It's Been A While

It's been a long time since I have posted anything here. This will be short. Gail and I were discussing a book called "The Faith Club" that she has been reading. It's a book about a relationship between three women; one Christian, one Jew and one Muslim. In listening to Gail tell me about her reading of this book I found it interesting that only the Christian, when confronted with the experiences of her friends, was compelled to question her faith because of her religion's self-proclaimed exclusivity when it comes to God. She thought, if her friends were as clear in their faith and as close to God then her faith must be wrong.

The Christian woman sought counsel with a pastor and was told "the opposite of faith is not doubt, the opposite of faith in certainty."

Faith is the human response to the experience of life. It is one of the only authentic responses.

Antidote to Our Contemporary Pharisees

Gandhi's view of Christianity and its possibilities for good in the world was influenced almost entirely by Leo Tolstoy's "What I Believe" and "The Kingdom of God is Within You." These should be required reading for American Christians who have succumbed to the idolatry of Empire and the religio-fascist lies of the likes of Robertson, Dobson, Falwell, and their lackey George Bush. Right Wing Christianity, what others have humorously called The Rapture Right, is a perversion of the teachings of Jesus. In this perversion, however, American right wing religious radicals are not alone within Christianity. The entire Christian enterprise with its popes and bishops and political aspirations of worldly power is exactly what Jesus rejected when tempted by these things spewing from the mouth of Satan in their confrontation in the wilderness after Jesus was baptized by the Baptist. Rather than following Jesus, by taking up what Mark called The Way, Christians have followed the lunatic who wrote Revelation.

The first decade of the Common Era's 21st century is remarkably similar to the first decade of the 1st. The world is dominated politically by one empire and is in the throes of an economic globalization that strips people of local self-sufficiency through exporting jobs and raw materials to places of cheap or slave labor. Cultural and economic globalization has created a wasteland of meaning. Individuals have lost their centers of meaning as they become increasingly defined by their career, their function in the great economic machine that grinds out increasing wealth for a few and increasing alienation for the many. One response to that alienation, then and now, is a religious fundamentalism that seeks a definitive answer to this question. If the world God created is good, why is the world in which we live right now so evil?

This recognition that the world is filled with evil and injustice is the experiential core of fundamentalism. This experience is genuine, authentic and oh so human. The world really is filled with evil and injustice. However, the response of fundamentalism is inauthentic. Jesus contrasted his teaching with those of his current day fundamentalists. The experiential core of Jesus's teaching was the same experience of evil and injustice in the world. His response was more authentic and more honest than his contemporary end-timers and dominionists, because while the world is filled with evil and injustice, it's also filled with love and hope and faith.

On the one hand, the fundamentalist yearning for The End is the result of an all consuming alienation from God's Creation. The world is so evil that God should just squash it like a grape, except of course, not me. You see, I'm not evil just Others. On the other hand, a segment of American fundamentalism wants to bring about complete political domination for Jesus by infecting all asepcts of political and social life. From the outside they look like the Borg from Star Trek. From within they look like avenging angels.

The author of Matthew calls this fundamentalist yearning for political dominion Satanic. In the Temptation drama, Satan takes Jesus to the top of a mountain and show him the entire "ecumene," the entire known world. He says I will give you all this if you just fall down and worship me. What Christian dominionists seek was rejected out of hand by Jesus before he was the Christ. Matthew also has something to say to the End Timers of his day when he has Satan badger Jesus from the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem to throw himself off and fly to his End because God will send angels to help and protect him. Jesus simply says that one shoulldn't tempt God. Jesus wasn't expecting any angelic help in his earthly sojourn against empire and globalization.

Any meaningful political and social program in the first decade of the 21st century must address the quesiton of evil and injustice in the world in its personal and systemic manifestations. But it must also be authentic. It must also remember that we are human beings, that we live in an in-between realm of imperfection tending toward perfection and that we can't jump outside of this central human condition. There is no End. The hope for God to just end it all for us is the chickenshit way out of evil and injustice. The authentic way is the way of Jesus, of love, hope and faith. It is the harder way because it demands that we become love, hope and faith rather than spectators waiting for the End. It's interesting to me that Gandhi, a little tiny Hindu understood the magnificent meaning of Jesus and yet embarked on his own version of The Way.

More on this meditation in future diaries.

Jesus, Baptism and The End is Not Near

One of the central tenets of American Christianity as it is professed by theological and political conservatives is that Jesus is fully God, that he existed at the creation of the world and that, as God, has a plan for His creation. If that is the case, why was Jesus wrong about his supposed return to earth after his death and resurrection? He said He would come in glory before this generation was gone. We're still waiting, and conservative Christians embarrass themselves with all sorts of childlike excuses and fantasy reasons to explain this away. Either God is wrong about the most central part of His program, or Jesus isn't God in that sense. Jesus himself, as a devout Jew, would have thought this equation of Jesus=YHWH to be the vilest blasphemy.

What did Jesus himself think? If he thought of himself as God and therefore without sin or blemish, why did he go to the Jordan River to be baptized by John for the redemption of sins?

Josephus, a 1st century Jewish historian, describes John the Baptist this way.

"When others too joined the crowds about him because they were aroused to the highest degree by his speeches, Herod became alarmed. Eloquence that had so great an effect on mankind might lead to some form of sedition, for it looked as if they would be guided by John in everything that they did. Herod decided, therefore, that it would be much better to strike first and be rid of him before his work led to an uprising, than to wait for an upheaval."

Josephus goes on to explain that because of this reasoning Herod had John arrested and put to death. Maybe these words of John explain why Herod killed him.

"You offspring of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming fury? Change your ways if you have changed your mind." And later, "He will overwhelm you with holy spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat to his granary. The chaff he will burn with a fire that no one can put out."

To clearly understand what John meant we have to understand who and what he was speaking against. What was it that God was going to burn away? Virgil, the Fox News of the Romans, wrote a poem about the Empire.

"Roman, remember by your strength to rule Earth's peoples--for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose rule of law, To spare the conquered, battle down the proud."

A Roman historian displayed a different view; that of the conquered whether in Britain, Gaul, or Judea. "To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and call it peace."

How can people respond to imperial occupation? We see can variants of these responses in our times. First, people can militarily fight and most likely be crushed, and then engage in insurgency often led by charismatic figures who call for holy war against the imperial force. Or they can let God do it, and announce that God's power will accomplish what they cannot and very soon wipe the imperial scourge off the face of the earth. The first response was the response of the Zealots in the 1st century, and a variety of terrorists in the 21st century; the second response that of John the Baptist and a whole succession of Jewish apocalyptic prophets all the way up to the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. This apocalyptic hope lives on in contemporary Rapture addicts, and various End-timers.

Jesus began his resistance to the Roman Empire as a follower of John. He was baptized for the forgiveness of sins by John, and Christian apologists from the very beginning have tried to explain this away. The Gospel of Mark, written first, simply says that John baptized Jesus "for the forgiveness of sins" and then proceeds to embellish that with a voice from heaven stating "you are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased." Matthew has the Baptist complain, "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?" And John, the last canonical Gospel written, changes the situation completely by having John call Jesus the Son of God and give no account of an actual baptism. The trend from the self-identification of Jesus as a follower of John and as someone needing baptism, to John calling Jesus the Son of God and not baptizing him at all reflects the progress of a battle to comes to grips with Jesus and divinity that wasn't settled until well into the fourth century CE.

What does baptism have to do with God's coming to wipe the Roman Empire off the face of the earth? Baptism for the forgiveness of sins was John's response to the imagined coming of God to separate the wheat (those baptized) from the chaff (imperial oppressors and their puppets). It was his way to prepare for the coming conflagration.

That Jesus was baptized indicates that he believed the same thing. However, that Jesus spoke of what the King James version calls the "Kingdom of God" indicates that he went beyond John's apocalyptic notions to something much more threatening to the Roman Empire. The translators of the Bible who gave us the King Jame's version called the greek term basileia kingdom in English. This expresses their provincialism and their obsequiousness. Basileia tou theou is better translated as God's imperial rule and was used by Jesus as the antidote to Roman imperial rule.

John called for people to be baptized and forgiven and then to wait for God in this new clean state.

Jesus called for people to become citizen's of God's imperial rule because God is waiting for us, here and now. And this requires that we act.

God is waiting for us to bring forth justice and righteousness. He won't come on a fiery chariot to do it for us. He expects us to do it ourselves. Jesus did not call for military action against Rome and its Judean and Gallilean puppets. He called for, and he and his followers actually put it place, a program more radical and seditious: to live as if already in God's empire, right now, right here, and act as if justice and righteousness are the only criteria for judgement and action. Not economics, not power politics to elevate one's clan above all others, not commerical dominance: justice and righteousness. Jesus was not interested in personal piety which is what American Christians want to reduce him to. He was calling for bringing forth justice and righteousness. Human beings had to do this, God was waiting. Those, like the Baptizer, who wanted to claim a personal piety through baptism and wait for God, and those, like Barabas who wanted to kill as many imperial occupiers and Judean collaborators as possible, are dead ends. The former will wait forever for a God who is not coming because God waits for us. The latter are lost because God demands that we bring forth justice and righteousness, not death and destruction.

No wonder Christians want to idolize Jesus. To follow him is simply too damn difficult. The road to hell isn't paved with good intentions, it's paved with Christians waiting for God to do what God demands they do themselves.

Following Jesus, not Worshiping Jesus

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is wrong on so many levels. Here are one trivial and one not so trivial wrong.

First, even the Romans in 1st century Judea didn't speak Latin. (As Dan Quayle knows, the only place people speak Latin is in Latin America). They spoke Greek, the language equivalent to English today. It was the language of empire, of global business, and diplomacy. The so-called Romans serving in the military occupation in Jerusalem and the rest of Judea, Samaria and Gallilee most likely weren't from Rome or even Italy. They were from modern day Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, maybe even the Balkans. If they wanted to speak to one another or to the Judeans, they spoke Greek, not Latin.

Second, Gibson's sadistic portrayal of the death of Jesus is a reflection of centuries of Christian propaganda that transformed Jesus from a human being to a god and made his death a sacrifice for our redemption. However, Jesus was killed for how he lived. He was a political and theological threat to the Romans. Gibson, by concentrating on his suffering and death, tries to make that suffering and death the reason that those who believe are saved. Gibson's movie is the latest chapter in a two millenia long derailment of the message of Jesus of Nazareth. It is simply the latest, and most cinematic, method of worshipping Jesus without having to follow Jesus. The difference is attractive to the worshippers because to follow Jesus is to enter into an endeavor that will very likely end in ostracism and death at the hands of the good, religious people of your society.

Mark's gospel is about the "way" of Jesus. Mark wrote in Greek. The word for way is (to transliterate) hodos. It can also mean path, but Mark uses it mostly in a manner that for us English speakers is best translated as the way. Regardless, the point of a path or a way is that it must be followed or travelled upon.

The non-canonical book of Thomas and the canonical Mark are two of the earliest stories written about Jesus. Only some of Paul's letters were written earlier. Thomas dates from about 50 CE and Mark from about 70CE. This fact doesn't necessarily makes these versions true, but it does mean that they have less interpretation and "spin" attached to them. Mark's gospel is a story of how Jesus followed his path that led to the confrontation with the Roman empire and its local upper class Judean collaborators and how he was killed for following that path. It is also the story of how even his closest disciples couldn't, or wouldn't, follow that path. (The most notorious story of this is Peter's triple denial that he even knows Jesus on the day he was executed).

By the time the gospel of John was written, Jesus has become a god equivalent to the Father, present at the creation of the world, and is simply not recognizable as a human being, but is something more like one of the gods on Olympus. The way of Mark has become Jesus himself whom John called "the way, the truth and the light." He can no longer be followed, because He and we do not share a common humanity. He is more than human, he is perfect and therefore can't be followed, only worshipped. Christianity went wrong within the first few decades because it is easier to worship a god than follow a prophet.

I'll have more on this in later posts, and more on how current Chrisitanity in America functions as an equivalent to the Roman theology of Jesus's time rather than an expression of the teachings and actions of Jesus.

Tension of the In Between

The In Between is a notion (following Plato) created by the twentieth century mystic philosopher Eric Voegelin to describe where Being becomes luminous to itself. So what does that mean? It means, quite simply, that human beings exist in an "In Between," as Voegelin put it,

"if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness, between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence; between amor Dei and amor sui, l'ame ouverte and l'ame close; between the virtues of openness toward the ground of being such as faith, love and hope, and the vices of infolding closure such as hybris and revolt; between the moods of joy and despair; and alienation in its double meaning of alienation from the world and alienation from God"

The important doublet for this meditation is that of "between the virtues of openness toward the ground of being such as faith, love and hope, and the vices of infolding closure such as hybris and revolt." The attempts to alleviate the tension between these virtues and these vices is the cause of much of the human suffering on the planet. Faith, love and hope exist in a reality where nothing is absolutely certain. One does not have faith (anymore) in the notion that the world is round; it is simply accepted as a fact. When it was not possible to know whether the world was round or not, it was an act of faith to attempt to circumnavigate it. Hybris is displayed by those who reduce reality to their little island within it and claim that this is the whole and then seek to stuff the whole of reality through the lens of their little island. Since Easter is just over I wanted to talk about a passage from the gospel of Mark that illuminates the difference.

Mark's account of the last week of Jesus is precise and detailed when compared to the other gospels. (See Crossan and Borg's "Last Week"). On Tuesday of Holy Week (using our day names of course) Mark tells a story of how Jesus was quesitoned by a "scribe" who was not hostile to him as were the "high priests, elders and scribes" mentioned by Mark throughout this week's encounters. This scribe asks a straight forward question about what is the greatest commandment. Jesus answers by quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Here's how Mark puts it.

The first is "Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength." The second is this, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." There is no other commandment greater than these."

The scribe says that this is so true. It's more important that all the burnt offerings and sacrifices made in the temple. Jesus then replies that this guy is close to the kingdom of God. Close but not in.

Questions about the greatest commandment were commonplace with Judaism. For a society that discovered the fact that God was a god of justice and righteousness and not a god of feritlity and reproduction, what other idea could be more important that the greatest of god's commandments? Jesus answers by quoting the passage in Deuteronomy that was so important to his religion that it was a prayer said twice daily by every devout Jew, and was even put in mezuzot andd tefillin. As Crossan and Borg point out, this phrase from Jesus has become so commonplace to Christians that it is a cliche muttered without understanding the historical context of it, and therefore not understanding the radical nature of the claim that god (YHWH) is God and that God is one. If god is God then all creation belongs to God. If god is God then God demands all of us, our heart, soul, mind and strength. God is contested by the gods of this earth, namely Caesar. If god is God, Caesar, (and no other lord of this world then and now) is not.

The second part of Jesus's answer, "to love your neighbor as yourself," is a corollary. If this is God's earth and not the earth of any succession of earthly lords, then it is a sacred duty to act against, and never accept, those divisions created by the "normalcy of civilization" (to use Crossan's and Borg's term), divisions between the haves and have nots, the respected and the unclean, sinners and self styled saints, between friends and enemies, between Us and Them. We are all Us to God. If one can't get with that program, one is not with, but against, God.

What does all this have to do with the In Between of our existence? Just this. What Eric Voegelin called the vices of infolding closure to reality is the creation of gods attempting to run this earth in opposition to the God of creation. Those who would create a false definition of god (or Jesus as god) in their own image and then worship that idol are exhibiting the closing off of Being through hubris. Christian Reconstructionsim in particular and the Christian Right in America in general are the most contemporary examples of this closure and revolt against YHWH.

There will be more.

Deconstructing Chrisitanity

In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that we will only find salvation when we succeed in bringing forth what is within us, namely that spark of divinity that makes human beings the image of God. He then teaches us what is involved in that bringing forth. By the time the Gospel of John was written, approximately 50 years later, this teaching of Jesus was reconstructed into the doctrine that only by believing that Jesus was the Son of God and that he died for our sins as a substitute for us and then rose again would we find salvation. That this Johannine doctine was specifically directed toward the Gospel of Thomas is evident in the story of Doubting Thomas, who said that until he sees and touches the scars of Jesus's torture and cruxifiction he will not believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Doubting Thomas only appears in John. Thomas is given doubt by John because Thomas's Jesus did not fit John's doctrine.
The Gospel of John is one of the early decision points where Chrisitianity became what it is today, namely an organized religion that made Jesus into a God by turning away from virtually everything that Jesus taught and acted upon. This derailment has created a religion whose adherents now support wars in the name of The Prince of Peace, who place worship ahead of doing justice, and who hate those different from themselves rather than following the commandment to love others as one loves oneself.
This blog is an attempt to deconstruct the edifice of Christianity from the point of view of holding Christians accountable for their words and deeds by comparing them to what their God instructed. Is this doing God's work? Don't know. How can I or anyone answer that unless we were to either be deluded or hubristic enough to claim to speak for God?
However, we all should know this. God is a god of justice and righteousness. When Yahweh revealed Itself to Moses it was as a god demanding that human beings create justice on God's earth. God showed that god is not simply a god of fertility, of reproduction (vegetable, animal or human), of making sure the rivers flood and bring forth mud, or of wanting to be worshipped and praised above all else. Why would God want the praise of that which It created out of wet dirt? God expected his creation to be good, as good as when it was first created, and that required that human beings bring forth justice and righteousness. Not just personal virtue, but public, social and common justice that comes from living well together in society. It is not sufficient to God for human beings to hide behind worship and to acquiesce in injustice in their society or their world. Specifically, news items reveal the thuggish quality of contemporary evangelical Christians who have picketed the homes of health care workers, who have assassinated doctors, and who have taken every opportunity to publically condemn and ridicule people different from them. But they go to church and sing "My God is an Awesome God," and think they are holy. Don't think so. Wouldn't want to be them when the time comes to be judged.
Like other people who seek God and who see Jesus as a path to God , I refuse to be called a Christian. The purpose of this blog is to to attempt to illuminate that path, and in so doing perhaps show why I refuse the name.