This is the 5^th blog in this series which began with A Quest to Know What It Means to be Human, and the immediately preceding blog is Florovsky: Scripture and Tradition. 

In this and the next 2 blogs, I am looking at the writings of Fr. Georges Florovsky on the meaning of revelation, Scriptures, the Church and Tradition, as well as the relationship of these terms to each other.   The quotes from Fr. Florovsky come either from his book BIBLE, CHURCH, TRADITION: AN EASTERN ORTHODOX VIEW (from now on referred to as BCT:AEOV) or from his article “The Work of the Holy Spirit in Revelation”, THE CHRISTIAN EAST, Vol  XIII, No. 2 (1932) (referred to as TWHSIR).  God creates beings capable of receiving and bearing His revelation – humans.   God creates language as the means to convey revelation to these creatures.  Language too is capable of bearing not only the divine intent but divinity itself.  

 

Matthew 28:20

“The Scriptures transmit and preserve the Word of God precisely in the idiom of man. … What is human is not swept away by divine inspiration, it is only transfigured. The ‘supernatural’ does not destroy what is ‘natural. … Scripture itself is at once both the Word of God and the human response – the Word of God mediated through the faithful response of man.  There is always some human interpretation in any Scriptural presentation of the divine Word.’”     (BCT:AEOV,  pp 27-28) 

When God spoke in Genesis 1, His Divine will created that which was capable of bearing divinity yet was not divinity.  When God said, “let there be light”, there was light.   His spoken word became empirical reality; and this created world was the original theotokos: God bearer.  This is God’s plan: God speaks His Word which calls all things into being; and this creation is capable of bearing divinity.   This creation is not God, yet not separated from God.   The humans are created precisely to carry out God’s will, to bear His Word and to put it into action.   “In Scripture we see not only God, but man as well.”  Humanity is revealed in scripture by God’s revelation.  For the human is exactly to whom God chooses to reveal Himself.    The bodiless powers may to this day be in God’s presence continually, but humans rely on God’s revealing Himself to them, espcially since the time of the Fall.  The humans are the mediators of God’s word and will to the rest of creation, over which they were to have dominion.   

 

Creation of Adam & Eve

“… God reveals Himself to man, appears before him, becomes visible to him, speaks with him, so as to reveal to man the hidden meaning of his existence, to show him the path and meaning of human life.  In Scripture we see God coming to reveal Himself to man, and we see man meeting God and not only listening to His Words, but answering them. … God wants, expects and demands this answer.  It is for this that He speaks with man.  He expects man to answer Him.”    (TWHSIR)

“The Bible is by no means a complete collection of all historical, legislative and devotional writings available, but a selection of some, authorized and authenticated by the use (first of all liturgical) in the community, and finally by the formal authority of the Church.  …  The message is divine; it comes from God; it is the Word of God.  But it is the faithful community that acknowledges the Word spoken and testifies to its truth. … It was the People of the Covenant to whom the Word of God had been entrusted under the old dispensation (Rom 3:2), and it is the Church of the Word Incarnate that keeps the message of the Kingdom.  The Bible is the Word of God indeed, but the book stands by the testimony of the Church.  The canon of the Bible is obviously established and authorized by the Church.”  (BCT:AEOV,  p 18)

“It was not enough just to read and to quote Scriptural words—the true meaning, or intent, of Scripture, taken as an integrated whole, had to be elicited. … it was the faith of the Church, rooted in the apostolic message, or kerygma, and authenticated by it.  … With them (those outside the church) Scripture was just a dead letter, or an array of disconnected passages and stories, which they endeavored to arrange or re-arrange on their own pattern, derived from alien sources.”  (BCT:AEOV,  p 76)  

Possessing the Scriptures (the written word) is not enough for holding the truth.  It is in the meaning/understanding/interpretation of the text – wherein we encounter the mind of Christ.  Literalism is not the key – the words by themselves are not sufficient to come to know truth (false interpretation is possible).  Scriptures are used to proclaim the kerygma, but the kerygma is the interpretation of the Scriptures which is authoritative.  You must have the correct scriptures, but that alone does not guarantee correct kerygma or understanding.  Remember kerygma predates the Scriptures – the apostles proclaimed the Truth many years before they wrote it down.  Thus God’s revelation is to a people, not to a book.  It is the people who recorded and authenticated the written record of God’s revelation.  It is to these people to whom God spoke that He also entrusted they would faithfully and correctly understand, interpret and proclaim the revelation.  Scriptures were never envisioned to be a truth that stands alone apart from God’s people.  The scriptures alone save no one for they must be read, encountered, engaged, interpreted and lived.  Jesus chose disciples to follow Him; He did not write anything, nor did he indicate that simply following some written texts would make holiness or orthodoxy possible.   The texts he said witness to Him (John 5:39-40) and it is to Him that we must go in order to understand the revelation of God.  The written word kills as St. Paul says the Jews discovered, but the Spirit gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6). 

Next:  Florovsky:   The Church, the New Testament & Christ

See:  God Questions His Creation: Introduction (B)

St. Clement of Alexandria (d. 211 AD) argued that meaning of scriptures is hidden intentionally so that we are forced to seek out their meaning.  He takes what Jesus says about parables in Mark 4:11-13 (“To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven.”), and applies the teaching of Christ to the entirety of the Bible.  We either are going to be dull and tired of God’s Word, or we are going to work hard to try to understand its meaning even when it is hidden from us.   Theodoret of Cyrus, 5^th Century bishop, acknowledges there is meaning concealed in the text of the scriptures, but he believes it is God Himself who will reveal the meaning of the text to us:

Previous scholars have promised to resolve apparent problems in holy Scripture by explicating the sense of some, indicating the background of others, and, in a word, clarifying whatever remains unclear to ordinary people. …  trusting not in myself, of course, but in the one who dictated this manner of composition for the Scriptures, as it belongs to him to bring to the fore the meaning concealed in the text.  He it was, after all, who in the sacred Gospels presented his teaching in parables and the provided the interpretation of what had been in riddles.  My appeal, therefore, shall be to gain illumination of the mind from him, so I may endeavor to penetrate the innermost sanctuary of the most Holy Spirit.”  (TQOTO, pp 3-5)

St. Jerome (d. 420) in his day, praised the widow Marcella for her persistently inquiring mind when it came to the scriptures:  “…she never came without asking something about Scripture, nor did she immediately accept my explanation as satisfactory, but she proposed questions from the opposite viewpoint, not for the sake of being contentious, but so that by asking, she might learn solutions for points she perceived could be raised in objection.  What virtue I found in her, what cleverness, what holiness…”  (quoted in Hall, RSWTCF).   To approach the scriptures in order to learn, with an inquisitive mind, with difficult questions was once viewed as virtue by the Christian Church and the right way for believers to approach the Scriptures in order to understand them.   To hunger and thirst for a deeper meaning of the scriptures, beyond a superficial or literal reading, was once thought to be normative for Christians and not just the prerogative of the non-believers.  Strange that today if someone asks difficult questions about the Bible we assume they are a nonbeliever!

In writing my reflections, I found the first three chapters of Genesis to be a luscious orchard filled with a super abundance of ripe fruit perfect for meditation.  Each verse blossomed into many ideas each filled with live-giving wisdom and understanding.    Certainly every verse yielded a hundredfold in terms of the number of words in my reflections!   I found Genesis 4-11 to be a garden with much more difficult soil to work, and requiring myself as the husbandman to do a lot more work for a lot less yield.  This may reflect the fact that the earlier chapters of Genesis take us into the Garden of Paradise where God-given fruit abounded, and all that is left to us is to reach out and partake of the sweet fruit.   Genesis 4-11 is life outside of the Garden of Delights.  The soil has become cursed and requires us to till to produce any fruit at all.  Nevertheless, God commanded us to do just this work and to produce the fruit of the ground with thanksgiving and to His glory.   These reflections are the result of those labors – a labor of love.  My hope is that it will bear fruit in your life as well – an ever deeper appreciation for the scriptures, and the joy of searching in God’s garden to find the fruit of hidden treasures.  Questioning is a very appropriate gardener’s tool when working one’s way through Scriptures, and wondrously enough questions are also and often the fruit of the labor of reading the Bible.  

A disclaimer – this is a collection of reflections, it is not a scholarly word study.  I do not read Hebrew or Aramaic, so I don’t comment on the etymology of each word in the text, though that is a valuable way to study the Scriptures.   I do not comment on the meaning of each person’s name, although that too can be helpful in understanding the Scriptures.  Nor have I done a numerological study, even though certain numbers repeat throughout Genesis and obviously have a symbolic value.  Generally such studies can be found in scholarly bible commentaries, dictionaries and encyclopedias (a couple which I have listed in the bibliography).   This work is also not meant to be an Orthodox dogmatic text.  These are simply my reflections on the text.  I’ve included concepts found in the text that disturb me or that I cannot readily explain.   I believe that in reading God’s Word, one way to approach the text is to look for answers.  But a different and very insightful way to approach the text is to discover what questions arise from the text? To what mysteries does it open our minds?  Since it is a revelation from God, what challenges does it present to our very limited and one-sided human thinking?    I embrace St. Basil the Great’s notion that a God who is totally comprehensible is no god at all, but nothing more than the projection of the best of human intellect.  The God whose ways are not our ways, and whose peace is beyond our understanding, is going to have a logic that we are not always going to comprehend.  It is exactly this logic which is at work in the universe and as revealed in the Scriptures – a logic which is beyond our human understanding – which actually led Dostoyevsky to believe a God must exist for how else can we explain the seemingly incomprehensible events of life?

The Lord Jesus said,

“As for what was sown on good soil,

this is he who hears the word and understands it;

he indeed bears fruit, and yields, in one case a hundredfold,

in another sixty, and in another thirty” (Matthew 13:23).

Next:  See God Questions His Creation: Genesis 4

See God Questions His Creation: Introduction (A)

Fr. John Behr (The Mystery Of Christ) points out that in Acts 8 when the Ethiopian eunuch ask the Apostle Philip about the scriptures he was reading (which would have been the Old Testament), he does not ask “what is the meaning of the passage?” but rather he asks Philip “of whom does the prophet speak?”  The meaning is not found in the text itself (as modern readers would assume) but rather meaning is in the person of whom the text speaks – Jesus Christ.  Christ is the key who gives meaning to the scriptures, even to the Old Testament texts.  For early Christians the Word of God was Jesus Christ, not a book.  The only book of scriptures the authors of the New Testament knew was the Jewish Scriptures (Torah, Tanakh), and they believed this bore witness to Christ, not just to past history.  They weren’t as worried about whether the Old Testament was literally true as they were interested in knowing how the Scriptures reveal Christ to us and of what precisely that revelation consists.   The modern obsession with whether or not Scripture is literally true is a very narrow perspective and causes us to lose sight of the depth and riches of the Scriptures. 

As in my book, QUESTIONING GOD:  A LOOK AT GENESIS 1-3,  so too in this series of reflections I caution against making a literal reading of the text as the test for whether someone believes in God.  Not because the narrative is not “true” but because limiting the text to a literal reading is to limit the revelation of God.  God is not restricted by our literary efforts or by our need for literalism.  God is the poet par excellence.   He also is the master story teller and giver of parables.   God’s Word is living, active and sharp, not flat and one dimensional.   It is a deep well of spring water which gushes forth with new and life giving meaning.   Just for the sake of example, Genesis 2:24 says that a man leaves his parents and is joined to his wife as one flesh – perfectly understandable in its literal form.  St. Paul however makes very specific use of this text.  After quoting Genesis 2:24, he wrote, “This is a great mystery, and I take it to mean Christ and the church…” (Ephesians 5:32).  St. Paul takes the text of Genesis and says its real meaning is figurative not literal.   God’s revelation recorded in Genesis finds its fulfillment and meaning in Christ and in the Church.   The literal reading of Genesis would never get you to that truth – to the fullness of the text’s meaning – only a Christocentric reading can.

Because of the way St. Paul interprets the Old Testament, St. Augustine in his LITERAL COMMENTARY ON GENESIS declared, “No Christian would dare say that the [words of Scripture] are not to be taken figuratively.”   He cites in defense of his idea the interpretation of the Old Testament that St. Paul himself uses in 1 Corinthians 10:11 (“Now these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.”   The RSV’s “as a warning”  is the Greek word “typikos” -  a type or as Augustine’s latin said, “figuratively”) and also in Ephesians 5:31-32 (where Paul figuratively interprets Genesis 2:24 – about a man leaving his mother to cling to his wife – to refer to Christ and the Church rather than interpreting it literally).  Augustine like most of the Patristic writers assumed scriptures have a meaning which is deeper than any plain reading of the text can reveal.  He assumed that scripture has multiple levels of meaning and the believer’s task is to discover those meanings.  The Patristic Writers could point to the many texts in the New Testament where the Old Testament is read and interpreted by non-literal methods.

When reading the first book of the Bible, we might also remember the words of St. Augustine who in his own commentary on that book warned against pitting Genesis against science and reason,

“In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received.  In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines that position, we too fall with it.”  

DNA

Long before the modern debate between science and religion, Augustine almost presciently can imagine that progress in the human understanding of things might show us truths that contradict a literal reading of scripture.   He warns Christians not to rush into that trap and to be cautious when speaking about things (like science) that may through further observation and reason be shown to be true yet are not taught by the Scriptures.   Many Christians fail to realize that much of the demand that Scripture must be literally true doesn’t come from the Scripture itself, but comes from non-believers who say if the Bible is not science or scientifically true then it is of no value (or is not true).  The Bible contains the revelation of God, not the discoveries of science.   The Bible never claimed to be a textbook of scientific discoveries.  Rather the Bible reveals God to us and reveals what it means to be human.   That is what we should be reading the Bible for, and that is why we often must get beyond the literal statements of the Bible to discover the revelation of God which is found, and sometimes hidden, in the written words.

Next:  God Questions His Creation: Introduction (C)

As I consider how to engage meaningfully and productively with creationists regarding evolution, I wonder about other things we take for granted as having been proven by science.

Do we really know that the planets in our solar system have concentric, consistent orbits around the sun? Actually, we have no more grounds for certainty about this solar-system-wide heliocentrism than we have grounds for believing in evolution. Every elementary science textbook shows the solar system diagram as if it were modeled on a photograph. Problem is, we don’t have the ability to take a picture of the whole solar system at once–the earth, yes, but the whole solar system, no. We have no video of planetary revolutions around the sun. We’ve merely guessed based on the fact that the planets don’t move through our sky in the same patterns as the stars… Yeah, they’ve been where we thought they would be when we’ve sent probes into space, but that doesn’t really prove that they revolve consistently around the sun in the way that our textbook models show them.

Of course we see that types of reasoning as ridiculous. Even among the hardest of the hard-liners I’ve encountered in fundamentalist circles, I don’t know of a single person who questions the heliocentric model of the universe. I’ve never heard anyone say that the heliocentric model is “just a model.” We believe it because thousands of experiments and observations have shown the model–the theory–to be sound. To be fact. To be true.

The scientific evidence for the shared ancestry of living organisms is as broad as the evidence that the sun is at the center of the solar system. Paleontology, genetics, comparative anatomy–they all point to this common ancestry in the same way that our calculate of Keplerian orbits enable us to establish a trajectory that puts our probes on Mars. The mechanisms are more complex and the model can’t be as simply sketched out using a few concentric circles; nonetheless, the evidence is equally strong.

But it’s just a theory.

Much time and effort is spent among biblical literalists arguing for the literal interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis. In response, atheistic evolutionists invest a great deal of time and effort presenting the abundant evidence against a 6000-year-old universe and a six-day creation. I’m intrigued, though, by the fact that I’ve never seen an anti-literalism argument based on assumptions regarding anthropology and the patterns of ancient cultures.

Countless polls document America’s overwhelming rejection of atheistic evolution; however, I’ve never heard a single fundamentalist reject the anthropological observation that all ancient cultures developed mythologies and legends. In my Christian elementary, junior, and high school classrooms—as well as in my studies at a respected evangelical college—all teachers and textbooks subscribed readily to the belief that all ancient cultures developed fantastical stories to glorify their military heroes, remember significant events, and explain natural phenomenon. It is universally accepted that these legends and myths changed over time, gaining and losing details and characters as they were passed from generation to generation. All of this is accepted as a central feature of human society—it’s just the way civilizations develop.

The problem is that this flies in the face of biblical literalism. If the Hebrew scriptures are literally true, then the Hebrews were not unique just in the sense that they were chosen by God. They were also the one people group—the only group in all of human history—to have developed culturally without developing their own collection of legends and myths. The gifted Hebrews simply saw things that really happened. Then recorded them accurately. Then passed them from generation to generation unchanged. Over thousands of years. Infallibly.

Wouldn’t a Christian faith—perhaps even one that holds to a more literal view of NT events—be better served by acknowledging that the ancient Hebrews were human in all of the same ways as all other ancient humans. Elijah’s flaming chariot, Jonah’s gustatory cruise, Balaam’s chatty donkey, Samson’s performance-enhancing hair (not to mention his 300 flaming foxes). Isn’t it be possible for at least these to be recognized for what they are?

“He was such a mess,” my mother sighed, shaking her head, “smoking marijuana, getting thrown in jail. But then, in jail, he became a Christian.” She beamed. “And now he is just the nicest, kindest, most gentle person in the world.”

I tried not to visibly wince and smiled wanly, saying nothing. My mother was doing it again. Laying the sugary icing on the conversion cake with a trowel, as born-agains are wont to do. I hadn’t been looking forward to this particular aspect of my parents’ Christmas visit.

To “born-again,” evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, the three modifiers I just used for clarification are superfluous. They are the only real, true Christians. When my mother says her friend “became a Christian,” it doesn’t mean he got confirmed by the Catholic Church. He didn’t join the Quakers or get baptized into Eastern Orthodoxy or start attending a Methodist church. No, he said a prayer, no doubt on his knees, to “accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior” — and then embarked upon a “relationship” with his New Best Friend by adopting a whole bunch of conflicting and sometimes outrageous dogmas as well as the unshakable certainty that the (Protestant) Bible, as the Word of God, is the inerrant source of all truth (including historic and scientific truth).

**

Conversion stories like these are offered up by “Christians” like my mother as evidence that their God is the only game in town, and that only accepting their version of Jesus can solve your major life problems. It’s a message I heard (and internalized) throughout my childhood, and even now, having had firsthand experience of the failures of such a belief system, I’m still at a loss for words.

“Testimonials in support of the faith,” notes missionary child Marlene Winell in her religious-recovery book Leaving the Fold, a book which saved my sanity, if not my soul, “are heard and recorded, whereas stories of failure go unnoticed.” (Only recently did I find out that the hallowed former pastor of my parents’ celebrated church had “nonbelievers” for children.) “Similarly,” Winell goes on, “reports of success with other belief systems may not be heard.”

Certainly within the yoga world I heard some miraculous redemption stories attributed to the power of yoga, or meditation, or a Hindu Swami by the name of Kaleshwar. My friend Natalie straightened out her chaotic life, apparently, with the help of all three.

This kind of selective perception proves useful in other areas as well:

An area of selection that is always interesting is the convenient use of “scientific evidence.” If it does not serve the fundamentalist belief system, as in the case of evolution, it is disregarded as “of man,” or worse yet, Satanic. But if it supports anything biblical, it is hailed as “proof.”

I remember excitedly watching, with my family, a Christian documentary about “evidence” of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, as well as reading articles in my parents’ Christian magazines about the Shroud of Turin. We found these “scientific discoveries” very gratifying.

It was that Satanic evolution taught in my “secular” biology classes, however, that became a major chink in the wall of my mighty fortress — a fortress that during my pluralistic public-schooled adolescence developed rapidly multiplying cracks.

**

My greatest objections with my parents’ faith are not about the ridiculously outmoded (scientific or historical) worldviews perpetuated by Biblical literalism. I don’t even identify myself as an atheist at this point. I did call myself an atheist before I studied philosophy, epistemology, and the history of science in more depth; after all that, I started identifying myself as an agnostic. (Now I’m just a yoga woo-woo wannabe.)

A tangent here: a friend of mine from the bookstore once gave me grief about not self-identifying as an atheist. She thought I was being cowardly and evading the question. I told her that I found the assertion that there is no God as hubristic as the assertion that there is one. The presumed omniscience of some scientific materialists is as baffling to me as the rock-hard certainty of some theists; they act as if there’s a kind of epistemological consensus among rational people that doesn’t really exist. The pure Skeptics question whether knowledge is even possible.

Here we are, after all, little nano-bits of nature ostensibly evolved from the primeval soup, yet we convince ourselves that the a priori categories we impose on nature with our evolved-out-of-nature brains can make definitive pronouncements about the nature which encompasses them…not to mention reality itself!

What’s more, given that the means we typically use to achieve scientific certainty is the controlled experiment (to prove or disprove a hypothesis), and that we can only experiment upon what we can control, i.e. that which is “inferior” to us (subject to our manipulations), anything “superior” to us (not subject to our manipulations) cannot be experimented upon this way.  A Twilight-Zone-y example: imagine that we are, at this very moment, being watched by a highly evolved alien race that has the technology to cloak themselves against detection by our primitive instruments and senses. How would we ever know they’re there?

For that matter, how do we know we’re not “in the Matrix?!!!”

**

But enough with the sci-fi head-tripping. I’m not about to pick apart my parents’ version of Christianity with science or so-called objective reasoning. There are better people available for that (some of them are even non-literalist Christians, like John Shelby Spong). I stumbled across one such rationalist, actually, while seeking some fortification after my parents’ Christmas bombardment…

Okay, one more tangent: I am currently utterly infatuated with yet another younger man*, this one a delightful 27-year-old Kansan named Chris who goes by the handle of Evid3nc3 on YouTube. Chris, a graduate student in advanced computer science, has made a series of highly intelligent yet compassionately delivered videos about the gradual loss of his Christian faith. You can find the playlist for his wonderful series here.

After fifteen minutes of listening to Chris’s soothing, mellifluous voice and looking at his kind, easy-on-the-eyeballs face (not to mention being impressed by the generosity and openness it took to offer such an anti-testimony), I was ready to give it up, and not for Jesus. At any rate, his series is a terrific thing to watch if you’re a “fallen” born-again Christian seeking comfort and solidarity. It’s extremely well done, from the graphics to the music. I felt as if I were watching PBS at moments.

(*Before anyone goes labeling me a cougar, I would like to point out that I don’t go out of my way to pursue younger men. If Sam was young enough to be my son, Seamus was old enough to be my dad. “It’s not the years in a man’s life that count, but the life in his years.” Besides, can I help it if I’m such a MILF-lookin’ mama that nobody but twentysomethings have been hitting on me all year?)

**

Where was I? Oh yes, I was about to go into some of my greatest objections with what I was raised to believe. For starters, check out a batshit-crazy Bible passage like this one:

(Romans 9:18-23) Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?” But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ “Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath — prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory?

The picture the apostle Paul paints of God is one of a totalitarian asshole for whom some people are, entirely arbitrarily, more equal than others. This passage, among others, supports the whole Calvinist notion of a saved “elect,” predestined for glory, while the great sinful mass of humanity trundles off to hell. So much for “red and yellow, black and white…(being) precious in His sight.” Some people are wholly expendable. (It brings to my mind a yearbook byline written by one of the most incorrigible wags in my high school: “If ten innocent people died to save one human life, it would be worth it.”) Such theology informs the attitude I see on display when our religious and political leaders talk about Our Great Land as a Christian Nation founded by our Christian Fathers (never mind Jefferson), entitled to military and moral dominion over all the world. Naturally, we should be the exception to things like weapons bans, climate treaties, and inconvenient Geneva accords. (Just as members of evangelical power group “The Family” in D.C. have to be allowed different standards of marital fidelity and morality in general.)

Of course, I find the apostle Paul to have generally been a major asshole himself — but where I come from, you’d better not say that. Paul is just taking holy dictation from God.

Bruce Bawer, a “liberal” gay Episcopalian, who has written cogently and at length about what he calls “legalistic Christianity,” puts the noxiousness this way in Stealing Jesus:

…(T)he problem with legalistic Christianity is not simply that it affirms that God can be evil; it’s that it imagines a manifestly evil God and calls that evil good. In effect…it worships evil. In America right now, millions of children are taught by their legalistic Christian parents and ministers to revere a God of wrath and to take a sanguine view of human suffering. They are taught to view their fellow Americans not as having been “created equal,” as the Declaration of Independence would have it, but as being saved or unsaved, children of God or creatures of Satan; they are taught not to respect those most different from themselves but to regard them as the enemy, to resist their influence, and to seek to restrict their rights.

**

I am just now starting to unpack what it meant to grow up with a truly warped fundamentalist conception of “love”  — but this, happily, also begins to explain why my mother’s loaded use of the word can arouse rage, as well as why I have had so much trouble “staying out of the circle” (respecting boundaries) in my romantic (or would-be romantic) relationships.

To be blunt, the “Christians” from whence I came are soupily sentimental — yet their beliefs demand an almost sociopathic withholding of empathy. With sensibilities seemingly derived from Hallmark or Thomas Kinkade, they love to imagine their soft-focus, handsome white Jesus cuddling fuzzy little lost lambs (oh how Jesus loves the little lost lambs!), but when it gets down to brass tacks, these folk neither spare the rod on their own little lambs nor bat an eye at the outright sadism and inhumanity of their capricious and abusive Old Testament “Father.” (I’m sure all those Midianite children deserved what they got.)

One has only to watch Rachel Maddow’s interview with born-again author Richard Cohen — the alleged “ex-gay” therapist (kicked out of the APA) whose book helped spur Uganda’s horrifying proposed death-penalty law — to witness the depth of sentimental “Christian” self-delusion at play. Cohen goes on and on about “loving” gay people, about “having compassion” for gay people, even “healing” them with his innovative (if questionable) hug therapy…but such blinkered and overstated sentimentality belies the bigoted and alarmist language in his book (gays are pedophiles who will recruit your kids!) that incites the kind of fear and hatred behind Uganda’s anything-but-warm-and-fuzzy legislation. (Don’t even get me started on that “love the sinner, hate the sin” bullshit.)

Then there’s the fundamental lack of respect for personal boundaries. In order to evangelize the “unsaved,” you have to continue to push and push them, to get all up “in their circle.” You’re supposed to be like God, after all, and God, as I’ve written before, is the Hound of Heaven who’ll hunt you down like a bloodhound whether you like it or not!

How shudderingly claustrophobic. As life coach Lisa Brown often says, a person pursued will run. We don’t like our boundaries invaded. My experience of both God and Family, as my inveterate readers know, was an invasive one; hence my flashes of seemingly inordinate rage when my mother coos about this sentimental but schizoid and suffocating “Christian” version of “love.” You and your soft-focus sociopath stay the fuck out of my circle, Ma!

Unfortunately, I also learned how to over-pursue. Sorry, guys. (I feel like writing one of those 12-Step-recovery “amends” letters to about half a dozen men from my past. But I doubt most of them want to hear from me.)

**

The perfectionism this belief system instills is also crazy-making. We “Christians” start out with some impossibly high expectations.

“When you feel disappointed,” Marlene Winell explains to those of us who grew up with reassurances of perfect bliss in Christ, “you are more likely to panic about having a bad life instead of a bad day.” This accurately describes the all-or-nothing thoughts that have often sent me spiraling into depression.

Lacking perfection, however, does not equal total failure.

…You were taught to think you needed life to be ideal. You were probably told that you had a void in your life that only God could fill, because only God could fill it perfectly. The implication was that you had to have your needs met perfectly. That is, only Jesus could truly understand you, and you needed to be understood completely. Only God could give you enough purpose in life, and you had to have a grand, compelling purpose.

Winell shares the experience of finally getting her emotional needs met by another human being in her first marriage. “The closeness with a real live person had a profound effect: it broke my addiction to God.” Likewise, for me, finally having a wholly pleasurable and fulfilling sexual relationship with Sam seemed to break my mother’s holy-perfectionist “curse”– No man will ever satisfy you. I could finally say she had been wrong.

This relentless “Christian” perfectionism extends not only to expectations about how life should be, but also to how we should behave and believe in order to make sure God is pleased and we’re doing everything right. (Otherwise we could lose our salvation, and wind up with the goats instead of the sheep.) Paul instructs us to be perfect, as our Father in Heaven is perfect…but I had a devil of a time trying to interpret all the conflicting messages in the Bible and determine whether or not it was even up to me, or to God’s grace. Predestination vs. free will, faith vs. works…what to think? (Check out the wiki History of the Calvinist-Arminian Debate if you’d like a little taste of the madness.)

Frank Schaeffer, son of the evangelical “intellectual giant” Francis Schaeffer, and father of the modern Religious Right, who is now basically a damned apostate like me, writes hilariously in his memoir Crazy for God about the infinite regress involved in simply trying to have faith “the size of a mustard seed” in order to have his prayers answered:

How exactly was this supposed to work? God was in charge, but he wouldn’t do anything for us unless we believed he would do it. But if he didn’t do anything, what reason was there to believe?

We lacked the faith to pray effectively and make God do stuff. So we prayed for the faith to make God give us faith to make him do stuff. But getting enough faith was the biggest problem, so we prayed for the faith we needed to pray for faith. But how much faith did it take to pray to have enough faith to pray for faith? And if God knew you wanted faith, why didn’t he just give it to you? It was like spending all your time calling directory information for phone numbers that you aren’t allowed to call unless you can guess the number right without asking.

Even if we did accidentally do something right, we couldn’t take credit for it. “Good things were always due to God,” Marlene Winell recalls, “and failures were always mine.” This is, interestingly enough, almost exactly the “pessimist” stance our old friend Martin Seligman discovered while doing research for a book on optimism. He found that those with a more pessimistic worldview took little or no credit for their successes, yet blamed themselves for their failures. (The optimists did the opposite, shrugging off failures as due to forces beyond their control, while taking full credit for their successes.)

So this rather insane version of Christianity breeds perfectionistic pessimists.

**

Is it any wonder I’ve been stuck? Lisa, while helping me identify my areas of learned helplessness and set some goals, asked me if I were a perfectionist. I said Hell yeah!

What reason is there to so much as move, if whatever you do is certain not to be good enough, and whatever good things that may happen aren’t up to you?

Meg Ferris, that writing and creativity coach who travels all over Europe and essentially lives the life I wish I could, cautioned me against overthinking. “If you overthink it, you’ll never do it.” When I realized, as a teenager, that God wasn’t going to show or tell me what to do, I still tried to make the perfect decisions every time by weighing all the pros and cons, trying to build watertight arguments for my preferred choice, and attempting to predict every eventuality (something my father still constantly hammers, in classic did-you-pack-your-long-underwear fashion)…which, I can tell you right now, is a recipe for inaction.

One of my favorite passages in Frank Schaeffer’s book is his reflection, infused with characteristic  humor and humility, on what faith really means in most of our lives. Even if you believe the events he describes are completely random in a completely random universe, they nevertheless invite us to be brave and curious and take a leap of faith. We can certainly choose to let them pass us by. I for one have let too many pass me by, while I stood immobile trying to write my own Consumer Report.

The irony is that we all — secular or religious people alike — make our biggest life-shaping decisions on faith. Life is too short to learn what you need to know to live well. So we make a leap of faith when it comes to what we should believe in, who we will marry, and our careers. Who we happen to meet, one conversation when you were eighteen, the college course you happened to sign up for, the teacher you liked, the elevator you missed and the girl you met in the next one, decide whole lives. You would have to live a lifetime to be qualified to make any big decisions. And since we can’t do that, we trust to luck, religion, or the kindness of strangers. Only the trivialities — say, buying cars, washing machines, or airline seats — are chosen on the basis of good information. I’ve always known I like aisle seats, but what does one really want in a wife? And spiritual leaders are selected like spouses, not like airline seats. There is never a good reason, just a feeling, just that fear of death that must be overcome somehow by something — by religion, or orgasms, or art, or having children, or politics — by anything that interrupts the contemplation of oblivion.

This is the kind of faith I need, far more than I need the kind I was sold as a kid.

**

As for my parents, I’d like to send them off with a quote from Woody Allen’s classic comedy Love and Death: “If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that He’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about Him is that basically He’s an underachiever.”

By Columnist Harry Trunckles

Jesus H-ing Christ you astronomers are a boring bunch! When I say boring, I mean boring with a capital boring.

Take black holes for instance. ‘Black holes’ is such an uncreative term. These singularities are actually pretty impressive. They speak to God’s glory. I say we call them Glory Holes.

I would be really excited if I could see more pictures of Glory Holes.

I proposed this in a paper I sent off to Sky and Telescope to be published but they said they liked ‘black holes’ better but that I should go ahead and send in any future naming suggestions I come up with. Wow, a group of scientists thats actually open to my brilliant ideas! That doesn’t make up for them being so damned boring, but I guess thats a plus.

Astronomers are also spending tremendous amounts of time and money on ridiculous endeavors. For example, NASA is undergoing a massive effort to find water outside of the solar system. Listen NASA jerks, its very hard to get out of the solar system and back. Just use the tap. Or if you’re really picky you could buy a bottle of water at the gas station. But seriously, you need to be realistic about things when you get thirsty.

In order to find this water, they first have to look for extra-solar planets. The method that astronomers use to detect these is called the Public Transit method which apparently involves checking the bus schedules in Alpha Centauri. Presumably if they have a bus route, there must be a planet.

Don’t even get me started on the supposed Big Bang. Its only saving grace it that its less ridiculous than their previous theory of the universe coming into existence after Orion the Hunter and the greek goddess Pilates had some cosmic sex and laid a cosmic egg. Out of this egg hatched the universe. Of course, the Hatching Theory never properly explained the motion of the stars and galaxies, so they eventually found a new theory (i.e. were apparently lying!). And it seems like every astronomer has a different theory anyway.

Famed astronomer Michael Jackson was able to invent a means of effecient locomotion for humans walking on the lunar surface. But those NASA jerks didn’t even use it! More proof that they faked the whole thing. I even heard from a cousin’s friend’s boss that he had met someone who was there when they faked it. Booya! Another point for Harry Trunckles!

And can someone please explain why astronomers are so obsessed with their love lives? I mean, I get that you don’t have dates and all. I mean, its understandable. But you never properly explained how Venus being in the house of Jupiter will help you get a date with the cutie who works at whole foods. However, I did read my astronomy report in the paper and found that us Virgos are going to have financial success in the future. So maybe I’ll change my mind.

One redeeming virtue of astronomers though is that they put all that research into the development of their famous Sun Chips. I don’t know how they got robots to the sun to mine for these delicious snacks but I’ll at least support that effort.

Now that's nuclear fusion I can get behind.

If you have any further doubts that astronomy is a total waste, here is a music video made by the folks at SETI (the Search for Extra Teritorial Intelligence)

Getting into the boat again Jesus departed to the other side. Now the disciples had forgotten to bring bread; and they had only one loaf with them in the boat.  And he cautioned them, saying, “Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” And they discussed it with one another, saying, “We have no bread.” And being aware of it, Jesus said to them, “Why do you discuss the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” They said to him, “Twelve.”  “And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” And they said to him, “Seven.” And he said to them, “Do you not yet understand?“   (Mark 8:13-21  RSV)

Here we have a Gospel lesson in discipleship.  

Jesus cautions His disciples to “beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.”

Being good disciples, they at once try to apply Jesus’ words to their current situation.   Their discussion immediately turns to the issue they are most confronted by – they have limited food provisions.  Jesus obviously doesn’t want them buying or baking bread which is made with leaven from the Pharisees or Herod.    They try to literally understand Jesus’ teaching and make it totally relevant to their lives.

Wrong.

Jesus offers them a completely different lesson.

Don’t be so literally minded.  Don’t limit your understanding of Christ’s teaching to what is immediately relevant.

Jesus asks them to think instead.  Jesus tells them to make full use of their heart, their eyes, their ears, their memories. 

He asks them to remember a miracle, but to think about the lesson of that miracle.  They are no longer in the same circumstance – no crowds around, no mass of hungry people to whom they must minister.  They are now alone, but they need to remember the lesson and apply it to this new situation. 

They way overstate their problem – “we have no bread.”  They underestimate their resources – “they had one loaf with them in the boat.” 

When Christ is not in the process of doing a miracle, the disciples need to think about lessons learned and how to apply them to new situations.

Miracles must be understood – they serve a purpose, they have a meaning.  Miracles are not mostly to astonish and bedazzle.  They teach.  They lead us to think not about the miracle, but the deep meaning beyond, behind, central to the miracle.  Miracles lead us beyond themselves and point to the reality to which they are directing our attention.  They are tornado warning sirens – drawing our attention not the siren but to what the siren is warning us about.  The siren like a miracle catches our attention, but then we need to think quickly to what is the siren telling us to pay attention! 

The disciples must learn how to apply these lessons to new situations. 

They must learn to differentiate between what is immediate (their fears and concerns) and what is important (the lessons they should be applying to their current situation).

They also must learn to give account for their inner fears and their communal discussions:  “Why do you discuss the fact that you have no bread?”

Think about how many discussions go on in our parishes – in parish council, in the fellowship hour, in the parking lot, on the phone.  What will we say when the Lord Jesus Christ asks us, “Why are you having this discussion?”  When Christ demands an accounting from us, will we be able to justify our behavior and our conversations?  Or will we realize we haven’t understood what is important to Him?

Christ asks us, “Do we understand?”  Do we understand what He has done and why?  Do we understand what we are to do as a result of His life, death and resurrection?

The disciple’s job is to perceive, to understand, to hear, to see, and to remember what the Lord has done.  What do we need to help us accomplish these Christ commanded duties?

Each day in our parishes we must apply to ourselves the lessons that the Twelve Apostles learned.

I think there are two definitions to the word mystery.  First, there is the sort of mystery that you find in a mystery novel.  When you pick up a mystery novel, you expect to know who did what to whom in which manor room with which unlikely household object by the time you finish the book.

After you wade through 300 pages of red herrings, the author finally reveals the solution and solves the mystery.  Christians seem to think that theological conundrums are like mystery novels:  If you wade through 80 years of red herrings, your author will reveal the solutions to and solve the mystery of the nature of the trinity, the mechanics of the atonement, and the relationship between free will and fate.

I don’t think Christians benefit from thinking of theological conundrums as murder mysteries, although I would love to read a murder mystery featuring theologians.  I think Kierkegaard would be a brilliantly moody detective, and he could have an older, smarter brother named Socrates who asks him a lot of annoying questions that eventually lead him to the murderer.  I’m not sure who should be the murderer – Augustine for abandoning the brilliance of Neoplatonism and thinking up the absurd concept of a just war?  Aquinas for being annoying Aristotelian?  C.S. Lewis for creating false dichotemies and being a simple-minded dolt who should have stuck to medieval literature?  It’s so hard to choose!

But as I was saying:  If Christians regard theological conundrums as murder mysteries with answers that will be revealed upon their death, they are less inclined to try to figure the answers for themselves while they are alive.  That is frustrating for me, because it is a conversation-killer (“Can you explain how killing one innocent person is a demonstration of god’s perfect justice?”  “Nope, it’s a mystery!  Next question!”), but it is also detrimental to their spiritual development, because it prevents them from learning more about their god and their faith.

I think a literal approach to the Bible results in the same spiritual stagnation.  If you believe that the Bible is literally true, you lose all the nuances of understanding that come from wrestling with an ambiguous text.  An ambiguous line in a text may have one literal meaning, but it has additional meanings that add color and depth and shading to the rest of the text.

For example, take Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquoy.  It’s fairly obvious that Hamlet’s primary concern is suicide: should he go on living, or should he end his life?  After all, his dad has died; his mom has remarried his uncle; his crown has been stolen from him; he’s been torn from his friends at college, and his girlfriend is acting weird.  Is life really worth living when you’ve got all that hanging over your head?

But Hamlet isn’t just concerned with suicide.  He’s also concerned with justice.  Is it just to trust the words of a ghost and murder his uncle, or is it just to doubt the claims of a ghost and do some detective work before adding another corpse to the family tomb?  Should he be trusting and swift, or should he be doubtful and contemplative?

And Hamlet isn’t just concerned with justice.  As the heir apparent, he’s got to be wondering how his uncle managed to slip between himself and the throne.  And he’s got to be wondering whether he wants to allow his uncle to reign as king while he finishes up at school and has a few more laughs with his friends, or if he should try to regain his lost crown.  If he tries to regain his lost crown, what method should he use?  Is he popular enough to lead the people in a revolt?  Should he gain the help of other countries, like Norway?

Hamlet has a lot on his mind.  So rather than leading us through each thought, Shakespeare provides us with one ambiguous phrase that contains suggestions of all those nuanced thoughts: To be or not to be.  If Shakespeare had simplified the speech and spelled everything out for us, we would never remember the speech.  Instead, he allows ambiguous wording to suggest the complicated nuances of Hamlet’s character, and he gives us a speech for the ages.  (Unless you believe he arrived at that phrasing through somewhat more comedic methods, as illustrated by this wonderful sketch starring Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie’s Gloriously Clad Calves:)

I think Shakespeare provides infinitely more insight into human nature than the Bible (and I think John the Savage from Brave New World demonstrates the truth of that statement, as does even a cursory examination of characters like Hamlet, Prince Hal, and Falstaff) and would therefore serve as a much better basis for your life, but if you insist on using the Bible as your holy book, shouldn’t you wrestle with its ambiguities to gain a deeper understanding of its truths?

Of course, if you believe that the Bible was divinely inspired, then delving into its ambiguities ought to reveal something about its creator.  And if you believe the Bible was divinely inspired, then don’t you want to know more about its creator so that you can have a deeper relationship with him/her/it?

The idea of forging a relationship with a living god by using an ancient text seems a little odd to me.  If I wanted to forge a relationship with my living god (Stephen Fry), I wouldn’t rely on his outdated autobiography to figure out what he thinks.  I would simply ask him.  I would get a twitter account and send him tweets until he got fed up with me and answered my question.

Christians are in a much better position to ask questions.  Their living god already knows who they are, so they don’t have to go to the trouble of introducing themselves via twitter.  Their living god also claims to love them, so they don’t have to go to the trouble of getting his attention and proving their worth.  All they have to do is ask.

Unfortunately, Christians are in a much worse position to receive answers.  God doesn’t bother to speak audibly; he seems to prefer to speak in a still, small voice that bears a stunning resemblance to the inner monologue that constantly runs through our rambling minds.  God doesn’t bother to leave written proof of his answer, like a quick email or a jotted memo, so you can’t go back and check the wording. 

That, I think, is why so many Christians insist on interpreting the Bible literally.  In spite of their claims that he is a living god who loves them and therefore communicates with them (although if he really loved them, wouldn’t he constantly call them and leave annoying voice messages?), their only real access to him is an ancient book.

Christians from earlier centuries and Christians of more liberal leanings (theological leanings, not necessarily political) understood and understand that books can be living documents that come tantalizingly close to dialogues with the authors, if the words are allowed to breathe.  If the words are allowed to contain nuances; if the phrases are allowed to contain ambiguities; if the paragraphs are allowed to be understood as metaphors for conditions and symbols for abstract concepts.

But many of today’s Christians (or perhaps just Christians in the Bible Belt, a reigion that is both scandalously under-educated and frustratingly religious – I know that correlation is not causation, but in some cases I wonder) feel threatened by such an idea.  They seem to think that a nuanced interpretation of an infinite being’s attempt to cram himself into the grunts of a finite people will immediately dissolve into moral relativism, because once you start interpreting things beyond the literal meaning of translated words from second-source reporting (at least in the case of the gospels, which is as close as Christians get to a literary record of Jesus), you can make scriptures mean anything.

Yes, you can make the scriptures mean anything – if you don’t understand the context of the passage and the culture of the times.  Why did Paul condemn homosexuality?  Because if you read the entire passage, he was condemning heterosexual men who were using other heterosexual men in the absence of women.  Because he was a zealous Jew who practiced strict celibacy and had no understanding of the role of homosexual relationships within Greek and Roman culture.  Because he was a flawed human being whose understanding of the infinite is doomed to similar flaws, and isn’t it possible that condemning one sort of love while preaching unconditional love suggests that this is one area where Paul was quite flawed?

Interpretation is difficult.  It requires study – study of the original language, study of the original culture, study of the development of the original language, study of the development of the original culture, study of thousands of years of interpretations.  Most people do not want to invest that much time in developing their view of the world, so they take the easy way out – they confine themselves to a literal interpretation.

Except, of course, that no one actually follows the Bible literally.  No one sells their goods because Jesus told the rich young man to sell his goods.  No one claims that they can recreate the same miracles that Jesus did, even though Jesus said they could.  No one drinks deadly poison, even though Mark says that believers can do so without fear of harm.  Instead, everyone chooses the verses that confirm their worldview and ignores the verses that challenge them.

But wrestling with ideas that challenge us is one of the purposes of literature.  I would argue that it’s one of the purposes of life – learning to understand why other people believe ideas that seem insane, and learning to defend your own insane beliefs without resorting to the claim that it is a mystery.

At the beginning of this post I suggested that there are two kinds of mystery.  We’ve already explored the first, which is a knowable mystery.  The second is an unknowable mystery, a mystery that cannot be solved.  For example, we cannot know what it is like to be another person, to be another creature, to be another thing, or to live in another time.  We cannot escape the confines of our own consciousness.  Those mysteries are fist-clenchingly, hair-pullingly frustrating because we cannot solve them.

And yet people claim that they do want to remove the “mystery” from life.  Sometimes the mystery is mundane.  Sometimes they don’t want to know how those clever stage magicians managed to do that very famous cups and balls trick.

Watch that video.  Penn and Teller perform their version of the cups and balls trick, and then they tell you exactly how they perform the trick as they perform it.  Were you more impressed during their first performance when you were completely ignorant, or were you more impressed during their second performance when they removed the ignorance of mystery and replaced it with the marvel of ingenuity and masterful technique?

The wonder of mystery can be replaced with the awe of knowledge.  When I show students how to play a scale on the piano, they think I am draining the mystery from that particular musical technique.  But when they try to replicate the scale, they realize that it is more challenging than it looks.  When I show them how they can transform a one-handed scale into a two-handed scale, or a one-octave scale into a two-octave scale, or a scale into a series of block chords, or a series of block chords into a series of flowing arpeggios, or a series of flowing arpeggios into a beautiful song, they are filled with awe.  Their new-found knowledge releases them from the mystery of ignorance and fills them with awe.  It also opens them to new possibilities, broadening their world.

Mysteries are meant to be solved.  On the rare occasions when we encounter a genuinely unsolveable mystery, we benefit from gathering as much evidence as possible.  We don’t reduce the world when we do so; we enlarge it.  When we realize that we are one small planet traveling around one unremarkable star, we don’t diminish the universe.  We enlarge it, opening our eyes to the many planets and innumerable stars that share this galaxy with us.

HT: James McGrath

This is the second and concluding blog in which I am commenting on Robert Hill’s READING THE OLD TESTAMENT IN ANTIOCH.  The first blog was titled Reading the Old Testament in Ancient Antioch.   I ended the first blog with Hill’s comment:

“The Scriptures, like the Incarnation, come to us as a gesture of divine considerateness, sygkatavasis—a loving gesture with nothing patronizing about it, nothing to suggest ‘condescension’ … The Incarnation, after all, does not represent a patronizing gesture on God’s part towards human beings—only love and concern.”  (pp 36-37)

So God speaks to us through people, using words, phrases and ideas that we are capable of understanding.    God realizes that His human creatures are not always attuned to spiritual realities and so He adapts His message in the Scriptures to our materialist limits.  It is because God loves us that He finds the way to communicate with us even when it means He has to use phrases and methods (such as anthropomorphic appearances) which don’t do full justice to His divinity.

“…that the concreteness (paxetes) of the language is required by the materialism of the listener/reader, that it was particularly necessary in the early stages of revelation history, that in Scripture God uses simple ways of speech to accommodate our limitations, that while the concern in such acts of considerateness is not primarily with the dignity proper to God, we should not remain at the level of banal vocabulary or think of God in human terms, and – eminently—that the prime analogue of divine considerateness is that (other) Incarnation of the Word in the person of Jesus.”(p 39)

God speaking to us through human writers using human images was done in fact to prepare all people for the incarnation of the Word in Jesus.  God’s goal is to lift us up to communion with God as Trinity not to get us stuck in literalistic thinking in which we drag God down to crude and banal images of Him as human.

“Chrysostom expresses his own deep appreciation of scriptural koinonia (my note – fellowship, communion).  For him the biblical authors are the means by which communication (omolia -  my note, discourse or homily) with God occurs, a communication which can be withheld…”  (p 36)

The Scriptures are thus the means by which God communicates with us.  For this reason the Antiochian Fathers were concerned with making an accurate reading of the text.  They tended to shy away from allegorizing every text (something more common in the Alexandrian tradition), but they felt they were called to discover the Holy Spirit’s intended meaning in a text so realized that it was necessary to get beyond the literal reading of the Scriptures at points to be able to see what God was revealing.   The “spiritual” reading of a text would be seen as the literal reading of the text if that is how God intended for us to read it.  Chrysostom says,

“’There is a great treasure stored up in the Scriptures, concealed beneath the surface,’ he tells his congregation in Homily 45; so there is need of study so that we can learn the force hidden beneath the surface.”  (p 153)

So when, where and with who is the proper time to study the Scriptures in order to drink deeply of the living water stored in them?  Chrysostom answers,

“Any time must be considered suitable for discourse on spiritual topics.  If we have a precise realization of this, we will be able while relaxing at home, both before eating and after eating, to take the Scriptures in our hands and gain benefit from them and provide spiritual nourishment for our soul… This is our salvation, this is spiritual treasure, this security.  If we thus strengthen ourselves each day – by reading (anagnosis), by listening, by spiritual discourse (dialexis) – we will be able to remain unconquered, and render the snares of the devil ineffectual.”  (p 184)

We render ourselves capable of hearing God’s voice by a frequent and regular reading of God’s Word.   The continual reading of God’s Word opens our hearts and minds to recognizing God’s voice and thus allowing God’s Word to implant itself in us and to bear spiritual fruit to the glory of God.

This is the 3rd blog in a series offering some quotes from the 5th Century Christian Bishop Theodoret of Cyrus who was also famous for writing extensive Scripture commentaries.   The first blog was Theodoret of Cyrus on Interpreting Scriptures and the second blog was Theodoret on Literalism.      The quotes are from  Robert C. Hill’s translation of THEODORET OF CYRUS: THE QUESTIONS ON THE OCTATEUCH   Vol 1 GENESIS AND EXODUS  .

Expulsion of Adam & Eve from Paradise

 Theodoret like many of the Patristic writers in the Antiochian biblical commentary tradition does not hold to the tenets of what is commonly called “original sin” as translator Robert Hill noted in his comments.   “Theodoret never speaks of original sin or the transmission to posterity of the guilt for Adam’s sin…”  (translator’s note p 81).    Commenting on the fall of Adam Theodoret writes:

“Thus the punishment is not the result of anger, but part of a divine plan of the greatest wisdom…. So that the human race would hate sin as the cause of death, after the transgression of the commandment, God, in his great wisdom, passed the sentence of death and in this way both ensured their hatred of sin and provided the race with the remedy of salvation, which, through the Incarnation of the Only-begotten, achieves the resurrection of the dead and immortality.”  (p xlix)

“Indeed, death is healing, not punishment, for it checks the onset of sin: ‘He who has died has been acquitted of sin.’ (Rom 6:7)   He ordered him to live directly opposite the garden so that he would remember his trouble-free existence  and hate sin for causing his life of hardship.”  (p 91)

Theodoret sees mortality not a punishment for human sin but rather part of God’s own merciful plan.   By making death the result of sin, Theodoret sees humans hating sin and regretting their sin.  Additionally by making death the consequence of sin, God was providing the way for salvation through the death of His Son and His resurrection. 

(Theodoret writes) :   “We learn from all these passages (i.e., from Ps 51:5; Gn 8:21; Rm 5:12), not that the power of sin is built into human nature—for if that were the case, we would not be liable to punishment—but that our nature is inclined to slip and fall, as it is undermined by the passions.  Nonetheless, rationality prevails when supported by our efforts” ….   Compare this with Augustine’s remark… on the same verse: “No one is born without trailing along with him the punishment [i.e., for Adam’s sin] and the guilt that merits that punishment.”    (translator’s note, p 95)

Augustine has humans inheriting the guilt of original sin as well as the punishment for this sin.  Theodoret does not believe humans have inherited a depraved human nature – otherwise each human would not be responsible for his own sin.   Theodoret recognizes that humans are each subject to passions which lead us to sin, but he believes optimistically that the rational part of human can overcome the passions. 

To those Patristic writers who suggested that Adam and Eve were originally pure spiritual beings who received bodies and flesh only when God clothed them with skins after the Fall, Theodoret writes:

“Since holy Scripture says that the body was formed even before the soul, how can this claim that the man and woman took mortal flesh only after the transgression of the commandment amount to anything but a fable?”  (p 89)

Theodoret believes bodily existence is part of human nature from the beginning, not something which became part of humanity after humans sin.

Christ raising Adam & Eve

“Why was it that, though Adam sinned, the righteous Abel was the first to die?

God wanted Death’s foundation to be unsound.  If Adam had been the first to die, Death would have established a strong base by taking the sinner as his first victim.  But since he first took the man unjustly slain, his foundation is insecure.”   (p 97)

Theodoret offers  a rational idea about why Adam does not immediately die after eating the forbidden fruit as God had threatened him.  If death had claimed Adam first, death would be just for humans.   But since death wrongfully took the life of the innocent Abel, as death will later unjustly claim the innocent Christ, so death proves itself not part of justice and righteousness but part of evil which God rightly destroys.

 Next:  Theodoret on Abortion and Science

This is the 2nd blog in a series offering some quotes from the 5th Century Christian Bishop Theodoret of Cyrus who was also famous for writing extensive Scripture commentaries.   The first blog was Theodoret of Cyrus on Interpreting Scriptures.    The quotes are from  Robert C. Hill’s translation of  THEODORET OF CYRUS: THE QUESTIONS ON THE OCTATEUCH   Vol 1 GENESIS AND EXODUS  .

Theodoret was in the Antiochian tradition regarding biblical commentary and interpretation.   This generally means that he shied away from pure allegorical interpretation of the text.   He does however use allegory at times but with constraint.  He more readily looks for the historical and “literal” meaning of the text.  “Literal” often implies the meaning the author intended.   Theodoret is critical of those who blindly or woodenly read all Scripture texts only literally.   Hill notes:

“Yet, in Q.40.1 on Ex, the commentator reminds his readers that those who attend to no more than ‘the face value of the text’… will not arrive at the full meaning of Scripture.”   (p xlii)

The “full meaning of Scripture” is generally what the Patristic writers were always seeking whether they turned to allegorical or literal interpretive methods of reading Scriptures.  He does not deny that the literal is meaningful, but just that it may not be the full or best meaning of a given text.  He is aware that a literal reading of a text can create problems in reasoning.   For example, commenting on Genesis 18, Theodoret writes:

“Holy Scripture declares that angels ate in Abraham’s tent. (Gn 18:8)

That same passage of Scripture says that Abraham had a vision of men.   If we must attend to the mere letter of the text, it was men, not angels, who ate.  But if we are to unfold the meaning, they ate in the same form in which they had appeared.  In other words, as they were incorporeal beings—they and their Lord—and yet seemed to have bodies (for this is how they appeared), so they seemed to eat.  Not that they put food into their mouths and stomachs, for they were incorporeal.  Rather, they consumed it as they wished.  Only the worst fool would try to pry further into the ways and means of a holy mystery.”  (p 145)

In commenting on the above Genesis passage, Theodoret deals with the difficult issue of angels who are immaterial beings who “appear” as men to Abraham.   Angels are not humans and don’t have physical bodies.  Theodoret accepts the “literal” statement of the Scripture that the angels appeared as men, but he had already labeled this a “vision.”  He however is willing to concede we may have to accept the literal notion that the these “men” ate with Abraham.  But how could they actually eat real food since they are incorporeal beings and/or a vision?   We have him here dealing with that point at which a “vision” interfaces with empirical reality.  His conclusion is that however angels can appear as men – appear to have bodies – is the same way in which they appear to eat.  He is not willing to explore the mystery any further.   Literally the text presents a problem – can apparitions consume real food?   Theodoret attempting to stick with a more literal interpretation of the Scriptures in general, realizes the literal interpretation presents a logical problem which he cannot completely resolve and so he has to accept that it is some form of mystery.

There are other texts which Theodoret acknowledges should not be interpreted literally.  Commenting on Exodus 20:5 which uses the phrase that the Lord is a jealous God – thus attributing to God the human emotion jealousy, which is also a vice – Theodoret strongly comments:

“God himself teaches us that it is irreligious to focus on the face value of the text when he requires the opposite.”   (p 289)

 In this Theodoret acknowledges that some passages of Scripture do not have an obvious (= literal) interpretation.  Accusing God of being jealous is unacceptable to him (though in the text God Himself lays claim to being jealous).  Thus Theodoret has to seek a meaning beyond the literal reading of the text in order to keep a theology of a good God.

 Theodoret also acknowledges that the Scriptures do not tell us everything we want to know about God, and sometimes are not clear enough for our purposes.

“When the questioner presses him on that sensitive issue of the creation of angels, he explicitly indicates that he can do no more than hazard an opinion on a question that does not admit of a conclusive answer (Q .4.2 on Gn): ‘Now, I do not state this dogmatically, my view being that it is rash to speak dogmatically where holy Scripture does not make an explicit statement; rather, I have stated what I consider to be consistent with orthodox thought.’”  (p xxix)

The issue is that Genesis does not mention when or how angels were created by God.  Since angels exist they must have been created at some point.  Since the Scriptures do not answer the question, Theodoret acknowledges that he can only make a reasonable guess based upon what he knows about Orthodox theology.  Thus the full interpretation of Scripture does require at times human logic and even speculation as the Scriptures have some gaps which mean they cannot fully interpret themselves.   Theodoret assumes God gives us intelligence, creativity and wisdom to come to reasonable interpretations of those questions which cannot be answered directly from the Scriptures.

Next:  Theodoret on the Ancestral Sin

Old Testamen Scrolls

I finished reading  Robert C. Hill’s translation of THEODORET OF CYRUS: THE QUESTIONS ON THE OCTATEUCH   Vol 1 GENESIS AND EXODUS   and decided to offer a few quotes from the book.   Theodoret was the bishop of Cyrus who died about 457AD.  He received training in the Antiochian tradition for Christian interpretation of the Scriptures and wrote extensive commentaries on the books of the Old Testament.   Theodoret’s commentaries  are important because they give us some insight into how Christians in the 5th Century were interpreting the Bible.   This is insightful because it shows that not even in the ancient Patristic writers insisted that the Scriptures must be read only literally.  

Regarding the reading and interpretation of the Scriptures Theodoret though a serious historian when reading the Scriptures warns against an overly literal reading of the Bible especially regarding those passages in the Old Testament in which God is described in human (anthropomorphic)  images.

“These simpletons fail to understand that the Lord God,  when speaking to humans through humans, adjusts his language to the limitations of the listeners.  Since we see with our eyes, he refers to his power of vision as ‘eyes.’  He refers to his power of hearing as ‘ears,’ since it is through these organs that we hear, and to his command as a ‘mouth.’”  (p 51)

Christ speaking to Adam and Eve

 Theodoret writes about Scripture as God “speaking to humans through humans.”  In this phrase he acknowledges that we receive God’s revelation mediated through the authors of Scripture.   This is important because it shows that He understands the Word of God to also be a product of human work – there is a synergy with God using a human intermediary in addition to human language and images to convey His message to the world.   Additionally he speaks against any literal reading of the text in which it anthropomorphizes God – such language, Theodoret says, is strictly for our benefit and because of our human limitations in understanding things abstract or divine.

At another point, speaking about Moses who Theodoret accepted as the author of Genesis, he wrote:

“Why did the author (i.e., Moses – my note) not first set down the true doctrine of God before relating the creation of the universe?

Holy Scripture normally adapts the contents to the learners… Since the Egyptians used to worship the visible creation, and Israel, in their long association with them, had joined in this idolatry, he had to set out the facts of creation and explicitly teach them that it had a beginning of existence, and that the God of the universe was its Creator.   …  Those he was teaching, however, had already learned of the eternity of God.  When the divinely inspired Moses was sent into Egypt by God, he was commanded to say to his fellow, ‘He Who Is has sent me to you.’  Now, “He Who Is’ conveys eternity, and it will be obvious to the attentive that that statement was made before the teaching in this chapter.  He taught them the former while they were still living in Egypt but composed this chapter in the wilderness.” (pp 7-9)

In this passage we see that Theodoret does accept Moses as the author of Genesis – Moses, not God, actually wrote the text down.  Theodoret rhetorically asks why didn’t Moses begin with a systematic theology – give a scholarly explanation of who this “God” is before launching into what God did?    His first answer again has to do with writing something that the Israelites could understand – they weren’t prepared for pure theology so Moses prepares them for it by writing narrative.  Obviously Theodoret believed Moses had a choice in what he wrote or how he wrote it.  Moses was inspired by God to write, but Moses under the influence of the Holy Spirit had to make choices about what to write.  The divine-human synergy is real to Theodoret; Moses is not merely an instrument of God’s actions – Moses co-operates with God and uses his free will and human creativity to accomplish what God wants him to do.   And Theodoret does not have Moses composing the Genesis creation story before becoming their leader in Egypt.  Rather, Theodoret clearly says that Moses composed the creation story after the Exodus while the Jews were in the desert.  So the creation story by Theodoret’s understanding is written after the Passover – after God wrought His salvation for His people.  Only after experiencing God’s salvation does Moses compose for the people of God an explanation about how the world came into existence in the first place.    (see also my blog The Literal Value of Genesis regarding the modern scholarly opinion that the creation narrative of Genesis was probably written down and became Scripture only after the Babylonian captivity of the Jews). 

Later in his commentary, Theodoret reminds his flock that Scriptures contain many different genres of literature and that the reader must pay attention to not only what is being read but also who in the Scriptures is speaking.

“The distinctive features of Scripture are the oracles of the Spirit, God’s laws, and the teachings of the devout; the rest is historical narration.  So one must take into account not only what is said but also who says it.”  (p. 173)

Prophet Moses

In other words sometimes Moses may be the mouthpiece for God and is giving voice to God’s Word.  At other times, Moses is simply the historian who is humanly reporting what the humans were doing.   The reader of Scripture must pay attention to these distinctions in order to properly understand “the Word of God.”

In discussing the origins of the word “Hebrew” Theodoret concedes no one answer can be offered with any absolute certainty.  So he advises:     “No point, however, in squabbling over this:  no harm is done to religion, which ever opinion we adopt.”   (p 129)   He thus holds to the notion that some questions which might rise as a result of reading the Scriptures may be worth pursuing to a degree, but ultimately the answer makes no real difference to the true faith.   Further, commenting on Genesis 15:9,  “Theodoret offers several interpretations and then concludes:  ‘I cite this view and the other for readers to take whichever strikes them as closer to the truth.’”   (p 139)  He actually allows for the fact that in some cases several interpretations of a text are possible, all of which can be correct.  In such cases he leaves it to the reader to decide which interpretation is correct.  This works for him whenever a main point of doctrine is not at stake.  He does not demand absolute uniformity in interpretation nor does he believe that each text has one and only one possible and correct interpretation.

Next:    Theodoret on Literalism

In the book by Frances Young,  BROKENNESS & BLESSING: TOWARDS A BIBLICAL SPIRITUALITY , she offered some thoughts about in what way biblical fundamentalism and modern scholarly (even liberal) methods made a similar assumption regarding how the Scriptures are to be read and understood.   She addresses an issue I had also mentioned in a previous blog  Gospel Lessons: Never Simply Bare Historical Facts when I was commenting on Fr. Paul Tarazi’s   THE NEW TESTAMENT INTRODUCTION: JOHANNINE WRITINGS.

“… since the nineteenth century.  The fundamentalist reader and the modern biblical scholar using historic-critical methods are the obverse and reverse of the same coin.  They are concerned with the Bible as fact, as real history; so the focus is on the truth behind the text, the exact reference of the words and narratives.  Compared with early Christian interpretation, this is earth bound, literalizing – a physical or material approach.  The patristic authors consistently show how the words point beyond themselves, how the Bible is really about transformation about change, about the conversion of the reader.  It is not the material or physical that matters but the spiritual.  Difficulties in the text, inconsistencies or impossibilities, the aporiai (to use the acient Greek word …) were put there specially to provoke the reader into seeking deeper insight, into search for the skopos or intent of the Holy Spirit.  They were able to develop a creative use of the Bible, rather than a defensive or aggressively dogmatic use, because they began with the idea that the Bible points beyond itself.”    (p29) 

In other words the Patristic writers were not as interested in a literal reading of the text if that literal reading did not aid the reader in discovering God’s true plan and purpose.  In other words, if reading the text literally does not help the person understand God’s plan and salvation in Jesus Christ then one is missing the most important aspect of the text.  Most of the Fathers even when they read the text allegorically assumed this was the way the text was to be read and so was the true literal reading  ofthe Scriptures.   By literal the Fathers often meant the deepest meaning that the text contained and that we are meant to comprehend – what could be found in the words of the Scriptures.

For the Fathers if the literal reading of the text only led to reading the text for “facts” then the text was in fact obscuring the truth – for that Truth is Christ one of the Holy Trinity not one mere fact among countless millions of bits of data.  The Fathers did not equate the facts of the text with the Truth, but rather saw the facts as a limited form of the truth. The real breakthrough comes when the believer in reading the text is led beyond the facts in the text to the spiritual Truth about God and the cosmos.   The Scriptures are our way to Christ who is the incarnate Word of God, not just our way into the words on a page and a few facts about life.

Basically Young sees both fundamentalism and the historic-critical method as being in search of simple historical facts while forgetting the Truth behind and beyond the literal words.    In some sense this is true because they both have accepted the rationalism of the Enlightenment which concluded that the only truth worth knowing is impirical truth – the facts that science can uncover.   This accepts a very materialistic view of the universe – not only is there nothing like truth beyond the facts of science, there is no meaning to the world so one can only study the facts which is all that exists.   For believers this is a very reductionistic way of seeing the universe because it means we seek facts at the expense of Truth or, in other words, we can fail to see the forest because of all the trees.

By Columnist Harry Trunckles

I am pleased to let you all know that I am brimming with pride. My hometown of Sedalia made a stand for what’s right.  Recently a jazz troupe at a local highschool was spreading their filthy ways with t-shirts depicting mankind evolving and playing jazz.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/08/sedalia_missouri_you_should_be_ashamed_o.php

Orac misses the point entirely. This isn’t about religion. Hell, it’s not even about the pseudoscience of evolution. Its about Jazz.  Orac, have you heard the satantic cacophony of a wiley saxaphone before? The devil himself is in the horns. In fact, 80% of the economy in Hell centers around mining for brass to sell and capture more souls with.

Miles Davis, prominent Jazzotomist, once said “The soul of jazz is in fact your soul. Selling it to Beelzebub is the only way to insure you can succeed. But with all this premarital sex, drug use and strange sounds, who needs salvation from Jesus Christ the one true god?”

Mr. Davis helps to prove that we shouldn’t be having brass instruments in our schools.  The fact that this hellbound music teacher is a fan of evolution too just reinforces my point.

“Who ever goes to war at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat of its fruit? Or who tends a flock and does not drink of the milk of the flock? Do I say these things as a mere man? Or does not the law say the same also? For it is written in the law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain.” Is it oxen God is concerned about? Or does He say it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written, that he who plows should plow in hope, and he who threshes in hope should be partaker of his hope. If we have sown spiritual things for you, is it a great thing if we reap your material things?”    (1 Corinthians 9:7-10)

 In the Scripture passage above written by St. Paul we see a good example of the New Testament interpreting the Old Testament in a non-literal way.  I think it is important to point out such passages to help prevent us from falling into a literalistic-only reading of the Bible.  The fact is the authors of the New Testament read the Old Testament for its spiritual value, not just its literal value.  The passage St. Paul quotes above, Deuteronomy 25:4, is in fact perfectly understandable if one reads it literally, and it is in fact part of the 613 mitzvot (commandments) that rabbinic Judaism identifies as mandatory for Torah observing Jews.  St. Paul’s point, however, is that if you read it purely or merely literally, you will miss its main value.  For St. Paul says God is not mostly concerned about oxen and so the commandment has a deeper, more spiritual, even true meaning which goes beyond its literal sense.  The commandment is not to be read according to the letter of the law, but as a way for bringing out hope in believers and those who proclaim the Gospel.   St. Paul applies the text to himself and his fellow preachers.  He really calls everyone who reads the Old Testament Torah to free their minds from dead literalism and to come to see how all of the Scriptures have an application to the lives of the people of faith.  St. Paul does not deny that the text has a literal reading, but to him the literal reading is neither the best understanding of the text nor the most important.

We can see St. Paul defending his non-literal hermeneutic in his Second Letter to the Corinthians:

 “… who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not in a written code but in the Spirit; for the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life. Now if the dispensation of death, carved in letters on stone, came with such splendor that the Israelites could not look at Moses’ face because of its brightness, fading as this was, will not the dispensation of the Spirit be attended with greater splendor?   …  Since we have such a hope, we are very bold,  not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not see the end of the fading splendor.  But their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away.  Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their minds; but when a man turns to the Lord the veil is removed”  (2 Corinthians 3:6-16 RSV).

In this passage St. Paul says the “written code kills” and it belongs to the “dispensation of condemnation” and “of death.”   He is speaking about the Ten Commandments!  Today, strangely enough many Christians want to post the Ten Commandments throughout American society, but St. Paul sees these commandments as belonging to a faded glory for ultimately the Ten Commandments do not save humankind.  Rather the commandments end up revealing our sinfulness and thus bring us under God’s condemnation because they do not stop us from sinning, they only point out what our sins are. 

St. Paul concludes the above passage by noting that the Jews do in fact have the written commandments of God, but they read them literally and do not understand their meaning.   For in fact, as St. Paul notes the only way to really understand the Old Testament and the laws and written code they represent is through Christ.  Those who endeavor to read the Old Testament purely literally put upon themselves the same veil which St. Paul says blinds the Jews from truly understanding God’s intent and purpose in giving the Law and the proper way to read and understand the law.    St. Paul’s interpretive principle is Christ – it is Christ who lifts the veil of literalism and makes the Scripture comprehensible.  It is to Him we must turn if we want to understand the text of the Old Testament.

 You search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life;

and it is they that bear witness to me;

yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life”   (John 5:39-40 RSV)

(Hello! I’m Sendai Anonymous, and this is my very serious post about Biblical literalism, in which I prove that it doesn’t exist.

Take that, Biblical literalism!

It really is serious, though. I actually surprised myself =_=)

It’s always been rather vexing to me to listen to the self-proclaimed “Biblical literalists” prattle on about how liberal Christians are so totally evil and sinful and will go to hell darn it, and how coffee-house Christianity is wrong, wrong, wrong, sinful, and wrong.

The thing is, the Biblical literalists are interpreting the Bible at least as much as the pick-and-choose liberal Christians they so despise, or even more. They do what any believer does: they pick those passages of their holy book, which will validate their pre-existent beliefs and notions about morality and ethics, and how the world should work in general. As with the more liberal believer, what really matters is: what will my family think? will my mum disown me? will my peer group make fun of me? will the teacher praise me? and the like.

There is also a marked tendency to skip “literal” readings when such readings are obviously absurd, as in the case of the Earth being flat and Earth being in the centre of the universe. On the other hand, when the theory competing with the “literal” reading of the Bible is difficult to understand and/or counter-intuitive, the literal reading will often be preferred, as often happens in the case of creationism and evolution.

The means by which the “literal” interpretation is achieved are usually the following:

1. Outright denial.

2. Misunderstanding and misinterpretation of arbitrarily chosen passages, including contextomy (by which I mean not just the usual quote-mining, but also every reading or interpretation which does not account for the cultural context in which the passages read or interpreted were written, and using the modern interpretation of some words, such as “homosexuality” whenever it conforms with preconceived notions of the reader) and false generalisations (generalisations do not constitute a literal reading after all).

3. Ignoring the passages that are found inconvenient, not conforming to the pre-existent notions, or absurd.

1. Outright denial

Denialist tactics in Biblical literalist movement include a wide variety of discourse techniques, but in my opinion, the most likely to come across are the King-James-Only movement and the it-does-say-so-because-I-say-so.

The King-James-Only is a bizarre movement in the English-speaking countries with no other European analogies I can think of(1). The movement claims that KJV of the Bible is the divinely inspired version of the Bible for the English-speaking world or the “second revelation”, and thus, other versions and translations have no precedence, even the original Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek one.

This is absolutely irrational, because one of course would assume that our knowledge of the relevant languages has grown greatly since the times of king James thanks to, for instance, the progress made by various archaeological expeditions since XIX century, where new texts, new text versions were discovered and/or acquired, which enabled philologists to conduct comparative studies, and so on. Also, having a larger source material enables a linguist to research the meanings of rare words (and there are a lot of them in Leviticus, for instance, and on the whole there are as many as 1500 hapax legomena in the Old Testament) with more accuracy.

However, some of the errors in the KJV of the Bible conform with the self-proclaimed literalists’ worldview. On the other hand, because the archaic language makes it more difficult to read and understand, the access to information is greatly hindered, which facilitates the further maintenance of fundamentalist worldview.

The it-doesn’t-say-so-because-I-say-so strategy is obviously a form of wishful thinking, where a believer engages in a form of circular reasoning by stating what amounts to “I think that (insert behaviour perceived as sinful by the speaker) is a sin, because the Bible says so, so the Bible says so”. Usually, no amount of presenting actual evidence(2) has any result whatsoever.

Because the mere thought of delving in fundamentalist forums in search for quotes(3) again makes me twitch, here is the link to Fundies Say The Darndest Things, where most of the discourse strategies that I mention are used.

For real.

2. Misunderstanding or misinterpretation

Misunderstand and misinterpretation can largely be divided in two main categories.

The first one is, let’s call it, cultural contextomy, where the reader forgets his or her source text was written over 2000 years ago, and that the words used in that text had then different connotations than they have now.

The most striking example which illustrate this would be “homosexuality”. In fact, there is no word for “homosexuality” as we understand it anywhere in the Bible. What is in the Bible, though, are various words which mean “having sex” or “having an anal intercourse” – depending on the participants – and some verbs whose interpretation as “male homosexual prostitutes” or “male cult personnel who has sexual relations with other men” is highly uncertain(4). The reason for the lack of word for “homosexuality” is that there was no concept of ‘homosexuality” as we understand it today(5).

The ancients’ concepts of sex, gender, and sexual orientation greatly differed from ours. Even if the preference of some people for homosexual relations was noticed, it was not explained as innate, but in terms of individual (and if it was a preference for being the passive partner – perverted) inclination. In short, an anal intercourse between two men was considered to be a threat to the established social conventions, because one of the male participants had to undertake the “passive” role, which was for the ancients female. Please note that what is meants by “social conventions” is actually “nature”. The disturbance of social order was perceived as a direct threat to the survival of community, which was true especially during the time when the Bible was only the holy book of the Jewish community, dispersed and/or surrounded by other peoples with quite similar cultures.

The word “nature” itself was understood in antiquity different than now. The philosopher Seneca lists as unnatural, contra naturam, things such as warm baths and potted plants(6). This is also the sort of nature that Paul means in 1 Corinthians.

Thus, when Paul and others mention their disapproval of homosexual sex, they do not in fact disapprove of the homosexuality as we understand it today. In the Old Testament, the disapproval is aimed only at the anal intercourse of two males, because of the power exchange and role reversal that it entails. The disapproval of homosexual sex in the New Testament was greatly influenced by the Jewish opposition to Greek and Roman social practice, in which the homosexual relationships were often unequal and exploitative.

An often misunderstood Biblical passage is the story of Sodom, in which often the homosexual aspects of the affair are wrongly overplayed. The reason why God decides to punish Sodom is not because its inhabitants were having the evil gay sex (eyeroll), but because they were inhospitable, arrogant and xenophobic. In any case, the last straw consisted not of homosexual sex, but an attempted rape (Gen 19:5), which the fundamentalists prefer to forget whenever they are outraged, and drone on and on about God hating the gays. And somehow, one hardly ever sees many instances of heterosexual rape from the Bible being used as an argument against heterosexuality.

The second example of misinterpretation, this time by generalisation, is Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13, parts of the so-called Holiness Code:

18:22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them

The above statements are then used by “literalists” as a proof that “homosexuality is a sin”.

This is not the literal meaning of the text, though. The literal meaning is “anal sex between two males is an abomination”. No matter how you look at it, anal sex is not equivalent with homosexuality. Furthermore, as we can gather from the passages about the slightly homoerotic friendship of David and Jonathan, kissing between males apparently is OK (1 Samuel 20:41-42). Thus we have fundamentalist Christians distorting their source text by making generalised, not literal interpretations that conform to their preconceived notions of homosexuality being wrong.

3. Arbitrary choice of relevant passages

Further proof for fundamentalist believers picking-and-chosing about as much as any other, more liberal believers, can be seen in the way they arbitrarily pick and choose Biblical passages to fit their agenda.

In Leviticus, the censure of male/male anal sex is part of a longer list of sexual transgressions, which contains also incest, intercourse during menstruation, adultery, sex with animals, child sacrifice to Moloch and the calling of ghosts and spirits(7).

What is striking about the list is that the modern day “literalists” aren’t quite as vocal about sex with your wife during her period being as much of a sin as “homosexuality”, and why is that so? Because it’s absurd? But then, why homosexuality being a sin is not?

(This is where I gleefully repeat my mantra about preconceived notions, but I guess, by now, everybody’s got my point)

Similarly, of two creation(8) stories included in the Bible, the fundamentalists prefer quoting the one where woman was created from the man’s rib (Gen 2) rather than the one where man and woman are simply placed in the garden (Gen 1), because they want to make a point about woman being inferior or subordinate to man(9).

Similarly, although relevant passages of Leviticus are used as evidence for homosexuality being a sin, the passage about eating sea food (Leviticus 11:9-12) being an abomination, and the passage about wearing mixed fibers being an abomination (Leviticus 19:19) are never mentioned(10).

When the literal interpretation of the Bible clashes with what we can experience empirically every day, the easier to understand the competing theory, the higher the likelihood that the literal interpretation of the Bible will be abandoned in favour of the competing theory. As we can see, there are relatively few flat-Earthers who back who their claims with Biblical quotes, but the creationist movement is as robust as ever. This is because it is much easier to understand that Earth is not flat than it is to understand natural selection, and also, because the fact of Earth not being flat has an enormous impact on our everyday lives (when we travel, and so on), which is also very easy to perceive. The same can be said of the geocentric versus heliocentric theory; that, contrary to what the Bible says, the heliocentric theory is true can be easily explained to anyone; understanding the main tenets of the theory of evolution requires much more effort.

Why the fundamentalists depend on their preconceived notions is quite easy to understand. First of all, one usually learns about morals and social norms from their parents and from the authority figures in one’s social environment. This process takes place far earlier than the learning of the contents of the holy text. A three-year-old may be told that they shouldn’t have fights with other children, and they can hear his or her parents often talking about “faggots” or using vocabulary pertaining to sexual orientation as swear words and so on, but they will hardly know anything about the contents of the Bible (or any other holy book for that matter). By the time they start learning what the contents are, they will want to look for validation for the views their parents instilled in them. Some of them will be disappointed by what they have found, some will see the inconsistencies and contradictions, and decide that it might not be the truth after all, and the rest of them will remain fundamentalist Christians.

Further reading:

The Scripture Project @ The Reason Project has a nicely annotated and tagged Bible, Quran and the Book of Mormon.

Boswell, John, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century <— about Christianity and homosexuality from the LGBT perspective.

Nissinen, Martti, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World <— about the Ancient Near Eastern religions and their attitude towards homosexuality, written largely from a purely scholarly perspective, without Christian apologetics or anything like that.

(1) If anybody else can think of such analogies, I’d be of course very grateful for any information.

(2) In this case, something as trivial as quotes.

(3) I did it once. It wasn’t fun. Had to drink several litres of coffee to make myself feel better =_=.

(4) arsenokoites and malakos from 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10, where the words are listed among the vices, and used to be translated as “sodomites”, on the assumption that the former meant the active partner, and the latter the passive partner in a homosexual relationship. However, the meaning of arsenokoites may be “man who sleeps with everyone” as well as “one who sleeps with men”, and malakos is usually used as an adjective, and means “effeminate”, a characteristic which was in the ancient times often associated, but not equivalent, with male “passive” homosexuality.

(5) As late as in the period between WWI and WWII the existence of lesbians was explained by theories postulating the existence of “third sex”, which would consist of women sexually interested in other women (Nowadays, “third sex” is used in a very different meaning).

(6) This and many more examples I owe to Nissinen, Martti, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World.

(7) The co-occurence sexual transgressions with the child sacrifice and interaction with spirits made some scholars propose that the list contains a sexual transgression in religious context, and that anal sex, too, was only forbidden in cult (the explanation why there was anal sex involved in any cults and what cults these were would be excessively tedious for a non-specialist, but in all probability, the cultic personnel of the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna/Ishtar and Syrian Ashtarte included males whose function might have included having sex with other males in ritual context. Either that, or they were eunuchs. Or, they were eunuchs who had sex with other males in ritual context. The assyriologists are quite divided on the issue.), however, it is rather improbable.

(8) Creation, what a filthy word.

(9) That sort of inconsistencies and contradictions make Biblical literalism absolutely logically impossible. You can’t believe two contradictory statements at the same time.

(10) One has to wonder to what extent exactly this strategy of picking the “right” quote from the Bible influenced the creationist quote-mining strategies. In any case, the find-the-right-quote-and-you-win sort of mentality had already been there.

Michael Rinehart is wise on how to handle ultimatums and on how not to read the Bible:

I have a letter from an angry member, who is threatening to leave the church if I don’t do this or that, or say this or that. I sit on the couch and smile, but it is a sad smile. In the light of Ultimate Things, this member’s petty manipulation seems so badly focused, his anger so misdirected, for a hundred reasons, I’m not sure what to say. Where do I begin?

Ultimatums are funny things. They are about control. I can control you if you are afraid of something. If you don’t do what I tell you, I will leave. If I am truly terrified at the prospect of your leaving, there’s no telling what I might do to appease you. Communities get messed up with this kind of stuff. I learned long ago that if I made my decisions by the polls, I made poor decisions. People think pastors are shaking in their boots at the prospect of someone getting mad and leaving. I suppose some pastors do worry. And then they’ll blow in the wind, doing whatever they’re told, for fear of declining membership and losing their job, when in reality the church needs strong self-defined leaders to grow. Not opinionated, my-way-or-the-highway pastors, but people who are gentle and kind, but won’t get pushed around. In the parish, whenever someone said, “Do this or I’m leaving,” I usually responded, “We are going to miss you so much.” The only way to create healthy community is to take the power out of the equation. Once people see that “I’m leaving” is a playing card that doesn’t work on you, they stop using it. And you really need them to stop using it. Congregations where people are constantly threatening to leave in order to get their way are not pleasant places to be. It’s like the spouse who threatens divorce in order to get his/her way. It’s an ugly, ugly way to be.

At the bottom of things, this conversation is about fear and manipulation, not sex. But I suppose it’s also about how we read the Bible, and this has been another disappointing realization for me. Biblical literacy seems so low in our church. We have work to do. When someone can quote Leviticus and assume that it’s binding, I marvel. The email writer points out that homosexuality is forbidden in the book of Leviticus as if that should settle things. But Leviticus also says you should stone your daughter to death if she has sex out of wedlock. Everyone knows this is absurd, and yet people continue to act as if everything in the Bible is binding on Christians. I find this astounding. We have so much work to do. Is anyone really proposing we follow all the laws in the Bible? I truly, truly don’t understand why this isn’t clear to people: The Bible says eating shrimp is an abomination. Do you believe this? Do you follow this law? The Bible forbids lending money at interest. Do you believe this? Do you follow this? Are you proposing a Bibliocracy?

(via Box Turtle Bulletin)

Your Thoughts?

By Opinion Columnist Harry Trunckles

Man. Scientists think they know everything don’t they. Well guess what? They’re not so smart. Really. I asked one once and he couldn’t even explain why my wife left me.

The ignorance doesn’t end there. There’s all sorts of things they don’t know. I asked an ecologist (more like ‘freakologist’, right?) how accurate the adage “liquor then beer, you’re in the clear. Beer before liquor, never sicker” is and he said some nonsense about being a muslim and not “well versed in alcoholic lore”  Christ, first you’re an ecologist, now a muslim? Typical cowardice.

Lie-entists like to talk about the world being testable and knowable…but can we really know the answers to the big questions? Like true love, life-after-death and math problems with more than 10 digits involved?

Why are we paying our tax dollars to fund things that aren’t even relevant? Like cancer research. News flash science dudes: I don’t even have cancer! Idiots.

And whats the deal with these embryonic stem cells they keep rattling on about? Its not really important for us to put that much time into fetuses. Lets just wait until they’re born. Its easier and they’re cuter then.

So the Ass-tronomers(so named for where their heads are placed) tell us the universe was created in a big bang. And what came before that? Blank stares and fumbling “we don’t really know” answers are all I get. How arrogant of these scientists to make a claim without knowing everything about the universe. Its silly anyways, since we have plenty of evidence in the Bible that this theory is false.

Jeez, and don’t get me started on the Higgs-boson. Do you know that you can’t even see the damn things? I think these physicists at CERN (Pretty sure that stands for Crappy Eggheads and Really-lame-Nerds)  are just trying to steal our christian women by using terms like “God Particle.” When they collapse the universe into a singularity of their lameness I think I’ll beat them up.

I’m always getting pissed about these guys. And they’re ALWAYS lying to us. I’ll be vigilant and expose their frauds. Every time I update, I’ll let you know what shenanigans they’ve perpetrated this time.  Probably some shit with test tubes.

Prophet Elijah

The Gospel Lesson for today, Matthew 17:10-13  begins with the disciples asking Jesus:

“Why do the scribes say that first Elijah must come?” He replied, “Elijah does come, and he is to restore all things; but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not know him, but did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of man will suffer at their hands.” Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist.

The answer which Christ gives is another example of the New Testament requiring a non-literal reading of the text.  The disciples are referring to the then apparently  common interpretation of Malachi 4:5-6 that God would send the Prophet Elijah (who had not died but was taken up into heaven) back to His people before the day of the Lord occurred.  The coming of Elijah would be the sign that the end of the world had come.

Christ however takes the prophecy not in a literal way, rather He spiritualizes the text and identifies John the Baptist as Elijah.   Jesus is not thinking that the historical Elijah had returned but apparently one like Elijah or one who is the same as Elijah.  Jesus certainly did not teach re-incarnation.  He wasn’t saying that John is actually Elijah – after all the birth of John is recorded in the Scriptures as well, John hadn’t mysteriously appeared like Melchizedek of old.  John was Jesus’ cousin and 6 months older than he; they knew each other from their youth.   Jesus speaks of Elijah in a typological fashion, not a literal one.

His disciples understand this perfectly.   Had they only a wooden literalist understanding of the Scriptures, they would once again not have understood the Lord.  An important lesson for us as we peruse the Scriptures daily in our own effort to be Christ’s disciples.

One could always read the Scriptures literally, but one would not necessarily get the most important meaning from the text as can be seen from today’s Gospel Lesson.