The Pathetic Fallacy, a Groaning Earth in Romans, and Possible Origins of Pauline Textual Exegesis

Paul’s explanation of the groaning of creation in Romans 5 may not be an original explanation for his understanding of sin, but part of a long history within rabbinical interpretation.  Appreciating this point helps us to appreciate Paul’s Jewishness and the tradition from which his words arise.

One of the most well-known midrashim (at least in Jewish rabbinic circles) with regard to creation, and which I think helps us to understand Paul’s exegesis, relies on a small nuance, that imprecision or mystery that appears in the text, often out of place, but becomes an opportunity for the creative yet arguably over-working minds of the Jewish Tannaim and sages of the earliest midrashic periods.

Christian theology has often taught that the suffering in the world that we experience and sin comes at the hands of other humans and through natural disasters. When we think of the question of the origins of evil, we often point to humanity’s first disobedience in Genesis and sometimes overlook the evidence for disobedience of creation.  The groaning creation of Paul is often read as figurative language for the absolute value of the fall of creation accompanying humanity.

The Jewish rabbinical interpretation, rather than suggesting that humanity’s fall brought about the fall of creation (as is more common in Christian theology) does something unique with the text.  In Genesis, we find that God’s punishes humanity for their disobedience, but that he also punishes the earth, causing it not to bear fruit without toil. Why is this? The theology supporting this seems to be based on a linguistic queue. In Genesis 3:11, the phrase “fruit tree that bears fruit” is replaced in Genesis 3:12 with “tree that bears fruit.”  The omission, which at first appears merely to be an unnecessary modifier since the bearing of fruit is accomplished in the latter half of the phrase, actually caused concern for early rabbinic teachers. Why in the second instance does the tree lose its attributive fruit-nature? Genesis Rabbah 5:9 attempts to resolve the inconsistency within the text. Rather than frame the modifier in verse 11 as a strange addition, they focus on verse 12, which omits the word. Here, they reason, what must have happened is that the trees were originally commanded to not only bear fruit but to become fruit themselves. When the trees actually do bear fruit but refuse to become fruit, it is accounted as disobedience. The trees themselves are possessed of will. Later thinkers like Maharal in his Gur Aryeh would assert that the trees did not possess a will but rather that God intentionally created imperfections (apparently between these verses) to challenge humanity and spur him to reliance on God. Part of the reason no doubt was given that in Genesis 1:11, God commands the fruit tree to bear fruit, saying “it is so” and then follows by praising the tree that is not itself made of fruit by saying “it is good.” Nevertheless, this form of the pathetic fallacy (attributing to non-humans characteristics generally applied to humans) is striking as an early attempt to imply a fundamental reason why God goes on to curse the earth. Though he is not explicit, Paul appears to accept this tradition, or at least the consequences that the earth has been cursed for some sort of willful disobedience, since the earth itself “groans” in anticipation of its own redemption.  Does this make Paul or the early Jewish rabbis pantheists? Probably not, as it was rather more important to resolve the text than work out the consequences of the said resolution. Nevertheless, this groaning earth, one might argue, places Paul squarely in the ebb and flow of his rabbinic contemporaries and the accepted traditions about the rebelling world that humanity occupies.  

How Luke Makes Jesus a Roman: The Custom of Dining in Luke 14

I am forever interested in the ways the Bible appropriates wisdom from the culture around it. And the Roman influence is significant as it concerns the New Testament. One of my favorite pastimes is finding obscure tracts of wisdom in Roman culture that are taken up in the scriptures. For example, Jesus’ admonition against putting new wine in old wineskins can be found in Martial’s Epigrams and so we must assume that it is far from an original wisdom saying with Jesus. So at a conference the other day on drinking and symposia in the ancient world, I ran across this passage by Horace. In ancient Greece, when men came together to recline and drink, they didn’t discriminate between rank and position (most of the time this was because the men were of equal station anyways). But in Rome, the situation is quite different. Rank, station, position are all taken into account when drinking with other men (or women, as became the case among the Romans) and were reflected in the seating arrangement. The passage below from Horace sheds light on a Roman symposium:

Nasidienus’ Dinner Party

I was there at the head, and next to me Viscus

From Thurii, and below him Varius if I

Remember correctly: then Servilius Balatro

And Vibidius, Maecenas’ shadows, whom he brought

With him. Above our host was Nomentanus, below

Porcius, that jester, gulping whole cakes at a time:

Nomentanus was by to point out with his finger

Anything that escaped our attention: since the rest

Of the crew, that’s us I mean, were eating oysters,

Fish and fowl, hiding far different flavors than usual:

Soon obvious for instance when he offered me

Fillets of plaice and turbot cooked in ways new to me.

Then he taught me that sweet apples were red when picked

By the light of a waning moon. What difference that makes

You’d be better asking him. Then Vibidius said

To Balatro: “We’ll die unavenged if we don’t drink him

Bankrupt”, and called for larger glasses. Then the host’s face

Went white, fearing nothing so much as hard drinkers,

Who abuse each other too freely, while fiery wines

Dull the palate’s sensitivity. Vibidius

And Balatro were tipping whole jugs full of wine

Into goblets from Allifae, the rest followed suit,

Only the guests on the lowest couch sparing the drink.

Horace - BkIISatVIII:20-41

So I was thinking of the way this works out in the New Testament and found this passage in Luke 14:8 in which Jesus warns those attending a wedding not to seek the highest place. The word here prōtoklisian can be translated many different ways, and you find it as “seat” in Aramaic versions, although in English versions it is usually translated as “highest room” or “place of honor.” Given the socio-context, the idea of a seat seems to make the best sense in the Galilee of Jesus as imagined by the Greek writing author of Luke.  As Willi Braun points out in his excellent book Feasting and Social Rhetoric in Luke 14, “Luke shows himself to be a master of narrative evocation of the Greco-Roman social dining scene.” That is to say, he uses the image of the Roman Triclinium, the three-sided room situated with couches on those sides and used by the Romans for socializing, drinking, and eating. And so we have example of Luke’s genius for syncretistic borrowing of situation to place on the lips of Jesus wisdom sayings about a cultural practice that relevant only to Luke's Hellenistic audience, and would have been anachronistic to Jesus' real situation.

The question of whether Jesus was acquainted with such customs is only of secondary importance and possibly not important at all. It seems more likely by those like Braun, that it is the Lukean writer, educated in his own right and writing in Greek, who was more than likely interjecting the influence of his own Greco-Roman world into Jesus’ world, and in doing so, appealing to a Gentile audience.

For more information:

Braun, Willi. Feasting and Social Rhetoric in Luke 14: Society for New Testament Studies, Monograph Series 85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Freedom is Not a Biblical Virtue

When we speak of freedom these days in the United States, one would think we are quoting a code of moral ethics that spans the pages of our world religions and is so robust in its conceptual underpinnings that to deny anyone their “human dignity” comes at the price of heresy.

The problem is of course that while every American President talks about freedom, and today, especially within the Republican party which uses it as a battle cry against left-leaning big government politicians, the concept has emerged as a vacuous hole, devoid of any unambiguous meaningful content.  We fight for the cause of freedom, but cannot define it. We call ourselves a nation where freedom reigns, but refuse to talk about its application except where it promotes our politics. The freedom we like is an American form. It is idealistic, but little do the ones who champion it the most know that it derives from the Enlightenment form of humanism than from a supposed divine origin.  

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, talk of freedom in the Bible does not exist. The freedom we speak of in our country is most often regarded as a civil and civic freedom, dare I say, a secular one that has been co-opted by politicians as spiritual rights. Freedom of religion is not the same as a theology of freedom in religion. And therefore, where both Democrats and Republicans remain true to this ideal of freedom they remain true to the ideals that launched in Europe hundreds of years ago in the renaissance of humanism that itself underpinned the founders’ framing of our own country.

The Bible discourages freedom. It does not opine about what a man can be in society (never mind a woman), but rather gives practical advice about minding and remembering one’s place. These references are scattered throughout the scriptures, whether it is the advice to slaves to obey their masters or mitzvot concerning the practical duties of the Levitical order, the subjugation of lepers and women. In fact, just about everywhere you look there is an underlying message of anti-individuality whether it is in rank and file order of custom, ritual, society, even lineages. Paul himself tells us that any man who thinks himself something must remember that he is nothing. Was this simply the call to avoid pride, while a thin thread of positive self-image writhed underneath the surface? Or was this the order of the day. The humble man, the one who denies himself the freedoms of self-expression, but who lives in obedience is the man who is truly free. This was the thinking of many a theologian in Germany in the last century. But it is so counter-intuitive to our American political theology that we would thumb our noses at such theological advice today.

Certainly, there are exceptions. We see David being promoted. Saul is promoted. But where those exceptions exist they are not given for the general advancement and welfare of the individuals making up the culture. Instead, they are often contextualized to fulfill God’s purpose, a purpose that time and again diminishes man to “drop in the bucket status.” Yes, David is in awe that God is mindful of him. But the question we must ask ourselves is why? Is it for our benefit or his glory? If it is for his glory, then we again run into an important theme in the scriptures.

“In a Beginning, God Created…” or Stretching Possible Interpretations of Genesis 1:1

During my first graduate school program, I did a whole paper on the interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2. Indeed, these verses have made for quite a bit of entertainment and controversy. One of my favorite possibilities alluded to in Genesis, comes with this very first phrase from the very first line: in the beginning.

Of course, this is not what the phrase says in Hebrew:

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית

The root of the word is “head” reš with a bә added for effect. Scholars seem to think it means something like “at the head.” Of course the glaring problem is the absence of the definite article. But without the definite article, which would look like (ba)reishit instead of (bә)reishit, we are left with an awkward construction, namely: “in a head.”

Now perhaps it has been suggested that what is really being said is that creation began in the mind (head) of God. Other than making this a Matrix-type/Bishop Berkeley illusion of creation, the other possibility suggests that if we stay with the colloquial translation of “beginning,” we still are left with something like this: “in a beginning.” This is actually theologically consistent when one considers that the story of the flood and the rebirth was a beginning as well, and so Genesis 1:1 is not the most important beginning but is a beginning. This is also possible, if one considers that this most likely had nothing to do with creatio ex nihilo. And so God, working and fashioning pre-existing matter created “a beginning” by giving it form, the same way he creates a new beginning in the post-diluvian world. That is to say this isn’t a cosmological statement about the universe, but one about humanity’s beginning. The existence of the matter prior to its fashioning is of no interest to the author, but rather that God creates out of it a world for us. It is story thoroughly situated in our world!

There is still another possibility, and unless you are into ancient alien myths, the knights templar, and other Christian conspiracy theories, you’ll most likely not like this one, but I would caution that it is about as cogent a theory from a secular standpoint then it is to claim that Genesis 1:1 points to a scientific theory of Big Bang cosmology from the Niels Bohr particle.  That is to say, there is a modicum of faith that must be administered, in the same way one must tie any faith to his spiritual life.

Let’s propose that beyond the ancient texts, there is a God who is all-powerful and from himself begets reality. “In a beginning” may imply that there are also other beginnings, not important for us, but perhaps on other worlds. This was something I considered as I completed a very interesting independent study course on the Question of the Incarnation and Extra-terrestrial Life. After all, the vastness of the universe makes our own reality a bit absurd, even WITHIN the context of one’s faith. That God would reserve billions upon billions of galaxies for nothingness while we make up the only contingent of life would be an incredible tale. The crowd who considers that all of this is for us still seems not to have gotten past the Christocentricism and Anthropocentricism that despite science’s best attempts with Darwinism and Copernicanism remain hard at work in convincing us that we are prized creatures.

David’s question “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” need not be a statement of our solitary station in the universe or multi-verse for that matter. That God would mind anything other than himself seems an even greater statement than his minding us once you try to wrap your brain around what it means to be eternal and perfect!

The Importance Often Overlooked in the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkoth) and the Apologetic Motif in the Gospel of John

I had planned on writing a little something on Sukkoth this year, but the week was busy and the festival has since passed. But I still figured this might be of interest for some.

Sukkoth, known as the Feast of Tabernacles, makes an important appearance in the Gospel of John. As we are coming out of this holy time, which was commemorated on October 2, 2012 this year, I was reflecting on the importance of the event and how it ties into its most famous New Testament reference in the Gospel of John.

On the one hand, in John, chapters 7 through 9, we find a Jesus who is being pursued by the Pharisees because, as the gospel writer tells us, they want him dead. Jesus tells his disciples to go ahead of him into Jerusalem to celebrate the holy week (in Jesus’ day it was a seven day celebration), but latter makes his way there as well.

While John is no stranger to harsh depictions of the Jews, it is somewhat surprising to find those same Jews mercilessly hunting down Jesus despite the sanctity of the event, especially since during the passion they at least seem to revere the prohibition against his dead body remaining on the cross over Shabbat. The interesting correlation here is that Sukkoth commemorates the Jews’ wanderings in the wilderness when they carried with them the Ark of the Covenant while they set up a makeshift tabernacle where the ark would come to rest. With the construction of Herod’s temple, and before that Solomon’s, the Shekinah glory of God was provided a place of residence. We cannot be positive how Jews celebrated Sukkoth in the first century and most likely practices varied. At least one criterion, which depending upon whether you lived in a walled city, would determine the length of the celebration. During the years of the temple, the multi-day celebration and festivals, including a pilgrimage to Hakhel, and at least every seventh year, the faithful gathered in the Temple courtyard on the first day of Chol Hamoed Sukkot to hear readings, according to Deuteronomy 31:10-13. Other testimonies to the festival appear in Nehemiah, Leviticus, the Mishnah, Tosefta, and both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds.

 It is interesting that the practice that comes down from the Rabbinic tradition is most commonly associated with building sukkahs, or makeshift dwellings, in imitation of the dwellings Israel’s ancestors must have inhabited as a nomadic people during the Egyptian exilic period.

Between chapters 7 and 9 in John, Jesus is chased from the Temple and finds his way to the outside where on the day after the seven-day long commemoration, he is said to have cured a blind man. There are some interesting apologetic motifs here, if indeed this was the author’s intention. In John 4, Jesus tells the Samaritan women that the true followers of God will not worship him in the temple or on the mountain (since the Samaritans believed Mount Gerizim to be the site of God’s coming to Moses and so ignored Jerusalem), but in “spirit and truth.” Therefore, Jesus’ being ousted from the temple during the time of a holy day that commemorated being “outside the temple” seems to be a symbolic but also a thematic point in the gospel of John, which of course makes sense when one considers that John, the latest of the canonical gospels was written after the Destruction of the Temple, and so was an attempt to write a narrative that downplayed the importance of the Temple in Israel’s destiny as a people.  Here then, perhaps John was eluding to the true meaning of the Feast of Tabernacles, which involved recovering a time in which those wandering in the wilderness were led by the presence of God. It is not without irony that at the culmination of this story, Jesus’ opens the eyes of a blind man, which the Pharisees who chase him out of the Temple believe he does to indict them of their own spiritual blindness. The Pharisees are indicted for working their form of Judaism from within the confines of the Temple, while John is attempting to show that the true power of God outside the temple. It is a classic Christian re-interpretation of the material.

I saw Satan Fall from Heaven…but not sure if I saw it like Isaiah!

I’m currently pursuing new research into popular depictions of the supernatural in video games and today my theological reflections turn me to one of the more tantalizes verses in the Bible. That reflection is on the person of Lucifer, a treasure chest of creative interpretation in video game storylines.

It had been my understanding growing up that the figure of evil Jesus is referring to was the same one found in the Isaiah 14:12. Here, Lucifer, the morning star was cast from heaven and in Luke 10, Jesus appears to be confirming this when he talks about seeing Satan fall from heaven.

Many scholars have wrote off the comparison, saying that the being falling from heaven in Isaiah is a Canaanite deity known as Helel ben Shahar, which was translated by Saint Jerome as “Lucifer.” It is argued that Helel was a Canaanite deity who is the son of Shahar (the dawn) and appears in the sky as a star (or technically the planet Venus). 

The fact of the matter is that nowhere is there any mention of Satan in this OT verse. There are a couple possibilities than as to what may be happening here. First, the writer of Luke (10:18) might have been trying to make a statement about Jesus’ pre-existence. In finding this verse, he includes a first person account put on the lips of Jesus who is witness to the actual event and reinterprets it as the figure of Satan since Helel ben Shahar was not a popular subject during the Inter-Testamental Period. This may speak to an early tradition in the church in which Christian writers were vigorously attempting to prove Jesus through the Old Testament whether by theophanies or prophecy. We have good evidence from the Post-Apostolic Fathers that this was true, and Jesus himself on the road to Emmaus chastens the two men for not believing what was written about him by the prophets.  On the other hand, Jesus’ testament of seeing Satan fall from the heavens may not at all have been an attempt to rework Isaiah 14 and may have referred to something entirely different. Here then, it would lack the apologetic effect that it could have had if it were a reinterpretation of Isaiah 14. But we have to at least allow for that possibility.

Of course, this may have been a primitive scientific attempt to make sense of a cosmic event. While the “morning star” itself is not a shooting star, the movement described in Luke 10:18 as lightning and Isaiah 14:12 as falling may have simply used the impetus to account for the repeating event of  meteorites entering the earth’s atmosphere, which gave rise to the myth.  

What remains interesting is that those who assert Helel and Shahar are Canaanite deities have trouble showing any myth in which this may have occurred, which has led commentators like James Dunn to suggest that the reenactment was most likely the product of early Israelite imagination and not an actual Babylonian mythology carried over into their own texts. I have to admit that this seems like the best gamble until archaeologists have any information otherwise. This of course does not solve whether Jesus was speaking of the event in Isaiah or speaking of something similar. Given however the re-imaginative working of Christian thinkers and the effect of Christian apologetics, I am more persuaded that this was precisely an attempt to do something like that.

What’s All the Fuss About Jesus’ Wife?

Why the Conservative Reaction to the Newly Discovered Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Doesn’t Make Sense

Everybody and his mother in theology land are commenting on the papyrus fragment find of the year. Considered to be Coptic in origin, this small piece, being called “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” by the scholar who brought it to light, Dr. Carol King, consists of seven lines that given the size and lack of context make it impossible to interpret with any real clarity. The pivotal words causing the stir “my wife…” appear to come from the lips of Jesus in the fragment but cannot be fleshed out any further.

So was Jesus married? Conservatives have dogmatically said no. Liberals say it is possible but not on the basis of this fragment alone. What at best might be said is that because scholars agree that it is representative of Coptic Christianity, and most likely to be in the tradition of Gnostic Christianity, the person of Mary has played an interesting role, lending to the notion that she enjoyed some elevated status among the disciples as a prophetess, enlightened one, oracle, etc.  Dr. James McGrath has made the point that in the Nag Hammadi library, Mary is represented as Jesus’ mother, sister, and sometimes companion.

If you don’t accept the legitimacy of the Gnostic gospels, you will not be convinced by this new find. Still most respected scholars recognize Gnosticism as a legitimate early strain of Christianity that eventually succumbed during the time of the Ecumenical Councils and the politicalization of different

bishoprics that exercised control over the churches in their region.

Strangely, it is worth noting that the overblown reaction by some conservative Christian talking heads seems to suggest the defensive attitude with which they operate.

Conservative religious and political commentator, Eric Metaxas, for example, writes in a Facebook post:

 “According to a document in my possession (it’s in book form and has been thoroughly authenticated by thousands of scholars). Jesus actually DID have a wife, and still has one. It refers to her as his Bride. She’s been far from perfect, but He’s utterly committed to her and has vowed never to leave her nor forsake her…His love for her brings tears to my eyes.”

Reading this post brings tears to my eyes, but for different reasons that should be obvious, and I won’t mentioned Eric’s complete inability to understand where and how this text fits into his Christianity or why it is important.

But I find there is absolutely no reason to fuss over this, but for extremely different reasons than someone like Eric.  We’re not going to prove empirically that Jesus was married from a fourth-century fragment. I agree with conservatives on this one. But on the other hand, we’re also not going to prove empirically that Jesus has ONE story to tell. In fact, we can empirically prove that he had MORE than one story to tell! Or at least, to be told about him! We only need to look at the four accepted gospels to show us this. Of course, another problem remains with regard to how much time is needed to tell anyone’s story before the details start drifting into the interpretative reality of the community or scribe that oversees the text. My ability to record accurately will obviously be affected if I am transcribing rather than counting on my recall. The question of whether the Holy Spirit “inspired” as in a word-for-word mimeograph is not a question that can be assessed by history. What we can see however is that, if this is the case, than the Holy Spirit has no problem giving four different accounts of the action.

So while conservatives are relieved that this small fragment falls flat on the grounds of what they suspect is a significant space of hundreds of years between Christ and the words of the papyri, we have to be careful that we don’t create a separate standard for the Biblical witness, in which the Bible itself is somehow more than a popular interpretation that survived the test of time and gained ascendancy. The question of whether the story that has been canonized and told in our Bible is a question of truth that cannot be deduced on the grounds of historical research. That is a matter of faith.

Paul the Apostle and Maimonides on Seeing Through a Glass Darkly

It’s always interesting to discover how Jewish Paul could be. This often is revealed when one immerses himself headlong in other Jewish thinkers. As I have been reading the “Eight Chapters,” Maimonides’ famous introduction to the tractate Pirqei Avot in his Commentary on the Mishnah, I found his discussion of the veils in Chapter Seven particularly enlightening when recalling Paul. In 1 Corinthians 13:12, Paul talks about seeing through a glass darkly, and it is important to note that not only is this not simply an original metaphor, but it is part of a larger rabbinic tradition.

The controversy here in modern times is that the Greek phrase blepomen gar arti di esoptrou en ainigmati in 1 Co. 13:12 may not be the best translation, for which the KJV translates the word esoptron as “glass.”

The associated term found in Jewish literature  אספקלריה (aspaklaria) actually does not originate in the Hebrew, but is a translation of the Latin specularia. It appears to represent a reflective surface, such as that of a polished stone or a mirror. The problem however is that when one finds this in rabbinic literature, there is often no sense of a mirror in which the person looking into it only sees himself. The specularia is found as early as the second century by Judah ben Ilai who noted, “All the prophets had a vision of God as He appeared through nine specula…Moses saw God through one speculum.” The Babylonian Talmud also notes that all the prophets’ visions were obscured by specula. Only Moses saw through a speculum that shines.”

If one understands the function of a mirror, it is hard to see what the rabbi and the Talmud describes functions similarly.  While I grant Maimonides comes centuries after Paul, it is interested to note that the mirror does not give us a clear sense of what Maimonides sees represented either. For Maimonides at least, the context comes with regard to Moses seeing God in the Torah through a diaphanous veil. In Exodus 33: 18-23, God tells Moses he cannot look on him directly, and therefore he is only given a glimpse of his back. Moses is of course greater than anyone before or after him in Maimonides’ view and the concept of the veil is synonymous with human vices that prevent us from the true ethical perfection necessary to know God (it’s just that Moses veil was “thinner” than anyone else’s).  

Maimonides calls this veil sefaqlaria (from the Arabic translation). For both Paul (see 1 Corinthians 13) and Maimonides (Eight Chapters, Chapter 7 and The Guide to for the Perplexed, Chapter 54), this passage and the surrounding subject matter have to do with how one knows God and what is and is not permissible in that knowing due to one’s epistemological limits. The greatest difference being here is that where both diminish the role of the prophet (who for Maimonides is of greater value than even the pious or holy man), where Maimonides holds up Moses, Paul ignores the rabbinical tradition that elevates Moses’ place in this context in his own letter to focus on the limits that prevent us all.

Finding One More Reason why James the Just was not the Author of the Epistle of James

The Epistle of James has been known to lack certain themes that one would expect to encounter in a Jewish epistle of its type. For example, scholars have noted that topics such as circumcision and the Sabbath are completely absent. In the course of higher biblical criticism, this has made its traditional attribution to James the Just, the leader of the Jewish Church in Jerusalem, unlikely. Technically, this would also exclude James the Lesser, another of Jesus’ apostles, although attribution to this apostle had never reached the type of popularity it had with the former. Along with such notable absences, nowhere in the epistle, unlike Paul’s own recollection during the same period (that is, if one buys the argument that the epistle is older than Paul’s or contemporaneous), is there any mention of the strife that erupted between Jewish and Gentile Christians over purity laws, which becomes rationale for the first doctrinal council ever, referred to as the Council of Jerusalem.

Thinking along these lines, I came across a phrase in James, which appeals to the associatory fallacy used in Roman courts at the time. The author writes in James 2:10:

For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.

If James’ Jewish background is questionable, this is at least one place where scholars don’t, but perhaps should, point a finger more frequently. While we cannot be completely confident, the type of logical fallacy presented here is very close to what the Romans knew as falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus (false in one thing, false in all things) and fits the context of Roman thinking at the time. The author goes on to assert that one who is guilty of this infraction is a “lawbreaker,” though this may not necessarily be the same as one accused of covenant-breaking with YHWH in the sense in which a Jew would have understood being a sinner means to be outside the community. The rather generic tenor suggests one more reason for an author who was not in fellowship with the Jewish community at the time and challenges the traditional attribution to Jesus’ apostle.

A Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Chic-Fil-A Controversy: An Observation

The Chic-Fil-A controversy made us painfully aware of our differences that reflect both religious and political commitments. In the following weeks, a lone gunman attempted to enter the offices of FRC and open fire on members of the group, indicating his displeasure with their “politics.” In the following reflection, I’ll try to boil down both sides of the issue to show what the two sides were and continue to squawk about.
As a side note, I’ve always been interested in watching professional debates among Christian apologists and atheists when those debates involve the question of God and are peppered with appeals to scientific data, philosophy, and arguments from ethics. I would say a good percentage of the time, one or both debaters will accuse his opponents of deflecting away from the issues being presented in favor of punctuating an agenda. In their responses, they will remind the audience how the issue they presented was largely ignored, to which the other debater will often cry “foul” but quickly note that the charge was in some way not significant to his own platform.

Like so many of these debates, even after the subject question has been decided upon months in advance, it never seems the two sides can entirely focus on what content is critical to the exploration of that question. That’s a good thing on the one hand because it creates the very excitement and charged environment we want to see in a debate. But it’s a bad thing when the path is so far divided that we longer have the ability to speak one another’s language. I introduce this preface because the debate over chicken these days finds us in about the same place. I have taken part in a few exchanges through various social media. Some end up better than others. Sometimes there is traction, but oftentimes not. So this is my impression of the debate as concerns us today.

Like most people, I don’t particularly care for labels, but nevertheless I must concede to “liberal” and “conservative” if we are going to have any chance of talking about the issues. I understand that to be liberal doesn’t always mean one is liberal in all things and the same goes for conservatives. But for sake of argument, we’ll go this route as a matter of course and for the sake of clarity.

Let’s begin with what we might call the “big picture issue.” Both sides have one. So for their part, liberals were focusing on the content of the initial salvo, primarily the words put forth by Truett Cathy of Chic-Fil-A in relation to his financial support of institutions that block the rights of homosexuals on the basis of their sexual orientation.

Liberals do not think Cathy’s remarks were simply a neutral expression in opposition to same-sex marriage. They see a more dangerous undercurrent in which he attached his opposition to “divine judgment.” Now in the history of the Judeo-Christian biblical narrative, one thing stands clear: judgment meted out by God many times comes in the form of human hands. Therefore, liberals and those in the LGBT community consider Cathy’s remarks a form of hate speech. As is true in legal cases over the past number of years, hate speech is proving not to be a guaranteed protection that is safeguarded by the “say-anything” First Amendment Rights proponents, though admittedly, it remains a difficult subject in the court of law.

Hate speech, liberals offer, has been demonstrated to stir people to action, sometimes in forms of emotional abuse and other times in violence. Stephen Sprinkle, in his book Unfinished Lives: Reviving the Memories of LGBTQ Hate Crimes Victims, takes a look at those in the LGBT community whose lives were taken in hate crimes, and one case that stands out in particular, that of Kenneth L. Cummings Jr., in which God was “invoked” in the crime. The concern remains that such speech that invokes one side of God is all that is needed to reproduce such persecution.

On the other side, conservatives were not primarily interested in the content of Cathy’s comments. They instead focused on the reaction by the liberal opposition, claiming that it is never in the interest of the government to deny the rights of any group who express their religious views and that the radical reactions following days later by public officials violated a constitutional right to free speech and created a terrible precedent that would likely open the floodgates for other legal abuses. Some conservatives I have conversed with also countered that hate speech in itself is not a crime, but they vehemently contested the charge that Cathy’s comments should be framed by hate speech. The accusation of hate speech carries with it an appeal to the legal system even as it originates in the religious sphere. Furthermore, "hate speech" suggests that what is “hateful” is something inherent to the speech itself rather than the speech’s ability to insight hatred.

Liberals once again counter that if there is no particular religious motivation involved, then it only underscores the question of how any governmental law, given the separation between church and state, should deny homosexuals the right to marriage, especially since the Declaration of Independence notes that all are created equal and all have the same rights. Interestingly, this was part of the war cry against the establishment by gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

Conservatives counter by saying this is not a religiously motivated discrimination, but a position that upholds the definition of “traditional marriage,” rather than “biblical marriage,” a carefully selected term that moves away from the awkward religious grounding that find multiple forms of marriage in the scriptures. Although some conservatives are quite clear that the laws of the country are founded in Judeo-Christian values, they point in particular to New Testament verses that show Jesus to have a particular bias to heterosexual monogamy. Even where the Biblical language should not come out in the wash of political language, it inevitably is communicated through the laws of our country.

At this point, the conversation moves seamlessly into the religious sphere because the details of those comments create further context.

Conservatives counter that invoking the name of God to call down wrath is not hate speech, and some even regard it as sound Biblical theology. The pages of the Old Testament are littered with it, and even Jesus reserves special bile for a handful of cities who do not seem to give a hoot about his message. In fact, Jesus goes further by comparing those cities to notable cities in the Tanakh, demonstrating perhaps that he is working within the methodological framework of an eschatological prophet (Note: What I think this really reveals is that despite the high priority that conservatives place on the Bible and the doctrine of inerrancy, they don’t really believe everything they are reading. If they truly believed that Cathy's words ran the risk of calling forth divine wrath, working as he thinks he is from the biblical authority of the scriptures, I think many conservative believers would pack up and consider deserting their residences for less liberal geographies.)
Liberal Christians, and, to be fair, less radical conservatives, counter by saying that everything in the Bible shouldn’t be up for grabs. Because they are more interested in the way those verses worked themselves out in the context of the world in which they were written, the question of what those verses actually point to suggests other understandings that are not so obvious on the surface, one being that the Jews were oftentimes an oppressed people. And so, being a religious people as well, their prophets interpreted these oppressions religiously, and in doing so exercised their own theological interpretations of the matters. They determined, as one read shows consistently, that the cause for the oppression was the nation’s unfaithfulness.

Other prophets determined it was solely the fault of the oppressor and therefore pronouncements were made upon those responsible. Another problem is suggesting of course that anyone can “know the mind of God” and in so doing, tragedy becomes the pawn of God’s wrath to explain every calamity and the reasons given reveal a particular interpretation of scripture. Fundamentalists of all stripes have fallen into this notorious brand of reasoning for quite some time.

On the political front, liberals are charged with ignoring First Amendment rights and supporting threats that undermine the liberties of religious groups to express their free speech. On the religious front, they are charged with cherry picking certain scriptural precedents over others. Conversely, radical conservatives are charged  with protecting--in their politics--a man whose free speech promotes hatred, either directly or indirectly, while he pumps in millions of dollars from his company to organizations that oppose same-sex marriage. On the religious front, conservatives are charged with literal appropriation of God’s actions in our modern day situation and with a lack of appreciation for higher forms of textual criticism.

This is why I fear we will not gain any legitimate traction on the ideological battlefield so long as we can’t agree what’s at stake or where to start. We may see some converts shifting sides along the way, but, like many things, this will decidedly be an issue that is resolved in the courts of law rather than in the court of public opinion.

One final thought. I remember some time ago discussing a professional debate that John Dominic Crossan (a liberal Christian historian) had with William Lane Craig (a conservative Christian philosopher and theologian). When I asked Crossan what he thought about the results of that debate during a book signing in my hometown, he smiled and very calmly provided me with the following observation that has been wisdom to me: “It’s very difficult for a theologian and historian to see eye to eye. At times the debate felt like we were throwing rubber against concrete and hoping it would stick.”

There seem to be a lot of ideological walls being erected in the current debate and our ability to provide the sticking points necessary is a battle that reveals no easy end.

Letters From Prison: Alfred Delp

I have recently been working through various letters by political prisoners during the time of British colonialism in India and Nazi Germany in hopes of presenting a paper at an upcoming conference in 2013. Among some of the more interesting are those by the Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, who I only stumbled upon doing this research. It may not even be proper to call him a political resistor in the proper sense, since Delp’s primary concern, if we are to believe him, was the reconstruction of Germany after the war. It was a visit to Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg to speak about these matters that effectively sealed his fate. Delp was apparently unaware that Stauffenberg just shortly after his visit would attempt to assassinate Hitler.

Delp’s letters run the gamut of emotion. Fear and anxiety are met with moments of extraordinary peace and well-being.  In December 1944, during his period of incarceration, he has what could only be identified as a conversion experience, though he had been in the Jesuit order for his entire professional life. It is in this experience that realizes and feels the hand of God. The fear entwined in his earlier letters, while still palpable is no longer all-consuming. He learns how to trust and surrender.

“God has become almost tangible. Things I have always known and believed now seem so concrete; I believe them. But I also live them.”

Surrender, he finds, the type of Christian surrender that so often eludes us in our well-being, is found when and where there is nothing left to be found. Delp discovers Paul’s spiritual principle – in weakness, the strength of God is perfected in the one who has nowhere else to turn. The quest of making this real in our life, in a world that is inundated by the self, it is the “selfless turn” that makes draws us into true peace.

Despite his best efforts, Delp would not escape his fate. He was executed in February 1944. His role indeed was minimal and his execution unjustified. But he gained something much greater. During those six months of incarceration, he gained himself.  Joseph Fleischer, perhaps the most notorious SS judge ever who presided over Delp’s case, was killed only days later when a bomb hit the building where the deliberations took place and he was crushed by fallen debris. Sure it was no lightning bolt. And my mind immediately moved to the kinds of stories I used to read in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. However much one relegates these stories to fairytales of divine judgment on the Roman Catholics who executed Protestant testifiers, the comparison with Delp’s end is enough for some pause.

Are Christian Fundamentalists Marcionites? Well, Kind of...

Marcion’s historical trouble with certain episodes in the Old Testament is well-attested at least by his enemies. Iraneaus of Lyons reports that he was so appalled by some of the genocides attributed to the God of the Bible that he identified the God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge, a lesser god of evil who opposed the true God of Jesus Christ, who on occasion shot through the pages of the Old Testament.  Jesus was therefore not simply a covenant-fulfilling supercessionist. He went even further. The God of Jews was an evil, misleading creature, and Jesus came to point us not to a softer interpretation of that God but a new God altogether! In doing so, he decided to completely ignore those texts that seemed offense by claiming they were the work of something else.

There are few that would debate that Marcion was dealing with a form of the problem of literalism. The scriptures during his time didn’t have the character of authority that they have today, considering too that good ole Marcion was the first to put together anything that looked like a canon of scripture based upon his own offense.

Christians today realize that with the codification of the canon, they are left with these offending passages.  If they are to remain full communion Christians in both the Old and New Testaments, they have to pick and choose carefully. While they may not attribute evil actions somewhere else, they choose to ignore many of them, having some sense that certain practices must have been overcome in Jesus’ overwhelming mission of love. Yet ironically they will drudge up other practices, sometimes even in the same passage that Christians surely should not give up!

In the New Testament, many choose to ignore the affirmation of slavery in the ancient world but focus on Paul’s sayings towards homosexuality (again ignoring that Paul is clear in those cases when he receives an absolute word from the Lord, of which homosexuality is never one of them).

Within the Old Testament itself, many choose to ignore Numbers 5 where God brings on an abortion, but are conveniently reminded of the God of Jeremiah who told him how he knew him in the womb, which of course one has no way of arguing it as a New Testament principle since Jesus nor Paul spoke of abortion.

These methods pretty much frame the interpretation of many fundamentalists. It’s a free-for-all that rather than preserves the integrity of scripture, exposes it as something diabolically unbalanced and hardily chases off even the most untrained skeptics who spend anytime rummaging around in scripture.

Trying to speak to the radical collisions that occur between literal interpretations applied to some verses and the cultural context of other verses in Scripture is of little practical use.  Pointing out to Fundamentalists that they do this all the time, but apply an unfair measure of equality across the board seems to be no illumination either.  Of course a problem that not even Marcion dealt with, makes Fundamentalists all the more arbitrary, and that is the doctrine of inerrancy. The doctrine simply means we take the parts as the sum of the whole, which is the revelation of God to man. This allows for a dead Moses to refer to himself in the Deuteronomy for example. If there is no touch of the human experience in this, then this famished text presents a God that is so utterly unintelligible in his demands upon us that we must cower in fear. In fact, a study by the conservative Biola University suggested that the anxiety level among Fundamentalists and surprisingly atheists about the fear of death is much greater than in groups where the Bible is not interpreted literally and where ambiguity about the divine remains. As far as Fundamentalists go then, there is a lot riding on “getting their scriptures right.”

Seeing Marcion and his struggles with the scriptures alongside Fundamentalists and their struggles with scriptures testifies to the very nature of belief. At times, it is desperate for harmony. And until it is exposed to other forms of interpretation, it may always be defensive and dismissive.

Bonhoeffer Meets Buddha: A Reflection on the National State of Formation Conference

*This piece is reproduced from the State of Formation website, sponsored by the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue.  http://www.stateofformation.org

Across the room, I saw a woman draped in traditional Buddhist Kasaya, or “chougu” if you are Tibetan. While I was here to explore interfaith dialogue, I admit on one level I had no idea what to expect. And seeing this very Eastern expression of religion, my stomach twisted, my teeth ground – I was uncomfortable. On the one hand, in the past several years, I had made great intellectual strides towards interfaith dialogue among representatives from the Abrahamic religions, in which a shared tradition of sacred texts made certain intellectual realities possible. And while our traditional heritages shared an ensemble of characters, each who had their different entrances and exits, my own view of this world stage was still hindered by a narrower view from the back that continued to blur its true dimensions.

As this smiling Buddhist and I shook hands for the first time and made our introductions, for we had been seated next to one another for a few hours already, my filter had broadened, and the horizon before me was threatening to expand once more.

Early in my life, I learned that mission statements are only as good as your intention to own them.  Loyola Blakefield, where I attended high school, was an all-boys Roman Catholic Jesuit institution whose motto was “men for others.” Growing up in an economically privileged upbringing where the price of a Roman Catholic education at an all-boys private school was expensive back then – today, I could not even consider sending my own children to this school due to associated costs – the only “others” available in my insular worldview were the others who looked like me, whose fathers were doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and our mothers, many of whom did not need to work. These were our mothers and fathers who were always available for their sons’ soccer and baseball games. Early on, I learned that being “men for others” had a lot to do with economic advantage.

It wasn’t until I came to a deepening of my own faith and its radical rebirth in my mid-‘20s, that “the other” would confront my own worldview in an entirely different manner. After receiving my undergraduate degree at Towson University, I decided to attend The Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary & University. The school itself was a product of Vatican II cooperation between Episcopalians and Catholics. By this time, I had left my own Roman Catholic upbringing, and was uncomfortably comfortable “church-jumping” (a pejorative phrase for someone who knows he has no accountability and takes full advantage of his liberty) from one non-denominational church to the next. I attended the Institute, therefore, because, in all honesty, the program was affordable, accredited, and there were no viable programs in the immediate area that offered the quality of education I could get here.

Yet at the Institute, it was first time I was truly presented with something more than doctrine. Here, I sat in the classroom and encountered other human bodies, many from traditional mainline denominations but also those from other backgrounds, each of whom confessed to experiencing similar fears, failures, and spiritual concerns, as they questioned themselves and their own traditions. This had the effect of turning me inward, and while one might think that such a turn is counterintuitive to interfaith dialogue, it was a step that allowed for self-critical examination of my own prejudices, and allowed me to open up to the person occupying the seat next to me, whose love and adoration for Christ was becoming harder and harder to impeach as some form of inauthentic expression the more they explained their own faith journey to me.

In my final year of study, I wanted to do a thesis for my final culminating experience. The discipline I chose was Christian Ethics and the theologian whose lens I chose to look through was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran who enjoys rock star status among Protestant Christians, but who also has a broader appeal as well. It was in reading Bonhoeffer, in reading reflections about him, in carefully looking at the importance of his own struggles with social justice as a Christian imperative, that my conservative bent towards the primacy of personal piety, already in a state of flux, started to complete a much needed retreat.

One of the most important expressions of Bonhoeffer’s deep and abiding sense of Christology was not Exclusivism, but Inclusivism. This Inclusivism was a call to enter into the experience of the “Other,” a theme that occupies his own writings from his early work on Sanctorum Communio to his unfinished work known as Ethics. Bonhoeffer’s concept of the Other was not only an integral part of loving one’s enemies who are actively seeking your harm, but also those who for whatever reason have caused you little concern. For Bonhoeffer, the question of Otherness was then tied both to the Reich Church, but also to the Jews  in Germany in the 1930s through 1940s who were being persecuted. It was a Germany in which one’s neighbor might be one’s enemy but unlike our society, could not be avoided.

It reminded me of Jesus’ own time, one which was riveted by its own culture wars, a world in which the Other, be that individual Jew, Samaritan, or Roman could not help but be engaged. The Otherness, however, of interfaith dialogue was something that I had been disengaging, especially because the community where I dwelt could remain geographically isolated in its Protestant, white, upper-middle class character and unaffected by the real demands of the gospel, except to pick a pet homeless project in someone else’s community for a couple hours a week.  Otherness, I found had not been grasped, neither by me nor by those with whom I chose to worship.

The significance of Bonhoeffer dissolved the dogmatic boundaries of transcendence as a category of epistemology and became for me what Bonhoeffer had demanded in his own form: a relational ethic in Christ. Christology then for Bonhoeffer was not an expression of knowledge “How does Christ operate in the world,” but rather “Who is Christ for me?” The form of Christ therefore is not what he looks like as a subject of knowledge, but how he forms himself in the people who are the Church.
This revelation, and it was a revelation, meant that where doctrine, Dogmatics, and epistemology had been my reigning hermeneutical pressure points, if I were to understand myself as a Christian, I was fully obligated to take in the charge and, at times, the challenge of the Other. And because this had to be done in love, there was no turning that person, be that individual Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, into an object of ethical abstraction. He or she had to be embraced in his or her own life, work, and worship. The significance of this charge in Bonhoeffer’s day was so great, that when he wrote a popular work on the Church and the “Jewish Question” in the early 1930s, in which he speaks about ministering to those who are themselves a community within his community, a later editor seemed uncomfortable and decided to insert some passages by Luther on a Christian’s proper orientation to the Jew for the purpose of bringing them to Christ. Yet Bonhoeffer himself does not go this route.

Among some of the takeaways from my time at the State of Formation conference was an ancillary event in which we heard a panel speak about their contributions to a new book of essays entitled My Neighbor’s Faith. In hearing Dr. John MaKransky, professor of Buddhist and Comparative Theology at Boston University, speak on the “Religious Other,” Bonhoeffer immediately resurfaced. I stopped him after the lecture to discuss my observations. Dr. Makransky was intrigued to discover that this concept of Otherness and the idea of “freedom from the world as freedom for the world” is as much a concept in Bonhoeffer’s writings as it was for him in his early explorations of Hinduism through his own Buddhist context. To quote a line from Dr. Makransky’s own contribution to the book, “I had a strong desire to understand how freedom from the world could become such a powerful force of enlightened activity in and for the world.”

Makransky asked me where he could find this in Bonhoeffer and I pointed him in the direction, but in doing so I too was compelled to go search out the Bhagavad Gita, which had framed part of his own story. There were other things said by Makransky through his own experience that brought to life Bonhoeffer’s own theology as a personal charge, and I am all too glad to pursue those down this road.
I ended up spending some of the most important moments of the conference in dialogue with my Buddhist friend Bhikshuni Lozang Trinlae. She was charismatic, passionate, and readily accessible. As an ex-Roman Catholic who grew up in a farming community in Connecticut she had a lot to add about her own experience of Christianity.  I was able to bounce back my own questions. It was in breaking bread, in going down to the local sports bar and restaurant and conversing on important questions of nonviolence and her own tradition of scriptural discourse that helped reinforce the human face I had found in Bhikshuni.

Some of my conservative Christian friends, who continue to remain cut off from this conversation, who attempt to convince me that their love, to use Makransky’s phrase for the “Religious Other,” is no empty shell but genuine and true must understand that where love will flourish, it always has a mind to seek out the expression of humanity in the Other. It is very hard to love a community of people who exist to you only on the front pages of newspapers by way of streams of negative images or as hypothetical communities to which abstract commands are directed.  Living by accident in communities of religious diversity is not the same thing as living intentionally. While you may not be out rightly hostile to them, you obliterate the Other person each time to fail to enter into their humanity, seeing them as the Other. Christians have a phrase: Christ died for that person. How wonderful would it be if we understood this as more than a mode of proselytization and like Bonhoeffer, as an affirmation of our shared humanity?

In closing, my own tradition continues to speak to me very powerfully. But I’m learning that my tradition is incomplete without these other voices. I’m learning that so much of the work that non-denominational and Baptist churches have done to avoid stagnant sermons on doctrine and dogma to create a “non-threatening” worship experience that draws in people who are traditionally frightened by past images of a heavy-handed Church is no different than the kind of work that is being asked of those who are interested in interfaith dialogue. We are onto something here. And as one who comes to the table through Christianity, I would only add that perhaps what makes you most uncomfortable is precisely where you need to be if you are going to have any chance of grasping the meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ at a deeper level.

Christians Who are Uncomfortable with Homosexuality and How to Deal with it Theologically.

I want to make a frank confession.

Homosexuality, while something I have gradually come to understand intellectually and theologically, is still something I struggle with existentially.  It is a struggle that manifests when I struggle not to express discomfort when I receive my coffee from an effeminate man with long painted fingernails at the drive-thru window of the fast-food restaurant on some mornings. It is a discomfort that rises when I see “flamboyant” homosexuals parading down the street in a Gay Pride parade as opposed to the more scrupulous homosexual who tries not to make identity his window of access to the world. In the past, it has been a discomfort when I deflected a sexual advance after a girl friend of mine told me another man was attracted to me. I would like to wax intellectual here and say that what bugs me at times about the whole politicized homosexual movement is the celebration of difference as a form of direct antagonism against the status quo that stirs up these feelings, but it is something far deeper.  I have come to realize that it may be a part of who I am.

And what I realize is that this “issue” that I have spent time trying to intellectualize and overcome seems at times a worthless mental exercise. In this same way though, it reminds me of the often worthless profession of faith I claim as a Christian. It reminds me clearly of how at times I’ll leave church, having been inspired in the peace and communion of Christ, only to enter a car with three screaming children and let off a curse word, meeting their screaming with my own. Or how I promise to volunteer more in charitable activities and no sooner have I said it that I forget this pledge of compassion and move on with my insular life, attending to my own needs, spending my own money on me. Or how I bad mouth someone or gossip and feel convicted even as the words are coming over my lips, but continue because the catharsis that comes with it is too satisfying not to indulge.

There is no other image to me perhaps more striking than the events that immediately follow Christ’s resurrection. Resurrection life, that promise which we believe opens us up so entirely to the Other, seems on an applied level like so many moralities that we fail and which fail us by expecting of us a person who simply cannot follow step-by-step along the same path. And yet if we are to believe the reports of the gospel writers, then at some point, Jesus does things that are completely unexpected. He enters the home of a sinner to share a meal. On another occasion, he allows an unclean person to clean his feet with her hair, as these motifs increase, we are constantly confronted by Jesus doing things that many Jews of his time would find unclean and abominable. And in doing such things, we are led to believe that what was unclean, what was abominable, he makes clean. What makes clean is not the transformation that occurs in the Other, if any, but rather that Jesus comes alongside the Other in humanity and compassion, and by doing so challenges the status quo.

The reality of the gospel cannot simply be summarized as the actions of a holy man doing holy things that we get to emulate every now and then when we pass a poor person on the island of an intersection we decide to give him a 5.00 dollar bill, even while against our better judgment because we can’t account for our act of charity once it leaves our possession. And as Americans, it’s our duty to know where our money goes. The reality of the gospel is the lived experience of the Other. The pre-Passion cross sayings that the gospel writers put on Jesus’ lips in the living world seem like a call to live among the despised, the damned, and the outcasts. It is self-death.

Paul talks about being dead to the law and alive to Christ. What does this look like? The law is the law of sin and separation, not just from God, but to ourselves and others. When I see myself only as a functionary of God’s law, I have failed to relate to what it means to be alive in Christ. There is something profound to be understood that even after the experience of resurrection life, we find that the Apostles continue in their progressive understanding of Christ to live as those whose lives are continually making room for new understandings. Having been in his presence was not enough. Continuing to live in his presence is necessary.  

Two particular issues of post-resurrection importance that required the Apostles to examine their interpretative filter were among these, and they were far from trivial. These included the eating of unclean meats and the problem of circumcision. Paul’s answer to circumcision was one of ecumenicity. Peter’s answer to the eating of meats was one of inclusion. In both, the customs of the outsiders, despicable, abominable, and unclean, were met in the spirit of love and grace. If you are not Jewish, if you do not understand the meaning behind ritual laws of purity, you most likely will not capture how problematic this was. As a lay Christian far removed from this world, my response used to be “get over it.” And then I quickly realized that I may as well have said “get over it” to the post-slavery generations of my time who still strongly identify with slavery, despite myself, who has virtually no bond that could bring me to any such ethnic identification, primarily because I have always existed at the top of the ethnic power structure and have no need to remind myself who I am.  

I mentioned earlier that the existential discomfort I feel for homosexuality is perhaps a part of who I am. This however is not without qualification. What I’ve learned in my Christianity is that who I am and who Christ says I am are not the same person.  Outside of Christ, I am isolated from God, a sinner, and to add to this rather abstract notion and ineffective motif, I am also a liar, jealous, envious, in the past, a brawler, a thief, a fornicator, in essence I have never had a problem understanding what Paul says of me before Christ:  I am guilty of it all. And while my life has been shot through with the resurrection life of Christ, this other law working in me expresses the expectation for the fullness of resurrection life I have yet to experience, even while I continue to grow. While many Christians intellectualize the importance of sanctification as a life-long process, it is often understood as a conformance to something they think they’ve already got a handle on intellectually. For as soon as their transformation is complete, their interpretative window closed, and their Bibles bound cover to cover, and there is no longer a living Word but a codified Word that they knock the cobwebs off each Sunday to re-read the same static passages, and in doing so prove sanctification is not a conformance to the character of Christ but a conformance to ethical duty. Despite talk then of a living confrontation with the living God, it is always a confrontation with the past that fails to find itself as a genuine experience in the present. It is the “dead men’s bones” Jesus inveighs. There is no room for new wine, for the skins are already full. These Christians live the faith of their fathers, but it is not their own. Is the problem deeper? Is there a fear that we will go off track? Is there a presumption that God inspires the men who went before us in a way that is unattainable to us? It is an unspoken presumption, unvoiced, but present and deeply attached to our own restrictive interpretations of ourselves as spiritual persons.

The discomfort that at times catches my spiritual life off-guard is precisely the impetus I need to understand the universal gift of salvation through the dying and rising Christ. Discomfort indicates that I am still struggling with my former self, the sin that has always been the reflex of my instinctual physical life. I think if Christians are real with themselves, they would not mistakenly translate a discomfort for homosexuality they have felt all their life now as a spiritual discomfort that they justify as emanating from their spiritual life. They would recognize that the “man of sin” remains, and we are at war with surrendering to fear, distance, and simply the discomfort of difference. Christians should see these as opportunities. Those who fear the house of the publican should enter boldly into it, for “perfect love casts out fear.” Those making difficult spiritual transitions are often the ones who are existing in the fullness of relationship with God, eating meat among those who drink milk - they understand that relationships are dynamic. Cornelius learned this. Paul learned this.  Peter also learned this. The afterglow of the resurrection story is not the conclusion but the beginning. Beginnings make new possibilities not codify old ones. And the thing that you are uncomfortable with may very well be the thing that God is calling you to enter into and understand in love.

The Road to Interfaith

Early this week I spent time with students from various seminaries and university across the United States for a 2-day seminar on interfaith dialogue in Boston, MA. The experience was exciting and new territory in the ever-changing shape of my faith. The faith that had been discovered in the context of Fundamentalism has over the past few years slowly eroded to make room for new content, and this was surely one of those moments. This new direction seems appropriate. The Ecumenical Institute of Theology prepared me for inter-denominational dialogue. As a Fundamentalist, I had trouble accepting the sincerity of other Christian traditions. Calvinists had misunderstood free will as a guarantee of the Confessionalism that was necessary to come to Christ. Roman Catholics gave inordinate expression to sacramental grace, works, and the veneration of Mary had robbed them of a genuine experience of the life-giving salvation found only in Christ. As these walls crumbled during my time at the Ecumenical Institute, inter-denominational dialogue was logically extended to interfaith dialogue, and the fruit of that came this weekend as I spent time with Jews and even a Tibetan Buddhist discussing our traditions. In fact, I found the Christians who were attending to have expressions of faith much different than mine, hinging almost on something entirely different. I plan on following this with a much more extended reflection of my time in Boston.

The next stop is an emerging educators conference on interfaith in Connecticut in June.

My Photo History with N.T. Wright

Yesterday, I officially ended my academic career at The Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary's Seminary & University, which is the only institute of its kind in the Roman Catholic tradition and exists under the oversight of the Sulpician community. Among the graduates was none other than Rev. N.T. Wright, who received an honorary doctorate. I found an older photograph of the two of us back in 2008 when he was invited to deliver the institute's 40th anniversary lecture, and thought I'd simply post the two.

                                                                                2012

     
                                                                             2008

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and North Carolina’s Ban on Same-Sex Marriage

With the defeat of same-sex marriage in North Carolina, I am reminded once again of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sensitive analysis of the cultural, religious, and political ideals that divided his people. During his days of public protest, especially in the early 1930s, laws that sought to discriminate against non-Aryans grew increasingly brazen in their direct assaults on human rights.

The situation we witnessed yesterday cannot help but conjure images of the introduction of one such Aryan paragraph on June 30, 1933. This “law” prevented Aryans from holding civil service jobs if it was discovered they were married to non-Aryans. That marriage was being attacked as a right available only to those of Aryan descent along with other factors created the backdrop for Bonhoeffer’s now famous response “The Church and the Jewish Question.” In this defensive work, Bonhoeffer questions another dimension of these laws barring ministers of non-Aryan/Jewish descent to continue their activities in the Church. In the work, he questions the legitimacy of distinguishing within the Church between Jew or Gentile, claiming that such things are undermined by one’s belief in Christ and place in the community of faith. Likewise, Bonhoeffer also states that it is the Church’s duty to come alongside and support anyone who is being discriminated against and whose rights are being displaced, and not only those who claim “the household of faith.”

This concern for the “Other,” (Andere) an early theme in Bonhoeffer’s writings, eerily anticipates the circumstances that would come to affect the German Jews. Bonhoeffer, who had Jewish family, knew all too well the real-world consequences of discrimination. He deeply regretted, for example, caving into pressure not to preach the eulogy at his brother-in-law’s Jewish father.

Reflecting further, I was also unfortunately reminded that as various non-Aryan laws were passed, one of the outcomes was that Jews were systematically prevented from obtaining benefits through the public healthcare system in Germany.  For those of you following closely, one of the arguments against prohibiting same-sex marriages in North Carolina was a protest of the same quality. By denying homosexual parents marriage status, children in those relationships would not be recognized as legitimate offspring, and could be subject to the exclusion of healthcare benefits.

In effect, what we have in North Carolina is “National Socialism in miniature,” folks. Who knows? Perhaps the next measure will be the reinvention of a new State motto.  

American Idol's Kelly Clarkson, Germany's Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Worldwide Abuse of Aphorism

"What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger." - You've heard it many times. I would bet it is one of the most popular aphorisms and because of this it has been overused, reused, and abused countless times.

From Tupac Shakur to the lovely Kelly Clarkson whose pop song is currently a number one for the past six weeks and uses the words in its chorus, no where is the aphorism safe.  It is the latter which actually brought me to re-examine this piece of “truth” that makes so many rounds with so little thoughtfulness that those who have heard it believe that exposure is equal to knowledge.

The aphorism itself comes from the 19th century thinker Friedrich Nietzsche, the prophet of cultural nihilism and critic of moral idealism. As for the quote, it is always quoted incompletely, and therefore loses something one would argue that is integral to its decoding. It reads as follows:

“From life’s military school - that which doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”

One finds the first part an almost obscene intrusion because it is so unfamiliar with respect to the more popular last half. What is life’s military school? Could it be a portend of the school of hard knocks? Most likely not.

Tracy B. Strong points out that Twilight of the Idols, from which the quote is extracted, writes Nietzsche, is a “declaration of war.” Perhaps than the military reference ought to be understood within this broader context. But a war against what? Strong suggests Nietzsche declares a war against oneself from becoming too deep. Depth is a problem that continually finds itself in the crosshairs of Nietzsche’s criticisms. In another place, Nietzsche pokes fun at the depth attributed to women. It is a woman, he says, the essence of mystery that is a foolishness culture perpetuates unreflectively, for, after all, mystery itself is inaccessible to reflection. How can one say anything about mystery? And if one cannot access mystery, how can it be? Nietzsche, the existentialist, dismisses this idealism, this shadow of life. Here, instead of Kelly Clarkson, Nietzsche might track better with Talk Talk, the pop 80s band, who sung the song, “Life’s what you make it.”

So, as Tracy B. Strong reminds, “anytime one thinks he knows what Nietzsche means, the first thing to do is to stop and ask oneself what precisely this is that one thinks he means.”  But since it is this very kind of aphorism that begs to be reinvented, redefined, segmented, and even forgotten, Strong suggests that Nietzsche intends the kind of activity and re-reading that becomes democratic, so that the possibility of misinterpretation is written into the interpretation.




Though, one becomes acquainted with a shadow of Nietzsche, but not Nietzsche.  It is a prophecy he himself predicts. “Whoever has thought to have understood me, has made me in his own image.”  But in doing so, this is something of the existentialist mode, the unattainable individual who is not but is always becoming. If this is hard enough to grasp, consider then how misappropriated his aphorisms must appear. Till next time...



For more info: Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration.