We Have Met the Enemy

When the late Walter Wink wrote that religion all too often neglects the soul in its preoccupation with institutional maintenance he echoed the cry of the millennial—“spiritual but not religious”—generation. In response, the religious community accuses that generation of not being faithful. Faithful to what? Generally faithfulness is judged by conformity to a specific doctrine—ours.

Western Christianity’s competitiveness to identify and enforce “correct” doctrine has led to an “us vs. them” mentality. Such a dichotomy always leans toward an exclusionary witness and doctrine that is enforced with power and often with violence.

Regarding people with that mind-set, a recent blog stated, “To them, the Bible is a message of selective grace… Conveniently, they always see themselves as privy to special revelation that’s given only to them and the select few who adhere to their strict rules, practices, and traditions. They view God’s ‘love’ as exclusive rather than inclusive.” He continues, “The concept of ‘the mystery of God’ is a direct threat to their ideologies. Therefore, almost every situation and question has an answer and explanation. Everything is black and white — nothing is unknown.”[1]

In this outlook “we Christians are the good guys with the good book, and ‘they’ (feel free to insert your own enemy here, be it Jews, Muslims, Fundamentalists, Liberals, etc.) are the bad guys with the bad book. So rather than deflecting the blame to some “other” we need to have a way to recognize and deal with the problem of violence in ourselves—in our culture, nation and faith.”[2]

Wink points out the human tendency to locate evil outside ourselves. In ancient times people did this by projecting demons and evil spirits. Flip Wilson’s alter ego, Geraldine, put it this way: “The Devil made me do it!”

But, Wink insists, “None of these ‘spiritual’ realities has an existence independent of its material counterpart. None persists through time without embodiment in a people or a culture or a regime or a corporation or a dictator.”[3]

Perhaps the greatest barrier to human reconciliation and unity is the unwillingness of so many to consider, even remotely, “What if I’m wrong?”

During conflict resolution, when I confront people with the question, “But, what if you’re wrong?” the invariable response, almost without fail, is, “But I’m not.”

There is a world of difference between, “I believe this with all my heart, and I stake my eternal destiny on that belief,” and “I’m right. Period;” between, “That’s just wrong!” and “I have a problem with that.”

The insecurity-driven obsession over control has risen to demonic levels; and yet even as we try to convince ourselves that we are in control, we simultaneously whine and complain about all the ills that happen to us. Bottom line: we control nothing—except our own choices.

Derek Flood takes up Walter Wink’s idea by suggesting that as Israel moved into a monotheistic faith, the people still had a need to locate evil outside themselves. But with only one deity, the only place to lay blame for evil was God. So in the earliest phase of their monotheism, God was credited with both good and evil.

“When disaster comes to a city, has not the Lord caused it?” (Amos 3:6)

When David’s infant son died, according to II Samuel, it was the Lord who had struck the child (II Samuel 12:15), because, “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers!”

Later counter-testimony emerges in Ezekiel: “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel … He will not die for his father’s sin, he will surely live … The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son” (Ezekiel 18:3, 17, 19).

And by the time of Jesus, Israel was addressing the obvious moral difficulty of attributing acts of evil to God. They simply attributed it to the devil.

Jesus affirmed that God is not the author of evil, and that our response should be the same as God’s, namely, compassion and care. Suffering is never to be considered a part of God’s will; rather, it is to be opposed in the name of love.

The process of identifying the source of evil outside ourselves is an exercise in self-deception. Of course some things the ancients called evil still manifest themselves beyond our choice and control. No one would choose cancer, or a tornado or Tsunami. But we do control our choices and our responses to those events that transcend our control.

Since at least the early 4^th century when Constantine decreed the Roman Empire to be “Holy” and enforced a bastard Christianity through the power of the state, the ugly truth is that human choice more frequently has chosen to follow the way of the Pharisees than the way of Jesus. Therefore, the history of the Christian movement has been bloody.

The first step in following Jesus is to cleanse our own house—to rid our lives of the myth of “redemptive violence” so we might pursue the way of love and peace. That may require us to face the hard question: “What if I’m wrong?” or to admit, in the immortal words of the prophet from Okefenokee, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

That’s the way I see it through the flawed glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim

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[1] http://sojo.net/blogs/2015/03/31/7-reasons-christians-refuse-change

[2] Derek Flood, Disarming Scripture: Cherry-Picking Liberals, Violence-Loving Conservatives and Why We All Need to Learn to Read the Bible Like Jesus Did (San Francisco: Metanoia Press, 2014), Kindle edition, Location 1085.

[3] Walter Wink, The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday Galilee, 1999), Kindle edition, Location 360.

A More Excellent Way

With a lot of help from Derek Flood[1], Walter Wink[2], Walter Brueggemann[3] and others, I've been exploring how to read the Bible as Jesus did. Basically, Jesus applied the rabbinic hermeneutic[4] of faithful questioning, in contrast to the approach of the Pharisees of his day, who employed a hermeneutic of unquestioning obedience.

Ever since Christianity first began its shameless dance with political power, the Bible has been used primarily to maintain orthodoxy and define heresy. When Constantine marched his army into the ocean and pronounced them “baptized”, the church began a long history of enforcing orthodoxy with threats of death, torture, exclusion and hell fire. The record of atrocities is almost endless, from the crusades and the inquisition, to Puritan witch hunts to slavery to basically every human rights issue.

In every case, the practitioners of barbarism viewed their interpretation of the faith as the one and only “right” reading, and enforced their “right” way with violent use of power. This clearly represents the very worst of the way of unquestioning obedience and inevitably leads to violence committed in God’s name.[5] It is a total misreading of Scripture’s intent.

In striking contrast is rabbinic Judaism’s tradition of faithful questioning. Rabbi Anson Laytner makes the case that faithful questioning is typical, not only of the Hebrew Bible, but also of the Jewish faith itself.[6] (I have this delightful image of Tevye arguing with God in “Fiddler on the Roof.”)

Key examples of faithful questioning are found throughout the Jewish commentaries on the Scriptures. Instead of a single interpretation that establishes the orthodox, “right” way of reading Torah, the commentaries typically present dissenting views from various rabbinic sages, offered side by side like the transcript of a courtroom trial. It may help to recall that the word, “Israel” means “wrestles with God.”

From this line of thought we can see that reading Scripture by faithfully questioning violence and harm perpetrated in God’s name is not only characteristic of Jesus and Paul and the rest of the New Testament, it’s also a deeply Jewish way to read Scripture. Remember: Jesus also was a rabbi, steeped in that tradition.

Every culture and every religious faith is susceptible to error. The root of the matter is not necessarily within the particular culture or religion, but rather is the marriage of religion and political power. This always is a poisonous combination, and is the point at which the church diverges from the way of Jesus.

But there always are those anxious souls who want to nail everything down, who want guarantees and control over their destinies, both temporal and eternal. Their needs are such that they must live by sight, and not by faith.[7] The harm emerges when their insecurities lead to the use—or at least the threat—of violence to silence dissent. The greatest heresy is their belief that the use of force is a valid example of upholding the faith.

 The key difference between Jesus and the Pharisees, and between differing groups today is in which narrative we choose to embrace, and which we choose to avoid, discount or (as Jesus did) outright reject. The question is not whether we will choose some texts and ignore or reject others. Even the most fundamental literalist reads the Bible selectively, if only by emphasis and tone of voice. Rather, if we are to read the Bible as Jesus did, the question is which texts we choose and by what criteria!

The criterion both Jesus and Paul used is love. I will develop that theme more in the blogs that follow; but here is a teaser:

"While the Pharisees were focused on strict adherence to religious rules and regulations (the “right” or “correct” reading), the priority of Jesus was instead focused on loving and caring for people in need. Clearly, the way Jesus understood faithfulness to Scripture was that it should lead to love. ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbor as yourself’ Jesus said, ‘All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments’ (Matthew 22:37049).”[8]

How then can we continue to claim that Scripture is inspired if it truly justifies hurt and damage to people? As Christians we affirm that the Scriptures are good, intended to lead us to love. However, as history reveals, it also can be read in an abusive way. My teacher, the late Fred B. Craddock once said, “There is nothing so holy that it does not have its pornographers.” Paul also wrote, “I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death” (Romans 7:10).

The common denominator is love.

That’s the way I see it through the flawed glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim

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[1] Derek Flood, Disarming Scripture: Cherry-Picking Liberals, Violence Loving Conservatives and Why We All Need to Learn How to Read the Bible Like Jesus Did (San Francisco: Metanoia Press, 2014).

[2] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Galilee Doubleday, 1999).

[3] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005).

[4] Hermeneutic, derived from Hermes, the messenger of the gods in Greek mythology, is the process of transmitting the divine message into language and concepts that can be understood by humans. In recent generations it has become generalized to mean any process of interpretation.

[5] Flood, op. cit., Kindle Version, Location 1017.

[6] Anson Laytner, Arguing with God: A Jewish Tradition (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc. 1990).

[7] The direct opposite of the life of faith described in II Corinthians 5:7.

[8] Derek Flood, op. cit., Kindle version, Location 967.

Balance

I’m wearing my preacher’s hat today.

Although most of us want balance in our lives, history is more like a pendulum swinging from extreme to extreme. Historically, the church has mirrored secular culture and more closely proclaimed political party talking points than it has preached and lived the kingdom.

My own awareness of church/cultural dynamics dates back to the 1960's: "flower children", bell-bottom pants, sideburns and peace symbols. My ministry was emerging, and the church whose call I answered was more about social relevance than about stained glass and brass plaques; more about justice than doctrine. Matthew 25 and Luke 4:16-28 were frequent preaching texts, often to the neglect of more personally edifying texts.

Were things better then? No. It was a time when part of the Church neglected crucial elements of faith and practice, like evangelism and spiritual discipline; and in our concern for being non-judgmental we diluted views of morality and erased some lines that should never have been crossed.  Much lost ground was never recovered.

Perhaps the greatest fault of the church in that era was the rigid, non-negotiable lines that were drawn between various manifestations of the Body of Christ. In the last six decades the church has sinfully wasted much time in-fighting over specific differences, instead of finding common ground and working from there to build up the kingdom. “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand” (Matthew 12:25 NIV). That may explain the six-decade decline of the North American Church. A partially united kingdom is better than a broken, divided one.

So, were the 1960's worse than today? No. The social consciousness then was a needed corrective to a tunnel-vision evangelicalism that was suffocating the church. It presented the church as hardly more than an ecclesiastical maternity ward: its only purpose to get people "born again." But if the Church prior to the 1960's was too narrowly defined in terms of maternity, many churches of the 60's and 70's closed down the maternity ward altogether, and attempted to define the church more like an ecclesiastical Department of Human Services.

Again, both are good and necessary dimensions of Christian Disciple­ship. On balance Jesus talked more about ethics than about prayer; more about money than about salvation; more about social justice than about heaven. His kingdom parables were filled with images and metaphors of justice; and, he more frequently spoke of just and ethical relation­ships than of prayer. The Hebrew prophets consistently called God’s people to repent from two sins: idolatry and the unjust treatment of the poor.

But to diminish either focus is to weaken the Gospel, and the pendulum of history brims with correctives that become more destructive than the evils they were designed to correct, and each swing of the pendulum provokes its own hostility. The rigid moralism of Victorianism led to a reactionary swing to "19th century liberalism". When liberalism seemed harmful enough the reactionary swing was toward biblical literalism, which, in turn, created yet another reactionary swing into the 1960's cry for relevance.

NOTE: each reaction was a valid corrective, but when each became an end in itself, rather than a means toward a more balanced, holistic end, it became counterproductive to the Gospel.

Today, for the first time in the church's history, the pendulum may have stopped, and nobody seems to know what to do. An emerging generation is sick and tired of watching people "play church"; sick and tired of watching people who call themselves Christians fighting with each other over style and semantics; sick and tired of seeing Christ represented by people who come across as judgmental and intolerant.

What a wonderful opportunity for the church to become real again! What a wonderful time for the church to hear, as if for the first time, the Word of the Lord:

"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?  Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard." (Isaiah 58:5-9 NIV)

And what a wonderful time to acknowledge that the same Bible also says,

"I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.  Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' (John 3:5-7 NIV)

And that same Bible says,

Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you. (1 Thessalonians 5:17-18 KJV)

And,

If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.  But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.  For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man.  For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. (1 Corinthians 15:19-22 NIV)

What a wonderful time to proclaim the balance: the Word of GRACE that leads to the peace and wholeness that is God's Shalom (salvation); the PROPHETIC Word that calls God's people to repent and to seek justice and to love mercy; the INSTRUC­TIVE Word that teaches God's people how to walk in the ways of the Lord; and the Word of PROMISE that fills us with hope. I believe it is only through hearing and believing and living such a balanced diet of God's Word that Jesus' words make any sense:

"You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.  Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.  In the same way, let your light shine before everyone, that they may see your good deeds and praise God in heaven." (Matthew 5:14-16 NIV)

And that’s how I see it through the flawed glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim