Does It Really?

When asked to summarize his theology, the renowned theologian Karl Barth reportedly responded with the words of the beloved hymn, “Jesus loves me! This I know, for the Bible tells me so.” This was a surprisingly simple answer coming from the prolific author of, among other things, the voluminous Church Dogmatics; someone of whom it is written “is one of the few men who has ever begun a world-wide theological revolution while pastor of a local church. Generally regarded as the most influential theologian of the twentieth century, he may well be one of the most influential men in all Christian history. And his theological movement, now generally termed neoorthodoxy, began while he was pastor of a church in Safenwill, Switzerland.” (20 Centuries of Great Preaching, 1971, Word, Incorporated, Waco, Texas)

I often make mention of those who start out with a conservative/fundamentalist point of view and then evolve to the liberal/progressive vantage, so it is only fair that I would note that Barth’s movement was in the opposite direction. Beginning with the liberal school of thought, he eventually championed sola scriptura as the source of divine revelation, although “this does not mean that Barth had a fundamentalist view of Scripture; the Bible shows the ‘acts’ of God as he revealed himself in Christ. Barth recognized the humanity of the biblical authors; he believed that man discovers behind the fallible words the infallible truth. Barth believed in preaching as an explanation of the text of Scripture in order that man might have an existential encounter with the living Word.” (Ibid.)

Someone like myself has a great deal to learn from someone like Karl Barth. I am not a biblical scholar by any stretch of the imagination, but at the same time must acknowledge that simply by virtue of my vocation I have had an above-average opportunity to study the Bible. There are many “laypersons” far more well-read in the scriptures than am I, and yet I also know that there are many who profess to be Bible-believing Christians that have not had as broad an orientation as I have had the benefit of. This subject is worthy of examination primarily because of the contemporary American infatuation with all things evangelical, not the least of which is the role that the authority of scripture plays in determining whether or not one is truly born-again, saved, “Christian.”

I am now satisfied that it is not just my personal paranoia which is discerning an unprecedented alliance between the political and religious Right in this country. It is daily becoming increasingly apparent that a purportedly Bible-based morality is being used to justify the imposition of a particular ideology upon not just our nation, but upon the world. For this reason alone it becomes necessary to identify the hermeneutics (1. the science of interpretation esp. of the Scriptures. 2. the branch of theology which treats of the principles of Biblical exegesis. [Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary, 1994]) being employed by those who are making these moral claims, as well as those we are employing ourselves.

Is “God told me” and “the Bible says” the same thing? As we have seen, I think that someone like Barth would say that it is. But what are we to do with the element of human fallibility to which even Barth concedes? How do we justify taking a position on “homosexuality” when the word does not even appear in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (arguably the most accurate English translation currently available) while at the same time choosing to ignore the thirty-one times that “divorce,” “divorced,” and “divorces,” do? When God “tells” me two distinctly different creation stories (Genesis 1:1-2:3; 2:4b-25), which one am I to believe?

The role of organized religion (the Temple, the Church, etc.) in originally making this determination is undeniable. Before Guttenberg opened the proverbial Pandora’s box by making the Bible available to all, the priesthood (both before and after the Common Era) was in the enviable position of selecting which lections were to be considered authoritative and which were not. But once commoners were in a position to “see” for themselves what had previously been privileged and esoteric information, the concept of authority itself was challenged.

Let me try to give an example of what I’m saying: “In 1985 the Jesus Seminar, a distinguished group of biblical scholars led by Robert W. Funk and John Dominic Crossan (co-chairs), embarked on a new assessment of the gospels, including the recently discovered Gospel of Thomas. In pursuit of the historical Jesus, they used their collective expertise to determine the authenticity of the more than 1,500 sayings attributed to him.” (The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, 1993, Polebridge Press) Ranked number one as the most authentic were:
But I tell you: Don’t react violently against the one who is evil: when someone slaps you on the right cheek, turn the other as well. (Matthew 5:39 SV)
When someone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other as well. (Luke 6:29a SV)
When someone wants to sue you for your shirt, let that person have your coat along with it. (Matthew 5:40 SV)

Not wanting to be guilty of taking anything out of context, it needs to be noted that the Seminar ranked another twenty-two sayings as almost certainly authentic to Jesus, and an additional 166 as very probably something Jesus said. Nonetheless, utilizing a methodology that many evangelicals have dismissed out-of-hand without even knowing what it was, there is now overwhelming evidence to support that Jesus (if he is to be considered authoritative) never once took a position on gay marriage, abortion, Christian superiority, the right to bear arms or to preemptively attack a perceived danger.

Where I begin to take offense is when today’s “authorities” try to convince me that Jesus – per Scripture – did take an absolute and unequivocal stand on these issues, and that as a result God incarnate is “telling” these folks that they are “right” and that those who disagree or think otherwise are “wrong.” With all due respect to Barth et al., I must even challenge the notion that Jesus loves me personally simply on the basis that the Bible tells me so, because an earnest study of scripture informs me that I individually am not (or was not) chief among his concerns. What the Bible tells me was of paramount importance to Jesus is the understanding of God’s love of the whole, and of what a profound and sinful transgression it is to ever violate that love on behalf of one’s own selfish wants and desires.

We are living in the ever-unique present that does not allow us the luxury of believing in unexamined assumptions. I cannot disagree with Karl Barth that the Bible is foundational. But just because it is the first Word does not mean that it is the last. For the Judeo-Christian tradition Scripture serves as the point at which the journey of faith begins, but it is a spiritually fatal error to believe that it is an end unto itself. I personally do not consider it editorial oversight or omission that there is no record of the significant figures of faith – including Jesus himself – teaching Bible study classes or constantly citing chapter and verse to back up what they were saying. Indeed, the gospels are quite explicit that what astonished and amazed his hearers was that Jesus spoke from his own authority.

So, please, before you try to tell me that God “thinks” this way or that about something just because it “says” so in the Bible, do both of us the favor of finding out: 1) how it came to be there in the first place; and 2) how it fits in with the whole theological picture that has been developing from The Beginning to which both Genesis accounts attest. Let us enter together into a healthy skepticism of any claim to know absolutely the mind of God based upon scripture alone. Too much is at stake to blindly accept such simplistic, formulaic approaches. There’s too much to lose in terms of spiritual fidelity and theological integrity to reduce the wisdom of the ages to the opportunism of the moment. After all, don’t we owe it to ourselves to know the truth, the truth that will liberate us? (See John 8:32; in the opinion of the Seminar “Jesus did not say this; it represents the perspective or content of a later or different tradition.”) Amen.

Who’s Right?

I need to begin by telling you that I have been diagnosed as clinically depressed. This is not a new assessment, as it is a condition I’ve dealt with for a number of years. Medication seems to help most of the time, but there are other times when the symptoms seem overwhelming. And this is why I’ve chosen to share my “secret” with you, because I really can’t tell if my dark feelings about what is going on in today’s world are affected by my illness, or if they’re legitimate.

I cannot explain how or why I was born a Caucasian male into a middle-class American home in the mid-twentieth century. I cannot explain how or why I live comfortably in a suburban condominium that three-quarters of the world’s population would regard as luxuriousness they cannot even imagine. I can explain my ongoing battle with the bulge by the fact that I like to eat and that food is never in short supply, but I cannot explain how or why such is not the lot of the majority of Earth’s inhabitants.

Nor can I explain how it is that when I find myself in this privileged and blessed state of being it is not that difficult to be envious of those that have even more than I, and to catch myself aspiring to keep up with their lifestyle. How is it that I own a Subaru and a Toyota but that there are influences that lead me to think that I can’t really be happy without a Lexus and a Mercedes? How is it that when I have so much, I find myself wanting more? And more disturbingly, what allows me to think that I am deserving of what I already have, much less to conceive of deserving more?

It is this aspect of our contemporary culture that I find particularly troubling. If I ever dare to stop to think about it, I realize that my relative degree of comfort is at the expense of many, many others. It’s not that I’m intentionally subjecting others to my oppression, but that doesn’t keep my attitude of believing that I deserve – that I’m entitled to – the better life from subordinating “them” to the inferior status which they somehow “deserve”. Predictably, I am of the opinion that theology is involved.

My faith is literally the rock upon which my life is built. Further, the most critical aspect of this faith is my understanding that, by virtue of the phenomenon that my tradition has labeled the Christ, I am not only capable, but actually worthy, of direct communication with my Creator, with the Higher Power, with God! Regardless of what it is called: prayer, meditation, etc., it is universally accepted by all but genuine atheists that such a thing is possible. The variations and distinctions between different traditions have primarily to do with who is entitled to participate in such a relationship under what conditions.

This is where it gets tricky, and where it also serves to generate a degree of doubt for someone like myself. The doubt is not about my relationship to and with God. This is experientially validated for me on a day-to-day, moment-by-moment basis. There is no question in my mind about who, and whose, I am, or about the ongoing “conversation” I enjoy with the Higher Power. The questions arise from how very different the messages I am “hearing” are as compared to the messages being heard by those who are very public in their conviction that they unequivocally know the mind of God on every matter.

Examples of what I am talking about are unfortunately plentiful on today’s American scene. In this election year we are bound to be increasingly subjected to the conservative/liberal debate, and not just on the political front. The unprecedented alliance in this country of the political and religious right is influencing socio-economic ideology in ways that we have heretofore never had to deal with in quite the same way. Is Christianity superior to Islam? Is heterosexual marriage the only kind sanctioned by God? Is publicly displaying the Ten Commandments unconstitutionally instituting a state religion? If President Bush was ordained by God to be President of the United States, does that make his decisions like the one to preemptively attack another nation infallible and inerrant?

The attempts by the Democratic candidates to prove that they, too, have “got religion” are, in my opinion, pathetically feeble. I know a little something of how stereotyping in this arena works. When someone finds out that I’m a pastor, there is an almost immediate rush to judgment regarding how I think and where I stand on the issues. Genuinely liberal (what I prefer to term as “progressive”) theological thought is so foreign to the popular mindset as to almost be unknown, and as a result even those who would identify themselves a politico-socio revolutionaries end up espousing a relatively tired theology.

As this series (yes, I think it is going to develop into a series) progresses, I am either going to be so brave or so stupid as to share how my faith is being informed by the relationship I have with God. I am going to wonder openly how it is possible for the Creator of us all to be communicating such disparate and contradictory messages to the faithful. For, you see, I am not ready to count myself out just yet in my understanding of such things as scripture, experience, tradition and reason. I am going to hold on to the notion that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are perhaps just as apt to be in error as am I, and that the “message” I am “hearing” from God is no less credible than theirs.

I humbly follow in the footsteps of one who some two millennia ago dared to do the same thing, although his ability to effectively turn the theological world upside down remains to this day unsurpassed. I continue to be inspired by this thought of the nineteenth century preacher, Phillips Brooks:
“In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical….His religion has so long been identified with conservatism…that it is almost startling sometimes to remember that all the conservatives of his own times were against him; that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him.” Amen.

There Ought To Be a Law

I’ve never gone into much detail about what I do at my day job. Simply put: I attempt to enforce morality. Somewhere in the human moral code is the presumption that parents are responsible for their offspring. This is one of those common sense presumptions that is, at first glance, so obvious that it defies closer scrutiny until it is challenged or violated. And both challenged and violated it is in today’s society. Divorce and single-parent households are so commonplace in America as to actually now be the norm, to the extent that the issue is no longer even considered newsworthy.

Capitalism has a way of assigning a monetary value to things, including morals. In my world this means a mathematical formula for calculating the amount that an absent parent is supposed to pay the parent who still has custody of the child(ren) as compensation for his or her absence from the home. I have been told that one of the problems encountered in the development of Nevada’s multi-million dollar child support computer program was the inability of the Pakistanis assigned to the project to understand such a concept. As absurd as it is, however, it was employed to collect nearly $70 million dollars by just our office last year.

It may have occurred to you by now that not every absent (we call them non-custodial) parent is going to agree with the sum determined to be adequate financial compensation for the child(ren) for whom he or she has a shared responsibility. In this nation of ours that prides itself on being a government of laws it should really come as no surprise that the supposed solution to such a predicament is legalistic. So, as has become commonplace in our culture, legislators, lawyers and judges set about the business of legalizing morality, of passing laws that are supposed to make people behave responsibly.

That’s where my job comes in. All according to law, offices such as mine across the nation establish paternity if it isn’t known, establish legal orders where once there were none, and then execute those orders through the powers of local, state and federal government to force, if necessary, persons to assume financial responsibility for the children they have brought into the world. For forty hours each and every week I deal with the frustration, unhappiness and anger that is the direct result of people either not knowing or ignoring the moral responsibilities that accompany parenthood, thereby making necessary the insane practice of trying to legally enforce them.

There are times when I consider my religious education to be a liability. For example, consider this passage from the book of Jeremiah:
“The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34 NRSV)

If ever there was a succinct explanation of why it doesn’t work to attempt to legislate morality, this is it! It will never be possible to write enough laws to counter human indifference and apathy. It will never be possible to write enough laws to force a parent to feel lovingly responsible for a new life it has shared in creating. There will never be enough gun control laws to remove murderous intentions. There will never be enough corporate laws to overcome selfish greed. There will never be enough traffic cops to stop the reckless slaughter on our highways. And on it goes…

The tragic irony of my original example lies in the fact that the place where the instilling of moral values – the home – is the very institution under siege in our litigious society. The lessons to be learned at the mother’s breast and upon the father’s knee are being irrevocably lost to a worldview whose faith is mistakenly in the law of the land rather than the law within us, the law to be perceived by our hearts instead of the courts. It didn’t take me long to learn that a life insurance sale is virtually impossible to someone who genuinely doesn’t care what happens to her or his survivors. And you will never be able to effectively force such a person care by legislation alone.

That this is the year of a presidential election has prompted me to address this issue. We are going to be immersed in a plethora of promises for legislative cures for anything and everything that ails us. I am not really so naive as to believe that we can rid ourselves of all laws and ordinances, but I am increasingly convinced that legislation must be a reflection – not the source – of our morality. It will be the responsibility of the larger community of faith to provide the loving and nurturing environment in which the nuclear family may be nursed back to its critical role of transmitting the values that translate into new and abundant life for all.

“The days are surely coming, says the LORD,” when our hope for the future will no longer be dependent upon our legalistic prowess, but will instead be firmly grounded in the relationship we have with our Creator who promises to reside in the hearts and minds of “the least of them to the greatest.” God grant us the wisdom and the courage to seek moral inspiration rather than empty promises for more laws. Amen.