Critical Discipleship

Jesus' last words in Luke

2012-03-12T01:39:00.001-07:00

There's an old set of commentaries from Pelican Books on the four gospels that were written in the sixties. G. B. Caird's book on St Luke in only a couple of hundred pages long - but every time I open it, it contains some incomparable gem. I have no book on Luke that I treasure more. The commentary itself is a work of art, and a deeply spiritual reflection on the scriptures from a beautiful soul, albeit from a "theological Liberal" whom I would probably disagree with on a variety of issues.

I'm sorry to say this work is completely ignored in Lukan scholarship. It's a "layman's" commentary, "non-technical" and worst of all "out-dated".

This is what Caird has to say on Jesus' final words in Luke 22:24-27

His life has been marked out from the common life of men, not merely by what he taught and achieved, but by what he experienced. Looking back now on his ministry he sees it as a series of trials, tests of his spiritual stamina. His call has been to drink the cup of experience to the dregs, to walk a path of obedience never before explored by man; and from the first wrestling with Satan in the wilderness to the last grim agony that now awaits him on the Mount of Olives he has had to face this destiny alone.

~ Caird, Saint Luke, pp. 239-40.

The Jesus you don't see.

2012-03-11T22:16:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, what you don't see in the gospels is as important as what you do see, says Jesuit spiritual director, Fr. Barry.

"Some note that he is a man of great purpose and energy. Some focus on his compassion for those in need… One man, a social activist, later told me that he did not believe the people who noticed the number of times Jesus went off by himself to pray, until he went back to reread the gospel. He then realised that he had been neglecting prayer in his own life and did not want to see that Jesus took time to pray… I recall one man who saw only the kindness of Jesus and did not notice until it was pointed out to him that Jesus is often angry in Mark’s gospel. In his own life he did not know how to deal with his own anger and, indeed, repressed it… a man could get angry because Jesus seems so much in a hurry… a woman might get angry because he picks only men as apostles…"

William A. Barry, S.J. Finding God in All Things: A Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius (Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1991), 90-91

Maralyn Monroe, Refugees, Christ and Feminism

2012-03-01T05:19:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I sat in the Refugee Review Tribunal for four hours, as I, and eight of my friends were cross-examined to prove that my two Bangladeshi refugee friends are gay.

These people have been ostracised from their families, outed by former lovers, beaten senseless, and sentenced to death by the local Imam, fled from city to city. Their bodies are full of scars and they are traumatised.

There is something surreal about sitting in front of a judge and being asked to prove they're gay. I have to prove that I'm not here trying to forge a false identity for these two people. How do I prove it? It beggars belief that they could be lying, but what can I put forward as proof?

"I am gay, so I know that they are gay." That's the argument the lawyer recommends to me. It feels too inauthentic to me so I say "I'm a good judge of character, and when they tell me their story, you can see the emotional pain they've suffered in their eyes and hear it in their voice. I'm their pastor and they've confided in me, and I've seen the scars."

During the hearing, we have breaks, and paging through the Sydney Morning Herald, I read of a Versace catwalk in Milan with horrifyingly anorexic models, protested by topless feminists, holding "Fashion = Fascism" signs.

Today, they reported again on anorexia today. "Anorexia became my friend, it loved me", said an anonymous woman who was raped by a police officer, and turned to extreme dieting to try to take back some skerrick of personal power.

And after the tribunal, to clear my racing thoughts, I took myself to a movie. To A Week with Maralyn. What a terrifying insight into the way women are dehumanised by the treatment of their sexuality as a for-sale commodity. The way men consumed her image, at least in this portrayal, and she herself became addicted to that approval, sought after it as a replacement form of love. She plays the part of Maralyn because Norma Jean wants to be loved, but all they love is Maralyn, so Norma is all the more lonely, insecure.

I wake up every day, and assume that every person I meet is a human being worthy of dignity and respect. It's not true in our government or our society's estimation. If you're brown-skinned and born in the wrong place, you have to have your sex life cross-examined by a tribunal just to find a safe place to avoid murder. If you're a pretty woman, you have to starve yourself, market your own body, fulfill the fantasies of men, just in order to feel worthy.

What does it mean to be human in a sick world?

Christ, hanging on a cross, is the picture of a perfect human being. A monstrosity, and a public spectacle. One who stood before the world and refused to be silent about the truth, even to the point of death. We take this horror as the definition of human nature, because we have never seen one as human as this.

Christ is the anorexic model, the victim of police-rape, the abused vulnerable movie-star, the refugee before the tribunal, and therefore the dehumanised ones are truly human, in a way that the best people - the healthy and acceptable ones - will never be.

liberating the bible?

2012-02-29T04:07:00.000-08:00

Even though he's frequently maligned as a heretic, Spong is actually quite reverent in this little excerpt from Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, which was published today. He speaks about the way to read the Bible in the 21st century:

I want to take my readers into this Bible in a new way. I want to plumb its depths, scale its heights and free its insights from the debilitating power of literalism.

Where I part from Spong is that I think he imagines not just the Bible but ultimately Christ himself as mere stepping stones which will take you to God, and then recede into the background. Much like the Buddhist sage who said "if you see Buddha along the road, kill him!", or Wittgenstein who said philosophy is a ladder which, once you have climbed it, you can kick away from under your feet, Spong sees Christ as a way to get past or over Christ, to experience ultimate divine reality. He writes,

I want to help people to develop a faith that goes so deeply into the essence of Christianity that they can walk beyond Christianity into that towards which Christianity can only point.

But I want to know Christ - and I'm not interested in any God other than the one I know in Christ. "When every enemy has been defeated," as Paul said, "Then Christ will be all in all." I want to know God not as a transcendent existential experience, but "in the fellowship of Christ's suffering", and I can imagine no greater final destiny than to be completely absorbed in Christ, so I can say "it's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."

And there, Spong and I differ on a very fundamental truth.

Tibet in Flames

2012-02-15T03:59:00.000-08:00

A Buddhist monk has been reported to have self-immolated this week in what many believe to have been a protest for Tibetan independence, BBC news reported this Thursday.

The immolation follows a series of national independence protests in Sichuan, an ethnically Tibetan region of southwest China, which is outside of the Tibetan autonomous region

Since the Arab Spring, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of self-immolations by Tibetan Buddhists. This incidence is reported to be the twentieth such event since 2011.

Ritual self-immolation is permitted in some Buddhist monastic orders, but only after a life of religious devotion, and then a long period of intense spiritual preparation for the ritual.

It became a symbol of national liberation protest after the immolation of Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese hermit in the Mahayana tradition, who is now revered as a Boddhisatva (a Buddhist saint) in Vietnam.

Đức’s death was the one of the key events leading up to a coup in the same year, which overthrew the U.S. backed Ngô Đình Diệm regime, and the last relics of French colonial rule in Vietnam.

Đức’s last words were, “I call the venerables, reverends, members of the sangha and the lay Buddhists to organise in solidarity to make sacrifices to protect Buddhism.”

The Arab Spring is understood to have been triggered by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17 2010. Bouazizi was the sole-income earner for a family of 8, whose vegetable cart had been confiscated by police, who also insulted his dead father.

These extreme protests are carried out either by extremely distressed people or highly enlightened religious leaders. They are not a tool which should ever be used by Western activists, but they are a powerful reminder of both the desperation of oppressed people in the developing world, and the potential of courageous actions to bring about revolutionary change.

who killed whitney houston

2012-02-13T02:34:00.000-08:00

When I was in high-school, many of my friends went on their first date to see Whitney Houston's the Bodyguard at the movies, and people listened to I will always love you cassette tape singles on their ghetto-blasters.

Now, while the death of one person is not news-worthy unless that person is dear to you, the deaths of Whitney Houston, and less recently of Michael Jackson, have become symbolic to people now entering their 30's of the loss of childhood innocence and naivete. I suppose every generation feels this as the symbols of its youth gradually vanish.

And like some of our simpler dreams, I wonder whether Whitney might still be alive if we didn't live in a world with:

over-marketed over-glamorized super-stars

over-marketed over-glamorized drugs - both legal and illegal, proscription and recreational

women's bodies and voices being used as entertainment for the gaze of men

an economic and cultural divide between black people in drug-infested ghettos, and white people often in nice suburban neighbourhoods

These factors don't just kill the rich and the famous. They kill the poor, and the poor do not make the news. They rob society of its innocence and its beauty, and they rob us all of our humanity. Many precious things died with Whitney Houston.

I wonder what would life be like if we lived in the kind of society that prophets have proclaimed throughout the ages: an economy of sharing not exploitation, and a society of justice not inequality - a world where no person was used for anybody else's profits?

This last picture looks like a different world to the world of rock-stars, ghettos and drug-addiction. I wonder whether a woman like Whitney may have been present in that crowd - loved by her whole community but only loved for what she provided that was useful. I wonder if the experience of being fed outside the normal family context of meals gave some people hope to rise above their poverty, addictions, fears and hatreds to a better kind of living.

Jesus looked at a multitude of 5'000 men not counting women and children, and saw that they were like sheep without a shepherd, so what did he do? He fed them.

Would Whitney still be alive if we build create a society that functioned like the one Jesus created for just a moment on that day?

polyamory and mardi gras

2012-02-03T04:44:00.000-08:00

There's a little uproar going on at the moment because a polyamory group has been denied a float in Mardi Gras. (I'll say allegedly denied because Mardi Gras haven't confirmed this yet, but it does seem to be the case.)

Urban Dictionary defines Polyamory as "the practice, state or ability of having more than one sexual loving relationship at the same time, with the full knowledge and consent of all partners involved."

This is the statement the group released:

I have just got off the phone from Victor from the Sydney Mardi Gras about our entry. Victor was very clear that Sydney Mardi Gras does are not include us as part of the LGBTIQ community. He said that while we can express our support for the LGBTIQ community, we cannot have any signs that talk about polyamory or say things like “polyamory is ethical/natural etc”.

Let me start by saying that Polyamory is absolutely wrong. It's either multiamory, or polyphilia. Mixing Greek and Latin stems: WRONG.

But Polyamory's wrongness is not the point at all in this case. One's personal morality should not be the defining criterion of participation in a parade, because nobody is perfect. What is the point is that Mardi Gras as an organisation has a right to define the purpose of their own parade, and its theme, and to decide which floats to include. And in this case, I think they are doing the right thing to take this stance.

Mardi Gras is historically a human rights march, and a human rights movement needs to be able to state clearly whose rights are being violated. This is why LGBTQI needs to be defined clearly. The demands of the rally should also be defined: Mardi Gras should take a stand on specific issues such as marriage equality, free gender reassignment surgery and anti-bullying.

The basis of LGBTQI rights is the fact that sexual orientation, gender identity, and intersex condition are objective conditions which can result in oppression for minority groups. These minority groups need to have rights which can be legally protected.

There are a lot of groups such as polyamorous people, stay-at-home-dads, vegetarians, cat-people, gamers, ornithologists, insomniacs and bloggers which are not LGBTQI groups. These groups are full of very nice people, but only some of them are LGBTQI and others of them are straight, cisgender (ie. not trans*), biologically male or female people.

All these people are awesome, but the LGBTQI movement should not blur its boundaries and take up these issues as its own. This has nothing to do with excluding those groups of people. Mardi Gras are simply saying polyamory isn't the theme of the rally, because it's not a specifically LGBTQI issue.

So, polyamorous people should definitely be included, and (in spite of their immoral mixing of Greek and Latin stems), they should be encouraged to march in a float which is specifically LGBTQI themed.

But the blurring of definitions in the LGBTQI movement is a great way to kill the movement for equality, so good on Mardi Gras for having the guts to have clear definitions.

...and frankly, I would be highly surprised if we were to discover that Mardi Gras is being taken over by oppressive monogamists. Wouldn't you?

the fighting pacifist

2012-02-01T19:02:00.000-08:00

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theological giant of the 20th century, preached Christian pacifism as an essential aspect of discipleship. He was later martyred by the Nazi state, after attempting to assassinate Hitler. How could he justify this? A few sentences from his Ethics might give us a hint of how...

“In this situation there can only be a complete renunciation of every law, together with the knowledge that here one must make one’s decision as a free venture, together also with the open admission that here the law is being infringed and violated and that necessity obeys no commandment” (Ethics, p. 208-209).

Sometimes, then, it is right to do wrong, and at times one must throw oneself before the judgment throne of God, for

“Before other men the man of free responsibility is justified by necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience; but before God he hopes only for mercy” (Ethics, p. 216).

science and compassion

2012-01-16T20:09:00.000-08:00

A scientific understanding of the world is objective and free from value-judgments. Is there then a place for compassion in a scientific world?

These two views are obviously in tension with each other...

To Einstein, it is obvious that a scientific understanding of events creates a greater clarity, which enables us to help the poor more effectively.

Alas, it seems there are also those to whom, if they were to "cave in" to a scientific world-view, there would be no reason left.

nothing without passion

2012-01-13T20:07:00.000-08:00

In modern culture, a passion is an entertainment or an enthusiasm. In the Bible πάθος (pathos) means literally to be moved: to be acted on by an outside force. Sometimes it means to "suffer." Only after many centuries of erosion has the word come to be so meaningless that we can talk about being "passionate" about our favourite tv show.

There is something dynamic and passionate about following the way of Jesus. The Biblical worldview contains this idea that there is something within each person that is greater than that individual person - a destiny which demands to be fulfilled.

This quote by Hegel, "nothing great has been, and nothing great has been accomplished without passion" is talking about passion as πάθος. Hegel build a whole logic and philosophy around the idea that everything is drawn toward a greater destiny, because everything contains the seed of something greater than itself. This logic is called dialectic reasoning.

While formal logic, created by Aristotle, insisted that everything is identical to itself (the law of identity), cannot be other than itself (the law of non-contradiction), and must only ever be one thing (the law of the excluded middle)... dialectical reasoning insists that all things are in a state of flux, and that there are contradictions built into reality. Nothing is identical to itself - everything is greater than itself and negates itself.

To put it more simply, dialectical reasoning is a dynamic logic which insists that everything has come out of its opposite, and everything will cease to exist as it is eventually superseded and negated.

The Hegelian and radical revolutionary, Leon Trotsky said in his Defense of Marxism (p. 51) said "consciousness grew out of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology, the organic world out of the inorganic, the solar system out of nebulae."

Trotsky himself was writing from an atheism that hardly justifies his magnificent vision of human potential. But he says here that humanity is itself a contradiction in terms - the organic inorganic; the conscious matter. The traditions in the book of Genesis understood this long before. "Then the LORD God formed Adam of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Adam became a living creature." ~ Genesis 2:7

In Dialectical Logic, (p. 31), George Novack describes the dialectic with an eye to the future of humanity - the death or self-negation which is part of us from our birth. "In the growth of a plant," he said, "the bud is negated by the blossom, the blossom by the fruit." Paul had earlier expressed a similar idea. "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." ~ Galatians 2:20

The human condition then is a mediating existence, trapped between the dust of the earth and the exalted Christ of heaven.

worship fail

2012-01-10T01:11:00.000-08:00

In The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann describes the difference between a religion of imminence (which says God is predictable, dependable, present in everything I do) and a religion of transcendence, which says God is free (God is awesomely beyond the world, God's ways are beyond our ways.)

Historically, the awesome freedom of God has characterised religions that preach justice, and the imminence of God, those religions that seeks to establish their own power.

I've always felt Pentecostal experience can take you in one of two directions: it can reawaken a deeper sense of God's glory in today's meaning-deprived world...

...or it can lead to the kind of irreverence that just puts on an entertaining dance show and just assumes that God will show up if we use the right techniques.

I believe in the creator of heaven and earth

2012-01-09T00:39:00.000-08:00

Every now and then you suddenly realise your whole perspective on an issue has changed. I'm in the process of proof-reading a journal article I wrote a few years ago, and I stumbled across this sentence:

Is the story told in Genesis 2-3 something that actually happened in time and space, or is it a story told for the purpose of communicating theological truth?

When I wrote it, it was meant to be a rhetorical question, and imply the latter was obviously true. That's what everyone is taught these days in (even moderately mainstream) theological seminaries, in the obligatory Intro to Hebrew Bible class where you find out about the historical critical method and read Enuma Elish (the Babylonian creation story on which Genesis 1 is [allegedly] modeled) for the first time.

I now realise the rhetorical question doesn't work on me any more. I don't think either claim is true. Genesis 2-3 is not there to impart any kind of information at all - neither theological nor historical. It's there to inspire spiritual depth and personal growth.

In other words, these stories were not written by some clever individual in order to teach anything, but they came into being through a long process of traditional storytelling and mythical creation to do something in the lives of their hearers - to ground people from childhood in an awareness of the presence of God in the world, give them an imaginative framework with which to negotiate the relationship they have with that God, and to give them some hope of coming to terms with the problem we all face of reconciling the good God (who puts us in a garden paradise, and gave us all life, and an amazing universe that we haven't even bugun to explore) with the morally ambiguous God (who put a snake in the garden, allows terrible disasters and starvation and genocide and abuse to happen without intervening), and even the wrath of God (who threw us out of the garden, demands integrity from us as human beings, and whom nobody talks about any more).

Tangent. I think I understand better now why we have these long genealogies in the Bible. In 4004 BCE, so the genealogies say, there was a world in which God walked and interacted directly with ours. That is the 4004 BCE of myth. The 4004 BCE of this world which we see and touch is a different 4004 BCE to that world. Snakes talked, people lived for a thousand years (Genesis 5), and angels came to earth and fathered the race of giants (Genesis 6). That world is the place where heaven and earth meet.

If we were to drag that event into this empirical world as some do, and place it smack bang at the end of the fifth millenium BCE, after the invention of the wheel, writing, copper and farming, and just before the Egyptians invented the plough and social inequality - then the story stops functioning. It simply doesn't work any more as a bridge between humanity and God, and becomes a big awkward and logically absurd blob in the history of the human race which makes God seem small, petty and annoying compared to the big bang, black holes and quantum physics.

As you read through Genesis, the age of men dwindles down to something within the vicinity of three-score-and-ten, and then in chapter 12, Abraham is born in the land of Ur of the Chaldees. We have arrived in empirical human history. The genealogies of Genesis serve the same function as the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis, or the tornado in Dorothy's Kansas. They are a bridge between this world, and the world of myth - where God walks among mortals.

And the beautiful thing about all of this is, I've regained something that seminary took away from me! I can once again proudly affirm in the words of the creed "I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth and all that is seen and unseen," without wincing slightly.

Calvin & Hobbes on New Year's Resolutions

2011-12-30T05:48:00.000-08:00

A picture of the ugly side of self-esteem...

Born in 1980, I was raised in a generation who were taught to believe that we were all good people on the inside, and you could do or be anything if you just believed in yourself.

And then of course, we witnessed two Gulf wars, 9/11, Afghanistan and the children overboard disaster. We saw genocide in Rwanda, Croatia, Sri Lanka and East Timor, and then found we too were guilty as they uncovered of the scandal of the stolen generation of Aboriginal children. We experienced bullying at school, our parents divorced, our friends overdosed, we knew child abuse... the list goes on.

I think we have now wised up to some painful truths about human nature. Of course, even then, the problem we face is that even our New Year's Resolutions, while they might be a great pep talk for a while, are ultimately being made by the same people who fail for the remaining 11 months... we can run, but we can't hide from the reality of human nature.

I don't think people are really buying into "self-esteem" quite so much any more... Time magazine just named "the protester" the person of the year for 2011, which indicates a few things to me. Firstly, we are now inspired by communities and groups more than we were by powerful individuals. Secondly, "greed" is no longer "good". The penny (or should I say euro) has dropped that between global warming and financial ruin, money does not make the world go round very well. Finally, perhaps most importantly, we have figured out that everything is not rosey. There are things wrong with humanity. Being cheerful doesn't make that go away.

Is this all the beginning, then, of a sea-change from crazed optimism to hopeless despair? Perhaps. But eventually, when you have exhausted yourself trying to find goodness within, you have to turn and look for something, a power greater than yourself. A place where heaven reaches out to earth and helps us in our weakness. God is crying in all of this mess: "Come back to me with your whole hearts, my children. Come back!"

dead sea scrolls, peanuts, christmas.

2011-12-16T17:26:00.000-08:00

This is an education for poor Charlie Brown.

Banksy's true meaning of Christmas

2011-12-15T05:24:00.000-08:00

Street art is a truly democratic form of truth telling.

The statue Cardinal Sin is Banksy's Christmas gift to the Walker gallery in Liverpool - a statue of a priest vandalised with tiles: such literal 'iconoclasm'!

"At this time of year," Banksy said, "it's easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity - the lies, the corruption, the abuse."

The vandalised priest is so confronting because it confronts us with that monstrosity of what the Christian religion can and has become, the way that culture, tradition and institution protect predatory individuals so that nobody's hands are clean.

It ask whether this is what it means to take the cloth, or to take the name of Christ in our world? To ally oneself with such anonymous, criminal power as this menacing priest represents?

why i believe in virgin births and angels

2011-12-14T05:55:00.000-08:00

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head...

or did he?

Theologians are divided. And they're not divided over the evidence... in the best debates, evidence and reason are weighed up against each other. Sadly, on this issue, the lines are drawn over sheer ideology. One's view on the history of the nativity scenes is becoming the great shibboleth of Evangelical vs. Liberal Christian. There isn't much grace given for a margin of error. Either any belief in a Bethlehem birth is seen as a sign of sentimental weakness, or and denial of the birth is a heresy.

My own view, which I recently put on the table "neither dogmatic nor skeptical", is therefore intolerable fence sitting. If the half-caste embodies the worst of both worlds, then I am a sentimentally weak heretic.

But this debate, as I will demonstrate, is one in which the battle lines should be blurred. First, let me set forward the case for the prosecution. The Christmas stories were the creative work of Matthew and Luke, who edited Mark and added a preface which encapsulated not any real traditions, but instead their theology.

The earliest gospel, Mark, doesn't have a Christmas story, or an Easter story. It starts with Jesus' preaching, and ends with his tomb. Later, Luke and Matthew would rework his material, and add on Christmas and Easter - but unlike almost everything in Luke and Matthew, the added bits don't have any verbal agreement with each-other. They don't quote from the same sources.

Matthew's infancy, for instance, has a flight from Bethlehem to Egypt, and wise men. The narrative is from Joseph's perspective, and Joseph is the one who speaks to angels rather than Mary. Luke's account is very different: there is a journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem (not Egypt), Joseph doesn't see any angels but Mary does, and instead of wise-men there are shepherds.

So this is normally explained by regarding the nativity scenes in Matthew and Luke as the work of the authors. Since they are creatively written, they are not historical sources.

So now comes my case for the defense.

I am happy to admit a complete lack of verbal parallel in the two accounts, which implies that the two authors are not colluding with each other. Most scholars know that Matthew and Luke were completely unaware of each other at the time of writing.

However, the two accounts seem to be aware of similar data. For instance, they both date Jesus' birth within the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE (Luke 1:5=Matt 2:1). They both describe Mary as an engaged virgin who was not yet living with her fiancee (Luke1:27, 34; 2:5=Matt 1:18). They both mention that her fiancee, Joseph, is of royal Davidic descent (Luke 1:27; 2:4=Matt 1:16, 20), and that Jesus is therefore of David's lineage (Luke 1:32=Matt 1:1). In this they echo the sentiments of Paul, who says that Jesus' Davidic descent is a part of the gospel revealed to him (Romans 1:3).

Both nativity stories refer to angels announcing the birth of the Mary's baby, and naming the child 'Jesus' (Luke 1:28-31=Matt 1:20-21), and calling the child 'saviour' (Luke 2:11=Matt 1:21) and assert that the Holy Spirit was responsible for impregnating Mary, not Joseph (Luke 1:34-35=Matt 1:18-25).

The sequence of events also lines up nicely. Mary and Joseph move in with each other during the pregnancy (Luke 2:4-7=Matt 1:24-25). The birth takes place in Bethlehem (Luke 2:4-7=Matt 2:1), and the raising of the child in Nazareth (Luke 2:39, 51=Matt 2:22-23).

The way that these details all line up without any collusion between Matthew and Luke demonstrates a scarcely admitted situation: that there was a well-known body of tradition built up by the time the gospels were set down in ink. Any creative work done by Matthew and Luke, therefore, must have taken place after the structure and events of the story were already known by many different communities (Matthew's, Luke's and the one Paul is writing to in Rome).

I'm going to show my hand and say I find it hard to believe that many features of the narrative outside of these twelve or so details are historical. It is well known that Luke stuffed up the date in Luke 2:1 (Quirinius not becoming governer of Syria until about a decade later). But this nucleus of widely accepted, pre-gospel details are sufficient to establish that the virgin birth, Davidic lineage, and angelic revelation were not made up by the gospel writers.

Neither a skeptic nor a dogmatist be: or 'Have you any room for Jesus?'

2011-12-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

Everyone is chattering away about whether Jesus is a myth. Early today, the principle of the school where I teach couldn't stop talking about it. Gerry Adams (of all people) has been doing a documentary on SBS over it, and it seems to have gotten out of hand. This is how far it's gone: when I got home today, I discovered John Saffran just retweeted a Macquarie University historian John Dickson threatening to eat a page of his Bible if Jesus is not historical.

I'll get right to the point. This is my line: The Christmas story is the truest story that has ever been told. However, it's impossible to know whether the Christmas story is historical fact.

If these two claims sound contradictory, I assure you they're not intended to be. Let me express them again slightly differently. We can know with absolute certainty that Jesus Christ is the saviour, and the only-begotten son of God, come into the world to bring peace on Earth, and reconcile us to God. We just may not be able to prove it from any historical event.

I speak as an eyewitness to Bethlehem. When wise men told me a King was going to be born, I wanted him killed - I was thrown into a murderous rage! This usurper challenging my right to run my little kingdom my way. Yes, I was Herod, and I saw the whole thing.

But I was also Mary. When God came to a young girl and asked her to experience shame so that God could be born in her, I said "be it done unto me according to your word."

And I was Elizabeth. I was barren and desperate. God saw my plight and lifted me up. I was Zechariah, I couldn't speak, my throat seized up, until I spoke the truth God had given me.

I was with the wise men. So enamoured with my philosophy until something as simple as a child arrested my attention.

And I was an inn-keeper. I stupidly, stupidly slammed the door in the face of my only Hope of Salvation.

Two gospels from the first century tell this tale which I saw.

First, Matthew, deeply authentically Jewish, models his story on that of Moses, a refugee from a wicked King (Herod/Pharoah) who flees a refugee into Egypt and then returns to the Promised Land.

Later, Luke, worldly and radical, presents the baby Jesus in more cosmopolitan images - heralded by Angels as the bringer of peace and salvation for the whole world just like everything Caesar ever claimed to be.

Now are these stories based on empirical facts or theological truths? We can never know, given the evidence we have. Matthew and Luke don't tell us. People do sometimes craft historical fact into powerful stories, and even myth can be based in true events... but the Bible is also rich with parables that are not historically true. We can't know which case is true of the nativity scenes. At least, if we can, I have never heard of a way to find out.

This much I will say... It is a strange thing, I think, if Herod slaughtered a whole generation of babies, and nobody recorded it in history outside the Bible. A strange thing, but not the strangest thing that ever happened. And with that (not very) astounding argument, I resign myself to agnosticism on the question of the historical manger and historical wise men. But there are some issues I will never be agnostic on:

I know that God was made flesh (John 1:1-3) - because he is made flesh in me.

I know that Christ brings peace on earth (Luke 2:14). I, myself, have received that peace ("I do not give it as the world gives..." says Christ in John 14:27)

I know that the light of God has shone into the world (Luke 2:32), not because the light of history shines on Christ, but simply because I can see (John 9:25).

We can know the truth about Bethlehem, only if we make our hearts a stable, and by allowing him to be born in us, find ourselves to be born again in him.

Have you any room for Jesus,
He who bore your load of sin?
As He knocks and asks admission,
Sinners, will you let Him in?

Room for pleasure, room for business,
But for Christ the Crucified,
Not a place that He can enter,
In the heart for which He died?

Room for Jesus, King of Glory!
Hasten now His Word obey;
Swing the heart’s door widely open,
Bid Him enter while you may.

And all this noise people are making about whether there was a real historical nativity... is just noise. And it is the worst kind of noise - noise that distracts us from the true meaning of Christmas.

behold, a greater than Bultmann is here

2011-12-07T00:28:00.000-08:00

You find theology in the most surprising places...

Joseph Campbell's 1949 book The Hero's Journey is a secular, anthropological reading of myths from every corner of the globe. Campell's genius is the way that he tell all the various myths as a single, universal story which he calls the "monomyth": the story of the great universal hero and his quest into the realm of shadows and back again.

(see Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces 3rd edition, New World Library, 2008.)

I read this book looking for information about literary structures which I could use in my research on Luke's Gospel... but the theological content of the book goes well beyond information about Biblical Literature.

What I have found is that Campbell's contribution to the enterprise of theology rivals Bultmann's in its ability to speak of the Christian story as a mythical expression of deep truths.

The idea of the monomyth contextualises the whole Bible. It sheds light on the purpose of the Biblical story by contrasting it with other, similar stories from every culture - indigenous, Arabic, Biblical, medieval European, Classical... Campbell's vision is global.

Campbell's view (as I understand it from this first reading) is that the ultimate purpose of myth and of theology is to articulate the experience of atonement with the Father - but that this message must be cloaked in mythic symbolism because it is beyond the ability of words to adequately express.

As such, he is able to characterise the nature of the theological task:

The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey. "For then alone do we know God truly," writes Saint Thomas Aquinas, "when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God." p. 219

and also warn about where it can go wrong:

Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult. To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning. p. 230-31

I find myself, as a liberation theologian, troubled by this "do not apply, but illuminate" mantra... but not too troubled. If the Bible is a myth, rather than a programmatic political agenda, then we have the opportunity to "disclose permanent meanings" about what it is to be human. In other words, we are not copying formulas from the Bible and applying them, rigidly, to contemporary situations. Instead, we are enlightened by the Bible in order to better understand contemporary situations.

But therein lays the greatest challenge:

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of "yes" and "no" revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void? p. 202

The "vastly democratic" saviour's cross

2011-11-29T04:58:00.000-08:00

There is a clarity which only outsiders have, looking in. Sometimes you read a secular book and suddenly you are faced with a profound summary of some aspect of Christian theology.

I got this reading Joseph Campbell The Hero with a Thousand Faces today:

The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children.* Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo, the techniques of worship, and devices of episcopal organization (which have so absorbed the interest of Occidental theologians that they are today seriously discussed as the principal questions of religion),** are merely pedantic snares unless kept ancillary to the major teaching. Indeed, where not so kept, they have a regressive effect: they reduce the father image back again to the dimensions of the totem. And this, of course, is what has happened throughout the Christian world. One would think that we had been called upon to decide or to know whom, of all of us, the Father prefers. Whereas, the teaching is much less nattering: "Judge not, that ye be not judged" (Matt 7:1). The World Savior's cross, in spite of the behavior of its professed priests, is a vastly more democratic symbol than the local flag (Hosea, 6:9; 7:3).

* Matthew, 22:37-40; Mark, 12:28-34; Luke, 10:25-37. Jesus is also reported to have commissioned his apostles to "teach all nations" (Matthew 28:19), but not to persecute and pillage, or turn over to the "secular arm" those who would not hear. ''Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." (ibid., 10:16)

** Dr. Karl Menninger has pointed out {op. cit., pp. 195-196) that though Jewish rabbis, Protestant ministers, and Catholic priests can sometimes be brought to reconcile, on a broad basis, their theoretical differences, yet whenever they begin to describe the rules and regulations by which eternal life is to be achieved, they hopelessly differ. "Up to this point the program is impeccable," writes Dr. Menninger. "But if no one knows for certain what the rules and regulations are, it all becomes an absurdity." The reply to this, of course, is that given by Ramakrishna: "God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with wholehearted devotion.... One may eat a cake with icing either straight or side wise. It will taste sweet either way" (The Gospel of Sri Rumakriskna, New York, 1941. p. 559).

(2003 edition, p. 146)

The "world saviour" stuff is nicely put - and had been said well before. What is so disarmingly candid is the way he presents the choice about what is the core truth of Christian faith. Do we define ourselves at the heart of the Christian experience as people who are being saved? Or will it be about some other trivial thing, some "pedantic snare" such as the Creed, the liturgy, or church politics.

And then the link between the cross and the global unity of the human race: now that is a credo worthy of our acceptance!

Mythbusters: was Jesus a prophet of doom?

2011-11-27T16:09:00.000-08:00

A lot of people I know who engage with Christianity struggle through concepts about hell and the afterlife, and the end of the world. I think there is value in contemplating these questions, but there is no need for anxiety. Christianity is not a religion of terror, and I do not believe (as some have said) that Jesus was a prophet proclaiming the end of the world.

This is a historical judgments, based on the way that apocalyptic (we would say "doomsday") discourses in the first century were discourses of the literate... less than 1% of the population in the ancient world. Jesus was poor, and the poor in ancient Palestine were not apocalyptic prophets.

This is also based on a model of ancient rural-agrarian societies well established by social-science, and the carpenter's son in a rural-agrarian society doesn't know how to read. "Tradeys" are not scribes, and they simply didn't have anywhere near the economic resources to become such. In peasant societies, tradeys are downwardly mobile: you can only pass the family trade onto one, maybe two kids - and there's no decent form of contraception. Given this economic reality, luxuries like reading are an unthinkable expenditure of resources.

The scribes, on the other hand, are one of the few upwardly mobile groups. The ruling aristocracy used scribes to administer their taxation, tributary and legal systems. They were drawn from the wealthy peasants - landowners and landlords. By first century Palestine, no actual Palestinians were able to acquire land, and most of it was being bought up by Roman citizens.

In addition, the general scholarly consensus (among archaeologists and historians) is that there is really no hard evidence that "second temple Judaism" (the religion of apocalyptic) ever reached Galilee, and rabbinic Judaism (its successor) possibly didn't reach there until the 3rd century... There was a tradition of Israelite scripture, and purity laws, and these were passed on orally. However, the local Galilean "synagogues" were local community assemblies, not Rabbinic schools as they would later become. If there were Rabbis in northern Palestine then, they were not in positions of authority in the synagogues yet.

The picture of northern palestine given by Josephus (who is the only primary source on this subject) is that Galilee is quite hostile to the south, that they viewed the temple down there as being (what it really was) - a front for the Roman Empire, which always colonized local religions, and used them to dominate local culture.

I am personally of the opinion that almost everything being written on the historical Jesus at the moment ignores these problems, and uncritically tries to understand Jesus as a second-temple Jew. Well, certainly, if you want to give an apocalyptic reading of Jesus (as many do), you have to do so, because apocalyptic is essentially a second-temple discourse.

the wheat and the tares in an unexpected place

2011-11-27T06:17:00.000-08:00

CRAVE MCC is doing church in the pub these days. As a Metropolitan Community Church we've always practiced an open table, but now we've taken to consecrating communion and sharing it right there in the middle of the public bar. It's such a powerful way of communicating our theology about radical inclusion.

Funny the little intersections that happen... Over at Political Theology, an Australian theologian, Roland Boer, is exploring the intersection between theology and the writings of Bolshy icon Vladimir Lenin. He found this unlikely comment in Lenin's number 1 hit What is to be done:

It is not our business to grow wheat in flower-pots. By pulling up the tares, we clear the soil for the wheat.

Now of course, Lenin was using this metaphor with a political significance that Boer explores more closely than I want to here. But what has stuck with me is the absurd image of little flower pots full of wheat. What a futile way for wheat to be grown, wasting all of its incredible creative power trapped in tiny little terracotta containers...

We frustrate ourselves with self imposed limitations. But we're not wheat in flower pots, and Jesus didn't practice open table in safely enclosed church buildings. He ate in places that challenged social norms, that broke apart ideologies of exclusion - he created new and unexpected sites of community and inclusion.

As we bring the presence of Jesus into more places where he wouldn't normally be expected we too can smash open our flowerpots, break down the walls that separate, and create new, healthy, meaningful connections in this alienated world.

What really happened.

2011-11-22T04:37:00.000-08:00

Oh noez!

Queer piece of exegesis from the Herald

2011-11-22T04:31:00.000-08:00

It seems that every day, that beacon of truth we call 'Sydney Morning Herald' publishes another opinion piece on marriage equality.

In this rather clever one, Dr. Elizabeth Skinner points out a flaw in the "Adam & Eve" argument against marriage equality.

If Adam marrying Eve in the Bible has anything at all to do with marriage only being possible between a man and a woman (as has actually been suggested to me), then I pray to God that nobody asks how Cain and Abel (Adam and Eve's sons) had daughters, because I'm not sure what would be legal then.

After all, we must always think through our arguments to their logical conclusions.

Gandhi on God.

2011-11-14T03:56:00.000-08:00

The Great Soul describing God. I wouldn't presume to say anything differently.

A test of biblical litera(l)cy: or on "it clearly says..."

2011-11-14T02:55:00.000-08:00

The Bible seems so clear to many...

but beware how you interpretations gravitate to what is easy, not what is true.

Luke and the very rich

2011-11-11T23:07:00.000-08:00

My previous post may have been open to the misinterpretation that Luke is morally critiquing the rich man because he is wealthy.

Luke is not so shallow, and he is also not so moralistic.

In his Exegetical Commentary on Luke, Darrell Bock squarely demonstrates this by comparing the story of Lazarus and the rich man to other unique stories from Luck, which address the question of wealthy people:

[S]ome understand the verse to teach that there is a fixed quota of wealth and poverty to experience in life and the wealthy who run up their quota in this life end up with nothing later. Such a reading disregards not only the teaching of a passage like 16:9, it also ignored the poignant picture that Luke will deliver later in 19:8-9, where Zacchaeus becomes a model for how handle wealth. Luke 14:12-13 also illustrates the call to generosity, with a promise that such generosity will be paid back at the resurrection (Schneider 1977a: 342). More radically stated forms of the same emphasis are found in 12:33-34 and 18:22.
Vol. 2, p. 1372-3.

The reason for the rich man's demise, I claim, is because he hoarded his wealth. That is something very rare in our context. But in peasant societies like Jesus' Galilee, unlike our capitalist society, the wealthy did not reinvest their wealth; they had no concept of "reinvestment". Instead, they put their wealth on public display. They used it to establish themselves as an 'aristocrat', who in Roman times, had special privileges before the Empire.

When you think about what the rich man was doing, his denial of food to Lazarus makes more sense. He couldn't afford to lose honour and let Lazarus gain honour. He had to maintain his honour at the cost of others humanity.

The moral question then is not how much money you have, or in Orwellian terms "rich-bad, poor-good", but why people are so disproportionately wealthy, and what they should do with the wealth, once they have it.

Social justice, and the question of hell.

2011-11-11T01:54:00.000-08:00

In Luke 16:19-28, there is a story of a rich man who neglects a poor man, Lazarus, who is strewn pitifully at his gate. The rich man denies table scraps to Lazarus, dogs come and lick his sores. I have always read it to mean the dogs were wild and came to comfort him.

Australian Priest John Nolland, in his Word Biblical Commentary on Luke, argues for a different scenario.

"Though the common view is that the dogs here are wild street dogs, the linkage with the meal scene is best satisfied by these dogs being the dogs of the rich man’s house… Instead of a servant coming with the fallen scraps, the dogs come from having consumed the scraps and continue their meal with the juices that ooze from the afflicted man’s sores." p. 828-9

A close reading of the Greek text makes this reading very likely. For instance, these are probably domestic dogs, because "kuōn" is often used that way in Greek literature, and Luke is educated. Also, the use of the greek word "alla" ("instead"), which again most translations skip over, does seem to imply that the dogs are coming instead of the food.

Now this is where I think it gets interesting. I have often thought there is no biblical reason to think that, as C. S. Lewis suggests, ‎"the doors of hell are locked from the inside" (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 130).

The rich man ends up in hell (technically hades, which is Greek hell, not Gehenna which is the biblical hell), and I think the text of Luke 16 makes it clear that his locked door (or better, his 'chasm') is of his own construction.

Most modern translations of Luke 16 say that the "great chasm" of hell was created "besides all this" (v. 26). That's how the KJV translated it, and it seems to have been accepted uncritically by almost every translation since. But the word "besides" is not there in the Greek. In fact, a literal translation is "in all these things, a great chasm was set." In Greek, the word "in" is often used to express "instrumentality". i.e., the best translation would be "by all these things, a great chasm has been set." In other words, by his treatment of Lazarus, this man was digging his own chasm!

The creepy part is, just as the rich man said no to Lazarus needs on earth, the great chasm is what prevents Lazarus from giving the rich man any water while he is burning in hell. The punishment matches the crime so closely, because the crime is what created the punishment. The apple falls not far from the tree. Every day that he neglected the poor, he himself was creating this situation.

Kautsky on context.

2011-11-10T05:12:00.000-08:00

For a few years now, I have depended heavily on Gerard Lenski's Power and Privilege as the definitive work on the social context of Jesus' life in Galilee.

But recently, I have discovered this new (old) book: The Politics of Aristocratic Empires by John H. Kautsky.

Where Lenski explored the the inner tensions of a pre-industrial agrarian society, Kautsky focuses more on the international context of such a society, and on the aristocracies which are loyal always to Empire, not to local society.

Kautsky puts it bluntly:

Aristocratic societies are not like modern societies, not only because they are not modern, but because they are not societies. (emphasis mine)

Kautsky goes on to explain that in such societies, like Galilee, local villages were different communities to the aristocracies which governed them. Since the time of the Herods, the aristocracies in 1st century Palestine were thoroughly Roman.

The lesson to be learned is that many of that characters in the gospels are "outsiders": foreign powers who control from without. Within this category would fall Herod, Pilate, the Jerusalem priesthood, and to a lesser extent: scribes and tax-collectors. These were Hellenistic people, foreigners in Palestine.

It's worth remembering when you read the gospels that these characters do not belong to the same community as Jesus, the disciples, the crowds etc. When Jesus stepped into Jerusalem, he was entering a foreign world. This was not his culture, not his economy, it was not even his religion. This was the aristocracy's temple, and their Passover feast.

And I think that changes everything about the story.

hillbilly ten commandments

2011-11-02T05:16:00.000-07:00

So succinct! Reminds me of this passage from Steinbeck.

Atheist's prayer

2011-10-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

As the Joads travel across America in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a preacher named Casy has lost his faith - and a woman named Sairy lays dying (ch. 18).

I ast you to come to say a prayer.
"I ain't a preacher," he said softly. "My prayers ain't no good."
She moistened her lips. "I was there when the ol' man died. You said one then."
"It wasn't no prayer."
"It was a prayer," she said.
"It wasn't no preachers' prayer."
"It was a good prayer. I want you should say one for me."
"I don' know what to say."
She closed her eyes for a minute and then opened them again. "Then say one to yourself. Don't use no words to it. That'd be awright."
"I got no God," he said.
"You got a God. Don't make no difference if you don' know what he looks like." The preacher bowed his head. She watched him apprehensively. And when he raised his head again she looked relieved. "That's good," she said. "That's what I needed. Somebody
close enough - to pray."

And then, her final words.

It's the same thing, singin' an' prayin', jus' the same thing. I wisht you could a-heard me sing.

I believe God hears the Atheist's prayer.

"the unexamined Christ _________."

2011-10-28T17:58:00.000-07:00

Dale Allison says this in the introduction to his book, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, p. 5.

"the unexamined Christ is not worth having."

A million comments come to mind, but they all sound banal out loud (so imagine how bad they will be on a blog...)

What I want to do is find ways to fill in this sentence:

"the unexamined Christ _________."

(a) is a pretender
(b) has no followers
(c) works for the man
(d) is a blank page
(e) was born in Nicea
(f) examines you

(g)?

A picture-book essay on Economics, Biblical and Modern

2011-10-27T19:21:00.000-07:00

Modern Economics

Two investors each put $20 in a box.

The first investor then sold the box to the second for $30 ... both investors make $10 profit!!!

Repeat for infinite money.

This is called "economic growth". And here's a little reminder about how well that system is working for us:

There is an alternative...

Biblical Economics: Exodus 16:15b-18

Moses said to them, “It is the bread the LORD has given you to eat. This is what the LORD has commanded: ‘Everyone is to gather as much as they need. Take an omer for each person you have in your tent.’”

The Israelites did as they were told; some gathered much, some little. And when they measured it by the omer, the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.

Everyone had gathered just as much as they needed.

A/Theology around the webosphere.

2011-10-26T23:19:00.000-07:00

I like this rather clever thing about "speaking on behalf of God."

I like how Alexandro starts with a social, political comment and then, twist-ending, he climaxes with a point about the Divine!!

Political theologians (like me) do it the other way round. It's then an anti-climax! I start with some general principles about theology and then conclude with some grand statement of the political... I suck God into the vortex of time and space.

Theology becomes a ____ thing (insert: boring, idolatrous, tyrannical, comical), when instead of having a conversation with God, we take it upon ourselves to speak either on behalf of God, or even just to speak about God as some object of human study. I do this. I place divine imprimatur's on my own soap-boxes. Yawn!

Well I'm trying to learn...

Two recent publications of mine in alternative media, I hope, exemplify a different kind of theological method.

Call it A/Theology if you like... They speak about the human condition in light of the experience of God, or (if you prefer) the absence of God - the experience of abandonment by God experienced by people religion rejects:

"Don't Ask Don't Tell and the Theology of Honesty" God Discussion (26th October 2011)

“When Religion Fails To Comfort” New Matilda (13th October, 2011)

Please do have a read :-)

The Whig Interpretation in Biblical Studies

2011-10-14T18:59:00.000-07:00

Biblical scholars could learn a lot from a thorough reading of Butterfield's excellent work on historiography The Whig Interpretation of History.

So much of what is published in the world of Biblical Studies actually falls outside the scope of a scholarly discipline: moral judgments on Biblical characters, theological conflation of the concerns of the ancient world with our modern theological, political and ethical concerns, claiming theological truths as historically verifiable...

This historical method of studying the bible ought to work as a guard against this kind of unchecked subjectivism.

But if history is in this way something like the memory of mankind and represents the spirit of man brooding over man’s past, we must imagine it as working not to accentuate antagonisms or to ratify old party cries but to find the unities that underlie the differences and to see all lives as part of the one web of life.

The historian trying to feel his way towards this may be striving to be like a god but perhaps he is less foolish than one who poses as god the avenger.

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, p. 12

Gender Theory and Genesis

2011-10-07T20:41:00.000-07:00

If Genesis is more than just an account of the facts about how we came into existence, if it is actually an account of the meaning of our existence, expressed in the form of etiological stories, then I think this is a valid question.

How did Noah divide all the animals up into heterosexual couples, when many species of animals do not have heterosexual relationships?

A Glee Theology of Prayer

2011-10-06T05:55:00.000-07:00

Emma:

I’m Praying. I do it all the time in my head but right now it’s just not enough. When I need help I know God hears me better on my knees. Something about the acoustics of the linoleum or something.

Will:

I wish I could make things better for you, I just don’t know how.

Pauses. Joins Emma on her knees.

I don’t have any clue what I’m doing down here, but I’d like to learn.

Emma:

Kisses Will’s tshirt

Theses on a Mulberry Tree

2011-10-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

There is a Mulberry Tree outside my flat. This is what I gathered from it:

1. Picking mulberries in a public venue is socially awkward in our society - and that is both society's problem and the problem with our society.

2. The stress and tension created by a full day of battling a maddening corporate bureaucracy can be solved effectively with an hour of therapy, a tub of chocolate ice-cream ... or five minutes of berry picking.

3. Having hands stained red by berry picking is a rite of passage, and repeating it in adult years awakens the adolescent within.

4. When we invented the plough, and centuries later the factory, there arose a difference between work and play. Until that point, there was just creativity.

5. If all verges and nature strips had fruit trees, there would be a public welfare system in place that cost the tax payer nothing, and had no effect on our budget surplus.

6. If schools had fruit trees, childhood obesity would be considerably lessened.

7. As the world economy threatens to plunge into a worse disaster than the Great Depression and everyone is talking about austerity, the concrete surrounding my mulberry tree is spattered blue with the excess. Ergo, mulberry trees do not care about the world economy.

8. The hunter gatherers who lived in a 'primitive communist' society for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years did not suffer from depression.

9. "Ripeness" is a constructed category within a society which idolizes uniformity; you need some berries sweet and other sour for contrast.

What is real theology?

2011-09-30T19:40:00.000-07:00

This is a tribute to Cornel West. A Harvard academic, a black theologian and a liberation theologian, a socialist but not a Marxist, sometimes a movie star from The Matrix...

West was famously remonstrated by Lawrence Summers, right-wing economist and president of Harvard, for not publishing enough "real" academic material (i.e., enough material by the "right" publishing houses).

But "real theology" is written on cardboard with paint, and it is published on the streets.

Westies' Theology: and the best of Evangelicalism

2011-09-30T04:31:00.000-07:00

I saw an old friend on the train today, and struck up a conversation. One of those old friends that you only knew for a little while, but you will never forget.

When I 'came out', ten years ago, I experienced the awkwardness that goes with being gay in Evangelical Christian circles... from almost everyone but Rev. Peter (whom I won't identify by his full name).

In situations like mine, many have found that most people don't openly ostracize you, but it's too awkard to have any sort of real relationship with anyone... you have become a theologocal 'issue'. Not so with Peter - which was surprising to me because he was the pastor of a church that is one of the most conservative Evangelical denominations in Australia, a family man, from the country, studied at Westminster Theological College... Every stereotype in the world should have meant he would also be the world's worst homophobe. Instead, Peter was caring.

He met with me on a regular basis for a time, and helped me to put my faith back together. I don't know if I would have remained Christian without him, I can't imagine how... I do know that regular meetings are a big sacrifice of time when you're a volunteer, part-time minister. While he was up front that he thought I should abstain from being gay (whatever that means), but he never admonished me with biblical passages, not even once. He wasn't interested in pursuing that line; he just took my faith for what it was. He never speculated about whether I was a 'real' Christian. Instead he tried to understand what I was experiencing.

I ended up sneaking out the back door of that church and not returning. In fact, I remember going to the bus stop one Sunday morning, and just letting the bus drive past. The congregation were trying to get to know me, and that was too much of a risk... I found myself going to Metropolitan Community Church instead.

Today, after having lost contact for almost a decade, I sat across from Peter on a train for fifteen minutes, as he eagerly cleared the seat in front of him so we had room to talk. He spent some time in Africa, training people in theology and ministry. After he left his church, they didn't decide to continue. He's now working in Special Religious Education (SRE), I'm now trying to finish a PhD. Life goes on...

When I said I was still with MCC, I don't know if I saw the tiniest recognition cross his eyes. He must have been asking himself what path I had taken. But in character, he didn't pursue that line with me. Instead, his eyes lit up when I said I was writing on Luke, and he told me this story, which is the best story I have heard in years:

Recently, he met with a group of SRE teachers, who were comparing stories about their favourite book of the Bible, and he was the only one who immediately named Luke. The others said (I suspect, condescendingly) that he prefers Luke only because he's from the Western Suburbs.

His response was, "yes, that is exactly right!"

A gospel for outcasts, 'expendible' people and the rejected ones of society is a very fitting gospel for these poorest suburbs of Sydney. A gospel that dresses like a hobo, and catches public transport, and works at a checkout. A Westy gospel, with a Westy theology and a Westy social vision.

And that is the very best of Evangelical theology.

Who Stole Jesus?

2011-09-24T05:37:00.000-07:00

LifeJourney Metropolitan Community Church in Indianapolis, the people behind the Would Jesus Descriminate campaign, have launched a new on: the Who Stole Jesus? campaign.

Genius! It was also featured on Fox news:

As a pastor who is constantly meeting and sometimes counseling people who are trapped by images of Jesus that are not only harmful, but are also false, I think this campaign is incredibly powerful in its ability to help people question. But it's also revolutionary in the way that it takes the power away from the institutions that expend massive amounts of energy, moral authority and money branding Jesus in their own images.

We're left with their reconstruction and ours, or my reconstruction and yours. Jesus comes to each person in a completely different way, and while Jesus is the only way to God (John 14:6), Jesus comes to us in many different ways, many different guiseds. The choice is between reconstructing Jesus, or being spoon-fed Jesus. As John Dominic Crossan points out in the closing sentiment of his magisterial book The Historical Jesus,

…there is only reconstruction. For a believing Christian both the life of the Word of God and the text of the Word of God are alike a graded process of historical reconstruction... If you cannot believe in something produced by reconstruction, you may have nothing left to believe in.

But churches and cultures have interests in cultivating images of Jesus that serve a certain purpose. The magical miracle worker Jesus who leaves prosperity and health in his wake can be great for the people who have everything in this world to reinforce the idea that good people get every good thing they deserve (as long as they tithe), and absolving the uneasy conscience of greedy over-consumers. The cool, rational teacher Jesus can be a very effective device for maintaining social order, making children and housewives behave, and making workers bend over backwards to please their bosses. Jesus the mystical guru from the wilderness of Jordan can be an icon for self-indulgent lifestyles.

I'm not saying any of these reconstructions are invalid or wrong. I'm simply saying we should be aware of the purposes these reconstructions serve. Alternatively, when people do their own work reconstructing Jesus, they are empowered to hear Jesus without this kind of interference. Jesus is the revelation of God directly to the heart of the believer.

So who stole Jesus? Truth is, it doesn't matter. Pick up a Bible and steal him right back!

Church Signs: the best and the worst of ...

2011-09-16T17:47:00.000-07:00

You win some...

referring to Judge Vaughn Walker's August 4, 2010 decision to overturn Prop 8 and reinstate marriage equality in California.

... and you lose some :(

referring incorrectly to Darwin's theory that humans and primates evolved from a common ancestor (not from each other).

human rights and the covenant of moses

2011-09-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

Just recently, I've become intensely bored with understandings of the Christian message that want to boil everything down to mere social activism. If that's all we were about, we would be a political party, not a community of faith. As such, I am starting to reject the old liberal picture of the ancient prophets as social activists, and more so the idea popular among some Jesus scholars that Jesus was basically a political radical. There must be more to it than that!

I am also pretty damn sure that if Christianity has nothing to say about social issues, then it's a colossal waste of time. You can't read the Bible without seeing plainly that God's people were primarily concerned with the material realities and needs of communities, and the endless, passionate cry of God for justice and the oppressed. At least, I can't avoid seeing it.

So, I don't want to be short-changed. I want to find a way to bring together my experience of God with my love for the world. Heart and hands! To this end, I've been delighted to discover Richard A. Horsley's books, especially Jesus and the Powers: Conflict, Covenant, and the Hope of the Poor. I am suddenly enchanted by his reading of the law and community of Moses as a radical alternative lifestyle to the ancient Mediterranean world-view, in which the 'powers' of the world were oppressive and exploiting, in which Marduk the Storm-King created humans to build his temples and irrigate his ancient nemesis the rivers, while his priests and kings lived off the fat. Devotion to Yahweh was not, in Horsley's view, 'monotheism' (denying the existence of other gods); it was full acknowledgement that these powers existed, and an absolute abhorrence of them, joined with a fierce loyalty to the one who exalted above all gods.

In reading this book, I've just discovered a completely new image of Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments. In it, the children of Israel, having just thrown off the oppressive powers of Eqypt, discovered the living God, who demanded loyalty to him alone, and would not allow his children to live in thrall, or pay tribute, to any earthly power. And so, the ten commandments become a kind of declaration of rights and freedoms. "Thou shalt have no other gods" is a declaration of liberty, and the remaining commandments set up the rights of free people within the covenant community. He writes:

It may not be by accident that John Locke, who wrote in the seventeenth century about the natural rights of “life, liberty, and property,” was a Scottish Presbyterian thoroughly imbued with the covenant and covenantal teaching of the Pentateuch. The same covenantal background underlies Thomas Jefferson's paraphrase of Locke in the Declaration of Independence: We are all endowed by our creator “with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Horsley, Jesus and the Powers, p. 52

I have been toying for a while now with the question, what are human rights in the context of Christian theology? Or how should Christians speak about human rights? Are they a way of speaking about the dignities associated with bearers of the image of God. Horsley makes me wonder if it could be something more specific. Could human rights be the covenant of God with free(d) people?

I also find myself wondering, what are the names of the oppressive powers of our world: war, hate, exploitation, commercialism. Have we become so numbed by our scientific worldview that we have forgotten the demonic reality behind these 'powers'.

on theology

2011-09-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

I had this experience recently, reading theology, and suddenly feeling my awareness of God's presence in my life just click back into the "on" position - and suddenly I was clear as if for the first time that we do this not in order to be right or to be clever but to allow God to renew our minds, and transform us into the likeness of Christ.

I know that might sound unbearably pious... I think it's a good reminder.

And ever since then, I carry that exact thought with me as a beacon of God's presence in my life. It doesn't matter what the thought was. What matters is that God used it to invade my consciousness and bring my thoughts back to what is real.

This is why we never graduate as theologians, why God calls us back to these disciplines daily, why we must always come as beginners not experts, and why dogmatic beliefs (yesterday's truths) are the most toxic, even demonic of thoughts, because they prevent us from hearing what new thing God wants to say today in order to arrest our attention.

This is why the dead letter is not God's word, but the living Spirit is.

on passion

2011-09-06T06:15:00.000-07:00

Everywhere I look recently, the word 'passion' has been there... here are two examples that struck a chord:

Let others complain that the times are wicked. I complain that they are paltry; for they are without passion.

~ Kierkegaard's Diapsalmata

The contrast is stark and total: this passionate man set in the midst of numbed Jerusalem. And only the passion can finally penetrate the numbness.

~ Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination p. 91

It takes more than just direction or motivation to make a life human and complete, just like a donkey with a carrot and a stick is a wild beast tamed. So, a world driven by stress and frenzied by commercialism is by definition a world without passion.

It is the life, death and message of Jesus which exposes the paltriness of our petty world.

on busyness

2011-09-05T04:49:00.000-07:00

My friend Ian Packer facebook'd this quote today, which I quite liked

Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy—to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Therefore, whenever I see a fly settling, in the decisive moment, on the nose of such a person of affairs; or if he is spattered with mud from a carriage which drives past him in still greater haste; or the drawbridge opens up before him; or a tile falls down and knocks him dead, then I laugh heartily. And who, indeed, could help laughing? What, I wonder, do these busy folks get done? Are they not to be classed with the woman who in her confusion about the house being on fire carried out the firetongs? What things of greater account, do you suppose, will they rescue from life's great conflagration?

~ Søren Kierkegaard, Diapsalmata (interlude of aphorisms)

and which reminded me of this little scene from Journey to the West

Lao Tze was playing checkers when Lord Monkey dashed in and exclaimed, "what is this, you are wasting time?!"

The Master did not look up from his game but muttered sagely, "How can one waste that which is infinite?"

beyond all uncertainty

2011-09-03T15:37:00.000-07:00

Ask a child why, among many women, he calls this particular one his mother, and all he will be able to say will be only a repetition and affirmation of the very thesis for which he has been asked the reason: “But this is my mother.” That she is his mother is for this child the situation beyond all uncertainty.

Barth, Karl. "The Authority and Significance of the Bible: Twelve Theses," God Here and Now (New York: Harper & Row, 1964),45.

John 14:6, again.

2011-08-29T06:37:00.000-07:00

Forgive me this emotional language, but No Misinterpretation Annoys Me So Badly As The Misinterpretation of John 14:6.

As Moffatt (correctly) translates:
"I am the way, I am truth and I am life."

This is not a comment on other religions. It's not a comment on "how many" ways there are. There is absolutely nothing in the context of John to imply there is. This is a metaphor for who Jesus is and how we relate to God. It could very well be translated as "I am the journey." Let's not forget it is part of Jesus' farewell discourse to the disciples! This journey has an end in mind, and it's not heaven: it's an execution! This is meant to evoke all the imagery of journey stories from The Odyssey to The Grapes of Wrath; from the Exodus to The Lord of the Rings. To turn this into a proof text for religious superiority strips away all that richness.

Speaking of which, here is a LOTR quote which I think captures the meaning quite well.

"He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary." ~ Frodo Baggins.

Jesus said, that Road is me. You've never had a journey that wasn't me, and every time you step onto the pavement, I may chose that moment to sweep you up!

prophet's vision

2011-08-29T05:31:00.000-07:00

I found this magnificent Russian Constructivist oil painting today: Vasily Leskov's Vision of a Prophet (2004). I take it as a piece about revelation, that in the experience of seeing God a prophet's own eyes become clearer; they are seen as they see.

A truth that has been reaffirmed to me this week was about the (prophetic) role of the theologian. Discussing an 'introduction to Christianity' course with some leaders at CRAVE, and the meaning of 'contemporary' theology, I found myself saying, "God never changes but our language about God changes."

The triangles and angles of abstract art are changeless things. The startled look on the prophet's face must be momentary, and can't last more than a minute.

Christ and Capital

2011-08-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

This was posted at Resident Theology, and I had to repost.

"What is wrong with capitalism, then, is not that it involves some people being richer than I am. I cannot see the slightest objection to other people being richer than I am; I have no urge to be as rich as everybody else, and no Christian (and indeed no grown-up person) could possibly devote his life to trying to be as rich or richer than others. There are indeed people, very large numbers of people, who are obscenely poor, starving, diseased, illiterate, and it is quite obviously unjust and unreasonable that they should be left in this state while other people or other nations live in luxury; but this has nothing specially to do with capitalism, even though we will never now be able to alter that situation until capitalism has been abolished. You find exactly the same conditions in, say, slave societies and, moreover, capitalism, during its prosperous boom phases, is quite capable of relieving distress at least in fully industrialised societies -- this is what the 'Welfare State' is all about. What is wrong with capitalism is simply that it is based on human antagonism, and it is precisely here that it comes in conflict with Christianity. Capitalism is a state of war, but not just a state of war between equivalent forces; it involves a war between those who believe in and prosecute war as a way of life, as an economy, and those who do not. The permanent capitalist state of war erupts every now and then into a major killing war, but its so-called peacetime is just war carried on by other means. The recent [1979] strategic arms limitation talks (SALT II) have produced an agreement whereby the US should deploy a capacity to inflict 600,000 Hiroshimas on the human race. But at the heart of all this violence is the class war."

--Herbert McCabe, God Matters (New York: Continuum, 1987), 192-93

A Mirror of History: Steinbeck's Anthropology

2011-08-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote on the relationship between human rights and human nature, and suggested the two ideas may refer to the same thing. This passage from chapter 17 of The Grapes of Wrath is a description of the way rights came to be observed in refugee families fleeing from the Oklahoma dust-bowl famine on the early 30's, as they transitioned from peasants to proletarians, and found new social relationships they had not yet ecountered.

The families learned what rights must be observed -- the right of privacy in the tent; the right to keep the past black hidden in the heart; the right to talk and to listen; the right to refuse help or to accept, to offer help or to decline it; the right of son to court and daughter to be courted; the right of the hungry to be fed; the rights of the pregnant and the sick to transcend all other rights.

And the families learned, although no one told them, what rights are monstrous and must be destroyed: the right to intrude upon privacy, the right to be noisy while the camp slept, the right of seduction or rape, the right of adultery and theft and murder. These rights were crushed, because the little worlds could not exist for even a night with such rights alive.

There's even something in here on sexual ethics,

…a man might have a willing girl if he stayed with her, if he fathered her children and protected them. But a man might not have one girl one night and another the next, for this would endanger the worlds.

Much of this initially seems antithetical to my idea. Human rights are portrayed as a kind of specific social relation instead of an innate nature. However, what I see happening in moments of social upheaval is not some kind of "creation ex nihilo" of new social relations, but rather a mirror being held up to human nature. We learn who we are in the unfolding historical process, even though "no one tells us."

Today, on the streets of Tripoli, a dictator's historical downfall is happening. The Libyan people now have an opportunity to create a society that is more... "human". How will they know what that is? History teaches them.

Listening to young people, Darcus Howe and the signs of the times.

2011-08-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

The nagging thought I have every time I look at the progression of the conflict in London is, will this be happening again in 30 years? Will anyone address the social causes of this mess, or will politicians keep behaving like David Cameron, punishing the individuals who are the effect, not the cause.

"Apropos" of this nagging question, I just had to transcribe some powerful words! I am so inspired by the way this man Darcus Howe handled himself in this interview, but also by the way that he listens to the voices of young people, and transforms that into social commentary. If people listened to this man, we would have a way to work towards a solution.

Sadly, this sensationalist reporter listens to him about as much as I am sure West Indian negro men have come to expect from whites in England. You'll see what I mean:

Fiona Armstrong: I’m now joined with Darcus Howe, who is a Writer and Broadcaster and we can speak with him now, Marcus Dowe is right now in Croydon. Marcus Dowe are you shocked by what you seen last night?

Darcus Howe: No, not at all. I have been living in London for 50 years. There’s so many different moods and moments. But what I was certain about, listening to my grandson, and my son, is that something very, very serious was going to take place in this country. Our political leaders had no idea. The police had no idea. But if you looked at young blacks, and young whites, with a discerning eye, and a careful hearing, they have been telling us and we would not listen, that what is happening in this country, to them, wrong! What is morally wrong…

Armstrong: Mr. Howe if I can just, if I can just stop you Mr. Howe for a moment, you’re not, you say you’re not shocked, does this mean that you condone what happened in your community, last night?

Howe: I condone… Of course not! What I am going to condone it for? What I’m concerned about more than anything else, there’s a young man called Mark Duggan. He has parents, he has brothers, he has sisters, and few yards away from where he lives, a police officer blew his head off.

Armstrong: Well Mr Howe – we have to...

Howe: Blew his face off with a – let me finish...

Armstrong: Mr Howe – we have to wait for the official inquiry before we can say things like that. We don’t know what happened to Mr Duggan. We’re going wait for the police report on it.

Howe: Mr. Duggan is dead. You don’t have to wait for an inquiry!

Armstrong: If I can take you on a little bit, you were talking about your grandson, you were talking about…

Howe: … young people. They have been stopping and searching young Blacks for no reason at all. I have a grandson, he’s an angel, and he began to began to think when he was coming of age, when the police slapped him up against the wall, and searched him. I asked him the other day, apropos of a sense that something was going seriously wrong in this country. I asked him how many times have the police searched you. He said: “Papa, I can’t count there’s so many times”.

Armstrong: Mr Howe, that may well have happened and if you say it did, I am not to gainsay you. But that is not an excuse to go out rioting and cause the sort of damage that we’ve been seeing over the last few days.

Howe: Where were you in 1981 in Brixton? I don’t call it rioting; I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it’s happening in Liverpool. It’s happening in Port au Spain, Trinidad. And that is the nature of the historical moment.

Armstrong:
Mr. Howe. If I can just ask you, you are not a stranger to riots yourself, I understand, are you? You have taken part in them yourself?

Howe:
I’m not a… I have never taken part in a single riot. I have been on demonstrations that ended up in a conflict, and have some respect for an old West Indian negro, instead of accusing me of being a rioter. Because you won’t tickle me to get abusive – you just sound idiotic. Have some respect; I have grandchildren!

Armstrong:
Darcus Howe, thank you very much for joining us from Croydon, Darcus Howe, the writer and broadcaster.

Sermon on the Modern Church: "Catch My Disease"

2011-08-07T21:48:00.000-07:00

This is a sermon I preached this week on my vision of the church:

"Catch My Disease"

Part 1:

Part 2:

Catch My Disease: A Parable

2011-08-07T05:53:00.000-07:00

The kingdom of God is like a computer virus which was released onto the internet. It was downloaded onto networks and systems of major corporations without anyone knowing or consenting, and then it brought companies to a halt, it destroyed huge amounts of valuable commodities, and rendered the structures of those corporations completely unusable. When they tried to delete the virus, they found it was unerasable, unless they deleted everything. The virus was now a part of the mainframe.

best seat in the house

2011-08-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

It was the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin who first said a literary text could be 'polyphonic.' Polyphony is a musical term meaning "many voices", describing the many instruments that create a harmony in an orchestra or a band.

In a sense, my research is about untangling the different voices in Luke's gospel.

I spent today focusing on Luke 14:7-11, and asking myself "whose voice is this?" What community or perspective has treasured and remembered this specific story about Jesus? This is the text as rendered by the Common English Bible:

When Jesus noticed how the guests sought out the best seats at the table, he told them a parable. “When someone invites you to a wedding celebration, don’t take your seat in the place of honor. Someone more highly regarded than you could have been invited by your host. The host who invited both of you will come and say to you, ‘Give your seat to this other person.’ Embarrassed, you will take your seat in the least important place. Instead, when you receive an invitation, go and sit in the least important place. When your host approaches you, he will say, ‘Friend, move up here to a better seat.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests. All who lift themselves up will be brought low, and those who make themselves low will be lifted up.”

It occurred to me that somewhere among Jesus' first followers there was a group for whom a pressing issue was where to sit at dinner parties. Among Mediterranean peasants, who lived at subsistence level this was surely a luxury beyond imagination.

Luke opens with the story of Elizabeth and Zacharias, poor and faithful and barren. Then the young Mary, the shepherds. As the chapters progress there is John living in the wilderness, and Jesus and the disciples who leave everything behind to follow as itinerants. The crowds following are poor, hungry sick and outcast...

At some point, Jesus gave instructions on how to host a dinner party. Clearly this is a very unique gospel voice, and demonstrates just how polyphonic a text Luke is. Who on Earth in the gospel of Luke could afford dinner parties?

On having no voice, reflections after mediagate...

2011-08-04T00:19:00.001-07:00

Is there anything more dehumanising than having no voice?

Australian media is the most monopolised media industry in the world, with 70% of media sales going to News Limited. One little family, the Murdochs are doing all the talking in the world. Those who do tell the truth (ahem, Bradley Manning, cough cough) are thrown in Gitmo. If they survive Gitmo (cough splutter David Hicks sneeze), their story is confiscated by the state under the proceeds of crime act.

So, while ordinary people are given no voice, the Murdochs get all the voice, and they are not prosecuted or broken up. Their assets are under no danger from the proceeds of crime act, even though that is exactly what they have been shown to be.

Brendan O'Neill, the editor of alternative/libertarian news source Sp!ked Online, should be a person who is deeply sensitive to this injustice. However, on QandA this week, he argued against almost every other voice in the room that the State should not interfere and break up the Murdoch Empire – they should be allowed to keep their monopoly. He defended his views here.

For O’Neill this is an expression of freedom, but his concept of freedom just doesn’t match the real world. For instance, he says,

That's one of the great things about press freedom: anyone with the nous and the know-how and a fundraising sidekick can press their own ideas and offer them up for public consumption.

Really? Could a single mother realistically pull that off? What about an indigenous person living in poverty in Central Australia? The fact is, you need to be incredibly privileged to be able to start your own business in our world.

As 17th-century English poet John Milton put it in his impassioned plea for the freedom to print: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Such liberties are fine – but they are just paper-liberties unless the poor have access to media. But even if a person is white and male and trust-funded enough to get a small alternative news business underway, the whole point of monopolies is that because they have more resources than small businesses, they are able to undercut prices and invest more in marketing, so that they put their competitors out of business. They then take over the remains of the company and their monopoly gets stronger. For those who have played Monopoly before, that's how the game works - that's why there is always only one winner.

In other words, a free-market in the media is actually just a dictatorship of the big fish over the little fish, and even then most fish don’t even make it into the pond. It is “free” in name only.

Steinbeck's Missiology

2011-08-01T06:55:00.000-07:00

In John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Rev. Jim Casy is the spiritual compass of the novel. He is often interpreted as a symbol of Jesus.

He is a preacher who has fallen from grace, lost his faith, and thus come to a tremendous spiritual realisation, which he articulates in the most spell-binding southern drawl. This hillbilly is one of the most moving "missiologists" I have ever read. Here is an excerpt,

"An you ain't gonna preach?" Tom asked.
"I ain't gonna preach."
"An' you ain't gonna baptize?" Ma asked.
"I aint' gonna baptize. I'm gonna work in the fiel's, in the green fiel's, an' I'm gonna be near to folks. I ain't gonna try to teach 'em nothin'. I'm gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear 'em talk, gonna hear 'em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin' mush. Gonna hear husban' an' wife a-poundin' the mattress in the night. Gonna eat with 'em an' learn."
His eyes were wet and shining.
"Gonna lay in the grass, open an' honest with anybody that'll have me. Gonna cuss an' swear an' hear the poetry of folks talkin'. All that's holy, all that's what I didn't understan'. All them things is the good things."
Ma said, “A-men.”

Have mercy on me, THE sinful one

2011-07-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

I’m in the middle of a project, translating the sections in Luke which are unique to Luke. In order to bring out the unique style and vocabulary of these sections, I am using a much more literal and ‘wooden’ style than most translations aim for.

Quite a few times now, I have noticed things that often get airbrushed out for "smoothness" of translation. Take this offering from today’s work:

Luke 18:10-13

“Two people went into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, having stood by himself, prayed these things, “God, I am giving thanks to you that I am not like the rest of people, greedy, unrighteous, adulterers, or like this tax collector. I fast two times a week, and I tithe everything that I acquire.

“The tax collector standing far off, did not want to raise his eyes to the sky, but beat his chest saying, 'God, have mercy on me, the sinful one.'”

Generally, we’re used to reading “have mercy on me, a sinner”, as though repentance were about some abstract ‘sinfulness.’ But this tax collector is being much more specific.

The NASB and YLT had been the closest, translating it respectively as:

"God, be merciful to me, the sinner!"

and

"God be propitious to me -- the sinner!"

This is the Greek text (SBL). You will notice the little word "τῷ" (the) is there, glaring at us, demanding to be included, even though it messes up our smooth English and pious sounding, traditional prayer.

Ὁ θεός, ἱλάσθητί μοι τῷ ἁμαρτωλῷ.

The “the” in this context is a contrast. It means "the sinful one" of the two people in the story. Have pity on me because I am so unworthy compared to "the righteous one" over there.

Now this little monosyllabic word has the ability to add so much depth to our increasingly inane theologies of repentance and salvation in our world of "quick fix" and market economy.

So often, the gospel is preached as though what we need saving from is the concept of sin. The sin of the four spiritual laws, or the sin of Adam. Gospel preachers try to make people aware of this idea of sin, so that they can grasp the idea of mercy. Repentance and salvation, then, are a bit like downloading a patch to fix buggy software. No. No, no, no!

Sin is a material and specific force in our world. God cares about our lived experience, the real situations in which we feel shame and alienation. These are the things which also drive us to God for help. It is in those moments that we find God’s mercy.

When I am ignoring the needs of another human being and focusing on my own, I need this prayer to remind me that people are not objects to be used: "have mercy on me, the selfish one!"

When I am buying a product that exploits and pollutes, to save a buck, or to make my life easier, or because of market pressures, I need this prayer to remind me that God sides with the poor: "have mercy on me, the exploiting one!"

When I am looking in the mirror, judging myself on the basis of what other people think, I need this prayer to remind me that it is God, not people, whose judgment matters: "have mercy on me, the sinful one!"

Gunshots in Norway Shatter Prejudices World Over.

2011-07-27T00:51:00.000-07:00

The news is still saturated with the recent events in Norway, where, claiming the name of Jesus, Anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Breivik has become the worst European terrorist in living memory. Scores of teenagers are dead and there are daily pictures of loved ones traumatised with grief.

Two things happened today which reminded me why terrorism, apart from being morally appalling, is also completely ineffective. The first was this quote:

“We will punish the guilty. The punishment will be more generosity, more tolerance, more democracy.” ~ Mayor of Oslo, Fabian Stang.

How powerful! Let our inexorable determination to do what is right be the moral force which punishes this man. His terrible cause will become increasingly ludicrous as he moulders in his cell to old age and sadness.

The second thing that happened was of a more personal nature. I was at the supermarket and I saw two workers talking playfully to each other. One, a man of Lebanese appearance was joking around because he thought nobody could hear. Norway was far from his mind. He pulled his hoodie over his head and said to the other, “Do I look like a terrorist?”

I couldn’t help interrupting with the line, “Don’t terrorists have blue eyes and blond hair?”

The mystified worker, who hadn't realised anyone could overhear his conversation, looked at me in surprise and said, “but I’m Lebanese!” A whole cloud of societal prejudice and hegemony condensed into the single raindrop of one surprised statement.

Exhibit A. For now, Breivik’s actions have destroyed the most effective argument for his cause. Every time a white person bombed Afghanistan, or used depleted uranium to nuke an Iraqi town, the public kept believing that the Muslims were the ‘baddies’, that they are somehow stereotypical terrorists because of their race or religion. Breivik’s terrorism, however, has shattered that horrible lie.

One day, no nation will be able to have power over another nation. Jesus said it over and over, "Imperial Rule" (sometimes badly translated as "the kingdom"), he said in Matthew 5, "belongs to the poor, the meek, the hungry, the peacemakers, the persecuted." When that day comes, terrorism will end, because there will be no Empire left to hate. Until then, every action which destroys our stupid racist prejudices is a step towards that end.

the woman who was a sinner, take two

2011-07-20T07:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I translated and blogged on the woman who was a sinner in Luke 7:36-50, which is so often translated insipidly, making us think the woman just "moistened" Jesus' feet like maybe a postage stamp. The text is so vivid!

I want to translate 7:38 like this:

καὶ στᾶσα ὀπίσω παρὰ τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ κλαίουσα τοῖς δάκρυσιν ἤρξατο βρέχειν τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ καὶ ταῖς θριξὶν τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτῆς ἐξέμασσεν καὶ κατεφίλει τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ καὶ ἤλειφεν τῷ μύρῷ.

Having placed herself behind him, around his feet, weeping, she began to drench his feet with tears, and she wiped it up with the hair of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed him with the ointment.

As if the Spirit were nailing home the point, today a young Burmese woman offered me a free hair cut. She was a trainee. I had no idea until I sat down that I was in a Tony & Guy styling salon. I've never seen a 'stylist' before in my life. What followed was almost three hours of free treatments, trimmings and texturings.

As a gay male, I've always felt horribly awkward around girls or women my own age. Especially during puberty. Society and religion asked me to feel one thing/respond in a certain way, and I didn't feel it... if I didn't feel it I was a pervert, and if I did, it would be "lust". Nobody needs that added in to the mix of hormones, bullying and acne.

But I have come a long way since puberty. As I spoke to this young woman, I realised she was desperate. Burma is ruled by military junta, and is a place of civil uprisings, human rights violations and no democracy. She is seeking residency in Australia. She has to get employed in order to attain residency. She's still in school.

The parallels flooded my mind. This woman had come as an alien into "someone else's" space, "my" country. In that space, I had all the privilege and she had none. She washed my hair, massaged my temples and anointed me with fragrant (...err...) "hair clay".

Simon's lack of hospitality, the woman's extreme hospitality, are reminiscent of other lived experiences in our world. If this woman is living exactly where refugees live in our society, then Simon the Pharisee is like the white Australia which looks after nobody's but its own.

Luke 7:44-46
I came into your house; you did not give me water for my feet, but she drenched my feet with tears, and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but since I came, she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she anointed my feet with ointment.

Funny how the Bible comes alive

"polite" bible translations

2011-07-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

If this were the only reason to learn biblical languages, it would be worth it: Bible translations in English are too damn polite! They tone town the language from an intense, vivid imagery to a more appropriate shade of gray. Bible Translation English is the worst English. If the original text of the Greek Bible is Chai bought on the streets of New Delhi, overpoweringly strong and market-place common, then Bible Translation English is like weak British tea, tepid from too much milk.

This example today frustrated me. I was translating a section of Luke 7, and I came to the place where a sinful woman wept from love at Jesus' feet. I was accustomed to translations saying she either "wet" his feet (NIV, ESV, NASB, ASV), or "washed" them (King James, ISV) with tears.

The word used is βρέχειν (brechein). Here is a sample of the ways it is used in Greek literature, as given in Liddel and Scott:

1. wet, of persons walking through water; steep in water; shower; to be bathed in sweat or drench themselves; filled with water; of sponges; to be rained upon, esp. in Egypt of the inundation of the Nile; to be inundated; steeped, bathed in.

2. rain, send rain.

Clearly, we're dealing with more than a few splashes of salt-water. I was tempted to translate the verse as "she rained down tears on his feet," but that would have been reactionary of me. This is how I ended up translating the verse:

"weeping, she began to drench his feet with tears"

I really hope it captures more of the original affect of the story. We are so much poorer for having allowed the upright and politically correct religious establishment take this image of fierce passion and intense love away from us.

Philippines: Catholic Church bullies gay Christians

2011-07-17T20:13:00.000-07:00

Philippines: Catholic Church bullies gay Christians

From Green Left Weekly issue 887
Sunday, July 17, 2011
By Karl Hand

In the predominantly Roman Catholic city of Manila, a small group of Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) are preaching a message of inclusion and social justice that has angered the religious hierarchy.

Now, their practice of blessing same-sex marriages has resulted in leaders of the Catholic Church in Manila threatening legal action, and calling for MCC to be stripped of its right to solemnise marriage ceremonies.

On June 25, the MCC of Metro Baguio hosted a Holy Union of eight same sex couples at the Ayuyang Bar in Baguio City.

A “Holy Union” is an MCC rite which blesses a relationship, and is believed to join two people together spiritually.

The rite was performed by MCC clergy including pastors Ceejay Agbayani, Myke Sotero, Egay Constantino, and Regen Luna.

In the weekend following the rituals, a controversy erupted in the local media. By June 27, Catholic Bishop Teodoro Bacani described the ceremonies as “kadiri”, a Tagalog expression of disgust.

Bacani said: “I think they can be also be prosecuted for doing something illegal before the law.”

Other Catholic voices speaking out against the MCC include the retired Archbishop Cruz, who is the leader of the National Appellate Matrimonial Tribunal of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, and Baguio Bishop Carlito Cenzon.

They are calling for MCC’s licence to solemnise marriages to be revoked.

Cruz said: “Even if they get married, five times, 10 times, 20 times, or 100 times, no wedding had taken place. It was not a legal matrimony.”

Cenzon said: “This is an insult to our Civil Code and Catholic Church. I pity them.”

In response, Arbayani said: “We insist that we do not violate any Philippine law because this is a Holy Union, a rite conducted by MCC as a Christian denomination that minsters to the LGBT [community] in the Philippines.

Metropolitan Community Churches are an inclusive denomination of Christian churches who believe in social justice and human rights. They have often provided a safe environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex Christians.

[Pastor Karl Hand is an ordained minister in the Metropolitan Community Church, and currently pastors CRAVE MCC, www.cravemcc.com .]

Dreamtime, Steinbeck, the Acts of the Apostles

2011-07-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

I commented yesterday on the parallel between the communal Christian society (Acts 2:44-45) and the successful indigenous communist society in Australia, which is still the oldest living culture, and one of the most beautiful.

I am currently reading Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. I have never come across a novel (except, perhaps, for Dostoevsky) which demands such a slow reading. The dignified unfolding of this narrative is comparable to Holst's The Planets. That a text written with so much southern 'white-trash' drawl can be so elegant is a paradox itself. But the most contradictory feature of this text is its sense of time passing. It would be impossible to amble meaninglessly through any of these chapters. It would be indecent to read some parts of it quickly, and some chapters cannot be read only once without insulting the dignity of the text.

I suspect that Steinbeck created this effect by moving from extremelty intimate, personal settings to panoramic views regularly in the text. He "zooms in" and "zooms out" several times before even a single development occurs in the plot. The effect is liturgical: you are forced to contemplate, to savour the narrative. You also can't view the characters as anything but a product of their social and historical context, and still they are so thoroughly human that you can't think of them in a materialistic way.

The surreal disjunction between 'storied time' and 'real time' could easily be understood as evocative of the Dreaming, or perhaps of the emptiness of Australian geography. It could also be compared to the compositional technique of the Apocalypse of the New Testament, which is where the name "Grapes of Wrath" comes from. The book of Revelation alternates between visions of the Earth, and visions of Heaven.

Reading Steinbeck has therefore become a devotional practice for me, and it is deeply edifying. I use the term 'edifying' with no irony here. Steinbeck demands a lot his reader.

Last night, in chapter six, I stumbled across a short text which reminded me that it is not only primitive Christianity and culturally sophisticated Aboriginal communities which remembered the common-life of human paradise. It's hidden in the heart of a disenfranchised Okie tenant farmer in the dust-bowl crisis of the dirty 30's in the USA:

“God Awmighty,” said Joad, “it’s more’n four years sence I’ve et fresh-killed meat.”

Casy picked up one of the cottontails and held it in his hand. “You sharin’ with us, Muley Graves?” he asked.

Muley fidgeted in embarrassment. “I ain’t got no choice in the matter.” He stopped on the ungracious sound of his words. “That ain’t like I mean it. That ain’t. I mean” - he stumbled – “what I mean, if a fella’s got somepin to eat an’ another fella’s hungry–why, the first fella ain’t got no choice. I mean, s’pose I pick up my rabbits an’ go off somewheres an’ eat ‘em. See?”

“I see,” said Casy. “I can see that. Muley sees somepin there, Tom. Muley’s got a-holt of somepin, an’ it’s too big for him, an’ it’s too big for me.”

Young Tom rubbed his hands together. “Who got a knife? Le’s get at these here miserable rodents. Le’s get at ’em.”

Those who are familiar with the social setting of the Grapes of Wrath will know that these people were starving because the environment and the economy of Oklahoma crumbled with little warning, and banks came in a took everything.

History tells us that humanity is as ever sitting on the brink of these kinds of disasters. As Greece crumbles, as the ice-caps melt, and as we debate the carbon tax and the fate of refugees and people like broken records say in the media every day "we need to protect our own interests" and "what's in it for me?", we, the propertied and affluent people of Australia, should look at the Bible, the dreaming, and books like the Grapes of Wrath as a reminder that a life of sharing may be closer upon us than we think.

An indigenous take on why Jesus came

2011-07-10T06:18:00.000-07:00

"The reason that Australia was a paradise for 40'000 years was because we ate the snake and left the apple on the tree" said Aunty Kaz, beloved indigenous Australian leader, speaking at my church CRAVE MCC today.

Instead of airing my own views, I preferred to find an Aboriginal voice to speak about reconciliation and indigenous culture at our NAIDOC service. Kaz's perspective was so informative and refreshing. She pointed out that the first Christian communes in Acts lived in a tradition and ritual based society based on sharing not property, just like Aboriginal society did.

Acts 2:42-47 NIV

42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43 Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. 44 All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45 They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. 46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

There are some Aboriginal people who congregate near Central Station. I always walk past and chide myself about how we built a train station on top of their paradise. Of course, these people only represent a tiny and limited aspect of what it can mean to be indigenous in Australia, 2011. They still share everything. In the morning while I shuffle to my train, they ask me for a smoke or a coin, and I say no. Maybe they're living the Acts 2 life better than I do...

"40'000 years later, the Son of God came to you mob, and showed you how to live exactly how we had been living all along," said Aunty Kaz.

What an incredible perspective! And I'm so enriched by hearing it.