Don't Want to Live in That World

A couple of years ago at a conference I was sitting at lunch with a group of scholar; missiologists I respect. They were generally more conservative than I am, and so when the topic of same-sex marriage came up I decided to be more an observer than participant. 

Speaking of his church members one said, “they don’t want to live in a world where men marry men.”  And they all nodded.

Understand that these are people who speak other languages fluently. They have lived years in other cultural settings. They read the Bible and are dedicated to following Jesus. They teach students of many races and many have married into other cultures and ethnicities. They are themselves Latino and African American and  Asian as well as White American, men and women. They cannot be easily dismissed as bigots. 

But they can be located in a kind of global evangelical meta-culture which, to cite Geertz, creates a structuring of human experience that, being perceived of as uniquely real, offers a deep sense of meaning. And that structuring of human experience is around a divine ordering of human society believed to be read directly from and enjoying the authority of the Word of God in the Bible. 

The world the denizens of this culture do not want to live in is any world that interrogates or denies its founding myth; that God’s order is immediately available for human implementation through reading the Bible. 

And same sex marriage, not just in society at large (which isn’t expected to follow God’s order,) but especially in the Church, directly denies that God’s desired order can be read directly out of scripture. Same sex marriage in the church rests on the assertion that God’s desired order is equally revealed in scientific descriptions of the natural and human world. These become central to a natural theology  which any theological description of God’s ordering must take into account. Nor can one simply dismiss the observable natural order as spoiled by Sin. Genesis 9 quoted in Acts 14 gives the lie to any such theological perversions. It is and remains God’s world. 

But as soon as rational and scientific descriptions of the world become a partner with scripture in discerning God’s order the founding myth of the global evangelical meta-culture comes into question. God’s order appears more complex than scripture allows, and humans have a far more active and complex role in discerning it. A sense of meaning and even purpose in this world shaped by scientifically informed natural theology will be very different from that found by reading the Bible alone. 

I thought of all this as I watched a Brandi Carlisle concert. A brilliant, moving songwriter. A woman married to a woman. A mother of two daughters. I thought of it as I listened to the Turtle Creek Corale and their evokative imaging of Silver Bells at their Christmas concert. Where two men may marry and raise children and greet friends on the street. And that is the world I want to live in. 

Not just because it fully includes the people with whom I live and for whom I care along with their aspirations to love this world and in this world as God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. But because only this world is wide and deep enough to manifest the fullness of God’s self revelation; which cannot be limited to Jesus Christ or the words of God’s Word. 

And because only this world adequately challenges humans to rise to their full role as stewards of God’s created order. 

There is a parable of Jesus in which a man leaves three stewards in charge of his estate. Two take charge as he has directed, use their initiative, and bring an increase. One, fearing his master as a hard man,  buries what he has been given in the ground where it yields nothing. 

Too many Christians are like this third steward, frightened of the responsibility for reaching their own judgements based on all the evidence of God’s self-disclosure. They are frightened of the risk that leads to an increase for God’s Reign. And so fearing God’s wrath they try to simply reiterate what was always accepted as a godly order in the past, holding fast to the assurance that if they have not fully manifested God’s righteousness, at least they have avoided God’s wrath.

I don’t want to live in that world, and frankly I don’t think the apostles, not least Paul, wanted to either. Their teaching and preaching, fired by Christ’s spirit, exploded beyond the bounds of a first century Jewish conception of God’s order. It discerned dimensions of diversity in the human world hitherto unimagined. And it saw an underlying unity whose basis had been hitherto unknown. Their apocalyptic imagination saw a future so fantastic that it has inspired humans ever sense to dream of new Jerusalems.  What would those shaken into awareness of the vastness of God’s plan and the depth of their responsibility to understand it and carry it forward think of their descendants busy defending the status quo lest their master be angry? 

I do not want to live in their world. Christ calls us to something wider, deeper, and more far reaching. Christ calls us to be stewards whose task is not to imitate the past, but to discern from our ever expanding knowledge of God’s creation those forms of human relationship within creation that most resemble God’s Reign. And we do it knowing that even if we fail our daring to try is more faithful than acting out of a fear of failure. Any future we create as we act out our freedom and responsibility in Christ will be more beautiful than the past, and will give more glory to God. 

On the Border Between Science and Theology

Is where everything happens.

Marcelo Gleiser has written eloquently about what he calls the Island of Knowledge. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmos-quantum-and-consciousness-is-science-doomed-to-leave-some-questions-unanswered/  for an account of where he is coming from. Gleiser’s image of an island of knowledge that is always expanding raises the question of just what is the ocean into which it expands. What is that other part of reality into which knowledge expands, but which can never be fully known? 

Actually theologians and philosophers have a name for that other part of reality. It is called transcendence, that which is beyond the kind of human knowledge that science generates. The island that is known through science is then called immanence. 

Transcendence is the particular domain of reality that theology claims to explore with its particular ways of knowing. Those ways of knowing vary according to the culture in which theology takes its specific forms, as do the characterizations of transcendence. 

But regardless of these cultural (usually identified as religious) variations all theologies have this in common: Just as transcendence is the name of the space into which the scientific island of knowledge grows, immanence is the name of the space into which the theological island of knowledge grows. Indeed it has nowhere else to go. 

Whether a religion bases it’s understanding of transcendence on philosophical speculation or revelation, that understanding assumes and lives on the boundary between human knowing that belongs to the domain of immanence and the transcendent that it claims to know. And every expansion of its knowledge of the transcendent stretches the immanent capacity to know and pushes into the immanent domain of acting on that knowledge. 

So science and theology share a common boundary at which all increases in knowledge are possible, and that is the boundary between transcendence and immanence. And on the boundary are found all those currently contested issues about what it means to be human, since it is humans and humans alone who straddle that boundary with their personhood. 

This leaves us with two possibilities for understanding how science and theology interact. One is that there is an ever growing shared body of knowledge - what on a Venn diagram would represent the overlap between the expansion of science into transcendence and the expansion of theology into immanence. Thus, for example, as scientists push the boundaries of knowing into realms that directly affect our understanding of what it means to be human in relation with both other creatures and one another there is a clear overlap with theological reflection on the same relationships, but understood out of meditation on what is known through revelation or philosophical reflection. 

And each may, and should inform the other. The scientists' own boundary indicates the importance of transcendence to human self-understanding. Specifically to be human is to relate to transcendence out of the quest of knowledge. The theologian’s own boundary indicates the importance of immanence to human self-understanding because to be a knowing human is to be rooted in the immanent domain, more specifically to be a creature that grasps the immanent domain with its senses and seeks to extend the language of immanence into describing the transcendent. 

Yet there is a more intriguing possibility for shared knowledge. Rather than imaging relatively smooth overlapping boundaries between the knowledge of immanence and the knowledge of transcendence we might see them sharing a fractal boundary whose expansion can go on forever sharing only a boundary and never a domain. Transcendence and immanence always touch, but the one never crosses over into the other.

Rather than finding a shared domain, theologians and scientists will find new dimensions of their common boundary. 

And this is why scientists and theologians have much to discuss with each other. They are not only exploring a common boundary. At a macro level they have overlapping concerns related to what it means to be human on the boundary with transcendence in relation to society and the larger natural world. There is plenty about which to dialogue. But it will always be a dialogue at the border of their respective ways of knowing, lest either be deprived of having a voice at all. 

Pro-Israel and Anti-Semitic

That was what a Jewish colleague said to me in describing many of the Christians he works with regularly.

It seems a strange designation, but it should challenge Christians to think more deeply about their relationship with both Jews and Judaism, and how their attitude toward Israel may be the other same of the same bad coin.

Let’s start with the easy part. Christian discourse about Judaism is almost always anti-Semitic. The reason for this is that it almost always characterizes Jews and Judaism in Christian terms, inevitably creating some form of religious other in order to better define what it means to be Christian. There are three main forms:

1. The worst form of appears in the “Christ-killers” discourse that began, if not with John’s gospel then the earliest interpretations of it. It continued through the early church, inspired and justified pogroms and expulsions all through European Christian history, and most recently animates and inspires white supremeist attacks on Jews. 
2. More subtle, and still pervasive in Protestant Christian preaching, is comparing Judaism as religion of law versus Christianity as the religion of grace. The more subtle form of this is comparing any kind of Christian legalism to the teaching of the Pharisees, or of any kind of sacerdotalism to the religion of the Sadducees and priests. Jews and Judaism othered in the form of the cartoon caricatures of Jewish religious leaders found in the New Testament. 
3. Finally, and most difficult for those who have recognized the explicit and implicit anti-Semitism in the forms above, is characterizing Jews and Judaism as “just like us” except that Judaism doesn’t acknowledge Jesus as the Christ. Of course this is a big step forward from either 1 or 2, but it still defines Judaism in Christian terms. So, for example, when Christians recognize that Judaism really is a religion that recognizes God’s grace and love we are still defining it in terms of our centers of validity. 

One can argue that defining others in one’s own terms is inevitable. We all process human relationships in terms of our own point of view and values. Who a person, group, or religion is to us is inevitably who they are for us. But the problem with all three of the above characterizations of Jews and Judaism is that they define Jews and Judaism in terms of what came before us. By comprehending Jews and Judaism in Biblical categories found in Christian theology we are defining them in terms of what is supposed to precede Christianity and which Christianity therefore inevitably supersedes.

Even when we find in Judaism the foundations of our own religion; whether in theology, ritual, ethics, or prophecy we inevitably become a crushing weight built upon it and thus never allow it to be for us something new, something truly different from ourselves. 

And this is both historically false and demeaning. What I have learned these last 10 years in dialogue with Jews in both Dallas and Israel is that contemporary Judaism, whatever common foundations it may share with Christianity historically, is in many ways a post-Christian religion with its own integrity. The Judaism of the oral Torah, remembered and elaborated in the ongoing process of the Talmud, speaks to us with an independent voice that we cannot comprehend within the limited framework afforded us by Christian theology. We cannot speak about it, except to report what we have heard from it. 

And this requires of Christians that our theological understanding grow in the process of Jewish-Christian dialogue. We can't approach dialogue to find something we forgot about our scriptures but the Jews somehow remember.  We must approach dialogue with the expectation of learning what we never knew and never could know from a people with their own distinct knowledge of and relationship with God. 

But this requires that we recognize that our relationship with God manifest in creeds, rituals, and ethics be regarded as a sufficiency but not a plenitude. We know all we need, but never all that there is to know about God. 

And that gets us to the problem of Christians who are “pro-Israel,” or more generally understand Israel in geo-political terms. Almost inevitably the Christian concept of the modern nation-state of Israel consists of one or more three American Christian fantasies. 

1. The first is a fantasy in which modern Israel re-iterates our own American struggle to found a burgeoning, modern, democracy in a new land. As persecuted Christians fled Europe for the New Jerusalem, so persecuted Jews fled Europe to re-take the old Zion that was always rightfully theirs. Was the land already occupied? Well so was the New World. But just as Christian civilization would displace or convert the Native Americans so modern European Jews would turn the fallow soil of Israel into a gardens and vineyards, quite naturally displacing the Arabs who happened to already live there.
2. The second fantasy is the imagined Christian end of history in which apocalyptic end-times prophecies of the restoration of Israel usher in the return of Christ. Never mind that this scenario spells war, death, and destruction of countless Jews as the world’s armies gather on the plain of Meggido and the great tribulation takes place. From the safety of their post-rapture view of history Christians will be able to cheer the salvation of the righteous remnant before the creation of the New Jerusalem. 
3. The third, doppleganger of the first two, imagines that Israel is nothing but an extension of the American "empire" and indeed of some metaphysical "Empire" down through the ages. 

In either or all of these fantasies Israel as a Jewish nation is once again the “other” against which Christians define their place, now not theologically, but historically. So even when they are nuanced they are both simultaneously pro-Israel and anti-Semitic. John Hagee believes that Jews are “just like us” and do not need to convert to Christianity to be saved, but his understanding of Israel formulated in terms of the return of Christ is still anti-Semitic in the sense of which I speak.

And again, what Christians, particularly American Christians must do is to let Jews generally and Israelis specifically tell us who they are and how they understand history and their place in it. Instead of putting Israel into the context of a Christian reading of history we need to ask how Jews understand Israel in a Jewish reading of history. We might learn something. Because just as our Christian understanding of God is sufficient for salvation but incomplete, so our Christian understanding of history is sufficient to secure our hope but incomplete when it comes to political and social relations. To be complete it must take into account the understanding of history, and I emphasize the post-Christian understanding, found in Judaism. 

In normal interpersonal and inter-community relations the problem of “othering” is always present and must be worked out as each side listens and increasingly takes the other’s self-understanding into account of what can become a shared experience and understanding of reality. But the case of Christians and Jews isn’t normal. Christians and Christianity are directly responsible for centuries of oppression and ultimately the attempted genocide of the Jews. Since 1948 even Christians who have strongly supported Israel do so from a historical understanding of the nation that robs it of the agency of self-definition. 

So today it is urgent that Christians simply stop speaking about Judaism, Jews, and Israel, and even less at Jews and Israel, and instead simply listen. We don’t have to agree with what we hear, but we do need to take Jews, and indeed all those who are other but should never be othered, seriously.  

Blessed Assurance: Jews, Jesuits, Homosexuals, and Communists Oh My!

Oh yes, and witches.

The 1950's to the 70's were a troubled time. Out beyond the beaches of Key West, Biloxi and Galveston the Commies were setting up on Cuba and spreading their tentacles across Latin America. Back at home the tremors of social change were going to become the earthquake of the civil rights movement. There wouldn't be enough white robes, lynchings, and assassinations to keep the schools from being segregated and African Americans from having the right to vote. Then there were the original "culture wars" with Bill Buckley faced off against Dr. Benjamin Spock. The elite that had run the country was suddenly divided.

In my home town the school district was in a long legal battle over segregation, one that it would decisively loose in 1972. The heartbeat of the Richardson economy was the defense industry, and in homage to our fathers we all wore three piece suits to church. But we were watching the anti-war protests on TV, and hearing the strains of "four dead in Ohio." Nor could the hippies and the psychedelic movement be escaped. The Baptists tried to keep their youth engaged on Friday nights with glow paint, black lights, and sofas while the Methodist youth center featured sing-a-longs to John Denver and rooms dedicated to Dungeons and Dragons. Only those totally disengaged didn't know there were drugs available, both at church and in school. Long hair on boys and short skirts on girls became inevitable.

And, oh yes, Methodism was already declining in membership. From being the largest denomination in the United States in the 1950's it was steadily slipping behind the Southern Baptists.

Then when I was about 15 or 16 someone gave me a Chick publication. I’m not sure whether it was from someone in Young Life, the FCA, or a youth group leader. Maybe all three. Certainly available in the local Christian bookstore run by members of my church.

Amazingly this little tract was about two scholars, Westcott and Hort, who had created the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament and launched the movement to revise God's word.

To understand why this was such a big deal you need to consider the peculiar relationship between Americans and the Bible.

In a “new world" and especially on the frontier the authority of the Bible was almost the last ground upon which Christians could claim a sense of stability and empowerment in their possession. For New World denominations like Methodists and Baptists the reliability of the Bible became the main guarantor that a social order even existed for its far flung readers. With no priests, the barest online of a liturgy, and in many cases a disdain for creeds, God's Word was the tangible sign of God's presence - always found the home altar even among the illiterate. 

Out in the deep woods, far from cities or even towns, on the trackless prairies and often surrounded by humans whose ways seemed inscrutable, even barbarian, where could you find a sense that you lived in an ordered world? “This is my Father’s World” with its quasi nature worship, or the poems of Whittier and their gentle pantheism were fine for the mild climate of England or the well-settled Eastern seaboard. Try singing them in the face of prairie fire, blue norther, or tornado. In the face of chaos the Bible promised, and indeed created order. In a world that could turn chaotic in a heartbeat you needed promises to stand on.

And before Westcott and Hort the King James Version of the Bible had been the solid ground on which Southern Christianity could stand. The Yankees and their carpetbaggers could overturn the old social order. The suffragettes and their acolytes could shake the foundations of the family. But the KJV, build on the Textus Receptus, was a rock.

Until Westcott and Hort and those who followed with their hermeneutics and extra-Jesus began chipping away at it, noting that the "received text" wasn't received from Jesus, but from a French humanist name Erasmus.

Well by the 1960's Samuel Gipp, Th.D and Chick Publications weren't having it. They were going to tell the truth about Westcott and Hort. So they accused the scholars of: 1. being products of a Jesuit conspiracy to re-romanize England, 2. being homosexuals, 3. being socialists, pacifists, evolutionists, and communists. 4. and being "spiritualists" who flirted with sorcery and witchcraft. (Don’t search, just check out chick.com and go from there.) Eventually, because they always fall together, "world Jewry" was drawn into the conspiracy.

Westcott and Hort and their critical edition of the New Testament became the sum of all fears. They were simultaneously Jews, Jesuits, Homosexuals, Communists, and Spiritualists/Sorcerers. I only wish I could have led such an active social life.

Of course this would just be a bunch of paranoid craziness if it hadn’t been so widespread in Christian circles. Because finally someone had put a focus to our anxiety that attached it to our deepest source of security: the Bible.

These tracts were enthusiastically circulated among the youth I knew in the 1960’s and 1970’s and later, not least in my UM youth group. And I saw their influence as my own peers going into ministry chose DTS, where Zane Hodges had was trying to reinvigorate the textual debate over Westcott and Hort while maintaining a barely respectable distance from accusations about their motives. (The Hodges thesis had the Textus Receptus transmitted through various theologically pure groups in a chain leading more directly to the Holy Land than through Alexandria.)

In the Methodist circles I ran in I don't recall overtly anti-Catholic or anti-Jewish preaching, although you could sure hear it in the Bible studies, around dinner tables, and in the larger social discourse.

But the United Methodist embrace of the Chick advocated idea of a “gay agenda” was right out in public. The little Chick tract “The Gay Blade” was there, making the rounds of the youth group warning us that we were being seduced into deviant sexual behavior and a "homosexual lifestyle.” Coming from a family with no investment in the KJV,  and too focused on the prospects of non-deviant sexual behavior to really notice anything else, all this never bothered me like it does some. but it bothered some people enough to single out homosexuality as the focus of UM debate for decades.

So it is hardly an accident that in these years we saw movements within American evanglicalism that vigorously linked maintaining scriptural authority with the suppression of homosexuality. In the mind of evangelical Christians the rise of the homosexual agenda was the clearest bellwether of the decline of scriptural authority. After all, it began with two supposedly gay men.

Speaking of chains of authorization. It is time to break that link. Neither sexual orientation, nor behavior, nor any of the other supposed imagined sin or social movement is responsible for shifting sands of Biblical translation and exegesis on which Christians try to make their daily walk. The roots are deeper, and may be laid at the feet of Luther and the first Reformers. It is they that decided individual Christians should study the Bible for personal edification. And it was a burgeoning Enlightenment epistemology that told individuals that they could draw their own conclusions with regard to whether what it said was true.

You can't get that genie back in the bottle just by cracking down on one of the endless list of supposed sins that clergy might engage in. You would need a new inquisition and list of questions for boards of ordained ministry as long as the Bible itself.

We (all of us) need to find a coherent, agreed, means of moving from text to conclusion that is neither idiosyncratic nor incoherent, and is more intelligible than our current "majority vote wins" model. That model is a pure product of the Enlightenment. It is inconsistent with the epistemological claims of the current majority and lacking credibility with a large minority of the church.

A good start for thinking about this would be Billy Abraham's Canon and Authority. A good start for enacting it would be to jettison everything in our Discipline arising past that Council of Constantinople as having binding authority on the belief or behavior of any United Methodist.

Breaking news: You might want to check out the book: Holy Love, by Steve Harper - a former leader of the Good News Movement and former professor at Asbury for a personal and scriptural look at same-sex marriage in both scripture and the historical context of the UMC.