Recently at Watershed we attempted to cultivate a unique worship experience, specifically for Lent.
We called it ‘The Monastery Experience’, making use of the old, late-1800’s space recently restored in the Village at Grand Traverse Commons – our collective home as a faith community. In the brick-lined hallways and arches, it was easy to imagine ourselves in a monastery in ancient times.
Various stations were set up at which one was able to stop and have a contemplative worship experience. A nice group of people attended, from our own community and beyond. Young, old, and in-between walked the halls and spent time worshiping, reflecting, absorbing. In the background we had chant playing from Benedictine and Gregorian monks. As it echoed through the halls we were truly transported to another place.
There will be a page for each station on this site, and you are invited to experience this powerful event for yourself.
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LENT: the monastery experience
Enter here
Lent is about making space for God. This morning, we have created a monastery-like setting in which you are invited to consider the ways you can empty yourself, and create more space for God.
There are eight stations setup in the lower mercato area. Imagine you are entering a monastery. Act with the reverence you would have on such an occasion.
Some stations will work best by yourself, others will work better in a group.
Instructions will be provided at each station. You may want to experience each station, or a few, or some more than once. Don’t worry about rushing from one to the next – be present in each space. You may start at the end, and work forward, or the front and move back, or in any order you choose. When you are finished with a station, quietly move to the next.
Here is an overview, with links to each station:
STATION: WATER — seeking release Works best individually
STATION: FIRE — illumination, heat, warmth Works best individually
STATION: TREE — seeking fruit and life Works best individually
STATION: VOX — voices that bring life Works best in groups of four or more
STATION: TABLE — take, eat, remember, believe Individual or groups
STATION: GROOVE — breaking out of ruts Works best individually
STATION: STILL — quiet, empty, silent Individual or groups
STATION: LECTIO — sacred reading Works best in groups of four or more
An Irishman moves into a tiny hamlet in County Kerry, walks into the pub and promptly orders three beers.
The bartender raises his eyebrows, but serves the man three beers, which he drinks quietly at a table, alone.
An hour later, the man has finished the three beers and orders three more.
This happens yet again.
The next evening the man again orders and drinks three beers at a time, several times. Soon the entire town is whispering about the Man Who Orders Three Beers.
Finally, a week later, the bartender broaches the subject on behalf of the town. “I don’t mean to pry, but folks around here are wondering why you always order three beers?”
‘Tis odd, isn’t it?” the man replies, “You see, I have two brothers, one went to America, and the other to Australia. We promised each other that we would always order an
extra two beers whenever we drank as a way of keeping up the family bond.”
The bartender and the whole town was pleased with this answer, and soon the Man Who Orders Three Beers became a local celebrity and source of pride to the hamlet,
even to the extent that out-of-towners would come to watch him drink.
Then, one day, the man comes in and orders only two beers. The bartender pours them with a heavy heart. This continues for the rest of the evening – he orders only two beers.
The word flies around town. Prayers are offered for the soul of one of the brothers.
The next day, the bartender says to the man, “Folks around here, me first of all, want to offer condolences to you for the death of your brother. You know-the two beers
and all…”
The man ponders this for a moment, then replies, “You’ll be happy to hear that my two brothers are alive and well.
It’s just that I, myself, have decided to give up drinking for Lent.”
—
Delightful story, and fitting, as I have decided to give up beer for Lent. Alas, if I could do it his way…!
“For over 2,000 years the world has tried hard to erase the memory of the perfect conservative, and His principles of compassion, caring and common sense.”
What do you think? Did Jesus have an uncommon amount of common sense?
I’m pretty sure Jesus’s principles were anything but common sense. In fact, in my recollection, they were the complete opposite. The story of the Gospel is Jesus openly challenging the prevailing norms, social structures, and power dynamics of his day and turning them on their heads with a radical message of humility, non-violence, selflessness and faith in the seemingly impossible.
But what do I know? I have been accused of lacking common sense myself.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
–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?
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.
Whose idea is it to recap a discussion on theology over beer a week later? Not a great idea.
But here goes anyway.
These were last week’s topics, and I’ll do my best to give a couple thoughts that were expressed:
1. What is your favorite part about summer?
2. How does one move forward after a tragedy? How do you explain it?
3. Is history science or art? (See recent Paul Revere revisionism)
4. “Children are bad at lying for the same reason that adults are. We are born with a conscience (which is God’s voice in our soul) that says it is wrong for us to bear false witness.”
5. The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.
6. “The point of the universe is the hallowing of God’s name.”
Favorite parts about summer: no socks, the beach, SUNSHINE!, garden parties, SUNSHINE! and so on… in short – we’ve waited a long time for summer, and woohoo! it’s here!
Topic no.2 was a much more sobering one, given the tragedy with Carly Lewis, a local teenager who was killed in Traverse City.
How do you move forward after something like this? How do you explain it?
Most said that there is no explaining a tragedy, other than giving the straightforward account of what happened: so-and-so did this, and so-and-so did that, and X or Y was the result. It sucks, but that is what happened. Most felt it was beyond us, or even inappropriate, to try to give any larger philosophical or speculative explanations about the bigger picture.
That said, many felt that what is most important is how one responds to a tragedy. One can wallow in it, perhaps even remain paralyzed by it. One can find something deep inside that they didn’t have before. One can find communal support that he or she wasn’t aware of before. And one can perhaps be a source of help for others experiencing similar difficult situations.
But much of that is down the road. The immediate reality is grief, shock, anger – raw emotion. And no one can tell anyone else how they ought to respond to such things.
Some personal stories were shared around this topic, and I think it was a meaningful and important time to spend together.
Topic no.3: is history science or art? Did Paul Revere ring bells while warning the British about American weapons?
Here’s a re-enactment by Stephen Colbert of Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride:
4. We noted that children are actually quite decent at lying, and adults perhaps even moreso. But what does lying say about someone? And have you ever experienced someone blatantly lying to you and you knew it? What did you do?
5. Everyone agreed this quote was bunk.
6. One person responded: “I don’t think that is the point of the universe.” Then he rephrased, “Or maybe that’s part of it – but it isn’t the whole thing.” What do you think?
So… a good night at the pub last Thursday. So intense it took me a week to attempt to relive it. A nice group – some friends from in town, some friends from out of town, some other friends…
The topics, shorthand, were setup as follows: man vs. wild, soul vs. body, and interpretation vs. facts.
First topic: Like animals – we eat, sleep, defecate, and have sex. How are we different?
Interesting question. Everyone at the table finally admitted to participating in all the above activities. Wait, was I not supposed to share that?
“We are animals. Does anyone here think we’re not animals?” Steve had to know.
Silence. Crickets.
The non-animals among us refused to speak up. Guilty as charged. Apparently our initial dichotomy – ‘man vs. wild’ should be rephrased to: ‘man is wild’?
Brian noted the law recently passed in Florida which forbade sex with animals.
“Apparently it’s now illegal to have sex in Florida,” he quipped.
Clever.
Yet.
There are differences, aren’t there? You wouldn’t imagine a group of hyenas gathered around a table having existential ponderings. You don’t see chimpanzees inventing smartphones. You don’t see parakeets writing novels. So there are some differences. What are they?
Rational thought? The ability to step outside ourselves? The awareness of our own mortality? The ability to have empathy? The presence of a soul? The need to dispose of our defecation?
Well, we couldn’t let that one alone. Somehow we stumbled on the topic of privacy when it comes to going to the bathroom.
Courtesy flush?
“I can’t stand it when stalls don’t have doors.”
“Don’t you hate it when that guy just has to keep talking to you at the urinal? You know that guy.”
“One time, I was in a stall in a large bathroom near the beach, and I just started making loud painful groaning sounds. It was hilarious.”
Wait, what?
Speaking of, what do you make of the following:
“[T]he immediate appearance of the Inner is formless $h*t. The small child who gives his sh-t as a present is in a way giving the immediate equivalent of his Inner Self. Freud’s well-known identification of excrement as the primordial form of gift, of an innermost object that the small child gives to its parents, is thus not as naive as it may appear: the often-overlooked point is that this piece of myself offered to the Other radically oscillates between the Sublime and – not the Ridiculous, but, precisely – the excremental. This is the reason why, for Lacan, one of the features which distinguishes man from animals is that, with humans, the disposal of sh-t becomes a problem: not because it has a bad smell, but because it came out from our innermost selves. We are ashamed of sh-t because, in it, we expose/externalize our innermost intimacy. Animals do not have a problem with it because they do not have an “interior” like humans.”
Leave to Zizek to get all psychoanalytic about poop.
Yet perhaps he’s on to something.
In any case, isn’t there a Game 7 tonight? Spoiler: the Wings came up just short. Oh that’s right, that was a week ago.
We did spend some time on the idea of the soul. Is that a differentiating factor? Do all dogs go to heaven?
We started talking about the idea of the Christian hope in a new heavens and a new earth. I wondered, “So, what about dogs? I mean, I assume on the new earth there will be animals. Will they be the ‘same’ animals? I mean, will my dog Oscar that we had when I was a kid be there? Or will there just be some ‘stock’ golden labs who are like Oscar but aren’t actually Oscar?”
Compelling question. Unfortunately no one had a definitive answer.
“Much of the afterlife is simply speculation,” noted Kristen (not to be confused with Kirsten).
Agreed.
Somehow we stumbled on to the idea of biblical inspiration, and how to deal with some of the difficult texts in the Old Testament.
“When the Bible has God say, ‘Kill every man, woman, and child,’ is that really God saying that, or just the people saying God said that? Maybe they just slaughtered a group of people, and now they are attributing their actions to God’s commands to them, which sort of takes the responsibility off of them for what they’ve just done. History is written by the winners, so perhaps they’re just putting their spin on it. Or God did actually say it, and if so, what does that mean about God?”
“Well, maybe it’s neither of those – maybe it’s something else. History is often written by the winners – but the Bible seems an exception. Israel was not a great nation or empire, even at its peak, compared to Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and so on. Perhaps God is telling them these things, but he has a reason for it, and it’s reflective of the time, the culture, and how things worked then. If God was easy to explain, would he still be God?”
“Wait, is this the topic?”
“Who cares – this stuff is interesting!”
Indeed.
So we decided that we are all animals, but animals who care, and that makes us special. We also decided that some things, like difficult texts in the Bible, are a bit of a mystery, and we can have some flexibility in our understanding of them, and should allow our ideas of inspiration to have room for different readings and approaches to the text. Actually there were no group decisions.
A must read?
But on the note about challenging texts in the Bible, I came across a book recently that I’m intrigued by: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It). It’s written by Thom Stark and published by Wipf and Stock. (Hey – sounds like they publish quality books…)
Here are a few endorsements:
I learned so much from this book that I can strongly encourage anyone who is seeking to move from simplistic proof-texting to a comprehensive understanding of the Bible to read this book carefully.
–Tony Campolo
author of Red Letter Christians
Christians can ignore the facts that Stark brings into the light of day only if they want to be wrong.
–Dale C. Allison, Jr.
author of Constructing Jesus
This is must reading for Christians who have agonized over their own private doubts about Scripture and for others who have given up hope that evangelical Christians can practice intelligent, moral interpretation of the Bible.
–Neil Elliott
author of Liberating Paul
[W]ith the help of this book, we may discover that the Bible when we read it in all its diversity and vulnerability does bring healing words to those who keep listening.
–Ted Grimsrud
author of Embodying the Way of Jesus
Stark’s book effectively demonstrates how the Bible, in practice, is the most dangerous enemy of fundamentalists.
–James F. McGrath
author of The Only True God
The Human Faces of God is one of the most challenging and well-argued cases against the doctrine of biblical inerrancy I have ever read.
–Greg A. Boyd
author of The Myth of a Christian Nation
Stark provides a model for theology that is committed to hearing the voice of the victims of history, especially the victims of our own religious traditions.
–Michael J. Iafrate
PhD Candidate, Toronto School of Theology
This book is the most powerful antidote to fundamentalism that I’ve ever read.
–Frank Schaeffer
author of Crazy for God
Wow. Maybe I’ll read it. I downloaded the first chapter free on my Kindle. I’ll check it out and let you know if it’s as good as everyone says.
Here’s a summary:
Does accepting the doctrine of biblical inspiration necessitate belief in biblical inerrancy? The Bible has always functioned authoritatively in the life of the church, but what exactly should that mean? Must it mean the Bible is without error in all historical details and ethical teachings? What should thoughtful Christians do with texts that propose God is pleased by human sacrifice or that God commanded Israel to commit acts of genocide? What about texts that contain historical errors or predictions that have gone unfulfilled long beyond their expiration dates?
In The Human Faces of God, Thom Stark moves beyond notions of inerrancy in order to confront such problematic texts and open up a conversation about new ways they can be used in service of the church and its moral witness today. Readers looking for an academically informed yet accessible discussion of the Bible’s thorniest texts will find a thought-provoking and indispensable resource in The Human Faces of God.
From a reader on Amazon.com:
This is the book I have been waiting for my whole adult life. Like Stark, I was raised to understand the Bible as the inerrant word of God, “dropped from heaven”. I have been a Christian my whole life, yet I have increasing become uncomfortable with some of the difficult texts in the Bible and their implications on my faith and personal understanding of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. This has been compounded by the fact that I now have young children and am reading the Bible with them, struggling with how to present stories such as the Passover, wishing I could somehow skip over them. Stark addresses the difficult issues with precision, intellect, and devotion, never turning his back on Christianity. For me, the chains are off. Ironically, I can now read the Bible with more commitment. I don’t wish to skip over the difficult texts, I can address them again. My faith has been rekindled. Thank you, Thom Stark.
Good stuff! I think I’m getting a copy for Half the Sky, the Watershed Community Library. But I’m not here to sell books… (at least not yet.) 🙂
