Howe About

Monday, May 24, 2010

Finishing Up

This column completes eight years of putting up on this website short essays on faith, theology, and everyday living. It began and it ends, in this form at least, as a part of the outreach ministry of First United Methodist Church, Richardson, Texas.

What I have tried to do in all of these pieces is to bring the resources of scripture, the Christian tradition, experience, and reason to bear on the understanding of our common faith and its relevance and power for living transformed lives as servants of God in the present age.

Some of the columns address topics and issues that were discussed widely at the time of their writing --- e.g., conflicts in the Holy Land, health care, church and state, abortion, the economic order, stem cell research, poverty in the midst of plenty, intra-church controversies, the environment, homosexuality, and immigration reform, to name a few. With most of these issues, we still struggle.

Other Howe About columns take the form of meditations keyed to the church year of any year --- Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost.

And still others struggle with perennial issues of faith --- e.g., evil and God’s goodness, faith and mental health, the authority of the Bible, establishing a Christian home, the meaning of salvation, liberal/conservative divisions in church and society, gifts of the Spirit, the end-time, etc. and etc.
On all of these subjects, I have written with both a theological and a pastoral perspective in mind.

I have thoroughly enjoyed creating each one of these columns/essays, and I have appreciated all of the responses I have received about them, favorable and unfavorable. It has been a privilege to offer them in Christian love as a service to my home church and to a readership that has spanned 40 states and over 40 countries abroad.

Howe About’s 200-plus contributions, including a full-length book, will still be available for downloading at this address, with the hope that they will continue to stimulate discussion about how to express the Christian message credibly and lovingly for the present day. Each is easily accessed by clicking on the links provided at the right side of this page. May the clicking continue.
　
　
　

Monday, May 10, 2010

The Experiences Of Pentecost

Sometimes, I like to imagine myself standing with a few inquiring friends just outside the door of that upstairs room in Jerusalem and witnessing the Holy Spirit's descending on Jesus' followers before the whole neighborhood went ballistic. I still wonder what we would and would not have heard and seen that morning. Most likely, we would have heard the sudden outbursts in other languages. But whether we would have heard noise like a "strong, driving wind" or seen "flames like tongues of fire" (Acts 2:2-3) resting on everybody in the room, I am not so sure.

Clearly, the crowd that gathered before we got there heard the noise of both the wind and the speeches, but reacted primarily with bewilderment about both. Luke makes no mention of their seeing the flames at all. So Peter may have had a tougher job of it than the Christian tradition has acknowledged, trying to persuade people on the church's birth-day that his eleven companions were not simply "drunk." (vs.13) Yes, nine in the morning might have been a little early for inebriation; Peter had a point there. However, there really is no time of any day or night that makes testimony like Luke's any easier to accept at face value.

Confused, dejected disciples and perhaps a hundred or so followers besides were desperate for assurance that they had not spent the last year or three of their lives for naught. They needed nothing short of a miracle to convince them that the man who had just died ignominiously as a crucified criminal was in truth their peoples' Messiah. Is it all that difficult, therefore, to imagine their conjuring up the miracle out of their own collective imagination, perhaps with the assistance of spirits other than the One about whom Peter spoke?

Well, in truth, it is. What makes it difficult to write off all the hoopla of the day of Pentecost --- the noise, the flames, the strange utterances, the awe and wonder, the knockout sermon, the three thousand conversions --- as something like mass mania is the fruit that it bore. From that day forward, new communities of lively faith and hope came into being, honoring and serving a loving and reconciling God and placing the needs of others above hopes for self-gain, even to death upon more crosses.

No matter how many times I read this story, I can still feel the tremble of the question to Peter, "what are we to do?", the thrill of Peter's answer, "Repent and be baptized," and the triumph in the lives of those who took Peter's challenge to heart and put themselves at God's disposing for the good of suffering people all around them. And therein lies the truth of all the experiences that have energized Spirit-filled Christians from that awe-inspiring morning right down to the present day. Their experiences of hearing, seeing, and feeling became and become true in their acting to serve others in the name of God, and to put others' well-being ahead of their own.

Not every Christian, of course, reads Luke's narrative of the Day of Pentecost this way. For many, break-outs of tongue-speaking and other spiritual histrionics portend only break-downs of authority and structure in the church. In their view, spontaneous outbursts of spiritual fervor should be snuffed out as quickly as possible by generous applications of ritual, doctrine, moralism and scolding. On the other end of the spectrum are Christians for whom Pentecost signifies a divine mandate to every would-be Christian to seek the gift of tongues --- or some other spiritual gift just as dramatic --- as an indispensable sign of genuine faith.

But what people did and did not hear, see, and feel that long-ago morning has very little to do with what actually gave the day of Pentecost its lasting significance. Hearing, seeing, and feeling many of the same things in and around that crowded room, some in the gathered throng apparently chose to put the whole thing behind them, return to their homes and work, and get on with their lives. Others, however, chose to strive for transformed living as agents of reconciliation and hope. These same possibilities re-present themselves in every new visitation of the Holy Spirit.

Philosophers remind us that experience includes not only our perceptions of and feelings about things, events, and people that affect us in some way. It also includes what we do to affect them. The choices people made on Pentecost were just as much a part of their experiences as what they heard, saw, and felt that day. And for us, too, it is the choosing and the acting that will make all the difference to the life of faith.
　
　
　
　

Monday, April 26, 2010

Funeral Pickets

On March 10, 2006, the St. John’s Catholic Church in Westminster, Maryland, held a funeral service for Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, who was killed in the line of duty in Iraq. Nearby, members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, displayed signs of protest which included the following: God Hates the USA, Pope in hell, Fag troops, and Thank God for dead soldiers. After the funeral, the church continued to fulminate on its website, including condemning the dead Marine’s parents’ raising him “for the devil” --- that is, as a Catholic.

Eventually, Matthew Snyder’s father filed a lawsuit against the Westboro Church for, among other things, invasion of privacy and defamation. A jury found the church liable for several million dollars in damages, which the trial judge reduced. The church then appealed the entire judgment, on the ground that it contravened the First Amendment. On September 24 of last year, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that both the church’s initial protest and subsequent website screed, though “distasteful and repugnant,” were nevertheless protected by the First Amendment‘s guarantee of free speech.

As one who has been wondering for months about this suit, and about what happened in it to the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religious expression along with its protection of free speech, I am gratified to learn that the United States Supreme Court recently agreed to review the Appelate decision in its next session. Hopefully, the justices will find a way to cut through the many legal technicalities upon which this case has so far turned to address a matter seemingly lost sight of by the Fourth Circuit, peoples’ right to protection from being assaulted by outrageous speech and comment during a time of bereavement.

Sadly, the Westboro Baptist folk are by no means the only Christians across the land who appear to believe that God hates America for tolerating homosexuality, particularly in the military, and is punishing this nation by allowing its soldiers to be killed on the battlefield, whether they are homosexual or not. Neither are they the only ones who talk as if God has it in for Catholics as well. Most certainly everyone who espouses such views has the right to express them, even in a manner that may be offensive or outrageous to others, e.g., in a website with an address that I am too embarrassed to quote in this column. But I question self-proclaimed God-fearing funeral picketers’ scurrying for justification under the Constitution to intrude upon other peoples’experiencing the comfort that it is one major purpose of funeral services to provide.

It may well be that the protection I would like to see for grieving families against these kinds of protests is not something that, in the last analysis, the Constitution can provide. As long as funeral picketers confine their rhetoric to what a reasonable person would understand as hyperbolically expressed personal opinion, and not descend to asserting something factual and therefore disproveable about specific individuals, their excesses will be tolerated, because under the Constitution as interpreted by the Courts, they must and should be. I for one think that the Westboro website contains enough factual assertions about the Snyder family to warrant its writers getting sued out of their socks --- e.g., that they taught their son to defy his Creator, to divorce, and to commit adultery. But the Fourth Circuit did not think so, and neither may the Supreme Court.

One thing that I find hopeful in the Circuit Court’s judgment is a statement on its final page, recognizing “the sanctity of solemn occasions such as funerals and memorials,” and the permissibility of governmental bodies to place reasonable restrictions on activities that are otherwise constitutionally protected. So long, that is, as “breathing space” is left for contentious speech. Unfortunately, the Court appears to have seen no need to assess whether the Snyder family was allowed sufficient breathing room from such speech when they and their fellow worshippers needed it most.

Some years ago I assisted in a funeral of a young man who died of AIDS. At the reception following, a family member took hold of my arm and led me outside, to tell me tearfully that he had just been accosted by another church member who offered the following words of “comfort“: You don‘t have to worry anymore. God has finished punishing him for his sins. This parishioner should have known better, not in this instance than to believe what he believed about homosexuality, but not to use another’s grieving process as an occasion for driving home a point of much disputed theology. Christians deserve more from one another than this. And our judicial system should not be expected to make us better Christians than we should be capable of making ourselves.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Placebos, Beliefs, and Cures

Recently, I came across several highly regarded studies that question the effectiveness of anti-depressant medications on all but the most severely depressed patients. According to these studies, mildly to moderately depressed people do about as well on placebos as they do on meds. One reason this is so may be that more than a few people in the placebo groups believe they are getting the real thing. Which reminds me of a story…

“Will” (not his real name), was struggling with a degenerative disorder. One of his physicians, “Steven,“ found a place for him in a study whose purpose was to gather further data on the effectiveness of a drug just approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The methodology of the study --- Will would not know whether he was receiving the drug or a placebo --- had him worried, and he sought my help in thinking through whether to participate.

Will’s dilemma was obvious and scary. In order to participate in the study he had to go off the drugs he was then taking and run the risk of making his condition even worse. But by not participating, he could be denying himself something that might make a more positive difference to his long-term health. It helped to learn that even if he were placed in the placebo group, the researchers would be monitoring his condition carefully enough to pull him out of the study were his condition to worsen significantly at any time. After giving Steven permission to talk with me, and several prayerful conversations between the three of us, Will decided to participate.

A month into the new regimen, Will bounded into my office with a broad grin on his face. He told me he had figured out that he was in the medication and not the placebo group, and that he was certain he would get better as a result. It seemed ingenious to me how Will had put two and two together on the subject: he researched other studies of typical side effects produced by the drug and realized that he was experiencing some of them himself, along with increasing relief from his degenerative condition.

But here is the complicator: Will received only placebos, never the drug being tested. I learned this from Steven, who came to me with this new information (I chose not to inquire how he gained access to it) and the difficulty it created for him not only as Will’s physician, but as a man of faith and moral integrity: It has to be Will’s belief in the drug that is making it work, Leroy. I have to tell him this, but I’m afraid that if I take away his faith in the thing, his illness will worsen all over again.

Steven eventually resolved his dilemma by invoking the “do no harm” principle. Since by that time there appeared to be no risk to Will for continuing with the research program, Steven delayed telling Will “the truth” until he completed it. Will’s response continues to interest me. You may be right that believing in the drug was what made what I took work, but I think something else was involved. Actually, somebody else. God must have wanted me to get better, and it didn’t matter to him what those guys gave me. As Steven later said to me, there was nowhere for him to go, scientifically, with the “God-thing” in that particular conversation, except to see it as yet another aspect of the potentially healing power of belief.

There is something to be said for Steven’s reaction. Believing in a God who heals is an important source of hope, even when we know that validating specific claims about divine healing is impossible empirically. Present-day brain-imaging technology is providing increasing support for the perspective that peoples’ hopes bring about measurable reactions in the brain. Someday it may be possible to connect those reactions more precisely with those produced both by specific drugs and by specific beliefs than we now can.

Clearly, it is too simplistic to conjecture that in order for anyone to get the most out of pharmacological interventions, they must believe that the interventions will work. Believing makes some things so, but not all things, and certainly not upon demand. Further, drugs sometimes seem to work even when there is massive doubt about whether they will. These same things can be said about prayer.

Nevertheless, in Will‘s case, it was at first a very specific belief --- that a very specific drug would bring about very specific consequences --- that played a major role in a very joyous outcome. But Will then moved to the view that divine healing actions pretty largely by-pass those of earthly healers. My own take is that God acted on Will’s behalf as God sometimes also acts on behalf of others, through the expertise of medical practitioners and researchers, and through the medicines and even the placebos of which they make timely and appropriate use.
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　

Monday, March 29, 2010

Lenten Meditations In The First Person (3): Getting The Old, Old Story Straight

When I got converted, I had the trembles inside, like most of my religious friends had been praying that I would. But it was not those trembles that, as they loved to say, "led me to Jesus." It was God and not Jesus who played the prominent role in first opening up a new way of life to me, and a God of a quite different sort than the god who had been laying in wait for eons to stick it to his only begotten.

The heart of my experience was an ineffable experience and a decision to believe, first, that a Creator of all things existed at all, second, that he created and creates out of and for the sake of love, and third, that I would have to begin turning my life over to living as I believed such a loving Being would expect me to live. Later, I would learn that the word "conversion" itself has little to do with the trembles and a lot with the deliberate turning away from self-centeredness to God-centeredness. Much later still, I would finally get it that being a Christian means most especially to let the God-centeredness of Jesus be the principal guide to developing our own, precisely because Jesus was a consummately God-intoxicated man, not another man full of himself like most of the rest of us are.

Part of the getting-it process had to do with coming to terms with "Jesus Loves Me." The song still sounds too precious for my liking, and its Jesus-ology makes it less God-centered than I came to understand Jesus himself to be. But its rarely sung third verse introduced me to a Jesus far more interesting than the failed, flesh-flayed, disappointed proclaimer of a message with which at the end no one remained willing to deal. Here, Jesus is a friend who wanted more than anything else to "give light and love to all who live." Mercifully, the song leaves out the part where he died because self-serving Jewish religious leaders and self-protective Roman politicians elected to do him in, with a lot of support from the crowds that had filled up Jerusalem for Passover the week they did it.

The old, old story could never leave it at this, however. It deformed the acknowledgment of an historical inevitability into an ill-thought-out and morally outrageous dogma of divine necessitation, predicated on the decidedly un-biblical notion of a universal and total human depravity overcome only by a divinely wrought atonement through a fellow human being who was wholly undeserving of the fate his God meted out to him. The outrageousness of this dogma is compounded exponentially when to it is added the notion that the sacrifice had to be made by the Incarnate Logos himself.

What is fundamentally wrong with this article of traditional Christianity is its incompatibility with a still more fundamental understanding of what it means to be a human being created in the image of God. We are created, in finite measure to be sure, with the divine capacities for thinking, deciding, communicating, and loving. Precisely because they are of divine origin, these capacities can never be wholly overwhelmed by the sinful misuses to which we as sinful people put them. In a word, the divine image we bear within ourselves is indestructible. And because it is, we remain fully responsible for the uses we make of our God-given capacities, for good and for ill.

Or at least this was the way it looked until theologians began toying around with the notion that, somewhat like the first use of crack cocaine, the first disobedient act of Adam and Eve immediately hooked them into a destructive pattern of behavior that soon would cross the placental barrier to infect their children, and then their childrens' children, and finally all the generations to come. The result, according to this bewildering logic, is a human race addicted to sinning, bearing a fallen nature utterly bereft of its original resemblance to the Creator, and exhibiting a condition so corrupted as to merit only everlasting punishment.

By the time I graduated from seminary, I knew that I would continue to have major difficulties embracing this basically Augustinian line of thinking. But what I discovered in those hallowed seminary classrooms was that my own hard-won version of the Christian story also had a rightful place in the traditions of the church, and that there were more than a few believers across Christendom who were as "lost" as I was, not in hopelessness but in "wonder, love, and praise" for the offer of fellowship with Jesus’ God, now and forever.
　

Monday, March 15, 2010

Lenten Meditations In The First Person (2): A Full, Perfect, And Sufficient Sacrifice

It is quite a leap, theologically, from the idea that Jesus loves the world’s children to the idea that Jesus died for the world’s sins. “Christ died for us while we were yet sinners,” Paul wrote, as a kind of bottom line statement of what grown up Christians are supposed to believe. (Romans 5:8a) Even so, the first idea still seems the better one, particularly when to the second is added the Pauline embellishment “and that is God’s proof of his love to us.“ (5:8b) What should be the old, old story of Jesus and his love becomes instead the tough, tough story of Jesus’ pain --- pain that is properly ours to endure. At every telling of this latter story, my mind is aswirl with questions more than my heart is becalmed by gratitude.

What questions? Well, for one, proving his love by sending an innocent man to die raises makes one wonder about what kind of a God it really was who was moving over the swirling turbulence of that primordial chaos. In spite of its many inspired flourishes, the Bible sometimes seems to bring God down to the least attractive levels of human behaving, after the fashion of pagan mythologies long rejected by philosophers and plain-speaking believers alike. If the Bible’s God is truly an atonement-obsessed God, there seems little difference between him and the capriciousness of a mountain-dwelling Zeus, except perhaps in the former's graciously refraining from messing with people sexually. (Although on this latter, there is still Genesis 6:2,4 to be dealt with.)

Another question has to do with the proper way to give this one true God his due. Most certainly, everyone owes God a lot. For our sins, we all have a lot of making up to do. But I find neither credibility nor comfort in the idea that someone else has already paid the price for those sins, that a deal made long ago between him and God (and possibly the Devil as well) was accepted long before we would commit even the first of them, and that we are now free from having to make anything up to the God we continue to dishonor.

Closely related to this question about giving God his due should be at least some wonderment about what we hear from a lot of sweat-soaked preachers about the cost to Jesus of saving us from our sins. Mark's Passion Narrative --- the one that Mel Gibson parlayed into a blockbuster movie --- powerfully exhibits the pain and humiliation God's only Son had to endure to free humanity from its Creator’s wrath, but with a result quite different from what its author/compiler intended. Instead of making thoughtful people humbly grateful, Mark's account (and Gibson's even more so) should only leave them astonished, angry more with God than at the Jews and the Romans. What kind of strange logic is it to claim, with Isaiah, that by his stripes, we are healed?

And then there is the question of why a gracious, merciful, forgiving, and loving God keeps getting calumnied by references to the divine rage, reprisals, violence, and terrorization that dominate so many of the Bible's pages. My own first encounter with God was with a Being patient enough to have listened to my doubts that he even existed, and caring enough to have assured me that he still loved me with all his heart, in spite of both my doubts and my sins. (I never considered doubts themselves to be sins.) No one had to get up on a cross to make this God more hospitable to me than he otherwise might have been inclined to be. Forgiveness from this God is one on one, wholly undeserved on our part, a transaction that leaves no one else writhing in agony or despair, and that asks of us only a loving, not a blind loyalty, and a willingness to share a loving spirit wherever we can, asking nothing in return.

It is still blindingly clear to me how much greater God's capacity to love is than human beings‘, and that this gap is not something to be narrowed by any third party acting on our behalf, whether Jesus as an agent of pardon or the Holy Spirit as an agent of perfection. The only way that I can see toward becoming a more loving person is to traverse a lonesome valley that I and everyone else --- and not just Jesus --- must walk alone. The idea that Jesus somehow loves us for doing it, though, still counts for a lot.
　
　
　

Monday, March 01, 2010

Lenten Meditations In The First Person (1):Not So Good News From An Old, Old Story

When I was a kid, the time of the week I dreaded most was Sunday morning. On every one of them, my mother and I trundled off to church on the city bus at the time my father headed out in the family car for the golf course. It never seemed quite fair to me, Dad lining up long putts while I suffered through hell-fire and damnation sermons and Sunday School classes that always began with "Jesus Loves Me" sung off-key. When my sister came along belatedly, Mom gladly swapped the pew for the nursery, Dad eagerly made me his caddy, and I suddenly had a new lease on life, freed from preacherly harangues about having to be the kind of boy my pain-wracked Savior wanted me to be.

What eventually changed my Sunday apostasy was a group of lively, fun-loving, and occasionally spiritual high school buddies from the local Methodist Church who with their counselors set out to bring me back to Jesus. When they got through with me, Jesus and I had yet to become good friends, but a pretty primitive version of a "natural theology" was working well enough to make me do something almost unprecedented for my generation. I joined the church the first week of college. There I was: an almost Christian, sitting in the pews gladly, but watching with chagrin as a lot of my church gang declared a moratorium on religious practices altogether.

At one level, it is no mystery why leaving home and blowing off church still go hand in hand. For one thing, it is generally safer not to try church at all the morning after a grab-all-the-gusto-you-can soiree the night before. But for the more thoughtful late adolescents in my generation, there was something more important involved in the defections than mere wastedness: they were no longer making much sense out of the Christian story that they had been told from earliest childhood. By this time in my life, even my Mom had given up on it.

The story added up to something like this: The first two human beings on earth, who had everything going for them, went bad, passed their badness on to their offspring, and threw their Creator into several millennia of hand-wringing, second-guessing, and hissy-fits. His temper aside, the Creator had good reason to be righteously angry, and to demand recompense for the disobedience and dishonor done him. But, wonder of wonders, he chose to pay what was due him out of his own largesse, by sending his own son to sacrifice himself in our place.

The details were always a little fuzzy on the connections between Adam's sins and ours. But the big point seemed to be that unless all of us in the here and now get to thanking Jesus enough by being loyal to him and to his holy church, we will go to hell and remain there forever. I skipped enough of the high school and college soirees to make my way down the church aisles on Sundays without swaying, but not enough to render blotto my nagging questions about the story we were supposed to take as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I now think it was during those Sunday bus rides to church that I first began to sense how much coercion is involved in the church’s getting people to believe what its leaders have determined everyone should believe. One kind of coercion depends upon the promise of reward, e.g.: support our church and we'll support your advancement in life; praise and pay God enough and your life will be long and prosperous. Another kind depends upon threats and punishments, e.g.: believe and act as we do or there will be no place for you among us now and later on in the hereafter. Notwithstanding the frequency across the centuries of evangelization by coercion --- it began rather early with the baptism of whole households --- peoples’ allegiance to beliefs is more honestly won by credible arguments and a respect for genuinely held differences.

There may be some good reason lying around somewhere for believing that coercing religious behavior and the correct religious attitude through rewards and punishments is justifiable, but I have yet to discover it. Pressuring people to assent unquestioningly to prescribed religious beliefs and practices --- especially about the Atonement --- and always with a "proper" religious attitude, amounts to nothing less than repudiating one of the most precious of all God's gifts to humanity, the gift of freedom. With that gift comes the responsibility to choose wisely and well on the basis of the most reliable knowledge available and the most thoughtful deliberation of which human beings are capable.
　
　

Monday, February 15, 2010

Thanks But No Thanks To The Garden Of Eden

From the perspective of moral decision-making, the Bible's single reference to a tree whose fruit contained the knowledge of good and evil seems to call for trusting and obeying rules unconditionally --- e.g., Curb your curiosity --- and never asking for the underlying ethical principles that would render the rules morally approvable in the first place --- e.g., Pushing the limits of our finite, human nature can be a good thing, but not defying those limits altogether. Passing up the fruit stands for sticking to the rules. Scarfing it down exhibits a defiant insistence upon principles.

Tradition has it that we are to follow the former course not because we see for ourselves that it is the better course to follow. We are to follow it because God told us to follow it. On our own, we cannot see what is better and worse, good or evil at all; only God can. All of this cries out for a second look.

It is true that only a mind like God's could contain all of what it would be good to know about good and evil themselves. For one thing, the good or the evil of any created thing (e.g., a beautiful sunset, or a tornado) is relative to how that thing does and does not fit into God's plan for the whole, and it is just this Whole that stretches finite understanding and imagination to the breaking point. Nevertheless, we still want to know anything and everything, from first principles down to last details, even when we discover that our thirst for knowledge may be forever beyond our capacity to quench.

Whatever is good or evil, then, about something cannot be such merely because God says that it is. Rather, when God says that something is good or evil, he does so because that thing really is one or the other, given the kind of world he has chosen to create and the plan by which he has chosen to govern it. Further, he says so on the basis of perceptions and judgments that are open to our understanding as well as to his.

The question of what God sees in something that makes him call that something good or evil, from viruses through civilizations all the way out to black holes and the Big Bang, is one of the biggest questions that we will ever ask about the created order. But it is a question that we ask because we cannot stop asking it. As is the question of whatever else God may know --- about himself, the created order, parallel universes, and perhaps even contemplated universes yet unactualized --- that we might have the capability of knowing, and in the knowing of which we might love him with our minds all the more completely.

Theologically speaking, then, we eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because it is in our very created nature and not, as tradition would have it, our fallen nature, to do so. It was truly a tragedy when mention of that tree was dropped without ceremony from the Old Testament altogether, not to appear in its pages again, except perhaps in the oblique hint of a later Preacher that the fruit of a tree like that could only be bitter. "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." (Ecclesiastes 1:18, KJV)

And so, I keep on asking the very same question that flummoxed Eve so very long ago: did she hear the Creator right about those two trees? And I keep on thinking that she didn't. To her credit, she did see through at least one attempt of the serpent to confuse her, recognizing immediately that God's prohibition did not apply to each and every tree in the garden, but only to one. But what if Eve then got confused about which tree it was that she and everybody else must approach with caution?

Think about it. In the light of almost everything else that the Bible says about God's glorious gift of minds with which to know and love him, it simply cannot have been the tree of knowledge that posed the problem in the Garden of Eden. It had to have been that other one. And even the fruit of the tree of life could not have been prohibited absolutely, for it is a measure of God's own life that makes us the living beings that we are. Just as it is a measure of God’s own wisdom that makes us hunger for as much as we can find out about his created order, whose immensity and beauty will both thrill and stagger us for however long our lives shall last.
　
　
　

Monday, February 01, 2010

The Tree Less Cherished

Here is a little story that I heard about for the first time in third grade Sunday School. It pretty much spoiled my whole day. Once upon a time, there was a garden planted by the Creator of the universe. There, human beings and every other creature of the fields and the air were meant to live happily, forever. Right in the middle of the garden were two glorious trees. One, called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, was immediately declared off limits. But a very deliberate Eve and a very distracted Adam ate from it anyway, and the world has been paying the price ever since.

I still think about this story a lot, especially during the Epiphany season, which celebrates among other things the manifestation of God’s light, life, and truth to all peoples.With respect to the latter in particular, I like to think of the coming of Jesus as bringing with it a new planting of the tree of knowledge, this time in the human heart. But the problem still remains of making credible the reasons the Old Testament story gave for God’s prohibiting access to a tree like this in the first place.

According to the first creation story in The Book of Genesis, what God had in mind for human beings was that they/we would tend the earth with him caringly and knowledgeably. But Eden's god --- the god of a second creation story --- is a very different kind of god, who had a very different kind of plan for a not nearly so admired human race. This god is a jealous, vindictive, self-serving, tribal kind of deity who hands out prohibitions and then tempts people into ignoring them. He seems constitutionally incapable of embracing the only creatures on earth capable of comprehending the wonders of creation, and seems not to care a whole lot for their habitat either, if the big flood later on was any indication.

What the story of the Garden of Eden finally comes down to is God’s expectation of unremitting obedience, and about the troubled life that befalls people who disobey him, in specific: having to work harder outside the garden than they would have had to work in it, having to bear children in pain, and having to die. (Genesis 3:16-19) My Sunday School teacher had an impressive way of boiling this down to third grade essentials. When you truly obey God, she told us, you trust that God knows best and you do what he tells you to do with no questions and no grumbles.

Sitting in church the hour after she laid this on us, I came to the conclusion that my own relationship with the god of the Garden was no better than Adam’s and Eve’s, and for much the same reason. I could not bring myself to believe that the supposedly perfect God we pray to is a God unwilling to give reasons for what he asks of us. Even my own very imperfect parents worked hard to be reasonable about what they asked of me, because they believed that it was the right thing for any parent to do. "Don't touch that tree," God said. Well, okay, but for whom, then, was it planted in the first place, and why?

The right attitude, this story encourages us to believe, is one of trusting and obeying: our parents, our teachers, our leaders, our church. It is one of bending to their will, conforming to their beliefs, and becoming as much like them as our immaturity and inferior wisdom will permit. The one question not to be asked about any of these conditions for living long and prospering is: why? Why should anyone be better off for doing so? Why should we trust these parents, these teachers, these leaders, this church?

What truly makes for the kind of partnership with God that human beings were created to enjoy in the first place --- at least as the Priestly writer of Genesis 1 envisioned it --- is not merely obedience, but also knowledge: knowing for oneself what is good and evil, knowing why each is what it is, and knowing that God is just as bound by the good and is just as obligated to resist evil as we are. Obedience to shared norms, based upon shared understanding, is what makes for co-creatorship, not a do-what-I-tell-you-or-else approach that prepares people neither to become mature on earth nor joyful in heaven.

There is a lot to be learned from the second creation story in Genesis. But not how to love God with all our minds. Or how to share in all of God’s truth, rather than in just the truth Who is Christ, without feeling fearful or guilty about it.
　
　

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.

ADDENDUM: On Columns That May Be Worth A Second Reading

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

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.

Friday, January 01, 2010

Howe About Columns June 2002 - December 2009

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.
　
　

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.

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.
　
　

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.

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.