October 24, 2011

Why I’m Joining the Occupation

McLaren:  ”I’m in, and would encourage others to join the occupation. Not as a representative of your church or denomination, but as a human being, who is there to contribute and to learn.”

By Brian McLaren, October 19, 2011


Originally posted at Patheos.com

I never would have chosen the name “Occupy” to brand a movement. “The 99 Percent Movement” works a lot better for me. But I’m glad I didn’t get to choose, because I notice the term “occupy” is kind of growing on me.

What I don’t like about it: it sounds aggressive, like the (to me) ugly and unacceptable language of “taking back the country.” For a movement to avoid violent actions, it needs to avoid violent rhetoric as well, as Jesus made clear in the Sermon on the Mount. And deeper than rhetoric, it needs to be careful with the narratives it taps into. A case in point: “taking back” (to me) walks the line of a revenge narrative, implying that the country used to be “ours” and “they” took it away. That scenario is problematic for a number of reasons, so I’d rather steer clear of that kind of thinking—and language—entirely.

A term like “occupy,” then, must not be employed unadvisedly or lightly. Its strength must be tempered and its potential downsides managed. And so far, that seems to be happening (here in the U.S., at least).

Even in Traverse City

I was thinking about all this last Saturday while I was participating in the local occupation. About 300 of us walked down the sidewalk on both sides of our little town’s main street (we wouldn’t all fit on one side). Occasionally some chanting broke out, but for most of the time, we marched in silence; I would use words like reverent and pregnant to describe it. (One observer described it as “charged with secret extremity and transcendence.”)

As we walked along, I kept thinking about Jesus’ use of the term “kingdom of God.” I’ve been fascinated by the term for a while now, devoting a whole book to it in 2006 (and then revisiting it in a 2008 release). Like “occupy,” kingdom of God was a dangerous term for a nonviolent movement. It borrowed the language of the Roman empire whose pax was maintained by slavery, militarism, public torture, and frequent executions (i.e., crucifixion). It was overtly provocative—bursting out of the private sphere of spirituality into the public world of kings, lords, and laws. It threw down a gauntlet before the powers that be, challenging their legitimacy with a higher authority.

If I had been around, I would have counseled Jesus’ against using the term.

Once again, I’m glad I wasn’t consulted. It’s rather obvious now that Jesus knew what he was doing. “The occupation of God has begun” might inspire the same fear and hope among people today as “the Kingdom of God is at hand” inspired in the first century.

The term “occupy” is winning me over because it puts an ironic spin on one of our most questionable national habits—occupying other nations: occupying Iraq, occupying Afghanistan, supporting Israel in occupying Palestine. Like kingdom of God, it turns that familiar language on its head.

The term “occupy” is also winning me over because it’s about presence, making our presence known and felt in public spaces. These public spaces—from economic markets to political processes—have been colonized by powerful corporate elites (the 1 percent, or maybe the 10 percent), elites driven not by an ethical vision but by the relentless demand to maximize shareholder return. The 99 percent are realizing how destructive this colonization of public spaces has become, and by simply coming back—by re-inhabiting public spaces—we are demonstrating that we see what’s happening and we are not going to tacitly comply with its continuing.

After our local occupation last Saturday, a smaller group of us stayed around to hold an informal planning meeting. It was a good process . . . and reminded me of how different grassroots democracy looks when compared to public politics. Demonizing and vilifying the person you’re sitting next to—it won’t play. Neither will dominating and filibustering or attempting a “live” impromptu version of political attack ads. Learning to differ firmly and graciously, acknowledging the concerns of an alternate viewpoint, searching for common ground, asking for clarification rather than assuming the worst possible interpretation, agreeing to seek greater understanding through honest private conversation after the public gathering . . . these are among the skills and virtues needed to make grassroots democracy work. They are seldom demonstrated or even valued among our political elites. Could that tell us something about why the Occupy movement is needed?

Nobody knows how the movement will play out. Lots of folks will wait on the sidelines and maybe dip their toes in later on. But I’m in, and I would encourage others to join the occupation. I’d especially encourage Christian leaders to do so . . . not as a representative of your church or denomination, but as a human being . . . not to co-opt or control, but to contribute and to learn. As someone who’s had a lot of control (more than I realized) for a lot of years, I’m finding it a wonderful gift to simply be a participant, one voice among many, learning and listening and learning some more.

Brian D. McLarenBrian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is an ecumenical global networker among innovative Christian leaders. Among McLaren’s more prominent writings are A New Kind of Christian (2001), A Generous Orthodoxy (2006), Everything Must Change (2009), and A New Kind of Christianity (2010). His lastest book, Naked Spirituality, offers “simple, doable, and durable” practices to help people deepen their life with God.

The Pub Theologian resonates with much of what McLaren writes, do you? 

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October 20, 2011

Jesus at Occupy Wall Street

(Article by Lisa Miller, reposted from the Washington Post’s On Faith section)

Occupy Jerusalem?

LEON NEAL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES - A man dressed as Jesus sits amongst other protestors holding placards on the steps of Saint Paul's cathedral in central London on October 15, 2011 as part of the now-global Occupy Wall Street protests.

Born with little means into a first-century world, the historical Jesus might feel right at home with the very aspects of the occupation that so many 21st century observers consider gross: the tents, the damp sleeping bags, the communal kitchen. Jesus would have sympathy, I think, with the campers’ efforts to keep a small space sanitary in the absence of modern plumbing.
It was about nine in the morning, and some of the park’s inhabitants were just waking up. Scruffy, tattooed, abundantly bearded, these protesters looked not at all like the bright, shiny vanguard of a new, idealistic American left. What would Jesus think of the occupiers themselves, who have been derided by their opponents as a ragtag group of tax evaders, interested only in sex, drugs, and rock and roll? In the flesh, their unsavory appearance can make the heart of even the most convicted lefty hesitate before embracing their cause.

The Jesus of history would love them all. What Jesus really said, and what he meant, are the subjects of culture’s greatest controversies, but one thing is sure. Jesus gave preferential treatment to society’s outcasts. Lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes — all would attain heaven before the ordained elites. Jesus believed that God was about to right the world’s wrongs with a great upheaval – soon – and at that time, a radical reversal of the social order would occur. As he says in the gospels, “the meek will inherit the earth.”

Jesus would have sympathy, too, with the occupiers’ first complaint: that in America, the poorest have too little and the richest, too much.In first-century Judea, a powerful ruling class held nearly all the wealth and most people lived at subsistence levels.“Jesus believed the whole system was corrupt,” says Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina. “The people who ran things were empowered by the evil forces of the world and his followers had to work against these powers by feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and caring for the sick.”  Jesus had a fit when he saw the money changers in the Temple, and turned over their tables – a dramatization, Ehrman says, of the reversal that was imminent.

If he settled for a while in Zuccotti Park, Jesus might find himself disappointed in the fractious, secular nature of it all. For Jesus, the first thing – the only thing, really — was God. His ministry was an effort to help guide people toward a kind of moral perfection before the coming of the Kingdom of God.Thus, he might have sympathy for the various causes espoused by the campers (health care for all, no more bailouts, tax the rich, get the money out of politics, cap executive pay). But he would be frustrated by the protesters’ inability to name America’s much bigger dysfunction: our inability to get our moral priorities straight and care for our neighbors who need our help.

The protesters don’t talk much about Jesus or God. Nor do they offer explicit guidance on transcendent, higher principles. It’s easy, therefore, to complain, as the Iranian writer Sohrab Ahmari did in the Huffington Post earlier this month, that they’re morally unserious. The protesters can come across as childish whiners screaming “It’s not fair,” without offering a unified or collective moral vision.

A lesson from Jesus might show them that they have moral authority within their grasp – only it won’t be conveyed through banners or sound bites. Their most radical act is the company they keep. Jesus instructed his followers to be like little children. Only by emulating and caring for the “least of these” would they inherit heaven.

In Zuccotti Park and other Occupy sites, the temporarily unemployed stand shoulder to shoulder with the truly homeless; the media-savvy organizers lie down with the whacked-out babblers. The unsavory aspect of this group is its greatest asset. Every time a powerful person denigrates the occupiers; every time a member of the established elite takes a swipe at them from on high (as George Will did in this newspaper), the occupiers’ moral authority is re-affirmed when they stand together.

If the Jesus of history could wander the precincts held by the occupiers, “he’d see his people,” says Marisa Egerstrom, a graduate student at Harvard who organized a posse of chaplains to volunteer at Occupy sites. “I think he would be pretty pleased.”

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October 13, 2011

The Intimidating Task of Bible Study, Part 4

(Fourth and final in a series of posts taken from Wes Howard-Brook’s introduction to his commentary on the Gospel of John, Becoming Children of God: Read the first post here.  The whole introduction to this book, of which these posts are a small part, is terrific, and probably worth the price of the book alone.  This is the last post I am making from the intro, so enjoy!)

Still another aspect of my own reading perspective is important to note at the outset.  I am not a member of the academic guild of Bible scholars.  My reading of the Bible generally, and the fourth gospel in particular, comes not out of the context of university conversation – whether secular or theological – but rather from the perspective of radical discipleship.  That is, I am interested in the biblical texts not simply as objects of study and intellectual interest but as paradigmatic tales of God’s relationship to our ancestors and to us.  If I did not believe that the Bible offered insights that are essential to our negotiation of our way out of the desert of the decaying American empire and toward a more hopeful future, I would quickly move on to some other pursuit and urge all listeners and readers to do likewise.

the halls of academia

Of course, many academic scholars share a commitment to the power of the Bible to liberate people and social structures.  I do not intend by this description of my own reading location to characterize academia broadly as an ivory tower or as otherwise irrelevant.  Many of my own ideas have been the fruit of seeds planted by scholars, and many people in universities actively promote the Bible’s liberating message.  What is central here is not a critique of academia but an awareness of the different but equally credible reading perspectives that flow from university and “grassroots” standpoints.  The university environment is capable of nurturing conversation among other scholars, both within biblical studies and across disciplines.  The radical discipleship environment is capable of nurturing conversation among people of various experiences and traditions about the value of the Bible for social transformation.  Each standpoint has strengths and weaknesses too numerous to list here.  But it is important for those who read the Bible without a doctorate to recognize that their own readings are not necessarily diminished as a result.

It is, of course, almost trite to note that Jesus was not an academic; nor were his first followers; nor were the first Christian preachers, teachers, and other leaders.  The development of the perception of a privileged reading position by academics is a relatively recent phenomenon, based not on biblical criteria but on principles stemming from the Enlightenment’s notion of the primacy of “scientific” reason.

hmmm... this verse?

This is not, to be sure, to revert to the celebration of naïve or accidental interpretations that come from the fabled random opening of the Bible, with the expectation that God speaks through whatever passage one happens to land upon (Admit it – you’ve done this!).  Bible study, whether from within academia or from some other social location, requires hard work for our generation, so removed from the Bible’s own worlds and ways of speaking and thinking.  My own interpretation flows from the attempt to pay a respectful and sincere visit to the house of academia and then to share the insights gleaned from within with those whose daily lives do not allow the luxury of such a visit.

Finally, a personal element of my experience that cannot be separated from my reading of the fourth gospel:  I grew up Jewish as a member of the first post-Holocaust generation.  Although this upbringing was largely a matter of ethnicity than religion (perhaps, in the end, a false distinction, no matter what one’s beliefs about God), it seared into my consciousness a deep understanding of the capacity of human beings for evil as well as the ability of Christians to kill others in the name of Christ.  It is a difficult social dislocation for someone of this background to learn to see the wisdom of Jesus and come to claim the Christian tradition as one’s own.  It is particularly difficult to embrace the fourth gospel, given centuries of powerful misreadings that have found the text’s characterizations of “the Jews” as a basis for two millennia of mistreatment, mayhem, and murder.  My own experience of being a Jew who has come to accept the power of the church’s memory of Jesus has given me a perspective on the experience of the first Johannine community that is certainly different from those whose Christianity came with their “first” birth.  I engage John’s story of Jesus with the knowledge that this aspect of who I am both reveals and conceals.

I invite readers to consider how their own stance affects their reading process.  This is not a matter of “confessing” one’s “sins” or “prejudices” as much as engaging in a reflective process that has been made necessary by insights gleaned by the deepest sort of philosophical and literary thinking.  The powerful tool known as deconstruction challenges us to dig beneath any viewpoints that claim to be “objective” or “foundational” for the preconceived notions and commitments that underlie them.  If we believe that God calls us to break down the altars of idolatry that pose as divine centers in our society, we should also be willing to examine both our own false gods and the images of the true God that animate us.

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September 27, 2011

The Intimidating Task of Bible Study, Part 3

Third in a series of posts taken from Wes Howard-Brook’s introduction to his commentary on the Gospel of John, Becoming Children of God: Read the first post here.

Approaching the Gospels

One of the curiously powerful aspects of the gospels in general that stands out for readers familiar at all with other ancient literature is the social context in which their stories are told.  Whereas almost all other national epics and myths speak of the important events and struggles in the lives of gods, kings, or other nobles, the gospels’ concern is almost exclusively with the lives of the poor and marginalized.

stories of the unremarkable

Even literature after the New Testament, up until the Romantics’ discovery of the tragic narrative power of stories of street urchins and other outcasts, primarily focused on the trials and tribulations of people of wealth and authority.  Lives existing amidst material splendor and social power have always intrigued those who look longingly on what they imagine to be the “good life.”  In contrast, the lives of the poor have generally seemed banal and trivial, devoid of interest because of the supposed monochromatic pattern of hard work and routine demands.

If we have relatively lately learned to “enjoy” the stories of the poor and have come to accept the harsh beauty of emotions and minds living on the tense edge of daily despair, such a perspective would have been virtually unthinkable to those of biblical times.  The biblical patriarchs were wealthy herdsmen who, with their families, became landowners of distinction in their local communities.  If the exodus portrays the desperate struggle of an enslaved people, it is only to show that their imprisonment first in Egypt and then in the desert is but a temporary obstruction on their way to the Promised Land where they will eat their fill and gather abundant land and cattle.  The longest continuous biblical narrative is the saga of Israel’s poignantly ironic marriage to monarchy, in which the main characters literally stand head and shoulders above their peers (e.g. 1 Sam 10:23).  Even the prophetic promise/threat of exile was of concern primarily to Israel’s elite, as the majority of poor people remained in Palestine even after the Babylonian conquest.  And the postexilic narratives of rebuilding are the stories of priests and scribes, the intellectual and cultural leaders of the Persian colonial territory that had once been a great nation.

In this context of national journey from the perspective of the leaders and other powerful figures, the gospels sound a harshly discordant note.  Their tales of lepers, blind people, bleeding women, and landless peasants searching desperately for hope are a shocking contrast to their biblical predecessors.  For as we know, the New Testament was originally a collection of writings aimed at providing a message of divine love and healing for people who could not hear such a word in the established religious institutions.  Although the Christian “Way” amazingly quickly swept across social classes and national boundaries in its first centuries of proclamation, the stories themselves are most easily understood by people who have experienced for themselves the failure of governments and clergy to relieve either physical or spiritual hunger.

John’s gospel, in contrast with Mark and Luke in particular, has little to say about poverty and God’s promise to provide good things for those who have gone without because of injustice.  The fourth gospel proclaims not that the poor are “blessed” but that they are “always with you” (Jn 12:8) – although the Johannine perspective is not the cynical acceptance of the permanent presence of an underclass that it might seem to be when heard out of context.  In the fourth gospel, characterization and plot focus not so much on economic exclusion as on the social barriers of ethnicity, ritual impurity, and  lack of “proper” belief.  Those who have been denied privilege in the dominant culture because of their “wrong” birth (e.g., the Samaritan woman and the one born blind) are the ones upon whom Jesus’ compassion centers.  At the same time, those who are willing to be reborn, regardless of original birthplace (e.g., Nicodemus and the “Judeans”), are invited into the community to which the gospel calls its readers.

Beyond Reading

And this reality leads directly to the negative and positive poles of my own reading stance.  As a “white” male citizen of the United States at the end of the twentieth century, I must engage in strenuous acts of imaginative projection and concrete insertion in order to begin to hear the power of this gospel’s word to those on the margins.  It is a twofold task that cannot be done exclusively from the comforts of my warm home.

a context for reading

Each experience I have had in which I have, albeit hesitatingly and feebly, touched the actual lives of the poor in our culture has been a hermeneutical gift of immeasurable proportions.  An hour with street people in downtown Seattle metamorphoses the abstraction of “the homeless” into the broken yet still human lives of Junior, Charles, and Althea.  A few days in jail transforms one’s vague notion of “criminals” into a perception of ordinary people whose lives have either gone sour along the way or existed on a road of shattered glass from the moment of their births.  Many of us are, regardless of our good will, faith, or love, at a huge distance from those in our inner cities or in the Third World to whom the gospels speak clear and almost obvious truths.  Only by pushing out from our easy chairs and into the cold darkness of the streets, prisons, public hospitals, and other havens for outcasts can we begin to catch the radicality of the gospel’s word.

If this is true at the level of our personal zone of daily life, it is all the more the case with regard to our political and social privilege.  I come to recognize more and more each day how the wealth of our nation has been systemically taken from the mouths of others.  Indigenous peoples of North America, Africa, Latin America, and Asia all cry out as just prophets condemning our theft, indifference, and brutality as a nation.  The increasing clamor for immigration limits and border patrols bears powerful testimony against our claim of being a just and free land, open to accepting the world’s poor.  And, more to the point of the fourth gospel, we have again increased the sickening acceptance of racial and ethnic scapegoating, whether against poor African-Americans or wealthy Japanese and other Asians.

All this puts us as a people squarely on the opposite side from the Johannine Jesus and the community of the fourth gospel.  But this brings us to the positive pole in my own prerelationship with the text.  Despite my personal and national privilege and responsibility for massive injustice, I believe in a God who invites peoples such as myself to work and pray with others for the liberation of all peoples.  While acknowledging my participation in unjust structures and in enjoying the fruit of rotting trees, I trust in the God of all life, who constantly calls me to focus on God alone and the way of shalom.  Without attempting to express a complete personal philosophy in this space, it is important to proclaim my commitment to helping to shape a future in which all creation will sing joyously of the God of nonviolent and interdependent love.

Thus, I come to my own reading of John with a dual awareness.  My birthplace veils the gospel from me in certain ways, leading me to find new experiences that help penetrate into the place from which the text seems to speak.  At the same time, my commitment to a God who breaks down injustice and generates true love and freedom for all people opens me in other ways to hear the text speak its challenges to the status quo.

Stay tuned for Part 4! 

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September 19, 2011

Is Discrimination OK?

When is it legitimate to discriminate, if ever?  Consider the following two issues, the first via the Grand Rapids Press, the second via the Traverse City Record-Eagle.  Post your comments below.

GRAND RAPIDS, Sept 15, 2011 — Cathy and Jefferson Seaver are atheists, and they said they liked the Christian preschool in Allendale Township, where they sent their son.

But when they tried to send their daughter there a couple of years later, they hit a snag.

A Center for Inquiry discussion in GR

The school required them to sign a statement of faith in God. Feeling it would be a lie, Cathy asked if she could opt out. The administrators said if they didn’t sign, the school would not enroll their daughter.

“That was clear discrimination, and it was very disappointing,” she told an audience Wednesday at the Center for Inquiry Michigan gathering at the Women’s City Club.

The nonreligious group caused a stir last month by buying space on a billboard along northbound U.S. 131 near Hall Street SW with the message: “You don’t need God — to hope, to care, to live, to love.”

TC approves anti-discrimination ordinance

BY ART BUKOWSKi
October 5, 2010
abukowski@record-eagle.com 

TRAVERSE CITY — Mary Van Valin grew emotional as she stood at a podium to address the Traverse City Commission.

Van Valin, a Peninsula Township resident who’s building a house on Webster Street in the city, urged commissioners to pass an ordinance that would outlaw discrimination against gays. Van Valin’s comments lasted less than a minute, but her voice brimmed with passion.

“I have a dream that this community will stand on the side of love, not fear,” she said Monday night.

Van Valin got her wish when the commission unanimously approved the ordinance. The packed commission chambers erupted in applause, tears and hugs when Mayor Chris Bzdok conducted the vote after more than an hour of public comment.

The ordinance, among other things, bans employers from discriminating against or firing employees because of their sexual orientation. It also prohibits landlords and housing facilities from turning away renters based on their sexuality alone.

Religious organizations are exempt from the ordinance, as are residents who rent out rooms in their single-family homes.

The vote brings a measure of closure to an issue that’s been debated for more than a decade in the city, though it’s likely not the final chapter. Opponents of the ordinance plan to circulate petitions and force a special election on the matter.

“We’ve already started; we knew this was going to happen,” city resident and opponent Paul Nepote said of the vote.

The city’s Human Rights Commission drafted the ordinance to “close the gap” in existing civil-rights laws. Federal and state laws provide protection based on religion, race and host of other criteria, but sexuality is left out.

Cities across the state and nation are beginning to introduce local ordinances that address the issue. Traverse City’s new ordinance was patterned after a similar measure adopted last year in Kalamazoo.

A huge crowd gathered Sept. 7 when commissioners introduced the ordinance, and many of the same faces arrived Monday. Proponents said the ordinance will make the city more welcoming and provide necessary protection for gays, but opponents charged that such measure is immoral and isn’t needed.

City resident and business owner Jeff Judway said he was harassed by co-workers and eventually fired from a city business not long after they discovered he’s gay. He warned commissioners against believing the ordinance isn’t needed.

“This ordinance, I need it, we need it … nobody should be fired because of their sexual orientation.”

Gay city resident Jacob Hines, 19, suggested the measure is especially important to young gay people.

“I want to be able to grow up knowing my future is protected,” he said.

Opponent Mike Mulcahy previously told commissioners the measure could create headaches for employers, but seemed to focus his comments on religion this time around.

“There’s a lot of people who are opposed to this ordinance who have a good reason to be opposed to it, they’ve got a view of the planet that includes a higher power,” he said.

Bzdok addressed the complaints he’d heard about the ordinance in recent months, including a charge that it would hurt business owners.

“If there’s evidence out there about a negative impact on business in any of the other Michigan cities that have passed these, I would like to see that … the opponents of this ordinance have brought us no evidence that there’s an actual negative impact on business anywhere that’s done this, and I would argue the places that have done this are thriving,” he said before the vote.

Bzdok also said the city won’t be going on a “witch hunt” to ensure compliance with the ordinance and that the measure does nothing more than assure gay individuals the same rights as everyone else.

Commissioner Jim Carruthers, who is gay, spoke strongly in support of the measure and admonished those who sent the commission “violent, angry, ugly” e-mails on the matter. Such a negative response proves that protection for gay individuals is necessary, he said.

“These to me are all reasons why we need to do this,” he said. “There is so much hate and ignorance out there.”

Commissioner Mike Gillman said he remains “unconvinced” of the need for the ordinance, though he cast his vote in support.

“In the face of a unanimous or near-unanimous vote, I sincerely hope that opponents will drop any plans to initiate a petition drive, an act that would be extremely destructive to the reputation of this community as an open and welcoming town,” he said.

The issue spawned a long-running battle about 10 years ago, and that fight ultimately went before city voters.

Commissioners then passed a watered-down and legally nonbinding anti-discrimination resolution after months of discussion.

Opponents later secured a measure on a city election ballot that sought to prevent the city from passing an anti-discrimination ordinance, but voters soundly defeated that measure in November 2001.

After years of talk and the relatively meaningless anti-discrimination resolution, commissioners were ready for real action.

“It’s time,” commissioner Barbara Budros said.

—
UPDATE:  Opponents to the Traverse City non-discrimination ordinance succeeded in gaining enough signatures to put the ordinance on the ballot this November to the city.  A vote of ‘yes’ would keep the ordinance in the books, a vote of ‘no’ would remove it.  Read the entire ordinance here.

Post your thoughts on the above issues of discrimination below, and please be respectful in your comments.

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September 18, 2011

The Intimidating Task of Bible Study, Part 2

Second in a series of posts taken from Wes Howard-Brook’s introduction to his commentary on the Gospel of John, Becoming Children of God: Read the first post here.

If we choose to accept this life-changing invitation, how do we start? How do we know that the path we take is not simply a trail that loops back to Egypt ends in a cul de sac in the desert? If we journey alone, we indeed run a high risk of picking a futile road to nowhere or, worse, to a place of great danger. The Bible’s narrative of God’s mighty acts and words is heady stuff that can, to the misguided, justify the worst sort of violence and brutality.

Fellow travelers somewhere in Turkey

The antidote is the one given by the Bible itself in nearly every story: to journey not alone but in the community of fellow travelers. Whether that means starting a Bible study group, going to church, or delving into the scholarly conversation, the joyous task of encountering the Bible makes sense only as part of an interpretative community. From Eden to Revelation, the Bible’s various forms of discourse present one of the most intensely social collections of writings known to humanity. Its people are constantly in dialogue, either with other people or with God directly.

And its questions are persistently in the first-person plural: Who are we and where are we going? The Bible contains virtually no notion of the isolated individual, no flinty-faced Marlboro man gazing outward with a private vision. The first challenge of reading, then, is to share in whatever ways we can in acknowledging this most basic premise of the text.

This book is an attempt to share some of my own reading of a particular text from the Bible. By putting my reading into writing, I am aware that I risk the same freezing of live conversation that the gospels writers themselves risked. Each day, new insights unfold for me about the fourth gospel, as I continue to grow in my self-awareness and my awareness of the gospel’s own intertextual and intercultural contexts. But, as with the gospel, I hope that readers of this writing will continue the conversation, albeit at a distance, by continuing to think, pray, and act in response to what they read here.

This work, as with the Bible, is the product not of an isolated individual but of the collection of energies that make up the matrix in which I journey. In the following section, I will state openly some of my life commitments and reading strategies. I do this not so much to persuade readers that these are the best or the correct perspectives, but in the interest of encouraging all Bible readers to continue the process of demythologizing the notion of the “objective” or “scientific” reading.

In the next section we will note the importance of asking the question: “Where are you from?”, in order to name one’s commitments before encountering the Word.

Stay tuned for Part 3!

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September 13, 2011

The Intimidating Task of Bible Study, Part 1

Taken from Wes Howard-Brook’s introduction to his commentary on the Gospel of John, Becoming Children of God:

Attempting to read a biblical text challenges us in ways that quickly threaten to sink us in a quicksand of questions.  Which translation is “best” if we don’t read ancient Greek or Hebrew?  And even if we try to learn something about these long-dead languages, how do we move forward in our language to talk about the text?  Once we start getting enmeshed in inquiries about language, the paradoxes of words and their relationship to reality “out there” can become powerfully mind-boggling.  Linguistic and literary theory are minefields in which much heat is radiated but precious little light remains after the explosions.

it's all Greek to me

At the same time, the biblical texts – like almost no others still widely read in our time – confront us with worlds confoundingly foreign.  Names of people and places seem unpronounceable, and locations are obscure.  People behave in ways strange to our “normal” practice, but we cannot easily discern whether their behavior is strange to those with whom they interact in the stories.  Much of the context involves situations with which we have absolutely no experience or concern.  Furthermore, few sources of information from the ancient world are available to enlighten us on these crucial matters.  A few pieces of broken pottery or tablets and miscellaneous scraps of documents are hardly sufficient to recreate for us a sense of the long lost world of Israel.  What would future cultural historians do with a couple of our daily newspapers and a handful of random paperbacks from the best-seller list?  Would such artifacts allow for reasonably certain inferences about our daily lives and concerns?

What Is One To Do?

Beginning to consider these questions and the infinite corollaries that cascade from them can lead to several responses among prospective biblical readers.

First, we can attempt to close our minds to the questions and, like fundamentalists, pretend in effect that the Bible was written in English in the recent past, interpreting its “plain words” according to our (unspoken) cultural assumptions.  This is the de facto reading “method” of most people of goodwill who have grown up with the Bible as a book on the shelf to be read among other selections from history or literature.  Whether because the questions are threatening or simply because they have not occurred to us to ask them, we read the Bible naively and come up with naïve – and often dangerous – interpretations.

A second option is to allow the questions to take us over and move toward becoming biblical scholars at one level or another.  One can very easily be swept up into methodological questions – for instance, questions of form criticism and hermeneutics – and never return to the Bible itself.  Or one can attempt (impossibly) to consider all that has been written on a particular biblical text in an effort to cull the wisdom of “better” and “more qualified” readers than oneself.  This project runs into the barriers of one’s own linguistic competence (biblical scholarship speaks many languages) and the supply of periodicals in local theological libraries.  Not to mention the financial and social costs of giving up one’s job and family to create the time to read such a mountain of material!

A third possibility in the face of the mammoth nature of the undertaking is to give it up altogether.  The Bible is too arcane, too distant, too complicated to be of much practical use for those of us struggling to discern the Creator’s path for humankind in our troubled era.  Why bother to conjugate lost languages to figure out how to act in the face of racism, poverty, and the infinite oppressions of everyday life in the American empire?  The very act of attempting to dig out from under the mound of questions is evidence enough of the privilege we should probably be about the business of renouncing.

approaching the text

Each of these options avoids in a different way the challenge and opportunity to learn from our ancestors what the Bible offers.  Whether one chooses fundamentalism, ivory-tower academia, or some “new” religious approach disconnected from the biblical tradition, the result is to deny the invitation to acknowledge that we stand on the pinnacle of the mountain of human experience.  Our “age” – whether we conceive of that term as signifying the baby boomers, generation X, millenials, the period of technology, or the era of democratic capitalism in the West  – is only the most recent chapter in a human story spanning many millennia.  The simple fact remains that the Bible is the deepest echo of our ancestors’ own cries of “Who are we?” and “What are we to do with our lives?”

So, if we are to choose an alternative to abandoning or getting lost in the search for biblical wisdom, we must begin with a humble acknowledgement that our efforts are limited by many factors that cannot be overcome.  Rather than denying either the invitation to learn or the existence of barriers, I urge us to name our limits and continue to move forward.

Who We Are Matters 

This very process has also been taking place from within the formal institution of biblical scholarship.  Where once professional Bible readers (are there such things?!) claimed “scientific” methods that obviated the need to claim the personal positions and limits of the interpreter, more and more we find scholars admitting what has been true all along.  That is, each reader or community of readers comes to the Bible with a panoply of prejudices and commitments that necessarily play a powerful part in shaping how one hears the word of God speaking.  Poor peasants in Latin America can connect with Jesus’ parables drawn with images of farming far more readily than clean-fingered university professors in the United States or Europe.  Women can hear both the pain caused by the patriarchal mind-set that permeates the Bible and Jesus’ shocking invitations to reshape that mind-set in ways that men such as myself can never do.  People anywhere committed to the transformation of unjust social structures into God’s realm of shalom will pick up the pervasive political context of the gospels when readers satisfied with the status quo find only “spiritual” messages.

This is not to suggest that one particular cultural perspective or sociopolitical ideology is “better” for reading the Bible.  Rather, it is to call all prospective readers to the enlightening and humbling task of paying attention to how who we are affects who we believe the God of the Bible to be.  At the same time, it is not to succumb to a trackless pluralism in which anyone and everyone can read the Bible and find their “opinion” equally valid.  Criteria do exist for distinguishing among readers, just as distinctions between faith in Yahweh and faith in Baal, Marduk, or Caesar are not mere tricks of the text.  Our image of God and sense of God’s will for us and for creation powerfully influence our sense of what makes for a “right” world.  Are we simply part of a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest struggle to survive, or ought we to aim together for a harmonious interconnectedness that respects the dignity of all life?  Our biblical interpretations are crucial to answer this eminently practical inquiry.

Beginning the Journey

This getting to know ourselves in order to get to know the Bible can, of course, produce the same avoidance of the question as does the attempt to get to know the Bible “directly.”  We will never completely know ourselves any more than we will completely know the Bible.  But just as we should not allow our ignorance of Greek or Pharisaic practice to prevent our encounter with the sacred texts, we should not stop reading the Bible simply because some unrevealed prejudice may be affecting our reading.  Instead, we can, like the Hebrews in Egypt, courageously accept the invitation to leave our captivity behind and begin the journey toward liberation.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

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August 18, 2011

The Bible Project

A friend sent me this article…  Read it and let me know what you think.

In Jerusalem, scholars trace Bible’s evolution

By MATTI FRIEDMAN Associated Press
Friday, August 12, 2011

 
JERUSALEM (AP) — A dull-looking chart projected on the wall of a university office in Jerusalem displayed a revelation that would startle many readers of the Old Testament: the sacred text that people revered in the past was not the same one we study today.

An ancient version of one book has an extra phrase. Another appears to have been revised to retroactively insert a prophecy after the events happened.

Scholars at work at Hebrew University

Scholars in this out-of-the-way corner of the Hebrew University campus have been quietly at work for 53 years on one of the most ambitious projects attempted in biblical studies — publishing the authoritative edition of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, and tracking every single evolution of the text over centuries and millennia.

And it has evolved, despite deeply held beliefs to the contrary.

For many Jews and Christians, religion dictates that the words of the Bible in the original Hebrew are divine, unaltered and unalterable. For Orthodox Jews, the accuracy is considered so inviolable that if a synagogue’s Torah scroll is found to have a minute error in a single letter, the entire scroll is unusable.

But the ongoing work of the academic detectives of the Bible Project, as their undertaking is known, shows that this text at the root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was somewhat fluid for long periods of its history, and that its transmission through the ages was messier and more human than most of us imagine.

The project’s scholars have been at work on their critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, a version intended mainly for the use of other scholars, since 1958.

“What we’re doing here must be of interest for anyone interested in the Bible,” said Michael Segal, the scholar who heads the project.

The sheer volume of information makes the Bible Project’s version “the most comprehensive critical edition of the Hebrew Bible in existence at the present time,” said David Marcus, a Bible scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, who is not involved with the project.

But Segal and his colleagues toil in relative anonymity. Their undertaking is nearly unknown outside a circle of Bible experts numbering several hundred people at most, and a visitor asking directions to the Bible Project’s office on the university campus will find that many members of the university’s own staff have never heard of it.

This is an endeavor so meticulous, its pace so disconnected from that of the world outside, that in more than five decades of work the scholars have published a grand total of three of the Hebrew Bible’s 24 books. (Christians count the same books differently, for a total of 39.) A fourth is due out during the upcoming academic year.

If the pace is maintained, the final product will be complete a little over 200 years from now. This is both a point of pride and a matter of some mild self-deprecation around the office.

Bible Project scholars have spent years combing through manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Greek translations on papyrus from Egypt, a printed Bible from 1525 Venice, parchment books in handwritten Hebrew, the Samaritan Torah, and scrolls in Aramaic and Latin. The last member of the original team died last year at age 90.

The scholars note where the text we have now differs from older versions — differences that are evidence of the inevitable textual hiccups, scribal errors and other human fingerprints that became part of the Bible as it was passed on, orally and in writing.

A Microsoft Excel chart projected on one wall on a recent Sunday showed variations in a single phrase from the Book of Malachi, a prophet.

The verse in question, from the text we know today, makes reference to “those who swear falsely.” The scholars have found that in quotes from rabbinic writings around the 5th century A.D., the phrase was longer: “those who swear falsely in my name.”

In another example, this one from the Book of Deuteronomy, a passage referring to commandments given by God “to you” once read “to us,” a significant change in meaning.

Other differences are more striking.

The Book of Jeremiah is now one-seventh longer than the one that appears in some of the 2,000-year-old manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some verses, including ones containing a prophecy about the seizure and return of Temple implements by Babylonian soldiers, appear to have been added after the events happened.

The year the Bible Project began, 1958, was the year a priceless Hebrew Bible manuscript arrived in Jerusalem after it was smuggled out of Aleppo, Syria, by a Jewish cheese merchant who hid it in his washing machine. This was the 1,100-year-old Aleppo Codex, considered the oldest and most accurate version of the complete biblical text in Hebrew.

The Bible Project’s version of the core text — the one to which the others are compared — is based on this manuscript. Other critical editions of the Bible, such as one currently being prepared in Stuttgart, Germany, are based on a slightly newer manuscript held in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Considering that the nature of their work would be considered controversial, if not offensive, by many religious people, it is perhaps surprising that most of the project’s scholars are themselves Orthodox Jews.

“A believing Jew claims that the source of the Bible is prophecy,” said the project’s bearded academic secretary, Rafael Zer. “But as soon as the words are given to human beings — with God’s agreement, and at his initiative — the holiness of the biblical text remains, even if mistakes are made when the text is passed on.”

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Link to original article.

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August 10, 2011

On a Child-Like Faith

A magical moment

When I was little, there were many magical moments.  One such moment happened when I entered the living room and found presents under the Christmas tree.  Call it Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, or whatever you want – but it was mysterious, and I was in.

This was a wonderful time – and perhaps you can remember such a time in your own life.  Or if you have kids, perhaps you know the delight in ‘playing along’ with the story, vicariously experience the joy and innocence once again.

But it can’t last forever – can it?

I suppose we could all mutually agree to believe what we know isn’t the case – and in some ways, you could say that given our Christmas-overkill every year we do exactly that.  We reinforce the illusion, by some mutual agreement (which must be some marketer’s dream).

But then a ten-year-old who has figured it out says to her younger brother, “You know Santa isn’t real, right?”  And Christmas is ruined.  If only he could go back to his child-like faith.

I wonder if there are parallels to this scenario in the life of faith.  Jesus certainly commends children as ‘the greatest in the kingdom’ and calls us to receive the kingdom ‘like a little child’.  The phrase ‘faith of a child’ or ‘child-like faith’ does not actually appear in the Bible, though the idea is certainly present.

I often hear this referenced when someone takes part in a discussion about hard to understand issues or when learning something that might challenge an aspect of his or her faith that perhaps had been taken for granted.

“But you just have to have a child-like faith.”

OK.

Yes.

But what is a child-like faith?

For theirs is the kingdom of heaven

When Jesus mentions that children are the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, he is noting their humility – not their ability to believe certain things about God, nor their ability to believe almost anything.  In Matthew 18 he is contrasting children with those who argue and fight about who is the greatest.  (Though I know some kids who have the same argument!).

In Mark 10 he talks about receiving the kingdom like a little child.  Here I think the focus is being open to what God is doing in the world.  This may be in contrast to those who were skeptical or critical of the things Jesus was doing as he proclaimed the kingdom – teaching, healing, eating with outsiders, etc.  So there definitely is an element of openness and embracing what God is saying and doing.  Children probably didn’t have the status of adults, and Jesus may be surprising his listeners with who is actually included in the kingdom – children, prostitutes, tax collectors.  The kingdom is for ‘the least of these.’

 

Simpler Times

We all know there is something about grown-ups that gets in the way of relationships, that makes simple things more complicated, that is less willing to trust, and so on.

Further, in a complicated, intimidating world we want something that is easily graspable, something that we can hold on to easily, something that soothes and calms our fears.

Even David in the Psalms yearns for the simplicity of a child:

“I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.”

There is a time to just sit and rest in God.  He is vastly greater than we are, and it is a great comfort to simply trust in his goodness.  That is a very biblical thing to do and is one of the supreme joys of faith.


Growing Up

So what are we to do when things get complicated, as they inevitably do?  I suppose we could retreat and ‘find a happy place’.  Or plug our ears and simply ignore whatever is going on.  Or say, “I just want a child-like faith.”  Or tap our heels and say, “There’s no place like home.”

But we do not remain children.  We grow up.

And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

The Apostle Paul noted as much:

“When I was a child,
I talked like a child,
I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”

Some say faith is becoming ‘too heady’.  Perhaps we have Paul to thank for that.  Or the church fathers.  Or the desert fathers.  Or the various councils that met early on to hammer out incredibly heady ideas.  Or Thomas Aquinas.  Or Duns Scotus.  Or Anselm of Canterbury.  Or John Calvin.  Or the medieval scholastics who wrote volumes and volumes of incredibly dense theology.

The idea that faith is getting ‘more heady’ is probably not actually the case.  In fact, perhaps we are coming out of a time of when the faith has been ‘dumbed down’, and now some are attempting to deconstruct a few of the concepts that came out of our dumbing down period (the explosive growth of fundamentalism in the 20th century).  So maybe there is a reapprehension of the faith taking place.  A return to thinking.  This might be painful to some, but, in reality – this probably happens in every generation.

One might also point out that the very things we might call the ‘simple aspects’ of faith are themselves the results of some very heady dialogue, hard work and intense thinking.  Let’s take one issue: the Trinity.  As Christians we take this aspect of God for granted, but it took centuries of thought and argument for this ‘simple’ concept to be worked out.  Or the divinity of Jesus.  This also took centuries to work itself out.  Or pick your favorite ‘simple’ doctrine.  The idea that there was a pristine time when faith was simple and we didn’t have to think about things but just trust in God is an illusion.

Even in Jesus’ day children were expected to memorize vast portions of the Torah, if not the whole Torah itself.  That’s way too heady for most of us.  And that was the expectation for children.  So perhaps the faith of a child is the faith of one who takes their faith seriously.  Who takes God seriously.  Who commits their hearts and minds to knowing God as well as possible, by taking the textual tradition they’ve been handed seriously, and when the kingdom is breaking in around them (even in unexpected ways!) – they are open to it.

Additionally, Jesus himself was one who did quite a bit of deconstructing of what many took for granted.  “You have heard it said… but I say to you…”

So when we look for cracks in the settled foundations of our assumptions, perhaps we are simply walking in the path of the Master himself, who called us to be as children, without actually becoming children.

After all, when I was a child, I thought like a child.

But we are no longer children, and we must – at some point – put childish ways behind us.

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July 12, 2011

The Argument

–the first in a series of posts exploring the nature of the Bible–

In the beginning was the Argument, and the Argument was with God, and the Argument was: God.  God was the subject of the Argument, and the Argument was a good one.

Who is God?
What is God like?
What does God require of us?
What is God doing about injustice?
What is God doing, if anything, to relieve the human condition?
Is God benevolent, malevolent, or simply indifferent?
Is there any divinely-infused meaning to human existence, or is it all just senseless?

So begins Thom Stark’s book, The Human Faces of God.

I have recently posted a blog series – The Wars of the Lord – based on his chapter on violence and genocide in the Old Testament.  These posts were uncomfortable for some, and really made the question: ‘what is the Bible?’ come to the fore.

So what is the Bible?  A very good question, a central one.  Many of us grew up with a certain idea about what the Bible is, and what it is not.  It is the Word of God.  It is whole.  It is unified.  It clearly and unequivocably is the voice of God.  It is without error.  It is entirely different than any other books that have ever existed.

Upon deeper study of the Bible, many – myself included – have needed our understanding of this ancient text to be altered a bit.  The simplified understanding of equating the Bible with a unified book with no errors or contradictions, showing up at our doorstep directly from God – probably in the King James Version - needs to be revisited.

Many of us have unconsciously assumed the Bible speaks with unanimity on every topic it covers.  The Bible speaks with one voice.  So I can pick a verse from one place, say the Psalms, and expect that to be in line with a verse from the gospels, or one of Paul’s letters, or Revelation.  Simple, right?

Consider an alternative to this ‘single-voice’ approach:

Throughout history, worshipers of Yahweh have been engaged in this argument, and for every question posed, they have proposed a plurality of divergent answers.  In the beginning, long before there was the Word of God, there were the words of God’s people.  That is to say, before there was a Bible – a “Word of God” as a singular entity – there was an argument about God, reflected in diverse texts and traditions; and it is in fact that argument that is today enshrined in the Judeo-Christian canons of scripture.  As John Collins has it, the Bible is a “collection of writings that is marked by lively internal debate, and by a remarkable spirit of self-criticism.”  To put it bluntly: the Bible is an argument – with itself. (Stark, ch.1)

What do you think of this approach?

an ancient tradition

It is worth considering.  I like it because it preserves the rabbinical idea that God is present in the community as it debates the text together.  In other words, as we wrestle with the text together, God is there.  The wrestling is a necessary part of hearing the voice of God in scripture.  It is not a simple, one-off pronouncement of X or Y, but a divinely-inspired communal wrestling with the ways God has interacted with his people in the past.  As we do that, we may find God is at work among us today.  The text is not static – it is living and active.

This approach also acknowledges the discrepancies and alternative voices found within the Bible that we often ignore or attempt to impossibly reconcile in our attempt to squeeze the Bible into the box we’ve created for it.

The Bible is where I encounter God.  And as I approach it, I must remember that the Bible itself is a library of sorts – an ancient library, and like any library, contains various books written by different people that don’t all say the same thing (and some of the books themselves are products of the community).  That doesn’t mean that God isn’t speaking, but is, perhaps, the evidence that God has spoken.

–

I will follow up this post with several examples, but for now, just wanted to whet your appetite with a different approach that I feel does justice to what the Bible actually is, rather than what we want it to be.

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