martasfic | Entries tagged with theology

sjames_centre has written a lovely story about the aftermath of John Waton's wartime service, particularly the trauma of it all. It's written loosely around the pool scene at the end of The Great Game, where the smell of Semtex triggers a memory of a really ugly moment in John's war service, with all those of you familiar with trauma and PTSD in particular would expect. And Sherlock tries to help.

Sherlock actually does a remarkably good job of helping in my opinion, particularly for someone as emotionally immature as he seems to be. There is no talk of feelings, or at least not in the psychotherapy sense, but there is talk of reality, and the way nightmares and trauma skews our perception of it. I found both men's characterizations (and Mrs. Hudson's as well) to be delightful, with humor and empathy undercutting their reaction to what's going on. The resolution felt convincing to me, both in the "baby steps" sense and in getting the emotional pathos I think we all want in fanfic. For a mere 4,500 words, that's quite a lot to accomplish, and Susan does it well.

Do be aware, there's some discussion of a pretty disturbing moment from John's service. It's not at all graphic, but that doesn't mean it isn't upsetting. Which is just as it should be, really.

"Lashkar Gah," by Susan (AO3)

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On another note, I finally wrote up my reaction to somethin going on in the religion-blogosphere. Ninety-second version: there's a new biography out on Dietrich Bonhoeffer making the case he was romantically attracted to his (male) friend. The interesting bit is that the author was concerned how evangelicals would react to this, and that for the most part there hasn't been much of a controversy. So I talked a bit about whether this was surprising or not, whether we should expect more upset over this idea. Spoilers: even though no one's claiming Bonhoeffer actually had sex with another man, I still find it a bit surprising there isn't more concern; and the lack of concern, the way it's put, is still a bit not-good.)

Check it out if that sounds like your thing. Comments welcome there or here.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (probably) fancied men. Should evangelicals be (more) bothered?

St. Patrick's Day wouldn't be complete without some sharing of Irish culture. By which I mean the co-opting of it by various shows, with varying degrees of respect. Still, it's not half as bad as whatever's going on in Time Square tonight, and it makes me smile.

1) an Irish toast, Sherlock-style

( more goodies under the cut )

This morning I woke up to an internet full of push-back against an interview Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” fame gave in GQ. He came out pretty strongly anti-LGBT and even recalled the Jim Crow days of his youth fondly.

I didn’t agree with him at all, but I also wasn’t outraged because I wasn’t surprised. That doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t put their own opinions and reasons for believing them out there, of course, but speaking personally, I couldn’t think of a way to respond without giving Robertson’s remarks more respect than they deserved. I said as much over at FB, and thought I would then leave the responses to other hearts and minds. I’ve said quite a bit on why I don’t think of homosexuality as sinful in other contexts, and the other bits being passed around are the kind of thing I’ve never felt the need to clarify. Of course homosexuality doesn’t lead to bestiality. Of course Jim Crow was bad. And so on.

Then I read the actual interview rather than just the bits being passed around, and I found something substantive that is worth addressing, because it is entirely, entirely too widespread in certain corners of Christianity. I’ll quote a fair bit of the GQ article, but put the part that really caught my attention in bold.

“We’re Bible-thumpers who just happened to end up on television,” he tells me. “You put in your article that the Robertson family really believes strongly that if the human race loved each other and they loved God, we would just be better off. We ought to just be repentant, turn to God, and let’s get on with it, and everything will turn around.”

What does repentance entail? Well, in Robertson’s worldview, America was a country founded upon Christian values (Thou shalt not kill, etc.), and he believes that the gradual removal of Christian symbolism from public spaces has diluted those founding principles. (He and Si take turns going on about why the Ten Commandments ought to be displayed outside courthouses.) He sees the popularity of Duck Dynasty as a small corrective to all that we have lost.

“Everything is blurred on what’s right and what’s wrong,” he says. “Sin becomes fine.”

What, in your mind, is sinful?

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

During Phil’s darkest days, in the early 1970s, he had to flee the state of Arkansas after he badly beat up a bar owner and the guy’s wife. Kay Robertson persuaded the bar owner not to press charges in exchange for most of the Robertsons’ life savings. (“A hefty price,” he notes in his memoir.) I ask Phil if he ever repented for that, as he wants America to repent—if he ever tracked down the bar owner and his wife to apologize for the assault. He shakes his head.

“I didn’t dredge anything back up. I just put it behind me.”

So when figuring out what sin is, we’re supposed to “start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there”? Really, I can’t put it better than Sherlock already did:

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Faith Seeking Understanding. You can comment here or there.

The text, for anyone struggling to read it:”It’s not Adam and Steve, neither Madam nor Eve.
Give your life to Christ, he’ll set you STRAIGHT.”

The US Supreme Court is about to hear testimony on two cases involving gay marriage, which means the internet (or at least my corner of it) is buzzing with talk about homosexuality and gay marriage. I think a lot of the trouble people have with that issue is that the pro- and anti-gay marriage crowds are talking about marriage in slightly – sometimes not-so-slightly – different ways.

I want to get to that, and will. But every time I sit down to blog about it, my mind gets drawn almost immediately to the bad interpretations lots of Christians seem stuck in when it comes to certain Bible passages people think of when it comes to gay marriage. Interestingly, a lot of Christians from both sides of the aisle on gay rights tend to read these Bible verses in the same way. Many liberal Christians will agree that Leviticus 18:22 says gay sex is immoral, and they solve it by focusing on Jesus. I don’t think this is necessary; these verses only seem to be condemning homosexuality because they’ve been pretty widely mistranslated and misinterpreted.

So before I take on the marriage issue, I want to lay out what I think the Bible says about homosexuality. To be clear up front, I don’t think this has a whole lot of bearing on the marriage issue; whether a multicultural and secular society should let LGBT people get married is a very different question from whether a my religion condemns same-sex relationships and same-sex activity. But I hope it’s interesting in any case.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Faith Seeking Understanding. You can comment here or there.

The text, for anyone struggling to read it:

“It’s not Adam and Steve, neither Madam nor Eve.
Give your life to Christ, he’ll set you STRAIGHT.”

( Read more... )

So the world has a new pope: Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit out of South America. He’ll be assuming the papal name of Francis I, which nicely calls humility and peace. Here’s hoping those actually are the hallmarks of his papacy.

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Over at FB, Kaylee asked for the Latin version of “You can has cheezburger.” That’s one of the more fun phrases I’ve had to translate, but also one of the more challenging since they didn’t have cheeseburgers in ancient Rome. I finally settled on: Salutationes, novem praesulis! Potes habere bubula cum caseus. [Greetings, new pope! You may have beef with cheese.]

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Also over at FB, Dan posted a quote from Francis I from before he was pope.

“Let’s not be naive, we’re not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”

Here’s my reaction, slightly cleaned up to fix typos, which FB doesn’t allow.

This view is depressing but not altogether surprising. And he’s actually right on one thing: if you believe marriage and sex should be about procreation (as the RCC, or at least individual Catholics I know, seems to), then gay marriage is a redefinition of marriage. But it’s a redefinition most straight people my age have already made. And it’s a really good one, IMO, because it’s built on the idea that the most intimate relationship in my life isn’t built on my ability to bear children, but about something much more central to who I really am.

The Roman Catholic Church (and any other church) is free to recognize a sacrament that is unique to men and women. The separation of church and state means, among other things, that church theology is not up for majority vote or government interference. (This is bad theology IMO and bad shepherding of gay Christians, and I would really like to see churches change their approach, by recognizing and support gay monogamous couples sacramentally or some other way if they can’t manage that theologically. But that is a different issue.) But the separation of church and state also means the RCC and every other church needs to realize that people also have the right to organize other rituals and legal recognitions that afford gay couples the same rights as heterosexual ones. When the civil society chooses to let two men or two women receive a marriage license and give them all the civil benefits and honors we afford straight couples, that doesn’t change what the church says. Because, you know, church practice and theology are not defined by secular, popular vote.

On the rest of the quote, that gay marriage is a lie from the pit of hell, I can’t disagree strongly enough. But I hope that would already be obvious to anyone who knows me.

It will be interesting getting to know the pope’s views on this and other issues in more depth. I am not a Catholic but I recognize the influence the church has over our culture, and I hope the next several days will see some in-depth, even critical coverage of his thought.

Over at her blog, Rachel Held Evans is getting ready for a panel discussion she’s doing on the future of evangelicalism. As part of that, she asked her readers to discuss whether they see themselves as evangelicals and what that word means to them. It’s an interesting question so I thought I’d lay out my own answers. My inner platonist demands I mix up the ordering, since we can’t relate to concepts until we understand them, but I don’t think that’s a huge deal.

If you want to help her out, please do visit the link above. I’m sure she’d love any thoughts you might have. I’d like to know, too, so do feel free to answer them in the comments here (though I’m not going to assume she’ll read this blog!) And of course I’d love your thoughts on my own answers, if you have any.

2. How would you define evangelicalism?

That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?

I think at a broad level it’s defined by a focus on evangelizing, reaching out to people who aren’t yet in the Christian fold, perhaps including people who evangelicals don’t consider “real Christians.” This means they need a boundary between the orthodox and the heterodox, and tend to treat Christian identity as an either/or situation: you meet certain conditions, believe certain things or agree to certain things, and at that point you’re a Christian. Because Christians (rightly!) aren’t happy with the idea that we “earn” our salvation because of the things they do, evangelicals in practice point to certain things you must believe. It’s not that the belief saves us so much as that the belief is proof that we are saved. That means that evangelicalism is usually about getting people to agree to certain beliefs, like the existence of God, the historical truth of the Christmas and Easter stories, the reality of sin and hell, the depravity of humans, and similar things.

As part of that package, evangelicals usually believe, if you don’t agree to the right beliefs, that’s a one-way ticket to eternal torture. Some believe that some people are “called” (the predestination model) whereas others talk about salvation being open to everyone. But in either case, our salvation can’t be the kind of thing that’s contingent on anything we do, including being educated enough to know the finer points of Christian history, theology, and dead languages. Those points that are essential, the things that Christians need to believe, also have to be fairly obvious. This leads evangelicals to focus on the “plain meaning” of Scripture. They also tend to be distrustful of denominations and church hierarchies for a similar reason: if something is truly essential, God should be able to speak to the believer directly.

For me, evangelicalism is more about an approach to religion and life than a certain set of beliefs. Many mainline Protestant Christians would agree with most of those beliefs I listed above, but they believe it with a different focus. First, evangelicalism draws a sharp distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian, whereas MLPs are more comfortable with the idea there’s some fluidity here. The belief in hell and the focus on salvation raises the stakes on believing other things the right way, even things that seem more like “gatekeeper” issues, totems that help establish your evangelical identity like having the right position on homosexuality, abortion, and Israel. In a certain sense, the evangelical position is actually the more consistent way to act if you truly believe what many MLPs claim. I mean, if you truly believed that praying a certain prayer or believing certain things was the only thing standing between your kids, your parents, your best friends and eternal torment, making sure they were on the right side of that issue would probably be the most important thing you could do. It would be loving. But it also would shape the relationship in a very different way (IMO a worse way) than if this wasn’t the focus of your relationships.

This makes it sound like all Christians can be evangelicals. I know that modern evangelicalism comes out of a specific historical context embedded in the Protestant tradition, and that from this angle evangelicals are really Protestants who reject higher criticism. And on some level this is true. You have evangelical Catholics and Mormons and other groups, but mainly that’s because politics has led to people with very different histories becoming strange bedfellows and being “grafted in” to that history. In practical terms, I’m not sure how much all this matters, though. For me, evangelicalism is more about the approach and the way that influences things like our approach to injustice, our relationships, and just being educated about theological claims than it is about history.

2. Do you identify yourself as an evangelical? Why or why not? How do you feel about religious labels in general?

I’ve tried to be evenhanded above, but I really don’t care for evangelicalism. This doesn’t mean I’m biased against individual evangelicals. I do think that in the long run other approaches to Christianity are more helpful for developing a better kind of faith, at least for me, but I also know individual evangelicals who I respect quite a bit. But in practice, the evangelicalism I’ve encountered in my life simply isn’t for me, because I’m one of those brainiacs who has a hard time flourishing if she turns her brain off. I have a respect for expertise both when it comes to theology and philosophy as well as empirical areas of life like medicine, psychology, sociology and other areas. In my experience, evangelicalism negates the importance of things like this unless it agrees with what you already believes.

If psychology tells us that homosexual identity isn’t something we can reject if we choose to, any belief system should make sense of that when it talks about sexuality. Christian evangelicals often look no further than the standard interpretation of the Bible (which is not to say it’s the only or even the best one), and if psychology doesn’t support the conclusions they draw from it they’ll use that as a basis for rejecting the psychology. Or, if an economist tells us that modern society requires certain investment in infrastructure and planning at a high level for the economy to flourish but you interpret the Bible as saying each family should see to its own affairs, that economist will most likely be dismissed in favor of what the evangelical believes the Bible says. This methodology has always struck me as backwards and a bit dangerous.

But I’m also a MLP because I like tradition. There’s something about the way I think that does well in what I call a narrative – a sequence of people struggling with the same issues, building on and reacting to what they say. It’s part of what draws me to philosophy. Rather than trying to start from scratch on (for example) what it means to be free, I’ll take Robert Nozick’s account of freedom and look at it seriously, figure out where I agree with it and disagree with it and try to fine-tune it further. And it works that way with religion, too. Instead of reading the Bible on my own, I do better when I look at what Origen said about Biblical questions, or John Calvin, or Augustine, or… you get the idea. That means I actually find religious labels very healthy, when used rightly. And I definitely want to tap into a tradition, a liturgy and a theology that goes beyond what I can think of on my own. So I’m not rejecting evangelicalism because I don’t want to be boxed in. If anything, evangelicalism is just a little too boundariless for me, at least in some way.

Btw, I’m not mentioning the political and equality issues a lot of people associate with evangelicalism. I disagree with them in a big way, but I also don’t think evangelicals have to take positions like this. In fact, the way evangelicals work with Jim Wallis to address poverty, immigration, climate change and even gun violence makes me hopeful. Being evangelical doesn’t have to mean being a member of the Religious Right, so I’m trying not to conflate the two.

3. What are some of your greatest concerns for evangelicalism? And what are some of your biggest hopes?

I think I’ve laid out some of my biggest concerns above. I won’t go through those one more time because it this point it feels like I’m beating up on evangelicalism a little, and I don’t want to do that. It’s definitely not for me and I think the way it’s usually practiced, there’s definitely room for improvement. But I also know lots of evangelicals who seem to really thrive in this approach to Christianity. It’s not like I just want evangelicalism to go away.

So what about my hopes? For one thing, I’m genuinely encouraged to see some evangelicals questioning the ways they’ve been told to read the Bible. Steve Chalke is Exhibit A. An influential UK evangelist (I heard him called England’s answer to Billy Graham more than once), he basically came to the conclusion after reading the Bible that the church should find a way to support monogamous, same-sex couples. It’s not just that he and I agree; it’s that he was able to read the Bible as an evangelical without concluding that the conclusions other evangelicals had reached on this question had to be true. You’re seeming more of this, with figures like Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, and even Rachel Held Evans herself being in a grey area. Are they evangelical, or aren’t they? Many evangelicals, both the big names and rank-and-file, are recognizing that you can read the Bible faithfully, even in the commonsense way favored by evangelicalism, without necessarily agreeing on every point of interpretation. It’s leading to a more complex and (IMO) accurate way of thinking about Christianity for them.

I also mentioned folks like the Sojourners crowd, where many evangelicals are questioning the “value voters” set of issues and positions. They’re even finding common cause with non-evangelicals and non-Christians on issues that are important to them. This is good, and not just because I like the positions they’re coming around to. It trains people to work with folks who aren’t their ideological clones. And that can only help evangelicalism (and the rest of Christianity) in the long run.

Finally, I hope evangelicals will join up with MLPs more than they have. I don’t mean this has to be the end of evangelical Christianity as such; they could do this by being able to absorb MLPs in dying denominations, or they could join up more with those traditional denominations and think of themselves as evangelical Presbyterians or Methodists much as we have evangelical Catholics today. Evangelical Christianity has a lot to offer in terms of passion and outreach and hospitality, done right. MLP would benefit from an infusion of that spirit, frankly. But I think evangelicals would also benefit from being around people who worship with their head and not just with their heart. We’d also do well to surround ourselves with people who don’t believe exactly the same way we do. There’s a biblical model for this in 1 Cor 12, where Paul tells the church that we are one body made of many roles. I see major potential for a symbiotic relationship between evangelicals and MLPs, though I think it will take a paradigm shift to get there. We need to see someone can be different from us in important ways and still have value, even maybe be able to help me. But then that’s not a bad change to make.

4. Do you know what Roger Olson’s favorite candy is? Because I think I’m going to owe him one for compensating for my lack of expertise on this.

One could do worse…

http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/11/23/five-chocolate-bars-you-should-be-eating-now/

This post was written as part of the October 2012 synchroblog, " a home-grown group of bloggers who like to write on topics of post-modern faith & life and have the chance to interact and intersect with other bloggers considering the same topics." As such, it's written from a uniquely Christian perspective, and is more Sunday School than apologetics. You're welcome to read it whether you're a dyed-in-the-wool Baptist, "spiritual but not religious," atheist, or anything in between. Just keep this vantage-point in mind as you read.

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Brian McLaren has been taking it on the chin a bit lately.

If you don't recognize the name, Rvd. McLaren is a big name in Christian circles. I'd describe him as an evangelical, though he's certainly on the more post-modern edge of that movement, and he tends to ask hard questions like how to make sense of Christian exclusivism in a multicultural world to whether penal substitution is the best way of understanding Biblical justice, to a lot of other issues that are social rather than theological. And I promise you, that's the last of the technical jargon, because the issue that has Rvd. McLaren in the news these days is really quite simple.

Trevor McLaren (Brian's son) just got married. What should have been a joyous occasion was absolutely not ruined by Rvd. McLaren's reaction to the gender of his son's soon-to-be-spouse. See, Trevor is gay and recently married Owen Ryan. Technically it wasn't a sacramental marriage in the Christian sense because no Christian denomination (to my knowledge) offers non-heterosexual sacramental marriage. But Rvd. McLaren did officiate at a commitment ceremony with many of the traditional liturgical elements. Since then McLaren Sr. has been in the spotlight a bit. Over at Patheos, Tony Jones has collected up a lot of interesting links and given a good synopsis of the situation. Needless to say, Brian is handling himself with the grace and generosity of spirit I've come to expect of him. Given that this whole thing is casting a cloud over his son's wedding, that says a lot to me.

(ETA: As Mary Gorski pointed out at FB, the United Church of Christ does offer full marriage to both hetero- and homosexual couples. The Episcopal Church also has commitment rites for LGBT couples, but they're not sacramental marriage. McLaren Jr. did have a small UCC wedding in his apartment before the commitment ceremony his father performed.)

This has sparked some truly disheartening discussions about whether McLaren is still an evangelical. Since I'm not an evangelical myself, it's not that I dislike what's being done to the evangelical "brand." The problem is that a Christian - any type of Christian - could be devined in terms of a single characteristic we can wrap our head around like that. Sadly, it's not limited to Brian McLaren. I can almost guarantee you that, come November, some Catholic priest will tell his congregants they must confess the horrible sin of voting for a pro-choice candidate. A pastor who dares to support (or criticize!) Obamacare will be condemned as the unholy monstrosity he is. And it happens from more liberal Christians as well. If you're against the welfare state, or don't support nuclear disarmament, or whatever, then you must be a bad Christian. It's really not that surprising - when you start treating the Bible as if it is recommending specific tax policy, you're moving into a territory that makes honest, good-faith disagreement all but impossible.

All of which reminds me of a classic protest sign that's forever getting made into memes and passed around the interwebz:

( Read more... )

Now, if you were going to plop me on the American political map I'd probably be pretty far to the left on most issues. I'm more of a communitarian than a proper liberal but often it works out to the same position, at least at the national level. I am the kind of person that's naturally suited to think that caring for the poor through government programs is both a good thing and a duty. But I can also understand how other Christians might feel differently. The Bible tells Christians to care for the sick; it doesn't tell us to require everyone to buy into a tax-subsidized system of privately-run insurance programs. So, while that sign is funny and good up to a certain extent, am I prepared to say that if you're not for Obamacare you're against Jesus? Heck no.

I occasionally read at a medium-sized Christian blog, ThinkChristian.net. Over the last few weeks they've been running several posts with the subject line, "A Christian Vote For..." (They've had different bloggers endorsing Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Gary Johnson, and now Jill Stein.) The first three have been pretty thought-provoking, and while I've not had time to read the Stein piece, I suspect the author did her usual good job. While I may disagree with some of the specific claims the different bloggers made, one thing they all did very well (both individually + overall) is show how you could be a Christian and vote for each of these candidates. What about the politician's record lined up with the kind of values Christians might have, etc.

But even though I thought they did this kind of thing as well as anyone could, that phrase "Christian vote" really got under my skin. It always does, because there really isn't a Christian vote. Oh, I think there are lots of votes motivated by some very un-Christian priorities. The thought of that GOP primary debate where the crowd cheered the idea of a poor man dying on the hospital curb because he had no insurance still makes my hair stand on end. But God is big and complicated, too big for any of the many boxes Ant and Bee look through. And politics is messy, too. There's lots of room for good-faith on disagreements about how to achieve the same priorities.

Put it this way: Brian McLaren is trying to love his gay neighbor the way the Bible requires. I'm sure at least some of his critics are trying to do that, too. There is room for humility here, and a sharp mind and gentle heart not yet sure it has everything all worked out. But excommunication, formal or informal? Not so much. And when people talk about the Christian vote, with the implication that the other way of voting is somehow un-Christian, we just get a little too close to that for my comfort.

So what's the answer? I think a good place to start is with the blind men and the elephant. Christians --everyone, really-- have two options in situations like this. We can look at the guy grappling with the ear "very like a fan" and try to figure out just how that meshes with the rope-like tail we're investigating ourselves, or we can say that guy is just wrong and stick with the idea we've had all along. The problem with that second option is we'll never grow beyond what we have right now. I'm sure you can guess which path I'd recommend. And yeah, sometimes people are just wrong and we have to help them leave their beliefs behind or excommunicate them somehow. But we should definitely try to the first road first, until it proves impossible.

Btw: later this week I'll be posting a review of The Cross in the Closet, a book about one Christian fundamentalist to understand what his gay neighbors were going through by living with that label for a year. Great book. I mention it because it's one of those testimonials to the way we can change and grow if we're brave enough not to shove the "other guy" away too quickly. Check back in a few days if you're interested.

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Do check out my other synchrobloggers! Nine other contributions on the intersection of faith and politics, by some very sharp bloggers.

It's not often that I follow books coming out. I wait with baited breath for movies (Hobbit! Twilight! Catching Fire! *goes splodey*), and I'm always on the lookout for new music that's to my rather eclectic tastes. But books --fun books, popular press-- for whatever reason I don't read them as much as I used to. Chalk it up to reading so much for school, that by the end of the day all I want to do is stare at a screen.

All of which makes it odd that I'm so excited about two books, each coming out in the same month, each concerning religious topics and probably marketed to a fairly religious audience. They're also looking at some social inequalities (sexism for the first one, homophobia for the second) and how they play out in American evangelical Christianity.

One of those authors could use a bit of support just now. Rachel Held Evans, whose interview of a stay-at-home dad I recommended last night, tried to take all of the Bible's commandments for women (Old Testament and New) as literally as she could. Based on the sample bits I've read (I can't speak for the whole book yet), it seems to be more than straight memoir. It's more about her struggle on how to view herself as a woman, how her experiences changed how she understood "biblical womanhood." She's funny and humble and open-minded, and it makes for a good book, at least based on what I've seen. For the record, Rachel was an egalitarian going into this, and she's still one.

(Read about the project here, pre-order it at Amazon, and don't miss the reviews of it at NPR, Slate, and the Oprah blog.)

I don't want to get into a big debate over whether the Bible supports egalitarianism, or whether following the Bible literally is a good way to understand what it teaches, or any of that. I'm talking about Rachel's book because Vaginagate is rearing its ugly head again. Back when she was getting her book ready for publication, her publisher wanted her to take out the word "vagina." Christian bookstores are infamously persnickety, and there was a concern that if she included the word (which is appropriate in the context, btw) some Christian bookstores would refuse to carry it. Rachel was initially prepared to edit it out, but as she describes here eventually decided that was the wrong move:

In the wake of Lifeway’s highly-publicized ban of the movie “The Blind Side,” and after speaking with some industry insiders, I wrote a blog post in July about Lifeway’s influence on the Christian publishing industry, explaining how its standards not only affect the highly sanitized inventory we find on Christian bookstore shelves, but also which books are contracted by publishers, what content gets edited in the writing and editing process, and the degree of freedom authors feel they have to speak through their own platforms.

Whatever you think of Rachel's project or the Christian publishing industry, I hope we can all agree this is a trend worth fighting. And she's paying a price for it: the major Christian bookstore Lifeway isn't carrying the book. Other Christian bookstores are, and you can get it on Amazon + Barnes and Nobles, and certainly by request anywhere. Or you can take the rather hilarious approach suggested in the comments at Rachel's blog by several ex-Lifeway sales clerks: pre-order a few copies through Lifeway (they're doing special orders, not just stocking it normally), then only buy the one so they have to put the remainder on their shelves for other people to buy. They'll only charge you for the ones you actually buy.

Whether you buy it or not, and however you buy it, it might not be a bad idea to stop by her blog and show your support. Unlike most blogs and articles, I actually can recommend the comments at her site - I'd say they're the best part, but the main posts rock, too. And censorship always sucks, whatever its form. I'm sure she'd appreciate an encouraging note and/or a preorder, if you're so inclined.

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The other book is Tim Kurek's The Cross and the Closet, which is available from the publisher, Amazon, B+N, and all the other usual places. It's coming out on I think the tenth. I've just finished the preprint Tim gave me and will be writing a review of it this weekend. Which will be positive, but I'll save the specifics for next week.

Which probably means I need two betas, or one person willing to do two projects. One to look over the review for grammar and writing style of the review, probably on Saturday or Sunday. (I'll need a quick turn-around there.) I also need someone besides Ann to look over a short Swordspoint ficlet. Let me know if you're game for either or both.

Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has not made me a Gentile.
Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has not made me a slave.
Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has not made me a woman.

As an undergrad student, I had a friend, Ruth, who prayed these words every morning. Well, not these exact words; her brothers prayed these words, whereas she as a woman got to say "… who has made me according to Your will" for the last verse. Ruth was a modern orthodox Jew, meaning that she believed Jews were still obligated to keep all the commandments, but that this didn't mean eschewing modern non-Jewish society or the science. Like many modern orthodox, Ruth's family also was a bit more liberal in how they interpreted Jewish law. They didn't compromise on the actual requirements, but (at least as Ruth described them) they tended to separate what was actually required by halakha from the bits that were just encouraged for cultural reasons.

In this case, that meant Ruth had to pray alongside her brothers. As I understand Jewish orthodoxy (keep in mind, this is me stretching back to conversations I had a decade ago), men are required to gather for three communal prayers every day; women still have to pray but aren't required to actually gather at specific time, though they are expected to pray on their own. I think this had something to do with the fact that since women were charged with caring for the families rather than working outside the home, it was harder for them to get to public services. They weren't optional for Ruth, though, because her family belonged to a shul that interpreted things differently. I won't even try to remember the details of their reasoning. The point was that for Ruth the prayer I mentioned above was a regular part of her daily life. And as you might expect it's not the easiest thing to live with.

I once asked Ruth what she made of it. Didn't it insult her that her classmates and neighbors and even her brothers prayed every day thanking God for not making them like her. Turns out, this was a major part of how she wrestled with herself in high school – figured out what it meant to be an orthodox Jew and whether she wanted that or whether she'd be more comfortable in a different variety of Judaism. A teacher she was particularly close to told her there were really three ways to look at something like this: either the way Judaism was presented was correct and what feminism claimed was wrong; or that feminism was right and Judaism was wrong; or that there was some way to reinterpret one or the other, so they could both be right. This teacher said she personally tried to take the third approach, though it was obviously a personal decision how to handle things like this when they came up.

I've been thinking about this conversation today. This afternoon I posted the following status at FB:

Coming out of the subway, there were some JWs handing out this month's Watchtower that has the cover article "Does God Care About Women?" I was absolutely floored that this is a question that still needs asking. I'm not singling out JWs since many religious people ask this question (though usually not so brazenly), and I haven't read the article so this may be a headline designed to grab attention. But still, any profanity I know is either wholly inadequate, beyond the PG13 level I try to hold myself to, or both.

In case it needs saying (and it doesn't): If God exists, and if he cares about people in general, he definitely, DEFINITELY cares about women. It should be assumed. The fact that this question occurs to religious people, let alone that they think it's the kind of thing they want to use to brand their religion to random strangers passing their kiosk, is simply outrageous.

Things got pretty heated pretty quickly. (The post is public, though you'll need a FB account to see it due to FB's privacy settings.) Dan in particular seemed surprised that I would claim the God of the Bible cared about women in light of misogynistic passages like the ones saying you could not divorce your spouse even in the case of domestic violence, or that women weren't allowed to speak in public.

I'm not so sheltered I've never heard of these verses. Someone better versed in apologetics than myself could probably answer those specific concerns better than I'm able to. Like with the "clobber" verses many Christians use to "prove" homosexuality is immoral, I believe that most of these verses refer to a specific local context that simply doesn't exist today. For instance, one common verse from Paul's epistles that Christian fundamentalists use misogynistically is 1 Corinthians 14:34-35:

Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says. And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church.

But one commentary I read years back (again, I'm going by memory) pointed to two cultural facts driving this directive. First, women often did not know the language the service was conducted in, and second, they were often seated separately from their husbands. The consequence was that you'd have women calling out to their husbands across the sanctuary, asking what the leader was going on about, and because they were literally shouting across the room this all got disruptive. It's not disruptive today, though, since (a) women speak English as well as their husbands do if not better, and (b) couples tend to sit together so if they want to talk it won't disturb the whole group. Ergo the motivation for this particular command simply doesn't apply.

I could sit here all night and answer each of the verses that seem women-hating on the surface. I could also point to some facts that I find particularly affirming of women, such as the story of Mary and Martha where Jesus affirmed Mary's choice to learn from him rather than doing the dishes, the high honor paid to Mary Jesus's mother, or the women in positions of authority in the early church. But I think there's a deeper question lurking behind all this. When a Bible verse seems to contradict with some other value we have, like men and women deserve respect and opportunity and whatever other good things there are in equal measures, how should we handle that?

Following the approach Ruth's teacher suggested, I think we have three main options here.

1. The Bible verse is correct and our valuing equality is wrong.
2. The Bible is wrong and our valuing equality is right.
3. There is some way of reinterpreting the Bible verse, or our other values, or both, that avoids this contradiciton.

The first option is the path preferred by religious fundamentalists. Scientific evidence be damned, the cosmos must have been created in six twenty-four-hour days because that's what the Bible says. Whatever suffering those policies take, gay rights must be rejected because the Bible says homosexuality is an abomination. And on down the list.

The second approach is one I see from a lot (though by no means all!) of atheists. They stick to the most literal interpretation of religious scriptures, but rather than reject other things like evolution, LGBT rights, and feminism in the name of the bible, they reject that tradition. Any "softening" of this position is often viewed as less authentic than what fundamentalists claim. So if a Christian comes out in favor of gay marriage, they are in some sense not "as" Christian as the folks claiming homosexuality is an abomination.

If you've read this blog, you really should know that I'm not comfortable with the first way of viewing things. I really don't think I'm alone on this either. Any Christian bookstore will have whole shelves of Bible commentary, many of them by leaders of the various denominations. (As a Methodist, I often turn to John Wesley's commentary, though John Calvin is also very good, and I'm sure my Catholic or Orthodox friends could point to excellent resources from within their own traditions.) As a matter of fact, there's a fine tradition going back all the way to Jesus and even to Abraham, where smart people see some revelation and ask "Surely that can't mean what it seems to say?" Abraham did this directly to God's face; I'm thinking particularly of the bartering before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Jesus certainly took several passages from the Bible of his day and said that those lines couldn't possibly mean what they seemed to mean on their surface. And it doesn't stop in Biblical days.

I'd go so far as to say I think we're supposed to ask these questions. Does the Bible say you'll burn in hell if you don't accept specific doctrinal points? How do we reconcile this with love for neighbor and enemy, which Jesus clearly requires? Does it say homosexual sex is an abomination to God? How do we reconcile this with what modern science tells us, that homosexuality is not a choice? Again, I could go on for quite a while about these things. But the more I study these things, the more I realize that questions like these are really worthwhile not because one answer of the other is correct, but because they present a puzzle that can spur us on to a deeper understanding. I approach them more and more like aporiai, the puzzles Aristotle uses as opportunities to finetune his beliefs about the world.

This is important to me, really important, because both approaches #1 and #2 treat the Bible in a way that robs it of a lot of its depth. I won't lie; a lot of Christians in America view the Bible this way; but a lot don't, and we (or at least I; I have no right to speak for such a diverse group of individuals) get really and truly sick of people equating obvious or surface meaning with the most true one, or even the most authentically Christian one. Non-fundamentalist Christianity definitely has its challenges, but we don't all think that the first interpretation that comes to mind is the correct one.

My own denomination, to give one example, emphasizes the Wesley Quadrilateral, which says interpreting revelation involves not just the scripture itself, but also tradition, critical thought, and our own personal experience. Truth does not conflict truth, but the interpretation we have (of scripture or the scientific evidence or whatever else) can easily be misplaced. I know in my own past, I've interpreted passages differently after learning a new fact or theory from philosophy, the sciences, psychology, or whatever. I see other Christians reading Scripture similarly, and going back much further than John Wesley.

It's interesting that in a lot of ways I come quite close to approach #2. I know there are Christians who think they understand the Bible precisely, that it says that certain things (homosexuality, equality for women, and the like) are wrong and need to be rooted out. I am very much against that kind of Christianity and work hard both here and in my offline life to help religious people develop a more nuanced kind of faith that helps them see why sexism, homophobia, and the like are so wrong. (You can also make a secular argument here, but religion provides a narrative a lot of people are used to working within. When it comes to values in particular, I'm all for using the stories people are fluent in, since in my experience that's typically the easiest way to encourage change.

As for Ruth? She eventually found a book dealing with that prayer that tied it to the way men had a few religious obligations that women didn't, just as non-slaves had more obligations than slaves and Jews than Gentiles. She's got an eight-year-old daughter who has taken to thanking God for not making her a man, since there are also obligations and rituals that only apply to women, which Rachel (said daughter) finds meaningful. I'm not quite sure I'm satisfied with this particular explanation, and the prayer has always bothered me a good bit. But the key thing is she's wrestling with it, and through that process she's working out what gender equality means to her. And whatever I think of the prayer, I can certainly agree that that is a good thing.

I just got out of a seminar with Fr. Davies on the philosophy of religion. I'm actually sitting in the library because I had to scan next week's readings, and once I got here it seemed like a good place to sit and think for a while. The photocopying room is apparently deserted and peaceful at this hour. (For anyone reading this concerned with my safety: I'll either be taking the courtesy van back to my just-off-campus apartment, or will be accompanied by a very burly security guard. I'll be safe.)

Clifford starts by giving the analogy of a shipowner. Basically a man owns a ship some immigrants are going to use to travel across the ocean, and rather than simply investigating whether it's seaworthy he sends them off full of confidence that the ship will survive. The ship is old and he does not have good reason to assume this; he's just optimistic or (more likely) doesn't really care about their safety. Darned one-percenters and all. :-) A few weeks out the ship sinks, and the man is shocked by the "tragedy." After all, he didn't mean for those people to die; he didn't know the ship was so bad as all that.

Clifford points out that this defense is bunk. He may not have known but he should have known and would have known if he'd looked. But then Clifford asks an interesting question: should we hold the unlucky shipowner any more blameworthy than if he'd been lucky and the ship hadn't sank. Clifford thinks not. If you believe something on good evidence and it turns out you're wrong, that may be tragic and not your fault. But if you didn't actually see what was wrong with the situation because you weren't looking, or because you ignored what you saw, well, that is your fault. As Clifford said most memorably, It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

As far as I can see, Clifford has two real reasons here. The first is that beliefs inspire action. He thinks it's all but impossible to truly believe something and not have that impact the way you act toward different people in some way or another. But he also points to another issue. If you get in the habit of believing things on insufficient evidence, then you lose your ability to be rational and critical. Even if you could believe something and out of luck it never caused you to act wrongly, it would still be wrong because that would build up bad habits in you.

I think Clifford's on to something here in most circumstances. Certainly if Henry Ford believed he needed to put fairy filters on his cars to keep the creatures from gumming up his cars' engines, that would be an irrational action. If he acted on that, I'd even say he was being wasteful and probably hurting someone (himself, his customers, possibly even indirectly his employees since he can't give them the benefits or wages they perhaps deserve). This is because if fairies existed or messed up car-engines, you'd expect to find evidence of this near at hand. Similarly if I ran across a field without looking where I was going, and consequently stepped in a rabbit-hole and twisted my ankle, you'd be quite right to say my belief that I didn't need to be so careful was a bad one. It would still be a bad one even if I got lucky. This is because the assumptions here - that fairies gum up engines, that a certain field is free of holes and other dangers - are easily verifiable and refutable. And in both cases my beliefs were based on insufficient evidence. The fact that I hadn't bothered to go out and gather the evidence doesn't change the fact that they were bad beliefs.

This brings us to the question of God. Clifford isn't talking about philosophy of religion in particular, but the essay is in a philosophy of religion anthology being studied for a philosophy of religion seminar. And it's obviously relevant. If religious beliefs are operating in the same way as everyday beliefs are, then I should need evidence for my claim that God exists, just like I should need it for my claim "This field is safe to run across" - if anything, I'd need more evidence. Extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof and all. But as we were discussing this in class I found myself thinking of Karl Barth and D.Z. Phillips and even Kierkegaard (what little I understand of him). These people not only have some kind of a "belief" in God --or if not belief, there's some kind of epistemic state concerning God they want to affirm, whether it's faith or hope or whatever-- but they're quite clear about the fact that they're not offering a hypothesis like a scientist would about the observable world. This isn't the kind of belief (if you want to call it that) that requires any kind of evidence, because the "believer" (what a misnomer that seems at times!) is doing something very different than what Clifford thinks the shipowner ought to do.

Let me put it another way. Clifford says we should not have a belief based on insufficient evidence. This is kind of like the point I raised with the Dawkins scale of a/theism the other day: many people, fideists and the like, don't have a belief where any kind of evidence would be sufficient. This implies our concept of God is the kind of thing that can be proved even in principle, and as I said at the time, to many religious "believers" this is a pale concept of God. So in these cases I'm not sure that the belief has insufficient evidence; it's simply not the kind of thing where you should expect evidence.

I'll take this a step further. If Clifford is concerned (as he seems to be) about the cumulative effect of believing something on insufficient evidence, he should also be concerned about the effect of disbelieving something on the basis of evidence. If our cocnept of God is the kind of thing where we shouldn't expect proof, then what kind of lack of evidence justifies skepticism?

My gut instinct is that the fideists are on to something here, too. By all means, demand sufficient evidence for a scientific hypothesis. But when it comes to the kind of things that don't really fit that kind of analysis --things that are beyond our ability to comprehend-- I think Clifford's approach can lead people to overstate their ability to reason.

The problem of course is that a lot of religious people do talk about their beliefs about God like they're true and false the same way that the statement "my wallet is black" or "my soda is room temperature" are true or false. And people like Clifford (and anyone else) are probably right to criticize religious people for making those kinds of statements. When someone says a statement like a particular wallet is black is true, what I usually hear is that they know it to be true - or at least that they believe it to be true in a way that would lead to knowledge if they had the necessary evidence. But the more I think about it, statements like "God exists" simply don't seem to work that way. It may be misleading to call such statements "beliefs," even. At a minimum, I'd say we need to be very, very careful not to mix them up with scientific hypotheses.

This idea is very much a "baby" concept - just something that occurred to me as I was sitting in class this afternoon. But it seems to me that Clifford's argument only really works against people treating a belief as grounded (supported by good evidence) when they don't have that kind of evidence. I'd go a step further and say it's just as dangerous (and dangerous in a similar way) to say evidence should be possible if we only looked for it, when that kind of evidence isn't really possible - it leads people to reject ideas they're not really in a position to reject, which in itself leads to bad epistemic habits. I'd say both atheists and theists approach religious belief wrong when we treat it as beliefs like scientific beliefs. At least with myself, there's something radically different going on when I call myself a "believer." Maybe we need a new name for what we call religious beliefs, or something. But blaming religious beliefs for not meeting that burden doesn't seem like the answer.

This line of thought really requires more time than I'm able to give it just now. And it may be wrong. But I at least wanted to take the first step of laying these thoughts out.

I've heard of several billboards like this one:

( Read more... )

For those who don't have a Bible at hand, Psalm 109:8 reads in the NKJV, "Let his days be few, and let another take his place." That's enough of a twist on Christian ethics, since the Bible also commands Christians to pray rightly - as in, pray for their success - for leaders placed over them. The wider context makes this particularly ugly. I was aware of that, but a lot of the people putting up these billboards and the politicians who have invoked it casually may not.

The next several verses, again in the NKJV:

9Let his children be fatherless,
And his wife a widow.
10 Let his children continually be vagabonds, and beg;
Let them seek their bread[b] also from their desolate places.
11 Let the creditor seize all that he has,
And let strangers plunder his labor.
12 Let there be none to extend mercy to him,
Nor let there be any to favor his fatherless children.
13 Let his posterity be cut off,
And in the generation following let their name be blotted out.

That's enough of a downer. "In the generation following let their name be blotted out" basically means that his line won't continue - that any sons will either not have sons themselves, or else will die young. Not particularly pro-life. And even without that, it's hard to imagine the people who laugh at this being a prayer they can say for Obama laughing at the idea of his children starving in the wilderness. (Recall the context - it would've been next to impossible for a widowed, disgraced woman to earn a living.)

BUt it actually takes a turn for the absurd, and almost becomes funny, when you take into consideration the real context. As Robert Cargill points out, this is David recounting the curses other people have made against him:

1Do not keep silent,
O God of my praise!
2 For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful
Have opened against me;
They have spoken against me with a lying tongue.
3 They have also surrounded me with words of hatred,
And fought against me without a cause.
4 In return for my love they are my accusers,
But I give myself to prayer.
5 Thus they have rewarded me evil for good,
And hatred for my love.

And then:

Help me, O Lord my God!
Oh, save me according to Your mercy,
27 That they may know that this is Your hand—
That You, Lord, have done it!
28 Let them curse, but You bless;
When they arise, let them be ashamed,
But let Your servant rejoice.
29 Let my accusers be clothed with shame,
And let them cover themselves with their own disgrace as with a mantle.

So just to recount, you have a godly king recounting people wanting him to die and see his family in ruin, and then praying that God will help him withstand their curses "that they may know that this is Your hand" when he is saved from those curses.

I'm setting aside the question of what relationships religion and politics should have. I personally think anyone who wants their particular vision of God to overwhelm the political process is being a bad American, but that's a side point. Invoking this kind of prayer, in light of the Biblical command (1 Timothy 2) to pray for our leaders means you're being a bad Christian. And using this particular reference to do it would be laugh-worthy, if the thought behind the prayer wasn't so awful.

I'd say if God has anything to do with this whole affair he's having a good belly-laugh at the irony. Of course, I'm pretty sure God doesn't enter into this whole line of "prayer."

Over at FB, Hank Fox of the Blue Collar Atheist blog asked:

I'm curious ... where do different people fall? And why, if you know?

Personally, I'm a bit leery of Dawkins's scheme for dividing things up. It assumes there's evidence that makes it more or less probable that God exists, I'm not sure I accept that. (Acutally, I'm not sure about evidence full stop when it comes to God since that seems to apply God is understandable more than I think He is.) As I've grown up and decided what I believe for myself, I've become more and more agnostic, but not in the sense most people mean by agnostic. I'm one of those religious people who think that God is unknowable because if I could break down god into facts that would fit in my brain, the kind of Being I was thinking about wouldn't really be worthy of the name God. I still firmly believe God exists, but it's not some kind of propositional claim I believe because I know it's true. It involves faith, which is something else entirely. (I seesaw a bit on this, and sometimes I do believe I can prove God exists, but more and more I'm leaning in this direction as I figure out what I truly believe.) All of that means I don't think it's more or less likely God exists - that implies the kind of evidence you could be wrong about.

But if you pushed me and let me put aside that concern, I'd say I'm a "two" (de facto theist) or a "three" (weak theist) depending on what I'm going through on RL. This is mostly about my mental state; sometimes the problem of evil seems more real --psychologically, not rationally-- than at other times. Rationally, I have answers to that problem that are more or less convincing (to me). But emotionally? Sometimes belief or faith or whatever you want to call it is a struggle. Actually, believing God is good is much harder than believing God is.

A while back, Christian author and blogger Tony Jones challenged "all progressive theo-bloggers" to "write something substantive about God. Not about Jesus, not about the Bible, but about God." He rattled off a whole list of well-known bloggers about religion working from a more or less progressive protestant starting-point, like Fred Clarke, Rachel Held Evans, and others.

Before I go any further, let me make one thing clear. I know a lot of people reading this are atheists or not particularly religious. That's fine, and I think what I'm talking about is interesting even for you. (Or I hope it is!) But in this post I'm doing what I consider "inside" work - theology rather than apologetics or evangelism. So when I say "you" ought to do a certain thing before, I'm talking about what I think theism, and in particular Christianity, requires. I just don't want to confuse anyone, because it's a bit different than how I usually write.

Anyway, I don't know that I count as a "progressive theo-blogger." I do write about God a fair bit, but I'm nowhere near in the league of the people mentioned above. I don't also write solely about God or even about theological concepts (though it seems like that some days!) And as I explained back in June, I don't necessarily think of myself as progressive in the way that most people use that term. I'm progressive in the sense that I think religion is supposed to get closer to the truth as history progresses, not in the sense that I think my religion or any other should be defined by a liberal or progressive political agenda. As my friend Ellen Haroutunian once put it, my God is neither red nor blue, but purple. Still, the company is flattering and the challenge was interesting, so I thought I'd give it a try.

Here's the problem, though. Tony Jones wants me to write something substantive, and I am at heart a medievalist. And to a student of medieval philosophy, substance means substantia, essence – think transubstantiation, having been one substance/essence and now being something else entirely. And, also probably because I'm a student of medieval philosophy, I'm just not sure I can answer his prompt. Not because I don't read my Bible (there's that thing I'm not supposed to be talking about), or because I haven't been touched by Christ (that other thing) or the Holy Spirit or even what Christians might call God the Father.

( the problem of religions lnaguage )( Aquinas, Maimonides, and Eriugena )( Anselm )

Personally, I think all of these different approaches help us out quite a bit. If you're going to say something meaningful about God, you can't start with words that suit everyday things (creatures, in Aquinas's words). But Maimonides's, Eriugena's, and Aquinas's approaches all give us tools that help us stretch with all our will to really come to terms with what we have inside of us but don't know just yet. Thinking about what God can't be, or what God must be like, help prod us as we reflect on that inner image of what God truly is. The trick is to keep in mind this simple truth: none of them can really tell us what God's really like.

That means a bit of humility's in order here. It's also why I always buck against people who say "The Bible says it, that settles it." Because while the Bible may say it, I don't understand it – not really, or at least not totally. It doesn't mean I should stop talking about God and explaining why I think some peoples' views of God is wrong (sometimes disastrously so). But it does mean I shouldn't think I've got it all figured out myself, either.

P.S.: Credit where credit's due. The Aquinas and Wittgenstein quotes, and the reference to the Exodus story, are taken from Fr. Brian Davies's An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, mainly because I loaned out my Summa of the Summa (which has the text in question) so don't have it on hand to give you guys a readable translation. I recommend it if you like philosophy of religion. The Anselm quotes are from the Charlesworth translation in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works. With Anselm in particular I've only scratched the surface and really want to say a lot more, but given it's past midnight and I'm rounding 3,000 words here, I should probably leave that for another post.

(This post is part of the August synchroblog.)

A few weeks ago Jared Wilson entered my world for the first and what I hope will be the last time with a sexist screed that rocked the blogosphere, or at least my corner of it. His original post has been deleted, and I don’t exactly want to give his words any more air-time than they already received by posting them again, plus they are rather trigger-ish for anyone with an exposure to rape or domestic violence, and to a lesser extent to women generally. So let me just summarize them briefly.

( warning: triggerish for rape, DV, and general ickiness )

The thing is, I’m not sure it’s that simple. Don’t mistake me, Mr. Wilson is 100%, outrageously wrong here. But the Bible does come close to endorsing a position very much like his at times. To wit:

I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception;

In pain you shall bring forth your children;

Your desire shall be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16, NKJV)

The problem for folks like Mr. Wilson is they’re a few thousand years out of date:

Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:24-27, NKJV)

I don’t want to turn this into testimonial or anything. If I wasn’t a Christian, I’d probably find lots to object to about this statement, like the implication that we need faith to know that that rape-triggerish junk is, if you’ll excuse my language, complete and utter crap. We don’t. All we need is to be decent humans.

But speaking as a Christian, within that tradition, there’s something that’s especially wrong with Mr. Wilson’s language. Not only is it wrong and insulting but it turns the whole of Holy Scripture – you know, the sola thing you evangelicals are so keyed into – on its head. Because curses like this that were clearly temporary and the results of sin are quite honestly the only Scriptural evidence I can find that one group gets to lord it over the other. I don’t particularly accept the idea that men and women are innately different, but I sure don’t accept the idea that this gives any other human the right to dominate, particularly in such a violent way. And if that was ever the case, the whole thing about being sons (and daughters) of God through faith pretty well proves it. Alike in dignity, alike in worth, and each of us precious and unique – whatever bits of anatomy we might have between our legs.

This summer session I read Bertrand Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship” with my ethics class, and we got into some interesting discussions on human dignity and autonomy and whether having God dictate right and wrong got in the way of all that. Russell writes,

A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurrying through the abysses of space, has brought forth at least a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the restless forces that control his outward life.

Russell’s point, as I understand it, is that there is a certain dignity and a moral worth in being the one to choose. This idea seems very Kantian to me: we are the moral legislator, the one that makes sense of the chaos, and to submit to someone else’s authority is a betrayal of self. Is this idea at least reconcilable with the Christian ideal of submission, of following? Obviously the rest of Russell’s essay is thoroughly atheistic, and I don’t want to Christianize him. But the idea expressed in the quote above is a naturally attractive one, and I see it in a lot of religious peoples’ attempts to live well through horrific consequences. How does submission come into all this?

Years ago, when my grandfather died after a long illness, I remember standing against a wall at the wake and being unable to cry. We weren’t all that close as he had been chair-bound for most of my life, and I thought that was it. So on top of feeling, well, as bad as one does at funerals, I was feeling royally guilty too, but strangely stoic at the same time. My cousin Lisa (who even then “got” me very well) saw what was going on and said that, just for that day, she would be my big sister. I was maybe thirteen or fourteen and the oldest of three siblings, and I thought it was my job to be “strong” for them. I was wrong, and only when someone showed me that could I start to cry like we all need to at those points.

Christianity glorifies submission and weakness but at the same time many Christians rely on human dignity to find worth in their lives, particularly in life’s dark allies. (This is what I think Paul is really getting at in 2 Corinthians 12 – not that humans are decrepit without God, but that we are strong enough to see even weakness in our strength, something greater than ourselves.) I think, particularly in the wake of tragedies like the Colorado shooting or the recent attack on the Sikh temple, we need what Russell pointed to: “to examine, to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create.” It’s also for me the beauty and salvific power of Tolkien’s mythic vision of a world where “the [story’s] cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands.” As humans, we need to stare into the void and find more than emptiness. And if there isn’t anything but vacuum, we need to fill it ourselves.

That requires a very different kind of submission, of following, than the one Mr. Wilson points to, and for reasons that go beyond the obvious ones. It isn’t about giving up our authority and dignity as rational beings, capable to act on something other than simple instinct. It’s about recognizing our limits and choosing to rest a bit, let someone else carry the load for a mile or two, so we can take it up again all the better.

That’s a kind of submission even this dyed-in-the-wool egalitarian can get behind.

Tim Kurek (a Christian author I follow over on FB) has a new book coming out. As he describes it:

In January 2009 I entered the closet a straight man and came out to my friends and family as a gay. I lived with the label for an entire year. After my life as I knew it had quickly unraveled into nothing, I began building a new one. I became a barista at a gay café. I played in a LGBT softball league. I protested in New York City with a group of gay activists that I had encountered years before while I studied Liberty University. And I even participated in a marriage equality event with the son on Jim and Tammy Faye, Jay Bakker. For a year I immersed myself, completely and utterly, in the small gay scene of Nashville, Tennessee, and experienced firsthand the agony of being isolated, repressed, and alone.

My book is the result of that year and it tells the story of the men and women that challenged, and ultimately changed my life’s path. It is a book about faith, and a book about doubt. But mostly it is a book about people, and how the men and women I’d always been taught to shun ended up saving my life.

He emphasizes that he is not writing about the gay experience, since (as he's not really gay) that's not a topic he feels competent to address. Rather, it's about a rather extreme exercise in empathy: a Christian trying to exorcise his inner-Pharisee, as it were, and to live with what many LGBT Christians live with "for real."

He's asking the same questions that spurred my own "evolution" on homosexuality, and changed me from someone who thought the Bible taught homosexuality was immoral to being convinced of the opposite. While I didn't go so far as Tim did (not nearly that brave, unfortunately!) I found myself asking questions like the ones that motivated his project. If I was gay, could I come out to my family and friends? Could I still be a Christian? What made any love I felt for another man better or more worthy of support than the love a gay friend of mine felt for his boyfriend? These on top of the obvious political problems of denying equal legal protections to anyone, based on a religious belief. It was this striving for empathy that really changed my position on homosexuality, and though this was private in my case - I lived with "what if's" rather than dealing with peoples' very real reactions to my actually coming out - I can definitely see the appeal of Tim's project.

Tim has a trailer out for the book...

( Read more... )

... and he is accepting donations to help pay for a publicist and final book editing. Even if you decide not to donate (which I plan to, and encourage - this really is an interesting story that needs to be told), I hope you'll check out the trailer and think about the experiences he describes. It'll be four minutes well spent. The book comes out October 11.

Earlier tonight, I'd had posted a link to a picture Gina Bertucci shared over at FB:

( warning – may trigger for survivors of domestic violence )

The picture has several phrases at the bottom that most Christians I know would agree describes God (if I just told them the phrase without the picture). But it’s juxtaposed with an image that should turn all of our stomachs, of a man abusing his girlfriend. I highly doubt the people who put this image are Christians. It's not how Christians see their own views. But that's rather the point. There are many Christians who describe God in a way that – in almost any other context – they'd reject. Vigorously. (To be fair, the image is about "religion," not Christianity; I'm talking about Christians because that's the group I'm most familiar with.)

Context matters, of course, but I think a lot of Christians are just so used to hearing God described in these terms that they don't recognize the problems with their beliefs. An abusive spouse might tell her husband, "I love you so much that if you left me I'd die," so much the husband stops seeing it as abuse – but that in itself doesn't make it kosher. That's why I shared the meme . Not because it was a description most or even any Christians would recognize as their faith. But because it was worth thinking about whether these phrases did describe a God we should be ashamed to worship.

Most Christians do believe in heaven and hell. We saw this played out earlier this year in the controversy over Rob Bell's book Love Wins. Rob Bell is a well-known Christian Protestant preacher (a darling of the Christian Left, but his theology always struck me as pretty moderate and definitely Bible-based), and he caused waves when he published a book questioning whether hell as it was usually understood by Christians was really Biblical.

The Southern Baptist Church passed a resolution (linked above) condemning the view that there was no hell. They said, among other things, that "orthodox Christians have affirmed consistently and resoundingly the reality of a literal Hell" and that "God must judge the unregenerate because He is a holy God whose judgments are altogether righteous." It's undeniable that many pew-sitters, when asked, would probably say they believe hell is real. I certainly heard enough sermons on it growing up. But when I actually went to read the Bible verses being referenced, it struck me that the idea of "fire and brimstone forever" wasn't the only interpretation you could apply to them.

Why believe in hell? I'm sure there are psychological reasons, like the need to encourage good behavior or the desire to feel better than other people. A more theological point is the idea that God can't allow evil anywhere near him. The basic story I grew up with is that it's not so much a problem with sins as it is with Sin. It's kind of like the reasoning we see in the Akallabêth, that for (mortals? Warring armies?) to set foot on Valinor would somehow pollute it. This is the whole point behind the Easter story: that God, being just, can't just look the other way when wrongdoing has been done.

Except, that's a pretty wack view of justice. Seriously. How would we feel about a judge who let my brother go to jail for a crime I committed? The fact that I was literally incapable of serving the time wouldn't make it justice for someone else to do the time for me. Even if they volunteered for it. That would still be unfair. Massively so.

There is another option. Standard Christian theology says that people go to hell because they're fundamentally "corrupted" and need to be covered by some sort of sacrifice of the innocents, if they are ever to become righteous again. But there's a view I see in a lot of my students, and that I've heard from countless Christians I knew (from across the spectrum here). Basically, it's that hell is for "bad" people while heaven is for "good" people. I think this was the idea behind a rather outrageous NY Post cover that came on after the bin Laden assassination:

( Read more... )

It's not a Biblical view because Paul writes in his epistles quite extensively how none of us can be made holy through our own efforts, but the idea has staying power, I think because people like to believe the world is fair and that there's a reason to treat people fairly. Plus there's just a psychological need to feel "bigger" than others. One problem, as I explained a while back, is that this kind of justice is impossible. There's literally nothing I can do that would make an infinity of suffering in hell (or an infinity of bliss in heaven) a fair response on Gen trying – because no matter how awful my life is, there will just never be enough bad behavior to work off, to earn hell.

There's a bigger problem, though. If you're being good because you think God will punish you if you're not – well, in what possible relationship is that healthy? There's a different between acting out of a healthy kind of love, like Aristotle's friendship, because you recognize this person is good and want to become more like them. That's fine. But if you're acting a certain way because you think you'll face a lifetime of indescribable pain... I've seen that kind of "love" on display at the domestic violence shelter where I volunteer on occasion. I'd sooner be an atheist than worship someone who demanded that of me.

Personally, I've toyed with other options. The Catholic idea of purgatory is very appealing to me philosophically; I find the idea that God allows for perfection even beyond what's possible in the mortal life, and that it's our sanctified selves that gets welcomed into heaven, makes a lot of sense of things like moral progress and justice. (I don't think of it as punishment; more a chance to "freshen up" before dinner.) this is how I understand what the Bible means by judgment: either being ready for paradise or needing yet more time to ready yourself.

The positions I just mentioned are my starting positions, and I'm still trying to make my peace with this issue. I also haven't studied the Biblical writings enough to be able to say "this view is what the Bible says" and "this view is offbase." I'm not alone, btw. While the fire-and-brimstone Christians get all the press, I know many Christians, both inside the academy and without, who are trying to work out these answers. The popularity of Rob Bell's book shows how many Christians are yearning for answers. And, contrary to the SBC, not all orthodox Christians believe in an eternal hell. (See all the humor about people going to hell.

The philosopher in me insists it's a good problem to think through even because the concepts involved – love, justice, responsibility, power – are so crucial to how we view the world. But more than that, I think as a religious person it comes down to how you want to view God – as something to fear or something to try to become more like. From the outside, I'm sure it seems all Christians are happy to choose the first option, but from the inside, you can see more than a few people taking this question seriously and often as not deciding Rob Bell is more in the right than the SBC. That's something.

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

P.S. – Re the late hour, I did a half-hour as part of an Easter prayer vigil, and couldn't quit unwind. So I took the opportunity to finish this post that has been languishing on my hard drive in various bits for several weeks now. Here's hoping it's as typo-free in the morning as it seems righow.

Over at FB, I've seen several people post this meme;

( Read more... )

It's not that different from lots of other memes that float around there, and I feel a bit guilty for singling it out. Particularly as I'll be posting a link of this to FB and really don't want to single out my particular friends. So let me say at the start - I'm not trying to single out the people who shared this. I know they meant well, and my frustrations have to do with a much larger problem. In particular, several larger problems.

#1. Armchair Activism: I always get frustrated with altruism, activism, whatever that doesn't require any real sacrifice. The Kony2012 video is a great example of this phenomenon. You also see it in stores that make donations if you buy a certain product, like the recent October Baby that would donate ten percent of the profit to pro-life groups. Whatever practical good they do, they inoculate us. There's something we're supposed to care deeply about, but all we have to do is go to the movie, or share a YouTube video, or share a picture on FaceBook. And suddenly we feel like we've done our part.

Loving God and loving your neighbor should require more than that. It's supposed to be hard - certainly harder than sharing the news about the new Hobbit movie. And of course there's nothing wrong with doing the simple stuff either. But I know in my experience, with things like this, so often this is the end of the story. You're outraged over child soldiers, you share the video, and there's this catharsis; your angst is relieved. My faith requires more of me.

#2. The "Christian Nation" Vibe: This picture says that 97% of FB users won't repost this simple message. I bristle at drives to "won't you please forward/repost this" on principle - they strike me as manipulative even when they're not meant that way! - but here in particular it seems to assume that all FB users are the kind of people who will post Christian-themed things. There are around two billion Christians in the world, last I heard - roughly 1/3 of the world's population. And that includes people who are Catholic because they were born in Italy, or Southern Baptist because they were white and born in Atlanta, or whatever.

In lots of areas of the world, if you're born there and you don't really think that much about religion or theology, you're probably going to be a member of a certain religion. It's actually a very rare person who considers the different views on offer by the different religions and secularism, chooses the one that best matches up with his own, and is as likely to be a Buddhist or a Jew as he was a Baptist. It's a matter of identity (and of necessity - understanding theology takes a lifetime of study and living with it; not everyone can afford that). Christian Scripture pretty much teaches this fact - cf. Mt 25.

Whatever you think of people like this, it's not just that they're lazy. Acting like the whole world is Christian, let alone devout Christians, is misleading at best.

(For the record, I'm one of those Christians that feels odd about public professions of faith. Not because I'm embarrassed or anything, but because what Jesus said about using faith in God as identity - you know, the people that prayed loudly in the temple, who'd already received their reward. It's not laziness on my part, either.)

#3. He Sees You When You're Sleeping... It's the last bit that really pushes my button. You should post this picture because: "Repost if you love God. He already saw you read it. That's just insulting on many levels, as if the way I live out my faith is just because God's watching over my shoulder. It actually reminded me about another meme I've been meaning to blog about. Will just link to it because it has some triggers for domestic violence, but I can't say it any more plainly: the kind of love depicted in that picture - and that grows out of the fear implied in that last line - is not worthy of worship. Or even sharing on FaceBook. And it's definitely not worthy of God.

Many atheist friends of mine (I’m thinking of Dan Fincke in particular, but I’m sure I’ve heard the point other places as well) describe “faith” as being more sure of something than is warranted by the available evidence. It’s not a complement. The thought, as I understand it, is that we should only believe things we have good reason to think are true, and that there’s no good reason to believe God exists. So people who do believe God exists are either making a factual mistake (they think there’s evidence but there isn’t), or otherwise they’re wrong to think we don’t need that evidence. Either way, all theists are being irrational.

( on theology being 'true' )
( on heaven, hell, and a rather messed-up kind of justice )

I actually saw this one coming a mile away:

What the 'After-Birth Abortion' and 'Personhood' Debates Have in Common

A few weeks back I wrote about a journal article proposing that infanticides just after birth should have the same legal status as abortions just before. Meaning that they should be legal if the mother's welfare was at risk, and not even called infanticides. I find this claim preposterous, and I tried my best to explain why. Basically, I think there's a big distinction between legal status and moral status.

ChristianityToday, a major online and print magazine in the evangelical (not necessarily conservative, not necessarily fundamentalist, but just evangelical) publishing world made the above post in one of their associated blogs. Basically, the argument goes, this whole debate over infanticide comes from the recognition that there's no recognizable distinction between a fetus and an infant, meaning we should give all the rights of an infant to a fetus. Think the personhood bills you've seen put out in U.S. states like Mississippi and Colorado.

The problem here is that the concepts of "fetus" and "born human" (to say nothing of human and person generally) are really not so simple, and we're using them like they are. I tend to think the whole abortion debate would be much, much easier if we thought about what we meant by a fetus. I'll grant that a fetus a minute before birth has more in common with an infant one minute after birth, than it does with a fetus one minute after conception. I'll even grant that some of the ways these three things are similar and different are morally relevant. All that proves, though, is that a fetus is a distinction where the members in it don't all have the same moral status.

There are a lot of big philosophical words floating around in there, so let me try to make this simpler. I'll give you that it's morally wrong to kill a fetus one minute before it's born. (Allowing the usual exceptions for self-defense, etc.) That doesn't mean it should be morally wrong to kill any fetus. And, just for the record, it doesn't actually mean it should be illegal to kill a fetus one minute before birth. The law's a blunt instrument and may not be up to the task of splitting that moral hair. It just means that not all fetuses are in the same position, morally speaking.

While we're on the concept of distinctions, it's worth looking at one more: human vs. person. On one definition, it's quite obvious that a newly-fertilized zygote is human. So is an amputated leg or fingernail clippings. Human here just means "has human DNA" or "has human cellular structure." But a doctor who amputates a leg to save the patient doesn't have to go through a hospital board inquiry, and I didn't have to explain to the police why I cut my nails last night. There's another definition of "human," which philosophers both prefer to call "person" to avoid speciesism and to avoid the confusion of using human in more than two ways. Persons are members of the moral community, things that have rights and responsibilities. Some philosophers use the ability to feel pain; more common is the sentience idea, or the ability to act on something other than just instinct. But when a scientist or a bioethicist talks about a fetus being human, they don't usually mean it in the personhood case.

So to sum up:

Yes, fetuses are (genetically) human.
No, not all fetuses are humans/persons in the moral sense.
The solution is not to call a zygote a person – it is to recognize that fetuses exist along a continuum, and while some may reasonably be called a person, not all can.
So: drop this drive to call a zygote a person. It's not helping.

I am actually as dismayed by this journal article's claim as anyone else. The solution, though, isn't to double down and insist all fetuses are people. It's to recognize the very real difference between a zygote smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, and an eight-month old human baby that could survive on its own outside the womb.

It also wouldn't hurt to distinguish between a late-term fetus's right to life, and the mother of a late-term fetus's obligation to preserve that life. She may have such an obligation based on her past actions of not terminating the pregnancy, not using appropriate birth control, etc. (depending on the situation – this is a big if), but it's not all about a "right to life." There are other concerns that play out here, and the dueling claims in this situation are complicated. You don't do anyone any good by pretending this is a simple issue.

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Sherlock Fic Rec: Lashkar Gah by Susan, + theology blogging over at FQ
a merry St. Patrick's Day
in which I utterly fail to sit on my hands regarding the Duck Dynasty interview
God made Adam and Steve, too
God made Adam and Steve, too
Habemus papam!
thoughts on evangelicalism
Synchroblog October 2012: Why There's No such Thing as the Christian Vote
"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes." (Erasmus)
Blessed are you, O Lord, who has not made me a woman
the ethics of belief
the dangers of prooftexting
Richard Dawkins' a/theism scale
Why everything you were ever told about God is wrong (but you should believe some of it anyway)
Finding Strength in Weakness [August Synchroblog]
Jesus in Drag - the Trailer
on the "justice" of hell
Christian ethics: ur doing it rong
Synchroblog, April 2012: on faith seeking understanding, truth, and theology
more on abortion, infanticide, and personhood

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Marta's Mathoms

because not all who wander are lost

Entries tagged with theology

Sherlock Fic Rec: Lashkar Gah by Susan, + theology blogging over at FQ

a merry St. Patrick's Day

in which I utterly fail to sit on my hands regarding the Duck Dynasty interview

God made Adam and Steve, too

Sodom and Gomorrah

God made Adam and Steve, too

Habemus papam!

thoughts on evangelicalism

Synchroblog October 2012: Why There's No such Thing as the Christian Vote

"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes." (Erasmus)

Blessed are you, O Lord, who has not made me a woman

the ethics of belief

the dangers of prooftexting

Richard Dawkins' a/theism scale

Why everything you were ever told about God is wrong (but you should believe some of it anyway)

Finding Strength in Weakness [August Synchroblog]

Jesus in Drag - the Trailer

on the "justice" of hell

Christian ethics: ur doing it rong

Synchroblog, April 2012: on faith seeking understanding, truth, and theology

more on abortion, infanticide, and personhood