An Illness Not a Sin

An Illness Not a Sin

Meditations on Depression and Suicide

I’m a Christian pastor. I serve a Christian church. I have done work as a volunteer chaplain for a local fire department. In my capacity as pastor and chaplain I have on a couple of occasions ministered to survivors of a loved one’s suicide. Once it was a young man who lived with and had been raised by his grandparents who took his own life. Twice it was a woman who had been married to her husband for thirty years before he ended his life. In those cases the surviving loved ones were of course in shock and grief, trying with every resource they had to understand what had happened and how they would go on without their now deceased loved one. Of course they wondered why. They wondered what they could have done, the answer to that being (as it is in nearly every such case) nothing they hadn’t done. Losing a loved one to suicide must be a nearly unbearable trauma for those who live on. I have experienced the death of loved ones, including my wife of thirty years; but I have never experienced the death of a loved one through suicide. I’ve seen the pain in people who have, but even so I’m sure I can truly understand it. It is always a tragedy of immense proportions when the one who decided he or she could not live on is otherwise not on the brink of death. Suicide is a tragedy, and it brings immense pain to those survive.

I have seen the pain of the survivors, but in the cases I just mentioned here I have also seen something going on with them that makes their grief and the trauma of a loved one’s suicide even worse than it must necessarily be. That thing is the fear that because loved one has taken his or her own life that God is then punishing their loved one for the unforgivable sin of suicide. They’ve heard that claim proclaimed by preachers and so-called pastors as divine truth. They suffer their own pain, and they fear for their loved one’s eternal soul. This fear that Christian preachers have instilled in them makes an event that would be unspeakably painful in any event far more painful. It adds fear to grief. It add fear of their loved one being in eternal torment to their own torment at losing him or her. It adds a layer of spiritual fear to a condition of emotional grief.

Back when I was a seminary intern one of the pastors I worked with told me how years earlier, when he was serving a local church in a different city, he had gotten a call from a parishioner whose child had just committed suicide. I said I had no idea what I’d do. He said “you go.” I said “yes, you go; but you go empty-handed.” In those very early days of my life in ministry I had no Idea what I could say in such a situation. Now, years later, I have been in that situation myself; and I have learned that you don’t necessarily go empty-handed. You go as a conduit of the love of God for people in deep pain. You go to offer them God’s care and grace. You go to hold them. You go to sit with them. You go to be with them. In all of those things you do not go empty-handed.

And you go with something else. You go with the good news that there is no such thing as an unforgivable sin. You go with this profound truth: Your loved one who has ended her or his life was suffering from depression. As far as I know that is almost always true. I suppose that if one has received some terrible diagnosis of a terminal illness that one might decide to end one’s life without being depressed. That’s what the “death with dignity” movement is all about, and I don’t think that’s a sin either. In the cases I have dealt with as pastor or chaplain the person who has committed suicide was indeed suffering from depression. In those cases I have told the grieving survivors something that I know to be true: Suicide is a consequence of depression, and depression is an illness not a sin. God does not condemn us when we suffer from heart disease. God does not condemn us when we die from cancer. God does not condemn us when we have failing kidneys. God does not condemn us for the mental illness of depression either, and that means that God does not condemn us even when our depression becomes so bad that we end our life.

Depression is a mental illness. I’ve had it myself. It is an illness every bit as physical as a heart attack or a stroke. Yes, it can interact with conditions in our lives in complex and unhealthy ways; but it is a chemical imbalance in the brain as much as anemia is a chemical imbalance in the blood. It is an illness not a sin. God does not condemn us for having it. God does not condemn us when it causes us to act in a self-destructive way.

I hope that the people to whom I have said that truth heard and believed me. I don’t delude myself that I can overcome centuries of bad Christian teaching all by myself. I just pray that maybe my sharing what I know to be true helped these suffering people at least a little bit. I pray that perhaps what I’m writing here may help someone else who discovers these words online. Depression is an illness. It has spiritual and emotional effects, but it’s still an illness. I don’t understand why anyone thinks God would condemn a person for being sick. We all get sick. We all die. It’s part of our human condition.

So if you have lost a loved one to suicide, I’m am truly sorry for your loss and your grief. Know that God loved you before your loss. God loves you now, shares your pain, and offers you God’s everlasting arms of love as a comfort and support. Know that God loved your loved one before his or her death. God loves him or her now and holds her or him in an eternal embrace of peace. Depression is an illness not a sin. It’s way past time for the Christian church to realize that truth.

Thank you Jason

Thanks to Jason Sapp for the kind comment. It is always good to hear that my work has been meaningful even to people I've never met.

Despicable

Despicable

Republican politicians, or at least it’s mostly Republican politicians, have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that they are despicable political actors and deplorable human beings. They are demagogues who pander to the basest instincts of the most ignorant American voters. They wear their lack of knowledge and their bigotry on their lapels as a badge of honor. Shame on them. Shame on all the uninformed and fearful Americans who listen to them. No Syrian refugees in my state, they bray. Keep the Syrians out, they bellow. No Muslims to be admitted to the US, they holler, as though that notion weren’t just illegal but immoral as well. They know nothing of the dynamics of the Middle East. They know nothing about Islam. They know nothing about the lives of decent Muslim people whose homes and livelihoods have been obliterated and from whom all opportunity for a decent life has been taken by murderous zealots who do nothing but terrorize and destroy, often in the name of God and the great Islamic faith. These jackals of the American right have driven our political life into the gutter. They want to respond to the spilling of innocent blood with even more spilling of innocent blood. They live according to the myth of redemptive violence, a myth that leads only to more violence and can never truly solve any problem. Despicable is too kind a word for them. If I didn’t believe deeply in freedom of speech I would want to see them stopped by legal means from spreading their hatred and their lies. That’s what our American political life has come to. Ignoramuses pretending to be patriots. Bigots claiming to care about safety and security. Fools who know nothing about how violence really works—and doesn’t work. Dunces willfully blind to the way their ignorant anti-Arab, anti-Muslim vitriol aids the purveyors of hate that they think they’re opposing. And legions of uninformed Americans so unpracticed in the skills of critical thinking that they can’t see through the lies and the posturing and reject these peddlers of falsehood and hatred for the despicable asses they are.

Our democracy is being corrupted by power hungry idiots who don’t know the truth, don’t care about the truth, and are perfectly happy to corrupt the truth for their own narrow, selfish political ends. Are we going to wake up? Are we going to start to think and not just react? I hope so, but the signs aren’t good. It is hard to underestimate the intelligence not of all American voters but of a lot of them. There are easily enough ignorant and bigoted Americans that these merchants of hatred get more of a hearing than they deserve, they actually deserving none at all. Heaven help us. God help us. Lord knows we need the help.

Biblical Literalism Makes People Say Stupid Things

Biblical Literalism Makes People Say Stupid Things

There simply is no doubt that faith sometimes makes people  say stupid things. We have just seen a classic example of it. Ben Carson, the far right candidate for the Republican Party’s nomination for President of the United States, who as far as the objective eye can see has no qualifications whatsoever to be President, thinks that the pyramids of ancient Egypt aren’t tombs. He thinks the Hebrew patriarch Joseph built them as granaries.[1] I suppose that’s because it says in Genesis that Joseph, one of the sons of Jacob, was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, that he rose to a position of great power there, and that he stored up lots of grain against a coming famine. See Genesis chapter 37 and 41:41-57. The contention that the Egyptian pyramids are actually Joseph’s store houses is just plain stupid. There are lots of reasons to believe that Genesis’ story of Joseph isn’t at all factual, but we needn’t get into that can of worms to see how stupid Carson’s contention is. The evidence of the pyramids themselves is indisputable. They are tombs, the tombs of pharaohs. Period. There is not a shadow of a doubt that that is true. I mean, just look at them! Look at what is, or was, in them. They’re tombs designed to facilitate the deceased pharaoh’s life in the afterlife. No reasonable person can have any doubt about that. To contend otherwise is just stupid. It can’t be anything other than stupid. It’s stupid, and that’s all there is to it.

Ben Carson, however, is not stupid. I think his politics are really bad, but he isn’t stupid. He is a retired neurosurgeon. Stupid people don’t get to be neurosurgeons. Stupid people don’t graduate college. Stupid people don’t get into medical school. Stupid people don’t complete residencies in neurology and neurosurgery. Carson did all those things. He graduated from Yale and the University of Michigan School of Medicine. He was Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital for years. He isn’t stupid, or at least he’s not stupid about medical science and the art of neurosurgery. Far from it! But he thinks Egypt’s pyramids are Joseph’s granaries! He’s a very intelligent man who thinks a very stupid thing and is quite willing to express that stupid thing publically. What’s up with that?

To understand what’s up with that we have to look at Carson’s version of Christian faith. He is a Seventh Day Adventist. That’s a version of Christianity that arose in the United States in the nineteenth century as part of a much broader cultural effect of the Enlightenment that reduced all truth to fact. Like other conservative evangelical strains of Christianity it holds that the Bible is infallible, and it understands the Bible literally, that is, factually. Seventh Day Adventists believe that every word in the Bible is literally true, and to them that means factual. Many Christians, especially Protestant Christians, share that conviction. The literal inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible has been so widely held and taught by Christians that most of us probably don’t think much about it. He hear that someone believes those things and shrug our shoulders. We’ve heard it before. We’ll hear it again. If we share those beliefs we don’t’ think much about or react much to someone else holding that belief except maybe to be glad that they do. If we don’t, and I don’t, we don’t think much of it because it is so common among us and there seems to be so little we can do about it.

Well, belief in biblical inspiration and inerrancy may be common, but it is not something we should just ignore, That’s because it is not harmless. It is in fact very harmful. It is harmful to the spiritual life of those who hold it. It is harmful to the broader Christian tradition because it drives so many people away from the faith. It is also harmful to Christianity because it distracts Christians from the deeper truth of the faith and has them off chasing literalistic rabbits rather than living into the faith’s great spiritual depth.

And here’s another thing biblical literalism does. It makes people think and say stupid things. Literalistic religion creates a faith that cannot tolerate intellectual curiosity or inquiry. Because it is grounded not in authentic spiritual experience but on supposed facts, it cannot tolerate anything that questions the truth of those supposed facts. I have had many people tell me that they left conservative evangelical Christian churches at least in part because those churches didn’t allow them to ask questions about their faith. Spiritual truth is multivalent. It isn’t exclusive. Factual truth is necessarily exclusive, for a fact is either true or it isn’t. Spiritual truth is, indeed necessarily is, potentially true and necessarily false because that to which it points, that ultimate reality that we call God, is essentially and paradoxically the unknowable known, both being and not being at the same time. Questioning does, or at least can, drive spiritually grounded faith deeper. Questioning undermines faith that is grounded only in fact because questioning might lead to a denial of a supposedly foundational fact.

Therefore even otherwise intelligent people believe and say stupid things when they adhere to a literalistic faith. Their doing so of course requires them to engage in a lot of compartmentalization. It certainly appears that Ben Carson is doing precisely that. As an accomplished physician Carson must be very knowledgeable about medical science, and he must trust the truth of the findings of medical science. Yet he won’t let the kind of critical thinking and investigation that leads to advancements in medical science have any role in his religious faith. If he did let contemporary critical techniques influence his faith he would never say anything as stupid as the pyramids are Joseph’s grain elevators. It is such compartmentalization that makes religious literalists say stupid things.

Compartmentalization is not what God wants for us. God's dream for all people is wholeness of life, the kind of wholeness we see in Jesus Christ. An entity that is capable of wholeness but that is compartmentalized into different parts that don’t mesh and that don’t communicate with each other is broken. It is not fully realized or, to use the term for it from Jungian analysis, fully individuated. It is not, in other words, whole. It is not fully what it was created to be. So it is with humans who compartmentalize the way biblical literalists do and must. They are broken, they are not whole. They have not attained the abundant life that the Gospel of John tells us Jesus came to give us. Not that any of us attains that life fully of course. We are, after all, creatures not gods. Yet compartmentalizing our being so that our brains don’t communicate with our faith is a clear sign of brokenness. It must surely take a great deal of spiritual and emotional energy to maintain that compartmentalizing, energy that could be put to constructive not destructive uses. God calls us to wholeness of life. Biblical literalists put a significant obstacle toward getting there in their own paths, or at least they let some church leader put them there for them.

Faith doesn’t have to make us stupid, nor does it have to make us say stupid things. True faith never does. God gave us brains, and it simply isn’t possible that God doesn’t want us to use them. Any remotely properly functioning brain will know, if it bothers to know anything about it at all, that the Egyptian pyramids are the tombs of pharaohs. Whether or not they are also ancient power plants I can’t say, but they clearly are tombs and not granaries. Saying that they are granaries is stupid. An intelligent, in some ways perhaps even brilliant, person saying that they are is a sign of the worst kind of intellectual compartmentalization. I don’t hate Ben Carson, but I sure hope no one as spiritually broken as he seems to be doesn’t become President of the United States.

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[1] Not everyone who thinks unorthodox things about the pyramids is a religious literalists like Carson is. I know a woman who thinks the pyramids aren’t tombs but what she calls “ancient power plants.” Whatever her reasons are for thinking that (and I couldn’t possibly tell you what they are), they aren’t grounded in biblical literalism.

On My New Book

My New Book

Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians

I have a new book that’s just coming out. I self-published it under my full name, Thomas Calnan Sorenson, through Archway Publishing, the self-publishing arm of Simon and Schuster. The title is Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians. I want to say a bit here about the origin and intent of this book and why I think it is a worthwhile effort. Yet it occurs to me that I said most of what I want to say here in the Introduction to the book, so I’ll begin this post simply by pasting in that Introduction. Here it is.

“The Bible is to be taken with great seriousness, and studied, and made the basis of our preaching, and the guide to the church’s ongoing reformation of itself; but in the knowledge that it is a human book, however transcendent the message that it wants to convey to us.”

Douglas John Hall, Waiting for Gospel

“The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so.”

Ira Gershwin

INTRODUCTION TO OUR GUIDED TOUR OF THE BIBLE

©Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2014, 2015

Many people know, or believe that they know, many things about the Bible. Here’s one truth about the Bible that few people know. The Bible needs liberating. That may seem an odd statement to you, but it’s true. The Bible needs liberating because it has become a captive. The Bible has become captive to a narrow, restrictive, even strangulating literalism that is choking all of the life out of it. The Bible has become captive to old theological understandings that no longer have validity in the postmodern world. It has become captive to a narrow, restrictive, even strangulating sense that because it is, as people suppose, the Word of God there can be no error and no contradictions in it. Those convictions, that the Bible has no error in it and that it has no contradictions in it, won’t stand up to even the most minimal critical scrutiny, but they are what countless millions of people over countless generations have been taught about it. The Bible is the prisoner of what in my book Liberating Christianity I call Biblicism, the belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible combined with the belief that it must be read literally, that is, factually. In Part Two of Liberating Christianity, which has the title “Overcoming the Obstacle of Biblicism,” I critique Biblicism and offer a vision of the Bible as myth and human spiritual experience that I believe liberates the Bible, but my earlier book doesn’t examine much of the Bible itself. Its focus is more broadly theological, not specifically on the Bible and what’s in it. My work as pastor of a local congregation has led me to the belief that we need a general introduction to the Bible, all of it, that is not Biblicist, that is, that looks at the Bible with clear eyes not clouded by old teachings and beliefs that actually obscure the real Bible from us. We need a guided tour of a liberated Bible.

So welcome to a guided tour of the liberated Bible! I, your humble tour guide, hope that this tour will help you in understanding the Bible, help you use the Bible for your personal devotions, and help to bring the Bible alive for you in all of its many different aspects. The Bible is perhaps the most important book in the world, but it is an immensely difficult book at best. Understanding it in any meaningful way takes a lot of work. It may take a lot of work to overcome what you have been taught about the Bible in the past that now doesn’t work for you. My hope is that on this tour I will be able to help you do at least some of that work.

It is a commonplace today that the Bible is the most read and least understood book in the world. That clever remark about Christianity’s foundational book is almost true. It is almost true and not totally true because while the Bible may be widely purchased it is probably less widely read. It certainly is widely misunderstood. We mustn’t however let the rather flippant nature of that comment about the Bible conceal a profound truth from us. The way that the Bible is understood today is a serious matter. The way that a great many Christians today misunderstand the Bible is, in particular, a cause of much harm in the world. Misunderstanding the Bible leads Christians to deny and reject the brilliant insights of modern science and to attempt to force a totally unscientific—and un-biblical—creationism on the public schools. Misunderstanding the Bible once led many Christians to deny the God-given dignity and equality of Black people and to support slavery. In like manner misunderstanding the Bible today leads many Christians to deny the God-given dignity and equality of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and to support legislation that codifies discrimination against them. Misunderstanding the Bible leads some Christians still to deny the God-given dignity and equality of women, to deny them positions of leadership in the church, and to oppose legal measures designed to protect their equality in the workplace. Misunderstanding the Bible leads a few Christians to deny the value of protecting the earth’s environment because, they believe, the world is going to end soon in any event and they will be whisked up into a blissful eternity in heaven. All of these positions claim to have biblical warrant; and, while it’s easy enough to cite biblical texts that appear on the surface to support them, they are all grounded in a misunderstanding of the Bible. My aim on this tour is to give seeking Christians a different, and I am convinced better, way to understand the Bible. My aim is to guide you through the Bible without either of us wearing a Biblicist lens.

This tour began as a yearlong adult education forum at the church I used to serve as pastor. That series was occasioned by a particular book that claims to be an introduction to the Bible. One of the members of my church who regularly attended our Sunday morning adult education forum read a book with the title Bible Babel.[1] He was very enthusiastic about that book, so I read it to see if it would be a good book for our whole group to read. I very quickly decided that it wasn’t. Because my reservations about that book prompted this one, or at least prompted the adult education series that spawned it, I’ll restate here some of my objections to that book:

1. It says that the only way one can reject the notion that the Old Testament book of Isaiah predicts Jesus is to deny the divinity of Jesus. It says that Christians are on solid theological ground when they say that Isaiah predicts Jesus. Wrong. Isaiah doesn’t predict Jesus. Rather, early Christians applied some of the language from Isaiah to Jesus as a way to express their experience of him. Isaiah was written in and for particular ancient Hebrew communities. It addresses their concerns, not the concerns of Christians hundreds of years later.
2. It applies the term “homosexuality” to things in the Bible while admitting that the Bible “says very little about homosexuality.” Wrong. The Bible actually says nothing about homosexuality. The concept “homosexuality” didn’t exist in the world of the Bible. It is a modern concept not an ancient one, and the Bible says nothing about it. The Bible does on a very few occasions mention and condemn homosexual acts, but it says nothing about homosexuality as a natural variety of human sexuality. That is, it says nothing about homosexuality.
3. It mentions Jesus’ “turn the other cheek” statement in Matthew without betraying any awareness of Walter Wink’s brilliant and revolutionary exegesis of that passage. We’ll look at that reading of Jesus’ words in Matthew when we get there. “Turn the other cheek” doesn’t mean what you’ve probably understood it to mean.
4. It insists that all New Testament authors saw Jesus as divine and believed in his virgin conception. In fact, most New Testament authors actually don’t see Jesus as divine, and only Matthew and Luke show any interest at all in his conception and birth. No one else in the New Testament even mentions those things about him.
5. It says that there are four “biographies” of Jesus in the Bible. Wrong. There are no “biographies” of Jesus in the Bible. There are four Gospels, but they aren’t biographies in anything like the modern meaning of the term biography. They are proclamations and confessions of faith in Jesus and are not primarily intended as factual accounts of his life.
6. Swenson’s book says that “Christians believe that Jesus is the incarnation of God and that because he was a uniquely sinless human being who sought with divine love to redeem people to God, he could choose to die as an ultimate sacrifice for human sin so that those who believe in him would be forgiven and enjoy eternal life with God.” Wrong. I’m a Christian, and I (along with a lot of other Christians today) don’t understand Jesus as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin. That understanding is a classical and wide-spread Christian understanding, but you can’t say that all Christians believe it. Most New Testament authors didn’t believe it either. The New Testament has several different understandings of the significance of Jesus. His being a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin is one of those understandings but it isn’t the only or even the dominant one.
7. The book says that Christians believe that Jesus returning will still happen someday in the future. Wrong. I’m a Christian, and I don’t believe that. I believe, with John Dominic Crossan, that the Christian belief in the Second Coming, which did indeed appear very early in the Christian tradition, is actually a great denial of the first coming. Our task is to continue the work of the first coming of Jesus, not to sit around waiting for a second coming.
   
   
   These aren’t the only problems I found with Bible Babel, but they make the point. I hope that my quick review of some of the problems with that book gives you just a tiny foretaste of the discoveries that we’ll make on our tour of the liberated Bible. Bible Babel is nowhere near an adequate introduction to the Bible for critical, thinking Christians. It does not introduce us to a liberated Bible.
   Because I couldn’t recommend that book to my church group I looked for an introduction to the Bible that I could recommend. I couldn’t find one. So I undertook to give my adult education group a more adequate introduction than I could find in any published book. That effort led me to write introductions to some of the preliminary concerns that any informed reading of the Bible must address before reading the book itself. Those notes quickly began to look like the beginnings of a book. This book is the result. It is quite obviously not an exhaustive study of the Bible. The books and scholarly articles that have been written on the Bible would fill many libraries. This book is only a brief introduction to the Bible; but it has a serious intent, and it is based on what scholars say about the Bible .
   A great many people believe, or at least have been told, that there is some virtue in reading the Bible straight through, cover to cover. Many have done it. Some have done it many times. More have tried and not made it all the way through. I can admire the faith and the tenacity of people who have made it all the way through the Bible on their own, but I have reservations about how valuable that exercise really is for most people. As we shall see on our tour, the Bible is an immensely complicated book. Really to understand it requires a knowledge of languages, history, and ancient cultures that most people, including many people with a seminary education, don’t have. I don’t have all of those things either, on my own. The virtue of seminary training in the Bible isn’t that the student learns all of the answers. The attentive and interested seminary student will, however, at least get an introduction to the issues that the Bible raises with regard to its construction, intent, and meaning. She will also learn some about reliable resources for addressing those issues as they come up in her ministry. I intend this tour as a guide to the Bible for seeking, critically thinking Christians who want to read the Bible cover to cover or who at least want to know what’s in it and to understand it better than they have before. I intend it as an introductory guided tour of the liberated Bible for people who want to love and use the Bible but who cannot accept the traditional understandings of it that they have been taught, people who must either find another way of understanding the Bible or reject it altogether. I also intend this book for those o who are beginning to question their earlier understandings or at least are open to hearing about a different way to understand the Bible.
   This series is grounded in a critical perspective of the Bible. In western Europe critical scholars began to apply newly developed methods of critical analysis to the Bible in the eighteenth century CE. Those methods were grounded in the rationalism of the Enlightenment, that transformative intellectual movement of the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries that transformed the way western people understand truth. Before the Enlightenment truth was understood largely factually, but it was understood also as something that God revealed to people. It wasn’t, for the most part, something people discovered on their own. In the Enlightenment truth became precisely something that people discover on their own. For the great thinkers of the Enlightenment people discover truth through the application of human reason to whatever the question was to which they were trying to find an answer. When scholars began to apply reasoned human analysis to the Bible they quickly discovered that much of what people had taken to be true about that foundational book of the Christian faith wasn’t actually true at all. All of a sudden it made no sense to say that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, for example. All of a sudden (relatively speaking) the complex editorial history of many of the Bible’s books became apparent. All of a sudden there wasn’t one book of the prophet Isaiah, there were three different Isaiahs whose work had somehow gotten all clumped together into one book. All of a sudden Mark was understood as the oldest Gospel, and the letters attributed to St. Paul were divided into authentic letters and pseudo-epigraphical letters, letters that say they are by Paul but that are not by Paul. The insights that have flowed from a critical analysis of the Bible are endless, and new ones come to light every day.
   Yet a great many Christians have no real knowledge of any of those critical insights. Rather, they have been taught Biblicism. They have been taught, in effect if not in so many words, that God wrote the Bible and that therefore there are no contradictions and nothing demonstrably false in it. They have been taught that they must understand the Bible literally, that is, factually. Those contentions about the Bible, however, are simply untenable. On our tour of the Bible I will introduce you to at least some of the major critical insights into the Bible, who wrote it, when it was written, and how it came to be in the form in which we have it. Those insights may challenge some of your long-held beliefs about the Bible. So be it. On this tour we will look at what is really there in the Bible, not what any of us have been told is there nor what any of us expect is there. We will spare no sacred cows. We will not ignore unpleasant (or worse) realities in the texts of the Bible. We will lift up and celebrate the things in the Bible that are worth lifting up and celebrating, and there are many such things in it. Still, the Bible says what it says; and if we are to use it as the foundational book of our faith we must understand what it actually says, not what we’ve been told it says or what we wish it said.
   This tour is obviously an introduction only. It is not an exhaustive study of the Bible. No tour can include every sight along its route, and we won’t include every verse of the Bible in this tour. We will focus on the most important things. We will look at major themes. We will look briefly at each book of the Bible, more briefly at some books than at others. My hope is that on one or another of our stops your interest may be piqued and that you will then do more research into a particular book or a particular issue. Obviously the selection of subjects is subjective. I have selected things that I find interesting or important. Such a subjective selection of topics to cover is unavoidable. Every author does it. Every tour guide does it. I hope only that you will find the topics I have selected for discussion to be interesting and perhaps important for your own spiritual journey. On a couple of the Bible’s books I will offer only side trips. I do that because some of the books are less important for today’s readers than others, and I do it in the interest of space. This tour is long enough as it is.
   Our tour has three major parts. The first involves preliminary matters, things to consider before we dive into the Bible itself. This part gives a very brief overview of the Bible. It’s a good idea to learn something about what you’ll see on any tour before you take the tour, and that’s what Part One of this tour seeks to give you, some preliminary, background knowledge that, I hope, will make the tour itself more meaningful for you. Part One includes brief discussions of questions such as the theory and practice of biblical interpretation, issues of language, manuscripts, and translation, and the development of the canon. Part One also gives you a quick overview of such issues as biblical geography, the history behind the Bible, the history in the Bible, and questions of biblical authorship. Part Two covers the Old Testament. Part Three covers the New Testament. By the end of the tour you should have received at least an introduction to the whole Bible and the myriad issues that it raises. You should have gotten an introduction to a Bible liberated from the things that keep it bound, that keep it from being alive, that keep it from being meaningful in our lives.
   Whatever else the Bible may be, it is at least the foundational document of our Christian faith. We encounter the Bible regularly in worship, in classes at church, in our private reading and devotions, and even out in society. Knowing some of the basic facts about the Bible—about its nature, origins, content, and legitimate uses—is important to any informed Christian faith. Yet especially in our more liberal or progressive Christian tradition biblical literacy is not very deep or widespread. The purpose of this work is not to use the Bible devotionally but to study it more or less objectively (not that true objectivity is ever possible for us humans) as an essential element of the Christian faith. My hope is that you may become more familiar with the Bible and with some of the major issues involved in reading and using it. My purpose is not to detract from the Bible as holy scripture but to deepen our understanding of it so that it may open to us the spiritual treasures that it contains.
   
   
   There’s a little bit more in the Introduction than that, but this is the part that tells you about the book. I hope this book finds a readership. I think it deserves one. It gives open-minded Christians a rather thorough, although of course by no means exhaustive, introduction to Christianity’s foundational texts. It addresses and corrects many misconceptions about the Bible and how to read it. It gives lay readers an introduction to some of the most significant biblical scholarship of recent times. It introduces the reader to concepts like postmodern hermeneutics that are vitally important and nowhere near widely enough known. The book has not been professionally proof edited because of the cost of having that done. I gladly accept responsibility for and errors that remain in it. If you’re interested you can order the book from Archway Publishing, or any bookstore should be able to order it for you. It’s also supposed to be available in a much less expensive e reader version, but I don’t know if that one is available yet. I hope you’ll read it. I hope it is meaningful to you.

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[1] Swenson, Kristin, Bible Babel, Making Sense of The Most Talked About Book of All Time, HarperCollins, 2010.

Sick Unto Death

Sick Unto Death

Our American society is sick, sick unto death. Americans’ addiction to guns is nothing short of pathologic. No other supposedly advanced nation in the world is anywhere near as enamored with instruments of injury and death as are we Americans. I have Canadian friends, and they simply cannot understand Americans’ attitude toward guns. It’s not that guns are outright illegal in other advanced nations. They aren’t. Even in Soviet Russia it was possible for people to use rifles for hunting, certainly a more legitimate use of guns than any other possible use of them. Yet here’s what the rest of the world understands and we Americans don’t: A gun has one purpose and one purpose only, to inflict death and injury on some living being, be it human or animal. That’s why guns were invented. The manifold technical advances in gun design have had one purpose and one purpose only, to make the gun more effective in inflicting death and injury on some living being. Yes, we sometimes use guns for target practice, shooting at some inanimate object; but the purpose of that exercise for most of the people who engage in it is to improve the shooters ability to inflict death and injury on some other living being. Guns are instruments of violence and nothing else. Guns create violence, they don’t prevent it. Where there are guns there is more violence than where there are no guns. A person is significantly more likely to be shot in a home that has a gun than in a home that has no gun. Strict regulation of guns reduces violence. The experience of supposedly advanced nations around the world proves that truth beyond any reasonable doubt. Yet in our country we hear again and again that to stop violence we need more guns not fewer. That’s like saying that to cure a person’s alcoholism he needs more alcohol not less. The reactions of gun advocates among us to any proposal for stricter gun regulations is emotional not rational. The facts simply don’t support them or their reflexive responses to gun laws and gun violence. If our society is to get healthy around guns we need to stop the gun lobby. People, especially gun owners, need to stop believing the NRA’s lies, as many of them already have done. For us to get healthy around guns we need to stop the lobbying power of the NRA and other advocates of essentially unrestricted gun use. Our culture is mentally ill around guns. Curing mental illness is never easy, but it must be done. We must do it. We must do it now.

Of course there is the small matter of the Second Amendment. It reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Before 2008 the courts of our country had never held that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to keep and bear arms. Indeed, on its face it doesn’t. It clearly creates a right to keep and bear arms for the purposes of maintaining a well-regulated militia and for no other. It is a basic principal of statutory or constitutional interpretation that the courts must give meaning to all of the language of a law whenever it is reasonably possible to do so. We simply must assume that the reference to a well-regulated militia in the Second Amendment is there for some reason. We cannot assume that the drafters of the Constitution put in superfluous words just for the sake of putting in words. They put the words they used into the document for some purpose. The purpose of the phrase about a militia in the Second Amendment seems obvious on its face, namely, to foster the development of local militias for the purpose of securing the state. It stretches the wording of the Amendment beyond recognition to say that it provides for essentially unregulated personal gun ownership. It just doesn’t do any such thing.

Or at least it didn’t until the United States Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US 570 (2008). In that case the majority of the court’s justices held that the Second Amendment does what it obviously does not do, namely, create a private right of gun ownership. The court read the language of the Amendment that refers to a militia out of the Amendment, holding, at least in effect, that that language has no meaning at all. In that case the court voided a perfectly reasonable law that regulated gun ownership in the District of Columbia. It is one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of recent times. It’s consequences have been and will continue to be deleterious to public safety in our country. That decision is a gross example of the kind of judicial legislating that the political right is so fond of decrying. Overruling that decision must be one of the major tasks of the Supreme Court in the years ahead.

Yet there it is, a Supreme Court decision that strips meaningful language out of our Constitution. The court was wrong, but it’s still the Supreme Court of our land. What it says, right or wrong, is the law of the land. For now at least we have no choice but to live with it and to try to do the best we can under it. Even under that wholly misguided opinion there is a lot we can do. No constitutionally guaranteed right is absolute. We all know that the First Amendment guarantees the right of free speech, but we all also know, to use a cliché that is true despite its overuse, that you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Why not? The US Constitution guarantees free speech doesn’t it? Well, yes it does; but it is well established in the law that constitutional rights must be weighed against other legal considerations. In the fire-in-a-theater case the right of the people to be safe outweighs the rights of any individual to put them at risk through the exercise of his or her free speech rights. The court has approved many other limitations on free speech. The First Amendment’s right of free speech is not absolute.

Neither is the right to keep and bear arms that the Supreme Court created in Heller. If the public’s right to be safe outweighs anyone’s free speech rights in certain cases, surely in most cases the public’s right to be safe from gun violence outweighs an individual’s right to have a gun. Virtually unregulated gun ownership makes us all unsafe. Sure, most gun owners are responsible and law-abiding people; yet it cannot be denied that there are people among us who are neither responsible nor law-abiding. We all have the right to be as safe from their acts of violence as we can be. There simply is no rational argument against expanding the laws on background checks for gun ownership for example, yet the US Congress won’t pass even that important and minimally invasive measure. Their refusal to do so is a sign of pathology not reasonable consideration.

Gun advocates say that none of the measures people like me advocate will stop all gun violence. To that I say Duh! Of course they won’t. Can you seriously expect us to conclude from that undeniable fact that no further gun regulation should be enacted? The premise—gun regulation won’t stop all gun violence—while true simply doesn’t support the conclusion—that no more regulatory laws should be enacted. None of us has any guarantee of absolute safety in this life. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do what we can to increase public safety. Our governmental entities enact legislation to improve public safety all the time. Take safety regulation in the workplace as an example. Can such regulation prevent all industrial accidents? Of course not, but it does make the workplace safer. That accidents still happen is no reason to repeal the laws and regulations regarding workplace safety. It’s the same with guns. Safer is better, even if safer doesn’t amount to absolutely safe.

Gun advocates say that automobiles kill more people in the US every year than guns. I’ll take that as true for the sake of argument. Once again that contention does not support the conclusions gun advocates draw from it. Let’s look at the differences between automobiles and guns as  starting point. First of all, automobiles are designed, built, and sold overwhelmingly for legitimate purposes. Yes, criminals use cars too; but most of us by far use them for lawful and constructive purposes. Guns are designed, built, and sold for the purpose of causing injury and death. That is not a legitimate purpose. Gun advocates say self-defense is a legitimate purpose of guns. OK, I’ll accept that as true for purposes of argument; but look the at differences in how we regulate guns and how we regulate cars. You have to pass a test on your knowledge and ability to handle a car to get a driver’s license. You don’t to get a gun. Cars are licensed, guns are not. Cars display license plates that make it relatively easy to identify and locate the car’s owner. Guns don’t. We must all operate our cars within the limits of numerous traffic laws put in place to improve safety on our streets and highways. Far fewer laws and regulations govern the use of guns. We know that while cars are mostly used for legitimate purposes they can be dangerous, so we surround them with laws and regulation. We know that guns are nothing but dangerous, and we surround them only with weak regulation that is full of loopholes. All this makes absolutely no sense.

The most vociferous gun advocates don’t support repealing our traffic laws, so why don’t they support stricter gun regulation? There’s only one answer to that question that I can come up with. Pathology. We are pathologically addicted to guns. Perhaps that addiction comes from our history. We developed as a frontier society in which guns were common and often necessary for personal safety and to obtain food. We are such a society no longer. To cite just a couple of examples, Canada and Russia developed as frontier societies too, but they aren’t pathologic about guns. We are. It’s time for us to get healthy. We must enact whatever gun safety measures we can under Heller. Beyond that, we must overturn that tragically wrong decision. If we cannot adequately regulate guns under the Second Amendment, they we must repeal or modify the Second Amendment. When we are sick we consult a physician. We’re sick about guns. There are lots of people among us working hard to enact better gun regulation. We need to turn to them in order to gain our health around guns. We’re sick. It’s way past time for us to get healthy.

Reflections on an Evangelical Endorsement of Bernie Sanders

Reflections on an Evangelical’s Endorsement of Bernie Sanders

A former parishioner of mine (from quite a few years back) has on Facebook asked me and other Christians who know her to reflect upon remarks made by a man, who identifies himself only as “Jim,” who describes himself as an Evangelical Christian and who endorses Bernie Sanders for President. Jim made his remarks in response to the speech Sanders gave at Liberty University, the radically conservative, Evangelical university founded by Jerry Falwell, on Monday, September 14, 2015. You can find Sander’s speech on C-SPAN, and you can find Jim’s remarks at http://reverbpress.com/politics/biblical-argument-for-bernie-sanders/. Sanders’ speech is on that site too.

Before I get to Jim’s remarks perhaps some background reflections will be helpful. Bernie Sanders is an independent United States Senator from Vermont who is running for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States. Sanders describes himself as a democratic socialist. He takes his social and economic ideals from the social democratic countries of Scandinavia. He supports a woman’s right to abortion. He supports same gender-marriage and gay rights generally. He has a consistent anti-war record. He bases his campaign for the presidency primarily upon a quite socialistic critique of the injustice of income inequality in our country among other progressive insights into the realities of American life. I too support Bernie Sanders for President.

For the last one hundred years or a little bit more American Evangelical Christianity has not supported the positions Sanders takes or any political positions very much like them. Conservative American Christianity has focused not on issues of economic justice but on issues like denying women the right to control their own bodies and preserving legal and societal discrimination against people of minority sexual orientations and gender identities. It has worked hard to deny at least some of the truths of modern science and to try to force Christian prayer on everyone in the public schools. Evangelical Christianity has seen Jesus as being primarily a sinless sacrificial atonement for human sin so that those who believe in him can go to heaven when they die and has largely overlooked his teachings on social justice. That’s not to say that conservative Christians have not done good charitable work with people in need. A great many of the them have and do. It is however nonetheless true that conservative Christians have not for the most part let Jesus’ teachings on care for the poor inform their political positions. They certainly have not grafted Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence onto their political stances.

I will begin my reflection on Jim’s remarks by saying that I am a Christian but not an Evangelical one. I suspect that my take on the Bible is very different from Jim’s. I doubt that he would much appreciate most of my book on the Bible that will be published soon. I suspect without knowing that my take on Jesus is in some foundational ways different from Jim’s. Nonetheless I believe that Jim has come upon a profound truth about Jesus and that he is absolutely correct when he concludes his remarks by saying that he wouldn’t be much of a Christian if he didn’t stand on the side of the poor because that’s where Jesus stood. In his remarks Jim cites many of Jesus’ statements about bringing good news to the poor. He doesn’t always cite everything exactly correctly. He reads more of Jesus into John the Baptist than the texts will support, but he gets Jesus proclamation of good news to the poor quite correct. Jim says that Sanders spoke of one who is coming with good news to the poor the way, in his not entirely correct reading, John the Baptist spoke of Jesus coming with good news to the poor. Sanders didn’t actually do that. I find those technical errors a bit irritating, but they don’t take away from the profound truth of Jim’s basic point. Jesus calls Christians to care for the poor and for all who are in need. American Christianity, especially conservative Evangelical Christianity, has failed pretty badly in its response to that call because it has limited its activity to charitable work and has ignored the larger issues of societal and economic justice.

Jim is absolutely right that Bernie Sanders proclaims a value of Christianity that Christianity has far too often ignored, although Jim probably makes Sanders sound more Christian than he is. Sanders is Jewish, as Jim says again and again in his remarks. The demand for social and economic justice for the poor is a Christian value, but it is not exclusively a Christian value. In his speech at Liberty University Sanders quotes Amos 5:24, which in the NRSV translation reads: “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Jesus got his commitment to justice from his Jewish heritage. Jim might have acknowledged that truth a bit more than he did.

Still, on the whole Jim is absolutely right. It’s past time for us Christians to listen to him, to Bernie Sanders, and most of all to Jesus Christ. I don’t expect many Evangelical Christians to vote for Bernie Sanders. His support of abortion rights and same-gender marriage is too much for most of them to swallow. That’s a pity. Jim is right when he makes Sander’s remarks sound profoundly Christian. They are first of all profoundly Jewish, but they are Christian too. Perhaps a few Evangelicals will hear Sanders and Jim and be called back to commitment to the things Jesus talked rather than to things like abortion and gay rights about which Jesus said not a single direct word.

On Salvation

Thoughts on Works and Salvation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

June, 2015

A parishioner recently gave me a written piece with the premise that while works do not bring about “salvation,” works are required to keep one’s salvation once one has it. This piece claims to support this thesis with several quotes from the New Testament, all of them more or less taken in isolation from the context in which they appear. The piece raises, or perhaps better points to, profound issues about the meaning of Christianity and how the faith shapes our lives and our relationship to God. There are also foundational issues here that we must address before turning to the specifics of the matter.

The first issue we must address is the issue of methodology. It is so common for Christians to support some position by throwing Bible verses at it. Yet the simple truth is that we can “prove” almost anything with carefully selected Bible verses. We can cite Paul for the proposition that justification (whatever that means) comes as God’s free and unmerited grace that we access through faith, and we can cite James (as this piece does) for the proposition that works are necessary for our faith to mean anything. We can “prove” that Jesus was born in a house in Bethlehem where Mary and Joseph already lived by citing Matthew, and we can “prove” that he was born in a stable in Bethlehem where Mary and Joseph did not live by citing Luke. We can “prove” that God created the world in six days by quoting Genesis 1, and we can “prove” that God created the world in one day by quoting Genesis 2. We can “prove” that God wants strict adherence to Torah law by quoting Deuteronomy or Leviticus, and we can prove that God cares nothing about robotic obedience to the law but wants us to treat vulnerable people with justice and compassion by quoting the great eighth century BCE prophets like Isaiah, Micah, and Amos. The Bible says so many different things that we can find a text to support most any proposition. Trotting out a string of Bible quotes to prove some point only proves that the person doing it found some quotes he or she likes. It very probably doesn’t prove the point being argued at all.

So what are we to do? We need to step back from the specific verses we find in the Bible and discern just what the Bible is really about. It is of course about a lot of things, but mostly it consists of the accounts of their experience and understanding of God by many different people in different historical and cultural settings. Despite its great variety of views, the Bible does have certain big themes that course through its pages. These include the themes of God as the Creator of a good world, human beings as being made in the image and likeness of God to serve as stewards of God’s creation, God as love, God as a God of both law and grace, Jesus Christ as the Son of God come to proclaim a new understanding of God, and salvation (whatever that means) coming from God for us Christians through Jesus and for Judaism through the revelation of God’s law. These themes have spoken powerfully to a great many people in a great many historical-cultural-linguistic contexts, and they still do.

So in general terms the question of whether salvation requires works either to obtain it in the first place or to keep it once we’ve got it comes down to understanding how the question of salvation fits with the Bible’s great themes, not whether proof texts can be found to support any particular position. I am convinced that the question of salvation comes down to a question of grace, but before we can examine that contention in more detail there is another preliminary matter we need to deal with.

It is the matter of definition. Before we can have any meaningful discussion of anything we need to make sure that we’re all understanding the same things by the terms we use. The most basic definition issue this document raises is the meaning of the word “salvation.” The piece never defines that basic term. It seems to assume the common definition of salvation as being in right relationship with God so that your immortal soul goes to heaven after you die. The first thing we have to understand in this context is that your soul going to heaven when you die is mostly not what the New Testament means by salvation. There are to be sure passages that fit with that understanding. For example, the Gospel of John has Jesus say to his Disciples “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.” John 14:2 NIV The Gospel of Matthew has the famous judgment of the nations scene in chapter 25 in which a resurrected Christ separates the sheep from the goats. Christians usually understand this passage to be about judgment for salvation or damnation after death. Whether that is really the most important thing about that passage is another matter altogether, but we need not go into it here.

Many Christians take the Gospel of John in particular to be about the life of the soul after death. In support of that notion they often cite John 3:16, easily the most frequently cited verse in the entire Bible. There Jesus says (or perhaps it’s only John says, but we needn’t jump into that briar patch): “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not parish but have eternal life.” NIV Christians most frequently understand John’s term “eternal life” to mean unending life of the soul in heaven after death. The Gospel of John itself, however, makes it quite clear that that is not what the term eternal life means. John defines eternal life, only once to be sure, but he does define it. In chapter 17 of John Jesus is praying before his arrest and execution. He says to the figure he always calls Father in this Gospel “For you granted him [Jesus] authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” John 17:2-3 NIV Notice: He doesn’t say you get eternal life by knowing God and Jesus Christ. He says that knowing God and Jesus Christ is eternal life. Given this definition of eternal life we should understand John 3:16 as saying that God gave us Jesus so that we might have life in the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ. The life that is intended here is clearly life in this life on earth. The Gospel of John isn’t primarily about how you get to heaven at all. It’s about living in the knowledge of God in this life. That is the life that John calls eternal.

That being said, the New Testament has many different voices and many different views of what salvation is and how one gets it. Christianity (or at least western Christianity) most commonly sees Jesus as being about salvation of souls in the hereafter. Yet it is a simple fact that in the Gospels Jesus talks about this life a whole lot more than he talks about any next life. In the first three Gospels what Jesus mostly talks about is something he calls “the kingdom of God.” In Matthew he mostly calls it the kingdom of heaven, but that term means the same thing in Matthew as kingdom of God means in Mark and Luke. For Jesus the kingdom of God isn’t heaven. It is a vision for life here on earth. We know that because so much of what Jesus says is about how God wants us to live in this life. One powerful way in which the New Testament understands salvation is as liberation from the ways of the world so that we can live into the ways of God.

Nonetheless, over the centuries after New Testament times it has become much more common for Christians to think of salvation as being about our eternal fate with God, more specifically the fate of our souls after death. It is common for Christians grappling with the issue of salvation understood in this way to reduce the Bible’s many views of the matter down to two primary ones. The question usually gets reduced to the ancient and contentious issue of faith versus works. Faith versus works is the dominant issue in the authentic writings of St. Paul, the oldest Christian documents that we have. The background of the issue over whether salvation depends only on grace through faith or only on what is usually called works, is the Jewish law. In first century Judaism salvation was mostly understood as coming from strict adherence to the Torah law, those 613 laws (by the traditional count) contained in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. The first Christians were Jews. They grew up with Torah law, and they retained their Jewish training which said that to be right with God they had to obey the law, meaning the Torah law, also called the law of Moses. That belief was no particular problem as long as most Christians were Jews. It became a big problem when word of Jesus Christ began to spread through non-Jewish areas, mostly through the cities of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, where the people were Greek not Jewish. Greek people, especially Greek men, were not about to obey some of the Torah laws, especially the law of circumcision. Some leading Christians, particularly St. Paul, began to preach that justification, that is, right relationship with God, came not through obeying the Torah law but by God’s unmerited grace accessed through faith in Jesus Christ. Paul insisted that the works of the law were unnecessary and even harmful for people seeking to be in right relationship with God. Paul believed, correctly I think, that it isn’t even possible to obey all of the Torah laws. For him, the primary function of the law was to convict people of sin, that is, to show us that we are sinners in need of God’s grace. Paul is not always perfectly consistent on the matter, but the thrust of his writing is that right relationship with God comes through grace not through works.

Not all early Christian writers agreed. The piece that has prompted this essay includes several quotes from the Letter of James, the book that famously says that faith without works is dead. I think that there is a sense in which James is right about that, but I don’t think that works are necessary for salvation. The Protestant tradition of which I am a part has long held that right relationship with God comes by grace through faith, not by the works of the law. Martin Luther had that brilliant insight after studying Paul’s letter to the Romans. He called James a “book of straw” and would have thrown it out of the New Testament if he could have. He thought it misleads people into relying on their own works for salvation rather than on the grace of God. Grounding his theology in the writings of Paul, Luther taught that we are saved by grace through faith and not by any of our own good works. The basic Protestant teaching is that salvation is a free gift of God’s grace that we neither merit nor can earn. God offers salvation simply because that’s what God does, that’s who God is.

It follows that if a gracious and forgiving God extends salvation when we have neither deserved it nor earned it, that God isn’t going to take it away when we continue to demonstrate that we don’t deserve it. It’s not that God doesn’t make demands on us. God does; but if our being put in right relationship with God didn’t depend on our works, our goodness, in the first place, it only makes sense that any failure on our part isn’t going to cost us our salvation later on.

Here’s how I and a lot of other people understand the matter of salvation today. Our salvation, either for new life here on earth or for eternity hereafter, is grounded in God’s grace. God’s grace, that is, God’s love in action, is free and universal. God offers it without condition to every creature. God never takes it away from anyone. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection reconciled God and creation. See 2 Corinthians 5:16-19 That work of reconciliation was God’s work through Jesus. Since it was not the work of any mere human its effect applies either to all people or to no people. Since that work is meaningless if it applies to no one, it must apply to all. God has given us salvation through grace. God’s not going to take it away.

God’s not going to take it away, but that doesn’t mean that we humans have no role in the drama of salvation. God extends unconditional grace, but we are free to acknowledge and live in that grace or to ignore it, deny it, or reject it. God calls us to respond to God’s free offer of grace with lives of faith and service to God’s people and God’s earth. When we acknowledge that God has saved us through God’s grace, the abundant life that Jesus came to bring us, John 10:10, opens before us. We find peace, inspiration, and hope. Many people who are ignorant of God’s grace live decent lives, but those of us who have felt God’s grace know that what John calls eternal life, that is, life in the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, is far fuller and far deeper than mere earthly life. We live more abundantly now, and we have good hope for the life to come.

I’m guessing that perhaps the attempt that was recently shared with me to work both grace and works into the economy of salvation is grounded in a belief that every verse in the Bible is true and must be taken into account in our understanding of the faith. I’m afraid I must say that that just isn’t correct. See the brief examples of biblical contradictions above. It is undeniable that the Bible includes many different points of view, and it simply is not possible to reconcile all of them. Bible verses don’t always mean what they appear to mean at first blush, and it is important to understand a verse deeply and in its original context before accepting or rejecting it. Sometimes, even after we’ve done the work to understand a passage deeply, we simply must conclude that it does not express the will and nature of God for us. A good example from the Old Testament is the command God supposedly gave King Saul to kill every living thing among a foreign people called the Amalekites. See 1 Samuel 15:1-3 The God I know, love, and seek to serve never gave any such order to anyone. God is a God of life not death. God is the God of all people, even the Amalekites, not only of the Hebrews. The claim that God told Saul to kill every living thing among the Amalekites is simply false. An example of the same dynamic from the New Testament is the directive in 1 Corinthians that women must be silent in church. See 1 Corinthians 14:34 That directive, which almost certainly is a later insertion into this letter and is not actually from Paul, is quite simply patriarchal nonsense. It’s in the Bible, but it isn’t from God. It’s just plain false. I make no effort to reconcile it with divine truth, for it is a satanic lie that made it into the New Testament as cultural sexism reasserted itself in the early Christian community against early Christianity’s radical acceptance and inclusion of women. So it simply isn’t necessary to reconcile everything in the Bible with everything else in the Bible. It isn’t necessary because it isn’t possible.

So yes, the Letter of James is in the Bible, and it seems to say that works are more important than faith in the dynamic of salvation. I’m not so sure it really says that, but I’ll assume for now that it does. I find that contention to be false, and I have no need to reconcile it with anything. It contradicts my experience of God. It contradicts other passages in the New Testament. It contradicts the dominant teaching of the Protestant tradition of which I am a part. I am convinced that salvation comes only from God and not from anything we do or don’t do or anything we believe or don’t believe. That is the only way grace is grace, for if salvation depends on something we do or believe then salvation is a reward, a payment, and not a free gift of God.

So, to my parishioner who gave me the piece that prompted this essay, I say that I believe that salvation is God’s free and unmerited gift. I do not believe that we need to or even can do anything to earn it, and I don’t believe that God ever takes it away. There probably are Bible verses that say something different. It doesn’t matter. We must always do our own discernment in dialogue with the Bible and the Christian tradition and figure out what in the Bible rings true for us and what doesn’t. It does not ring true to me that we must do good works to keep our salvation. If it does to you, OK. We can talk about that. For me, salvation is God’s free gift that never gets taken away. Thanks be to God!

On American Racism

Back in 2008 the national office of my denomination, the United Church of Christ, asked us local church pastors to preach on racism. I did. Below is the sermon I gave, typos and all. Given the tragic events in Charleston, SC, this week, I think it is more important than ever for us white Americans to hear what I said, so I'm posting that sermon here. May God open our hearts and minds to confront and transform our history of murderous racism.

On Racism

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 18, 2008

Scripture:
Genesis 1:1-2:4a

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

This is the first time I’ve preached on a topic that someone else selected for me, so this sermon may be a bit different from most. The Collegium of Officers of the United Church of Christ has asked us parish pastors to preach on racism today. As near as I can tell, the Collegium of Officers is the UCC’s version of the old Soviet Politburo. It is the collective body of the denominations four top leaders led by Chairman—I mean President and General Minister—John Thomas. They want us to preach on racism, and who am I to argue with the Politburo—I mean the Collegium. So, for what it’s worth, racism it is. And because my denomination has asked me to speak on it, I’m going to tell what I know to be the truth of American racism with no holds barred, or at least that is my intention. Some of what I have to say may be difficult for us white people to hear, but perhaps it should be. And before I start there’s something I need to say to Manny, Shawna, and anyone else here this morning who isn’t white: I apologize in advance that this sermon is directed mainly to us white people in the congregation. It’s what most of us are, and my white experience is the only experience from which I can speak. I pray only that I may speak as a white ally of the victims of racism everywhere. Amen.

My reflections on racism in American history and contemporary culture, and on my own life experience, have led me to the conclusion that the key dynamics of American racism among white people during my lifetime and today are historical ignorance and contemporary denial. But rather than speak in the abstract about these matters, let me tell you about my personal experience as I grew up in the thoroughly racist white American culture.

My parents came from overwhelmingly white North Dakota. They didn’t know any Black people, and I don’t think even the Lakota Indians of the Dakotas were ever on their view screens despite the fact that they both graduated from the University of North Dakota whose teams were, and are, called the Fighting Sioux. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, in those days an almost exclusively white town. There were some people of color around, mostly Asian or Asian-American faculty members at the University or foreign students from around the world, including some from Africa. I had one Chinese-American friend in grade school, but I knew not one single Black person.

As I grew up my parents, my schools, and my culture lied to me about American racism, if only primarily by ignoring it and failing to teach me about it. We kids used to sing “eenie, meenie, miney, moe, catch a nigger by the toe” And no one told me that was racist, but of course if was. No one told me how hateful that “n” word is, but of course it is. My mother, may she rest in peace, on occasion would say about someone who had done something decent “that was white of him.” And no one told me that was racist, but of course it was.

In school in the 1950s and into the early 60s we were taught some about American slavery, but its true horrors were glossed over. We weren’t told of the millions who died in the holds of slave ships. We weren’t told of families ripped apart when members were sold away to other slave owners. Most of all, there was no moral outrage expressed over it, no repentance, no instilling of a passion to make sure its vestiges were rooted out from American culture. I attended South Eugene High School, and every year at the football game with North Eugene High School, someone dressed in a Confederate uniform rode a horse around the field carrying a Confederate flag. A few people complained, and we thought they were silly. No one told us we were being racist, but we were.

We were not taught that slavery and the genocide of the American Indian nations are the twin moral abominations upon which this country was built, but they are. Nothing at all was said about the racist reality of the Jim Crow South, the de facto segregation in the North, the power of the Ku Klux Klan in earlier decades even in supposedly morally pure Oregon, the reality of lynching of Black people, the power of “Yellow peril” politics in Oregon, or about the many, many other ways in which racism permeated American history. We loved Black entertainers like Sammy Davis, Jr. and Nat King Cole, but no one ever told us that these men were not permitted to stay in the Las Vegas hotels that made fortunes off of their appearances simply because they were Black. Both the racism and the denial or ignorance of racism were pervasive in the culture in which I grew up, and I could hardly be unaffected by them. I can only hope that I have grown morally and spiritually and that, although my past will of course always be with me, I can to some extent transcend it and embrace a new understanding of the equality and the equal worth and dignity of all of God’s people.

I like to think that I have done that, if not completely than at least to a significant degree. I fear, however, that I cannot say the same about our country as a whole. We have made some progress to be sure. It is significant that the apparent Democratic nominee for President is of mixed race, but he self-identifies as African American. Nonetheless, racism remains a central characteristic of American life today. If you doubt that, just look at the statistics. I’ll just quote one set of them. As of June, 2006, in the US the incarceration rate for whites was 406 per 100,000. The incarceration rate for Blacks was 2, 468 per 100,000. Among Black males the rate was 4,789 per 100,000, and for Black males ages 25 to 29 the rate was 11,695 per 100,000, or nearly 11.7% of Black men in their late 20s.¹ This outrageous disparity in the rates at which we incarcerate Black people compared to white people can be explained by only one thing—white racism.

Yet there are loud voices among us today that say that we have transcended our racist past and now live in a post-racial America. Friends, it just isn’t true. Centuries of racism do not disappear in a few decades just because some significant laws were passed, as important as they are, as any reputable historian will tell you. The claim that we have now leveled the racial playing field is so obviously false that I have become convinced that the denial of the reality of racism in today’s America has today become the dominant, socially acceptable form of American racism. That denial functions to perpetuate racial inequality behind a fraudulent mask of racial neutrality. Racism is our past. Racism is our present. And I fear that unless we white Americans get a lot more honest about that reality than we have been, racism will be our future for a long time to come.

Racism is American reality, but the God we claim to love and to worship rejects racism categorically. I’ll cite just one place where we see that rejection from this morning’s lectionary readings. In the magnificent, poetic creation myth of Genesis 1 we read that God created humankind on the sixth day. The text says: “In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” Genesis 1:27 NRSV God created men and women, not White, Black, Red, Brown, and Yellow men and women. God created all men and women. We force onto people the false sociological construct of race, but God does not. God sees all people in all their marvelous variety of colors and shapes as humans created in God’s image. And consider this, all of us white people here this morning. God did not come to us as one of us in the person of a blond, blue-eyed European, all of those Eurocentric portraits of Jesus to the contrary notwithstanding. God came to us as one of us as a dark skinned Semite, someone our wonderful Traffic Safety Administration would today racially profile as a potential terrorist.

God does not see race. Does that mean that we should all suddenly become color blind? Actually, no. People who engage in the denial of American racism today often claim that they simply do not see race. That claim is almost certainly false, but there is a deeper problem with it. God did not make race a significant fact of human existence, but our history of racism has. White racism has so shaped the lives of non-white people in our country that when we whites say we do not see the race of non-white people, we deny a significant part of the human reality of those people. I’m afraid our task is more complicated that simply not seeing race. Our task is to see and acknowledge the racial diversity of God’s people, to recognize it as a significant part of a person’s humanity, especially the humanity of people of color. Then we need to celebrate it, rejoice in it, embrace it as part of God’s good creation. There used to be a sign in the Pike Place Market in Seattle that read: “We don’t tolerate diversity around here. We celebrate it.” That is our call as Americans today.

And when we have come to the place where we can truly celebrate the diversity of God’s people, what else can we do? We can confront our own internalized racism. We can recognize it, name it, and set it aside. We can refuse to remain silent, as we so often do, when we see racism in midst. On a few occasions out here in Sky Valley I have seen trucks and buildings with that Confederate battle flag on them that my high school used, that ultimate American symbol of hatred and oppression, the American equivalent of the Nazi swastika flag. And I have said nothing. I, and you, can remain silent no longer. We can call the deniers of contemporary racism, like the leaders of the successful movement here in Washington a few years ago to ban affirmative action, on their denial, which surely is grounded in and reflects the very racism they deny. We can refuse to follow their siren song that says we have no more to do. We can refuse to let veiled appeals to racial fears determine whom we will support for President this year. That’s not an endorsement of Senator Obama. It is merely an appeal that whatever decision you make on his candidacy not be based on his race.

There are many more things we can do. Do your relatives still use racist language the way mine used to? Talk to them about it. Do people at your work place tell racist jokes? Call them on it. Demand an end to racial profiling by law enforcement. Demand that prosecutors stop seeking the death penalty disproportionately against Black defendants, or much better yet, demand that they stop seeking it at all.

Racism is a fraud. It is a lie. It is one of the great American lies, a lie that resides at the very heart of our culture. May God grant us the wisdom and the courage to root it out in all of its aspects. We are all made in the image of God—Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, White, and all of the myriad gradations in between. That’s the truth that can dispel the lie of racism. Let us hear God’s truth and listen to the lie of racism no more. Amen.

¹ www.prisonsucks.com