The Limits of Dialogue

A long time ago I was driving in Kuala Lumpur and as I came around a corner in a quiet neighborhood I found a man beating a woman on the side of the road. He and she belonged to an ethno/linguistic/religious culture in which I have some expertise and much experience. For that reason in a heartbeat an entire cross-cultural / interreligious dialogue played out in my mind.

I would tell him to stop. He we would tell me that his religion and culture allow him to physically chastise a disobedient wife. I would suggest that he was misinterpreting his sacred texts, and that well-known scholars of his religion and culture would say otherwise. He would assert that he preferred to trust God's Word to a group of academics. 

My fallback plan would be to point out that what he was doing was against the law. He would assert that God's law was more important than human laws. 

I would appeal to his battered wife, but she was likely to tell me to mind my own business. Or to be too frightened of him to say anything at all. 

Finally I would tell him that if he didn't stop I would stop him. He would point out that for me, an American, to tell him how to behave in his own country was the height of colonialist behavior. He might even use a few choice indigenous terms for Americans/Europeans. How would I answer that? 

In the event this dialogue never took place. I got out of my car and told him to stop. He told me to mind my own business. I physically threatened him. He relented and let go of his wife, who ran to my car. I asked her where she wanted to go and we went there, leaving him on the side of the road. 

This kind of thing has happened to me a few times in my life. Once I picked up a young man who had been injured in a motorcycle wreck out in the country. No one would take him to the hospital, or accompany me to the hospital and care for him as I drove. They were afraid of evil spirits if he died. So I verbally intimidated one of them until he came along in the car to the nearest hospital. He was scared. It was a long 60 minute drive with my newly recruited assistant moaning about unclean spirits, possession by the monkey god, and so on. In the end the boy survived and I paid for a taxi to take his friend back to his village. 

Another time I rescued a truck driver who accidentally knocked over a motorcyclist who tried to pass him on the right. The cyclist was okay, but the gang of boys with him had every intention of doing some harm to the truck driver. So I stood them down and took to the driver to the local police. My actions were a clear intervention and violation of local custom. I was siding with the servant of a big corporation over relatively powerless local workers. 

I could go on. My point is simply that there comes a time when dialogue over.  Despite cultural differences, integrity, power structures, colonialism and so on dialogue comes to an end because human lives are more valuable than anything else. They are the only thing that is actually sacred, and thus their preservation is of greater importance than any scripture and any religious teaching and any claim to know God's will. That it what we learn from Christ. 

This doesn't save us from complex moral and ethical decisions where saving one life means abandoning another. Nor does it remove the reality of moral ambiguity in the midst of complex structures of power that makes it impossible to tell who is innocent and who is guilty. It simply gives us a basis for making decisions when it comes down to the preservation of human lives.  

Today I read in the Religious News Service that many African church leaders, and some United Methodist leaders, have chosen to support laws that criminalize LGBTQ personhood and to affirm actions that cause death and physical harm to these persons. African Leaders and LGBTQ Rights In my view these bishops are no different from the man beating his wife on the side of the road. They are no different from the vigilantes ready to kill a man they think is guilty. And when they are silent they are no better than the bystanders waiting for the death of an accident victim. 

If these reports are true there can be no further dialogue. Only whatever effort is possible to save human lives. Respect sometimes means crediting leaders with a humanity they have not yet discovered by refusing to engage them any further until they repent and cease attacking that which is sacred.

To the Taliban: It's not really Islamic Law, is it?

The Taliban have, not surprisingly, reinstituted the brutal regime of gruesome punishments that has been central to their idea of an Islamic State. When challenged they defiantly claim they will not give up on God’s law. 

But is cutting off the arm of a thief God’s law in Islam? Is stoning adulterers God’s law in Islam? The question is relevant to Muslims, Christians, and Jews because all three traditions have scriptural mandates for the community to carry out such grotesque acts. Even as a Christian I must ask whether the Taliban's actions fall within what I know about Islamic law. 

These crimes and their punishments are referred to in Islam has "hudud," which in this case means offenses against God. Or more literally crimes which transgress the boundaries God has set. However, even in the Prophet’s lifetime putting these laws into effect in a human community was complicated. 

Early on the human implementation of these punishments seemed inconsistent with other values the Quran enjoins upon the Muslims. When the Muslim community moved from these general laws to specific people and offenses there immediately arose complexities that begged for definition and exception. 

Moreover it could be argued that God, in God’s final judgement would punish those whose sin offended only God, such as apostasy. After all, these were offenses against God.

So questions came to Muhammad about these punishments. How serious must a theft be to warrant removing a thief’s hand? What standards of evidence were necessary to establish adultery?  How can you carry out a harsh punishment without risking it becoming a death penalty?  And most of all, who exactly is to carry out the punishment? These are critical matters in which the Quran by itself is silent and thus demands interpretation.

These complexities are no doubt the reason that for most of Islamic history these punishments were rarely carried out. The questions above, and many others led Islamic courts to recategorize criminal behavior in ways making it more amenable to human judgment. It is only in the last century that Islamist movements have made codifying and implementing these punishments central to their demand for what are called "Islamic States." And it should be remembered that much of this codification was inspired by, if not driven by the need for colonizing powers to systematize local law. 

But in this modern codification Islamist movements make two fundamental mistakes, as numerous Muslim scholars have pointed out. 

First they assume that there a should be Islamic States. In reality neither the Qur'an nor the Hadith make any mention of a state in its contemporary form, nor did any such state exist in Islamic history until the modern era. There were kingdoms, and caliphates, and military dictatorships. But no states as we know them. Taking these crimes and punishments and putting them in the context of a modern state is deeply problematic. It takes these laws out of the context of personal, human interactions characteristic of classical Islamic societies and places them in the context of a modern state’s bureaucratic machine. 

Inevitably the result, as pointed out by scholars like Zaiuddin Sadar and Tarik Ramadan, is oppressive, violent, and dehumanizing. What Muslims need to be Muslims isn’t an Islamic State, as Sadar and Ramadan point out, it is human rights. 

Secondly there is a difference between Shariah, or Divine Law, and these hudud laws and punishments. 

Shariah, Divine Law, does not spring direct from reading the Quran. At the very least the Quran requires interpretation, the mastery of which involves considerable study of everything from grammar, to literary forms, to history.  Moreover, according to classical Islamic teaching, Shariah is identified through a process of rational reflection on its four roots: the Quran, the Hadith traditions of the Prophet, the use of analogy, and seeking the consensus of legal scholars. To take a punishment directly from the Quran is to tear it away from the context of the Prophet’s interpretation of the Quran, the wisdom of the early Muslim community in understanding its full meaning, and the consensus of the community about how it is to be administered. As Muhammad said, “my people will not agree on an error,” making the consensus of the people critical to the understanding of Shariah. 

In short, just listing the hudud crimes and punishments as laws and implementing them on an ad hoc basis isn't Shari'a, it isn't Divine Law. And in the context of a modern state it may be a travesty of Divine Law. 

The reality is that calls by Islamist groups for hudud punishments in modern times have served one or both of two purposes. The first is to claim some kind of Islamic legitimacy among Muslims who are ignorant of Shari'a. Some politicians put these laws in place with no intention of enforcing them, and indeed in circumstances in which they are unenforceable. They want to appear Islamic without actually doing what they know is wrong. The second reason is to give an excuse for engaging in a reign of terror against the enemies of the state. 

The Taliban have used the hudud punishments both to claim Islamic legitimacy and to excuse their terrorist rule over an unwilling population. 

And that is why the Taliban regime may claim to be an Islamic state, but quite apart from its enemies from within who clearly disagree, the Taliban implementation of Quranic punishments has little or no claim to be rooted in Shari'a, or Divine Law.

But I want to take this a step further based on a recent presentation I heard by a Muslim scholar. She pointed out that in Islam the highest realm of ethics is not submission to outward laws, but ihsan, or doing good for others; beneficence. Ihsan is putting into action the core of Islam. It is, as Dr. Hiza Azam pointed out, putting Shariah into action. 

Quran 4:36, "Worship Allah, and do not associate with Him anything, and be good to parents and to kinsmen and orphans and the needy and the close neighbor and the distant neighbor and the companion at your side and the wayfarer and to those (slaves who are) owned by you. Surely, Allah does not like those who are arrogant, proud"  

Quran 2:177 "Righteousness is not that you turn your faces toward the east or the west, but [true] righteousness is [in] one who believes in Allah , the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the prophets and gives wealth, in spite of love for it, to relatives, orphans, the needy, the traveler, those who ask [for help], and for freeing slaves; [and who] establishes prayer and gives zakah; [those who] fulfill their promise when they promise; and [those who] are patient in poverty and hardship and during battle. Those are the ones who have been true, and it is those who are the righteous."

Always beneath the laws are the principles that determine how they are to be interpreted and implemented.

So here is the takeaway: When the Taliban announce that they are going to implement the punishments found in the Quran they are not actually implementing Shariah, or Divine Law as it is understood by most Muslims. Indeed from the standpoint of classical Islamic jurisprudence they are taking these verses of the Quran entirely out of their proper context, and thus may be implementing something completely opposed to Divine Law. 

Those of us who are non-Muslims looking on in horror at the emerging Taliban regime should not be misled by their claims to be the guardians of Islamic Law. They are far from it, and far from representing the religion of which our Muslim neighbors are a part.  

The Taliban aren't Fundamentalists.

Are the Taliban Fundamentalists? 

Is the Texas anti-abortion law like Shari'a? 

Well people seem to be saying so, but they are wrong, maliciously wrong. The Taliban are not Fundamentalists, and Texas anti-abortion law isn't like Islamic Shari'a. 

To understand why we need to go back in history a bit. 

The first religious use of the word "fundamentalism" was coined at Princeton Divinity School over 120 years ago. A group of Protestant Christian theologians led by Benjamin Warfield were alarmed by the influence of modern ideas on Christianity. They therefore formulated a list of what they saw as the fundamentals of Christian teaching. They and those who followed them proudly called themselves "fundamentalists." 

And what were the fundamentals? Well they asserted that the authoritative basis for Christian teaching was Bible, which was without error and should be interpreted literally. Secondly they asserted that five doctrines were fundamental: The total depravity of humankind, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. None of these beliefs have any relationship to Islam, so clearly the Taliban are not fundamentalists in this sense.

Through the twentieth century the word fundamentalist gradually lost its popularity among conservative Christians, most of whom preferred to call themselves Evangelicals. They had a little different take on being faithful in the modern world. 

However, the term fundamentalism was revived and introduced into the formal study of religion by Martin Marty and others who launched the "Fundamentalism Project" in 1987. They were trying to identify common characteristics across movements in many different religions. Perhaps the most important long term effect of the project was that it legitimized using the term fundamentalist for groups in any religion, and not just a specifically  Christian groups. The project never succeeded in creating a definition for fundamentalism that could usefully be applied across many religions, although it certainly stimulated a lot study of emerging religious groups. It is now 20 years or more out of date.

But there was another factor influencing the use of the term "fundamentalism." Long before the Fundamentalism Project began liberal and progressive Christians had come to use the word "fundamentalist" as a broad term of derision for any Christian who didn't share a liberal theology and progressive political agenda. It wasn't a theological description, it was an emotional ejaculation. 

With the extension of the word "fundamentalist" to other religions there was a kind of legitimization of using this derisive term against non-Christian religious movements as well. Again not a description, but an expression of emotion. 

In short the term "fundamentalist" ultimately had no clear meaning beyond "someone I don't like," and has come to be widely used in that way in American culture. 

This has two pernicious results. First, lumping together all conservative religious groups with militant and even terrorist religious groups like the Taliban casts derision and hate on peaceful, innocent religious movements that happen to resist modernity and progressive politics. This is particularly harmful to Conservative Muslims and Orthodox Jews, who face endemic islamophobia and anti-semitism already.  

The second pernicious result is that it actually obscures the truth about the Taliban and similar Islamic movements. And it thus makes it impossible to engage in public discourse about how they should be engaged politically and religiously. 

So what are the Taliban? Well they are not a group interested in getting back to the fundamentals of Islam. In fact their embrace of terrorism, their violence against religious minorities, their tribal interpretations of Islamic law and government, and their treatment of women are radically different from the  fundamentals of Islam, even in its orthodox pre-modern forms.  

Beyond this the Taliban didn't organize around the rejection of modernity, like the original fundamentalists. They organized in opposition to colonization by the Soviet Union and subsequently by their opposition to any government supported by an outside power. Or more bluntly: the Taliban are organized around a desire for the political and military power in order to implement and enforce their radical Pashtun nationalist religious agenda against an unwilling population. 

In saying this I don't mean that they don't have religious motives, or at least religious excuses for their behavior. I mean that these motives and excuses aren't based on the historically and widely recognized fundamentals of Islam. So calling the Taliban "fundamentalists" both misleads efforts to combat them and denigrates the teaching of Islam and the vast majority of Muslims. 

So what about Texas' anti-abortion law as a form of Shari'a? The same problem. Except this time people totally ignorant of what Shari'a really is are using it as a kind of byword for laws they don't like. They use it as insult against Texas law when all they really do is insult our intelligence. You cannot fight what you do not rationally describe, and insulting potential allies (for Shari'a may be on your side) isn't a good political strategy. 

The term "fundamentalist" is void of intellectual content and serves primarily to focus ill will on religions and religious movements that may be perfectly innocent. It is high time to banish it from both religious and public public discourse.  Similarly the term Shari'a as used in anti-Muslim and anti-Texas polemic is without rational content and only serves to obscure the truth about both Muslims and Texas.

It may take a few more words to describe a religious movement with which one disagrees, or a law that one finds loathsome, but that is burden those engaged in adult conversation are obliged to bear. 

You Can't Always Have What You Want

Conflict over control of the public space to promote one form of identity over another is as old as our Republic. The desire for such control is the birthplace of totalitarianism whether it comes from progressive or conservative political forces.

A series of cases related to religious freedom have recently come before the Supreme Court. The details of each case vary, and the Robert's Court has chosen to rule on fairly narrow aspects of the law. This leaves an unresolved tension between claims to religious freedom and demands for non-discrimination.   

LGBTQ+ Individuals are claiming a right to participate in private sector programs and to purchase goods and services without discrimination against their identity and the ways they express it. Other individuals and groups are claiming that allowing or facilitating LGBTQ+ participation in their programs, or purchase of their goods and services, involves them directly in behavior to which they have a strong moral objection based on religious teaching. 

Note that it is behavior and activity to which there is a moral objection, not LGBTQ+ individuals themselves. In the recent case of Fulton v. Philadelphia,  Catholic Social Services did not claim a right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals. It claimed that "CSS holds the religious belief that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Because CSS believes that certification of prospective foster families is an endorsement of their relationships, it will not certify unmarried couples—regardless of their sexual orientation—or same-sex married couples." 

It is the relationship, not the individual, that CSS could not in good conscience affirm. Similarly in a case the Supreme Court declined to hear today (July 2nd, 2021) there was no question that the florist who filed suit had worked with LGBTQ+ persons for decades. Her objection was to flowers for a same-sex wedding. In this case the court's refusal to consider the case let stand a ruling against her in a lower court.

What is at stake in these cases is whether individuals and groups can be compelled by law to participate in activities, behaviors, or relationships they find morally objectionable, or whether the constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and expression allow them to decline such involvement. This makes the problem different from that of discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, religion or political beliefs. The individuals aren't being excluded on the basis of who they are, but on the basis of what they are doing. 

Except that it isn't that simple.

There are two ways to look at human identity. The older of these ways understands identity as a given no matter how the individual acts. A person's sex, family, ethnicity, gender, religion, and even political affiliations are a primal part of who they are and cannot be changed. Withdrawal from society, whether in the form of a Hindu Sadhu, Christian monk or nun, or Buddhist bhikkhu was the only alternative to accepting one's identity.

In the modern world we have come to see identity not as a given, but as something that individuals choose to enact. You can take action to change your family, your ethnicity, your sex, your gender, your religion and your political affiliations. Modern identity, the modern sense of self, is created through action. A person creates themselves; writing through their actions an autobiographical narrative of who they are as they go along. 

In the West the shift from identity as a given to identity as something enacted began in the early modern era. Changing religious identity was revolutionary 500 years ago and could engender violent responses, but it came to be accepted as a basic human right. During the birth of the United States changing political affiliation became an accepted part of changing identity, and again a basic human right. And Europeans migrating to the US enacted changes in their national and even ethnic identities to adopt the new identity: American. 

Now in the 20th and 21st centuries there is an acceleration of this movement from given identity to enacted identity. This acceleration has been accompanied by broadening those aspects of identity that can be enacted rather than being a given. This is particularly the case with sex, gender, and sexuality. Aspects of the self that many people still regard as immutable are becoming more and more widely accepted as a matter of choice being put into action.

Recognizing this clarifies the conflicts that are now unfolding. In the modern world religious identity is an identity that must be enacted. One cannot just be a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, or Buddhist. One must act out the beliefs and practices of these religions. Now this centuries old understanding of religious identity is claimed in relation to sexual identity. Whatever the biological and psychological components, sexual identity is no longer understood as a given.  It is a chosen way of living out one's relationships in public life. And that includes marriages, adoptions, and even transitioning parties.

What is unfolding in the US is that Roman Catholics and conservative Protestants are maintaining that while religion is a properly enacted identity, sex and sexuality are a given identity; fixed by God. There may be deviations, but no acceptable exceptions. As a result the claim that religious identity must be enacted directly conflicts the claim that the same is true of sexual identity.

In a diverse society the possibilities for conflict are thus nearly endless. For a baker to enact his religious identity he cannot offer a service to a person who needs that service to enact their sexual identity. For one doctor participating in an abortion is murder, while for another it may be a moral obligation. And either may work in an institutional setting that whose desire to freely enact its moral understanding conflicts with that of the physician. 

The only reason we don't have constant conflict over enacted identities is because in general individuals and groups can choose from multiple providers of services and simply choose to take their business and needs to someone who has no objection to fulfilling them. In a society where almost every service is available from a corporation whose only identity is enacted by making money it isn't hard to find almost any service one might desire.

And yet there are many for whom this is not satisfactory. Many people simply don't have access to a diversity of choices. In many parts of the US there don't exist a variety of tailors, bakers, hospitals, florists, adoption agencies and so on. 

Second, having long been marginalized LGBTQ+ persons do not wish to merely enact their identity somewhere in public (probably on the margins.) They want to be able to enact their identity always and everywhere in public. They don't want to be accepted in the sexuality in a big city but not their rural home town. Anything less than total acceptance is just another form or marginalization.

But of course the same thing is true of those who wish to enact their religiously based moral standards. They don't want to be forced from the public realm by demands that they act against their religious convictions. That is also marginalization. 

A truly diverse society cannot offer either those enacting their religious identities or those enacting other forms of identity what they want. A diversity of conflicting ways of enacting identity, including sexual and religious identity, cannot be realized simultaneously in every place or relationship. Demanding that one type of identity take precedence over others in public simply shifts the locus of marginalization from one group to another. 

This is essentially what is happening in the cases coming before the Supreme Court. The demand is being made that identities related to enacting different forms of human sexuality take precedence over  enacting of religious identities, or visa versa. If it passes, anti-discrimination legislation before Congress will ultimately generate a precedence of sexual identity over religious identity, although it is more likely to generate endless litigation than open the public space to diverse identities.  Even if the legislation passes, the Constitution will continue to be a battleground for contention over discrimination in the realm of enacted identities. 

But legislation isn't just initiated by LGBTQ+ progressives seeking relief from discrimination. Social conservatives have, at a state level, legislated to discriminate against LBGTQ+ persons. Laws outlawing  use of bathrooms by transgender persons, forbidding changes in legal sexual identity by those who transition, and in particular banning abortion are all thinly veiled efforts to write religious doctrine into law while pushing any who can't live within those constraints to the margins of society. 

Conflict over control of the public space to promote one form of identity over another is as old as our Republic, so there is no excuse for not knowing that it is both futile and oppressive. It is the birthplace of totalitarianism whether it comes from progressive or conservative political forces. 

The public space can accommodate the actual diversity of society only when the members of that society are willing to give up their individual or group claims to dominate the whole public space in order to make room for everyone in at least most of the public space. 

If all insist on dominating everywhere then eventually our society will face two choices. It can self-destruct through a withdrawal into self-affirming private enclaves. Or it can effect a takeover of the public space by a government with a commitment only to maintaining its power. We can withdraw into fenced and barricaded communities with an empty public square. Or we can lapse into a totalitarianism that discriminates against everyone. We need not look too far historically and geographically to see what happens to societies in which either of these has occurred. 

Israelis and Palestinians - A Conflict Misunderstood

There is no modern solution to a non-modern conflict. 

What is called modern world, or modernity, is an understanding of the nature of reality that came to prominence in North Atlantic culture from the 17th century onward. Prominent in modern culture is the idea that all human behavior is, and should be, governed by natural law, human laws, and self-realization. Some of the laws governing human behavior are natural and can be discovered through the sciences of psychology and sociology. Others are made by humans themselves to be willfully imposed and voluntarily followed. Some are the rules humans choose for themselves as part of their personal identity. 

God’s law, beyond natural law, is excluded from consideration because if it exists at all it follows no discernable pattern and can achieve no universal consensus. And consistency and universal consensus are the marks of any true description of reality.  

There is also, in our time, a non-modern world that continues to be present in our societies. In this world human behavior is and should governed by interlocking systems of mutual obligation. These obligations are understood to be primal, built into the structure of reality, and are between humans and the non-human natural world, family members, clan members, tribe members, one’s fellow humans beyond the tribe, a variety of spirits or deities, and ultimately God. Law is essentially a description of these obligations, which are root of an identity that is unreservedly related to a community. 

 

At many levels, even in supposedly modern societies, the rule of law and the system of mutual obligations come into conflict. In Highway Patrolman Bruce Springsteen sings about a man caught between law and family obligation, “nothing feels better than blood on blood.” One could offer a thousand such dramas where the essential conflict is between modern obedience to the rule of modern laws and obedience to the law of primal obligations. 

 

If we understand this we can better understand the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, because both Israelis and Palestinians, and their ethnic and religious allies, are in conflict at two levels; one modern and one non-modern. And there is no modern solution to a non-modern conflict.

 

The modern Israeli view of this conflict is typically taken back 2000 years ago to the time in which Rome colonized Israel. After a series of civil wars Rome ultimately expelled the Jewish people from land that was rightfully theirs by virtue of having long inhabited, cared for, and governed it. Yet is remained for the Jews their homeland, and they maintained an intrinsic relationship to it through constant ritual remembrance and whenever possible a return to it. (A modern account typically leaves out claims about God giving the land to the descendants of Israel, because such claims are beyond modern modes of argument and reason.) 

 

The modern argument for the current status quo of both Jewish possession of the land and Israel’s sovereignty over it continues with an account of the legal purchase of land by Zionist settlers, who then held internationally recognized titles under Ottoman law and much later purchased land from 20th century Arab/Palestinian landowners. Ultimately an international decision and settlement of borders recognized Israel as a state and set aside land for a future Arab state. Because the newly independent state of Israel was at war with its neighbors the exact borders in that agreement were never realized in practice. 

 

Finally, and more contentiously, the argument goes that certain lands occupied in a war of self-defense can be legally annexed to Israel out of necessity for its own security, so long as the annexation is done under a set of clear, rational, laws passed by a democratic Israeli government. And further, that Israel has a legal right to secure the safety of its citizens and borders through police and military actions even if this sometimes means acting outside Israel’s borders and legal possessions. 

 

The argument ends with the expressed desire that a treaty, binding in international law, could be signed between internationally recognized governing authorities to resolve final issues of borders, sovereignty, and land ownership. In the meantime another kind of agreement, the Oslo accords, regulates issues of jurisdiction, land ownership and management. 

 

The modern Palestinian view of this conflict, pitched equally in terms of law, is rather different. First it questions the validity of Ottoman claims to ownership of the land subsequently purchased by Jews. After all, the argument goes, the Arab families that actually lived on the land claimed by Ottoman landlords had done so for centuries. Their right to the land was not acknowledged when the Ottomans conquered it, and their own legal systems for determining land rights had simply been ignored. In short they, not the Ottoman and certainly not the Jewish title holders, had the prior claim. 

 

Continuing this argument maintains that the UN Resolution 181 partitioning the former British Mandate of Palestine was passed with no representation by the Arab residents and landowners and violated the UN Charter itself which granted peoples the right of self-determination. The subsequent Declaration of Independence by Israel was thus in violation with the fundamental principles of international law. Thus no state has an obligation to recognize Israel, and indeed most majority Muslim countries do not formally recognize Israel. 

 

Going further, this modern argument states that Israel’s subsequent acquisition of land outside the boundaries specified in UN Resolution 181 has been through wars of conquest and subsequently is not recognized in international law, even as supposed title transfers from Arab/Palestinians to Israeli Jews have no basis in an agreed legal framework. The argument then goes that Israel has unilaterally violated the Oslo accords by its allowed expansion of Jewish settlements; noting that even in Israeli law many of these settlements are illegal. 

 

Beyond this, both sides continue to pose modern arguments concerning ever finer points of Israeli law, international law, and past and current events and treaties. 

 

And none of this actually tells us what is really going on. Because there is a distinctly non-modern side to both the Israeli and Palestinian societies that plays a huge role in the conflict. The non-modern side to the conflict arises from the ways in which both parties are involved in interlocking primal obligations  and identities that find no recognition in international law, but which they cannot give up and retain their sense of integrity and identity. 

 

For Israel these obligations are outlined through a series of covenants between God and Israel, culminating in the Torah. In these covenants the people of Israel are bound together in mutual family, clan, tribal, and ethno-national obligations. As importantly they have both ownership and an absolute obligation to be stewards of the land that God has promised them, and in particular of Jerusalem and the Temple as the sacred space in which God has chosen to be most immediately present for God’s people. Such ownership is non-transferable and cannot be abrogated. 

While circumstances over the past millennia temporarily relieved Israel of these covenantal obligations, the obligations never ceased. And now these circumstances have changed. For many Israelis and Jews more broadly the situation that has emerged in the last two centuries has renewed their absolute obligation to the promised land in general and Jerusalem and the Temple Mount in particular. Such obligations are sacred, and cannot be negotiated away by modern laws and treaties. They are the essence of Jewish identity.

 

The result, at this moment among both Jews generally and within Israel is conflict between Jews who understand themselves in terms of sacred obligations and those who understand themselves in terms of modern national and international law. While only a minority of Israeli Jews are religious, a larger number accept the non-modern/traditional world view in a visceral sense even if they don’t enunciate it in religious terms. 

 

There is a similar situation among Arabs/Palestinians. Their obligations to family members, clan members, and tribes are deeply inscribed in their ancient culture and affirmed by their religion: Islam. Similarly their culture and religion obliges them to be stewards of the lands of their ancestors; to care for their fields, trees, springs, and streams. Moreover, that religion gives them a sacred obligation to care for and protect the Al-Aqsa mosque which marks the very spot from which Muhammad journeyed to heaven and returned. And again, these are obligations established with and through God, and cannot be negotiated away. To be an Arab Muslim from the land between the Jordan and the sea is an identity bound to these obligations. In modern terms it is to be a Palestinian. 

 

Thus no purely modern framing of this conflict, whether it places it in the context of International law, psychological trauma, or sibling rivalry can provide more than a partial and temporary solution. Nor can the conflict be seen solely as a religious rivalry, although this has existed between Muslims and Jews. Religion is just a pointer to sacred obligations that overlap within a social and geographical terrain. 

 

I use the term “overlap” intentionally, because it appears to this outside observer that neither Jewish nor Muslim sacred obligations necessarily conflict. Yet in reality both sides understand their sacred obligations to be exclusive. This is why, as my friend Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger suggests, they can be resolved only through processes of reconciliation (rather than law) through which people understand that what was viewed as exclusive can be viewed otherwise without being disloyal to history, the  tradition and to the overall system. Finding a path toward reconciling apparently exclusive obligations is the work of Roots https://www.friendsofroots.net.

 

In the meantime those of us who care about both Israelis and Palestinians would do well to be conscious of the need above all for a reconciliation that cannot be reached through diplomatic efforts and the exercise of power. And we can support those groups, of which there are many, working toward that reconciliation  - often far from the spotlight of the media but ultimately to much better effect than either military force or political arm twisting. 

Enough with Bashing the Catholics and Evangelicals

 I’m over the rather continual progressive bashing of Evangelicals and Catholics. It is pointless, alienating, and risks becoming an exercise in self-righteousness. This is particularly so when the charge is that these groups are unloving without acknowledging that the meaning of the term “love” is part of the disagreement. 

Catholics, traditional Evangelicals, and Orthodox Christians find in the Biblical narrative and the tradition of the church support for a particular understanding of the created order that is intellectually coherent and emotionally satisfying. It is hierarchical and binary in its physical form, gendered with regard to animals and humans, cyclical with regard to time, ordered by eternal laws, and embraced in its entirety by God; whose relationship with it gives it purpose and meaning. 

The relationship of God to this created order is characterized by the word “love,” and thus the maintenance and restoration of this order is the essential act of love. The life of Christ, and particularly his death on the cross, is the ultimate act of Divine love to restore this order. When defined in this way, acts that discipline individuals into conformity with the created order are acts of love; human expressions of God’s relationship with Israel and then the Church over the millennia. 

There is no contradiction in saying that the Catholic church loves LGBTQ persons and that it refuses to bless their marriages. From their perspective the refusal to bless is an act of love intended to bring into or keep them within the order of creation. 

Of course there is a tension point, particularly among some Evangelical Christians: the ways in which they have already abandoned parts of the created order as found in the Bible under the pressure of social change. The justification for this has come by reading the Christ narrative as one not merely of restoration, but of progress. 

Under the influence of modernity and its acceptance that social structures evolve and progress, these Evangelicals make a move that the older Orthodox and Catholic traditions found more difficult. They came to see Christ as not merely restoring, but revealing hidden aspects of the old created order. When egalitarian and democratic ideals took hold in popular society Evangelicals embraced them as Christian while Catholics and Orthodox remained politically reactionary for much longer. Recognizing gender equality and divorce and remarriage took longer, but under the pressure of changes in their own membership Evangelicals eventually decided that this type of “progress” was actually just a deeper understanding of what had been there all along in scripture. 

But even so Evangelicals found ample New Testament evidence for an ordered creation, and love as the discipline that restores and maintains this order. The order wasn’t changing, it was just becoming clearer through the study of scripture under the influence of Christ’s Spirit. Discernment was the key, and up to now most Evangelicals haven't discerned Christ revealing a less binary and gendered social order. 

Where progressive Christianity has finally broken from Catholic and Evangelical views is that it does not read the Biblical narrative as a description of God’s order for creation. Progressives can read Genesis 1 and 2 to be sure. But instead of finding an order we find a process of ordering, a process that is evolutionary and progressive and whose continuation is placed in the hands of humanity as its stewards. The scriptural narrative does not reveal an order. It reveals the principles God has put in place to guide the progress of creation. 

Christ then comes to heal a creation and humanity whose ability to progress has been broken by sin. And through his death and resurrection Christ by his Spirit in the Church restores humanity to its task overseeing the continual progression of the created order toward the Reign of God as revealed in both Jewish Scripture and Christ’s own ministry. 

And this reveals an understanding of God’s love and thus human love that breaks sharply from the traditional view of love. For progressives God’s love revealed in Christ aims to fulfill, rather than merely restore, creation. It accepts and embraces emerging forms of self-understanding and social relations so long as they move humanity and creation toward the ideals of God’s Reign. It is the love of a realizable eschatology, even if it awaits some further act on God’s part to be fully realized. It is love as acceptance of difference given that we still await the full revealing of the glory of the Children of God.

So ultimately there is little point in talking about who is or is not acting in “love.” Progressives, Catholics, and Evangelicals simply don’t have a shared understanding of what the word love means. Nor, when it comes to it, do we have a fully shared understanding of the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection. And this isn’t merely in terms of atonement theory, but in terms of what constitutes the meaning of “sin” and what is entailed in overcoming it by Christ. 

We need to show solidarity with those who are being wounded because of their ongoing affiliation with groups that reject them, but at this point that means an invitation to leave a church that has no capacity to offer what we regard as love. 

In my wife’s language there is a saying, “like chickens talking to ducks.” But really what is happening is chickens talking to chickens about ducks, and visa-versa. As if this is going to change anything. We might consider trying to find a common language. Or at least listening long enough to be heard.