Deep Gleaning

Every other morning lately, I'm out in the front yard, harvesting okra.  

I've grown far more of it than I need, with just about twenty plants chugging away.  Ten of those are packed over-dense into a four by eight bed, so their production has been less per plant.  This is only my second season growing, so I'm still figuring the whole thing out.  The tallest of them now stand well over five feet, and lately I get about a quart a day from the lot of 'em.  

I don't need anywhere near that much, and there's only so much bhindi masala, gumbo, and batter-fried okra folks in my household want to eat.  I've already selected the healthiest plants to let run to seed stock for next year, so the question becomes: what to do with the rest?

Giving those pods to neighbors?  That's a bit of a stretch in the suburban Mid-Atlantic, where okra mostly has a reputation for slime.  This is, of course, utterly unfair.  Okra's delicious when prepared properly, nutty and nutritious, with a satisfyingly toothsome texture.  But still, folks seem confused and unfairly repulsed by it.

In most of the rest of the world, that's not the case.  In the traditionally warmer regions of the planet, where most of humankind dwells, it's a staple crop.  Easy to grow and productive, it's highly desired, even in its spinier forms.

Out in front of my little church, there's that Little Free Pantry, one that we started to supplement the traditional food bank in town.  Folks get hungry in the off-hours, after all.  It's taken off in ways we didn't anticipate.  In the last six months, with the support of the church and our friends in the community, twenty seven thousand pounds of food have been funneled through a cheery little bird-feederesque box.  We've set out coolers, too, and...notably...built a Little Free Produce Stand.

Because Poolesville Presbyterian sits in the heart of an agricultural reserve, there are plenty of folks who garden, and from their efforts produce an overabundance.  There are, similarly, many who have more resources than they actually need for their well-being.  When gardens produce more than we need, it shouldn't ever go to waste.

When there's an overabundance, the great sacred narrative of the Bible is real clear about how we are to use it.  More than you need?  Torah sez: don't squeeze every last drop out of the land.  We are called instead to be sure to set a portion of our efforts aside for those who have need.  From Leviticus 19, we hear:

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.  

From Deuteronomy 24, we hear:  

When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow.

And as the Law was woven by storytellers into narrative form, that becomes part of the defining mythopoetics of a culture.  The Book of Ruth recounts how Ruth the Moabite and her mother Naomi...a foreigner and a widow, respectively...gleaned from the fields of the honorable Boaz.  And Ruth and Boaz getting to know one another better was, as the story goes, how the lineage of King David.  Without the ethic of leaving something for those who have need, there is no Israel.  There is no messianic understanding.  It's kinda sorta important.

And in our grasping, Mammonist age, we've forgotten this.  We're encouraged to anxiously optimize, until everything we have is turned inwards, our energies like those of a collapsing star, hoarding light as it folds upon itself.

If my efforts serve me alone, if I maximize my profit at every turn and seek my own advantage without exception, then I have become an affront to the justice of God's covenant.  That's a sustained and basic moral imperative, if you understand the Bible as an authoritative text in your life.

That said, there's not a whit to stop you from doing more.  Gleaning can go deeper.  If you expand your plantings, you can do so with the explicit intent of feeding those who hunger.

And so I knew, when I planted all that okra, that I'd have my fill, and that come harvest time, I'd be bringing bag after bag of tasty nutritious pods to the produce stand.

They're gone within the half-hour, picked up by women driving cleaning service vehicles, or men driving pickups filled with lawn equipment.

And every morning, when I snip those pods, I recall that if I expect any blessing upon the work of my hands, I need to be that blessing.

Aging in History and Scripture

There's a peculiar dissonance between aging in the world of human history and aging in the narratives of Torah.

We know, because we do, that in both the ancient world and in prehistory aging wasn't something most of us did.  What most of us did was die young.  Get a childhood illness?  You died.  Have a complicated birth?  You died.  Get an infected wound?  You died.  By the time most human beings were in their mid-thirties, they weren't finally getting established in their career.  They were dead.  

As a species, we got around this the way that all other animals get around that basic existential challenge: we reproduced in large numbers, spamming ourselves into the world.

Age wasn't something that most people did.  The idea that most human beings would make it into their seventies would have seemed impossible.

Yet the tales of Torah lay out an entirely different spin on aging.  The farther back you go, the longer people live.  In Genesis, we hear that Adam, literally "the creature of earth?"  Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years.  Nine hundred and thirty.  Methuselah, whose name was once synonymous with "very old dude?"  He lived the longest, at nine hundred and sixty nine years. 

Noah had his kids at five hundred, which sounds...exhausting.   

All of the antediluvian...meaning "before the flood"...folks in Genesis lived preposterously long lives.  If one was a literalist, which I am not, there'd be all sorts of reasons one could present.

For instance, one might argue that so close to the exile from the Garden, the first humans were closer to immortality and agelessness, a lingering echo of the deathless perfection of unmediated connection with YHWH.  That works theologically and within the text, but it's a little hard to jibe with the way the human body actually functions.  If you have any engagement with Creation as it actually and observably exists, that sort of argument isn't particularly satisfying.  

When I was a kid reading the Bible for the first time on my own, I just kinda assumed the authors of that section were using a lunar calendar, and where they said "years," they meant "months."  That breaks down when you get further in, but hey, I was nine.

Or perhaps it's a factor of the peculiar subjectivity of time, in which days seem longer when you're younger.  

Or perhaps, as historical critical scholarship suggests, the great age of the antediluvian patriarchs is a conceit of the storytelling of the Ancient Near East, where the archetypal heroes lived in a time beyond time.  In Mesopotamian literature, for instance, the legendary figures in their pre-flood narratives typically lived for thousands of years.  This directly parallels ancient Hebrew storytelling, because of course it does.  

No matter what your interpretive framework, what is clear is that age in the ancient world was viewed as a thing of great worth, something fundamentally positive.  Aging was a rarity, and those who did reach their seventies or eighties were viewed with reverence and honor.  Their lives would have spanned the equivalent of several normal lifetimes, and they would be valuable repositories of collective memory, living relationships, and experience.

In the ancient world, the old were rare and precious and valued, because so few human beings attained great age.  

What a strange and different world that must have been.

Take Up And Read

My annual week at the beach is now just a warm hum in my memory and a faint umber in my flesh.  Beyond the playing in sand and surf, the beach has always meant one thing to me: reading.

This year, my seven days at the beach involved reading, and a blessed break from the march of churchy books I've been reading for my doctorate.  It five novels, around 1,500 pages or so of storytelling goodness.  

Three of the novels were recent offerings from the publisher that, God willin' and the crick don't rise, will soon be working with me on getting my own novel to print.

Those were intimidating, at first, serious books written by clearly gifted authors.  I'm going to be in the company of these folks?  Sure, I've self-published and ePublished.  But looking at that stack of books, hardbacks one and all, was peculiar.  They bore the labels from the library, that place of deep magic remembered from childhood.  I felt a bit like a clueless, as-yet-unsorted muggle-born, wandering into Hogwarts and gawking at the towering, godlike seventh-years as they bent reality to their whims.  

It took me four days to read them, and then I moved to one I'd loaded onto my Kindle.  It was by Stephen King, just because, well, it had been a while.  Darned fine yarn, as it so happened.  And the last was one my wife had read on my Kindle, and came with her recommendation.  It did not disappoint.

I inhaled them, as I do with books, as I always have.  I breathe them in, and whole days disappear as I lose myself in the worlds they create.

What struck me, as I packed up my books from a week of intense, blissful reading, was the book that I had brought and not read.  I'd brought my study bible, as I do, everywhere I go.  But I'd not cracked it, nor had I been tempted to crack it.

It's not that I haven't read it recently, of course, or that I don't read it as part of my usual weekly discipline.  Reading and studying scripture is a part of my every week, as I first meditate over the selected readings, seeking one that seems to resonate or harmonize with my soul and the things of the world.  I refresh my understanding of a text, reading through commentaries in preparation for interpreting it in worship.   I find that fascinating, because the text--as the Spirit moves in it--is always different in different contexts.  It's why, after over ten years of interpreting from the many and various books of the Bible, I still find the process of preparing the Sunday sermon a life-giving place.  It is a task I enjoy, like the good feel of a well-made tool in your hand, or the good sweat that comes from working the earth when preparing for a planting.

But what struck me, in that week of reading other stories, was just how important it is to know other tales.  Bringing the ancient and sacred texts of our tradition alive requires an immersion in other stories--in books, in film, in the stories shared by those around us.  Relating those living stories to that life-giving story, understanding that dance, that exchange?

It makes that One Story--the one we know, and in which we are free to participate--more meaningful, more filled with purpose.

English, Dragonish, and the Problem with Fundamentalism

Yesterday, as I bumbled my way through a reasonably productive Monday, I encountered two things that got me thinking about faith and language.   The first of those two things was the video below, which was pitched out onto Facebook by the former head of the religious school at my family's synagogue.   It's a pleasant little bit of history, the history of the English language, presented by the inimitable Open University.   The Open University, in the event you haven't heard of it, is a British institution, one that allows easy access to quality, college-level coursework to anyone who has the desire to partake of it.   Back then I lived there in the late 70s, much British daytime programming during the day on one of the three television channels was dedicated to Open University lectures and course preparation.   Those wacky socialists and their educations!  Anyhoo, here it is, ready to sop up 10 minutes of your life.  It's a bit naughty in that wry British way, so thou art forewarned:



After this little excursus into the organic evolution of the English language, I took a break from FB and blogging, did a few chores, and then settled in for a bit of day-off gaming.  I'm playing my way through Skyrim on the PS3, and it's a remarkably entertaining, deep, and well-constructed game.  One of the elements that Bethesda Softworks has really nailed in both this game and others is a well-crafted soundtrack.  It's a contextual soundtrack, meaning the music shifts and varies depending on location, time of day, and whether or not you're blowing up zombies with balls of magical fire.

As I settled in with my controller yesterday, though, something caught my attention.  At the beginning of the game, during the initial load screen, there's a song.  It's a big bellowy hoo-hah song, all pomp and bombast, the sort of music that stirs the small Viking fragment of my genetic heritage.   In the midst of drums and blaring brass, a big male voice choir grunts and vocalizes, and then starts yarping gibberish in an MMA-meets-Glee testosterama.

When the yarping began, I realized, suddenly, that they weren't singing nonsense words at all.  For the purposes of verisimilitude, the game has a language that was made for it, a language spoken by dragons.  The words in that tongue are spoken throughout the game, and in a moment of geekish epiphany, I recognized dovakiin, the Dragonish word for "dragon-born."  And then the word Anduin, the name of the great dragon who brings about the end of time.  It was a bit like that time I first attended a synagogue service after learning Hebrew.  Only geekier.

I went online, and found the...cough...English "translation," which goes like this:



So here's a language, or the framework of one, that exists solely in-game.   I'm not sure there's enough there there for the American Bible Society to attempt a translation into Dragonish, but I figure if you can translate the Bible into Klingon, anything is fair game.

Twice in one day, then, there came the reminder of the ephemeral character of human language.  It's one of the reasons I find fundamentalist literalism so completely bizarre.

Sure, the nature of God is unchanging, and the nature of the Being that God speaks is boundlessly, deeply real.  But words?   As much as I love 'em, words in human tongues aren't the thing itself.  They can evoke.  They can suggest.  They can point to, and lead to, the Holy.  But they are not the Real that rises from our Maker.

Perhaps that's why we find it so easy to fight over them.   As MacDonald puts it:

God has not cared that we should anywhere have assurance of His very words; and that not merely perhaps, because of the tendency in His children to word-worship, false logic, and corruption of the truth, but because He would not have them oppressed by words...even He must depend for being understood upon the spirit of His disciple.

Viva la Neoreformacion!

The Boundaries of the Word

As I mulled over a post earlier this week on the dynamic between the Holy Spirit and Holy Scripture, I found myself wrassling with one of the concerns that I've heard from conservatives whenever I suggest that the Spirit has primacy over the texts of the Bible.   When I came before a committee of the Presbytery charged with reviewing my pastoral qualifications,  a conservative member of the group listened to my position, and then asked (and I paraphrase, though he put it well): "Well, then what is it that makes the Bible significant?  If the Holy Spirit has the level of primacy you state, how can you clearly delimit spiritual authority to the texts of canonical Scripture?  That seems to open the door to other texts having the same level of authority, and if you do that, where are the boundaries?"  His point was well taken, and it was offered up not by way of hostility.  He really wanted to talk about it.

In my own personal journey as a Christian, I've experienced just such a blurring.  My introduction to Jesus of Nazareth and the foundational concepts of Christian spiritual and ethical life seem a good representative example.  As a child, I didn't really read the Bible all that much.  I got little snippets of Jesus stuff in Sunday School, sure.  Eventually, I ventured into those texts on my own, but not until I was a tweener.   By then, though, the teachings of Christ and the great narrative of the Gospel had already been imprinted.  Christian faith already felt familiar, because as a voracious reader, I'd already read about it elsewhere, even though the name of Jesus had never been mentioned.

As a child, I learned my Christian faith in the green fields of Narnia. 

Yeah, they're just fantasy, and a bit fusty and oh-so British.  But those stories serve a particular purpose.  They introduce all of the central concepts of the faith, and have woven into them some sophisticated apologetics.  In their own gentle way, they teach about sacrifice and redemption and repentance.  They teach about resisting cynicism.  They teach about the nature of God's justice, and about the distinction between destructive syncretism and the deep universality of God's grace.  Over the years as my adult faith has encountered challenges, I've marveled at how robust a ground was created in those books.  They are remarkably sound.

I know I'm not alone in having been formed by C.S. Lewises writings.  He has appeal across a broad swath of Christianity.  I've heard Aslan invoked by both conservatives and progressives in my denomination.  He's almost universally viewed as articulating what is most essential about Christian faith.  Which gets me to wondering.  If these stories can form faith, providing an intentionally crafted and reliable foundation for understanding Christ's role in the world that echoes and shapes even into our adulthood, does the Holy Spirit work in them?   Surely, surely it must.  And if so, how can those wonderful stories not be a manifestation of the logos? 

Not canon, of course.  But in a very real way, the Word, just as so many of our small efforts to preach and teach the Gospel each Sunday are the Word. 

John Calvin Says Scripture is not the Word of God

Recently, there was a minor stirring within the shrinking corner of the Reformed Tradition that I inhabit. Landon Whitsitt, the new Vice-Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), is someone whose blog I've been feeding since well before he got that rather long and impressive title. Up until he was selected for that esteemed position, he was...as I am...more or less invisible to the reactionary wing of our denomination.

Now, though, he's gotten their attention. He's done so by offering up this thought: Sola Scriptura may no longer be the rule of the church, and it's something he's moved away from. This pressed the rather large and well-worn panic button at the headquarters of the Layman, the right-wing publication which polices matters of fundamentalist orthodoxy in our neck of the woods. Claxons and red lights and alarms went off. They printed an actually-rather-fair summary of Whitsitt's conversation, attached to the headline: "Vice Moderator: Scripture is Not the Word of God." This was followed by much irate shouting and stomping around on their response page. How can a church leader suggest that Scripture alone is not adequate? We're going to heck in a handbasket! We're abandoning the core principle of the Reformation! Apostasssseeeeeeeeee!

Problem is, Sola Scriptura as a free-standing and defining principle is simply not adequate. Scripture...meaning the sacred texts and narratives of our faith...is not sufficient in and of itself. It does not stand alone. It can't. It never has. You can know those texts and stories backwards and forwards, and even the most detailed intellectual knowledge of that data will not make you a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth. Spend even 10 minutes in discussion with a committed and studied atheist with a chip on her shoulder, and the truth of that will become clear.

That's because Scripture derives its meaning from the power of the Holy Spirit working in the heart of a reader. It is the Spirit that guides our interpretation of Scripture. It is the Spirit that opens us to the significance of that narrative for our own existence. Scripture does not stand as an authority for us, and cannot stand as the basis for our salvation, without the Spirit at work. Yeah, I know, this is squishy liberal relativism. It's the sort of thing you get from hopeless pomo leftists like, say, John Calvin, who wrote:

The testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason. For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in his Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men's hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit. The same Spirit, therefore, who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded. (Institutes, I.vii.4)

If what connects us with Scripture is our personal connection to the Spirit of the living God, and what allows us to recognize its authority is that Spirit, then Sola Scriptura cannot be a foundational axiom without making explicit that rather significant caveat.

That, as I see it, is the fundamental failure of Christian fundamentalism.

Homosexuality, Orientation, and Choice

During the hurly burly of the summer of 2008, I managed to read this article, which details a recent study on the neurophysiology of homosexuality. Obviously, the researchers in question are interested in doing more research, and make no definitive claims about causality between orientation and brain structure. But that there is a seemingly meaningful correlation between gay male brains and heterosexual female brains is nonetheless fascinating. That a similar correlation exists between lesbian brain structure and the structure of heterosexual males just adds to the sense that there is in fact something real at work here.

As my own denomination prepares to plunge once again into the fray over the ordination of gays and lesbians and the gay marriage issue, the continuing witness of objective neurobiological research like this makes the assertion that homosexuality itself is a choice seem more and more tenuous. On the radical left, there are many "queer" activists who are utterly unwilling to accept that homosexual orientation is not something chosen. On the fundamentalist right, homosexuality is declared a "lifestyle choice," something analogous to being drawn into a cult, and from which you can be deprogrammed.

Both of these perspectives don't seem to reflect the reality of homosexual orientation, and are instead rooted in an existing bias. The "choice" that gays and lesbians face has very little to do with orientation itself. It has more to do with the way that they respond to their orientation. Individuals who tend towards same-sex attraction have to find a way to respond to that orientation...and it is there that Christendom needs to determine what responses are permissible within a Christian moral framework.

If you've read my previous blogging on this issue, you'll know that I reject the two extreme positions. I reject the idea that any and all expressions of human sexuality are acceptable in the eyes of God. Here, I part ways with the radical left, which asserts that morality is contingent and essentially meaningless. Sexual behavior that is predatory or radically self-seeking is inherently sinful. It tears not just at the fabric of society, but also represents a radical violation of the love ethic, which is itself an expression of God's nature. I apply that standard evenly to heterosexuals and homosexuals. If you act sexually in ways that treat another child of God as an object, you sin, and God will hold you accountable.

I also reject the position that holds that homosexuality is inherently sociopathic, that any and all same-sex interactions are automatically evil. Here, I am explicitly rejecting the position of Biblical literalism. That does not mean that I reject Holy Scripture as the rule of life and faith, but that I understand it's authority in a radically different way.

From the core principles of scripture, I hold that either celibacy or covenant relationships are acceptable ways to set boundaries around our sexuality. As not all of us are called to celibacy, covenant relationship is a more viable approach. Those covenant relationships allow us to express our hardwired sexuality freely within their boundaries, and give us the moral basis for stepping away from destructive and disrespectful desire. That moral core is something that Christians should apply to all human relationships.

The Doctrine of Differential Authority

One of the most maligned aspects of religious traditions is the role of doctrine and dogma. Being called "doctrinal" or "dogmatic" isn't usually considered a statement of respect. Instead, those terms are pitched out at people whose "faith" seems to serve as an impenetrable outer shell, a carefully constructed wall of tradition and received teachings that insure that there's no chance anything outside could ever touch or change them. As the common wisdom holds it, such souls are safe from the the pernicious influence of things like other human beings, reason, and the Spirit of the Living God.

This isn't entirely fair, of course. We all "take things on authority," and holding to doctrines and dogmas means little more than that. Abandoning doctrine entirely means essentially dismissing the insights of everyone who has come before you. For Christians, that would mean you're trashing several thousand years worth of insights from brilliant, thoughtful, Spirit-filled Jesus people. I just can't do that. I love Paul. Augustine is my brother. Walks through the woods with St. Francis would be marvelous. It is only out of the strange, self-centered arrogance of this age that we're able to delude ourselves into imagining that our "personal relationship" with God doesn't connect us to all those other souls who've rejoiced in Him through the ages.

But we don't like doctrines. Bleh. And because doctrines are so stinky, I'll..ahem...offer up another one. I've expounded on this a few times here before: The Doctrine of Differential Authority.

The rule of thumb...the "doctrine"...coming out of the Protestant Reformation regarding the reading of Scripture has always been that Scripture interprets Scripture. The intent of the reformer's approach was to liberate the interpretation of the Bible from the institutional church, and to allow it to speak for itself. If you read Calvin in particular, that liberation was intended to unfetter the Holy Spirit, which is the source and root of Scripture's authority.

This has taken us down two unfortunate paths. First, many Christians allow themselves to accept what I like...in my usual non-provocative manner...to call Satan's Method of Scriptural Interpretation. We've all seen it used. You take a random assemblage of unrelated texts that seem to prove your point, and count 'em all up to prove whatever point you wanted to make. Old Scratch used that one on top of the Jerusalem Tower. Whoever's got the most verses...wins!

Second, there's the tendency to view every single text in our canon as equally full of transforming power. Unfortunately, this lends itself to a level of cognitive dissonance that most sentient life forms can't endure. Let's say I'm in conversation with a woman, and she lets slip that she's a practicing Wiccan. Do I obey the infallible Word of God and immediately stab her? (Exodus 22:18) Or do I obey the infallible Word of God and engage her in an open and respectful conversation that surfaces my theological disagreement but remains guided by love? (Romans 12:17-18)

Many Christians get around the disagreements in Scripture by saying there is no disagreement. I understand this perspective, but I just can't do it myself. At a basic level, it doesn't seem to respect the authors of the texts...or the Author, for that matter. Instead, I prefer to interpret using the Doctrine of Differential Authority, which assumes that not all Scripture speaks with the same amount of God's power. To put it bluntly, some Scriptures are more rich with the Spirit than others, and those scriptures must be used to define those below them.

Well, you say, that leads us down the slippery slope of subjectivism! Though I appreciate your alliterative reply, I beg to differ. The Bible itself tells us that some passages are more important than others. Torah can be condensed into 10 Commandments. Those 10 Commandments can be condensed into the Great Commandment, the Love commandment, which is itself an expression of God's own nature.

As we approach scripture and seek its guidance as the rule of life and faith, it is this understanding that needs to govern our interpretation. Why approach it this way?

The point of such an approach is to do two things. First, to recognize and accept this innate hierarchy within canon. Second and more importantly, it's to help unlock the movement of the Holy Spirit in Scripture, which is its ecstatic source and the foundation of its authority.

Time To Move On

‘tso…what’s the point of all this? We Presbyterians have spent much of the last 25 years spinning our wheels over this issue. Folks on the left and folks on the right have been lobbing theological mortar shells at each other, in a deeply entrenched spiritual battle of the Somme. Back and forth we’ve gone, battling in blood and mire over the same 40 yards of theological turf.

At the recent General Assembly of the denomination, a panel of conservatives and progressives brought us a different way of approaching this issue—essentially declaring a truce, and making the issue one that is adiaphora for the church. In other words, it is an issue on which people of good conscience can disagree.

Progressives and liberals are challenged to accept that conservative Christians may not, in fact, be simply acting out of bigotry and repressed hatred, but out of an honest desire to stay true to God’s will. Conservatives have been asked to accept that progressives aren’t just culturally corrupted pseudo-Wiccans, but might be acting out of an honest desire to fulfill God’s scriptural commands of love and justice.

We’ve been asked to set our swords aside and listen to each other, and to pray with each other. I don’t know, honestly, if it’s going to work. It’s a whole bunch easier to fight than it is to forgive.

My personal position on this—which a critical and dispassionate assessment of scripture indicates—is that the issue is not of central importance within the Bible.

But weaseling out of expressing the voice of my conscience would be annoying, so I’ll spit it out. I’m convinced that those who want to set aside the dysfunctional isolation and deception that have defined homosexual lifestyle and live instead in open partnered, covenanted same-sex relationships are doing something new, and that that new thing that is pleasing in God’s sight. That position is drawn from my own observations of partnered gays and lesbians working in ministry.

It is grounded in my wholistic approach to scripture, which places greater emphasis on the central principles it teaches and the Spirit that fills it.

Back to Pastor Strangelove

Will and Grace are Pauline Theological Concepts

Romans, Romans, Romans. It's the very pinnacle of Paul's theology, a complicated and passionate letter that establishes how we as Christ's people understand what it is that Christ has done for us. Here Paul lays the foundation of our understanding grace as triumphing over the condemnation of the law. Here Paul *defines* the saving power of faith. This essential book also contains--in Romans 1--the most explicit condemnation of homosexual behavior in all of scripture.

In a speech given several years ago to a group of evangelicals, conservative Bible scholar Paul Achtemeier asserted that if the church is to meaningfully wrestle with this issue, it first needs to come to terms--honestly and openly--with what Romans 1 is actually saying. So...what does it say? Here are the specific verses in question:

Romans 1:21b-27 "...although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator-- who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion."

There we go! Here we have Paul clearly--clearly--telling the church at Rome that being gay is a "shameful lust." Case closed. Right? That was the point Paul was trying to make, right?

But Romans is not a book that can be understood verse by verse. It isn't a series of pithy little proverbs and aphorisms. It isn't a *simple* book, to be easily grasped by a casual reader. To understand it, you have to read it as a whole, following the arguments as they develop. Then you scratch your head, pray, and read it again. And again. The whole book is a carefully assembled and complex argument for the necessity of Christ's grace, crafted by a brilliant, passionate, and Spirit-filled rhetorician.

For in addition to his rabbinic training and his part-time camping supply business, Paul was also clearly a master of the art of Greco-Roman rhetoric. Rhetoric gets a bad rap nowadays, but it was an essential part of any educated person's training in the ancient world. To succeed in life, you had to be able to persuade people with the spoken and written word. That's exactly what Paul is doing with the whole letter of Romans. He's persuading Rome--and us--of the saving grace of Christ, using all of the tools in the classical rhetorician's toolbox. In classical rhetoric, the many tools of a speaker or writer fell into three primary categories: ethos, logos, and pathos.

Ethos is, in essence, laying a common groundwork with a listener. It establishes the authority of the speaker. Ethos helps an audience understand who you are, and why you're someone to be trusted.

Logos is a particular type of argument, using data and the application of logical proofs as evidence for the rightness of your position. Understood simply, it is an argument from reason, the Mr. Spock school of persuasion.

Pathos is another type of argument, which is intended to stir an emotional response in it's listeners. You stir a crowd to laughter, you move them to tears, you goad them into anger, you cajole them into uncontrollable flatulence, and having evoked that feeling in them, you lead them to agree with your position.

The educated and erudite church in Rome would have expected--needed--Paul to approach them with a letter that showed a mastery of rhetoric, and Paul did not disappoint.

So what point is Paul making, and what place does Romans 1:21-27 have in his argument?

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Beavis and Butthead Snicker When They Interpret This Verse

1 Corinthians 6:9 gives interpreters and translators something of a challenge. It's a list of sins--Paul loves firing off lists--but what exactly are those sins? Particularly, what are the last two sins listed in the verse? The King James and its updates in particular render the verse in a marvelously obtuse way...heaven is forbidden to the "..effeminate and abusers of themselves with mankind."

You're damned if you're effeminate? But...Alberto Gonzales is such a nice man otherwise.

In the Greek, the last two items on Paul's naughty list are "malakoi" and "arsenokoitai." Read literally, the verse condemns the "soft ones" and the "man-bedders." While Paul coined the word "arsenokoitai" from the Levitical injunction against homosexuality, the term "malakoi" was actually used in the Greco-Roman world to describe a young man who sells himself, typically to older, more powerful men. So why the repetition? Is Paul saying: "I condemn homosexuals, and homosexuals, too!" Or is it the professional gay v. amateur gay distinction? "It's a sin if you get paid for it, and a sin if you don't!"

Some have suggested that it refers to the passive versus the active role in the relationship. Others have interpreted it as specifically condemning homosexual practices at the time, which usually involved wealthy and powerful men indulging themselves with young men-- "arsenokoitai" and "malakoi" referring specifically to that dynamic.

But whichever way you slice it, both of those words are really tangential to Paul's point. He's not talking about sexual sin here. 1 Corinthians 6:1-11 deals with the issue of lawsuits among believers, not sexual immorality. He's just firing off a list of commonly known vices, to reinforce to the Corinthians that they're being wicked when they go after each other in court. Paul's fond of "vice lists," because they make for a good, punchy spoken argument. For another example, look to Galatians 5:19-21, where Paul seems to leave being gay off the list entirely. Relying on this verse, or the deutero-Pauline 1 Timothy 1:10, just doesn't give you enough of a solid theological grounding to oppose committed same-sex relationships. 1 Corinthians is a pastoral letter, dealing with pastoral issues in the church at Corinth. Homosexuality just isn't one of the issues that Paul is centrally concerned with in Corinth. It isn't. To argue otherwise is to violate the plain and evident purpose of the text in service of a pointless and idolatrous literalism.

Not that I have any opinion on the subject.

That leaves us with only one passage left to explore, the Mac Daddy of the scriptural teachings on homosexuality, Romans 1.

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Arseno-What? Malaka-Who? Looking at Pauline Theology

Moving into the Epistles...'cause the Gospels have nothing to say to this topic directly...we find ourselves looking at three verses that deal with same-sex relationships. Two are very similar to one another, so we'll look at those first. In both 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10 , homosexual behavior is specifically included in lists of wrongdoing.

In each of these two verses, the Greek word arsenokoitai is used. This has given conniptions to interpreters over the years, as it appears to be a word that Paul himself made up. The variance in translations of the word among the different Bibles is evidence of this. The King James renders it "abusers of themselves with mankind," and the New Revised Standard has it as "sodomites." The NIV folks can't seem to make up their minds, as in 1 Corinthians it is translated as meaning "homosexual offenders" and in 1 Timothy it is translated as "perverts."

As arsen means "man" and koitai means..well.."bedders," the most literal translation would be "man-bedders." Paul appears to have coined the phrase by combining two words that appear in the Greek Septuagint version of Leviticus 18. Although some progressive scholars have tried to suggest that this word doesn't refer to the love that dares not speak it's name, their arguments are not convincing. Paul is specifically referring to homosexual behavior here, using the Levitical codes as his clear inspiration.

In interpreting this passage, however, a more legitimate question is whether Paul is condemning any same-sex relationship, or--as some have claimed--a specific type of same-sex relationship. For that, we need to look more closely at 1 Corinthians 6:9.

Must it be chapter 6, verse 9? God's sense of humor sometimes surprises even me.

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What Happens in Sodom, Stays in Sodom

Beyond the story of Sodom in Genesis 19--which leaves some ambiguity as to what the problem in Sodom actually *is,* where else in scripture do we find reference to that unpleasant little burg? Perhaps that'll clear things up a bit. Or not...

In the Old Testament, we hear only two references that try to explain what happened in Sodom, both times in prophetic literature.

Isaiah 3:9-15 The look on their faces testifies against them; they parade their sin like Sodom; they do not hide it. Woe to them! They have brought disaster upon themselves. Tell the righteous it will be well with them, for they will enjoy the fruit of their deeds. Woe to the wicked! Disaster is upon them! They will be paid back for what their hands have done. Youths oppress my people, women rule over them. O my people, your guides lead you astray; they turn you from the path. The LORD takes his place in court; he rises to judge the people. The LORD enters into judgment against the elders and leaders of his people: "It is you who have ruined my vineyard; the plunder from the poor is in your houses. What do you mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?" declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty.

Ezekiel 16:49-50 "'Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.

Here, neither Isaiah or Ezekiel use Sodom as an example of God condemning same-sex relationships. In fact, sexual immorality doesn't come into the equation at all. If you read the plain, straight-up text itself, it just isn't there. Sodom, for both of these prophets, is used to symbolize those who oppress the poor, as they lay a theological whuppin' on the self-absorbed Judeans around them.

Well, what about in the Gospels and Epistles? There are nine references to Sodom itself in the New Testament, and two uses of the word "sodomite."

The term "sodomite" is used in some English translations (not the NIV or KJV) to render the Greek term arsenokoitai (1 Cor. 6:9 and 1 Tim. 1:10). That word comes from colloquial English, and does not indicate any original textual connection with the city or what went on there. We'll talk about what it means later.

So what of the nine specific references to Sodom? Of these, eight don't talk at all about the nature of the sin of Sodom. Only Jude 1:7 speaks to it, and what it says varies depending on your translation:

NIV: Jude 1:7 "In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion..."

New Revised Standard Jude 1:7 "Likewise, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which, in the same manner as they, indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust.."

King James Version Jude 1:7 "Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh..."

Clearly, Jude presents Sodom's crime as sexual sin. The challenge for translators comes with the words that are in bold. What sort of sexual sin is being referred to here? What the NIV translators refer to as simply "perversion" is actually an entire clause in the Greek. "apeltheousai spisou sarkos heteras." The King James comes closest to giving us a literal translation, as what Jude is saying is "going after strange flesh" or, as heteras is in every other location rendered "another" in the Bible "going after another's flesh."

Again, there is no direct reference to same sex activity here. If this verse--as it occurs in our most ancient manuscripts--is read as it was written, then the sexual sin Jude is referring to is better understood as describing their attempted violent assault on the strangers in their midst. If we take scripture as a guide, the sin of Sodom is twofold: 1) They oppress the poor and are selfish, and 2) They engage in predatory sexuality.

If you're looking for scriptural justification to condemn homosexual behavior, you're going to have to travel beyond the Sodom city limits, and travel elsewhere. Let's stick with the Old Testament for a bit. Where else in the Torah, the Prophets, or the Writings can we find talk of gayness or..um..what's the term...lesbiosity?

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Pastor Strangelove: Welcome To Sunny Sodom!

Given my ongoing desire to explore only the simple, non-controversial issues, methinks it's time to talk a bit about scripture, the essentials of our faith, and homosexuality.

Whenever I start one of these conversations, I always feel a bit like Slim Pickens in the classic Cold War movie Dr. Strangelove. You know that delightful scene--simultaneously rousing and horrific--where Slim pounds away at a nuke that's jammed in the bomb bay door of his B-52. It comes loose while he's on top of it, and down he goes, riding it like a bronco, hootin' and a-hollerin' and waving his stetson like a rodeo cowboy. With that in mind..."Yeeeee HAW!"

The obvious starting point of any discussion of homosexuality in scripture is Genesis 19. Welcome to sunny Sodom! This little story--part of the ancient histories of the Hebrew people--is conventionally interpreted in a pretty straightforward way. The folks of Sodom were all overly light in the loafers, so God sends in an angelic rescue squad, extracts the one straight arrow and his family from the city, and then lays in with a divine game of smear the queer. This is nice, simple, Fred Phelps theology.

But there's much more complexity to the story of Sodom than first meets the eye. The angels that visit Lot have just visited Abraham and Sarah, where they were granted generous hospitality. Being welcoming to the stranger in your midst was a core principle in the Semitic world, and when the angels arrive at the gate of Sodom, Lot insists on feeding them and putting them up.

That evening, every single man in Sodom shows up at Lot's door to have a go at his guests. That's a pretty impressive turnout--I don't think even San Fran breaks down that way demographically.

Lot's reaction is--well--interesting. He offers the rapacious mob his virgin daughters instead. "Gee, thanks, Dad." Why? Why is he willing to toss his girls to the crowd?

In his attempts to persuade the assailants to back off, what does Lot say? He doesn't say "don't do anything to these men, because gay sex is unnatural, and God hates fags." He says, "...don't do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof." The primary issue here, as articulated by Lot, is that the basic principles of hospitality and care for the stranger are being cast aside by those seeking to do sexual violence to others. Violating a guest was..by the unfortunate standards of ancient Semitic culture..far more shameful than violating a female family member. Women were, after all, little more than property.

From this passage, that willingness to do violence to another for one's own gratification seems to define Sodom's wickedness far more deeply than same-sex intercourse.

As the text itself doesn't really provide much support for the popular interpretation of why God trashed that town, we should ask ourselves: what does the rest of the Bible have to say about "the sin of Sodom?"

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Fundamentalist Dance Contest

Ah, literalism, how I love thee. The deeper I get into my walk with Scripture, the more I appreciate the Spirit that fills these holy texts, and the more I find the doctrine of literal inerrancy more and more—ah—interesting. Ahem.

Literal inerrancy requires that there be no flaw, no disagreement at all in scripture. The Bible must be perfect, if it is to be trusted. The task of fundamentalist apologetics is to defend the empirical truth of every last line of scripture. If a single line fails, the whole interpretive system fails. This makes fundamentalists entertaining, in a perverse sort of way. The rational gyrations a literalist must go through to show that not a single word of scripture can be factually incorrect are hypnotic, a sort of theological burlesque.

So for any literalists out there, I offer up the challenge text of the day. In the study series I’m running on the major prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) in adult ed on Sundays, I’ve come across a few fascinating examples of cutting and pasting in scripture. Read, for instance, Isaiah 36:1-39:8. Then read 2 Kings 18.13, and then 2 Kings 18:17-20:19. You’ll find them essentially identical, as one scroll is duplicated and inserted entirely into another. It’s a logical editorial decision—the folks who compiled this portion of the book of Isaiah just wanted to include information on Isaiah that was found in another text. No problem there.

In preparing for my final class on Jeremiah, I found exactly the same thing in Jeremiah 52. The whole last chapter of Jeremiah is a duplicate of 2 Kings 24:18-25:30. Read them both…it’s a little eerie, like an echo in a Judean desert valley at twilight. That echo isn’t exact, though.

Take, for instance, Jeremiah 52:31, which reads: “In the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the year Evil-Merodach became king of Babylon, he released Jehoiachin king of Judah and freed him from prison on the twenty-fifth day of the twelfth month.” (NIV)

Then read 2 Kings 25:27: “In the thirty-seventh year of the exile of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the year Evil-Merodach became king of Babylon, he released Jehoiachin from prison on the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month.” (NIV)

So…what day was he released again? The 25^th day of the 12^th month, or the 27^th day of the 12^th month? Of course, this is just a copyist’s error. One text or the other is off by two days. They can’t both be right. For those who understand scripture as primarily a vessel for the Holy Spirit, the disagreement is irrelevant. But for literal inerrancy, this is an issue that must be dealt with. There. Can. Be. No. Error.

Want to take a crack at it?

The Firmament

I often muse on the "author's intent" defense of a literalist interpretation of scripture. Following that line of reasoning, if the person who is responsible for writing a passage felt that it must mean one thing, then it must mean that thing. If--as tradition has it--Moses believed that the world was created in six days, then it can only mean that the world was created in six days. You can't say that the Genesis story is a metaphor, or a symbolic expression of God's creative power. It has to be taken literally, because it was intended literally. To do otherwise is to violate the integrity of the text, or so the argument goes.

I can appreciate the intent of that approach. However, there are a few minor difficulties with it. Take, for instance, the meaning of the Hebrew word raqi. This word, which surfaces in Genesis 1:6 and Psalm 150, has been translated in a variety of different ways. In the King James, it is "firmament." In the New Revised Standard, it is "dome." In the NIV, it is the somewhat misleading "expanse." The raqi, according to Hebrew and other ancient Near Eastern cosmologies, was the solid barrier separating the earth from the waters of chaos. It was a fixed boundary, into which the lights of heaven were mounted. It is the windows in this solid barrier that God opens in Genesis 7:11, sending a veritable Double Gulp of a flood down upon the earth.

Abraham, Moses, and Jacob would have all looked up at the stars and seen them this way. That was their understanding of the nature of the universe. That was their intent in presenting the heavens in that way. Raqi was meant to be understood as a physical reality.

Moses--as an ancient Hebrew-- would have believed that a great solid dome with recessed lighting covered the earth. Has NASA been pranging rockets off this dome for years, then covering it up? I'm sure there's a web site somewhere arguing just that. When I place my eye to my father-in-law's nifty reflector telescope and see the rings of Saturn or Mars as a clearly three-dimensional object, am I defying the intent of scripture? Which leads me to wonder...how far are we willing to go to defend literalism?

Faith is enough of a leap without descending to Flat Earth Christianity.

Scripture and Idolatry

In a fit of grumbling dudgeon about the Intelligent Design movement, I once said: "Literal creationism requires that the universe not be as old as it seems to be. It must reject science completely in order to defend its carefully constructed--and ultimately idolatrous--approach to interpreting scripture."

I'm going to have to 'splain my position a bit more.

First, what is an idol? We get the word--as we get so many words--from the ancient Greek word eidolon, meaning a visible image, symbol, or object. Of course, that describes everything in the world around us, even the symbolic representations that direct us towards an awareness of the divine. The practice of idolatry comes when you direct your worship towards an object or symbol, and not the God to which that symbol points. The symbol, instead of directing you to an awareness of the divine, becomes a magical token. It becomes a fetish--no, not THAT kind of fetish, sinner--but fetish in the classical sense of an inanimate object that is worshipped. Idolatry is a Queequeg faith, a belief in the thing you can carry around in your pocket, utterly comprehensible and manipulable, stripped of all of the mystery and glory of our real and living God. The insanity of that type of "faith" is expressed with delicious poetry and satire by the Prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 14:9-20.

The doctrine of literal inerrancy, I would contend, does precisely that to Holy Scripture. That isn't to say that there aren't large portions of the Bible that can be read literally. Nor is that to say that much of the moral teaching and spiritual guidance that can be found in Scripture won't convey to those who read the Bible literally.

But the words that we read in our New International Versions or our King James Versions are just that...words. As words in a human language, they are a form of symbolic representation that is intended to point us deeper, to the Word that rises up through those symbols. When we say that they are perfect in and of themselves, that they are literally inerrant, we turn our worship to the symbol itself. It is the symbol that is perfect. It is the symbol that becomes the object of faith, instead of the Holy Spirit that gives it true authority.

As a system for approaching Holy Scripture, that is inherently idolatrous.