Sunday, May 28, 2006

About Howe


With over forty years in my profession and in my marriage, and still counting, I am a happily involved minister in the United Methodist Church who cherishes the variety of opportunities I have been given to serve, especially as a pastor, as a University chaplain, as a counselor, and as a college and seminary professor. Along the way, I have written some books and articles, and more recently, twice-monthly columns on faith, theology, and everyday living. About all of them I typically receive more gracious comments than they probably deserve, along with an ungracious comment or two more on the mark than I like to admit. My eighth book, Explorations in Faith and Belief, is posted for the taking on its own blogsite.

My wife and best friend, Nancy, and I have two daughters, Jennifer and Allison, and two grandchildren, Reiss and McKenna. If you are hesitant about telling me what you think of the postings on this site, be assured that none of these five loved ones is.

About the Blog

"Howe About" began in June, 2002, as a contribution to the outreach ministries of First United Methodist Church, Richardson, Texas. The bi-monhtly columns formed a basis for Sunday School classes and private exchanges not only at FUMCR, but across the country and overseas as well.

In 2006, Leroy changed the platform for his columns and became a full-fledged blogger. I am the technical assistant. I look forward to reading many more thought-provoking posts about the ways in which one can think Christianly about what is happening near and far today.

Chris Guldi

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Navigating the Slippery Slopes

A favorite argument of rule-oriented legislators, jurists, and arm-chair moralists is that waiving disapproval, condemnation, or punishment of those who for any reason violate accepted codes of conduct will lead to a break-down of social values on a massive scale. Allowing our hearts or our conscience to interfere with meeting our obligations to do the right thing by following the right rules, without exception, is to begin a long, slippery, unstoppable slide into libertinism and godlessness, with only perdition at the end. A caricature of their position? Perhaps a more pragmatic --- actually, bureaucratic --- version of it would be fairer: “if we make an exception for you, we will have to make it for everyone.”

Recently, I had occasion to participate in a Memorial Service for a woman who committed suicide, to the shock and dismay of everyone who knew her. It was my task to deliver some “Words of Faith” and it was made extremely difficult by the celebratory tone of everything in the service to that point, except the final words of a beautifully rendered song offered just before I spoke: “There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.” The words helped me get out other ones that simply had to be heard, too: that our friend betrayed our love and God’s by not reaching out to us as friendship demands. But the service ended as it began, rightly, by reassuring all of us that not even suicide can finally separate people from God’s love. There is no slippery slope here toward the countenancing of suicide.

About the time that this friend committed suicide, many of us were reading about an 83 year old man, dying from cancer, who fatally shot his wife out of fear that following his death, she would not receive adequate care in the aftermath of debilitating strokes. Before he died three weeks later, we were told, the man received compassion, understanding, and love from friends, neighbors, and even strangers, along with his priest’s assurance of God’s forgiveness and promise of a funeral in the church for himself and his wife together. Apparently, what trumped the act of murder in the eyes of those who knew him was the uncomplaining care he had lovingly given his stricken wife over many years. There is no slippery slope here either, this time toward the countenancing of homicide.

Both of these troubling cases suggest an important principle, not rule, of religious ethics: forgiveness is not permission, and it is not exoneration. It is grace and mercy tendered in the face of horrific culpability and destructive self-blame. It proceeds from a love that is respectful of the rules even as it reveres the persons whose struggles to obey them are sometimes agonizingly unsuccessful. It acknowledges that the basis of truly moral acts is more a purity of heart than it is a conformity of mind. To say all this in no way implies that rules are unimportant, or that church and society should sit loose on their enforcement, either in the legal or the moral sphere. The implication is only that there is more to law-abidingness and morality than knowing and mindlessly obeying the rules.

The truth about slippery slope arguments is that there really are such slopes to navigate in legal and moral decision-making. But most slip./slop. arguments misdirect attention from the single most dangerous argument of all, the “no exceptions” approach itself. This is a slope that confronts at every turn, and people can careen all the way down it before recalling how they slipped on it in the first place. All over the place these days there is a lot of such slipping and sliding going on, provoked by the-rules-period way of looking at things. While they whirl and twirl, legalists cry loudly to send all the “illegals” back where they came from, to deny access to the morning after pill for rape victims, to condemn jury nullification, to make doctrinal allegiance a condition for church membership (and in the Muslim world even citizenship), to allow hate speech to flourish in the name of freedom of expression, to preclude adoptions by gay and lesbian couples, to…

At the bottom of the no exceptions slippery slope is a legalistic mind-set that contemplates adoringly rules for the ages that bear only slightly, if at all, on the present circumstances of real people facing issues and decisions of unprecedented complexity. Jesus seemed to going after this way of thinking when he tossed in the idea that the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. No wonder he got tossed out for breaking the rules.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

The Gospel of Judas

The National Geographic Society has put a lot of time, money, and effort into the restoration and translation of a (3rd? 4th? century) Coptic manuscript of The Gospel of Judas. The original (Greek?) document ran afoul of church officials by the 180’s and its newfound successor may irritate even more of them in the 2000’s. I am glad the Society is involved in this, and wish its leaders well in recouping their costs, even if they have to continue pandering to the media in order to make it happen. Early Christianity was more diverse than many today are comfortable acknowledging, and anything that brings out both the diversity and the discomfort can be to the good.

The story of the document’s discovery is itself an exciting one and worth the price of the several books now coming out that include it. One of its implications is just the kind of thing that has been making people salivate over The Da Vinci Code: Big Dude church leaders from the late first century on have engaged in massive cover-ups of the real truth about Jesus to consolidate their power over rank and file believers everywhere. You can’t ask for a better story line than this. But it is well to remember, as Dan Brown usually but not always does, that we are talking about intriguing, captivating, exciting, not-to-be-taken-literally --- fiction. 

One cover-up alleged to have been exposed by the Judas Gospel is Gentile complicity in Jesus’ death. Making Judas, in name and in demeanor, the quintessential expression of how the Jews reacted to their own Messiah got everybody else off the hook and gave Christians just the scapegoat they needed to get a lot of things off their backs for millennia to come. Supposedly, this new gospel undermines the stereotyping completely. This would be a good thing --- anti-Semitism is blasphemy --- if it had not amounted to  substituting one set of falsehoods for another.

In the gospel, Judas hands Jesus over to the authorities at Jesus’ own request, a request Jesus made of him because he knew, contra everything else that is believed about Jesus’ life, that Judas was the only disciple who truly understood what he was about. In a strange kind of logic, the general agreement of all four of the canonical gospels --- none of whose authors knew any of the other three in person --- about Judas’ act of betrayal is now supposed to count against their reliability and for their participation in a massive cover-up. Could you run that by us again, please?

A second alleged cover-up is of the true nature of Jesus as divine, and as only divine. Those really in the know, in contrast with those who merely allow themselves to be told what to believe, know that Jesus’ so-called humanity is just that, outward appearance, for show purposes only, like an easily discarded and disposed of garment. Tucked into a neat phrase depicting Judas as exceeding all of the other disciples is a good illustration of this kind of reconstruction of Jesus’ identity: “For you will sacrifice the man who clothes me.” Just as clothes cover the body, Jesus’ manhood covers a divine nature that is  indestructible and incapable of really experiencing pain. Upon this view, the crucifixion was just play-acting on Jesus’ part.

One thing that must have turned on second-century Christians about this document is the support it gave for the newly emerging view that the divine nature proclaimed to co-exist with human nature in only one human being is actually in all of us, too, rendering our own physical existence inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. The second century bishop, Irenaeus, now taking a lot of heat for failing to give this peculiar view its due, actually saw very clearly why the view will not do at all. Physicality is a wondrous gift from God, to Jesus and to everyone else besides. Whatever else Jesus’ resurrection implies for our own future with God, it also and emphatically implies that whatever is to come will come in at least some kind of bodily form. 

Comparing the truth “exposed” by the documents upon which Dan Brown drew for The Da Vinci Code with the document which is The Gospel of Judas should make us all just a little more reticent to glom onto the latest “revelations” about so-called long-suppressed ideas and conspiracies from earlier Christian times. What continues to bend people out of shape about the former is the idea of a Jesus so human that he married and had children. Now, the Judas thing comes along to enlist support for just the opposite view, a view which denies his humanity altogether. That’s diversity for you. Any discomfort yet?