Messianism - Reflecting Four Abrahamic Models

The soon-coming already-here kingdom of God is part of the larger narrative of messianic hope and expectation in Christian Theology. This theology is contrasted to the soon-coming already-here messiah of Judaism. In the first, the features largely are an historical-theological eschatological perspective. Jesus in his historical embodiment ushers in the kingdom of God. With the promise of his second coming, the theological idea of the reign of Christ in time culminates in history. Both messianic versions center around the central figure of worship, Jesus.

Like Christianity, Judaism's traditional messianic theme centered around a figure. Whether it was Elijah or Moses, this redeemer came from the haeretz Israel, was connected with the historic reality of Israel, and would therefore consummate the redemption narrative there, although not all were natives. A second concept sees a non-embodied messianic reign. Those like Rav Kook, and perhaps even Maimonides, who did not consider the messianic person a principle of Jewish faith, saw messianic expectation as the ushering in of good will and universal love. With these in place, the need for a supernatural personality is displaced and the messiah becomes transparent in the action of the people.

Both Judaism and some versions of Christianity have this idea of mending the world to bring in messiah. While no formulaic theological concept exists for this impulse in Christianity, the idea of tikkun olam in Judaism is the idea of doing the work of messiah. Messianic expectation is therefore communal and participatory. In Christianity, the idea almost appears redundant, provided one only assumes it as a type of preparation for full communion, which most Christians who subscribe to this notion do.

Censored by my Seminary: How I was Shut Down from Sharing My Alumni News

I usually don’t write on personal topics that affect me, but experiencing this recent incident, I felt compelled. First, some background is in order.

I entered seminary with strong conservative-fundamentalist leanings. After eight years and taking some time off in between those years, I eventually graduated a different kind of Christian, one whose sensitivities and breathless need to defend the doctrines of the Church had taken on new meaning. I remember one pivotal conversation in a classroom where I said I was surprised that I had stuck around at this institution since there was such a gulf between the community of my faith and the classroom. At the time, I was as assured of the Bible’s infallibility and inspiration as I was left-handed. Another woman responded that if she had been in such a seminary where conservative-fundamentalist principles were taught, such as the Bible being the absolute, infallible Word of God, she most certainly would have left. Such encounters continued to shape my views.

My first class was in the summer of 1999 and was called “The History of the Devil.”  Sounded like a great title, but I was horrified when my professor showed point for point how the concept of the devil changed over a period of time, how from one book to another the Satan becomes just good ole Satan, as he summarized that the concept of a supernatural adversary to Jesus was dubious at best. I had many more experiences like this, even among the more conservative core of professors, who maintained in their faith-life the doctrines of the church despite teaching about the inharmonious reality of the gospels. As each one of my foundational beliefs cracked under the weight of new scholarly information, I eventually found myself surviving my own faith within the strictures of a more progressive version of Christianity… all thanks to my seminary. It was certainly a kind of liberty. But for anyone who has made this jump from one extreme, the journey there is an anxious rebirth full of uncertainty, doubt, indecision, and this was partially the reason why I left seminary for a number of years.

Eventually, I received my degree in Theology, did my thesis on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and moved on to interfaith dialogues over the summer of my last year in seminary.

So I was shocked this week by the reaction I received to an alumni news post I submitted. In the past, I had submitted at least three or four, and each had been accepted without any problems. However, in this last attempt, I submitted information about a presentation I made which included the title of the paper I presented at the mid-Atlantic regional meeting for the American Academy of Religions. When my newsbyte did not appear this week in the newsletter, I questioned the administrator. The response I received was cryptic and terse: “Sometimes things make it in and sometimes they don’t.”

This concerned me as I found the response intentionally misleading. So I began thinking about possible causes for exclusion. Of the two possibilities I could surmise, the first, space requirements, could not have been an issue simply because the newsletter comes out in an electronic format where no such restrictions (within reason) need exist. The other possibility then became more likely. My paper was titled “Homosexual Union as Responsible Marriage in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” And just like that I realized that despite the progressive nature of my seminary, despite the fact that professors within their ranks teach on pluralism, consider other, less stringent paths to salvation, reject divine inspiration, deconstruct the devil, or show inconsistencies in scripture, the one issue that seemed more damnable than all others is the same that popular culture reflects in its own ongoing warfare:  the sin of homosexuality!

Along with abortion, homosexuality makes up the unholy dyad of all sin in today’s Church. Despite the Pope’s continued deflection of its importance as opposed to larger issues, the Catholic Church (and my Alma mater seminary is funded by the Church) remains far behind its leader or at least fearful because of the pace with which society transforms. The Catholic Church has proven historically to be very careful in its attempts to connect with society, usually until the pressure to conform is just too great.

But even more disconcerting is the fact that my submission told the administrator (or whoever was responsible for making the decision) nothing about the paper’s content. Neither did it suggest that this was my own position. As a researcher looking at theologians of interest, we don’t expect that we are actually adopting the positions are subjects did. Another possibility is simply one of political survival. Not everyone giving their money to an institution is likely to know what goes on there i.e., until they are tipped off. You can take the case of Dr. Christopher Rollston, scholar of Ancient Near East studies, and an alumnus of Johns Hopkins University, who was let go from Emmanuel Christian Seminary after writing an op-ed piece in the Huffington Post. The administration later was forced to admit that pressures from benefactors who were threatening to pull their funding that made his continued employment an issue.  Rollston, however, landed on his feet, and took up a position at a prestigious institution.

In my own backyard, it was a case a few months ago at Notre Dame Prep, an all-girls Catholic high school that reminded me of my present situation. In this case, a young lady submitted a marriage announcement to the school’s alumni newsletter that was denied. The reason? Only later it was found out, and after media pressure, that the rejection of the announcement had to do with the Church’s position on homosexuality. And they were not going to allow a same-sex marriage announcement to be cast with heterosexual ones for fear that it would look like they supported it. My wife actually attended this high school for four years. Behind the gilded gates of NDP, my wife recalled that, oddly enough, they learned more about world religions than Christianity and that the school had strong liberal leanings, including the employment of an openly lesbian teacher! In fact, Sarah Rupert-Sullivan, the alumna in question here, said in an article in the Baltimore Sun that she attended the school because her parents thought it was a “forward-thinking school.”  And indeed it is! At least the experience of some of its alumnae attest to this! But keeping up public appearances is often a different animal than the day-to-day reality at a school, and so I found myself in the exact same place.

In the time I was there, my seminary did not build up the faith upon which I was standing. It caused me to rethink it entirely. But when I moved too far afield, crossed an invisible line perhaps, it demonstrated to me that there are boundaries it was not willing to cross with me. It should make us all wonder what the psychological consequences of any education is when a school fills our heads with “radical” possibilities only to reel us back in at the expense of those ideas clashing with practical realities and commitments. Higher educational institutions at all levels are often guilt of this: They fill our heads with loads of disconnected information and then assume the student is responsible enough to give it shape or find a place of equilibrium. This is not to say that going off in this or that direction is inherently wrong or that extremes are wrong, but rather that there is a real lack of nurture in places of learning. Sure there are reasons for this i.e., too many students, an overworked staff, too many commitments, or multiple jobs. But having been at a small-enrollment seminary this certain was not the case. In the end, the student is left to make sense of his world, and most of the time alone. The classroom itself is not always an appropriate medium where one’s belief structure should be wrung out in the academic rigor of the classroom. Worlds collide and students may feel embarrassed to touch on such problems with other classmates or professors. The hollowness of this reality may be amplified in an interdenominational setting where fear of offending one another causes people to shut down. I had a few students during my time approach me with such problems, not knowing how deeply I struggled with them as well.

I still love my seminary. I had great professors and learned a lot. I had invaluable opportunities that have made possible more opportunities. So this is in no way an opportunistic attempt to bad mouth one of the best seminaries around.

And I cannot say for sure that this decision not to publish my scholarly news had to do with one individual administrator deciding and censoring content or if consultation was involved. Perhaps there is the question of why I am not taking this directly to the administration. In the past, I had a similar incident where at my former church a pastor’s administrator told us to vote down a referendum that would make same sex marriage legal in Maryland. I wrote a long and thoughtful email to my pastor and his administrator, both of whom met my email with silence. Within a community of faith where we are meant to build up one another, there was a very real sense that neither of these men knew how to handle the issue or deal with a person who had done his homework and was requiring a responsible answer for their position. In fact, my position at the time was simply to ask them if they could image a better way to confront the issue since drawing lines in the sand seemed to only create a deleterious effect and simply cement what the homosexual community already knows about most evangelicals, namely that we don’t like them, they are different than us, so that such an action would only prove what they already knew. I figured “why not surprise them with love”? And then decide how we will love them. Their silence was their answer. And it was a shame how unimaginative this church showed itself. Sometimes going directly to a group is a conversation starter and sometimes it is not. Sometimes public consumption helps the issue to take on a life of its own.

But what I do not accept was that the omission of my alumni newsbyte was accidental (a point already conceded in the response). What I prize is honesty, even when it is brutal. Honesty never seemed a problem in the classroom in seminary. The same brutal honesty came across many times as pillars of my faith were turned into ash, and so when it comes to incidents outside the shelter of the classroom, the old perception that academic Christians and faith-committed Christians occupy two different worlds redounds, even in the body of the same person! Honesty is difficult. Perhaps if it was said to me “we are simply not ready” at this point, that might have been enough honesty. And sometimes a little honesty with ourselves and others is all that is needed.

A Reflection on the AAR mid-Atlantic Regional Meeting 2014

Usually I am among those who support liberal theological platforms. And the American Academy of Religions, by and large, supports the broader spectrum of religious voices in the world, which by extension tends to exclude Fundamentalist groups who stake claims in exceptionalism, authoritarian theology, and the divine inspiration and inerrancy of scripture.

At this year’s mid-Atlantic regional meeting, a panel met to discuss what they are defining as Theology without Walls. While the panel included esteemed theologians who are well-read in the literature of interfaith studies, I was quite surprised that so much of the audience, was not readily happy with their conclusions.

Like its annual counterpart, the regional meetings are filled with progressive thinkers in the religions, whose backs usually back religious inclusiveness. But it was refreshing to see a number of people comment to the panel that they found the use of the term “Walls” to describe dogmatic borders an offense that could not sufficiently account for the movement as universal, as the panel has imagined it. One comment in particular spoke about the problem of discounting years of ecclesiastical decisions as simply being the work of disengaged theocrats who were were not complicatedly involved in hashing out doctrines within the community in which they found themselves. I found this point quite compelling since the concern was that if someone does not “come to the table” do we have the right to consider them outside of the question.

At least in terms of U.S. foreign policy, as an example, we do this all the time. As the situation in the Ukraine heats up, we impose sanctions. When North Korea does not subordinate to our demands, we isolate them economically. We do not tolerate insubordination or dissent. And so I think the question is importantly relevant. Surely, liberal universities do not hire conservative thinkers, but I guess the same could be said for conservative seminaries hiring liberals who do not append to their statements of faith. So listening to one another and talking to one another is often done despite one another…antagonistically. This gentleman’s comment, however, reminded me that perhaps we don’t have the right to create or imagine any theological worldview that does not take into account our fundamentalist brethren, even the ones who go to their deaths as martyrs and take innocent peoples with them.

The way to answer this has been done of course. The anonymous Christian of Karl Rahner or even Bonhoeffer’s grasp of his doctoral advisor Reinhold Seeberg’s idea that God acts despite us and that this reality is not merely perspectival but is a reflection of the world, needs to be considered, especially if we grant people the freedom to speak for themselves. Perhaps it is only that in rejecting our conversation and the proposition that “all religions being equal” excludes them that we might ask why they are not open to us, and then going to our experiences, especially those of us who have come out of fundamentalists churches, ask what it took in our worldview to crack to allow for our transformations of thinking that was even bigger than say soteriological expectionalism.

Sharia law, Pashtunwali, and Another Textual Reason Why Jesus’s Condemnation of Sodom and Gomorrah was not about Homosexual Indiscretion

Recently, I watched the movie Lone Survivor. At its conclusion, Marcus Luttrell, played by Mark Wahlberg, encounters Afghani civilians whom he asks for help after having his unit wiped out by the pursuing Taliban. In return, the Afghanis take him into their village. When the Taliban comes in and orders the villagers to turn him over, the Afghanis refuse. Just prior to the credits, the audience is informed that it was the custom of Pashtunwali that kept Luttrell alive, and that the custom dates back 2,000 years.

The technical term, melmastia, is a dimension of Pashtunwali in Arabic and Pashtun Sharia Law that deals with hospitality. The custom of course is not exclusively Arabic, but Semitic, in the sense that peoples of the region felt themselves honor-bound to acknowledge it. It is the prevailing theme in the Jewish Bible’s story of Sodom and Gomorrah, in which the men of the city surrounded Lot’s house and demand his visitors.

After the cities are destroyed, we are told, that the reason why it was judged was because Sodom and Gomorrah did not treat its visitors with hospitality. A fact seen in the following verse.

“Get out of our way,” they replied. “This fellow came here as a foreigner, and now he wants to play the judge! We’ll treat you worse than them.” They kept bringing pressure on Lot and moved forward to break down the door. (Genesis 19:9)

In fact, the men of Sodom also despised Lot because he too was a recent foreigner who made his home there!

So when Jesus charges his disciples to preach the gospel, sending them out in twos, he warns that any town that does not welcome them will have a harsher punishment awaiting them then even Sodom and Gomorrah on the Day of Judgment.

If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. Truly I tell you, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town. (Matthew 10:14-15)

One reason for this may have been that while Sodom and Gomorrah were the cities of Canaanites, the cities which Jesus commands his disciples to visit are restricted to the cities of the Jews. And perhaps as Jews, being among Jews, the standard was higher.

One rarely hears the Matthew passage in this context, but indeed the fact that Jesus acknowledges that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah is not homosexuality or even rape but a lack of hospitality remains an important interpretative lens to this passage. Given the seriousness with which Jesus treats this sin, it remains difficult to internalize, especially for a 21st Century Western audience where we tend to keep our neighbors at arm’s length.

Christmas is About Salvation

I was thinking about Bonhoeffer’s own approach to Christmas as I sat in church this evening. For German theologians in the mid-last century, the question of salvation was one of the major considerations found in everyone from Barth to Bonhoeffer. What came about was an original emphasis on the way the nature of atonement theology was thought of as a formal divine transaction that happened in the Reformed and Lutheran traditions to salvation as an ontological reality that separated humanity from God.

And so while the cross was certainly important, it was God taking up flesh in the person of Christ that more than anything else became the centering point for first considerations about the meaning of salvation. As Christ takes on flesh, so he takes on the concerns of humanity, our frailty, our fallenness, and the distance that by our very natures makes it impossible for us to come to God.

All of this is raised within the context of the problem of transcendence, a question that seemed more critical when the reality of the First World War made it clear to European theologians that the liberal guarantee of a confidence in the power of humanity to overcome its own moral shortcomings was a tragic overestimation. This sensitivity to the gap that divided human ability from divine being and attempt to find an answer was a way to explain how a good God could remain good despite a world that was debased of any such goodness.  

From a theological position, this meant that events like the First World War debunked the notion that commandment-based ethics (Gebot  Ethik) were the guarantees of salvation desired by humanity.

Reconciled as humanity is through this mystery, divine concern takes up humanity so that salvation does not emerge on a cross but as an act divine self-making that begins in a manger.  The realization of God’s love for us is not that Christ died for our sins, but that God took flesh to himself at all.  Salvation is found first in the Christmas story.

The Emerging Religious Landscape in America

I just got done perusing some new figures and poll information that suggest a growing population of Muslims in America and continued downward trend of mainline Catholics and Protestants. There was also a decline in those who claim Judaism as a religion. Finally, there is a rise in atheism. America is beginning to looking more and more like her European cousins every day. 

(You can read the original article here.)

As a progressive, what concerns me most are radical expressions of these minority religions taking root in American soil, and not for any reason usually given by conservative Christians who fear the loss of majority status and power. As I find radical conservative Christianity an often idealistic and sanitized vision of the divine message given to humanity, I’m no more fond of radical expressions of Islam, though I will say I don’t believe most expressions of Islam are radical. While Christianity has suffered the loss of its romanticized uniqueness and exclusivity under the microscope of modern scrutiny beginning primarily during the European Enlightenment (with Judaism soon following), faithfulness to core values of Islam as markers of truth remain strong while critical scholarship of Islam is fairly new and mostly unwelcomed.

While there is an understandable psychological fear of loss of culture, loss of identity, and the kind of pushback we witness in far-right conservative media on a daily basis here in the States, those of us who continue to be optimistic about interfaith dialogue have less to worry about.

I say this not because distinction is unimportant, but rather because I approach the question as a person who sees himself within the grip of time and from a place of historical relativity. And by relativity I mean humility – we simply don’t know it all. Our knowledge, our truths are relative in span of history.

Despite those who prize its transcendent value, it’s hard to debate the fact that Christianity has always been a religion that sees itself as a prophetic extension of another religion (Judaism) that explains some of its most important characteristics (doctrines) through the lens of Greek philosophy and neo-pagan thought. That’s not to say there is nothing original about Christianity, but far less than is often admitted by its adherents as it owes a lot of itself, its socialization, its ethical awareness, and its prophetic vitality to its neighbors.

Therefore, in seeing Christianity as a sort of syncretistic experience in antiquity, an individual involved in interfaith dialogue may not be as put off immediately by what we can learn from our neighbors if in fact one day we find Christianity to be a minority expression. If anything, we can see that Judaism lives on though it has been a minority most of its existence with sporadic periods of dominance, which were few and far between. Yet Judaism has managed to survive. It is as diverse in its expressions as Christianity is in its expressions. And this leads me to my second point; namely, that there is no one expression of Christianity for which we have to fight to protect against cultural collapse. With the amount of variety directed to major doctrines such as the virgin birth, ethics, resurrection, the way of salvation, the differences are not small or simply nuanced, but completely up for grabs. So when one thinks about the campaign to save Christianity from its cultural despisers, one wonders what Christianity he has in mind.

Merry Christmas!

Various Updates on Academic Endeavors

I haven't written anything here for a while, but I'm busy as ever and have been writing voraciously. Here's a look at the irons in the fire:

I'm finishing the third semester of graduate program in Jewish Studies, putting the last touches on a paper on the St. Louis affair of 1939, and coming into exam week.

I recently had an article I developed from a paper I presented at Oxford in April accepted to a peer-review journal and I'm planning to incorporate edits very soon.

I've finally hit the figurative "go" button on my Bonhoeffer manuscript. I expect that it will be published by the first quarter of 2014.

I've sent a proposal for a conference in New York and am awaiting feedback. While I wait, I'm in the process of preparing a second proposal for another conference in Europe.

I was recently inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa, an honors leadership fraternity.

I attended AAR/SBL in Baltimore in late November. A very interesting social experiment. But I attended the two Bonhoeffer sections that I wanted to, and was happy to meet a few of the people in personal I had only encountered in their books.

Finally, I'm awaiting word on a major grant that will allow me the opportunity to explore major Holocaust sites in Europe. I'm excited about this opportunity and turned down a trip to Israel in January 2014 in hopes of landing this one.

I have a few entries I'm sitting on that I will eventually finish and post.

Until then...