The ancient conversation that could cure the Catholic Church...and maybe the rest of us too!

Nicholas Kristof, in his New York Times op-ed piece A Church Mary Can Love, hits crucial nails on the head. The Vatican establishment is completely out of touch, and Christians need to put vital community service at the center of their faith.

But I think some tweaking of his understanding of the history involved could strengthen his case. Further to my last post, I think appeal to 2nd and 3rd Century "lost books of the Bible," while these texts may properly be cited as at least plausible secondary evidence of proto feminist ideals in earliest Christianity, distracts from the power of the canonical and more indisputably primary sources of early Christianity to address the problems of churches today. Not that I pretend to offer anything more original or authoritative than a second-hand regurge of scholars I've read, but I think the school of thought I will seek to summarize, which has eluded most journalists, is at least worth considering.

To be sure, I think the transition from house churches to larger public gatherings that Kristof notes was an early contributing factor to making churches what they are today. But there is so much more to the story, and therefore so much more to be consciously recognized and confronted, if we are to find our way again.

Kristof nails the oppressive and bungling tendencies of "good ole boy clubs" like the Vatican. But how many other "good ole boy clubs" do you know of get all excited about...celibacy?!?! There is surely a more bizarre and convoluted story that begs to be told in this regard. Not to be ignored is the influence of the anti-material Greek philosophies, e.g. Neoplatonism, that saturated Greco-Roman culture in the 3rd and 4th centuries. Many expressions of this kind of thinking were deeply anti-woman, saying that the allure of matter (and therefore sex and women) are "the problem." Kristof does not even mention this, even though it is arguably one of the most dominant factors leading to the anti-sexual features of the church he critiques. Concerns over property and inheritance in the medieval period further solidified the drive for a celibate priesthood.

As to the "lost books," as mentioned in my last post, I think there is a strong case that many of these were not accepted simply because they came decades to centuries after the New Testament was written, and were thus far removed from Jesus and his earliest followers. Really, the clincher for me is this: If the folks who at various points in church history compiled lists of "accepted" books were willing to consider texts that late, would they not have included late texts that affirmed their anti-feminist views? They would have had plenty to choose from.

To be sure, many scholars believe 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, traditionally attributed to Paul, are pretty much that--later pseudonymous texts expressing a more patriarchal and hierarchical view of the church. (And this was the consensus of scholars long before feminist issues really came to the fore.) But even those books don't come nearly as late or as far removed from the original Jesus communities as many of the "lost books" people have in mind. Don't get me wrong. By all means, I'd say, read the "lost books." For that matter, read the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Quran. Definitely read Rumi. Include them in the conversation. But due regard should be given to the time and historical circumstance of each. And it's just quite a quite a stretch IMHO to consider the voice of a 1st Century Jesus to be represented equally well by 3rd Century texts.

Some scholars also think there are later insertions into parts of the earliest New Testament texts. 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, the passage where women are urged to be silent in the church, though appearing in a letter that virtually everybody agrees was written by Paul, may have been inserted later by others as a kind of "damage control" to offset Paul's acknowledgment of female prophets elsewhere in the same letter. (And lest it be thought that these scholars are simply trying to sanitize Paul for modern consumption, let it be noted that they appeal not only to the apparent incongruity of the message of these verses with other parts of 1 Corinthians, but also to the fact that the verses are placed in a different location in some manuscripts.) Or it may have been Paul's own "damage control," reflecting a kind of two steps forward and one step back, to put the brakes on applying his more radical teachings in ways that would have offended social mores to no immediately constructive end. Or, more likely as I see it, there may be a specific context to the forbidden "speaking" that was understood by the original audience but not by us.

In any case, just how jarring this whole matter is, and what one feels to be at stake, will depend on how one understands the nature of the Bible and its intended role in the life of faith. This is one area where I think we've gotten de-railed, and I'd like to say just a little about that....

There's no doubt, there are isolated Bible texts that people can use to put down women, exclude gays, justify slavery, insist on not mixing certain kinds of cloth, defend the divine right of kings, and what have you. But all this misses the grander narrative. Biblical authors were motivated by a desire to escape and transcend the oppressive traditions, social structures, and powers that were causing misery in their societies. The fact that their thinking, in part, was also inevitably conditioned by the same should not blind us to where the conversation, as a whole, is headed. There is plenty of dialogue in the process, yet the overall direction is not only discernible, but IMO inescapable: "The Bible bends toward inclusion," as Walter Brueggemann puts it.

Fundamentalists treat the Bible as a repository of absolute truth claims, out of which they seize upon a few things, usually out of context, in order to define themselves apart from other people. Many skeptics unwittingly accept this same flawed understanding of the nature and purpose of the biblical conversation, and spend most of their time refuting such claims, motivated by the admirable goal of preventing fundamentalists from imposing their will. But I think both miss the sense in which the Bible is truly a divine word, a divinely animated conversation leading flawed and wounded people on a path to redemption.

This conversation, as I read it, finds its climax in a Palestinian prophet who preached radical love for all people, who at one point had the opportunity to lead an armed revolt against the Romans but chose not to, leading to his abandonment and death, and in the story of his disciples who, convinced of his divine vindication in the resurrection, found strength to fight evil and oppression in a much more powerful way--specifically, by organizing communities of shared goods whose definition of "family" transcended blood lines and tore down barriers of language, ethnicity, ritual "cleanness," etc. There's more than enough power in that story to cure what ails the Catholic Church in its current crisis, and much else besides, if only we re-connect with the main drift of it, and stop being absorbed by tangents and accretions, not least those which some old white goons dressed in funny suits have built a whole institution around.

The ancient conversation that could cure the Catholic Church...and maybe the rest of us too!

The Bible: Friend or Foe?

On another forum someone wrote: "What I cannot comprehend is how this collection of fables and myths [the Bible] has evolved into the infallible word of a creator" and cited Nahum 1 (among others) as an ethically deficient text.

What happened, I would submit, is that the biblical documents and the oral traditions and social movements for justice that lay behind them were so powerful, and constituted such a threat to the powers that be, that the powers HAD to reckon with them somehow. So they did all they could do to hijack and subvert the interpretation and application of these texts. From Constantine to Karl Rove this is essentially what we see. This hijacking has been very successful and has become easier to maintain the more temporal and cultural distance separates readers from the original context, and as interpretations alien to the original contexts have been repeated so often for so long that readers no longer follow the original drift of the conversation. Imagine a Victorian era literary critic who has never lived in, say, late 20th C. Detroit, trying to understand rap music. "Oh my, what crazy nonsense...and EVIL!" would likely be the all too hasty and dismissive conclusion. The result is that neither today's fundamentalists nor those dedicated to combatting them--both carrying out an Enlightenment agenda of arriving at true and provable propositions that is alien to the original purposes of most biblical texts--are reading with much sensitivity.

But over the last 40 or so years biblical scholarship has made great strides, through historical investigation and the application of social science insights, in shedding light on the social circumstances in which biblical texts were written, edited, and reflected upon. Unfortunately, you won't hear much about this from the journalists, op-ed writers, pastors, priests, etc.--the folks on whom most people depend for their understanding of the Bible--who have yet to catch on. But some of the scholars who have sensitized me to these developments include Walter Brueggemann, N.T. Wright, Dominic Crossan, Richard Horsley, Warren Carter, Reta Halteman Finger, and others.

The above-named scholars disagree, of course, on many particulars, but they would all affirm the following observation that I think is crucial for reading and applying the Bible responsibly today:

The Bible was written in the shadow of empire, as the title of an excellent book on this topic suggests. Most of the Hebrew Bible was redacted in final form at a time when the Jews were living as exiles in Babylon, or not long after. Many of the stories and traditions are the preservation of a culture's distant memory of living under the thumb of Egypt and the oppressive system of tribute it imposed. Norman Gottwald argues that ancient stories of the Exodus and Conquest, for example, are a distillation of centuries of resistance by Hebrews who sought refuge in the highlands of Palestine against the rule of Canaanite and Philistine client states of the Egyptian tributary system. These stories are applied by later redactors and their exilic and postexilic readers to their situations of living under Babylonian, Persian and Greek domination, and they are applied yet again by people of Jesus's generation to the context of Roman imperial oppression.

So what do we do with a text like Nahum, in which the prophet pronounces violent divine retribution against Ninevah, home to the throne of the Assyrian Empire? The background is that the prophet and his readers live under the thumb of Assyria, whose leaders boast that its empire and oppressive system are invincible and inevitable. But, as Walter Brueggemann writes:

"The prophetic imagination knows that the real world is the one that has its beginning and dynamic in the promising speech of God and that this is true even in a world where kings have tried to banish all speech but their own. The task of prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there."

Read in this light, this passage speaks hope to the oppressed. It affirms that the Assyrian Empire, contra the claims it is continually making about itself, is NOT the only or final reality. There is a LARGER REALITY that will bring it to an end. To be sure, the passage expresses a people's inevitable rage. And is there really no place for affirming such feelings in the large scheme of things, in the light of the biggest picture analysis?

But we must not read a text like this in isolation from the larger ongoing biblical conversation. Balancing the rage of Nahum 1 is the scandalous generosity of the Book of Jonah (one wonders how this book that preaches love toward the oppressor could ever have been written and gained acceptance--maybe there ARE divine miracles!) and the vision of "win-win" universal peace and justice throughout the prophets. Moreover, by the time we get to the New Testament, all the violent imagery is taken over and transformed via poetic irony as a metaphor for the power of faithful nonviolent love and service to overcome the corruption and brute force of oppressive systems like that of the Romans. For example, in the Apocalypse (the word means to reveal the true nature of something), Jesus, understood to be the prophesied "lion of the tribe of Judah" who would come and save God's people from their enemies, is revealed to be a gentle sacrificial lamb. The twelve tribes counted and loved by God are revealed to be an innumerable ethnically diverse multitude. Faithful nonviolent and just living is called "victory" (a word with violent military connotations in the Roman context). And the peaceful Jesus who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and preached peace is portrayed metaphorically as having more power than a Roman emperor, filling a valley with the blood of horses and soldiers. (I wish to thank Brian McLaren for solidifying this insight into the meaning of violent imagery in the Apocalypse.) The overall message is that there is a place for rage but that energy has to be transformed into gentle, persevering loving service that will change the world in the way that quiet yet forceful yeast transforms a lump of dough.

So back to Nahum's scorched earth rhetoric against Ninevah.... The Assyrians, like all ancient empires, justified their oppression via religion, with its army of priests and thought police. (Sound familiar?) The oppressed Hebrews fought back, saying Yahweh, the transcendent "I am" who is beyond subordination to any nation's interests or agenda, will not let oppression ultimately prevail. In Nahum, this is expressed as "Yahweh's gonna torch ya!" Beneath all the mythical and poetic dressing, the original bottom-line significance is really, "Hey, this business of establishing equity for all instead of this hierarchical pecking order society that the Assyrians are imposing is important--damned important!" Thousands of years later, some child-abusing leaders in the Catholic church come along, and they may want to give "red-hot" texts like that a different spin: "Don't f*** with us, or God will do this to YOU!" But I hope what I have said shows the perverse absurdity of that. So long as we listen attentively to the original contexts, and keep in touch with the broader biblical conversation, we should stay out of trouble.

And we will turn that "troublesome" collection of ancient texts back into the powerful resource for justice that it was originally meant to be. So when we come up against all the evil of corrupt religion, which is a more authentic and effective response? To debunk the biblical texts that corrupt powers have hijacked and ripped out of context to serve their own interests? Or to expose the hijack, and bring the full original anti-imperial force of the biblical conversation to bear? To fail to do the latter, IMO, is to squander an incredibly powerful resource. As we face practical and moral crises greater than any humanity has ever faced--nuclear weapons, corporate domination and global oppression, climate destabilization, etc.--we cannot afford that. We need all hands--atheists, agnostics, Catholics, evangelicals, Buddhists, Muslims, etc.--on deck. My experience is that once you see the anti-imperial thrust of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, and a number of pieces start falling into place, you cannot live long with it without caring very deeply about these matters.

One more thing. Which "Bible" am I saying needs to be reclaimed and applied to the great struggles of our day? The tendency of many today who want to overthrow corrupt religion is to debunk the biblical texts that church establishments have accepted and used in their own interest, and to play up other "lost books" that were "suppressed." But many scholars believe the latter to be mostly later gnostic texts about Jesus that were farther removed from Jesus and his closest friends. Moreover, some have argued that they lack the anti-imperial narrative of the traditionally accepted texts. But, if that is so, why would an empire-imitating church accept and affirm such texts as the Pauline epistles and the canonical gospels if, properly understood, they indeed undermine the interests of the corrupt religious establishment?[1] I would submit that corrupt religion, like any shrewd mafioso, knows the importance of keeping your most dangerous enemies close. So you gotta accept these books that most people associated with the original Jesus, and then take their claims about the supreme importance of justice and subvert and harness them to support your own claims to absolute authority. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright argues that the later gnostic texts just weren't in that playing field:

"We should note, as of some importance in the early history of the Bible-reading church, that those who were being burned alive, thrown to the lions, or otherwise persecuted, tortured and killed were normally those who were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and the rest. The kind of spirituality generated by 'Thomas' and similar books would not have worried the Roman imperial authorities, for reasons not unconnected with the fact that 'Thomas' and the similar collections of sayings are non-narratival, deliberately avoiding the option of placing the sayings within the overarching framework of the story of Israel. It is sometimes said or implied that the canonical books, unlike those found in other collections, were written as a way of making early Christianity more socially and culturally respectable. Irenaeus, who returned to Lyons as bishop after his predecessor had been martyred along with several other Christians in 177, and who remained an implacable opponent of the kind of theology found in 'Thomas' and similar writings and an enthusiastic supporter and expositor of scripture, would have found such a proposal grimly amusing. As his writings make abundantly clear, it was the canonical scriptures that sustained the early church in its energetic mission and its commitment, startling to the watching pagan world, to a radical holiness."

(N.T. Wright, The Last Word (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), pp. 63-64.)

Hope this is food for thought, at least, in support of a point of view that is not getting as much airplay in the usual popular channels as I think it deserves. Your comments will be most welcome.

[1] I am not suggesting that any particular statement of a church father or council affirming books of what is now considered the "canonical" Bible embodied this hypocrisy. On the contrary, the spirituality of people like Athanasius was on the whole exemplary. I am suggesting that the trajectory of corruption present at all times in the history of the church and coming to flower over the centuries could neither officially expunge the accepted Scriptures nor tolerate their original and authentic force. So long as the people were kept in the darkness of illiteracy, corruption could flourish unchecked by any appeal to Scripture. I think the Reformation, the Enlightenment, aspects of the more moderate expressions of postmodernism, and the relatively recent flowering of historically and anthropologically informed critical scholarship mentioned above, have all contributed in their own ways to unleashing the original power of the Bible in opposing unjust powers.

The Bible: Friend or Foe?

Suppressed hopes rising

"The prophetic imagination knows that the real world is the one that has its beginning and dynamic in the promising speech of God and that this is true even in a world where kings have tried to banish all speech but their own. The task of prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there."
--Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, quoted in Luke Gascho, Creation Care: Keepers of the Earth.

"It's a race to stay alive, baby, it's lawyers tax and steel
'Til the life that you are living is the thing you never feel"
--Mark Heard, "Long Way Down," Satellite Sky.

Suppressed hopes rising

Change Cities, Change the World

They say you can't beat City Hall and the vested interests that control it. But a growing number of environmental thinkers are saying we had better start winning at the municipal level if we are to stop the current ecological apocalypse in progress and prevent social collapse.

How can we transform cities from being the huffing, puffing ecological monstrosity they are into ecologically wholesome havens of human thriving? The question cannot be answered casually, but requires rigorous thinking and debate. And it requires many more people entering that debate and organizing to overcome entrenched powers invested in the status quo.

Fortunately we do not have to start this conversation from scratch. New Society Publishers has published several excellent books dedicated to systematically re-thinking how we build cities and organize communities. Among these is Ecocities, by Richard Register, who urges us to seek more thoroughgoing change than we have thus far:

It's no mystery to me [why environmentalists are winning many small battles but losing on the big issues of species extinctions, climate change, soil loss, harm to oceans, etc.]. We've never engaged the big battles. We try to make cars better rather than greatly reduce their numbers. We try to slow sprawl development rather than reverse its growth and shrink its footprint. We keep making highways wider and longer, dreaming of "intelligent highways" rather than removing lanes and replacing them with rails, small country roads, and bicycle paths. We continue to provide virtually every subsidy and support policy the oil companies want. It's no wonder we're not winning the war. The objective of this book is to lay out an evolving strategy that faces the big problems head on and gives us at least a chance of winning.[1]

Another worthy title, with practical blueprints for action, is Toward Sustainable Communities: Resources for Citizens and Their Governments, by Mark Roseland et al.

Lots of serious thinking about ecological city development is on the table. But will enough of us engage with it, and mobilize to make building sustainable cities politically feasible? What's needed, I think, is to form local groups in every city, bringing people together from diverse walks of life to study these issues and take constructive action to influence their city governments.

---

[1] Richard Register, Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2006), pp. 1-2.

Change Cities, Change the World

Veteran city manager challenges ideas of the "good life"

"We need courage, another spiritual gift. We need courage to stand up to the sacred cows of Western society--to challenge the idea that everyone has a right to a big car with an internal combustion engine so they can drive whenever or wherever they want, regardless of the environmental consequences. We need to challenge the idea that the best way to live is in a large, isolated home built on one-half an acre of good agricultural soil that we proceed to fill with grass that in turn is maintained with heavy applications of pesticides, herbicides, and a lawnmower with a two-stroke engine that puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in an afternoon than a car does in a month."

Gwendolyn Hallsmith, The Key to Sustainable Cities: Meeting Human Needs, Transforming Community Systems (Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2003), pp. 246-247.

Veteran city manager challenges ideas of the "good life"

Monsters in Recovery

Radovan Karadzic was a genocidal mass murderer. But, as Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić chillingly points out, he was also a physician, psychiatrist, and accomplished poet. Which leads me to ask: If being cultured and creative and, to all appearances, an all-around cool guy, is not enough to keep one from murdering 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, what is? Certainly becoming devoutly religious is not the cure - it can make matters worse. So what does it take?

"You must be born again," says the Jesus of John 3. This phrase that no doubt hit the original readers with the confounding force of a Zen koan has in our day been reduced to religious marketing, emptied of meaning, and filled with ideological implications and cultural associations that would have felt alien to the original audience. But in an ancient community of slaves and poor peasants, sharing food and possessions, encouraging one another in resisting the spiritual forces they believed animated Roman oppression - as they unfolded the scroll that had just arrived from their beloved teacher and read these words aloud for the first time in their sacred gathering, it must have meant something awfully powerful.

What did it mean? I suspect that deep down we all know. We get more in touch with the answer the more we are truly willing to ask the question, and vice versa. We "get it," not so much as individual seekers, but - as the early followers of Jesus knew so well - as a community of resistance seeking strength from the Spirit that we find in one another to swim against the tide.

The question of spiritual transformation is not distant or theoretical; it is intensely personal, practical, and urgent. For are we really less "monstrous" than Radovan Karadzic if, faced with ecological perils that jeopardize not only an ethnic group but the living systems of the entire planet, we remain paralyzed into inaction or impotent half-measures by the seduction of special interests, the anesthetic of air conditioning, and the blind darkness of our own apathy?

The practical paths love requires in our current circumstances can seem so onerously uncharted, is it any wonder we shy away from looking at the problems of our society and planet honestly? And yet Jesus said his yoke is easy and his burden light. And, note well, the extortionist tax collector we meet in Luke 19, who gave away possessions and resolved to repay his victims four-fold, was not glum but exuberant. In taking what seemed to be the most burdensome step, he found liberating lightness. I'm looking for, longing for that lightness, for practical ways to put my life in alignment with justice and peace. Is that your longing? Write me. Leave a comment below. Maybe we can help one another chart a practical course, and step into a lighter and less monstrous way of life together!

Monsters in Recovery

Books Guiding an Urgent Journey

Here are a few books I have found very worthwhile of late....

The Clashing Worlds of Economics and Faith, by James Halteman.
This book by a veteran professor of economics and Mennonite leader outlines a practical vision of Christian economic lifestyle today, and argues that the best that the world's economic systems offer is none too good.

Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts, by Reta Halteman Finger.
This work of historical investigation and biblical interpretation by a noted feminist scholar applies social science insights to uncover the robust lifestyle of economic sharing that the author believes early Christian communities practiced, as well as the socially and historically conditioned biases that she believes have prevented much past scholarship from recognizing this.

Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth, by Lester R. Brown.
This book, published in 2001, details the ecological perils we are facing and outlines practical steps to take. I plan to order his 2009 book Plan B 4.0 which covers the same ground in the light of updated research. One chapter subheading in the 2009 work, I think, says it so well: "Our Global Ponzi Economy." Brown is wonderfully specific in his ecological claims and remedies. If you want to take issue, take issue with the specifics. Or perhaps you will, like me, find the facts and arguments Brown presents convincing, realize that the dream of unrestrained economic expansion as usual is neither desirable nor possible, and resolve to join hands with others in forging a more responsible path.

These matters are so urgent, I believe we need all hands on deck: Everybody, on your block and mine, should be reading, debating, discussing, and working to implement practical changes to build a sustainable and livable future. "Everybody" includes persons of pro-life convictions, who will be unavoidably disturbed by Brown's advocacy of abortion. However, while Brown himself might consider the point non-negotiable, it is by no means the centerpiece of his agenda, and the otherwise strong case he makes for the urgent necessity of ethically reducing human population should not be thrown out on this account.

Herman Daly, Robin Hahnel, Michael Albert, and Bryant L. Myers are among other authors who have been part of this conversation for me. I have just begun to dip into Vandana Shiva, whom I think I will find rewarding, though my initial impression is that her work may be aimed more at rallying troops than winning converts. What can one put in the hands of conservatives and libertarians who are captivated by the promise and compelling internal logic of infinite capitalist expansion, to open their eyes to the larger limiting ecological parameters? Herman Daly and Lester Brown effectively engage the categories of traditional neoclassical economics, and make a case that is hard to refute. At least they worked with me. And, difficult as it may be, I think generating genuine dialog with the unconvinced is the only way we will ever get past current impasses and move the project of saving the planet forward.

What readings have helped guide your journey of late?

Books Guiding an Urgent Journey