Christmas In The New Jerusalem

The Book of Revelation and I do not get along very well, theologically. Too much of it is devoted to depicting all the horrible things that are in store for people who do not pass muster with the Heavenly Authorities. In its gloating over others' soon to come punishments, hope gets swallowed up in terror, judgment crowds out love, and new creation almost vanishes from sight. That narratives like these might be read aloud in worship services, especially those with our grandchildren in attendance, should be appalling to contemplate.

Scattered through this mostly dreadful book, however, are images not of a world coming to its supposedly deserved end at the hands of a fed up God, but of a world as it should be, as it was meant to be, and as it will be, at the hands of an infinitely loving One. My favorite is the image of a coming holy city, within whose gates God will "have his dwelling with (human)kind." Death, grief, weeping, and pain will be no more, for the old order will have passed away. ( 21:2-4) There is a New Jerusalem to come, we are told, on earth and not just in heaven, whose center is God and peace, justice, and love its everlastingly sounding harmonies.

This is a truly breathtaking image, but one that seems out of place with almost everything that surrounds it in the book. The holy city it depicts is hard to appreciate in the context of a plan of salvation built around a final tallying up of accounts and a separating of the righteous from the unrighteousness for all eternity, accompanied by a wholesale obliterating of the earth in the here and now. Worse still, all of this is to happen long before God's already promised work of reconciling and transforming all of humankind remains unfinished. How can divinely wrought destruction on a cosmic scale, and perhaps even of the cosmos itself, possibly be thought of as anything but a failure on God's part, and on Christ's, to fulfill the central promise of The Book of Revelation, that all things are being made new? That the final destruction is just about to begin (evidently, we are supposed to keep on believing this, the passage of time to the contrary notwithstanding) makes God appear to be unfaithful to his own purposes and commitments.

A more sensible way of looking at humanity's future --- sensibly biblical, that is --- is to begin with the obvious fact that there is still a lot of work to be done on the part of our Creator to bring to pass what he had in mind "in the beginning" for all of us. Most probably, it occurred to him well before the morning and evening of the sixth day that the human race he was about to create might, in spite of his best intentions, become mired in mistrust that the created order would have enough in it to go around. And that its members might become consumed by fear and suspicion of others' schemes to grab more than their fair share of things. And that they might wind up making a life out of devious plotting on their own, driven by a finely tuned sense of entitlement, to cop all the provisions for themselves first. That the Creator, having stared these discouraging alternative scenarios squarely in the face, went ahead and finished his sixth day of work anyway, should tell us that he had already figured out how he was going to deal with them, and that his plan would be successful.

The plan? To keep working on us, lovingly, to bring about a change of heart that eventually will let fear and suspiciousness be overcome by gratitude, competition and aggression by sharing, and narcissism by self-sacrifice. This is the kind of plan that is going to require a lot of time to complete, much, much more time --- maybe the whole five billion years or so that earth has left before the sun fizzles out --- than a lot of rightous people apparently are willing to give it. For them, the rest of us have already had time enough to mend our ways, and God should simply quit taking his own sweet time about exacting his price for our not doing so. Basically, he should cut his losses quickly, salvage the few good souls that still remain in the world, set everyone else to genocidal conflict, and move on to alternative universes in which things might go better.

Evidently, though, the Creator has something else in mind. For one thing, a vulnerable baby, whom he trusted to become the kind of human being in whom the true holy city, New Jerusalem, would forever dwell, and through whom it can dwell in everyone. Life and light to all he brings, even now.

Muhammad Bears

Does anybody know whether the Chicago Bears have any of those free #87 jerseys left?

Now hold on, fellow Cowboys fans, and let me explain. The jersey offer to which I am referring showed up last month alongside the story on a media website about the Bears' 38-20 victory over the New York Giants. Recent events have drawn me back into that story a little, for reasons other than the help the win gave the Cowboys in their pursuit of a now safely locked up division title.

It is now worth pondering who got a lot of praise, high praise in fact, for the Bears' win that day. Number 87 on the squad is a twice-elected Pro-Bowler who caught seven passes against the Giants, for over 100 yards and a touchdown. His name is Muhain Muhammad. Replicas of his jersey that were offered for free carried on their fronts the number 87 and just the name "Muhammad." Just that name. On a football jersey.

About the time that all this was coming out of Chicago, a British teacher, Gillian Gibbons, who was teaching seven-year-olds in Khartoum, Sudan, had thrust upon her another playful use of the name Muhammad, this time in connection with a teddy bear brought to class by one of her students. Class members, apparently under the influence of the popularity of a schoolmate who bore the name, wanted to call the bear Muhammad, too. Ms. Gibbons went along with their choice, and then found out, too late, that this would become a big no-no in at least certain quarters of Muslim society. There, you can sire a thoroughly rotten son and still call him Muhammad, but you cannot make invidious comparisons between the Prophet and any of the other animals in the world, even pretend ones.

Ms. Gibbons barely escaped a brutal lashing and an extended imprisonment in Sudan for what was deemed her crime of "inciting religious hatred." The Sudanese Foreign Ministry referred to Ms. Gibbon's act as misconduct against the Islamic faith. (Say what?) Sudanese clerics condemned it as part of a Western plot against Islam in general. (Say what, what?) Even the Muslim Council of Britain, otherwise very positively disposed to Ms. Gibbons, would come to call her classroom action a "mistake." (Aw, come on now.)

We can only hope that while Ms. Gibbons is enjoying a much deserved rest back in England, there is at least one Sudanese seven-year-old who can still cuddle her teddy bear with the wrong name and not worry about somehow putting a rip in the fabric of the cosmos for doing so. But we can be sure that there is one sweaty football player still being allowed to enjoy his highly praised name's being run through washing machines all over Chicago Beardom by those fortunate enough to be able to wear their own #87 jerseys without impunity. And that there will be other bearers of the name Muhammad, bad as well as good, all over the world for all the time to come.

The more I read about The Prophet of Islam, the easier it is for me to like him, and to get really ticked off at so many of his followers who fail to appreciate the sublime quality of his humanness, and who substitute their own humorlessness, ill-temperedness, and viciousness for it. The child-loving Muhammad I have come to know would have immediately gotten beyond whatever negativities his culture attached to real live bears, and cherished any child's treasuring her pretend bear's bearing his name. Just as the business-savvy Muhammad would have appreciated both the commercial and the human value of rewarding one of his real-life name-bearers with a little more than the normal fifteen-minute allotment of worldly fame.

I wonder what has happened to the Christian presence at Ms. Gibbon's school in Khartoum. It was originally founded by Christians groups, but now has an enrollment that is 90% Muslim. And that is fine. But what isn't fine is the continuing attacks on Christians by Muslim extremists for speaking of Jesus and God in the same breath, in contrast to the "purer" faith of Islam that extols the humanity and not the divinity of its own Prophet. It makes no sense to honor Muhammad's humanity and then permit no physical representations of him, ostensibly because his perfection is that of the unrepresentable Allah Himself. And while we are on this subject, I have a really big problem with protecting The Prophet from being pulled into the world of physical representations, while affixing his very name to as many Muslim offspring as a family unit will permit.

Where better place to have aired out issues like this than at Unity High, Khartoum, rather than in a courtroom presided over by a besieged, even if wise, judge? In our dreams, perhaps.

The Idea Of A Second Coming

An early Christian hymn, which Paul incorporated into his letter to the Philippians, told of a man who had all of God's own completeness in him, who nonetheless put himself utterly and sacrificially at the disposal of others, ultimately at the cost of his own very human life. He humbled himself, even to the point of placing himself in bondage to others' needs, hopes, and animosities. And he died because his commitment to obey God's will left him no room for compromises.

Possibly in Aramaic, more likely in Greek, the hymn sang of God's exaltation of Jesus, his raising Jesus "to the heights," and bestowing upon him the name before which "every knee should bow" because and precisely because he did not count equality with God something either to be held onto or grasped for. It was because he made himself nothing in comparison with God that he became the Jews' Messiah and the world's Savior. Although this consideration may be the most important in all of Christian moral theology, it seems to be the one most often missed by Jesus' followers. It was not easy to tolerate juxtaposing the humiliation of Jesus' death with the humility of Jesus' life.

Even though Jesus' life and ministry made plain from the beginning that his servanthood and his humiliation would be inextricably bound for all eternity, hardly anyone from his time and thereafter have shown much by way of gratitude to Jesus' God for arranging his son's life this way. The way things were supposed to go, according to theology at least --- Jewish and Christian theology alike --- was that when he finally gets here, the Messiah/Savior will hardly be the bearer of a divinely-embodied weakness. Rather, he will be a conduit only for God's power and righteousness, and he will employ both to overcome all worldly powers and all human sinfulness, and to bring about a final separation of good and evil, either for the sake of a kingdom of the godly on earth or as part of earth's annihilation and the raising of God's chosen to eternal life beyond time and history altogether.

To say the least, a good bit seems to have gone wrong with the idea of bringing all of this off with the help of Jesus of Nazareth. As a deliverer of his people, David's track record was better, as was Moses'. The Jews expected either a David revividus or a Son of Man coming on the clouds, and got instead an entombed criminal. The Gentiles expected a Savior from highest heaven, and got instead the lowliest of the low on the rungs of status and success. Not even the resurrection of Jesus seems to have helped all that much in assuaging his earliest followers' sense of bewilderment and defeat. After all, the risen Lord soon left them all behind for heaven.

For a while at least, Pentecost proved promising. With Peter's help, many began to understand their renewed energy as a sign of Jesus' very presence in their midst. Soon, though, energy flagged, a sign of presence became a sign of absence, and the idea took root that it was going to take a second coming to overcome the failure of the first. Then, in between killing time by putting together the kind of church organization that held zero interest for Jesus himself, his followers fixed their attention not so much on helping people find their lives by losing them but on figuring out when Jesus would make it back and who other than themselves would be left behind this time.

It used to be that Christmas sales and TV commercials before Thanksgiving were the chief obstacles I had to face in opening my heart to Jesus before Santa Claus could make it down our chimney. More recently, what has gotten most in the way of my remembering Jesus' first coming is the obsessiveness with which people who should know better are preaching his second. I get what the first Advent was all about: sacrificial love. And I really have been trying to make it the theme of my own life, as I know it was the theme of Jesus'. The big difference between the two of us is that my successes are few, and his were total.

Or maybe that I brag on all of mine, and he bragged on none of his. Pretty obviously, I and most of the rest of us have a long way to go in coming to terms with Jesus' first coming. It may be, of course, that God has been holding off an already decided upon second coming until we get the first one right. I kind of think, though, that when we finally do get our response to the first Advent right, there will be no need of a second at all.

Post-Denominationalism

Between orientation meetings and worship services my first week of seminary, I managed to squeeze in a reading of H. Richard Niebuhr's classic study, The Social Sources of Denominationalism. Two among its many important points still stand out prominently. The first is that social and economic struggles had as much to do with the development of Protestant denominations as theology did, and even more with Protestant Christians' choices of denominational affiliation. I was especially struck by Niebuhr's laconic application of this point to Methodism.

Early Methodists, Niebuhr began, exhibited an especially strong passion both for improving the condition of the poor and for teaching methodical living in both the spiritual and the mundane spheres of life. He then observed that by accomplishing the former so effectively through the latter, the Methodist movement raised up successful, even wealthy people who then found members of lower economic and social classes increasingly distasteful and turned to high steeple hob-nobbing and ministering to the poor with checks more than personal presence. This description pertains to most of mainline Protestantism today as much as it does to the Wesleyan tradition.

Niebuhr's first point left me mildly embarrassed to be an upwardly-aspiring Methodist surrounded by seminarians who quite clearly had a better grasp of God's good news to the poor than I did. His second point left me in outright shock: denominationalism, he wrote, is sinful in its very essence. Why? Primarily because the loyalty that denominations demand of their members typically wafts toward their own leaders and programs and away from Jesus's mission to the world on God's behalf.

Not too long after finishing this deeply troubling book, I dropped by Mr. Niebuhr's office (I chose the seminary I did partly because he was on its faculty) to confess some of my own denominationalist obsessions, and to see if he thought there was any hope for me. Gently and with good humor, he told me that the sin of denominationalism was serious, but not unforgiveable. Then, and somewhat gravely, he said that I would not overcome it easily.

How prescient my much revered professor was. I still let myself get sucked into the quadrennial swirls of episcopal elections as if the future of Christendom were at stake. And I still get caught up in fending off ever more strident efforts of General Conference's ill-informed to tell people out of plumb with their own favorite social principle to get lost, as if intelligent Christians do not follow the dictates of their own consciences anyway. And then there is all the hot button pushing to get as many United Methodist churches --- they have to be Methodist --- started or re-built on grander scales as quickly as possible, the immediate needs of society's sick, poor, helpless, and hopeless be damned.

A lot of people have been struggling to break out of denominationalism's thrall for some time now, and in dramatic numbers have set about the creation of nondenominational churches they believe to be the only proper habitat for communities of believers that profess true apostolicity. Even people who have chosen to remain in their denominationally-affiliated churches are quietly eliminating as many public references to their wider connections as they can from their signs, their stationery, and even their spiritual practices. Their hope seems to be that the taint of their corporate past can still be eradicated before it is too late.

For hard-wired denominationalists, the really big tragedy in the church nowadays is that mainline membership continues to decline. Their non-denominationalist counterparts are sometimes equally tunnel-visioned, only for them the light at the end of the tunnel is merely that their own growth makes up for losses among the established denominational churches. For neither group it appears to matter much that the world God loves continues to be ruthlessly exploited, that the human race God loves continues to be recklessly partitioned into haves and have-nots, saved and damned, or that the future God presents on the far side of grace, mercy, and forgiveness continues to be deformed into utopian visions concocted and imposed only by the most powerful and self-serving among us. What matters more seems to be how packed the pews are on Sundays, even if much of the crowding is accomplished by stealing away the membership of other churches.

As both H. Richard Niebuhr and his more famous brother Reinhold knew well, human sinfulness eventually affects --- actually, infects --- every kind of human organization, and that looking to some new way of doing business as a way of absolving ourselves from messing up an old one only ensures that the new will be swallowed up all over again by the old. New things under the sun there are, but nondenominationalism is not one of them. It is just as sinful as denominationalism is, in the same ways as denominationalism is. And it is so because its constituency is just as sinful as we are.

Speeding Up Jesus' Return

One belief that many Jews and Christians share in common is that when the Jewish people finally reassemble in what is a Holy Land for both religions, the Messiah will return and usher in God's Kingdom. From this conviction, though, others spin in very different directions within both groups, often leaving in their trails a dangerous mixture of confusion, over-zealousness, mutual suspicion, and even full-blown hostility. Making things even more complicated is the fact that there is still another group, the Palestinians, with a stake in determining whose land it is going to be when all this takes place, and that right now this group is having difficulty getting either a word or a bullet in edgewise.

As if all of this has not made the present situation in the Holy Land sufficiently volatile already, add to it the long-standing commitment of the U.S. government to the massive support of Israel --- not only of her existence, but of her conquests as well --- in the interest of having a democratic presence in the Middle East. It is a good thing that this commitment has recently been getting a going-over, and that the idea of a separate Palestinian state is finally receiving the consideration it deserves, even to the point of acknowledging that a Palestinian state that does not include East Jerusalem is hardly a Palestinian state at all. But this latter idea is not without its own problems on the strange religious terrain that Israel's orthodox Jews and the Gentile world's millennialist Christians currently occupy together. If the Mount of Olives, where the Messiah may return, winds up controlled completely by Muslim-minded, or even secular-minded Palestinian authorities, it would seem that he may have to apply for a visa before landing there for his last journey to earth.

One of the things that puzzles me most about the hurry-up project to get as many Jews back home as possible, to a land whose resources cannot possibly support the return of all of them, is the naïve openness of so many Jews to accept the kind of help that shaky and flakey Christians have been all too willing to offer them. A case in point: Christians United for Israel, a pro-Israel lobbying group whose leaders act like they are on a first name basis not only with the members of the Trinity, but of the Congress and the White House staff as well. On the one hand, this outfit is a gift horse into whose mouth it is hard to imagine at least some Jews wanting to look for very long. On the other, looks can be deceiving; what looks like a horse may actually be a larger than normal hog, and a very hungry one to boot.

What this organization actually roots around in are the slops of a theological outlook from which Jews interested in preserving not only their integrity but their spiritual destiny should be turning away without the slightest glance backward, precisely like Lot's wife did not. Only a little oversimplified, the outlook with which Christians United for Israel are identified is one which sees things roughly this way: as soon as Jews the world over have returned to Israel, Jesus, who has really been their Messiah all along, and contrary to what their Rabbis have been teaching them for two millennia, will meet them on the Mount of Olives and in their presence usher in their long-awaited Kingdom --- at least, the Kingdom of those who confess him to be their Messiah and renounce any further waiting around for anyone else. Actually, there will be no more time for anybody to wait for anything. There and then, only believers in Jesus as the Christ will have any future worth having. Everyone else the world over, Jews and Gentiles alike, will be damned forever.

In the light of what Christians for Israel really stand for theologically, their organization's noble-sounding pronouncements about the importance of "protecting" Israel, and their sacrificial giving in the name of worthy social causes and of promoting further immigration to this essentially Jewish state, are not only hypocritical. In their seductiveness, they are expressive of what is in fact a profound disrespect of the Jewish people in their Jewishness, and of a disturbing unwillingness to let God, and God alone, be the final judge of who may enter his Kingdom and who may not. One thing that Jews can be certain of about Christians for Israel is that those under its real protection are the Christians, and not the Jews. Getting as many Jews as possible back to Israel, soon, is in this organization's mind the quickest way for good things to begin happening, exclusively, to Christians.

The Freedom To Express Hate

It is hard to imagine the Founding Fathers anticipating just how far we would eventually push our freedom to express whatever might be in our hearts and minds at any given moment. Many of them were rightly suspicious of their fellow human beings, enough to build into the Constitution all kinds of blocks to using power for purposes of self-aggrandizement. But they also believed that, in most instances at least, civility would triumph over impulsivity, that destructive feelings and attitudes could generally be tempered by rational discourse, that most people understood the difference between talking about doing bad things and actually doing them, and that it is generally a good idea to put voluntary limits on our expressions of feeling and thinking by cultivating a mindfulness of what serves our own and others' needs most constructively.

These thoughts came to mind the other day as I listened to a local radio station while coming back from teaching a class, and was told I had only two minutes to wait before the "noon flip-off," a time opened to listeners who wanted to call in and rail against whomever, for whatever reason, in pretty much any tone of voice and with almost any words they chose. Curious about what kinds of calls would come in, I kept the dial steady for a while, and actually heard a few well-argued complaints rather than just fulminations. For the most part, though, blowing off steam seemed the order of the day, and eventually I decided to exercise my own right to do a flip-off, by switching to the classical music I should have been listening to in the first place.

There is a lot of blowing off steam going on these days, far more, I think, than the Founding Fathers could have anticipated. The good thing about the eruptions is whatever may be harmful about them usually ends up dissipated into the air. The bad thing is that whatever may be valuable in them suffers the same fate. What I would like to think about the blowhards themselves is that more often than not they are left with an affective emptiness that they might be willing to begin filling with thought. Putting feelings in their place at least temporarily, they could get down to the business of what is really bothering them, whether their complaints have anything to them, whether they point to conditions about which all of us ought to be concerned, and whether, together, we might begin the really hard work of doing something about them, instead of merely blowing off more steam, and flipping more people off.

I am not as optimistic as many of the Founding Fathers were about the possibility of transforming the power of anger and outrage into the kind of thinking that ensures lasting change for the better. But I am still convinced that attaching the transformers to the synapses of anyone who will let us do it, beginning with ourselves, is still the best hope we have of making our God-given, Constitutionally-ratified freedom to express ourselves work in the way that it is supposed to work. One thing that made me especially frustrated as I listened to people flipping off each other the other day was that I could not get close enough to any of them even to begin to find out who and what they were really flipping off. In most cases, it could not have been who and what they were telling us; their feelings were far too intense, and their mental states far too confused, for their flip-offs to be taken at face value.

As are those of the noose-hangers around the country these days. Apparently, they have been at it for some time; most of us simply have not been paying sufficient attention, anymore than I have been paying attention to Confederate flags waving in my face, except to let them annoy me for a nanosecond or two. It may be that we are going to have to stand up more explicitly for Old Glory if the specter of a not yet completely buried Confederacy keeps on rearing its very, very ugly head. But for sure we are going to have to start untying nooses whenever we find them, and put the ropes to more useful work, like pulling people out of the poverty, discrimination, and diseases in which we have forced them to languish for far too long.

Standing up for our flag and untying nooses, however, cannot mean burning others' flags and hanging people with their own nooses. If we are to get anywhere with either, we will have to find out more about what the wrong kind of flag and the wrong use of rope is really expressing in the lives of those who are running so far afoul of Jesus' cautions against calling anyone a fool.

The Jena Tree

As weary as many people must be in Jena, Louisiana of outsiders messing with their lives, it is not likely that they will be free of their stunned and outraged critics any time soon. A genuinely repentant District Attorney might help, or at least a judge or two. Not to mention white barbers who will cut blacks' hair without anyone else's having to make a federal case for it. As for deep-down change on the part of the all-their-lives racists in the community, however, little if anything is likely to make much difference for a long time, Al Sharpton to the contrary notwithstanding. But the very worst thing that could happen to, and that could come out of, Jena would be for its critics, within and beyond, to give up trying.

My personal vision of reconciliation in Jena had a tree at its center, with the whole town standing under its branches, in the charred remains of their burnt-out school, spreading out across the school property and beyond as necessary, but also squeezing close enough together to sing and pray as one voice --- old and young, blacks and whites, parents and politicians. If Kum Bah Yah hadn't already been flipped off by the know nothings of a generation younger than mine, I would have written it into my ideal scenario as much the more realistic accompaniment than We Shall Overcome.

The tree I had in mind in my vision was the tree where all of Jena's troubles began. It was a 20-year-old oak, lovingly planted, sheltering more and more kids as it gained height and as its branches slowly spread wider and wider. Although pretty young for an oak, it had already become a lovely tree; who wouldn't have wanted to nestle under it? The problem, of course, was that the kids who did nestle were only its school's white kids. The black kids had to stand, sit, and otherwise congregate in the sun, the dirt, and the winds. At least until one of them had the temerity to ask a school official if it would be all right to sit under the tree. Encouraged by the official's response, the kid invited some of his friends to join him. And the rest is sordid history: nooses on the tree's limbs, mutually traded insults, a beating, accusations, arrests, jail, and obscene assurances that people in Jena are all just good ol' boys at heart, with nary a prejudiced gene in their double helixes.

By the end of the summer, my vision for Jena was no more. Here's how it almost died. Apparently, some of the big shots at the school where all the nastiness began came belatedly to the conclusion that it was time to dissipate the force-field of hostility and hatred that had enveloped their school and their town. It is not clear whether their primary motivation was the best interest of the students or merely keeping the protestors out of town, but at least they showed a willingness to begin addressing the issues head-on. Well, not quite. Most people committed to ensuring justice believe that a good way of working toward it is to get and keep people talking to each other, respectfully and sensitively. What this not so very august body of leaders did, instead, was to hire a timber company to chop the Jena tree down for firewood.

It is difficult to fathom just what the thinking might have been that went into this awesomely incredible plan. (I would call the plan's immediate consequence immoral, but I realize that we have not yet succeeded in extending the scope of our moral actions very far into even the animal kingdom, much less to plants. The latter will just have to keep on handling things on their own for a while.) No tree, therefore, no nooses? No congregating, therefore, no place for fresh hostilities to break out? Make a little money for the school by selling pieces of the felled tree for souvenirs? If thy tree is a source of offense to thee, pluck it up? I can hear all the answers now: "we were only trying to help."

In that Jena schoolyard, the blows that felled what now has become my tree were blows struck for a truly perverse kind of justice. It is the kind of justice that, when believed impossible to render everyone, is denied anyone. It is the kind of justice that is blind to human beings' genuine needs, pressing problems, and God-given capacities to deal with both, constructively and together. But you know what, Jena? Your tree is still alive, because peoples' vision for you still is. How about we keep tending both?

God And The Lottery

And then there was the fellow who complained all the time about his bad luck, and thrust his fist skyward to ask why the Almighty had not helped him win the lottery. He pressed his question for months, and finally the answer came. One afternoon, he heard a voice coming out of gathering storm clouds: "Harry, buy a ticket."

Of all the theologically-toned lottery leg-pulling I have witnessed over the years, this particular back of the knees kick has been my favorite. At least until recently. After winning hugely in a nation-wide lottery, a Wicca practitioner (witchcraft, that is) has been quoted as saying that he didn't know which one of the gods fulfilled his wish to be a big winner, but that he was grateful to whomever. I love thinking about the pressure his doxology could put on folks who are into forging connections between having Jesus as their Savior and prospering mightily in life. Their God seems to have some catching up to do.

Without getting ponderous about the functions that humor in general serves in our psyches --- I once had a doctoral student do a really fine thesis on this subject which, nevertheless, wound up pretty unfunny to both of us --- I think that we can figure out at least something of why we keep listening to all these mediocre jabs about an institution that is neither all that amusing in itself nor all that worthy of the efforts we make to keep it alive and well in our communities. We all know that God is about more important things than fixing lotteries on probably the only planet in the universe with inhabitants playful enough to create them. But deep in some peoples' heart of hearts, there is a part of them that not only believes it credible to wish for the transcendental fix to be in, but to expect the Big Fixer to open up a parking space at the convenience store when they want to scoop up the winning ticket. What hilarious relief it is to know that we are not like those people.

Or at least not altogether like them. I myself do pray for birdie putts to fall every now and then, but I always do it under my breath, and I promise to take the full credit for sinking them myself, should any ever happen to drop. This way I can keep at least the appearance of theological integrity intact. I can also keep at bay any nagging worry that might ensue over what God might have been neglecting elsewhere while readjusting blades of grass four feet ahead of my golf ball's path toward the hole.

Recently I participated in a meeting to discuss implementation issues surrounding the new Religious Freedom for Schoolchildren bill passed by the Texas Legislature. As important as the issue is that it addresses, the legislation itself borders on the superfluous, as do a lot of the comments in support of it that I have heard since the meeting. One is a real rib-tickler. A parent wanted to make sure that students from the host schools of football games would retain the right to pray publically that God would be on their teams' side. When asked about providing an opportunity for the visitors' prayers also to be expressed, she said that they will have their chance at other times, when they are the hosts. What makes these words a laughing matter, of course, is how ludicrous this parent looks, compared with how sage I look to myself. She almost makes me forget my own desperate prayers to Holy Wisdom to get me through a few final examinations by pumping into my head on the spot the data I never got around to digging out on my own.

On balance, I think we are far better off looking with humor at the trivializing of divine providence than we are kicking righteous indignation into gear at the first sign of losing perspective on it. For the trivializing is all on our part, and not God's, and beneath its surface are not so very funny doubts about whether the maker of the heavens and the earth does indeed have better things in mind for us than we can come up with ourselves. Making light of the doubts may seem like a strange way to deal with them. But for getting beyond them, there is nothing like perspective, the kind of perspective to which, sometimes, only humor can lead us. Have you heard the one about the fellow who presumed to think that there is a God who is mindful of us?

The Spiritual Desolation Of Mother Teresa

The Gospels of Mark and Matthew convey a disturbingly candid portrait of Jesus' spiritual torments during his last hours on earth. According to their accounts, he was terrifyingly alone in the Garden of Gethsemene while oblivious disciples slept. And he was despairingly alone on the cross while uncomprehending antagonists mocked. In Luke's Gospel and John's, it is as if this portrait had proved too much for many in the early church to bear. Luke mitigates Jesus' suffering in the garden by giving him an angel for comfort and strength; John removes the element of agony altogether from the scene; and both Gospels present a triumphant Jesus on the cross. The net result of these greatly varied images is the knowledge that the Savior of the World did indeed experience abandonment by God, as so many of his followers would through the centuries, but that he had to endure the experience for only a few hours.

Now we are learning that one of Jesus' very purest followers in our own time experienced what he did in his, but not for just a few hours. By her own words, she experienced Jesus' cut-offness from God across the whole of her life of service to him. I think Mother Teresa deserved better. And if her church were not so heaven-bent on getting her elevated to sainthood --- a worthy striving, to be sure; if this beautiful woman doesn't deserve sainthood, who does? --- we might be hearing less about the commonality of her spiritual travail among saints in general. Cheeriness about Teresa's normalcy as a doubter seems to me a little disrespectful of the uniqueness, to her, of her heart-rending struggle. So my question in all this is not about whether her doubts will derail her canonization. It is about what to think of a God whose son promised that all we have to do is ask, but who Himself seemed so intentional about denying the one thing this loyal servant so poignantly said she needed from Him.

Yes, it may be that Mother Teresa herself contributed to at least part of her own sense of abandonment, through giving less credence than she might have given to the two deeply mystical encounters with Christ that apparently she did have. Early in her life, Teresa wrote, she heard Christ speak the words "Come be my light" directly to her, and her mission to India was born. Ten years later, she entered a glorious period of re-experiencing God's (Christ's?) presence in her life, and then --- nothing. But why --- and here I am trying to ask this out of as much pastoral sensitivity as I am capable of --- were these very powerful, very real encounters not enough for her? Might she have compounded her own distress by choosing simply to keep on asking for too much? Many truly faithful people I know have found it possible to remain faithful to God and Christ without experiencing anything remotely close to even one personal encounter with either.

And yes, signs of a very deep trust in God were all around Mother Teresa, just as I believe they are around these Christian friends of mine. That Teresa could yearn for validating encounters with Christ across the whole of her life and ministry, and yet not abandon her commitments when they were not forthcoming, clearly shows her to be a woman of faith, whatever may have been the terms with which she chose to describe herself to her superiors and confessors. Just as Jesus, in Luke's phrasing, set his face resolutely toward Jerusalem to die, Teresa set hers obediently toward Calcutta to help others live, and it is for their respective acts that both will remain especially honored by God through all eternity. Sometimes, it would seem, St. Paul to the contrary notwithstanding, people do get saved by their works as completely as they do by their faith.

But still, the picture I have for years held in my mind of that sweet, tough little woman, lighting up life with her smiles while protecting all of us from having to face the despair that lay behind them, has haunted me and will continue to haunt me for the rest of my days. The absence of the experience of God is surely one of the most profound deprivations with which any human being should ever have to deal in this life. Except, perhaps, the experience of the absence of Him. Better to have loved God and lost Him than never to have loved Him at all? My mind says yes, but my heart is not so sure.

Another Kind Of Adultery

Toward the end of a course on professional ethics I had been teaching for pastoral counselors in training, one of the members reported on a recently completed session that she said had unnerved her to the point of making her dread its follow-up. Her case unnerved all of us, too, partly because at the time none of us, myself included, had dealt with anything like it. Over the years to come, all of us would be dealing with cases like it in abundance.

Our colleague's counselee was a 32 year old avowedly hetereosexual man who was terrified that his wife would discover his sexual activity outside the marriage relationship --- with a series of men --- and leave him. The more the man disclosed about himself, the more committed he seemed to be to his marriage, the less homosexually oriented he appeared to be, the more defensive he was about the innocence of his one night stands, and the more confused his therapist became, to some extent about her pre-conceived notions of what homosexuality is, but more especially about where her professional responsibility in this case lay. Whatever the course of treatment, her obligation to protect confidential disclosures would remain binding. However, the man's behavior was putting his wife at risk, and the counselor was feeling more identification with the partner who was not in therapy than with the partner who was.

With this case, and some of my own that soon followed, I first began my research into the psychologically murky waters of casual, gay sexual activity engaged in by men who are neither homosexual nor bi-sexual in orientation, and who see no reason why their behaviors should undermine their intimate and often deeply committed heterosexual relationships. I am no less startled by what I find in the literature now than I was then. For one thing, this pattern of behavior is disturbingly widespread. The Centers for Disease Control puts the number of straight men who often engage in secret sexual activity with other men at 3 million plus. In one recent survey, 10% of all the married men who participated reported engaging in same-sex behavior the previous year.

And secondly, most people who are writing about this issue continue to focus on therapeutic strategy rather than on ethical reflection. Typically, the discussions revolve around helping straight men whose forays into gay sex have become a problem to explore unresolved conflicts from childhood as the root of at least part of it, and to do this in an atmosphere of non-judgmental, empathic, supportive responses on the part of the therapist, with the patient's well-being and no one else's the principal concern throughout. Therapeutically speaking, the problem comes down to helping their clients appreciate the potentially self-destructive consequences of their activities, and on the basis of that insight-based appreciation, modify them in a healthier direction.

Ethically speaking, though, the problem lies elsewhere. As my supervisee pointed out in our group clearly and passionately, a husband who fools around with other men puts his wife at serious risk for life-threatening diseases, and a counselor who does not somehow (the big question is always: How?) intervene on her behalf is guilty of a serious moral offense, whatever her obligation may be to confidentiality as a standard of care. Gay men, of course, are not the only transmitters of AIDS in the population; a husband committing adultery with another woman also puts his wife at risk. Any and every kind of extra-marital sexual activity --- whether gay, lesbian, heterosexual, with one accomplice or many, in one night stands or in long-term relationships --- threatens the health of the marriage partner. But it also threatens the integrity of the marriage relationship to the core and compromises, sometimes fatally, the character of one who pledges himself or herself to another and then breaks the pledge by not keeping only to the other sexually.

Once upon a time, couples whose marriages were faltering because of adultery usually conceded that for the marriage to survive, the messing around had to stop. Further, most couples whose marriages did survive came to a deeper grasp of the reasons why this is so. Right now, though, it is unclear to me whether men who are adulterating their marriages by having sex with other men are at all cognizant of what the moral foundation of marriage is all about. I do know that what passes for therapy with this population is pretty discouraging on this score. My specific concern here opens out on a more general one, about the massive erosion across our culture of the understanding that committed relationships are intended to serve moral ends even more than utilitarian ones.

What's Right About The New Atheism

Several years before some of my former classmates would be heading to Woodstock, I spent a memorable Holy Week with a bunch of fellow preachers on a Florida beach, striking up conversations with kids willing to pause long enough in their chugging to do a little praying. The evenings were spent under a big tent in the sand, engaging in coffee-house style give and take on, of all things, the question of what may have happened to God. That week, TIME magazine had put out its famous --- or infamous, depending upon your point of view --- feature, front page and all, of the really big God-is-dead kahuna of that generation, Thomas J.J. Altizer. And neither the magazine nor church folk in general were giving him an even break.

A year later, in connection with my work as a denominational chaplain on a state university campus, Tom and I got it on in front of the student body, and then of local clergy, and I revelled in the experience of listening to people who really understood what the "radical theology" agenda of that generation was all about. It was primarily about, well, theology. Not God, but human statements about God, especially the misstatements.

Altizer, along with Richard Rubenstein, and to a lesser extent Paul van Buren and Harvey Cox, were working overtime to help us understand how many things were wrong about the traditional idea of God that Christian theology had been transmitting for centuries, and to develop a sense of zeal about replacing it with a better one. As a group, what they were after was a new conceptualization that would respect the dynamic, changing essence of deity, that would close the gap between divinity and humanity in the direction of the former, that would substitute hard thinking for mushy doxology in the face of the problem of evil, and that would help people make peace with an increasingly secular society. Altizer and Rubenstein confused things a lot with their sloganesque, "God is dead" talk. But "classical theism" had been dead for a good while, and they knew it.

In the light of this brief bit of nostalgia, perhaps it will come as no surprise that I have been delighting in the break-outs of atheistic thinking in today's popular (actually, wildly popular) writing. For one thing, this generation's final four --- Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Bennett --- are every bit as captivating as the Altizer gang was, and behind their bombast, carefully calibrated of course to produce record royalties in durationless time, there is the same trenchant and important critique of traditional ideas about God that need just as much correcting as they did two generations ago. Further, what these guys have been writing is a whole lot better for our mental health than what we have been getting from most of their ranting and raving opponents.

As each of these writers in his own way points out, what the world needs now is anything but violence-inciting mythologies, crammed down peoples' intercessory prayers by authoritarian religious establishments hell-bent on doing in anyone and everyone with a different religious coding in their DNA. And what the church needs now is anything but the kind of anti-intellectualism, especially in the form of biology-bashing, that has been losing the more thoughtful of us friends in the secular marketplace for decades. Galileo, finally, is in, but Darwin is still taking his lumps, and that is just downright embarrassing. If you aren't cringing about creationism now decked out in the fancy language of intelligent design, read Natalie Angier's chapter on evolutionary biology in her delightful new book, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.

On Easter Sunday those forty years ago, I got asked by a number of my fellow parishioners why, in their word, I chose to "dignify" all those Spring Break shenanigans by showing up on a littered beach with my religious t-shirt on. When I went on to tell about a Good Friday night marathon discussion under our packed tent on the beach, with the death not of Christ, but of God, as the theme, several of them freaked out. I began to see that their take on evangelism was a good bit different from mine. For them, good Christians simply do not give the time of day to God-deniers. For me, the only way to get a hearing for the truth about God at all is to be willing to take all the time in the world with them. Anybody for whom that truth is either not news at all, or not the kind of news that portends good for anybody, is missing a lot from life. And that is something every lover of God should be concerned about.

Taking Some Of The Fight Out Of A Fighting Word

The old adage, that sticks and stones break bones but words never hurt, is only half right. Sometimes, words hurt even more. Mispronounce or misspell one in literate company, and you may never recover from the sudden revelation of what to others' jaded eyes is now your defective upbringing, education, mindfulness, or all three. Use one among perceptive and caring people to curse or to let off steam at others' expense, and your eyes may quickly become the only jaded ones in the group. Let someone in on your most sensitive spots, and the very word you most dread to hear about yourself may become your permanent nickname.

And drop the wrong one into an otherwise pleasant conversation, and the temperature in the room may turn fiery faster than the liquid in the punchbowl can turn tepid. Lately, I seem to have been doing a lot of this kind of word-dropping, and the reactions I have been getting have me on the verge of making things worse by throwing in yet another word: Grow up. (Okay, two words.) I admit it: it is bugging me that several words especially on my mind these days have become so alienating to clear thinking and responsible decision-making.

Here is one of them: amnesty. I like this word. And because I do, I have been spending more time on the hot seat than I believe I should, even among fellow Christians whose working vocabulary should be putting it into play often. I readily grant that opening up any of the issues that cluster around this not so gentle word can produce diatribe as well as edification, and that it is no wonder that even best friends may fear putting too much pressure on their relationships by getting into them. But the intensity of the charge that the word carries is directly proportional to the importance of the issues to which it points.

Consider for a moment what happens to the pursuit of humane treatment of illegal immigrants in this country --- assuming, of course, that even "illegals" have a right to such --- when references to amnesty first begin to surface in the discussions. A sometimes vicious polarization quickly sets up, between people for whom what the word stands for in this context is anathema, and people for whom it is essential. In the twitching of an eye, otherwise promising proposals for immigration reform are cast into outer darkness, along with their advocates, solely on the ground that somehow, somewhere, some "illegals" just might receive some form of amnesty --- or that they will not.

If we could pull it off, it would surely be better to set this particular word aside for a while and go straight to the heart of the trouble it generates by substituting for it the word "forgiveness." Trying and even failing to effect such a change might sober up at least the professing Christians in the current debate on immigration reform. At the very least, it could bring them face to face with one of the deepest problems of living out the faith with integrity: reconciling a universal obligation to forgive even our enemies with the God-given freedom to choose not to.

On the one hand, we do not have to forgive anybody for being in this country illegally, or for bringing them here illegally, or for hiring them illegally, or even for denying them the benefits their taxes are helping pay for. We can choose to do so, however, in each of these cases and others besides, in only some or one of them, acknowledging along the way that every choice we make --- whether to forgive or not to forgive --- will have consequences for which God expects us to take responsibility. Fighting against policy proposals built around ideals of forgiveness and reconciliation, though, can only continue to contaminate the search for genuine reform. That there will be amnesty in some form is surely beyond cavil. What kind, to whom, and under what conditions are the issues, and using this word as another kind of N-word, or L (for "liberal") word, only delays the necessary reckoning with these issues that sooner or later will have to come.

Yes, we can choose not to cut any illegal immigrant any break ever. But then we will have to figure out how else to tender the forgiveness that God has made it clear we owe them, and everyone else besides. And we cannot hope to get in place anything that is genuinely reforming about our current immigration policies and their enforcement --- actually, their lack of enforcement --- until it becomes clearer to us than it now is that we dare not let amnesty become swallowed up in judgment.

Being Reasonable About the Bible

Of all the rational arguments against the God of the Bible, I think the most powerful is still that of the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume. As elegant as it is simple, the gist of his argument went like this: an all-powerful and supremely benevolent Creator should have made a better job of putting together a universe hospitable to humans than he appears to have done with this one. Not surprisingly, Hume's views on this subject (and on others besides) were so threatening to Scottish society that instead of making him a professor, the guys running the University of Edinburgh stuck him as far back in their library as they could and had him work some of its operations from there.

Atheists of more recent vintage are making out a lot better than Hume did. By way of examples, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens are selling like Starbucks in snow flurries, their products as overpriced as the coffee, while Hume's most important reflections on religion had to await publication until after his death. Just as Hume did, Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens trade heavily on inept-inventor and failed-mechanic images of God. Hume, however, did it with subtlety, while these writers, Harris especially, come across as just plain grouchy. It seems to make them only mad, soooooo mad, that the Almighty may not have done his best by us. For Hume, the possibility that God learned enough from the experience to go on and make a better universe somewhere else was more a matter for humor, and even a little sadness, than it was for anger.

To give credit where credit is due, these new atheists are adding one other objection to the Bible's God that most reasonable people at least consider adding, even though it is one that Hume himself touched upon only briefly. The objection is that the world's allegedly great monotheistic religions have not made their followers actually better people. This is a hard fact to dispute, but the conclusion that many atheists often draw from it isn't. For them, the preponderance of sinners among the religious makes religion itself sinful and therefore worthy of being discarded. But staying away from church just because it is full of sinners makes no more sense than staying away from hospitals because there are sick people in them.

Paradoxically, the gap between believing in God and being godly both challenges and confirms monotheism's credibility. Facing up to our failures honestly can make Jews, Christians, and Muslims even more appreciative of a singularly important truth about human nature that the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qu'ran alike affirm as the central problem with which every religion sooner or later must deal. It is this: all --- the most religious, the least religious, and everyone in between --- fall short of the glory of God. In each of these faiths, the solution to the problem is the same: find in the scriptures the God who is truly worthy of being followed, separate Him/Her from the pack of lesser, deceiver gods that populate the pages of these same scriptures, and stop hoarding God's prerogatives for ourselves.

As Hume saw, and patiently expounded, and as Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens see and impatiently declaim, there is much about the Bible that defies reason and good sense. Many of its passages are about a jealous, vindictive, tribal deity whose own actions eviscerate any authority he once might have had to demand perfection from anyone else. (You still think Abraham's willingness to sacrifice a son was a model for faith?) Even more speak of a divine governance that reaches down as far as the number of hairs on our heads, only to be ground down by modern science's clearly superior methodology for explaining how things work, even if the whys and the wherefores still fall within the provenance of faith. (You still think the facts which evolutionary biology explains are not facts at all?)

Maybe one of the reasons that the New Atheism is attracting so much attention is that so many are so fed up with religious right-wingers everywhere, for whom the words of their respective scriptures --- all of the words, and only those particular words --- constitute the last word about anything and everything on earth and in heaven. Reasonable Jews, Christians, and Muslims have always known better than to restrict the Word of God to the words of written texts and then to insulate those texts from further examination. Pursuing the examination is, of course, risky; it can even lead to ill-conceived atheism. But it is also one of the very best ways we have to love God with all of our minds.

Experiencing The Truth In The Bible

When I first learned to sing "Jesus Loves Me," in a circle on the floor of my first grade Sunday School room, it was over the distractions of being poked, prodded, and tickled by buddies on both sides. They received my retaliatory gestures in the same impish spirit with which I delivered them, and somehow we all managed to keep our dis-graceful behaviors out of the view of a struggling teacher who deserved better from us. I think I have become a better person than the snotty kid I was then, but I still have trouble getting into that song. Believing things about Jesus simply because "the Bible tells me so" cuts as little ice with me now as it did then.

In fairness, I should confess that seminary almost cured me of my oppositional/defiant disorder in matters scriptural. In those days, the very strangeness of the Bible was what was supposed to capture our attention and imagination, and drive us to our knees in repentance over a too casual acceptance of modernity. If I hadn't had to deal with lots of Fundamentalists in my summer jobs as a youth minister, I might have bought the whole neo-orthodox program, lock, stock, and canon. But their idea of Jesus' love, like the idea I had been toying with in seminary, was just that: an idea more than an experience, and an idea pushed because a Book told us to.

During one of those summers, another sweetly pious song began getting to me in ways I never would have expected. Remember the one about walking and talking with Jesus in the garden, alone? And its grandiose closing words, to the effect that Jesus and the singer have something going between them that "none other has ever known"? If you want to know the truth, this is a really awful song. Dew still on the roses, the Master's voice so sweet that the birds stopped singing? As my church kids were fond of saying, gag me with a spoon. And yet, the song's closing tone is just right, with a voice of "woe" urging us out of the garden and into a suffering world. Its theology transcends its imagery. We know that Jesus loves us not just because the Bible tells us so; we know it because he tells us so. How he does it is a great mystery; that he does it is not.

The Bible is a stand alone source and norm for faith only for people unwilling to acknowledge the crucial difference between its many human words and the Word of God that struggles to break through them. Going for the Bible like Wyatt Earp went for his gun is a tactic only for people unwilling to acknowledge that its words deserve the attention they do because they speak from and to the depths human experience understandingly and compassionately. From the standpoint of having to experience its truth for ourselves in the midst of ever-changing circumstances, values, and hopes, the Bible is less a test for orthodoxy and more an invitation to fellowship. It is less about rapping things up in our heads than it is about warming things up in our hearts, less about securing peoples' loyalty and more about serving their needs. For the third millennium, it must be much less about conquest, and much more about reconciliation.

A lot of faithful people continue to find a perspective like this one discomforting, no matter what their own sacred scriptures may be. As the world-renowned religious historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith kept reminding us, there are fundamentalists everywhere nowadays, and (in my words) they are all working overtime to insulate what they believe to be timeless truths from the vicissitudes of new experiences, questions, and expectations. They seem especially put off by the very notion that has otherwise made so much sense in the Christian community ever since the time of the Apostle Paul: their treasures, too, have to be kept in earthen vessels.

Maybe not in as many vessels as there are individuals on the planet; the idea of Jesus having to take a walk with each and every one of us in order to get God's message across is just a little too weird even for me. Communities as well as individuals generate experiences --- of desire and fulfillment, fear and hope, sadness and joy --- and I for one cherish his presence in the midst of fellow believers as much as in my alone times. But however he shows up, it is in the showing up that what the Bible tries to say about him, not always successfully, gains its truthfulness.

A Bible Illumined By Tradition

One of the hardest things about running a reform movement is keeping all the reformers on the same page. The Protestant Reformation was and is a good illustration of this daunting reality. Maybe if Luther had counted to eleven instead of ten before he nailed his ninety-five theses to that Wittenberg church, and knocked on its door with only a Top Ten list, he might have gotten more Catholics to listen and not just react. More importantly, he might have discouraged other Protest-ants from jumping into the resulting fray prematurely. But jump they did, and we have been living with the not so happy consequences ever since.

One of the most remarkable of these unhappy consequences was the fracturing of the Christian community over what may still be the single most important outcry of Protestantism everywhere: scripture only. Or in more familiar lingo, The BIBLE says… (and you'd better believe it, all of it, or else.) As the demons trembled before the living Lord, Medieval Catholicism was supposed to quake before the unadorned Scriptures, and abandon all pretensions to be the sole mediator of salvation to an ignorant, sinful humanity dependent upon priests, relics, and rituals to avoid eternal damnation. Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Amen.

But Medieval Catholicism did not turn tail at the onslaught of its biblicist despisers. It just brought up heavier artillery, pounding the Christian world with tighter and tighter wound traditions and a higher and higher elevated Pontiff. Even worse, the very Protestant Reformers who thought and still think that they can nuke the Papacy, not to mention earthly powers and other churches, at will with "The Book" hold very different ideas among themselves about what this book does and does not do in the service of the Christian life.

Take, for example, one classic Protestant statement about the Bible, in the 6th of the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England (1553): "The Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man (sic) that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite and necessary to salvation." On the face of it, this affirmation seems to say it all about faith and the Bible. Our dependence is upon the Bible, period, not upon priestly devised traditions such as selling indulgences and saying masses for the dead.

As long as the gored ox in discussions about biblical authority remains the Catholic Church, the Sixth Article of Religion is abundantly clear in its implication: justify beliefs and practices by direct appeal to the Bible, or forget about them. Unfortunately, the application of this Article turns out to be more complicated than this. The reason is that its originators had more than one set of disputants in mind. Along with the Catholics, there were all those Anabaptist types, with their much quirkier ideas about both the Bible and the ("true") church. Thomas Munzer and Hans Denck thought that faith depended more upon some kind of inner, mystical light than it did upon the Scriptures at all. Balthasar Hubmaier went the other way and promoted the Bible as the exclusive law of a church that he believed should be willing to repudiate the authority of earthly powers altogether.

Whether divinely inspired or merely a stroke of genius, the image of the Bible as "containing" essential truths was just what mainstream Protestantism needed in the sixteenth century and needs even more in our own. It is just the thing for expressing the primacy of the Scriptures over more extreme positions which hold either that Christians must be people of one and only one book, or that Christians need no book at all in order to get right with God. And it is just the thing for calling people to keep on searching the Scriptures diligently for the essential truths in them, instead of treating "The" Bible as a rule-book that makes further inquiry unnecessary.

If there are truths essential to salvation contained in the Bible alongside other truths with a different status altogether --- for example, that women should have no authority over men in the church --- then there will always be a lot of work ahead when discerning God's Word in all of the Scriptures' very human words is at stake. At its best, "tradition" represents the process of getting about just such work. And the books of the Bible themselves contain some of the earliest examples we have of what the work looks like in concrete situations. "The Bible says…"? Well, maybe, and then again maybe not. Can we talk?

An Accommodating Bible

Across the five years that I have been writing these columns, two rules for interpreting the Christian faith sensibly have been especially important to me. One calls for acknowledging and respecting the sometimes very wide differences between the apostolic age and the present-day, and the adjustments that we must make to the fact that, in James Russell Lowell's words, time can make ancient good "uncouth." The other calls for assessing carefully the accommodations that must be made in order to transmit convincingly a saving message generated in one era and culture to people in other eras and cultures with vastly different mind-sets. Contrary to those who think that the Bible is undefiled by such, the Scriptures actually contain some of the most flagrant examples of accommodation at its best and at its worst. What follows looks more to the worst; the best are yet to come.

This Spring, preparing some new material for a World Religions course I was teaching, I found myself struggling anew to work out a coherent account of ancient Israel's transition from tribal confederations to a full-blown monarchy, and to make sense out of a number of so-called historical texts that in today's world surely are better forgotten. One set gleefully pictured God riding roughshod over the property rights of the Canaanites and the Philistines. If today's Arab-Israeli conflicts are any indication, the tribal deity invoked by both sides still delights in fomenting this kind of uproar, and the cost of catering to his whim has simply become too great for the rest of us to bear.

And then there is 2 Samuel 22, prefaced in the Revised English Bible this way: "These are the words of the song David sang to the Lord on the day when the Lord delivered him from the power of all his enemies and from the power of Saul." (Psalm 18 repeats the word with few variations.) The deliverance was really something: the whole earth shook from God's anger; smoke poured out of God's nostrils, and fire from his mouth; he swooped down from heaven, darkened everything, and pummeled his enemies with arrows of lightning, hail, and even burning coals. Why? For one reason, he had really gotten into the monarchy thing, at first with Saul, who initially wanted no part of it --- wisely, as it turned out. But here, there is another reason: the Lord rescued David because he "delighted" in him, repaying David as his "righteousness" deserved. (vss.20, 21)

Discussions with several of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim students to whom I introduced this material brought me to a new appreciation of just how "uncouth" the idea is of a God who will set our leaders' feet on our enemies' necks and wipe out those who hate us. (vs. 40) What did it was my horrified discovery that each was worshipping this very God, under different religious banners, and that I may have unwittingly supplied all of them with still another "holy" justification for expecting the destruction of their own enemies as the just desserts of being loyal practitioners of their respective faiths.

As if its accommodation to the need of an enslaved people for a God stronger than Babylon's were not enough, the text also offers succor in the face of the obvious fact that Israel and Judah proved to be no match for the rulers of Assyria, Persia, Macedonia, and Rome as well, except for --- are you ready for this?--- in the superior righteousness of King David himself. Huh? The cloyingly self-congratulatory king of this text is now the model of righteousness for everyone else, kings and emporers included? Hardly. The song here attributed to him bends the truth about God and his expectations of us at about the angle that the real David must have bent Bathsheba, after seeing to it of course that Uriah would not be around to complain, ever. (And whatever Bathsheba's own complaints may have been about it apparently did not count at all.)

Sometimes, biblical faith can accommodate itself to changing circumstances by means of relatively easy tasks like getting its own history reconsidered and even rewritten. Other times, the accommodation may require nothing less than the incorporation of a wholly new world-view. The writer of Ephesians seems to have had something like the latter in mind when he situated the true enemies of God on a different plane altogether from that of earthly battlefields. Our struggle, he wrote, "is not against human foes, but against cosmic powers…the superhuman forces of evil in the heavenly realms." (6:12) Or just maybe it is against the evil that is in our own hearts. The willingness to confront all the "maybes" in the Bible, and the different accommodations that incorporate them, is what interpreting the Christian faith sensibly is all about.

Little Ones To Him Belong

The reception was in full, boisterous swing, and having done my duty as the newly-weds' officiant, I was quietly making my way to the parking lot. Standing near my car was a young couple with whom I had chatted during the cake-cutting. Now, she was almost hysterical and he, clearly unsuccessful in comforting her, had settled for trying to shut her up. Perhaps it was the tone of my voice, or the robe and stole I still had on my arm, or just their desperation, but they took me up on my offer of help, and we headed back into the church to find a room where we could talk.

What had gotten Jan (not her real name) going was an unexpected encounter in a corner of the hall with a smiling bridesmaid who was breast-feeding her baby. For a few excruciating minutes, Jan held herself together, and then ran for the door. Confronted by her tears and near screaming, her husband, whom I will call Jim, substituted embarrassment and anger for acknowledging and respecting the source of Jan's melt-down: a sudden reminder of their two-month-old in her crib, not breathing. At the time of their baby's death, they had not arranged for her baptism, and for this failure Jan could not forgive herself. She described herself as having abandoned her baby to hell. Jim chastised her for holding on to "superstitious nonsense."

For more Christians than Jim could have known, the belief that unbaptized infants are consigned to hell is anything but nonsense. And far from being a superstition, it is rooted in what is supposed to be the most terrible "fact" of all, the primordial disobedience of Adam and Eve, whose sinfulness infected the whole human race from that time forward, pre-determining actions and character in a sinful direction, and dooming everyone to eternal damnation. The only cure for this disease is a single act of atonement alone deemed acceptable by and to God, the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. And to Jan and the church in which she was raised, the only way to that cure is baptism. For the unbaptized --- even babies victimized by their parents' indifference, unbelief, or sloth --- only everlasting punishment awaits.

If it were possible to rescind elevations to sainthood, and I am not sure that even Popes can undo this process, I would do my best to be the first signer of a petition to reconsider the status of "Saint" Augustine. Actually, for a lot of reasons, but most assuredly for this particularly vile concoction of outrageous deductions from mis-read biblical texts. Even his own church found it hard to accept the rigorism of his teaching on infant baptism, choosing instead to temper it with the image of an intermediate state, "limbo," between eternal blessedness and eternal damnation, to which unbaptized infants are consigned.

It is encouraging to read and hear that in the highest Roman Catholic circles, limbo is undergoing serious re-consideration. Now, some teachers of the church, the Pope included, are at least wondering whether a loving God would deny infants access to highest heaven before they can commit even their first sins themselves. I know we are supposed to be more charitable in our ecumenical conversations than I am about this one, but having stared into Jan's eyes and soul for as long as I did, about all I can muster by way of further reaction to this news from Rome is that it's about time. Once the idea of limbo goes, maybe that of the eternal damnation of infants will go, too. To hell with both of them.

That anguished afternoon, I did not add to Jan's pain or to Jim's need for reassurance by imposing on them my own ideas on this subject. What they needed was simply to be listened to and heard by a fellow Christian struggling to understand their loss and conflicting theologies and to convey respect and love to both of them in the process. Toward the end of our conversation, both Jan and Jim expressed a willingness to talk more with a priest acquaintance of mine, whom I knew would be able to help them to experience a new vision and hope beyond what their church had provided them to this point in their lives.

In the early days of television, Christians of all varieties were well served by a weekly broadcast of a magnificent orator, Fulton J. Sheen. For 30 minutes each time, Bishop Sheen expounded the Roman Catholic vision of life clearly and captivatingly, and ended each broadcast with a hale and hearty, "See you in heaven!" Especially the little ones.

Karma and Grace

It may come as a surprise to learn that the most comprehensive and clearly articulated views on divine justice come not from Western religions, but from Eastern ones. For Hinduism and Buddhism, what goes around does indeed come around, over and over, inevitably, across unfathomable eons of time. The wheel's turning pushes evil-doers lower and lower on the great chain of being, and elevates the righteous to higher and higher stations of being. Everything is in accordance with iron-clad, unchanging, and unchangeable laws that perfectly proportion actions and reactions in both the moral and the physical universe.

Who among law and order types could ask for a more perfect answer to the age-old question of why the rains fall on the just as well as the unjust? According to it, people get exactly the amount of rain on their parades as their wrong decisions and actions warrant, no less and no more, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. The good guys do finish first, and the bad guys last, eventually if not sooner.

It is just this kind of thinking that, in spite of every effort to keep it at bay, insinuates itself with astonishing regularity into even the most grace-filled witnesses to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faith. It is evident almost from the beginning in all three faiths. There we were, the story goes, happily sheltered in Adam's loins, only to have the promise of an everlastingly tranquil future snatched away from us by a single ill-considered judgment on our parents' part. We never even got to do the crime ourselves, before we wound up doing the time for it, in a world that all of a sudden became a prison-house rather than a garden. To wrench Abraham Lincoln's immortal phrasing from its original context, we should all tremble at the thought that God is just. Keep defying him, and bad things will happen to you in this life, and in the next …and the next…

This very tight, tie-up-all-the-loose-ends kind of thinking both answers a lot of questions and provides a lot of inspiration. Knowing how things really work in the world, we can now busy ourselves either with doing the right things out of a fear of punishment, or for the sake of jackpot rewards like having a bunch of virgins all to yourself in the hereafter for getting knocked off in a holy war on earth. (I still wonder how the virgins themselves will be feeling about their situation up there.) Whoever first put together these economics of salvation would probably think now that "he" (no woman would have ever done it this way) deserves a Nobel Prize.

No wonder St. Paul ran into such trouble with Jerusalem Christians and Thessalonikan Jews. He was intemperate enough to insist that Law enshrined in karmic-like thinking is death-dealing, not life-giving. That Christ frees people not just from the punishments prescribed by the Law, but from the force and authority of the Law itself. Not that the Law is annuled, any more than that the idea of a just God has become obsolete. But that in Christ, sinful acts are forgiven and the Law which defines them as sinful is, in instances of God's own choosing, nullified. Including the sinful act --- if it is one --- of choosing a different path than the one Christ followed, and the law that says we have to believe the right things or suffer everlastingly for not doing so.

Paul's kind of thinking is difficult to absorb, primarily because it demands so much more of us than the kind of thinking that puts everything into immediate good order by means of unambiguous statements about right and wrong, reward and punishment, present and future. For Paul, there are breaks in the karmic chain of cause and effect, work stoppages in the mills of the gods, changes of mind on the part of humankind's creator, a new order of being, an unfolding of a destiny beyond the logic of just desserts, in short, pure, unbounded, unfathomable, world-reconstituting grace. Grace, mercy, peace, love --- just the things quickly stomped underfoot by the platitudes and piety of people too certain for their own good and ours of what God has already decided for everyone else.
What I find especially ennobling in both Hindu and Buddhist thinking about karma is their characterization of it as a problem to be overcome rather than a truth to be enshrined. In very different ways to be sure, both religions offer liberation from karmic captivity, rather than baptism into it. Just as grace does.

Jesus As Hero, Savior, And Friend

One question I often think about during the Lenten and Easter seasons is whether historical knowledge about Jesus can help us much to believe that he is Christ and Lord. I try to keep an open mind on the possibility that it can, because modern methods of historical study do bridge all sorts of gaps between the present and the past, and because I continue to seek encounters with a very present, and not just a long departed friend and savior. The problem is that much of what can be learned about Jesus from the available records brings us no closer to the man himself than walking the walk with him brought his own contemporaries.

One image prominent in those records is the image of a heroic man who displayed extraordinary courage as he faced adversity of many kinds, in service to a cause that almost everyone who learned of it rejected. But to this distressing image was soon attached another, of a vindicated prophet whose resurrection was first proclaimed with a jubilant spirit, and later with a take-no-prisoners one. Death is swallowed up in victory. Then again, maybe not quite: the kingdom already here is a kingdom which, paradoxically, is still yet to come. And so, Jesus the hero became king either of a not quite ready for prime time kingdom, or of a kingdom not of this world at all.

A more complex image than that of Jesus as Hero is the image of Jesus as Savior. What makes this latter especially attractive is that it focuses attention on the very suffering that hero imagery wants us to get past. After all, what kind of a hero dies an ignominious death as a despised criminal? A hero ascending into the heavens looks much better, but at that point, of course, he stops being a hero and turns into something beyond the merely human altogether. The risen Jesus has always been a little spooky; it is easier to relate to him the longer he stays on the cross. Of course, that works only if we keep telling ourselves that he is the one who does all the suffering. After all, what kind of a savior makes us take up a cross ourselves?

There is not much about the biblical images of Jesus's heroism --- e.g., setting his face "resolutely" toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:51); insisting repeatedly that he lays down his life of his own free will (John 10:18) --- that draws me especially close to him; earthly heroes do stuff like this all the time. And the suffering savior image of dogma is little better: it has never made sense to me that someone else should have to pay for sins that are uniquely my own. This kind of substitutionary sacrifice, ransom to the Devil, appeasement of an offended God kind of thinking is highly dubious, from any moral perspective worthy of the name.

Another Savior image in the New Testament is more promising. It is the one that Luke seems to have had in mind when he put his own distinctive spin on Peter's three denials of Jesus. They take place in the courtyard of the high priest's house. Under heavy guard, Jesus sees and hears at least the third denial, and "turned and looked at Peter." (22:61) When I think of what that look must have shown, at least in Luke's mind --- a disappointment and a sadness beyond all human reckoning --- I want to run frantically toward the soothing words of his theology, and of John's even more, with their idea that since Jesus knew what was coming all along, he couldn't have been all that surprised by Peter's betrayal, and I shouldn't get too upset about it either. But that is theology talking, not Jesus. At least, not the Jesus into whose face I look when I face my own uncountable denials. It is the suffering on that face that sears me, and saves me. It is the suffering on the face of a lover who lays down his life for his friends. (John 15:13)

I wish that it were possible to know with certainty whether the distinction between being Jesus' servant and being Jesus' friend came from Jesus himself or whether it emerged somewhere along the way of a developing tradition. The truth is, historical knowledge leaves this kind of question unanswered about all of the Gospels' images of Jesus. But the image of being friends with a man who loved people so much that God's very own love became transparent through him is an image that could draw the whole world close to him on its own.

The Mystery of Jesus' Suffering

There we were, at our agreed upon end of a Lenten study on John's Gospel, and I was nowhere close to covering its final chapters. Then, some members of the group suggested that we continue by way of noon-time meetings the first four days of Holy Week. For me at least, it was a great suggestion. I only brought the lessons; they brought the lunch. Little did we know that we were establishing a tradition of both which would span decades.

Had I known at the time that I would be the one leading most of those sessions, the first question I would have asked myself should have been: Who do you think you are, presuming to know enough about just eight chapters of the New Testament (two in each of the four Gospels) to talk about The Passion Narrative across 30 years? Now, the question is: what was wrong with me back then for presuming that the Passion Narrative might not be able to speak for itself?

But speak it does, in the way that all of the other materials John assembled for his Gospel spoke to him: if all that Jesus did were recorded in detail, he concluded, the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. (21:25) The overwhelmingness of just the Passion Narrative comes to me most especially in the form of unanswered questions. Meditating on Jesus' final week on earth leads you straight into one question after another, and to the gradual discovery that none of the questions admits of any easy answer. Rather, all of them together seem more to open out on unfathomable mysteries.

I still shake my head over the incomprehension to which Jesus' earliest followers descended, even though they had been privileged to press in on him from all sides during the highest moments of his earthly ministry. At its lowest moments, they abandoned him altogether. Thinking about those few women standing off at a distance from the cross only makes it worse. Their distance says it all. Further still, it is searing to remember that only a Roman centurion might have had even a momentary insight into what the whole ghastly denouement on that hard to locate hill was all about.

And then there is the mystery of what Holy Communion celebrates as the "full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world." I understand the logic behind this language. It goes like this: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and for this outrage, no amount of contrition, confession, penitential action, or sacramental observance can possibly suffice as atonement. Only forgiveness from God Godself can possibly rescue a sinful humanity from its deserved and everlasting punishment. But God does exactly this; the Judge forgives, by sending His only Son to suffer on our behalf.

There is logic here, but not mercy. For it leaves it to the only one among us who has not deserved to suffer for anyone else's sins to suffer the most because of them. Meditating upon Jesus' sacrifice sometimes brings me to a sense of gratitude, but I still do not know how to release the guilt that comes over me for making Jesus go through what I will never have to go through. Our "interest in his blood" is no cause for boasting.

What heightens still further the mysteriousness of Jesus' "suffering under Pontius Pilate" is having to confront the idea --- or, for the early church, the fact --- that the humiliation and execution of the world's Savior were essential to the process of salvation itself. Were there were no other options open to God for reconciling the world to himself? Was forgiveness itself somehow not enough? If somebody still had to pay a price, where was the forgiveness at all? The answers must rest somewhere deep in the heart of a God whose thoughts and ways never run along the pathways that ours do.

Three centuries ago, Isaac Watts wrote about a "wondrous" cross, and conveyed in his hymn an image that has been especially comforting to me in all my struggles over the years to understand the horrific fact that the Son of God suffered and died at human hands like mine. When I survey that cross for myself, I see somewhat dimly what Watts saw very clearly: flowing down from Jesus' head, hands, and feet are "sorrow and love," mingled. The sorrow that Jesus feels over my failure to be all that his Father wants me to be has to be a depth of sorrow beyond all my comprehending. But so also must be his love, the only kind of love in all creation powerful enough to make me "pour contempt on all my pride."

An Exhortation Best Ignored

More than once in my ministry, I have taken communion in churches where, by virtue of my not being a member, I was not supposed to. I knew what I was doing, experienced no remorse over doing it, and whenever another occasion presented itself, I went and did it again. And now that my "sin" is out in the open, in order not to get barred from the chancel rail by the Reverends who may come across its exposure, the next time I may even show up in disguise.

What this dare-ya-to-knock-the-chip-off-my-shoulder rhetoric is all about is a recently released "Exhortation" of Pope Benedict XVI laying down, yet again, "non-negotiable" positions on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, and divorce that reasonable people have been negotiating for quite some time now and that American Catholics have been ignoring for just as long. In the midst of all the other prescriptions, a requirement of celibacy for priests was re-imposed by fiat, in spite of the fact that hardly anybody worth reading even tries to make a case for priests being single anymore, and the fact that there are married priests all over the place now. (You just have to make sure that you get married before you make public your sense of being called to the priesthood.)

Especially grating to First Amendment types like me is the Holy Father's reference to the "grave" responsibility of Catholic politicians and legislators to bind themselves to "a properly formed conscience" in getting the kind of laws passed and enforced over which Vatican officials can salivate. To my chagrin, a lot of non-Catholic Christian conservatives have been lining up with this Medieval view of church and state for sometime. Their only substantive disagreement with Rome is over who decides whose conscience is "properly formed" and whose is not.

What especially jerked my chain about this latest broadside from the Vatican are the crocodile tears wetting its pages about "the painful situation" of remarried Catholics. His Holiness solemnly declares that these unfortunates suffer only because of the sinful state in which they are living. For the remarried Catholics I have counseled over the years, the source of their pain is decidedly not their sinning; they do not in fact seriously believe that they are living in sin, nor do I. The real source of their pain is the demeaning words of their leader, barring them even from receiving Communion, the central sacrament of the Christian tradition. And now we get to the point of my earlier confession.

His Eminence appears to have forgotten somewhere along his path of elevation just whose table it is that we are talking about here, and whose church it is that embraces all of us in love, no matter how many in it jockey for the right to determine all on their own who will and will not be permitted to partake of its sacred substances. None of us --- single, married, divorced, celebate, straight, gay, remarried, shacking up, giving up --- is "worthy" to come to Communion. But God continues to honor his promise to be with us whenever and wherever his table is set, and nothing can be a more egregious perversion of his good news than allowing someone no less sinful than we are to block anyone else's access to him there.

Benedict XVI's exhortation is just the kind of weighty tome that has been sinking the credibility of his church's hierarchy for decades now, and that will continue to foster mischief, meanness, and malignity in peoples' lives for even more decades to come. All three are involved in the one approved way for remarried Catholics to extricate themselves from their "painful situation," basically by coming up with enough money to buy themselves annulments. I see little difference in this way of getting right with God and the church from the way of indulgences, which latter disgraces both.

For Catholics without the resources to buy an annulment of a first marriage, and without the dishonesty it takes to declare many a first marriage a nullity, I recommend a time-honored way of vetoing unjustifiable prohibitions, with one's feet. This is a seditious recommendation, of course, but sedition is not always a bad thing. (Remember the Boston Tea Party?) The next time you think about it, just slip into the pew of a parish the next neighborhood north or south, and receive quietly and gratefully at the hands of an unknown priest the body and blood of the One whose knowledge of you and your situation is the only kind that finally counts.

Dry Bones, Dead Faith

It is easy to get the sillies over the recent "revelation" that Jesus' bones have been collecting dust for 2,000 years in an ossuary while Christians the world over have been celebrating his resurrection and his ascension into heaven. Shame on you, James Cameron, for raining on our Easter parades. From the standpoint of building an audience for your documentary on all this, your sense of timing is impeccable. But from the standpoint of faith, it is just plain tacky.

Some people, of course, are going to work up a big case of the worries over this archeological "discovery," from the misguided belief that it somehow calls Jesus' resurrection into question. I can't wait to see how they will go about (and forgive the pun) covering all of this up again. The next breaking news story might even be about the sudden vanishing of the Shroud of Turin. If it happens, then mark my words: it will have been stolen to prevent a DNA match to the skeletal remains attributed to the Nazarene.

Other people will merely call upon their orthodoxy to protect them from sweating the possibility that Jesus was not raised bodily from the dead. Their argument will go something like this: the church teaches that Jesus took his body with him to heaven; therefore, we can be sure that the bones in that ossuary belong to somebody other than him. Hopefully, the Cameron documentary will be long forgotten --- it already has been by reputable archeologists --- before some of our fellow Christians embarrass us yet again with this screwy logic of determining facts on the basis of dogma.

The idea that there has been a lost tomb of Jesus somewhere in Jerusalem fits nicely with other commercially viable ideas now floating around. It is on a par with the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalen deftly combined co-habitation with saving the world from sin, and the idea that the pitter patter of their childrens' little feet were wonderful to come home to after a long day of miracle-working and fending off insults.

To get a little more serious, but not a whole lot: I have long wondered whether the earliest Christians helped their cause much by relying on the tradition of an empty tomb to support their proclamation about God's raising Jesus from the dead. Certainly they had to confront head-on an ugly rumor that the disciples stole Jesus' body, and they did it well by explaining that the real reason why it was in fact missing was that God took it back. Frankly, though, I wish they had soft-pedaled this whole issue. Saying a lot about it stirred up even more speculation about the body, and new searches for its tomb by folks who never trusted that Jesus' women-friends knew perfectly well where the original one was.

But enough already. Here we are in Lent, and the last thing we need is more kidding around on my part, and more pretentious posturing on The Discovery Channel's. The real question here is not whether Easter faith could be undermined by the discovery of earthly remains that are unquestionably those of Jesus and like the remains of every other dead person on the earth. The real question is what it has always been for faith: with what kind of body was Jesus raised? (And with which we will be raised as well.) If you believe that Jesus got out of this world with his this-worldly body intact, then your faith may indeed be in trouble. Not, of course, because of the recent vapid documentary, but because you have unwisely chosen to anchor it by the wrong apostolic tradition.

The more helpful one is the tradition of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances. According to St. Paul, after Jesus entombment over 500 people claimed to have seen him, and not just an empty tomb. What I especially like about this tradition is that it deliberately pushes our images of the body with which Jesus was raised into the realm of the uncanny, the hallucinogenic, and the downright spooky. He takes nourishment, lets wounds be touched, and yet goes through walls and vanishes before peoples' very eyes in a heartbeat. That's some kind of body. It was the kind of body that forced the early church to acknowledge that whatever body we will someday have in the Kingdom of God, it will not be a "flesh and blood" body at all. In truth, leaving his earthly body behind was the only thing Jesus could have done under the circumstances. I doubt that re-entering the Godhead as its second member could have been accomplished at all if he had had to take it with him.