The Sins of Scripture (21 page)

THE TERRIBLE TEXTS

CONVERSION, MISSIONARY EXPANSION AND RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY

T
here is an Episcopal congregation named St. Francis in the Fields, located in a fashionable suburb of Louisville, Kentucky, called Harrod’s Creek, that seems to have a hard time with the concepts of diversity and even freedom of speech. Some members of this congregation discovered, I gather to their horror, that a study group in their congregation was actually reading books that appeared to challenge what some of them called the “true faith of the church.” The clergy leadership of this congregation dispatched one of its own to meet with the members of that study group. This meeting confirmed their worst suspicions. This group had actually been reading books by Marcus Borg, Elaine Pagels, Rowan Williams and Karen Armstrong.

That was an interesting list. Marcus Borg is a well-published Jesus scholar who teaches at Oregon State University. He is married to an Episcopal priest and is himself an active Episcopal layperson. Elaine Pagels is a professor of religion at Princeton University whose books are regularly on the
New York Times
best-seller list. She is much involved in her Episcopal congregation as a regular worshiper. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is liberal on social issues but conservative on theological issues. Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun, is probably the best-known religious writer in the world today.

Undeterred by these credentials the priest issued an ultimatum to this group, saying, in effect, “From now on, you must read only the books which we, the clergy of this church, assign and approve.” He then suggested a list of acceptable authors, all well-known traditional and, I might add, rather boring writers who would be thought of primarily as Christian propagandists rather than as Christian scholars. The list included names of those with encyclopedic, but not necessarily original, minds. Furthermore, this priest stated that if the members of this group wanted to continue meeting in that particular church, they must be monitored regularly and perhaps even led by one of the church’s clergy. If they were not willing to follow this directive, said this “holy man from the office of the heavenly sheriff,” they would have to leave the church. The creeds of the church, he asserted, cannot be debated since they represent the faith that has been once and for all delivered to the saints.

Perhaps this priest was not aware that the historic creeds of the church were developed in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era and that far from falling from heaven in three neatly organized trinitarian paragraphs, complete with punctuation, they were adopted amid raucous debate, with all of the wheeling and dealing, the compromises and power plays that accompany every decision-making convention, whether it is primarily political or ecclesiastical.

I still have a difficult time believing that this scenario actually happened in my denomination and as recently as the first decade of the twenty-first century! Was not the Episcopal Church part of the Anglican Communion that bounded into existence as the result of Henry VIII’s sex life and multiple wives? Do they not still define themselves as the great via media, standing between the Catholic tradition and Protestant principle? But happen it did. I have actually read the correspondence between this priest, the members of the study group and the congregation. What amazed me most was the implication conveyed by the clergy of this church, who appear to define themselves primarily as the “defenders of the faith,” that the Christian faith can be and has been reduced to a set of propositional statements delivered to human beings by divine revelation. Perhaps it was even more incredible to me that they assumed that their finite human minds could define the reality of God and that their definition was ever afterward not to be subject to debate or change. That assumption was breathtaking in its naïveté. To bring this episode to its actual conclusion, the offending study group, I understand, accepted the invitation, not to be monitored or led, but to leave that church: they moved their meeting place, and perhaps their membership, to nearby St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church. Perhaps there they will be able to continue their journey into the mystery of God, unimpeded by “benefit of clergy.”

I wish I could assume that this rather bizarre tale was only an isolated event, triggered by an insecurity so deep as to be pitiable in the mind of one, or at least a very few, of the church’s clergy; but that would be to turn a blind eye to Christian history. This behavior might seem rare and warped in our “enlightened” day, but the attitude behind it has dotted the landscape of the Christian tradition during the majority of its two thousand–plus years of life. Religious closed-minded ignorance wrapped in bigotry has even been justified by appeals to the sacred scriptures, which have again and again been quoted to demonstrate that if one disagrees with the “stated faith of the church,” one is actually disagreeing with God and God’s truth. When one adds to this the claim that the scriptures are themselves the very “Word of God,” the circular argument becomes apparent and seemingly defensible.

The particular verse in the Bible that these Louisville clergy appear to have had in mind, and certainly the verse that has been frequently quoted to justify religious intolerance, is located in an obscure and seldom-read book in the New Testament called the epistle of Jude. In that very brief, one-chapter-long book, a reference is made in the third verse to something the author calls “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.”

Most people would not be able to locate this epistle in the Bible if their lives depended on it. Consisting of only twenty-five verses, it nestles between the third epistle of John and the book of Revelation, which makes it the next to the last book in the New Testament. It is part of a group of writings that scholars designate as “general epistles.” I have never heard any verse of this epistle quoted in any context save for this one. The implication present in this isolated text, and certainly the conclusion intended by those who quote it, is that Christianity can be and has been captured in a series of creeds, doctrines and dogmas, the truth of which is both self-evident and unchanging. Anyone who dares to question this conclusion or these core beliefs is questioning nothing less than God. Once those implications are accepted, it certainly becomes the duty of the church and its hierarchy to protect all the other people of the world from such heresy.

Whenever truth becomes set, it is inevitable that every new idea and even every new perspective becomes threatening and disturbing to the stated truth and thus it becomes an enemy to be suppressed. That clearly was the mentality underlying the behavior of the ordained persons in this Kentucky congregation, as they sought to justify both their ignorance and their arrogance in the claim that their actions possessed biblical authority and biblical respectability. When threatened religious people have a compelling need to command conformity for their own faith assertions, or to put down any challenge to the traditions of their religious past, the idea that there is such a thing as “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” is a godsend. It is used like a rapier’s thrust in defense of “orthodoxy.” It suppresses all lack of certainty. It leads the charge against any deviation. This produces the religious mentality that causes a variety of religious bodies to claim that they and they alone are “the true church.” This is the source out of which the assertions come that “our pope is infallible” or “our Bible is inerrant.”

When certainty combines with zeal in religious matters, horror always results. Jude’s suggestion that we must “contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” has thus been the source of enormous pain and horror, as any quick look at history will reveal. The fact that this attitude is still alive and well in Kentucky in the twenty-first century is a cause for great alarm.

This text from Jude supports the claim so frequently made by Christians that there is only one way to believe and that, of course, it is the way of the one who quotes this text. This pious claim thus gives to religious arrogance the mask of respectability. To the grand inquisitor, it gives the face of a holy man. This is the mentality that provides the rationale by which destructive conversion tactics and aggressive, imperialistic missionary activities have been countenanced. For is it not obvious that once God has been captured in some kind of creedal box, once the Christian faith has been reduced to a set of propositional statements, doctrines and dogmas, then an idolatry of killing proportions becomes operative in religious life? This is why, even in the twenty-first century, religion remains one of the most divisive and hostile forces in the world. Embarrassing as it may be to those of us who call ourselves Christians, the fact is that more people have been killed in the history of the world in conflicts over and about religion than over any other single factor. Religion has so often been the source of the cruelest evil. Its darkest and most brutal side becomes visible at the moment when the adherents of any religious system identify their
understanding
of God with
God
. The two are never the same. This misguided conviction then gives rise to the idea that it is a religious duty to preserve “God’s truth” from any challenge, from any source. Only with this kind of assumption would an Episcopal priest in Louisville, Kentucky, in the twenty-first century think it appropriate and even essential to tell a group of church members what books they may and may not read, or to insist that anyone who might stray outside some clearly defined box must be monitored by the clergy.

People who see themselves as “defenders of the faith” argue that without certainty, Christianity will not survive. They point to the fact that churches with fuzzy, “liberal” messages are dying and that churches with firm and unbending beliefs are growing. There is a germ of anecdotal truth in those claims. But holding fast to “firm truth” can be managed only if truth is narrowed to include just the data with which that believer is comfortable.

My contention, which I will seek to defend in this section of the book, is that the moment any religious tradition claims certainty, it turns demonic. It also gives up at that moment the very reason for which it was originally created. Whether such a tradition lives or dies, therefore, becomes of little significance. Above all, I contend that something called “the faith of the church” has never existed; truth, whether it be religious truth or any other kind, is always evolving and changing, and the moment truth is codified, it begins to die. That makes it very difficult to be triumphal and certain. We Christians are pilgrims walking into the mystery of God, not soldiers marching off to war. There is a great difference.

H
ow did Christianity, which began in the powerful God intensity found in the man Jesus of Nazareth, change into an ecclesiastical, institutionalized religious system that has clearly defined creeds, doctrines and dogmas that have been imposed on the Western world with coercive and sometimes abusive force? To say the very least, that is quite a transition. This faith system is not intrinsically evil. That is not just my assertion. Christianity has in fact contributed things to our world of tremendous value. It preserved civilization through the dark ages. It produced exquisite music, architecture and art. It began the system of higher education that we today take for granted. It built the first hospitals and sought to establish a person’s right to health care. It gave birth to the idea that life is sacred, an idea that still underlies our entire culture. Those are enormous, not trivial, accomplishments and they are not to be discounted or treated lightly.

However, Christianity has also given us religious persecution, religious wars and the Inquisition. It has produced a biblical fundamentalism that has endorsed slavery, oppressed women, justified wars, opposed scientific knowledge and persecuted homosexual persons. It has developed a history in which religious imperialism has sapped the meaning out of the very God that Christians claim to worship. It has helped to create a world where adherents of one religion feel compelled to kill adherents of another. So the question arises as to what there is inside religion in general and Christianity in particular that could compel us in these destructive directions.

Christianity was born in an experience. It moved, as all forming experiences do, into the apparently human necessity to explain that experience. Next it codified its own explanations so that they became creeds. Then it claimed for those creeds the authority of absolute truth. In time, it began to persecute and even to kill those who would not acknowledge the authority that was attributed to those creeds. In the process, it revealed ever so clearly what believers are loath to admit—namely, that religion is not primarily a search for truth; it is overwhelmingly a search for security.

Religion cannot really become organized unless it can be defined, nor can it be a source of security until it is defined. So religion needs to answer specific questions: For what do you stand? What do you believe? What makes you distinctive? But once those things are defined, religion always manifests its darkest, most destructive side. That is when we begin to hear the incredible claims of the frightfully fearful who require the possession of unchallenged authority. We have the Truth. Reject it at your own risk. We are God’s messengers. To obey us is to obey God. There is no salvation outside the church. We control the doorway to God. All of these claims should sound familiar to the Christian world, for in varying levels of sophistication, those have been offered as the underlying messages of the Christian faith.

Most members of the church’s hierarchy regard the creeds as the source of the church’s unity. However, the fact is that the exact opposite is the case. The creeds actually guarantee the disunity of the church and were consciously intended and designed to do just that. That is a strong statement, resisted by many on first hearing, but history reveals that the primary purpose of any creed is to determine who it is that does not qualify for membership. Creeds are designed to separate the true believers from the false believers. Because creeds set boundaries, they inevitably divide.

Christianity began when people had a life-changing experience that was associated with one named Jesus of Nazareth. That experience, which called them beyond their boundaries into new dimensions of humanity, was accompanied by feelings of wonder, awe and wholeness. Yet that experience as yet had no shape or form. The best they could do at the beginning to put their experience into words was to utter an ecstatic cry. That is what Paul did when he exclaimed, “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself…. That is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:18–19). There is in this text no explanation of how God got into Christ, no discussion of when, no debate about if. Just an exclamation that somehow, in some way, through some means in the life of this Jesus, God had been encountered. That was our faith story’s moment of truth. Shortly thereafter, a creed was formed to articulate that experience. Originally, it had only three words, all of which were rather vague: Jesus is
Maschiach!

Maschiach
was, as noted earlier, a Jewish word that literally meant “the anointed one.” Those three words constituted the first attempt to develop a creed. Many people will assert that this was the best creed the church was destined ever to produce, primarily because it made no attempt to pin down the power of this God experience. It understood the fact that human minds might experience a sense of the holy but they will never be able to explain that dimension of their lives, to say nothing of being able to explain the fullness of God. So it was that this three-word creed left vast amounts of what might be called “wiggle room.” At the very least this creed understood that God cannot be bound in human concepts. As history moved and Christianity became more institutionalized, however, the human need for the security of certainty overwhelmed the sense of awe and wonder in the experience of the divine and the creedal explanations of the church grew increasingly more complex and restrictive.

Most of the wiggle room in this original creed was found in the word
maschiach
. It entered the vocabulary of the Jews as a title for the king: Samuel anointed Saul to be king to rule over the children of Israel (1 Sam. 9:15–10:13). Later, disappointed with Saul, Samuel in an act of treasonous civil disobedience anointed the youthful David to be his successor (1 Sam. 16:1–13). As the power of the king grew in Jewish history, titles claimed by the king also grew, and so they were incorporated into the evolving word
maschiach
. The king is called “the son of God” in the Psalms: “You are my son; today I have begotten you” (2:7). This royal son of God was said to reign at God’s right hand and was sometimes called the “son of man” (Ps. 80:17). Like all human words,
maschiach
took on new meanings as it journeyed through history.

When the royal family of the House of David was destroyed in the conquest of Judah by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE,
maschiach
was set free to enter the fantasies, the hopes and the dreams of the Jews. It was then transformed into standing as a symbol for the ideal king who would on some future day come to restore the fortunes of Israel. That is how the concept of “messiah” entered the Jewish faith story.

As soon as
maschiach
was transformed into “messiah,” a proliferation of messianic images came forth. For some
maschiach
was simply a white knight who would conquer the enemies of the Jews and restore the grandeur of the throne of David. For others
maschiach
was a divine being who would come at the end of the world to establish the reign of God. For still others he was a mythical servant who would absorb the pain and suffering of the world, creating in the process a new human wholeness. Even these images did not exhaust the possibilities. The heroes of the Jewish past began to be magnified in order to expand the range of messianic ideas—a new and greater Moses, a new and greater Elijah, one who fulfilled the scriptures, one who was understood against the symbols of ongoing Jewish worship. There was a veritable explosion of images so that when the earliest Christians affirmed that Jesus was
maschiach,
people heard many things according to how they understood
maschiach
. So it was that this first creed came to be translated: Jesus is Messiah! Jesus is the Christ! Jesus is Lord!

As Christianity moved out of the Jewish womb in which it was born and into the Greek-speaking Mediterranean world, words that had particular and peculiar meaning to these gentiles began to transform and replace the Jewish words. “Messiah” was deemphasized and the Greek equivalent, Christos, which was transliterated into the word “Christ,” replaced it. In English, the title “Christ” has become almost the last name of Jesus. From the time of Paul Jesus was increasingly called simply Christ and not the original “
the
Christ,” which is still a title. This meant that the followers of Jesus, who were originally the “followers of the way,” became “followers of Christ” and ultimately Christians.

The more popular word, however, among the gentiles, and one that they understood in a variety of ways, was “Lord.” As Christianity entered more and more into a gentile milieu, the word “Lord” moved their affirmations about Jesus increasingly beyond human concepts and into divine definitions. One can see this happening even in the gospel tradition. The story of Jesus’ supernatural birth enters the Christian story in the writings of Matthew in the ninth decade of the Common Era. The understanding of the Easter event as a physiological resuscitation of a three-days-deceased body is the contribution primarily of Luke and John in the late ninth and tenth decades of the Common Era. The story of his cosmic ascension is a contribution Luke makes to the developing story, very briefly in his gospel (24:50–53) and then much more fully in the first chapter of the book of Acts (vv. 1–11), also written in the tenth decade.

Armed with these increasingly supernatural definitions of who Jesus was, believers began the creedal debate for real. How could Jesus be both human and divine? People knew he was human. He was “born of a woman, born under the law,” said Paul (Gal. 4:4). He suffered under Pontius Pilate. He died and was buried. These events attested by every gospel writer stamped him with an uncomplicated humanity. It was inconceivable that a deity could suffer, die and be buried. Jesus was depicted as praying in Gethsemane and on the cross. The agony of those prayers was real. We are told that he prayed to a God he called “Abba,” or Father. Jesus was not talking to himself. The witness of history was that Jesus was human.

Yet in that humanity, people believed that God had been encountered, met, received and experienced. So how was it that God came to dwell in a human life? This question engaged the Christian community for the first centuries of the Christian era. This was also the time when people found it more and more important to define the limits of faith, to remove the wiggle room in the earliest three-word affirmation. They were destined to move far beyond the limited debate as to whether
maschiach
should be rendered Messiah, Christ or Lord.

The church thus found itself in a deep and frequently bitter Christological debate that was destined to last for centuries. In the Greek world, the realm of the divine, which included God and heaven, was separated from the realm occupied by human beings on earth. The Greeks were dualistic, dividing bodies from souls, flesh from spirit, earth from heaven and God from the world. “Jesus is Lord” did not adequately convey to these gentile worshipers who Jesus was. People, who claimed to be Christians, were defining what that meant in radically different ways. The chaos of uncertainty became intolerable. That is what set the stage for the expansion of the three-word creed. The faith into which people were being baptized needed clearer definition. A statement of faith was required to make the boundaries of Christian belief clear. Clear beliefs created the security of knowing that “we and only those who agree with us hold the truth.” Unity in faith was to be achieved by drawing lines that would separate out those who did not believe adequately. The Christian church thus began to walk the long road that would lead to the persecution of heretics, the imposition of faith through warfare and era after era of religious intolerance.

That first expanded statement of faith was called “the Apostles’ Creed.” This title was a clever bit of propaganda, for it carried with it the suggestion that this was what the first apostles actually believed about Jesus. This statement of faith was thereby assumed to be rooted in antiquity, grounded in the experience of those who were closest to Jesus. It was, in fact, nothing more than an attempt to capture what Jude was speaking of in his epistle when he made reference to “the faith…delivered to the saints.” By and large, all of the disciples, save for poor Judas, were acknowledged as saints by the time the Apostles’ Creed evolved into its final form. That creed was thought to be necessary for catechetical teaching in preparation for baptism and confirmation. It cleaned up the lines of authority and it enhanced the power claims of the leaders of the church, who defined themselves as the successors of the apostles. All of these things were well served by claiming that what was in fact a third-century creedal statement of Christian beliefs was the actual faith of the apostles. There was only one liability implicit in that claim, but it was a major one: the assertion that this was the faith of the apostles was simply not true.

When this creed achieved its final form, it affirmed a trinitarian formula that the apostles had never even imagined. It followed a neat scheme, with one paragraph assigned to the Father, one to the Son and one to the Holy Spirit. It reflected the patriarchal era in human consciousness and referred to God as the masculine “Father.” It identified this God as the creator of heaven and earth, which was a direct reference to the seven-day creation story of Genesis (1:1–2:3), in which God created the heavens by separating the waters under the firmament from the waters above the firmament and calling the firmament “Heaven” (vv. 6–8), and then God created the earth by gathering the waters below into a single place so that dry land would appear and calling the dry land “Earth” (vv. 9–10).

The Apostles’ Creed affirms as literal history the story of the virgin birth, of which I am confident the original twelve had never heard since this tradition entered the Christian self-understanding after all of them had died. Certainly neither Paul nor Mark had ever heard of it. Paul never even mentions the name of Jesus’ mother, but he does say that Jesus was born of a woman and was descended from the House of David. The word Paul uses for “woman” has no connotation of “virgin” in it. Mark portrays the mother of Jesus rather pejoratively: she thought Jesus was out of his mind and wanted to put him away. The last gospel, that of John, seems to contradict the birth narrative. Not only does he omit the birth tradition, about which he surely must by then have been aware, but also on two occasions he refers to Jesus as the son of Joseph (1:45, 6:42).