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.