionBlog, where he fired back and invited further discussion.

I have yet to read the final third of the book entitled Religion Beyond Belief but I think Carse adds an interesting twist on the effort to rethink Christianity and other religions, moving away from defining them by outdated and rigid beliefs. I have been drawn to making a distinction between Christianity as praxis versus Christianity as a set of doctrines or beliefs about Jesus or God. To be a Christian is to follow in the way of Jesus. But Carse's religion-as-poetry metaphor opens up another way of thinking about what it means to be a religious person. The horizon has been altered once again.