Category Archives: bible

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    Raising Jesus and Original Sin

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    I have this theory about how it was that Jesus came to be born without sin and it is just that – a theory. But I thought I’d share it with y’all because it has real implications for those of us who are or will be parents. Traditionally, it has been taught that Jesus was born without sin because he was conceived without sex. Because somehow it seems, the act of sex by our parents mysteriously implants this dark stain of sin on us at conception. While there is a verse in Psalm 51 which can be read to confirm this view, I personally find the idea that my parents having sex to conceive me made me sinful unreasonable and unconvincing.

    Sex is a good thing. God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply. Sex allows the two to become one – to reach past ourselves into another. It brings joy and satisfaction into our lives. It is the means by which we bring forth life and become co-creators with God. It can be misused, to be sure, but how could something which is fundamentally a good also be the thing which stains us before we even have true being? Not to mention that the mechanics of how something my parents did when I wasn’t even there made me bad are problematic.

    I don’t think that Jesus’ lack of sin had its roots in the way he was conceived. Rather, my theory is that his lack of sin came about due to something far less mystical and more practical – from his parents. Mary and Joseph had been told prior to Jesus’ birth that this child would be the messiah. Which means that before he was even born, his parents understood that Jesus was good, holy and anointed. Don’t you suppose that this knowledge influenced the way that they parented?

    Orthodox Christianity teaches that Jesus was both fully man and fully God. But most Christians tend to give short shrift to the idea that Jesus was fully man. Rather, they seem to think of him as just playing at being human. He resided in a human body, sure, but otherwise, he was God. However, I think that unless Jesus had fully entered into the experience of being human – with all of its confusion, limitations and struggles – then he could not have been fully human. If he was born understanding why he was here and what he was supposed to do, he wasn’t fully human. If he arrived not needing to be instructed, not having to struggle with self-mastery, not being shaped by the culture and people around him, then he wasn’t fully human.

    We know nothing about Jesus as a child, but certainly he must have cried as an infant. He probably got frustrated and lost his temper as a toddler. Maybe he showed off his ability to burp the Hebrew alphabet to relatives. Or pulled the goat’s tail. Spilt things. At the wedding in Cana when Mary tells him to help out with the wine situation, Jesus responds, “woman, it is not yet my time.” It makes me wonder if he wasn’t teasing Mary about all the times while growing up that she’d told him not to use his supernatural abilities because “it’s not yet your time.” Then there was the time when Jesus was 12 when he stayed behind in the temple while his family headed back towards home. If I had done that, my parents would have killed me. And telling them that I had to be “in my father’s house” would NOT have gotten me off the hook.

    The reason I say that I think it was Jesus’ parents who were responsible for him being born without sin is because knowing that their son was good, they would have responded to his normal childish behaviors differently than those of us who believe we are parenting children born sinful. Perhaps this allowed them to see immaturity as immaturity rather than as a sign of sin. Perhaps this allowed them to see errors in judgment as simple mistakes rather than rebellion or willfulness. And perhaps this different perspective allowed them to avoid passing on their own brokenness.

    I’m not in the least claiming that Mary and Joseph were perfect parents and that is why Jesus was perfect. Parents don’t actually have that must power over their children anyways. But the older I get and the more I work through my own struggles, the more I realize how damaging the message that there is something wrong with me has been.

    When we reflect back to kids that their immaturity is sinful, we make normal growth and maturing a painful process of being wrong and bad. When we reflect a lack of judgment as rebellion, sin and willfulness, we similarly stunt their ability to grow while also undermining their trust in their own judgment. If we reject manifestations of their personality – playfulness, shyness, curiosity, determination – as sinful rudeness, withdrawal, impertinence or stubbornness, we teach them to reject the very tools God has given them to work with in life. And I do wonder if perhaps, working with the assumption that their son was good, Mary and Joseph avoided falling into these all too common parenting errors.

    Of course, Jesus was God. You and I and our children are not. Yet, it seems to me that as people who have been redeemed from the wages of sin through the work of Christ, we ought to adjust our own parenting accordingly. Our kids are not God, but they are made in the image of God. This and not sin is their true identity. So perhaps if we start where Mary and Joseph started – with the assumption of their child’s goodness – we won’t pass so much of our own brokenness onto our own children. Certainly, we’ll do it imperfectly and our own children, not being God, will no doubt actually sin. But if they in turn parent their own children with the assumption of their goodness and pass on less of their own brokenness, we’ll start to look less and less like what we have been and more and more like Christ.

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    So What Happened to Adam and Eve Anyhow?

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    Let’s do a quick horticultural lesson here today on the difference between fruits and vegetables. Fruits, technically, are the fleshy, edible part of a plant which contain seeds. They are produced by plants that flower as a means of reproduction. Vegetables, on the other hand, are plants which are themselves used in part or whole as food. So, for example broccoli is a vegetable because we eat the stems and immature flower buds of the plant. Tomatoes are fruit because they contain the seeds of the plant they grown off of. Lettuce is a vegetable because we eat the leaves of the plant. Apples are fruit because they are the seed bearing part of the plant which grow after the pollination of the tree’s flowers. Get the idea?

    The reason I bring this up is because there’s a little detail which is often missed in the story of the fall which is actually, very, very important should we wish to understand what happened. You see, God forbid eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The fruit is what a plant produces – not the plant itself. Fruit is the end result of a process of blooming, pollination and growth. What God was forbidding wasn’t the knowledge of good and evil, but the end result of it – the fruit of that knowledge.

    (Before going any further, if you haven’t already, you will need to read the previous posts on the fall or nothing I say below will make ANY sense. They are:

    Why Was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden?

    The Fall Wasn’t Our Fault

    Does God Sit Around Monitoring Our Thoughts? And Other Pertinent Questions

    Don’t worry. They’re short, We can wait.)

    You will perhaps recall that when speaking to the serpent, Eve said that God had also forbidden touching the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We don’t know if she was mistaken and actually thought she wasn’t allowed to touch the tree or if she was exaggerating to make her point to the serpent. But either way, I think it’s fair to surmise that Adam and Eve were unfamiliar with the tree. Which means that when they ate of the fruit of the tree, they got the results of the knowledge of good and evil without having even started the process which normally leads up to the having fruit to eat.

    The text says that Eve saw that the fruit was useful for gaining wisdom. Wisdom is when you use knowledge and understanding to guide your actions, thoughts and choices. Eating the fruit was useful for gaining wisdom – it gave the person who ate it the chance to live as one who knows good and evil – ie is able to put their knowledge into action. Only Adam and Eve had no knowledge. And without knowledge, the only way to learn wisdom is by screwing up and learning from it. The difference between how the fruit was meant to be used to gain wisdom and what happened to Adam and Eve is like the difference between dropping a newly minted navy seal off in the middle of the jungle with only a what he could fit into his pack to survive on and dropping a kidnapped child off in the jungle with a notebook, two pencils and a fruit roll-up in their Barbie backpack.

    Not only did Adam and Eve have no knowledge, they were immature – not yet grown. And it’s shown all through human history. I love my kids and they love me, but I am quite certain that if they had been able to manage it, a couple of them would have shanked me for having the gall to thwart their will back when they were small toddlers. Fortunately, by the time they were big enough to handle a knife, they had matured and no longer responded to discipline with blind fury. But imagine if the world was run by people with the emotional maturity of a toddler. It would look an awful lot like a world history book, non?

    The story of the fall is usually taught as being a morality tale about obedience to God. All of the details of what happened get swept together into one overarching fact: Adam and Eve had been disobedient. However, if you look at the story itself, you will see that this wasn’t how Adam and Eve saw it. They weren’t worried that God would discover that they had disobeyed him. They were consumed with the shame and fear of being seen naked. To them, their disobedience was barely an after thought. What really mattered to them was that all of a sudden they were completely convinced that there was something wrong, unacceptable and shameful about themselves. Why?

    The text says that when they ate of the fruit, “their eyes were opened”. Often this is explained as them gaining self-awareness. However, all of us gain self-awareness at some point in our lives. But we don’t always freak all the way out about it. Often it happens with us hardly noticing the change. We just become more self-aware. We are less apt to forget that someone else might be watching us. It does tend to make us less free, but usually it’s only really a problem when someone’s disapproval or ridicule triggers that self-awareness. But in the case of Adam and Eve, it appears that the only ones disapproving of them are Adam and Eve themselves.

    I think that what we see here is the damage which occurs when children are inappropriately brought into the adult world. They experience things which normally are reserved for the adults, but do not have the knowledge, maturity or perspective to process what is happening to them. Seeing themselves as one who knows good and evil was an adult activity. And just like when children are introduced to the adult activity of sex by a perpetrator, Adam and Eve reacted with shame. The felt sure that there was something wrong with their nakedness and sought to hide it and themselves.

    I think that what happened would be akin to what it might be like if a very young child were to gain an adult perspective and apply it to themselves. For example, my youngest daughter was known around the house for a long time as Lady Godiva. She was forever stripping down to her birthday suit and wasn’t the least bit impressed at our insistence that she not walk out the front door naked or strip down to her sandals at the park. I also have a 13 year old son who would just as soon allow himself to be stabbed to death as strip down naked in public. What Adam and Eve experienced was probably a bit like what it would be like for my little Lady Godiva to suddenly have my 13 year old’s view of nudity just after doffing her clothing at the playground.

    What Adam and Eve experienced might be explained by considering another example; my husband has repeatedly told us that should he ever lose control of his bowel functions, he wants to be left out back with a gun. Which is ridiculous, of course, but a common enough sentiment. Imagine what it would be like for an infant to understand that we consider pooping on ourselves so repulsive that some people would prefer to die than to live with it. Knowing that wouldn’t suddenly give an infant the ability to control their bowel movements and use a toilet, but it could cause intense shame at a normal bodily function.

    Of course, we don’t view a streaking toddler as some sort of sexual deviant or an infant in a diaper as revolting. There’s nothing wrong with either the toddler or the infant, although as they get older our expectations of them will change. Similarly, there wasn’t anything wrong with Adam and Eve being naked before the fall. And there wasn’t anything wrong with them just after the fall. But lacking all perspective and understanding, they judged themselves harshly for what was both normal and appropriate for them as young children.

    The reality is that Adam and Eve hadn’t changed after the fall – only their view of themselves changed. They faced the daunting task of walking a path meant to be walked with knowledge without that knowledge. They were going to have to learn on the fly, from their mistakes. A task made much harder than it needed to be by the fact that they saw normal immaturity and lack of knowledge as evidence that something was wrong rather than as places where growth was called for. Add in the ongoing work of the accuser – the one who revels in condemning us, in misleading us, in offering deathly imitations of the things our hearts most yearn for an need and you have a recipe for all manner of evil and confusion. The result is the skewed, harsh perspective of themselves and how to deal with life which fallen man and woman passed on to their children, and which their children passed onto their children and which has been passed down through the generations to us.

    Of course, all was not lost. We’ve stumbled and erred and done great harm to ourselves and this creation we were giving dominion over. Yet, God willing, as time has passed we have learned more about ourselves and the ways the world works. We have gained some of the knowledge which we should have had at the beginning of our journey of living as people who know good and evil. And we are hopefully maturing a bit past the wrathful toddler stage of dealing with life.

    When Jesus showed up 2000 years ago, he lived in a world which was utterly shaped by the results of the fall. By humanity’s wrath, its trauma, its fear, its lack of understanding and immaturity. But there was this one people – the ones who God had found so long ago “like grapes in the desert”. And he made a covenant with them to be their God. And gradually, painfully, over many centuries, dealt with them much like a parent might deal with a traumatized, drug addicted child, working to draw them back to himself – to the safety of the ones who love them. He met them where he found them, making offers of safety and rescue when possible and setting boundaries and consequences when needed. And when the time was right, he went in himself. He absorbed all of the sin, fury and cruelty that we could throw at him. And he overcame. He told us to stop worrying about his wrath and accept his forgiveness. From that point on, he declared, our job wasn’t to try to set ourselves right with him – our job was to learn how to love as Jesus had taught us. To gain the knowledge we had been deprived of so long ago. And begin the process of our redemption from the long nightmare we’ve been living. Until the day we have learned to live and love with enough wisdom for him to dwell among us in the new heaven and earth which is the promised end we are heading towards.

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    Does God Sit Around Monitoring Our Thoughts? And Other Pertinent Questions

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    Are there any limits on suffering? Does God sit around monitoring our thought? Does God know everything that’s going to happen before it happens? These are some big questions which I’m going to be tackling today. But first, if you haven’t already, you really do need to go read my last two posts so you won’t be totally confused:

    Why Was The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden?

    The Fall Wasn’t Our Fault

    And you should probably read this post as well to get a grip on what all this is about:

    I Think I’m About to Lose a Bunch of Readers

    Don’t worry – they’re all short. This post will still be here when you get done.

    ‘Kay? All caught up? Alrighty, then. So, I’ve been talking about the story of the fall for the last couple of days. But for the moment, I want to rewind a bit and go back to Genesis 2. In that chapter, God brings the animals to Adam to be named. Words are powerful things - “In the beginning was the Word . . . Through him all things were made.” Naming has been seen in many cultures and in many times as an act with great mythological and symbolic power. And God gave the power to name and label the creatures of his own creation over to the man. This is the act of a God who is willing to allow for the unpredictable and in not threatened by what he doesn’t direct.

    One of the grand arguments of Christianity is whether God knows exactly what is going to happen at all times or if events can be unexpected and unpredictable. I wrote yesterday and in another post on time that I think that there is a difference between God as he exists outside of time and God as he acts within the flow of material creation and time. Outside of time, all that is and will be and ever was exists together and God is complete, whole and unchanging. Within the material world where time exists, God is in dynamic relationship with his creation which does act and unfold in unexpected and unpredictable ways. In fact, I believe that God enjoys this aspect of creation. I think it gives creation an almost game-like quality and allows for true relationship. When God handed the naming of the animals over to Adam, God lost nothing. God does not have our dysfunctional need for control and predictability. He is sovereign all on his own to the point of being able to hand the naming of the animals off to humanity.

    I bring all of that up because one of the questions raised about what I’ve been sharing regarding the story of the fall is whether God knew it was going to happen. It was made very clear to me that the answer is no. Not only was it not part of his plan, it was not something which had been anticipated. As I explained yesterday, the accuser had a role to play in God’s kingdom but it in no way required inviting children into an adult game. God trusted the accuser and did not know that he had it in his heart or mind to do such a thing. (For those who claim that this indicates an error on God’s part, an error is doing something wrong. God did nothing wrong. You could say that God was mistaken in his trust, but this is the sort of “mistake” which God himself claims to have made in other places: Genesis 6:5-6 and Jeremiah 32:35 are two examples.)*

    Now, the question comes up though of how it could be that God did not know the accuser’s plans. Why did he not perceive that there was this dark and malicious intent in him? My understanding is that the separate-ness from God that we experience is part of the game that us to experience life as individuals. It is a separation that is breached only by willingly allowing entry. And we do control entry – I will allow God entry to my Sunday morning, but not to my sex life, for example. God respects the separation as part of allowing the whole process to play out. Life puts pressure on us to allow entry in all areas simply because it is how life is meant to be lived. Outside of time, God knows all things. While working inside of time, God doesn’t go rifling through other people’s minds without permission and as such it was possible for the Accuser to hide his intentions from God.

    Which leaves us with the question of why something so devastating was allowed to exist as a possibility. The reality is that not all things which could happen are allowed to be. We can’t stick our elbows in our ears, for example. We also can’t use our mind-control powers to force others to do our bidding against their will. (So we use money instead. ;p I kid – kind of.) We haven’t been born with the ability to interfere with the flow of time. Couldn’t God have found a way to set everything up so as to eliminate the possibility of the fall? Or to put a finer point on it, is there a limit to the amount of suffering God will allow us to experience? The answer from history seems to be that either there is little or no limit to the suffering which is allowed to exist or that God is incapable of limiting suffering. My own understanding is that God’s creation depends on freedom to function and as such the only things which are not allowed as possibilities are those things which cannot possibly be redeemed. Which means that if it happens or exists, it is within God’s power to redeem it. So although God did not know that the fall was going to happen, it was allowed as a possibility because God is able to redeem it.

    So, I went really meta on y’all today. In the next post we’ll be going back to the actual story of the fall. In particular, we’re going to look at why Adam and Eve reacted the way they did and what it means for us today. I’ll also talk about God’s response to what happened. And after that, well don’t worry – I’ve got more! I’m like a trainwreck you can’t look away from, I tell ya!

    *I know that some of you come from faith traditions in which God’s perfect foreknowledge and control of future events was a paramount teaching. A lot of churches – especially those which follow Calvinist or neo-reform teachings view open theism (the teaching that God is engaged in a dynamic relationship with creation rather than a pre-ordained one) as a serious heresy. So, here’s a link to an explanation/defense of open theism by pastor/theologian Greg Boyd. I don’t agree with absolutely everything he says, but he’s a big supporter of open theism and includes many scriptural supports for the idea.

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    The Fall Wasn’t Our Fault

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    So yesterday, we left young Adam and Eve standing next to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As I explained, I was told/shown that the tree was to Adam and Eve what the adult world is to a child. Rather than being a temptation or even a danger, it was a good thing which let them know that there is more to life than their childish existence. God told them not to eat from that tree because the experiences of the adult world are not for children to have – adult experiences being the fruit they were not to eat. Under normal circumstances, the existence and close proximity of the adult world does not pose a threat to children, nor is it particularly tempting. Unless one of the adults does something to bring a child into the adult world inappropriately. Enter the serpent.

    It has often been pointed out that the serpent isn’t specifically identified with the character of Satan in this story. However, the serpent was indeed Satan (whatever or whomever Satan is in reality). The connection between the serpent and Satan is made in several places in scripture – particularly in Revelation 12 and Revelation 22. But even more damning is that both the serpent and the character of Satan work in the same way. Satan is a Hebrew word meaning accuser or adversary. In Revelation 12:11, the serpent is described as “the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night”.

    Satan’s job is to serve as an adversary. He does this through accusations. Which is to say that Satan calls the goodness of God, creation and humanity into question by offering alternative explanations for what is going on. So at the opening of the book of Job, we get the accusation that Job isn’t faithful because he loves God, but because God has protected him. When Job remains faithful after losing everything, Satan claims it is only because Job has not suffered physical harm himself. This is what Satan does – looks for any explanation possible to explain away what is good, true, faithful and loving. When Satan tempts Jesus at the end of his 40 days in the wilderness, he uses scriptures to argue that things which are forbidden – grasping power, testing God, etc – are in fact scripturally sanctioned. He offers an alternative vision of reality which Jesus rejects.

    The thing is that Satan had a legitimate role in God’s kingdom. One of the ways to view the existence of the material world is that it is God exploring and expressing the reality of himself through this physical creation. I’m probably going to flub this explanation, but outside of the created world, God exists as whole, complete and unchanging. Within the created world, God can unpack all of that and share himself with us, his creation. One of the ways which we can know and understand something is by seeing how it is and isn’t like something else. God is light – in him there is no darkness. But without darkness, how can the light be known? If there is only undifferentiated light, nothing can be seen or observed. And this is the purpose which Satan serves. He introduces the dark by which the light can become known.

    Or to put it in slightly less abstract, esoteric terms, God is love and created everything in and through love. But what does that mean? Are there limits to love? When people suffer, is that a sign of a lack of love? How do we know what comes from love and what comes from serving self? Satan’s job is to come up with challenges to God. He tells God, “that’s not really love; here’s what’s really going on.” And God then has a puzzle or a challenge which must be resolved in such a way as to demonstrate that love is, in fact, the ultimate reality. This is why the serpent was “the cleverest of all the creatures”. If you are working on a tricky problem and need to step outside your own head for perspective, you seek out the most clever, challenging person you know to offer the opposing view and poke holes in your ideas in order to tease whole thing out. That’s the Accuser’s reason for existing

    So when the serpent approaches Adam and Eve, he does what he always does – he makes an accusation – offers a skewed vision of reality: “did God really say that you can’t eat the fruit of the garden?” Eve’s response is interesting. She actually adds to God’s instructions claiming that they were not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good or evil nor were they to touch it. But God hasn’t told her not to touch it. Even before the fall, human had a tendency to err it seems. The serpent responds: “God isn’t worried about you dying. God just doesn’t want you to be like him.” It’s the game he plays.

    Here’s the thing, though; this was a game to be played with God. It wasn’t a child’s game. What we have here is a powerful, clever creature – one whose job it was to act as an adversary for God himself – bringing the grown-up’s world into the lives of children. Remember – the existence and proximity of the grown-up world is neither a threat nor a real temptation to children unless an adult inappropriately involves them in the world of adults. Which is exactly what happened here.

    When this was shown to me, it was impressed on me that what happened at the fall was akin to what happens when a child is sexually abused. The fact that the grown-ups have sex is no threat to children, even if they are aware that it is happening. But when grown-ups involve children in sex, it is horribly damaging to them. Now, you may protest that Eve made a considered decision when she ate of the fruit: “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.” However, this is exactly what predators do. They induce their victims to make a decision to engage in something which they should never have been invited or tempted to do. They create the appearance of willing co-operation on the part of their victim. In fact they count on this dynamic – children who are being victimized often to do not seek help because they see themselves as culpable in what is happening to them. They are doing something they know they are not supposed to be doing. Which is exactly what happened here with Adam and Eve.

    We have always thought and been taught that the fall was what happened when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and reached for what was forbidden. But it was strongly impressed on my that the fall was in actually an act of abuse by a more powerful creature against immature, unprepared, unsuspecting mankind. And if you look at the reaction of Adam and Eve after the fall, you will see that their reaction is very much in line with how children react after being abused. They feel intense shame. They hide. They blame themselves while also lashing out at those closest to them. This is what happens when a child is traumatized and exposed to things which they are unprepared to cope with. We see it everyday.

    And all too often, callous and unthinking adults do blame victims of abuse as much as the victims do themselves. They say unless you put up a huge fight, it wasn’t really abuse. Or that if the child wasn’t physically forced to do it, it wasn’t really abuse. Or if there was any element of choice involved – the child went there, touched that, listened to this – then it was their fault. But the reality is that a person with power and experience inviting children into adult experiences and exposing them to adult experiences is a predatory abuser. The serpent was a predatory abuser. And Adam and Eves were victims of the worst, most damaging case of child abuse on record. And through them, we all fell victim.

    In my next posts I’ll get into more detail about why such a terrible thing could happen, the aftermath and results of having eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, what this all means for sin (traumatized people tend to fall into a lot of sin, after all) and some of the implication for our thinking and theology today. But for now, I want to leave you with this: as the story I was being told ended and I was coming back to myself, I sensed God telling that he was so, so sorry for what we’ve all been through. Yes, we’ve handled things badly, but the road we found ourselves walking was a broken one that was never meant for us. He never wanted us to go through so much suffering and it’s broken his heart to watch his lost, broken and suffering children on it. It wasn’t our fault that we lost our place in the garden and our innocence. There’s no going back, but it’s time to lay down the guilt and self-condemnation and allow ourselves to be comforted and redeemed by our pappa whose heart has broken over us and who has always, always loved us.

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    Why Was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden?

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    Hi, I’m Rebecca and I’d just like to say at the outset that to the best of my knowledge I’m not actually crazy. And no drugs were involved in the making of this post. Of course, the only reason for someone to start by declaring themselves sane and not drug addled is because they are about to say something which will make people think otherwise. Which is what I’m about to do.

    But first, a little background. Perhaps you recall me saying a few times that I have a bit of a fixation on the creation stories. I rejected a literal reading of them ages ago. A supposedly literal reading is incompatible both with the evidence from God’s creation and the text itself. I don’t honestly know if the stories are a figurative retelling of things that actually happened. Or if they are true myths in the sense that they are not true because they actually happened, but true because they happen all of the time. Probably as far as I would go is to say that they tell the story of a deep spiritual reality which has been made manifest in the material world.

    I think that the creation stories are important because they are our faith’s explanation for the start of all things concerning us. They give us a peek at our true identity, who we were made to be, what our relationship with creation is, how God works and ultimately, hold the key to figuring out what is wrong with us. That last bit seems particularly important to me, as it is very hard to fix something if you don’t know what is wrong with it.

    Over the last 20 years I have spent what probably amounts to an absurd amount of time meditating on and trying to puzzle out the creation stories. There are two things I have learned which are particularly relevant to our discussion here today. The first is that the garden was a place for Adam and Eve live and learn. It was almost like a playground for them in the sense that for a child, the whole world is a playground. Like a playground, the primary purpose of the garden was for Adam and Eve to have fun, but also to develop skills. And like a playground, it probably wasn’t entirely safe, but life with no risk isn’t really the sort of setting which mankind tends to thrive in. Too much is bad, of course, but too little is stunting.

    The other thing I have learned is that Adam and Eve were children. Remember the other day when I explained that adam actually means mankind and that when God made and dealt with Adam, he was dealing with mankind? Well, just like each individual person is born needing time to grow up into maturity, mankind is likewise in the process of growing up. There has been a tendency to assume that Adam and Eve were just like us, only without sin. However, Adam and Eve were just like us the same way that 3 year old me was just like me today. I’m still me, and I may or may not have actually improved since them. But inevitably I’ve grown and changed a good deal between 3 and 39.

    The point being that Adam and Eve were very young. We need only look at their actions immediately after the fall to see this. They were young enough to have no body modesty. They were not yet using the materials around them to make things. When God showed up after the fall, they were hiding like a couple of kids with their feet sticking out from under the curtains next to a broken vase. And when confronted, the response was “she did it!” These were not sophisticates. (I recently learned that this idea of Adam and Eve as children was also held by both Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus of Lyons. So I’m not the first to argue/pick up on this.)

    OK, so that’s all interesting and maybe a bit challenging, but now I’m going to go all wack-a-doodle on y’all. See, what happened was that a little less than a year ago, I suddenly got really tired pretty early in the morning. I went to lay down until it passed and had a dreamy-but not really a dream thingy. It was like I was being told a story with a few images. And when it was over, I woke right up and told my husband about it. I’ve shared it with just a few other people in the time since and now I’m going to share it with y’all. Of course, as with all such claims, you need to “test the Spirit” as they say. And I have often prayed that if anything I say is false, that it would be allowed to slip away and be forgotten rather than taking hold and leading people astray, and this is no exception. But I think that if you open your mind to this, you’ll realize that everything I am about to say has been right in front of us in scripture and in human nature all along – we just hadn’t seen it before.

    So, what I was told/shown started with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I have always wondered why in the world just a dangerous thing was put right in the middle of the garden the way it was. Some people would argue that it was a test of Adam and Eve’s obedience or trust in God, but that seems an awful lot like handing your little kid a ball and setting him down next to a highway to play with the warning, “don’t follow the ball into the street now!” Bad parenting. But what I was told was that the tree was actually there for a perfectly good and healthy reason.

    Going back to Adam and Eve being children, imagine for a moment, what it would be like to be children in a world where adults didn’t exist. Not so much where adults didn’t exist in the sense of being there to provide correction or supervision, but didn’t exist in such a way that children would believe that there was nothing more to life than childhood. A lot of us grew up in times when children were basically allowed to run free. We could go for long stretches of time without dealing with an adult. Until pretty recently, it was normal for groups of kids to spend their time together in their own little universe. But always, you knew that there was a world of adults out there. Your child universe wasn’t all there was and you knew it. This was what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was to Adam and Eve. It was the adult world which existed and let them know that there was more to existence than their childish lives.

    Of course, kids do like to peek in on the adults from time-to-time. The hide on the stairs to try and catch a glimpse of what the grown-ups are watching on TV after they’ve been sent to bed. Put their ears up to doors to try and catch what the grown ups are talking about at the dinner parties that the little ones haven’t been invited to. Usually the kids figure out pretty quickly that grown-ups are boring with their talk about politics and money and whether the new drapes go well with the sofa. Soon enough they wander off to see if they can get enough air to fly by using bed sheets and jumping from one bed to another.

    So, one day Adam and Eve were hanging out by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, listening in on the adults. And along came the serpent. “The cleverest of all the creatures.” And what happens next is actually more horrible and tragic than we have ever imagined. But, I have a messy house and dinner to prepare and all that other sort of boring adult stuff that needs to be done. So you’re going to have to stay tuned . . .

    BTW, while you’re waiting here’s some of my other writing which touches on the creation stories:

    Adam and Eve Part 1

    Adam and Eve Part 2

    Original Sin Gets a Bad Rap

    It’s the Prime Directive

  • If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other

    Moving From “Me” to “We”

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    If you are an American Christian, odds are really, really good that at some point you have been told that as you read scripture, you should try inserting your name for the word “you” in parts of scripture where Israel or God’s people are being addressed. So, I could read, “Rebecca shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of her God. No longer will they call Rebecca Deserted, or name her land Desolate. But Rebecca will be called Hephzibah, and her land Beulah; for the LORD will take delight in Rebecca, and her land will be married.” (Isaiah 62:4) It’s not a terrible idea; sometimes we do need help personalizing scriptures and realizing that the love expressed applies to ourselves. Of course, if you do this, eventually you will end up with something like “Rebecca also took her beautiful jewels made of My gold and of My silver, which I had given her, and made for herself male images that she might play the harlot with them.” (Ezekial 16:17) Which is a little too personal maybe.

    Now, if your pastors/teachers are any good at all, they have probably also taught you that in nearly all of the places where God speaks to “you” or even where Paul and Jesus address “you”, unless a specific person is being addressed, the word used indicates a plural you. So it’s more of a “y’all” than “you, Rebecca, sitting over there eating jelly beans.” This ought to be obvious as usually the word “you” is being used to address the nation of Israel or an entire church or the group of people being spoken to. But we Americans are notoriously hyper-individualistic. So with or without a anyone’s encouragement, we do tend to read scripture as if it were speaking to us individuals rather than to a collective group.

    A while back, I became convicted that the hyper-individualistic programming of our culture isn’t compatible with Christianity. I matter as an individual, but I am also part of a larger body. My life is not for me alone, but for the good of God’s Kingdom – a Kingdom which encompasses all of creation. If I see my life and my faith as primarily about me, I am very much mistaken.

    What I came to realize is that countering hyper-individualism isn’t just a matter of prioritizing social justice or even church fellowship. Rather hyper-individualism hides very deep truths about our identities, our purpose and even the meaning of our lives from us. Because the truth is that my life isn’t about “me”. My life and your life and the life of every other human on the planet is about “we”.

    Now, that might sound like some new-agey, mumbo-jumbo, but it’s actually very deeply embedded in scripture. Go back to the very beginning. God made “adam”. That’s adam with a lowercase “a”. It means “man” as in “mankind”. God didn’t make A man. He made humanity. And he called humanity Adam. (The word “adam” is actually used several hundred times in the Old Testament. It really does mean mankind/men/people!) When God was dealing with Adam, he was dealing with humanity.

    Ages ago, my husband pointed out to me that with few exceptions, God judges nations – peoples – rather than individuals. I found this idea offensive, frankly. I should be judged on my own merits, not on what the people around me are doing! But the reality is that a culture and a society are made up of the individuals in it. Unless, I am like Abram and have followed God’s lead to come out from among a sinful people, I am part of the society I live in and will be judged as it is judged. Look at the story of Sodom. God agrees that if there are even 10 righteous men in the city, he will not destroy it. In the end, the city is destroyed because it was beholden to a culture of violence, depravity and inhospitality. Lot clearly is not an innocent (he offers up his virgin daughter’s to a mob, after all!). But he does at least stand up to the forces of the culture around him and for that God allows him and his family to escape destruction. We are responsible not just for personal morality, but for how we handle ourselves in relation to the culture around us.

    Shortly before his death, Jesus prayed over his followers and over us – his followers yet to come. In that prayer Jesus prays repeatedly that we would be one as he and the father are one. We often read this as being about church unity. But it goes much deeper than that. Trinitarian theology teaches that God is both one and three. Over the centuries, a great deal of time, hot air and ink has been spent trying to parse out what that means. But what we know is that in some way God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are all one being, despite being three persons – for lack of a better word. When Jesus prays that we will be one as he and the father are one, this is the sense in which he is praying. That we would be both “I” and “we”. Both me, Rebecca and we, humanity, of which Rebecca is one individual. (Of course, theologically speaking, Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit are all of one substance which has its own implications for us – am I of one substance with you and just don’t know it? Many spiritual teachers have claimed just that. Our scriptures are largely silent on this beyond teaching that we retain our identities after death.)

    Or let’s consider it another way. Each of us has the same identity. Each human being was created in the image of God. It is, at the root, who we are. There’s an ancient rabbinical saying which Jesus would have known as well that says, “When Caesar puts his image on a coin, all the coins come out identical. When that One who is beyond rulers puts the Divine Image on a ‘coin,’ all the ‘coins’ come out unique.” Yet for all of our differences, we all have the same identity as image bearers. I recently read somewhere else that every person I meet is another version of me. That’s how deeply we are connected. And that’s what we are missing when we are working out of a hyper-individualistic mindset.

    As I started understanding these realities, I rather purposefully shifted my language to reflect the reality that I am not simply “me”, but am part of a larger “we”. It was an illuminating shift. I found that when I’m thinking in terms of “me” rather than “we”, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. But once I started using we language, I could see that the news was about the way we humans were behaving towards each other rather than about discrete events. Movies are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are or were or could be or wish we were or might have been. Our laws and policies are about the way we organize ourselves, set our priorities and treat each other. If I don’t like the way we are behaving, well, that’s an awful lot like when I don’t like the way I am behaving. If I don’t like the way I am behaving, I need to figure out why I’m doing things I know I shouldn’t be doing and set about fixing and unlearning and relearning. I don’t start a war with myself or engage in daily arguments with myself over it. I figure out what the problem is and make real, practically changes to address them. It works the same when we aren’t behaving the way we should.

    Reverend Terry Hamilton-Poore has said:

    According to the Presbyterian Church’s Book of Order, when a person is baptized, the congregation answers this question: ‘Do you, the members of this congregation, in the name of the whole Church of Christ, undertake the responsibility for the continued Christian nurture of this person, promising to be an example of the new life in Christ and to pray for him or her in this new life?’ We make this promise because we know that no adult belongs to himself or herself, and that no child belongs to his or her parents, but that every person is a child of God. Because of that, every young one is our child, the church’s child to care for. This is not an option. It is a responsibility.

    If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten we belong to each otherThis is how it works – we belong to each other. This has always been true, but this moment in history is probably the first time we’ve been able to see the reality of it so clearly. If I eat chocolate, odds are very good that a child in slavery harvested the beans for it. Another version of me has the life they have because of seemingly innocuous things that I do. My engagement ring probably bought a gun that was used to kill someone. Someone made with the same image as me at their core. I am wearing clothing sewn by a woman in a sweat shop. A woman just like me, only in a different place. And if she were in my place, she’d be wearing a shirt made in a sweat shop too. It’s overwhelming, really to have to face the reality that we human beings can’t do anything without it affecting people a world away who we barely know exist. But if you take that reality and add to it the fact that we all belong to each other, hope appears. The idea that the $100 I was going to spend on a new lamp might actually have been meant for someone else is no longer so strange and incomprehensible. It starts to make sense to me that I was given that excess so I could make sure it got to someone who needs it. We really are all in this together.

    One of the amazing things about learning to think in this way is that rather than my own personal identity disappearing, as those still caught in hyper-individualistic thinking fear is the case, I actually matter more. Who I am is part of a larger whole. If I want the larger whole to be better, then I have to be better. That’s the part that I control. It’s my little piece of the puzzle to work on. And the healthier and more whole I am, the more I am able to tend to others. And as I tend to others, I run into those parts of me which are still broken or immature or neglected. The parts of me which are selfish or prone to dysfunction or scared. And as those are uncovered, I can bring them to God for restoration. Instead of becoming better because I’m supposed to or I want to, I am becoming better so that I can help humanity be better. As we all do it, the world starts to change.

    Despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Muhammad Ali sometimes given speeches in support of his social advocacy work. At the start he will hold up one finger and say, “me.” Then he will hold up a fist and say, “we.” Power doesn’t come from the hyper-individualistic me. Power comes from “we”. We are all in this together. We are Adam – mankind. We do belong to each other. And it was Jesus’ fervent prayer that the we would be one as he and the father are one.

  • submission-umbrellas

    Worst Clobber Verse EVER – Christian Patriarchy Edition

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    In a more perfect world, the title of this post would be complete jibberish to all of my lovely readers. But alas, we live in a world which is in the process of being redeemed, so some of you know all too well about Christian Patriarchy and clobber verses. However – joy of joys! – we live in a world which is in the process of being redeemed and I know that some of you have no idea what Christian Patriarchy or clobber verses are. So, for the blissfully uninitiated, allow I to explain a bit.

    At its simplest, Christian Patriarchy is the teaching that there is a God ordained hierarchy in which men are over women and children. A daughter is under her father’s headship until she marries and responsibility for her is transfered to her husband. Ideally in this arrangement, the man is responsible for protecting his wife and daughter from other men as well as providing for her and overseeing her spiritual, moral and personal development. In exchange for this protection and leadership, a female treats her father/husband with respect, obedience and deference. Although this arrangement has been propagated around the world and throughout time irregardless of religion, Christian Patriarchy proponents insist that this is a Christian arrangement rather than just something people have had a tendency to do. Like going to war or practicing dietary restrictions.

    A clobber verse is a verse of scripture which is used to provide definitive proof – in the mind of the person using it – that a particular idea or teaching is true, biblical and theologically unassailable. Now I have a few verses which I will use this way all day, everyday. “God is love” for example. What makes a clobber verse a clobber verse is that inevitably, they are pulled completely out of the context they were spoken into. Nearly always, on closer examination  the verse in question doesn’t even say what the person using it seems to think it is saying. And as a rule, the clobber verse is used to support something which is expressly forbidden by scripture – like oppressing someone, condemning someone or creating division in the body. An example of a classic clobber verse is “I am the way, the truth and the light. No one comes to the father but through me” getting pulled out as proof that only Christians will go to heaven. Even though it doesn’t actually say that at all.

    submission-umbrellasNow, the theological problems with Christian patriarchy are so numerous and obvious that books have been written on the topic. (In fact, if someone wants to give me an advance, I’d be happy to add another one to the genre!) Pretty much every point used to support the idea can easily be unwound to reveal it for the hot mess it actually is. But for today, I just want to focus on the clobber verse that gets used as a foundation for the whole thing. It’s Ephesians 5:23:

    For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.

    And we may as well throw 1 Corinthians 11:3 into the mix for good measure:

    Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.

    More than any other, these verses get pulled out as incontrovertible proof that it is the job of the husband to protect and lead his wife. Just like Jesus does the church. Except that Jesus offers very, very little protection to his followers. And his leadership of the church is, to put it mildly, not so strong. Now, even among those who aren’t Christian patriarchy types, this idea of Jesus as protector and leader may seem obvious and perhaps I lost you there, but really, let’s look at the evidence.

    I know that many of us have and do pray to Jesus for protection which is fine. But really, we’re talking about a man who repeatedly told his followers to expect to be crucified. And many of them were in the years after his death. If it’s protection you are looking for, Jesus isn’t really your go-to guy. In fact, if you’re really big on safety, Christianity probably isn’t the religion for you anyways.

    There are two times I can think of that Jesus actually expresses a desire to protect anyone. The first was when he lamented over Jerusalem saying:

    “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”

    (For those of you who aren’t up on your barnyard basics – a hen is a FEMALE chicken, btw. Not really a great support for the idea of men as protectors.*)

    And then in his prayer over his disciples in John 17:

    “Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name—the name you gave me—so that they may be one as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me.”

    Which is fine except that the whole prayer is one expressing ideas of equality, mutuality and unity – NOT hierarchy. Jesus protected them so that they would survive to act independently without him, not as a sign of his position above them!

    As for leadership, let’s think for a moment how exactly Jesus leads his church. Did he give his followers a plan to follow once he was gone? Nope. Did he tell them how to pick leaders? Nope. Did he tell them how to dress, how to handle their money, where to preach or leave behind a catechism to follow? Nope, nope, nope and nope. If you’re looking for justification for command and control leadership, Jesus definitely isn’t the role model you are looking for.

    Of course, Jesus did frequently tell people to follow him. And he was recognized as a teacher by his followers. But even in his life, his goal was always that those who followed him would be able to learn and then go out into the world independently. He sent his disciples out to practice preaching and casting out demons on their own, for example. In Luke 6 he says, “a student is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher.” Jesus asked people to follow him so that they could become like him, not so that they could be under him.

    So, there are elements of protection and leadership between Jesus and his church. But to read that a husband is to his wife as Jesus is to his church and come away with the idea that protection and leadership are what a husband ought to orient himself to is absurd. If we want to take this verse seriously, we need to look at what Jesus’ actual relationship with his people is. Jesus variously said that he came to lift oppression, offer freedom, offer rest, challenge, love, rescue, save, comfort, bring salvation. Those verses which say that the husband is to his wife as Jesus is to the church are saying that men ought to do for their wives what Jesus does for his church: offer freedom, rescue them from oppression, offer rest, love, comfort, etc. Like Jesus did with his followers, husbands are to help their wives get to a point of being able to stand on their own two feet and go out into the world as a strong, whole human being (ie unified). The verses which say that the husband is the head of the wife have nothing to do with hierarchy, power, control or roles and responsibilities. In reality, they teach just the opposite of what Christian Patriarchy proponents take from the verse.

    The truth of the matter is that Christian Patriarchy takes a man-made construct which addresses worldly concerns like who is over whom and attempts to use Christianity to justify it. But it doesn’t work. It’s not consistent with Jesus’ teachings or his behavior. The whole thing is nothing more than an illustration of that bible verse that says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” (Proverbs 16:25) The idea of men over women has seemed right to humanity for a very long time. And yet, it does lead to death. Despite having been tried for thousands of years and in a myriad of contexts, there has never been a culture in all of human existence where placing men over women as worked to make a peaceful, abundant, just society. All too often it has meant literal death for women at the hands of the men who were supposedly placed over them to protect them. Far from being God’s design for men and women, putting women under men is exactly the sort of thing which husbands are instructed to be rescuing their wives from – just as Christ rescued his people what was oppressing them.

    If you haven’t already, you can read some of my other writing on women and Christianity by clicking this link.

    ****************************************************************************************************************

    *Slightly off topic, but I feel compelled to address the issue of men as protectors a little more. I have had men react very strongly to the ideas I’m explaining here. For some men, being a protector is part of their identity and seen as one of their primary purposes in life. When I have challenged the idea of husband as protector, they felt personally attacked and diminished. So let me be clear: I think that men who view themselves as protectors can be a wonderful, Godly thing. Especially men who feel called and compelled to stand up for those who are too weak to stand up for themselves. I in no way mean to say that this impulse and virtue in men is bad.

    However, a willingness to protect is in no way primarily a male virtue. This is shown in scripture where God describes himself as a protective mother bear or mother eagle. As well as in our everyday lives where women are often fiercely protective of others. In fact, I have known several people who were raised with predatory men and always the mother was judged in the harshest terms for not protecting her children from the abuser. For all our talk about men as protectors, we have strong expectations that women be protectors as well.

    The problem we often run into with men as protectors is two fold. First of all, protection often becomes a justification for restricting the freedom and autonomy of the people being protected. In contrast, the model seen in scripture is primarily protection by driving away threatening forces so that the protected can live freely and unencumbered. Secondly, male protection has a tendency to fixate on physical safety to the exclusion of the daily need to protect hearts, spirits and even emotions from being crushed. As we see in scripture, Jesus wasn’t really concerned with the physical safety of his followers – he promised them death. But he was careful to protect them from the enemy who could destroy their souls.

  • bible

    How I Read Scripture

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    Want to see me turn into a psycho raving wiotch? Say something like this to me: “if the book of Genesis – particularly the creation – isn’t a historical record of what actually happened, then the bible isn’t trust worthy and our faith is meaningless.” Seriously – I made myself stop engaging in online discussions about creation because I am incapable of behaving like a decent human being, much less like a good Christian, when confronted with crap like that. In fact, just recently I broke my rule and ended up telling someone that the “god” he served – who is so weak and pathetic that he can be toppled by some labcoats and DNA – was a worthless piece of filth that wasn’t worthy of being squashed under the feet of the mighty God of the universe that I know. Which while true, may not have been the best demonstration of Christian tolerance and charity that I’ve ever displayed. So now you know why I normally don’t allow myself to partake of such discussions.

    But for a lot of people who were taught some version of what is called inerrancy in certain Christian circles, the question does remain – how should we be reading and understanding the bible if not as the factually accurate Word of God, completely free from error or inconsistency? In the last few days, I’ve read a few other people’s explanations for how they deal with the hard parts of scripture or the parts which are in conflict with one another. Mostly the answers seemed to be that if there was a passage which portrayed God in what we’d consider a bad light, they would balance that passage against other passages which contradicted and decide that those took precedence over the negative passage. Or sometimes they would simply view a passage or story as an anachronism – a reflection of the cultural assumptions of the people at the time which was basically put in for their own benefit and not ours. Honestly, the answers I’ve read seem a bit like confirmation of the accusation that people simply pick and choose which parts of scripture to accept as true. So, I thought I’d share my own particular way of dealing with scripture with y’all.

    Thankfully, by the time I had been exposed to the idea of inerrancy, I had already read the bible a time or two so I knew enough to take it with a grain of salt. However, I truly hope that it is clear from my writing that I do, in fact, hold the bible in very high regard. It would be hard for me to put into words just how important the bible is to me and the actual love I have for it. Which given the fact that I’m a writer who is seldom at a loss for words is saying a great deal. And I don’t feel free to ignore or dismiss parts of scripture because I don’t like or agree with them. Instead, I actually have a pretty well developed approach for understanding scripture and dealing with the difficult parts which I will try to explain briefly below.

    First, I understand that unlike Muslims with the Koran or even Mormons and the Book of Mormon, Christians and Jews have always understood that our scripture was not dictated directly by God. Rather, it has always been considered to be inspired by God and written by men. Which means that it reflects both the input of God and man. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the scripture is God’s story alone – that anything which is not completely consistent with the reality and truth of God is absent from it. However, the scripture is rather clearly not just the story of God, but also the story of man. One of the best illustrations of this is the Book of Judges. The Book of Judges is filled with some of the bloodiest, most disturbing stories in scripture. But it has this odd feature which I just love. At several spots, it says something to the effect of, “there was no king in Israel in those days so each man did as he thought best.” If we read those stories as heroic tales of God’s people, we’ve missed the point. However, if we read it as an illustration of what people thought was good and heroic at that time, we can understand more clearly just what God was dealing with. These were not people who knew and understood God – these were very fallen, very misguided people who did terrible things because such things seemed best to them. So, as I read scripture, I do remember that sometimes I’m not being shown what is true about God, but about man. Which leads to my second point . . .

    The bible is a developing story, not a stagnant reference book. After the fall, God had to find a way to draw a confused, disoriented and immature humanity back to himself. It was a process which took time. The bible tells the story of ways in which God has worked out this process of redemption. There’s this lovely verse in Hosea in which God says, “I found Israel like grapes in the desert.” It wasn’t that Israel or the founders of Israel were perfect – much of the OT is taken up with illustrating just how imperfect they were. Rather, it seems to be that God had found people who he could work with. Wild grapes make poor wine. But the very best wines come from grapes which were cultivated over time from their wild ancestors. If we think that God chose a group of bronze aged people to hold up as exemplars of faith and morality and upon whom he would bestow his timeless law, we have totally missed what’s happening. Rather, what we see in scripture is the story of this process of cultivating a people from wild grapes to those worthy of making new wine with.

    The third way that I read scripture is that I start with the idea that God is good, God is loving and God is always working towards redeeming his creation. So when I get to a part of scripture which is hard to understand, I will often stop to ask myself if there is a way of understanding this passage which is consistent with the idea that God is good, loving and always working towards redemption. As an example, there are some passages which seem to portray God as taking pleasure in the destruction of the wicked. This idea of God taking pleasure in destruction of people is offensive to a lot of us. However, God created all of us to bear his image. Those who are wicked are bearing an image which is false – it doesn’t reflect either the reality of God or the reality of who they were created to be. Perhaps scripture is telling us that although it will be painful for those who have to go through destruction to experience it, God will be delighted and take pleasure in seeing this false identity destroyed so that the truth of who created these people to be can be revealed. The words of scripture themselves may not say such a thing explicitly, but by starting with these assumptions about God, we can often find a way of understanding scripture which is both consistent with the text and with the goodness of God.

    The fourth and for now final idea which I try to hold onto when reading scripture is that I don’t actually know what the text is telling me. I really can’t think of anything which destroys our ability to understand and benefit from scripture so much as the assumption that we already know what they are telling us. Hebrew scholar Ellen F. Davis has said:

    [It is] the gravest scandal of the North American church in our time – namely the shallow reading of scripture. Such reading results from the assumption that we already know just what the bible says; therefore our reading is a simple rehearsal of what (we think) we know rather than an attempt to probe deeper. ~ From Wonderous Depth: Preaching the Old Testament

    It’s like that saying that you can’t fill a cup that’s already full, Too many Christians are taught to approach scripture with a full cup and cram whatever they find there into their pre-existing understandings. It really cannot be overstated what a problem this is. We do not allow scripture to speak to us, to teach us and to show us what truths it hold – much less the limits of what we actually understand. And it’s all because we think we already know it all. We do such violence to the text this way. It is always hard to shake off prior assumptions, but that must be our goal. Otherwise we will never be able to allow the text to speak to and shape us as it ought to.

    As I mentioned above, I found the answers from some of those who reject literalism unsatisfying. If you look at my four points above, none of them include, “so I discard that passage” as an option. I do think that all of scripture is there because it’s supposed to be there. In fact, my experience has been that those passages which don’t make sense or conflict with reality are like markers screaming, “dig here!” There are treasures to be found there. Those markers are things which tell us that there’s something we’ve been missing or don’t understand properly. I think it’s a huge mistake to simply discard those parts of scripture.

    Now, it may well be that someone is reading this right now and thinking that I haven’t actually dealt with the crux of the problem. Is scripture true and if its not literally true, is it trustworthy? But that’s asking the wrong question. 2 Timothy 3:15-17 says:

    The holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

    The bible is meant to be a work out. It’s meant to teach and train. It’s meant to correct your assumptions. It’s mean to make you wise. Wisdom is not the same thing as knowing right from wrong or truth from falsehood. The devil knows these things and yet has no wisdom. Wisdom is a way of understanding. It means being able to take a story from 4000 years ago and figure out what it means for you today, when faced with a dirty, drunk, belligerent and obscene man on the street. Knowing history doesn’t equip you to do that. Having wrestled with and been shaped by scripture does. If you wrestle with scripture, it will humble you. If you let go of what you think it says, it will correct you. If you allow it to show you who man is and was, God will make more sense to you.

    Now, does all of this mean that I’m claiming that I understand all of scripture? That I have found a way to make every passage fit using my ideas/assumptions? No. Of course not. But that’s part of the deal. I cannot fully understand God. Nor can I fully understand scripture. There will always be more left to uncover, explore and think on for those who come after me. Scripture is not for me to conquer. It’s a privilege for me to wrestle with and be shaped by. And yet, what I do know is always enough. Even for a life as challenging, messy and confusing as my own.

  • girlreadingweb

    Is Reading Scriptures Literally, Literally Wrong?*

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    I came across a blog post by Father Stephen, an Orthodox priest about the problems with taking scriptures literally. On this blog, I have tended to focus on how insisting on taking scriptures literally leaves us vulnerable to being unable or unwilling to deal with reality or to losing our faith altogether when our literal understanding comes into conflict with reality. Father Stephen points out another, probably more important problem with a literal approach to scriptures: it engenders a shallow reading of scripture. From his post:

    The Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament, are frequently misread (from a classical Christian point of view) in a literal manner, on the simple evidence that the New Testament does not read the Old Testament in such a manner. Rather, as is clearly taught by Christ Himself, the Old Testament is “re-read” from a Christological point-of-view. Thus Jonah-in-the-belly-of-the-whale is read by the Church as Christ in Hades. The first Adam in the Garden is but a shadow and antitype of the Second Adam – the One who truly fulfills existence in the “image and likeness” of God. The Passover and the deliverance from Egypt are read as icons of the true Passover, Christ’s Pascha and the deliverance of all creation from its bondage to death and decay. Such a list could be lengthened until the whole of the Old Testament is retold in meanings that reveal Christ, or rather are revealed by Christ in His coming. . .

    A “literal” reading of the Old Testament would never yield such a treasure. Instead, it becomes flattened, and rewoven into an historical rendering of Christ’s story in which creative inventions such as “Dispensationalism” are required in order to make all the pieces fit into a single, literal narrative. Such a rendering has created as well a cardboard target for modern historical-critical studies, which delights itself only in poking holes in absurdities created by such a flattened reading.”

    Now, I do know that it is possible to see the deeper Christological meaning of the scripture stories while also maintaining a belief that these things are literally historical events, recorded in scriptures. And certainly there are certain things which we need to be literally true. For example, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:17 “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.”

    However, I think that Father Stephen is right that by seeing much of scripture as a record of events which can be shaped into a literal narrative, there is a strong tendency to “flatten” scriptures into nothing more than an account of historical events. A person who takes a very literal view of scriptures, will often also find themselves spending a fair amount of time either defending their perspective or avoiding what can threaten their perspective. To the extent that they are willing to deal with ideas contrary to a historical view of scriptures, they do so through the reporting of those who agree with them.

    I believe that scriptures themselves make it abundantly clear that in many places, the historical accuracy or lack thereof, is largely besides the point. We often miss it because we are reading translations, but a great deal of scriptures are written in poetic form. The use of imagery is widely used. There are places where we find hyperbole. Some stories are repeated and contradictory. Jesus himself taught using parables rather than finding “true” stories to illustrate his point. To insist that scriptures must be understood as historical accounts, even well written historical accounts, seems to me to be a violation of the very fabric of scriptures. Which again, is not to say that nothing in scriptures is literally true, and there are events such as the life, death and resurrection of Jesus which are supported by a variety of sources. But when we hang our faith on the idea that scriptures must be literally true, we are putting ourselves in grave danger of being left with a shallow, incurious faith which doesn’t reflect the full glory of an unlimited God.

    *Originally posted May 2008.

  • jerkaboutit

    Why We Christians Suck at Loving

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    Is there something about Christianity itself which leads to the sort of oppression which its adherents have too often been guilty of? You know – the inquisitions, colonialism, slavery, pretty much every interaction we ever had with First Nations people in the Americas. To name a few. The standard answer for western theologians is that the Christian faith and its teachings are not the problem – people’s sinful natures are. It’s the, “well those aren’t real Christians” blow off. However, South Korean theologian Andrew Sung Park posits a more honest – and more helpful – answer to this thorny issue of the convergence of Christianity and oppression. The problem as Sung Park sees it is that we westerners see Christianity as the answer to the problem of the sinner. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, so Jesus came and died for our sins so we can be forgiven and all that. Our theology, Sung Park argues, elevates the needs and concerns of the sinner over the needs and concerns of the people sinned against. And therein lies the problem.
    This may seem akin to blasphemy for many Christians for whom the problem of sin and sinners is THE message of Christianity. However, compare our sinner-centered approach to Christianity to the words which Jesus actually spoke.When Jesus started his ministry, this was the text he chose:

    “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind,to release the oppressed,to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” ~ Luke 4:18-19

    Jesus’ most famous sermon – the one which many scholars believe was his “stump speech” – the oratory he gave when he traveled to a new place and crowds gathered to hear him centered on this:

    “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

    “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

    “Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth.

    “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

    “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

    “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

    “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

    “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

    “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” ~ Matthew 5:3-12

    When Jesus spoke of the day of judgment, it wasn’t sinners who he focused on:

    “I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’

    “Then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink? ‘And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You? ‘When did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’

    “The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’” ~ Matthew 25:35-40

    Do you see the difference? Certainly, the forgiveness of sins matters. But Jesus’ life and teaching centered on the poor, the blind, the imprisoned, the mourning, the meek, the oppressed, the needy – not on the sinner. He spent far more time speaking of the need to forgive than about the need to seek forgiveness. I think Sung Park is correct in saying that we have erred in putting the sinner and not the weak, the oppressed and the suffering at the center of our faith.

    We see this distortion of our faith very strongly in American Christianity. We are very concerned both as a culture and within our churches with holding people accountable, morality, taking responsibility and upholding standards – all sinner focused activities. But we are far less concerned with lifting our fellow man’s burdens, offering solace to the suffering, refuge to the lost, freedom to the prisoner or liberation to the oppressed. In fact, when we do speak of the suffering, the lost, the prisoner and the oppressed, we use the language of accountability, morality and responsibility instead of the biblical language of solace, easing of burdens, refuge, freedom and liberation. We go so far as to tell people that those things will come through an embrace of accountability, morality and responsibility. But we have it backwards. The problem of the sinner is solved when the needs of the sinned against are met – not the other way around.

    The church is supposed to be a hospital where the sick go to be made well. But when the sinner and not the weak, weary, burdened and suffering are at the center of your theology, the church becomes at best a half-way house where people go to stay out of trouble and at worst a reform school where the way-ward are whipped into shape. And even worse than what it does to the church, is what it does to the way we relate to one another.

    I have known people who have mastered being responsible, who are active in their churches, volunteer in their community and haven’t broken any of the ten commandments in decades who have displayed breath taking cruelty to those near to them when they were weak, suffering and in need. And God-forbid that they had actually screwed up, fallen in the gutter or broken the rules. These supposedly good, Christian people wouldn’t piss on their fallen near and dear if they caught fire in front of them in a desert. Inevitably, their cruelty was justified in the name of demanding accountability, forcing responsibility and upholding morality. And often, the name of love (sometimes tough love) was given to what was nothing more than rank cruelty. When the problems of the sinner are your hammer, the weak, suffering, lost and dying look like nails sticking up out of the wood.

    What is particularly insidious about this distortion of our theology is that not only does it not solve the problem of sin; it creates and perpetuates it. It’s exceedingly rare to find someone raised with kindness, gentleness and tenderness who was cruel to those near to them like this. Back when I did prison ministry, I never met an imprisoned kid who hadn’t been egregiously abused. Hell, on pretty much every episode of Intervention, the addict suffered some trauma prior to starting their downward spiral. Sin creates damage to those who are sinned against. To stop the sinner, you must heal the damaged – they are usually one and the same. Offering forgiveness to the sinner lets them know that they are welcome in the hospital, but if you then stick them in the half-way house or the reform school and tell them to man-up, the cycle of sin will likely just continue from generation to generation.

    The truth is that it is a cruelty to give a starving man fishing lessons. It’s hard to learn anything with an aching, empty belly. Feed the starving man and when he is ready, he can learn to fish and teach his children to as well so that they won’t have to suffer as he did.

    Proverbs 16:25 says “there is a way which seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” Our sinner-centered theology seems right to us. A good number of people have achieved great success by sticking with the tenets of the half-way house or reform school. Or hope to one day. And a great many think that others would also be successful if they’d just get their crap together. But look around – people are suffering. Half of children in America are being born into broken homes. In certain income brackets, more marriages end in divorce than not. There’s a picture going around the internet of a little boy in African laying flat on the ground to drink from a muddy puddle with the caption “so you want a new iPhone 5?” The selling of poor children into slavery is commonplace in some parts of the world. If they are little girls, their slavery is often sexual slavery and it happens before they’ve even gone through puberty. Our way isn’t working. It seems right to us, but keeps leading to death. Even if it’s worked for you – we can’t wait for everyone else to catch up.

    Last night I found my 8 year old awake long after her bedtime. When I asked her if something was wrong, she told me, “I just keep thinking about the kids in my class who are mean to me who I have to give a valentine to even though I don’t like them.” I talked for a while with her about Jesus’ teachings about loving and doing good to our enemies and God’s perfect love. At the end of the conversation she asked me, “how come we have one way that we think we should do things but God always has a different answer that’s better? It’s like we can think of one thing to do and God has thousands of other ways of doing things that you’d never think of.” I told her it was because God made the game – he knows how it’s supposed to work.

    And that’s the deal – God knows how it works. And when he was here walking among us, sinners were a part of a much larger whole. The needs of the sinned against took center stage. I think the time has come for us to repent of having made sinners the center of the faith and set to work repairing the damage created by this error. For that to happen, we make Jesus’ priorities our priorities and his concerns our concerns. To do that we must stop trying to get everyone to act right and simply tend to one another:

    If you preach, just preach God’s Message, nothing else; if you help, just help, don’t take over; if you teach, stick to your teaching; if you give encouraging guidance, be careful that you don’t get bossy; if you’re put in charge, don’t manipulate; if you’re called to give aid to people in distress, keep your eyes open and be quick to respond; if you work with the disadvantaged, don’t let yourself get irritated with them or depressed by them. Keep a smile on your face.

    Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle. . .

    Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality. Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Laugh with your happy friends when they’re happy; share tears when they’re down. Get along with each other; don’t be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don’t be the great somebody.

    Don’t hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you’ve got it in you, get along with everybody. Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. “I’ll do the judging,” says God. “I’ll take care of it.”

    Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he’s thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don’t let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good. ~ Romans 12: 6-10, 13-21