How We Think Matters

There is a very significant and hopeful development afoot in contemporary Christianity.  It is a movement away from religion as belief and toward religion as discipleship, away from faith as giving intellectual consent to creedal propositions and toward Christianity as a way of life.  This movement is long overdue.  It is an effort to recapture the best things about early Christianity, from the time when following Jesus was called the Way.  It is an effort to move forward by rediscovering the positive aspects of ancient Christianity before it was radically changed, and radically corrupted, by the Constantinian compromise with empire.  It is an effort to return to the days before complex, formal creeds became the test of a Christian.  It is a movement back to discipleship rather than orthodox belief as the mark of a follower of Jesus.  All of this is very positive. 

For far too long the Christian tradition has taught that what God wants from us, and what is required for salvation, is right belief about Jesus Christ so that we can go to heaven when we die.  The importance of following Jesus often (not always, but often) got lost.  To quote Richard Stearns from his book The Hole In Our Gospel, a book that is itself part of the movement from faith as belief to faith as discipleship, albeit still from quite a conservative evangelical perspective, “In our evangelistic efforts to make the good news accessible and simple to understand, we seem to have boiled it down to a kind of ‘fire insurance’ that one can buy.  Then, once the policy is in effect, the sinner can go back to whatever life he (sic) was living….As long as the policy is in the drawer, the other things don’t matter much.  We’ve got our ‘ticket’ to the next life.” [1]  Mixed metaphors aside, Stearns has a valid point.  Much of Christianity has been reduced to an expression of a certain belief about Jesus for the purpose not of transforming the world but merely of getting ourselves to heaven. 

As I said, the broad movement in Christianity today toward the faith as a way of life, as a way of discipleship, is a very good thing.  Anyone not living under a rock knows how badly the world needs transformation today, and Christians sitting in their pews thinking orthodox thoughts are not going to transform the world.  Christians, along with others who share the essential Christian values of justice and nonviolence, who go out and embody the prayer we say every week that God’s kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven, just might.  I recently preached a sermon on this subject with the title “Follow Me.”  You can find it in the Sermon Archive section of monroeucc.org.  It is based on what Jesus says to the first disciples that he calls, Simon, Andrew, James, and John.  As he walks along the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee he calls to these fisherman “Follow me.” Not “Believe in me.”  Mark 1:16-20.  I really do believe that there is a new reformation afoot in Christianity in the direction of rediscovering discipleship as the way of the Christian, and that is a very good thing.

That being said, I need to insert a caveat into this discussion.  In The Music Man Harold Hill always thinks there’s a band.  I always think there’s a caveat.  The difference is, I’m right.  I always think that thinking needs to be nuanced, that it is far too easy for us to fall into enthusiasms that overstate one aspect of an issue and forget an essential counterpoint that must not be forgotten.  In the case we’re discussing here the enthusiasm is for the rediscovery of Christianity as discipleship, as action, as a way of living, for action being more important than mere thought.  The caveat, the essential counterpoint that must not be forgotten, is the what we think isn’t irrelevant.  In fact, how we think matters.  It matters a lot. 

              How we think matters even in the context of a shift from an overemphasis on faith as belief to a healthier emphasis on faith as discipleship because how we think about God and about Jesus will shape how we see discipleship.  As Elizabeth Johnson repeatedly says in her classic work She Who Is, “the God symbol functions.”  How we think about God has consequences.  Different images of God will produce different kinds of discipleship.  Different images of Jesus will produce different kinds of Christian discipleship.  Perhaps this example will illustrate the point.  The Gospel of John is very different from the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  In John Jesus’ primary message is that what God wants from us is belief that Jesus is who in the Gospel of John he says he is.  In John, when Jesus says from the cross “It is finished,” he means that his work of convincing the Disciples to believe that he came from God and is returning to God has been accomplished.  If our image of Jesus is only that he is the Word of God Incarnate and that what he and God want of us is to believe that that is so, and if our image of God is that God will save people who believe that that is so and damn those who do not, then discipleship really does mean doing everything we can to save souls by converting as many people as possible to the belief that Jesus is the Word of God Incarnate.  Given that view of Jesus and of God, converting people is precisely the kind of following, the kind of discipleship, that God demands from us.

If, on the other hand, we focus more on the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels we come up with a quite different kind of discipleship.  Yes, at the end of the Gospel of Matthew the risen Christ tells the Disciples to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Yet it is still true that in the synoptic Gospels, for all of the significant differences between them, Jesus mostly preaches the Kingdom of God not himself.  He teaches the divine values of the Kingdom of God, values of compassion, justice, inclusion, and peace.  If we believe that Matthew’s “insofar as you have done it to the least of these you have done it to me” (Matthew 25:40) is more important than John’s “those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are already condemned because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God,” (John 3:18), then our discipleship looks like caring for “the least of these,” not like simply trying to convert them to belief in certain statements about Jesus.  The God symbol functions.  How we think matters.

Here’s another example.  For the last nine hundred years or so (since the publication of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo), most western Christians have thought of God and of Jesus Christ in terms of the classical theory of atonement that says that God the Son became human in Jesus for the purpose of dying as an innocent sacrifice as the price God demanded before God would forgive human sin.  In western Christianity the classical theory of atonement virtually swallowed the entire faith whole and became the equivalent of Christianity itself.  To be Christian meant, and to many Christians, especially in the United States, still means to believe in the classical theory of atonement.  The God of the classical theory of atonement is an angry, judgmental, murderous God who engages in what feminist theologians have taught us to see as cosmic child abuse.  (For a more thorough critique of the classical theory of atonement see Chapter 8, “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement” in by book Liberating Christianity.)  With this angry, judgmental, violent God a great many western Christians have been angry, judgmental, violent people.  How we have thought about God has conditioned how we have behaved as humans.  When we get rid of the classical theory of atonement and replace it with a true theology of the cross that stresses not God’s anger and violence but God’s love and unshakable solidarity with all of humanity in everything that happens we can become more compassionate people, people who seek not to convert everyone to our way of thinking (often at the point of a spear or the barrel of a gun) but who stand in solidarity with those in need, with those who suffer, the way God stands in solidarity with us in our need and in our suffering.  (For a more complete discussion of theology of the cross see Chapter 9, “The Meaning of the Cross, The Demonstration of God’s Solidarity in Liberating Christianity.)  The God symbol functions.  How we think matters.

So, to use an apt cliché, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  The current movement away from Christianity as belief understood as giving intellectual consent to certain theological propositions and toward Christianity as discipleship, as following Jesus, is a very positive development.  It is a necessary corrective to a Christianity that had come to be far too much about what we believe in our heads and far too little about how we live in the world.  As we undertake that constructive transition let us remember, however, that how we think matters.  We are called to be disciples.  Jesus says to us as he said to the first disciples so long ago, follow me, not believe in me.  Yet let us not lose sight of the undeniable truth that what kind of disciples we are going to be depends largely on how we think, especially how we think about God and about Jesus Christ.  How we act in the world matters.  So does how we think.

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[1] Stearns, Richard, The Hole in Our Gospel, The Answer That Changed My Life and Might Just Change the World, Thomas Nelson, 2009, p. 17.

An Inapt Metaphor

President Obama began and ended his recent State of the Union address with a metaphor that has gotten a good deal of positive reaction.  He praised the unit cohesion, the unity of purpose, and the common dedication to the mission that characterize the American military when it is functioning at its best.  He raised this culture of the military as a metaphor for how the American political system should and could work.  Many commentators, and I imagine many American people, seem to have found this metaphor appealing.  I beg to differ.  I think it is a totally inapt metaphor for a couple of reasons.

The first is that it glorifies the military.  Readers of this blog know that, although I respect the men and women of the American military and, I think, can recognize the virtues of the military life, virtues of discipline, loyalty, and valor, I am committed to the value of nonviolence in all aspects of human life.  I have written elsewhere in this blog about what I perceive to be the dangers of the current American tendency to idealize and even idolize the military.  President Obama’s use of some military virtues as a metaphor for how the American political system in general and Congress in particular should and could operate is just another example of our elevation of the status of the military in American life.  I do object to it on those grounds.

Yet I have what I think is a more fundamental and important objection to this metaphor.  It is, I am convinced, an inappropriate image of our (nominally at least) democratic political system.  Military virtues are what they are because of the extreme circumstances in which military units operate.  Under the extreme conditions of the battlefield there is no place and no time for debate, for exchanges of opinions, for bargaining and compromise.  The conditions of battle require obedience and discipline.  They may on occasion also require individual initiative and spontaneity, but mostly they require unity and discipline.  I freely admit that I’m no soldier and never have been one; but I am an historian, and it isn’t hard to imagine how the dangerous and chaotic conditions of warfare require what we all know as the military virtues.

A democracy is an entirely different system.  It has different structures and different purposes.  When a democratic, representative political system is operating at its best it is precisely a place of competing programs, conflicting ideas, persuasion, and compromise.  Some of our political leaders may wish for “party discipline,” where all the members of a particular party fall into line and vote as the leaders tell them to, but that kind of discipline is not actually the democratic ideal.  Democratic government calls for debate not unit cohesion, compromise not strict compliance, independence not obedience.  In theory at least we elect our representatives to exercise their best independent judgment in deciding on important public issues.  Politics are different from the military, and political systems should, indeed must, have different values than military systems.

There have been political systems that operated more like military systems.  The one with which I am the most familiar is the political system of the  Soviet Union and in particular the structure and functioning of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.  The Party’s founder Vladimir I. Lenin created the doctrine of “democratic centralism.”  In theory that doctrine allowed for free debate within the Party right up to the point where a decision was made.  Then every Party member was required to fall into line and to support the decision, even if that member had argued for a different policy in the period of debate.  In practice, of course, the “democratic” part of democratic centralism got lost and only the centralism remained.  In practice democratic centralism led directly to the one man dictatorship of Josef Stalin. 

Democratic centralism was the political theory that most adopted a military system.  In the military debate about strategy and tactics can take place at the highest levels of command and at the point where the civilian political leadership intersects with the highest military command.  Once a decision is made, however, the entire military is expected and required to follow the decision and to obey the orders that flow from it.  Democratic centralism can work well in a military context.  The experience of the Soviet Union proves that it is a disaster in a political context.

It should then be clear that President Obama’s use of the discipline of the military as a metaphor for a better functioning political system is simply inapt.  In a democratic system politics is a give and take, an arena of argument and compromise.  It is not an arena of strict obedience, and it shouldn’t be.  Many of us have strongly, even passionately held political beliefs.  Yet if we are committed to democracy as being, despite all of its shortcomings and maddening inefficiency, the human political system that at least has the virtue of being less bad than any other that we know of, we must protect and preserve the political arena as a place of free exchange, of debate, of persuasion, of compromise.  President Obama’s metaphor of the military as a model for politics threatens those democratic values.  It is an inapt metaphor.  Let’s set it aside and work instead to make our political system work the way a democratic political system is supposed to work, not the way a military system is supposed to work.

An Introduction to Post-Modern Hermeneutics

I am currently teaching an introduction to the Bible to our church's Sunday morning adult education forum.  As part of that introduction I have written a brief introduction to hermeneutics in general and to post-modern hermeneutics as I learned them in seminary in particular.  I thought that work might be of interest to others, so I am posting it here.

Bible 101, Session 3

Hermeneutics

An Introduction to the Theory of Interpretation

Questions for the session:

Is it possible to read a text without interpreting it?

Where does the meaning of a text reside?

Does a text mean the same thing to everyone?

Does a text mean the same thing in all times and places?

How do we go about proper interpretation of a text?

Hermeneutics

          The fancy word “hermeneutics” means the theory of interpretation.  We used to joke that the great benefit of a seminary education is that we can use the word hermeneutics in a sentence.  It’s easy to be flip about it, but hermeneutics is (are?) really, really important.  Learning the principles of post-modern hermeneutics that I discuss in this handout was an eye-opening, nearly life-changing experience for me in seminary. 

          But why do we have a theory of interpretation at all?  Isn’t reading a text just about reading the words and understanding what they mean?  Well, no, that isn’t all that reading a text is about.  The process of a reader reading and understanding a text is actually quite complex.  Post-modern hermeneutics exposes and explains that complexity.

Modernist hermeneutics

          Whether we know it or not, most of us in our context today come to a Biblical text, or any text for that matter, with what we can call a modernist hermeneutic, a modernist theory of interpretation.  Modernism is the worldview that developed during the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Those times have been called the Age of Reason.  In the Enlightenment human reason came to be regarded as the measure of all things, of all truth.  The Scientific Revolution was a big part of the Enlightenment.  A major consequence of the triumph of reason and science was that the European view of truth was reduced to factual truth.  (For a longer although still very brief discussion of this development see Chapter 1, “The Rise of the Materialist Worldview and Its Effect on Christianity” in my book Liberating Christianity.)  History came to be seen as the effort to discover about the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” “how it actually was,” to discover the facts about the past, in a famous phrase by the German historiographer Leopold von Ranke.  (At least it’s famous with us professionally trained historians.)  Truth came to be considered as something factual, objective, and unchanging.

          We are all children of the Enlightenment.  That fact has many, many consequences, of most if not all of which nearly all of us are completely unaware.  We take the modernist worldview for granted.  We think of it just as the way things are, always have been, and always will be.  In that conception we are quite simply wrong.  The pre-modern world operated with a very different worldview, and the post-modern world is developing a new worldview that rejects many of the foundational assumptions of modernism. 

Modernist hermeneutics is rationalistic and oriented toward facts.  It assumes that texts that sound to us like they are reporting facts are indeed reporting facts.  A text may be wrong about what the facts are or were.  Reporting sometimes contains factual errors, but we assume that reporting objective, observable, verifiable facts is what journalism, history, biography, and all scientific writing are all about.  Because modernism assumes truth to be objective, that is, to have a reality of its own outside of the meaning that a particular reader gives to it, it assumes that a text means the same thing to every reader and in every time and place.  Modern hermeneutics assumes that a text means what its author intended it to mean and that no other meaning can legitimately be found in it.

          A good example of modernist hermeneutics that may be a bit easier to understand than the concept is when applied to the Bible is the demand by conservative politicians for “strict construction” of the United States Constitution.  These politicians say judges must only determine the original intent of the “framers” of the Constitution to determine what any Constitutional provision means.  Then the judge must simply apply the framers’ original intent to the case before the judge.  The judge’s job, in this view, is not to discern what a Constitutional provision might mean in our contemporary context.  It is only to discern what it meant when it was drafted.

          Modern Biblical literalists use modernist hermeneutics.  They read the Bible as if it were reporting facts, which to a considerable extent it does not and never intended to do.  They assume that every Biblical text has one objective, discernable meaning and that no other meaning someone claims to have found in the text is legitimate.  The assumption of modern Biblical literalism is that if a text is not factually true it is not true at all.  That assumption is grounded in the rationalistic, scientific modernist worldview.  It is a modernist hermeneutic.  That hermeneutic was well expressed by a woman who once said to me “I want my Bible straight, without interpretation.”  Her statement assumes that every Bible text has one set meaning that can be discovered simply by reading it, without interpretation.  It is grounded in modernist hermeneutics.

Post-Modern Hermeneutics

          Post-modern hermeneutics rejects most of  the assumptions of the modernist worldview and of modern hermeneutics.  Post-modern hermeneutics begins with the assumption that meaning, any meaning, is not an objective, absolute, discoverable thing.  Meaning is something that the human mind creates.  Humans are meaning-making creatures.  That may indeed be the most basic definition of what it means to be human that we can come up with, one that more than any other definition distinguishes us from other animals.  Interpretation is the quest for meaning; and humans make meaning, it doesn’t exist apart from the human mind that creates it.

          If meaning is something the human mind creates and not something with objective reality apart from the human who makes it, then the meaning of text does not and cannot reside in the text itself.  It must be created by a human reader who encounters the text.  For post-modern hermeneutics, then, meaning arises and can arise in the encounter, and only in the encounter, of a reader with a text.  The meaning does not reside in the text itself.  The reader adds it to his understanding of the text.

The realization that meaning is not something that has objective reality apart from a human mind that creates it and that the meaning of a text therefore does not reside in the text but arises from the encounter of a reader with a text has several important consequences, several other hermeneutical principles that necessarily arise from that basic understanding.  One is that the idea that anyone can read a text without interpreting it is a conceptual impossibility.  Reading is unavoidably interpreting.  We may not be aware that we are interpreting a text that we’re reading.  We probably think that we’re just reading what it says, but we’re not.  On its own the text says nothing.  In a very real sense the text exists as a text only when someone is reading it.  We  may experience a text as simple and has having an obvious meaning.  That experience of the text is itself an interpretation.  A text that seems simple to us may be impossibly difficult for someone else.  Take a text, for example, that might appear in a driver’s education manual that says “insert the key into the ignition.”  Simple, right?  Well, to those of us who have lived with automobiles all our lives yes, it is simple; and its meaning is pretty obvious.  But read that text to a member of a tribe living deep in the rain forests of the Amazon who has never seen a car before, and that text will be impossibly dense and incomprehensible to that person.  The reader makes all the difference.  Same text, very different experience of the text, very different interpretations of the text.

          This principle, and indeed all hermeneutical principles, can apply to things other than texts.  In the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy an African tribe living in the Kalahari Desert finds a Coke bottle.  The people have no idea what it is.  The strange artifact introduces the concept of property to the tribe with all of the conflict property can bring, conflict hitherto unknown by these people.  So they decide that the gods, who to them obviously put the Coke bottle there, must be crazy.  We would much more likely interpret the presence of the bottle to mean that someone had left it there; and if there was no one to have left it there, we might guess that it fell out of an airplane, which is what actually happened in the story.  Same Coke bottle, different interpretations of its origins and its meaning by people coming to it from radically different contexts.  And it’s not that the African tribe members are wrong.  Within their culture, their world, they are not wrong.  Their interpretation is different from ours, but for them it isn’t wrong.  It gives the Coke bottle a meaning that makes sense in their context.  We say the bottle fell out of a plane, but who is to say that the gods didn’t cause it to fall out of a plane?

The story of the tribe and the Coke bottle illustrates another hermeneutical principle that arises from the realization that meaning arises only in the encounter of a text, or anything else, with a particular human reader or observer.  Every reader comes to a text in her or his own particularity.  Every human being lives in a particular context.  Her context consists of things she shares with other human beings living in the same context, things like religion, socio-economic status, culture, and so on.  Yet each human being lives within his context with particularity, as a particular human being not totally identical to any other human being.  A person’s particularity consists of the way that she lives as an individual within her life’s context.  When a person reads a text he does so from and with his human particularity.  He brings some things to the text that he has in common with others in his context, but he brings other things to the text that are unique to him, to his individual life experience.  The meaning of a text arises in the reader’s encounter with the text in all of her particularity, both those things that she has in common with others in her context and things that are unique to her.  The particularity of no reader is exactly the same as the particularity of any other reader.  Therefore, the meaning of any text can and probably will differ at least to some extent depending on who the reader is. 

Perhaps an often used illustration from the recent history of Christianity will make this point clearer.  The native peoples of what is now Latin America were introduced and converted to Christianity (sometimes forcibly, but we need not go into that atrocity here) by Europeans.  Those Europeans and their descendants became the dominant elements in all Latin American countries.  They told the native people what Christianity means.  At the risk of oversimplification that is regrettable but unavoidable here we can say that the European masters and their clergy allies told the people of Latin America that Christianity is about how you get to heaven when you die.  That’s how these dominators of the culture interpreted Christianity.  It is how they interpreted the Bible.  It’s what they told the people they should be concerned about.

Then, in the second half of the twentieth century, a strange thing happened.  Some of the people in Latin America began to read the Bible for themselves.  They read it by themselves, but more importantly they began to read it together with others who shared their living context, their place in life, their culture, their poverty, their marginalization within their own societies.  They formed what are called in English Base Communities where they studied the Bible and talked about its meaning either with no participation by clergy or with clergy, usually Catholic priests, who were sympathetic to them and the harshness of their living conditions.  When they began to read the Bible without direction from those who had for so long told them what it means they made a startling discovery.  To them, it didn’t mean what they had been told it means at all.  It meant something quite different.  The Bible to them isn’t about how you get to heaven when you die, it is about justice, especially justice for the poor, here and now, in this life, on this earth.  Out of these Base Communities came Liberation Theology, a Christian theology that focuses on Jesus’ call for the establishment of the Kingdom of God as a call for social, economic, and political transformation in the direction of justice for the poor here, now, not there, not then.

Who was “right”?  The dominant forces in those societies who said that Christianity was about how you get to heaven when you die or the poor people who said that it is about economic justice on earth?  Both of them were.  For the wealthy and powerful Christianity is about salvation as getting to heaven when you die.  For them the Bible perhaps calls for charity toward  those in need, but it isn’t political, and it certainly isn’t about economic revolution.  For the poor and disenfranchised it may also be about how you get to heaven when you die, but first and foremost it is about God’s demand for justice for the poor.  Different people with different particularities read the Bible differently.  These meanings of the Bible didn’t exist as detached objective realities.  They arose in the encounters of different people with the same texts.

There is one more conclusion from the basic post-modern insight that meaning derives only from the encounter of a reader with a text that we must consider.  Because meaning is not found in the author’s text alone, a text can have a meaning that is actually different from the author’s original meaning, one that the author may not have intended at all.  I have certainly had the experience of people finding meaning for them in my sermons that had never occurred to me.  I suspect that all preachers have had that experience.  But again perhaps an example from outside the Bible will help.  In Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot several characters are waiting for their friend Godot to show up, to join them.  Throughout the play they wait and talk and wait and talk.  Godot never appears.  Godot is absent.  Many readers interpret the play as being about the existential experience of the absence of God.  Although Beckett, despite being Irish not French, wrote the play in French not English, the missing character’s name that begins with God has supported that interpretation of the play.  Many people find in it a story about the absence of God.

Samuel Beckett, the man who wrote Waiting for Godot, always insisted that his play is not about the absence of God.  He said he intended no such meaning when he wrote the play.  We have to take Beckett’s word for that.  So we accept that the author never intended the meaning God is absent.  Does that mean that all of us who find a story about the absence of God in the play are wrong, that that meaning simply isn’t there?  No, it doesn’t mean that at all.  Beckett, like all authors, lost control over the meaning of his work as soon as he turned it over to a reader.  Finding a meaning about the absence of God in Waiting for Godot doesn’t require us to rewrite Beckett’s text.  We find that meaning in the text that he wrote.  That meaning arises in the encounters of a great many people with Beckett’s text.  It actually is quite irrelevant that Beckett himself didn’t intend that meaning.

Scholars express this truth by saying that a text has a “surplus of meaning.”  A well-written text will have the meaning that the author intended.  As the example of Waiting for Godot shows it may well have other meanings too.  Sometimes it is difficult or impossible to determine what meaning an author intended, especially if the author lived a very long time ago in a very different historical context from his work’s current readers.  Yet the text can still have meaning for its readers even if they don’t know what the author intended.  It may not be the meaning the author intended.  Fine.  The text still has a meaning that arises, as all meaning does, from an encounter of a reader with the text.

The Bible and Hermeneutics

The principles of hermeneutics—any hermeneutics—apply to the Bible in the same way that they apply to any other text.  After all, whatever else it may be, the Bible is at the most foundational level a collection of written texts.  We encounter it the same way we encounter any other written text, by reading it (or having it read to us, which for our purposes amounts to the same thing).  As is true of any other text, the Bible has meaning only when a human being, a meaning-making animal, reads it and creates a meaning from it.  Even if we accept for the sake of argument that the words of the Bible are inspired by God, or even if they come directly from God the way Muslims say the words of the Qur’an do, we still encounter those words the same way we encounter any other words, by reading them.  The dynamics of interpretation, that is, hermeneutics, therefore unavoidably apply to the Bible the same way they apply to anything else.

The Pain of Voting

The state of Washington, where I live and work, has become the latest battleground in the struggle for equal marriage rights for same gender couples.  Last week Governor Christine Gregoire, in a passionate public statement, came out strongly and eloquently in support of equal marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples and committed herself to introducing legislation during the current session of the state legislature to accomplish that result.  I wholeheartedly support equal marriage rights for same gender couples.  When my wife Jane and I were married back in 2004 we began our ceremony with an expression of regret that our gay and lesbian friends could not do what we were about to do and of hope that one day that circumstance would change.  For the state to deny those rights is discrimination pure and simple, as Governor Gregoire so clearly stated.  I recognize that procedures have to be followed to change the law.  Nonetheless one emotion has dominated all others in me since Governor Gregoire's announcement.

That emotion is pain.  Certainly not pain at the prospect of my gay and lesbian friends finally being allowed to enter into the legal rights and obligations of marriage that Jane and I enjoy.  Pain rather that the rights, the loves, and the relationships of my gay and lesbian friends must be subject to a popular vote.  First there will be a vote in the Washington State legislature.  Whatever the outcome of that vote, there surely will be a popular vote of the people of Washington.  If the legislature does the right thing and removes the discriminatory provisions of Washington marriage law, the forces of discrimination will surely mount a referendum campaign to overturn the legislature's decision.  Washington state law provides for such a referendum.  If the effort to end the state's discrimination in this regard fails, the supporters of marriage equality will probably begin an initiative campaign to end marriage discrimination by popular vote.  Washington state allows for that process too.  Either way, the rights, loves, and relationships of my gay and lesbian friends and parishioners, and of all gay and lesbian citizens of Washington, will be up for a vote.  When that happens, nothing less than the human dignity and equality of those sons and daughters of God will be voted upon.

The human dignity and equality of no people should ever be put to a vote.  Those things are not subject to popular opinion.  They inhere in all people by virtue of their being people, by virtue of their being children of God.  No vote can really take away any person's inherent dignity and equality as a human being; but when equal rights are put to a vote, it feels like people's dignity and equality are indeed being voted on.  That is what pains me.  People's rights should never be subject to a popular vote.  They should just be recognized.

Yes, I know.  That's unrealistic and doesn't recognize the realities of how laws are made in democratic societies.  I used to be a lawyer.  I get that.  Still, I have to say it.  I hurt for my gay and lesbian friends who once more must endure the indignity of have having their rights, their equality, publicly debated and voted upon.  Once more they will endure the indignity of people denying their rights, denying their equality, denying their equal dignity, and often doing it in the name of Jesus Christ.  Once more we will all endure the absurdity of an ancient and outdated misunderstanding of human sexuality lifted up as the very word of God.  I wish it did not have to be so.

The goal is worth the fight.  Progress is rarely achieved without pain.  Still, I pray for my gay and lesbian friends, that they may endure the coming indignities with grace and courage, confident that God endures those indignities with them and that no popular vote can truly debase their love and their loving relationships.  May we all cling to that sacred truth in the difficult months ahead.