Showing posts with label Christian thinking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian thinking. Show all posts

Monday, January 18, 2010

Why Mainstream Protestantism Is No Longer Mainstream

About the time I graduated from seminary, a major era in American religious life was just beginning its slow, irreversible decline. In specific, a cluster of Protestant denominations professing to constitute the Christian mainstream in this country was about to lose a dominant position in American culture. It took the first twenty years of my professional life for me to see the partial drying up of this once energetically moving stream as something which could be for the better and not only for the worse.

Still struggling to swim in the barely trickling waters of the Protestantist mainstream are at least these denominations today: American Baptist, Disciples of Christ, Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian USA, Reformed, United Church of Christ, and United Methodist. Sadly, more than half of their congregations have fewer than 100 members, well below the number that most church strategists now believe is necessary to support a full-time pastor and a minimally effective ministry of nurture and outreach. The average age in most of them continues to be on the increase. And their membership growth, where there is any at all, generally falls far short of the growth rate in the surrounding populations.

Typical mainstream congregations, in spite of their well articulated theologies of inclusiveness, are still predominantly Anglo-American, upper-middle class aspiring, and dependent upon a highly educated clergy. In all three respects, they are swimming upstream against major demographic trends in society and ecclesial trends in the conservative-evangelical churches that currently are dominating the Protestant landscape. Not surprising, therefore, is the Pew organization’s finding that the Protestant mainstream now represents under 20% of the population of the United States.

It has been commonplace to attribute the decline of mainstream Protestantism to its disastrous clinging to a faulty liberal theology when the wider society was turning conservative on just about everything. The liberalism-is-the-problem argument may have had some validity at the beginning, but it is hardly credible anymore. Liberalism’s classic emphases on unity-in-diversity and the pursuit of universal justice are being celebrated just as often by conservative churches as they are by liberal ones today, and the acknowledgment of theological pluralism as inevitable may not be far behind in all but the most off the wall fundamentalist churches and denominations.

More to the point of accounting for the decline is the particular approach that mainstream Protestantism continues to take toward the (legitimate and important) cause of bringing about Christian unity on both a national and world scale. Oversimplified, but not by much, the approach tied ecumenicity very strongly to the promotion of denominational mergers, which many people only slightly misunderstood as an agenda for the creation of a SuperChurch.Two problems have plagued this approach from the beginning. The first was that the ecumenical spirit in this country has flourished best from the grass roots up, and not from institutional structures and hierarchies down. The institutional side of ecumenical movements has always been a pretty high-up/top-down operation, all too frequently enmeshed in clouds of condescending smugness and arrogance that blinds its leaders to Christian action on the ground and in the streets, and the never-ending gatherings of two, three and more disciples there to meet the Lord.

The second problem is that denominations themselves have come increasingly to be viewed as obstacles to, rather than essential supports for, the vitality of Christian congregations and faith. At most denominational headquarters perched atop the shorelines of the Protestant mainstream, visions for regaining cultural position more often than not reduce to faddish schemes for organizational re-structuring, with a little efficiency training for leaders along corporate more than spiritual lines thrown in for good measure. A major consequence is the siphoning off of energy and resources better spent in undergirding the ministry and mission of local congregations themselves. At least, this is the perception of droves of former mainstreamers who believe that there is more breathing room for the Holy Spirit in the non-denominational mega and cyberchurches that are making their presence and influence powerfully evident everywhere.

It may be because I have never been much of a swimmer anyway that splashing around in the diminished waters of the Protestant mainstream still remains for me a fulfilling way to live out the Christian life. If finding some rapids to challenge, as many of my conservative Christian friends are doing with gusto, is your thing, too, then more power to you. But less frenzied streams, whose headwaters continue to be churned by scripture, tradition, experience, and reason in frothy mixes, and whose revelers include dramatically increased numbers of highly involved laypersons, also flow toward that ocean of Being in whose temperate waters there is room for all.


ADDENDUM: On Columns That May Be Worth A Second Reading


Last year, I gave several talks at the end of which readers of this column came up to me and expressed both their appreciation for it and helpful suggestions for making it better. One suggestion was to re-run some of the columns which were favorites at the time, since we are now into the eighth year of Howe About and since new readers may not yet have ventured into searching out the earlier pieces. I came up with an alternative, to list a few and invite readers who may be interested to follow the links to them provided below:


Later on, I will list a few more columns that have also evoked a good bit of response.

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ADDENDUM: On Columns That May Be Worth A Second Reading

Last year, I gave several talks at the end of which readers of this column came up to me and expressed both their appreciation for it and helpful suggestions for making it better. One suggestion was to re-run some of the columns which were favorites at the time, since we are now into the eighth year of Howe About and since new readers may not yet have ventured into searching out the earlier pieces. I came up with an alternative, to list a few and invite readers who may be interested to follow the links to them provided below:


Later on, I will list a few more columns that have also evoked a good bit of response.

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Monday, January 04, 2010

Small Congregations And The Culture Of Bigness

Some of the most interesting research I came across in the year just ended was by Mark Chaves, a Duke University sociologist, who has been running what he calls the National Congregations Study (NCS) since 1998. The early phase of this study is described in his splendid book, Congregations in America, from Harvard University Press. Chaves redid the study in 2006-7 and made it available at www.soc.duke.edu/natcong. I hope that he will get another book out of his continuing surveys, and that it will generate the kind of discussion that his first book did.

The NCS is worth considerable attention. Over 2700 congregations across the denominational spectrum in this country participated in its second venture, and they shared a staggering amount of valuable information about their inreach, outreach, and sense of identity in general. The most significant findings from this research, in my judgment, include the following:

(1) Across the theological spectrum, and not just in isolated pockets and sharply differentiated worship hours, worship practices continue to trend toward greater informality and lay participation, even as social ministries broaden in scope and intensity.

(2) The dominant theological perspective of Protestant congregations today is increasingly conservative. By way of illustrations, over 80% of the NCS congregations describe their teaching of the Bible in terms which emphasize literalism and inerrancy. Just as strikingly, only 8% of them have female clergy leadership, even though female enrollment in seminaries across the country still hovers around 30%.

(3) The number of all-white congregations is finally beginning to decline, and all indicators are that this trend will continue.

(4) As a general rule of thumb, the vitality of local congregational life is on the rise, while that of denominational infra-structures continues to be on the decline.

Visitors to these congregations are typically finding fewer printed bulletins and more and more sophisticated video projection equipment in use during worship services, along with more personal testimonies, spontaneous “amens,” jumping, shouting, dancing, hand raising, and yes, even drums. And they will discover more outreach ministries that include such things as voter registration initiatives, English as a second language classes, comparative religion study groups, community needs assessment studies, book discussions across a broad spectrum of topics both social and spiritual, and lobbying meetings. With the possible exception of a trend toward fewer choirs and longer sermons, whatever else “conservatism” is coming to mean to members of these congregations, it is clearly not the conservatism of their grandparents‘ generation.

One section of the NCR report in particular continues to give me pause. It has to do with the finding that though most congregations in this country remain small, most church members are no longer in them. In specific, the on the rolls membership of the average congregation is still around 75, a figure unchanged since the first NCS study in 1998. But more and more people are actually attending larger and larger congregations, the very largest 10% of which contains half of all churchgoers today.

The travail of small congregations in America is well known and not difficult to understand. Agribusiness, along with urbanization and suburbanization, have made rural and small town life increasingly difficult to sustain and decreasingly attractive on their own merits.With no ability to achieve the economies of scale that are open to larger congregations, whose members expect programs that titillate, scintillate, and sometimes even inspire --- from womb to tomb --- small congregations are being overwhelmed with the difficulties not of matching the expectations and programs, but of just staying open.

Much to the detriment of American religious life, in my view, these congregations are now being held captive by a dogma from corporate America: grow or die. And a tried and true principle of town and country ministry for decades --- cluster and thrive --- typically evokes responses from denominational officials which at best borders on indifference and at worst, contempt. In this respect at least, denominational structures are more part of the problem than they are of the solution.

Having pastored rural and small town churches myself, I think I am rather well insulated against romanticizing a way of church life that all too easily glosses over the grubby side of a lot of small communities and the declining churches that are striving to survive in them. All too frequently, in neither the communities nor their churches are to be found the opportunities that abound for those who choose to leave them. And yet, in both, there remain people --- the numbers are wholly irrelevant --- to whom the Light of the World has come and who both need and deserve its quelling of the darkness in which they all too often feel themselves to be shrouded. That the quelling must be made manifest by the twos and threes will be as significant to God’s plan of salvation as will be the ministrations of the thousands and the tens of thousands elsewhere.

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Friday, January 01, 2010

Howe About Columns June 2002 - December 2009

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Monday, December 21, 2009

Christmas Truth

One Advent Sunday morning, standing in a crowded narthex while the early worship service was letting out, I could not help overhearing an interchange between two fellow parishioners about the Sunday School class they had just attended:

What a downer! Here we were, primed and ready for Christmas, and our teacher suddenly decides to tell us that the Christmas story is just that --- only a story. That’ll make a nice conversation around the lunch table today! I sure hope the kids are getting a different version of things.

(Laughing) What can you expect from a religion professor?

This Christmas thing is really a pretty big deal for me. Did you know that I was baby Jesus in our church’s Christmas pageant when I was two months old? It took! I’ve been hooked on it ever since.

I’ve never been in one, but I’m just as hooked on pageants as you are. I get a lot out of seeing not only real live people up there on the stage, but people I know. They all make Jesus’ humanness so vivid to me.

When I was in that manger, I guess it didn’t matter a whole lot whether my Mom was a virgin or not.

Maybe it didn’t matter to the shepherds and the wise men either.

This brief conversation reminded me powerfully that what Christmas pageants do best is to keep the focus more on the baby and less on his mother. They prepare viewers to discover the Lord’s divinity by contemplating his weakness rather than his power, his dependence rather than his sovereignty, his entering into rather than his rising above the human condition, the flesh he became as well as the Logos he was. Certainly, the story of Mary’s conception and birth played an important role in shaping a particular but by no means universal understanding of Jesus’ divinity as present from the very beginning of his life as well as after the resurrection. Paradoxically, though --- and this is what I heard my two friends getting at that morning --- his divine nature is sometimes most evident in his acts of emptying himself of it. (Philippians 2:6-8)

Clearly, there is far more to the affirmation that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary than the description of occurrences on the plane of ordinary human history. At best, what the affirmation says can only hint at what it intends to mean. The faith that still gives rise to it is a faith that, when logic’s limits are reached, willingly relinquishes clarity for the sake of honoring mystery, in particular, the literally indescribable mystery that God Godself dwelt and dwells among us. It is the very transcendence of its subject (a unique Son of God) to its language (a humanly constructed proposal for others’ assent) that has made the doctrine of the virgin conception and birth so vulnerable to overly imaginative as well as overly literal renderings that sacrifice both historical accuracy and intellectual credibility.

All Christian beliefs convey more than the mere declarations of fact that are also embedded in them. Indisputably, for example, Jesus experienced terrible pain at the end of his life “under Pontius Pilate.” This fact is beyond reasonable dispute. That Jesus is “God’s only Son,” however, can neither be established nor disconfirmed by objective historical investigation of facts alone; this is a quite extra-ordinary “fact” that only faith can finally determine. Jesus’ name becomes Emmanuel only in the decision to allow ourselves to experience God’s presence in and through him.

The particular assertion that has been the subject of this column and the preceding one is that Jesus was conceived in a woman named Mary, an assertion in which is embedded at once a confession of faith in her virginity and in Jesus’ divine humanness. It is the confession, and not the assertion, that makes the difference to faith. Faith, and not fact, is what points to the ultimate ground of all existence, to the reason why there is anything at all and not just God, to the delight that the Creator takes in all the works of his hands, and to that love alone which binds and knits all things together. What the Christian tradition says about the meaning of Jesus’ conception has always transcended whatever facts the belief itself struggles to assert. Overly literal descriptions inevitably get in the way of those genuine encounters with God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit that are finally expressible, in St. Paul’s words, more by sighs than by words.
　
　

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Monday, December 07, 2009

"Behold, a virgin shall conceive..."

This is the time of the year when I get asked most often, and not only by people outside the church, whether Christians still have to believe that Jesus came into the world by supernatural means. Put another way, the question is whether belief in the virgin conception of Jesus (virgin birth is not the same issue) remains a core belief for the Christian faith. One column will not quite answer both questions satisfactorily, but maybe this one and the next together will serve as at least a beginning.

In my view at least, the biggest problem about belief in the virgin conception is the physicalism that attaches to it. Taken literally, it is about impregnation without human sperm and a delivery without a broken hymen, and all of a sudden a divine mystery reduces to an enigma of biology. This hardly gets at the true meaning of the belief itself, whose primary purpose was to affirm both the greatness of God’s love and the specialness of Jesus’ humanity. The virgin conception in its barest literal form plays an important role in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but not elsewhere in the New Testament. If Paul’s single reference to Jesus’ birth, at Galatians 4:4 (“... born of a woman…”), is any indication, the emphasis for many if not for most of the earliest Christians fell not so much on Jesus’ divine origin as on his very human one. The distinctive fact may have been simply that, in contrast with the mother of Isaac in the Old Testament, Jesus’ mother was very young and not very old.

For Matthew and Luke, of course, the emphasis is not on the human, but on the divine origin of the Nazarene, and the (different) traditions upon which their testimony rests must be taken seriously. Both writers drew freely upon varied efforts of early Jewish Christians to present the details of Jesus’ life against the background of ancient prophecies about a coming Deliverer of Israel from all her enemies. Typically, these efforts sought to demonstrate Jesus’ Messianic identity by showing how everything he said and did and everything that happened to him fulfilled exactly what had been prophesied through the centuries about what God’s chosen Messiah would be like. Appearing in at least some of these demonstrative arguments was the idea that Jesus fulfilled the Messianic prophecies through the manner of his conception and birth. Especially important for this purpose was the prophecy of First Isaiah, at 7:14: “ Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (KJV)

Revered as this passage is in Christian circles, however, it cannot bear the weight that Matthew and to a lesser extent, Luke (in chapter one but not chapter two), placed upon it originally. Of the many scriptural passages that shaped the Messianic expectations of the Jewish people from the Exile in Babylon to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, Isaiah 7:14 was one of the least relied upon. In spite of the hold that this particular prophesy has had on Christian sensibility and belief, Messianic prophecy in Old Testament times showed little if any anticipation that the Messiah would be one who comes into the world through a supernatural conception.

As a whole, then, the apostolic tradition contains strong challenges to the view that the doctrine of the virgin conception expresses a core belief for all Christians, the assent to which is somehow essential for faith today. It also calls into question the view that the doctrine’s primary purpose is to assert as fact a supernatural conception of a human being under the conditions of time and history. Contrary to the standard Christian interpretations of Isaiah 7:14, the Hebrew text of this passage speaks of a young woman (alma), and not a virgin (betula), who would give birth to a Deliverer (who in First Isaiah turned out not to be the Messiah at all). It is true that, as biblical scholars who keep their textual analyses separate from their dogmatic convictions remind us, in one Greek translation of the passage a hundred years before Jesus’ birth (the Septuagint), the mother of the coming Messiah is referred to explicitly as a virgin (parthenos). However, later Greek translations of this passage do not repeat the practice; instead they use neanis, the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew alma.

That belief in Jesus’ virgin conception is difficult to maintain as a core belief, however, in no way entails that the belief lacks meaning and truth. It does suggest, though, that what meaning and truth the belief does contain --- considerable, in my judgment --- is more likely to be discovered when our language breaks free from the bonds of literalism and ascends on the wings of symbolism to realms of glory beyond the capacity of both facts and logic ever fully to encompass.

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Monday, November 23, 2009

Forgiving Our Enemies: The Fort Hood Shootings

Throughout the Gospels, there are many sayings and teachings ascribed to Jesus whose authenticity Biblical scholars have been questioning for a long time. Take, for example, his alleged statement in Matthew that he had not come to change anything about the Law (5:18). It is difficult to reconcile this statement with what all of the Gospels together present about his ministry as a whole. By means of it, Jesus changed the understanding of righteousness under the Law quite a lot.

About the authenticity of another teaching attributed to him, however, there can be no reasonable doubt. It has to do with the necessity of being forgiving. Both Matthew and Luke introduce the theme in their respective versions of the Lord’s Prayer, coupling a petition to be forgiven of our own wrongdoing with a commitment to forgive others who wrong us. (Matthew 6:12; Luke 11:4.) Matthew muddies the water somewhat by adding the warning that unless we forgive others, God will not forgive us (vs.14), which flies in the face of the gospel message of God’s unconditional grace, mercy, and forgiveness. But this tangent need not distract us from the central point: if we are ever to love people the way God intends for us to love them, we are going to have to let go a lot of our sense of being owed by them for the offenses and the harm they do us both accidentally and deliberately.

It is not difficult to forgive someone who wrongs us without meaning to do so. A quick counting to ten before reacting is usually enough to activate the right thought that it is the intent that finally counts. But, if Matthew can be relied upon at another point, in The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus did not leave things at that. At 5:44, he is quoted as saying, “Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors…” Here, the stakes are raised exponentially for the God-humanity relationship. We are to forgive not only those who wrong us inadvertently, but also those who wrong us maliciously. Even Major Nidal Hasan?

This vastly more demanding summons from God is not difficult to understand or accept. It is, however, vastly more difficult to carry out in practice. Most conscientious Christians with whom I have discussed it over the years have the same response to it: a question, not of whether we should do it, but how? The story of Hasan’s despicable actions at Fort Hood can only intensify the sense of the impossibility of fulfilling Jesus’ command; even with God, not all things may be possible after all. But then again…

One of the best answers I know to the question of how to love the unloveable revolves around the word “compassion”: feeling-with, by striving for a level of understanding of another’s mean-spiritedness that shrinks at least somewhat the degree of genuine differences between them and us. This need not lead to the obscene speculation that most anyone might, under the right circumstances, do what Major Hasan did. Rather, it leads to the sobering observation that those who do good are often influenced by factors beyond their control as much as those who do evil.
In Hasan’s case, the brainwashing inflicted by a mindless branch of Islam exposed a vulnerability to uncontrollable rage that a properly managed psychiatric training program should have caught and treated very early in Hasan’s residency years at Walter Reed. Did the flagrant irresponsibility of Hasan’s supervisors contribute directly to Hasan’s evil acts? Probably not. Does it, however, narrow the gap between the respective characters of the supervisors and Hasan? Probably more than just a little.

As far as it goes, urging the development of compassion in the service of becoming more forgiving is sound advice. The obstacle it must overcome, though, is daunting: a sense of confusion bordering on anger toward God for continuing to permit genuine evil in the first place. Why, many ask, does God not doing something to interdict everywhere the emergence of a character so depraved as Nidal Hasan’s? The Christian answer to this question is at once profoundly confounding and uplifting. The confounding part is: no one knows. The uplifting part is an invitation to consider another kind of question altogether: in the midst of the world’s genuine evils, for what goods may we be genuinely thankful? If forgiveness is a means to becoming more loving, and compassion is a means to becoming more forgiving, then thanksgiving is surely a means to becoming more compassionate. No truly thoughtful person can rest content never putting questions to God. But neither can he or she become whole without giving thanks to God, too.
　
　

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Monday, November 09, 2009

Another 3:16 To Ponder

It still catches my eye when football fans evangelize from the stands by holding up placards that read JOHN 3:16! This was my favorite of all the Bible verses I had to memorize growing up. It contained just about everything that my nowhere near Christian mind could then manage to comprehend of the Christian message. At least, the first half of the verse did. The idea that God came to earth out of love captured my imagination so completely that I never paid much attention to its accompanying reminder of what awaits those who do not believe that he did. By way of reminder, they will all "perish." It made no sense to me then, and it makes no sense to me now, to conjoin a threat of everlasting punishment with a proclamation about a God of Love. So, my John 3:16 has had to remain 3:16a, and not 3:16b.

There is another chapter three, verse sixteen passage in the Bible that I also had to learn once upon a time, this one from Second Timothy. It was and still is the conversation-stopper of all conversation-stoppers about the attitude that Christians are supposed to take toward the Bible. In the much favored rendering of the King James Bible, 2 Timothy 3:16 reads this way: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness…" It takes the next verse to complete the sentence, but this is the part that has created so much trouble in the church. To the generations following Timothy’s, right down to our own, it clearly implies that the Bible, alone among all the world's other books, was written by God. All of the Bible --- every last book, chapter, and verse in it from Genesis to Revelation, and not just our favorite parts of it --- was given by God to make us perfect in his sight. The reference to inspired scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16, then, is to that book on our coffee tables and in our church pews as the one and only book that anyone is ever to look to for answers about anything truly important in life.

But whoever wrote and first received 2 Timothy (both are subjects of considerable debate among New Testament scholars today) could not possibly have meant by the KJV’s "All scripture" what preachers and Sunday School teachers kept insisting they meant, the Old and New Testaments as a whole. In the first place, many of the books included in what would only much later become the latter --- at least three of the four Gospels, the letters attributed to Peter and John, the books of Hebrews and Revelation --- were not even written yet. And secondly, the Jewish community had not yet made up its mind about its own Bible; thus, there was no Christian Old Testament around either. What, then, does "All" (better: "every") scripture mean in 2 Timothy? Almost certainly, the reference is to the "sacred writings" known to the letter's recipients from childhood (3:15), that is, most or all of the books that by the end of the century would become the Jewish canon, and only those books.

It is hard to believe, however, that the author of 2 Timothy would have rested the early church's ability to discern truth from error solely on Jewish writings. He must have had Christian materials available to him as well: surely at least some of the genuine letters of Paul, perhaps a collection or two of Jesus' sayings, and most probably a coherent narrative --- or narratives --- of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, to name just a few. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, he chose not to group these materials under his category of "inspired scripture." Later on, they would come to be so designated, but not here. These considerations make 2 Timothy 3:16 irritatingly complicated. It is still unclear just where for him the church's most "profitable" writings were to be found among those that were beginning to circulate under distinctively Christian auspices.

The fact of the matter is that the early church was far less locked in than we are to the notion of a single, normative body of scriptures within which and within which alone God reveals Godself. And so, dropping the Bible on a podium or desk with a loud and dramatic flourish, as if it were a weapon designed to strike fear in the hearts of all doubters and dissenters, exhibits only a seriously deformed faith. Turning its pages slowly, deliberatively, and searchingly is better. Particularly if in the process we remain open to God’s speaking to us in unanticipated ways through unexpected passages.

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Monday, October 26, 2009

Conservatizing The Bible

All translations of the Bible are influenced by theological assumptions and convictions that sometimes obscure rather than illuminate earlier meanings. For example, the Latin word for sacrament was no way to render the Greek word for mystery, and our understanding of both the sacraments and the mysteries of the faith have suffered as a result. Or, a gender neutral translation of the Bible, such as the New Revised Standard translation’s marketers purport it to be, runs roughshod over the understanding of masculinity, feminity, and divinity that the supposedly shameless patriarchal renderings from the past are falsely believed to obscure. For most readers, though, theological intrusions into the translation process are too difficult to detect to be offensive.

Not so, however, with another kind of translation effort that is going on today, with perfectly straight faces on the part of its promoters. It goes by the name of the Conservative Bible Project, and the envisioned outcome is a complete fix of the Bible by clearing up imprecisions both in the original languages and in the English language, as a way of eliminating so-called biases that from the beginning have tilted the biblical message left-ward. There is nothing subtle about this project. It is designed to be not just mildly offensive, but painfully offensive as well, to liberals who allegedly have been about the business of highjacking Jesus to their cause from the beginning.

Methodologically, the Conservative Bible Project is preposterous on the very face of it. The commitment to eliminate every vestige of liberalism from the Bible means that the translators must already claim to know in advance how to render every particular passage, no matter what the plain meaning of the passage itself (a principle supposedly sacrosanct to all true conservatives) may be. An example: Luke 23:34, Jesus’ petition to God from the cross to forgive his crucifiers because they do not know what they are doing. Apparently, the Conservative Bible Project will take this passage out, partly because it appears in none of the other Passion Narratives and therefore may not reflect Jesus’ own words. This in itself might be a justifiable move, so long as the principle that informs it is applied everywhere else. However, we would then lose five of the other seven last words, not to mention Jesus’ bread of life sermon and a bunch of other good stuff besides. But the key consideration for the people running this project is that Luke 23:34 is --- are you ready for this? --- a favorite passage of liberals, because it shows Jesus in a liberal light. Good God Almighty, save us. I offer this as a petition and not as a curse.

To be more liberal-minded toward the Conservative Bible Project, though, something which all conservatives most surely deserve --- whether they want to admit it or not --- liberals sometimes take a back alley assault approach to the scriptures too. Even though I continue to admire what Thomas Jefferson tried to do by re-writing the Bible for the Age of Enlightenment, I also find his presumptuousness in undertaking it little short of appalling, and many of the results of his efforts disappointing and irritating. And as for the Jesus Seminar’s recent efforts to produce a Fifth Gospel by taking votes on what from the other four and the Gospel of Thomas ought to go into it, well --- be still, my soul might be another petition worth sending up.

There is certainly nothing new about taking liberties with organizing the ancient texts of Scripture. By the 140’s, the messing around had already begun, with the Marcionite faction in the Roman church proposing an early version of the Christian canon in terms of parts of Paul’s letters and of the Gospel of Luke, and nothing else. Because the God of the Jews was an evil God, or at least a very weak one, Marcion appears to have believed, not only did Jewish scriptures have to go, but with them every Christian book that in any way depended upon them, and every passage even in Paul and Luke that made Jesus out to be a faithful Jew (which, in fact, he was). What remained from Marcion's peculiar paring down was a very short Bible, a God of love and not of justice, a wholly spiritual and not physical Christ, a denunciation of physicality itself as evil, and an ascetism that could make even a Desert Father beg for relief.

It is hard to see how a conservatizing of the Bible is going to help very much in overcoming the suppposed negative effects that liberalizing the Bible has had in the life of the church. More helpful still would be an approach that allows the holy and gracious God of the Bible to be holier than the Bible itself is and more gracious than doctrinaire theologies will ever be.

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Monday, October 12, 2009

Conversion, Conviction, And Conscience

Soon after my high school conversion experience, my born-again Christian friends began hinting that the big event may not have been the real deal. I could report no stroke-like symptoms, bright lights, or angelic choruses, not even a basso profundo voice from above the clouds. I did not need to be helped to my feet after it was all over, or anyone to tell me what had happened or what it meant. I knew all by myself what had happened: a sudden massive energy surge went all through me, accompanied by an indescribable joy. And I had no hesitation expressing what it was telling me: "There is a God," I silently said to myself.

In comparison with the Jesus knocking at the door, slain in the Spirit, and tongues-speaking experiences my friends were having at the time, my own brief encounter with the Maker of Heaven and Earth had to have lacked a lot in their eyes. For me, however, it had all the quality of a one time only watershed occurrence, which is exactly what succeeding decades have proved it to be. The feeling of divine power and love that overwhelmed me in that single, momentary experience had a completeness about it that would only have suffered in the repeating. The process of reflecting upon it, however, has been on-going.

Most Christians who claim to have had a conversion experience seem remarkably consistent in their accounts of what the experience led to: a new or deeper relationship with Jesus, an unshakeable conviction about his identity as the Son of God, and a way of life intentionally even if imperfectly patterned after his. My own experience led me to someone and to something else, to the Source of the universe's matter, energy, and order, and to a life of passionate and continuing inquiry into the relationship between this Source and the God of Jesus Christ. At the time, there were enough Christians exerting a positive influence upon me to make me yearn to accept Jesus' heavenly Father as my own. And though I gladly joined my hands with theirs, I knew that before I could ever join my heart as well, I would have to discover in my own way whether the God I genuinely believed I had experienced could possibly have been Jesus' as well.
Some of my concerns were science-and-reason based; for example, I could not see any need for a God to explain the origin of the universe as a whole. Others sprang from a sense of moral outrage over things people kept telling me that their God relished doing, such as making a sacrificial lamb of Isaac and Jesus, and taking away any chance of salvation for people unfortunate enough to have been born before the latter's coming into the world.

These days, there is another reason for my continuing to struggle with conversion experiences of every sort. It is that these experiences are claimed to have a unique, unrepeatable character about them that by definition disqualifies them as solid evidence for the existence of anything other than of their experiencers. To count as genuine evidence for anything, an experience must be accessible to everyone and not only to a specially favored few. There are enough consistent patterns and predictable sequences observable in, around, and beyond us to make it reasonable to believe in a transcendent designer in, even if not of, the universe. But there is nothing in this kind of evidence that permits inferences to the more specific things about the divine nature in which faith is especially interested, e.g., that the designer is triune, or that he rewards the righteous and punishes sinners everywhere.

These are the kinds of logical considerations that keep generating questions which my conscience will not allow me to avoid for very long. Applied specifically to the vital center of my own conversion experience --- an in-pouring of pure, unbounded, glorious energy --- they still make me wonder about my jumping so quickly to the conclusion I did about what really was in that energy cloud surrounding me at that climactic moment. I judged it to be a "who" and not merely a "what." I have never recanted this judgment, but I soon realized that nothing in the experience upon which it was based itself necessitated any mention Christianity’s God at all.

Most especially, there was nothing in the particular idea of God that I brought to mind in my exclamation that even remotely corresponded to the Cosmic Accountant, Atonement-demanding, My Son or No One kind of God that people in the church continue to talk about as the only kind of God there is. In matters of faith, conscience has its own role to play over conviction, and even over conversion. To be sure, conviction not energized by conversion reduces to dogmatism. But conversion not tempered by reason equates with fanaticism.
　
　
　

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Monday, September 28, 2009

Revisiting The Ninth Commandment

Our many failures across the country this past summer to reason together about matters of social importance surely reached their nadir with a Congressman’s not easily forgotten “You lie!” shout to the President of the United States. Under the circumstances, the President’s response seemed appropriate enough --- “that’s not true” --- but also a little lame. Perhaps we can help him out --- the President, that is; the Congressman and his supporters seem beyond help --- with some reflection about the Bible’s own take on name-calling.

The sweet-spirited teacher of my unruly third grade Sunday School class somehow managed, in spite of all our efforts to thwart her, to get three ideas across to us about the Ten Commandments. The first was that God expects things of us. The second was that God tells us what he expects very clearly. And the third was that doing what God expects makes things better for everybody. These ideas still carry a lot of weight with me. To be sure, there are details about the handing down of the Ten Commandments that I still find irksome. For one, Moses' God was too jealously self-protective for my liking. And he seemed to be quite unrealistic about the whole business of coveting. Surely the feeling is understandable, even if the behavior is not. But about honoring our oaths and our parents, not killing people, being faithful to our spouses, not grabbing for what does not belong to us --- who could find fault? Or with not bearing false witness against our neighbors?

With most people who take this latter commandment seriously, I have paid relatively little attention to its earliest context, ancient Israel's legal procedure and its rules for giving testimony in courts of elders. Instead, I have broadened its context to encompass everyday relationships in general. The ninth commandment is not only a prohibition against lying for the purpose of bringing harm to others in a judicial proceeding. It is a mandate to attribute to people, on every occasion, only those things that we know to be true about them. The corollary is that there is no justification for deliberately saying something about another, whether thinkingly or unthinkingly, that we know or should know to be false, harmful, or both.

Elsewhere in the Bible, though, there is a somewhat troubling variant on this commandment. In a collection of teachings that Matthew made into a sermon on or at the foot of a mountain, Jesus says that whoever calls another a "fool" deserves hell-fire. (Matthew 5:22) It is embarrassing to have to admit that I have called people a lot worse things than this. But I have long thought the price for doing it would be relatively low. Basically, it takes the form of others' verbal pay-backs, tit for tat, absorbed without a lot of griping. In these admittedly not so nice games, we usually get about as much as we give, and it has not occurred to me very often that the price for my own defamations might and should be steeper.

But then again, Jesus sometimes seems to be doing with malice of forethought the very thing that he is supposed to have warned everyone else not to do. In these particular verses, the scribes and the Pharisees have irritated him (again), and the Master flat-out decks them. He calls them "blind guides," "whitewashed tombs," "vipers," and yes, even "blind fools.” Here, I think, Exodus and Deuteronomy have it all over Matthew 23: when it is a question of name-calling, sticking with the ninth commandment is the better way to fight the temptation to engage in verbal assault.

If we are to believe another of Matthew's characterizations of Jesus, that he came to make no changes in the Law at all, the real issue for Jesus could not have been just name-calling. It had to have been the refusal of people to obey the spirit more than the letter of the commandment by justifying their verbal aggression with evidence and reasons that are open to others' scrutiny. One way to look at all of the Gospels is precisely for the evidence that Jesus supplied in abundance for the claims he made against the religious establishment of his day.

It does not seem likely, therefore, that there are eternal consequences awaiting someone merely for calling our President a liar, or for calling another among God’s people a fool. But if we are going to continue to mouth off without taking the right kind of responsibility for our verbal leavings, then there may be at least an earthly variety hell to pay, from Someone who has better evidence for just about everything he requires of us than any of us will ever come up with for not doing it.

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Monday, September 14, 2009

Sin, Health, And The Sin Of Not Reforming Health Care

As serious as were the consequences of “original” sin --- toilsome work for Adam, painful childbirth for Eve, and eventually, death for both (but not on “the very day” they sinned) --- one thing that apparently neither of our First Parents had to suffer as punishment for it was bad health. It did not take long, however, for the idea to get going among their descendents that everybody else’s diseases, infirmities, and foreshortened lives (threescore years and ten does not begin to match the patriarchs’ longevity) were in some way God’s retaliation for their own sins. No matter that particular ailments were hard to match up with particular sins; it was the general theory that counted.

One would think that by now, for Christians at least, connecting ill health with sin would have no credibility whatever. Jesus himself roundly repudiated doing it. (See, for instance, John 9:1-2) Part of what went into his repudiation still makes good sense. Many saintly people get one ailment after another, while many rotten people seem never to lose a day’s dishonest work. Further, if by divine decree sin impedes health, its forgiveness should make people physically well immediately, and the refusal to honor God as a forgiving God should make evil-doers as sick as they can get without becoming downright dead.

Jesus’s refusal to look upon ill health as a by-product of sin is not without difficulties, however. The passage cited above goes on to make a theological point that, with all due respect to the Johannine school of the first century, squares all too well with at least one part of the message that it is the aim of its whole Gospel to communicate. In this particular case, of a man who was born blind, Jesus is quoted as saying that his blindness had nothing to do with his parents’ sinning, but rather with a decision on the part of God to demonstrate His power by curing him. There is more than just this one text in the New Testament supporting the notion that God must have his reasons for making people sick or infirm, but this one may be the most offensively stated of them all. John the Baptist seems to have been content to proclaim his own decrease that Jesus might increase, but no one else should entertain even the possibility that a God of love would ever inflict an infirmity on one of his creatures in order to aggrandize His own need to be a Curegiver. We can leave that kind of thinking to charlatan faith-healers.

It is important to disconnect our ideas about illness from our ideas about sin and divine purposing. By doing so, we can align ourselves the right way with responsible medical science, whose proper aim is to attack illness on the purely physical grounds upon which it should be attacked. And also, we can align ourselves the right way with responsible Christian witnessing to sin’s forgiveness more than to its ubiquity. God does indeed work in mysterious ways, but not by sticking it to one person whose sins happen to tick him off more than does another’s, and not by making the infliction of misery an essential component of the abundant life His Son has promised us.

And now, the point of all this for health care reform. The only credible explanation for this country’s dilly-dallying a half century and more over getting this done has to be that deep-down, there must still be lingering the notion that people who get sick deserve it and that alleviating their distress somehow would disrupt the divine economy of salvation. Still clinging to this lingering notion is the perfectly awful idea --- its Calvinist roots notwithstanding --- that it is meet and right for wealthier people to have easier access to health care because their worldly success is itself a sign of divine election.

People who suffer from this demented thinking also see the very real connection between poverty and ill health as even more evidence of God’s coming down on the side of the more successful among us. “The least of these” should get what they deserve. And if they are “illegals” besides, they should just be made to go away. In more down home theological language, the outlook here is that God clearly wants a few people more than he wants others to have all of life’s goodies, and that as a consequence and by his grace he enables his chosen to secure their benefits without any more than token struggles, while everybody else grabs, usually unsuccessfully, for whatever little may be left. It is sad to contemplate that this kind of a God is even more petty than we are.

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Monday, August 31, 2009

Toward A Faith Perspective On Health Care Reform

Riotous town hall meetings on the reforming of health care are finally ebbing, and Congressional debate on the subject can gear up again aided by the usual and quieter back alley lobbying and back room dealing. Right now, I am wondering whether faith communities across this country will glean enough from their own traditions to make a significant difference, and quickly, to a discussion that cannot be allowed to fail. From the standpoint of Christianity, the gleaning process may prove to be harder than we might expect.

If we think about health care reform the way we believe we ought to think about every other moral and social issue, by looking first to Jesus, we must face from the outset some major difficulties with translating his own orientation to life under God into terms that can be meaningful in our own. Remember, by way of example, that he never married. (I am singularly unimpressed with feminist theologies and popular recent novels to the contrary). And so, he never settled down with children of his own that he had to worry about. Further, he appears not to have shown much concern for the physical or emotional well-being of his own aging parents --- early in his ministry he got pretty testy with his mother, and his earthly father got dropped out of the picture altogether. He never struggled with finding and keeping a paying job, with meeting a payroll, or with covering employee benefits. He owned no property, left no estate, and eventually fobbed off on others even the expense of burying him.

The Gospels are pretty clear --- or at least the first three of them are --- about why his life took this shape: Jesus felt called to devote himself to announcing the imminent breaking in of a Kingdom not of this world. To the consternation of liberation theologians of all stripes, Jesus' sense of his calling forces us to consider the possibility that long-term planning for an earthly future may have no real importance at all in the Divine scheme of things, except perhaps to distract us from connecting with our true home in the Beyond. In the light of these considerations, can it still be said that by keeping our eye on Jesus we can find our way to a healthful solution to the problem of ensuring adequate health care in our society?

I think so. Consider, for example, a very early Christological hymn which impressed St. Paul enough to include it in his letter to the congregation at Philippi: "...he humbled himself, and was obedient, even to the point of death, death on a cross..." (Philippians 2:8) What really gets to me in this passage is its reference to Jesus' refusing to lay claim to his equality with God, for the purpose of making himself a servant of others. (The Greek word actually translates as "slave.")

There is hardly any of this spirit of humility to be found in most of what now passes for serious discussion about health care across, in Rush Limbaugh's pompous blathering, "the fruited plain." Instead, a snarky spirit of self-serving sinks most of the discussions, an I-have-to-get-mine attitude accompanied by a mean-spirited suspiciousness that some undeserving soul will somehow manage to sneak into an ER somewhere and siphon off resources for which he or she will not be required to pay. Caring for the strangers in our midst? Forget about it. Health care is a pay as you go proposition for the legally ensconced, guys and gals, and if you shouldn't be here in the first place and you can't come up with your fair share of its cost, no one else should ever feel obligated to do it for you. Isn't this just the kind of sinful attitude for which Jesus committed himself to die?

One of the most important things I have learned over the course of my life in the church is that early Christian communities made the inroads they did not just because of the Roman roads that turned the Empire's urban centers into mission fields, and not just because of the power of the earliest apostles' preaching and teaching to overcome pagan mythology. What also counted was the overwhelming compassion that flowed from the hearts of those who fully grasped the significance of a loving God's sending his beloved son to show the way toward a new life of mutual love by and for all, especially to those in need, and especially by the sacrifices of people willing to meeting those needs in his son's name. Caring especially for the widows and orphans, for whom no one else then cared, was a good place to start. Just as caring for the "aliens" among us would be today.

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Monday, August 17, 2009

Guns and Nukes

On the face of it, it seems reasonable to insist on having the first at our personal disposal and the second at our government’s. The argument goes like this: There are bad people on our streets and untrustworthy foreign powers beyond our borders who want to do us harm and who have at their disposal, respectively, both means of doing it. And so, it is our personal and societal right and obligation to protect ourselves and other non-aggressive people and nations by possessing weapons in sufficient number and magnitude to prevail in any conceivable showdown with the forces of evil anywhere.

The facts presumed in this line of reasoning are hard to dispute. As are the normative claims about protecting ourselves and the innocent. What murks up the thinking, though, is our tendency to believe ourselves always to be truly innocent, and to assume that more equates with better when it comes to accumulating weapons for the purpose of keeping ourselves safe. From the standpoint of the Christian faith, the first belief is highly dubious: remember all that we once learned about the universality of sin? From the standpoint of theories about self-defense, the second belief is highly dangerous as well: remember all that we have learned lately about terrorism?

Typically accompanying the rationalization of seeking and acquiring more and more weapons, ostensibly for self-protection and never from aggressive intent, is the interdiction of any analysis of how human beings keep getting themselves into the situations that call for them (answer: from self-centeredness), and of with whom the blame most truly rests (answer: us as much as them). Admittedly, there is more to be said for this interdiction with respect to gun control than to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation agreements.

For all practical purposes, reigning in restrictions on the purchase of guns for personal use is now a lost cause in this country. Too many manufacturers have created too many of them. Too many criminals have more of them than any democratic system of laws and law enforcement can control. And too many people oppose even the barest tinkering with their freedom to buy and use any piece they want.

Whatever we may discover, therefore, by continuing to search out the whys of our addiction to guns will not help very much to vanquish it. Basically, our society has decided to live with the dangers of giving just about everyone an opportunity to get a hand on a gun (or both hands on more than one). And though it is difficult to understand why some folks think they need so many of them, violence on our streets is very real and a gun-toting citizenry might yet prove to be an important adjunct to a well-armed police force.

Nuclear proliferation, however, is a different story. Efforts to reduce the present number of nuclear weapons across the globe, to stop further production of them, and to keep tabs on existing arsenals make every bit of sense, no matter how many obstacles to their success must be faced and overcome at every step of the way. The major world powers have made huge progress on all this in recent decades and the progress is likely to continue, at least if so-called rogue nations can be prevented from getting in the way.

Nevertheless, it is still terrifying to contemplate the consequences of firing off even a few of the estimated 10,000 nuclear warheads that are currently operational around the globe. Maybe the predictions of nuclear winter are unfounded; they most certainly are more difficult to defend than I once thought they were. But from any mutual setting off of nukes we would still be dealing with an aftermath far more destructive than that of fights between even armed to the teeth street gang members in our cities.

The recent decision of the United States Supreme Court on the right to bear arms pretty well cinches it for gun lovers in this country. We have that right, the Court said, as individuals and not just as militia members. (For the life of me, however, I cannot see this implied in the language of the Second Amendment.) With respect to guns, then, we may no longer be able to press the question of how many is too many. But nothing prevents the international community from working for a nuclear weapons-free world. Indeed, we have the right and the responsibility to proclaim in the name of the Prince of Peace that very, very few are still far too many. Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved that once and for all. It is disturbing testimony to the depth of human sinfulness that we still have as many of them around as we do.

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Monday, August 03, 2009

The God Particle

There is a passage in The Book of Colossians that in my mind nicely links the Christology of early church teaching with the cosmology of recent scientific speculation: “In (Christ) everything in heaven and on earth was created, not only things visible but also the invisible order of thrones, sovereignties, authorities, and powers: the whole universe has been created through him and for him. And he exists before everything, and all things are held together in him.” (1:16-17, NEB). Right now, it is the cosmology rather than the Christology of this passage that intrigues me. What has re-ignited my interest in the idea of a substance holding everything in the universe together is what I am learning about the Higgs boson—named for the scientist who first dreamed it up—and why some people cannot seem to avoid the temptation to call it the “God particle.”

The physics of bosons eludes my comprehension about as much as does the physics of leptons and quarks, all teenier by many orders of magnitude than the electrons, protons, and neutrons into which they come together and around which I can still get a small part of my rapidly aging mind. However, I do think I still have enough functioning neurons and synapses to grasp why particle physicists are positing the existence of at least one kind of boson to account for other particles in the universe having mass and coming together to form every-thing else. And why we expend time, money, and effort to build particle accelerators that will crash enough protons and anti-protons into one another with enough speed to set off enough fireworks to enable our seeing this elusive particle in all its glory. Or to determine once and for all that there is no such particle.

I only wish I could have gotten closer to this research myself than the fates allowed. In the early 1990’s I was doing some work for the Provost of Southern Methodist University that included helping coordinate the development of a new physics department with the world-class people who at the time were building a supercollider in, of all places, Waxahachee, Texas. Just when things were moving along impressively enough to guarantee US supremacy in particle physics research for a generation, Congress got cold feet and killed the whole project. As a result, the axis of the research shifted to Switzerland, and our country ended up helping to subsidize the building of the Large Hadron Collider just outside Geneva. Ironically, in the time it will take to repair a recent break-down with the LHC, physicists at the much smaller but no less venerable Fermilab near Chicago just may complete the search for the Higgs boson all on their own.

It is fascinating to contemplate the greatest particle physicists of our time repeatedly colliding with one another in a frantic effort to be the first to explain how, as one scientist friend found a way of putting it to me, atoms “congeal” into matter after the Big Bang. When I first began struggling to grasp the nature of elements, molecules, and atoms, the notion of a “Big Bang” was still generating more big yawns—and even big laughs—than big ideas. The prevailing wisdom was that things were made up of atoms and whatever sub-atomic particles there were, and that all of them had been here together, forever. Religious types like me were struggling against getting closed out of the cosmological action altogether, but about all we had to draw on was the very difficult to grasp idea that all the stuff of the universe was created out of—are you ready for this?—nothing, absolutely nothing at all. In short, we were trying to squeeze in a place for God the Creator.

But now comes the God particle discussion, grounded in the certitude that atoms and their components have not in fact been around forever, and focusing intently not on what happened before the Big Bang and how, but on what’s keeping the furniture of the universe now in place from disintegrating before our very eyes (if, indeed the process saves our eyes for last so that we can view the final collapse). The God particle is not a that- from- which- everything- else- material- comes, but rather a that- which- holds- together- everything- which- has- already- come. The writer of Colossians could not leave it at that with respect to Christ; he had to bring in the the idea of Him as agent of the universe’s creation as well. But what the writer also left us is a very present God in times of chaos, whose nature may be less to originate and more to bind, hold, and sustain.

If the search for the Higgs boson is any indication, people are now taking such an idea to their comfort just as much in science as they always have in religion.

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Monday, July 20, 2009

Finding Answers To Hard Questions About Faith: A New Book For You

For a couple of years, it was possible from this website to access a book-length collection of short studies that I wrote under the title: Explorations in Faith and Belief. During the time that this material was up and running, I received a number of e-mails from readers that I found gratifying and challenging, and that encouraged me specifically to refine and focus the material around a better defined and more consistently carried out theme. With the technical help of Ms. Chris Guldi, who created and who has managed this website from its beginning over seven years ago, I have re-fashioned some of the original essays and a lot of new material into a very different kind of book that I hope you will find interesting and helpful.

If you will look on the right side of this page, you will see a link to this just finished book, whose title I have reproduced above. There are several ways for you to make it your own. The first is by reading it online, and/or downloading parts or all of it to your computer, from which you may then read, reproduce, and distribute it free of charge. (I keep having to remind myself, though, that printing downloaded material does not come cheap, at least as long as I continue to rely on desktop printers that drink ink as fast as I drink bottled water.)

If you would like this material to have and to hold in more traditional book form, Chris has made this possible, too. A CreateSpace paperback edition is now available through a direct link that she has provided. And soon, Kindle owners can order it directly for download through Amazon. (Needless to say, I never could have figured out how to provide these options on my own.) Together, these access points have drawn my writing completely into Cyberspace, where some readers have waggishly suggested my thinking has been for a long time.

The organization of Explorations … came about originally as a response to readers of Howe About who had been either intrigued, put off, or both by my opinions and who wanted to know more about the theological method and principles that inform them. Several correspondents wondered whether my approach to theology can be defended as an adequate way of representing the Christian message in the present-day, and if so, how? Their questions were legitimate and important, and Explorations sought to answer them respectfully and as completely as I could. One response to my efforts that especially caught my interest came in the form of a question that has occupied my attention ever since: How can we use these discussions of theological fine points in everyday conversations with everyday people about their very personal struggles with faith?

It did not take me long to realize that this question has been at the heart of my pastoral and academic ministry across a professional lifetime, and that I may have developed a perspective on it that is worth sharing with more than just my own students, parishioners, counselees, and fellow church members. The perspective is anchored in the fundamental conviction that when we are struggling with faith-issues, what we need most is to be surrounded by fellow believers and strugglers who listen well, who can resist the temptation to impose their own opinions on us, and who encourage us to seek answers to our questions that are acceptably Christian but at the same time congruent with the dictates of our own conscience. A major corollary of this conviction is that the process by which we arrive at answers is as important as the answers to which the process leads us.

One hope that I have for this book is that all of its readers will find in it resources for nurturing their own spiritual growth. A second is that those who are engaged in the ministry of listening and guiding will find in it some very practical help for working with people whose life-issues are being made more complicated by their faith-issues. Thirdly, I hope that this book will add an important and needed dimension to my previous books on lay shepherding, and to the lay Christians who continue to read and use them in their own congregations. And finally, I hope that I will hear from you about how to make my on-going thinking about the book’s subject a more helpful account of how struggling with questions about faith is also a witness of faith.

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Monday, July 06, 2009

A Couple Of Biblical Texts In Context

I would like to think that it is a sign of maturing in faith and not just aging into crankiness that some of my favorite passages in the Bible have begun to trouble me as much as they comfort me. Two examples, both from my very favorite Gospel, should suffice to illustrate at least some of my --- and, I believe, our --- troubles. Since modern translations do not help very much to alleviate the difficulties, I will quote both passages in familiar King James language.

The first is John 3:16 --- “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.“ What is comforting and relevant about this verse is its picture of the scope of God’s love. Although the world of which it speaks is smaller than the world to which today’s astrophysical and ecological interests and passions stretch, it is still large enough to encompass the whole of the human world that St. Paul once characterized as groaning in travail, awaiting relief and release. (Romans 8:21-3) God’s love is for all, not some. It is not the limited, conditional love of one among many tribal deities, but the pure, unbounded love of the one and only Lord of all Life.

Well, not quite. As the Lord giveth in the first part of this verse, he taketh away in the second. All who are not “in” the Son (the mysticism here is an important theme running through the whole of this Gospel) will be cut off from the source and scene of eternal life. If we were Jewish Christians in the late first century of the second milennium, just kicked out of the synagogue for insisting that Jesus is the long-expected Messiah, we might want to take this verse to heart, give up our longing for an irretrievably lost fellowship with our still Jewish friends and family members, and rev up our participation in the Christian koinonia. But we are not of that time and situation. We are Christians in an increasingly interdependent and religiously pluralistic world of a new millennium altogether, who can no longer afford to allow the good news of John 3:16a to be swallowed up by the very bad and irrelevant news of 3:16b.

The second passage of this little exercise is John 14:6 --- “…I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Here, too, there is something comforting and relevant to be gleaned. At least, I have found it so ever since I began struggling in late adolescence with how to be a faithful Christian in addition to being a new church member. I got what God was all about; what I did not get was how to translate my understanding of God into a better way of personal living than I had managed to come up with on my own. The Ten Commandments helped some, although the jealous God of whom they spoke was not the God I had come to know. “Look to Jesus,” a lot of my friends kept telling me. And that helped more.

It was the first part of John 14:6 that first showed me what I would find by looking in earnest, even though the exclusivity implied by the “The” of the passage seemed more than just a little extreme. As for the second part of the verse, I could only close my eyes and shake my head in consternation. Jesus had become worth listening to not because I saw him as my only path to God, but because the God who had already come to me along his own path was the same God who came to Jesus too, much more powerfully.

Every now and then, I get to wondering about just what might befall us in the life of faith were the original manuscripts of biblical books ever to turn up somewhere. At present and for the most part at least, we have every reason to suppose that they were copied accurately and faithfully. But… One speculation I have is that in that Johannine School of editors back yonder, there might have been a dyslexic guy who inadvertently reversed the original phrasing of 14:6b and whose reversal got picked up and incorporated into all the versions of the Fourth Gospel that subsequently made it out of the School. Consider this possibility for the original statement: “no man cometh unto me, but by the Father.”

Or unto the Buddha, or to Muhammad, or… As speculation, of course, this line of thought is clearly over the top. As theology, though? Now that is another story.

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