There Is No One Old Testament God

There Is No One Old Testament God

June 22, 2020

We’ve all heard it, haven’t we? The God of the New Testament is loving, gracious, forgiving, and peaceful. The God of the Old Testament is judgmental, vengeful, condemning, and violent. Many Christians say they want nothing to do with the Old Testament God. All that God does is condemn and punish. There certainly are passages in the Old Testament where God does judge, condemn, and punish God’s people. I’ll get to some of them anon. Yet the truth of the matter is that there is no one Old Testament God. The Old Testament has many different views of God in it. After we’ve seen some of the places in the Old Testament where the stereotypical Old Testament God does appear we’ll take a look at just a few Old Testament Passages that give us a very different image of God.

One of the Old Testament’s conceptions is indeed of God as angry, judgmental, vengeful, and violent. Consider for example Amos 4:1-3:

Hear this word, you cows

               of Bashan

       who are on Mount Samaria,

who oppress the poor, who crush

               the needy,

       who say to their husbands,

               ‘Bring something to

               drink!’

The Lord God has sworn by

               his holiness;

       The time is surely coming

               upon you,

when they shall take you away

               with hooks,

       even the last of you with

               fishhooks.

Through breaches in the wall you

               shall leave,

       each one straight ahead;

and you shall be flung out into

               Harmon.

Scholars don’t know what “Harmon” was, but clearly Amos intended it as a place you don’t want to go. In this passage from the eighth century BCE Amos has God cosmically mad at the women of Israel, called here Mount Samaria. Amos calls them “cows of Bashan,” Bashan having been a place famous for having fine cattle. God is angry because these wealthy women oppress the poor. So Amos presents an angry God who is going to punish them severely for their misdeeds.

Here’s another example of the stereotypical Old Testament God. The book of Deuteronomy revels in listing curses that God will lay upon the people if they do not strictly obey God’s law. At Deuteronomy 28:15 we read: “But if you will not obey the Lord your God by diligently observing all his commandments and decrees, which I [Moses] am commanding you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.” There follows a long list of calamities the people will suffer if they don’t do as God says. The calamities include among others:

1.     The fruit of their womb and their ground along with the increase of their cattle and the increase of their flock shall be cursed. Deuteronomy 28:18.

2.     The Lord will send upon them disaster, panic, and frustration in everything they attempt to do until they are destroyed and perish. Deuteronomy 28:20.

3.     The Lord will inflict them with consumption, fever, inflammation, heat, drought, blight and mildew. Deuteronomy 28:22.

4.     The Lord will change their rain to powder, and only dust will come down from the sky until they are destroyed.

5.     The Lord will cause them to be defeated by their enemies.

6.     They shall become an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. Deuteronomy 28:25c.

7.     All their crops will fail. Deuteronomy 28:38-40.

8.     Their sons and daughters will go off into captivity. Deuteronomy 28:41

These are but a few of the curses Deuteronomy says will come upon the people if they don’t do what God wants. For the full list see Deuteronomy 28:15-46. Deuteronomy gives us an angry God who has no qualms about making God’s people suffer horribly for not being perfect in their observance of all of God’s laws.

Here’s another example of that sort of God that may be more familiar. In the Ten Commandments we read:

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me. Exodus 20:4-6.

This God is perfectly willing to punish people in subsequent generations for the sins of some ancestor though the ones being punished had nothing to do with it.

Here’s just one more example. At Genesis 6:11-13 we read: “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them….’” We know the rest of the story. Noah builds an ark, fills it with animals and his family, God sends rains that cover the whole earth and kill every thing living on the land that isn’t in the ark. Talk about vengeance! There’s that stereotypical Old Testament God at work. So yes, the Old Testament has passages that have given rise to the stereotype of the judgmental, angry, vengeful, violent Old Testament God.

What some people don’t know is that the Old Testament also gives us pictures of a very different God. There is for example a saying versions of which run like a mantra through the Old Testament: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” Psalm 145:8. See also Psalm 103:8 and Exodus 34:6. Slightly varied version of the saying appear at Nehemiah 9:31, Numbers 14:18, and Psalm 86:15. This view of God could hardly be more different from the God of Deuteronomy. These voices from ancient Israel see God as a God of grace, mercy, patient forbearance, and unwavering love.

Some of the voices of Israel also knew that God is a God of forgiveness. For example at Micah 7:18-20 we read:

Who is a God like you, pardoning

               iniquity

       and passing over the

               transgression

       of the remnant of your

               possession?

He does not retain his anger

               forever,

       because he delights in showing

               clemency.

He will again have compassion

               upon us;

       he will tread our iniquities

               under foot.

You will show faithfulness to

               Jacob

       and unswerving loyalty to

               Abraham,

as you have sworn to our

               ancestors

       from days of old.

Hardly sounds like an angry, judgmental, violent God at all, does it.

Finally there’s everyone’s favorite Psalm, Psalm 23. To know that in the Old Testament there is also a God tender and caring all we have to do is read that Psalm. Here it is in its NRSV translation:

The Lord is my shepherd, I

               shall not want.

       He makes me lie down in

               green pastures;

he leads me beside still

               waters;

       he restores my soul.

He leads me in right paths

       for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the

               darkest valley,

       I fear no evil;

for you are with me;

       your rod and your staff—

        they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me

       in the presence of my

               enemies;

you anoint my head with oil;

       my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy

               shall follow me

       all the days of my life,

and I shall dwell in the house of

               the Lord

       my whole life long.

So let’s be done with the idea that the Old Testament gives us only one image of God and that that image is one we can all do without. Let’s not assume that the stereotypical Old Testament God is the only God we find in the Old Testament. It just isn’t so. There are voices from ancient Israel that assure us that God isn’t like the stereotypical Old Testament God at all. In the Old Testament we can find these and other passages that speak of God’s love and God’s care for us and for all creation. For those voices I for one will say thanks be to God.

God Is in This Place

God Is in This Place

Genesis 21:8-21; 28:10-17

Maybe it was because he used a rock for a pillow, or maybe not. Either way one night Jacob had a dream. He saw a ladder stretching between earth and heaven. Angels were coming and going up and down the ladder. Hence the song “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.” The Lord, that is Jacob’s God Yahweh, stood beside him and him that he, Yahweh, would give the land where Jacob lay to him and his descendants, who would be as thick as the dust of the earth there would be so many of them. When Jacob woke up he said “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” He named the place Bethel, which means House of God.

Many people today are quite taken with Celtic spirituality—for all the right reasons. Celtic spirituality is deep, gentle, and moving. I’m no expert on it, but I know of one of its powerful principles. Celtic spirituality speaks of what it calls “thin places.” A thin place is a physical location where the physical barrier between God and believers becomes thin or at least thinner than it is elsewhere. In a thin place a believer is more likely to experience the presence of God than the believer is in other places. Somehow in a thin place God is nearer and easier to reach than God is elsewhere. Any place can be a thin place. A church can be a thin place, but so can beach or a quiet corner in your home. For many people mountains are thin places. Any place that holds special memories for you or has special meaning in your life can be a thin place.

For a place to be thin for us we must be open to the possibility of a place being thin. For me a city with all its noise and bustle is unlikely to be a thin place. I’m not likely to be very open to God there. A freeway jammed with traffic is unlikely to be a thin place. I’m not likely to be very open to God there either. Every time I read the story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel I think of the concept of the thin place. For Jacob the hard ground and a rock under his head became a thin place where God appeared to him in a dream. I think lying on the hard ground with a rock under my head would just make by back ache and my head sore, but then I’m not Jacob. Where he slept became a thin place for him. He experienced God there.

Thinking about thin places is one way that I react to the story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel, but I have a second way as well. I think wait a minute. Jacob says God was in that place, but isn’t God in every place? Our faith tradition has always called God omnipresent. That means present everywhere. So would Jacob say only that God was in that one place? Why would Celtic spirituality talk about thin places? Isn’t every place a thin place where we can encounter God? Maybe we wouldn’t use the term thin place for a lot of places, but can’t we meet God anywhere? I think the answer to that question has to be yes, yet I also think that the concept of the thin place has merit. Yes, God is everywhere, but there are places and circumstances in which we are more likely to experience God’s presence than we are in other places or circumstances.

Sometimes those places and circumstances aren’t exactly friendly or peaceful. Consider the story of Hagar and Ishmael at Genesis 21:8-21. Abraham has had a son with the Egyptian slave woman Hagar. The boy’s name is Ishmael. Even though Abraham’s wife Sarah is the one who set up the sexual meeting between Abraham and Hagar, about which Hagar almost certainly had no say, when Sarah sees Ishmael playing with her son Isaac, who was born after Ishmael, Sarah tells Abraham to send Hagar and her son, who of course was also Abraham’s son, away. Abraham is reluctant to do it, presumably because he knew that they lived in a harsh and arid place and that sending Hagar and Ishmael away was almost certainly sending them to their deaths. God however tells Abraham to do what Sarah wants, so he does. He gives Hagar one skin of water and sends her with her son off into the barren wilderness.

Soon the one skin of water Abraham had given Hagar ran out. There was no more water anywhere. So Hagar put Ishmael under a bush and went a good distance away from him so she would not have to watch him die. Then against anyone’s reasonable expectations the wilderness turned into a thin place for Hagar. An angel called to her from heaven because God had heard the boy crying. Miraculously a well appears, Hagar draws water from it, and she and Ishmael survive. Arabs say that he became the progenitor of their people. They see their connection with Abraham through him rather than through Isaac the way the Jews do. Hagar and Ishmael were stranded in the wilderness waiting to die of thirst, and the wilderness became a thin place for her.

Any place can be a thin place because God is everywhere, not just at Bethel where Jacob said God was or in the Judean wilderness where Hagar encountered God. That doesn’t mean however that God is necessarily equally accessible everywhere. There is no way to know if a place is a thin place for you until you open yourself up to the presence of God there. Testimony by others that a place was a thin place for them might direct you to a spot that might work that way for you, but here’s the thing. The main reason we so rarely experience the presence of God isn’t because we aren’t in a thin place most of the time. It’s because we don’t open ourselves to the possibility of meeting God wherever we happen to be. God appeared to Jacob in a dream perhaps because when he was asleep his defenses against an appearance of God were down. God appeared to Hagar in the wilderness because she was desperate and cried out to God. God often comes to us in the worst times of our lives. God once did that for me. God once did it for my late wife as she was dying of cancer.

We can encounter God in stillness and quiet when we still the judgmental voice that’s always yammering in our heads. We can encounter God in meditation and in prayer. Perhaps some places are thin the way Celtic spirituality says they are. Perhaps God is nearer to us in some places than in others. If you know a place where someone else encountered God go there, but wherever you are be still. Quiet your mind. Open yourself to God’s presence. Who knows? Perhaps you will encounter God there. Try it. It just could happen.

Will There Be Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth?

Will There Be Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth?

Matthew 13:36-42 and 47-49; Romans 8:38-39

Years ago I heard some right-wing preacher on the radio rant that “There is not one single contradiction in God’s holy word!” It hadn’t yet remotely occurred to me that I would one day go to seminary and become an ordained Christian minister, but even so I wondered: Has he ever read it? I’ve written elsewhere about contradictions in the Bible so I won’t go into many of them here.[1] I want here to look at just one of them, one I haven’t written on before. It is the contradiction between Matthew 13:36-42 and 47-49 on the one hand and Romans 8:38-39 on the other.

The Gospel of Matthew has various features that appear in it multiple times. It has for example several passages in which the author says that something has happened to fulfill something in the Hebrew Bible. See for example Matthew 1:22-23.[2] See also Matthew 2:5-6, 2:15, 2:17-18; and 2:23[3]. Another of Matthew’s repeated phrases, and the one I want to consider here, is the Gospel’s habit of having evil people thrown somewhere where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Sometimes it’s into “the outer darkness.” See Matthew 8:12, 22:13, and 25:30. On other occasions it’s “the furnace of fire.” We will consider two of those passages here.

At Matthew 13:36-43 we have an explanation of a parable Jesus has just told the people, the parable of the weeds in the field. In that parable, Matthew 13:24-30, a sower sows good seed, but weeds come up along with the wheat. The sower’s servants ask the sower if they should pull up the weeds. The owner says no, you might pull up the wheat too. Let them grow until the harvest. I’ll sort them out then. The disciples ask Jesus for an explanation of the parable. Jesus says that at the end time “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matthew 13:41-42.

At Matthew 13:47-50 we find the parable of the net thrown into the sea that catches every kind of fish. The fishers keep the good fish and throw out the bad. The text then says: “So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” In both of these passages a place of horrific punishment for earthly evil awaits the evildoers.

We’ve all heard it of course. Christianity has long understood the cosmos as consisting of a heaven above and a fiery hell below with the earth somehow suspended between them. Either at the end time or immediately after a person’s death there will be a judgment, or so we’re told. The righteous will spend a blissful eternity in heaven. The evildoers will spend an agonizing eternity in hell. There are more problems with that view of life, the cosmos, and God than I can possibly deal with here. I’ll just say that that view of a three-tiered universe can only be a metaphor for us at best because we know that the universe isn’t constructed that way. Also, since when was anyone except Jesus perfectly righteous? Since when was anyone perfectly evil? I mean, even Hitler loved dogs and children (as long as they weren’t Jewish, Slavic, or Roma children). Surely we are all some combination of good and evil, a reality that Matthew pretty much ignores.

Be that as it may, the Gospel of Matthew, which is the only place in the Bible that has a place where the evil go where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, gives us a vision of a post-death judgment that results in people spending eternity either in bliss or in agony. Matthew’s God is vengeful that way. Matthew’s God rewards the good and punished the bad. Matthew’s God is making a list and checking it twice. He’s going to find out who’s naughty and nice. In this view of God you’d better be righteous rather than evil because if you’re evil you’re going to pay for it big time.

Now let’s turn to the other side of the contradiction we’re studying. Romans 8:38-39 are my favorite verses in the whole Bible. There we read:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

These lines are for me the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a nutshell. God loves me. Period. God loves you. Period. God loves everybody. Period. It may not be possible for us mortals to love everyone, but God’s love is so much greater than ours that absolutely nothing can separate us from it or it from us.

Paul gives us here a rather specific list of things that can’t separate us from the love of God, but then he universalizes the point: “nor anything else in all creation” he says. Is it in creation? It can’t separate us from the love of God. Is unrighteousness, including our own, in creation? It can’t separate us from the love of God. Is evil, including our own evil, in creation? It can’t separate us from the love of God. Is sin, including our own sin, in creation? It can’t separate us from the love of God. Nothing. Absolutely nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

These great words from St. Paul seem to me directly to contradict Matthew’s image of evildoers being cast into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Yes, I can hear some Christians more conservative than I saying that the punishment of the furnace of fire is an expression of God’s love. That assertion makes no sense to me. Let me explain why it doesn’t.

Love, or at least human love, can sometimes punish its object. Those of us who are parents get that I think. We love our children, but sometimes we take away something a child values—screen time, allowance, etc. In former times we may even have spanked one of our children though I trust we don’t do that anymore. There is however only one way that punishing a child is consistent with loving the child, only one way that doing it is morally permissible. That’s if the punishment is meant as a corrective. We punish our child, nonphysically I trust, to correct some improper behavior by the child. Indeed “I’ll teach you a lesson” has come to mean I’ll inflict physical pain on you. Punishment—nonphysical of course—is permissible and appropriate only as a corrective for bad behavior.

The scenes Matthew gives us in which someone is cast into the furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth assumes that being cast into that hellish place happens after a person’s death. Unless you believe in reincarnation, which most Christians myself included do not, correction makes no sense after a person has died. There’s not going to be any future behavior to correct. The only purpose for Matthew’s furnace of fire after a person’s death has to be punishment having nothing to do with correction. Not even human love would do that. God’s infinitely superior love would never do it.[4]

You may have noted that I attribute the statements in Matthew about the furnace of fire in which there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth to Matthew not to Jesus. That’s because the phrase “furnace of fire” appears nowhere else in the New Testament, which suggests if it doesn’t quite prove that Jesus didn’t say it. The author of the Gospel we call Matthew said it. If we can safely conclude that Jesus never talked about people being cast into a furnace of fire where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and I believe we can, then Matthew’s verses about that place of torment are hardly divine truth. They express the belief of an ancient Christian who lived decades after Jesus. We take them seriously because the are in the Bible. We don’t have to accept them as true or meaningful.

So to answer the question I posed in the title to this piece, no, there will not be weeping and gnashing of teeth in some furnace of fire. Weeping and gnashing of teeth is not what God wants for anyone, for God loves everyone. I’ve always quite liked Pope Paul Vi’s saying that while he believes there is such a place as hell he’s not sure anyone in it. I don’t even think that hell exists. The hoary Christian notion of hell as a fiery place for the eternal torment of sinners is incompatible with our God of love. So I will stand with St. Paul on this issue. Nothing, absolutely nothing can or ever will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Thanks be to God!

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[1] For more on contradictions in the Bible see Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume One, Approaching the Bible, Coffee Press, Briarwood, NY, 2018, pp. 199-201.

[2] Be careful with this one. I has a significant translation error in it between the Hebrew original and the Greek version the author if this Gospel used. The passage it quotes is from Isaiah. That passage uses the Hebrew word for young women not the word for virgin. Matthew’s error here is hardly insignificant.

[3] The Bible verse Matthew claims to quote here doesn’t exist, but never mind.

[4] I am painfully aware that in the US we often punish people convicted of crimes by sentencing them to prison where little or no effort is made beyond the fact of imprisonment itself to correct the prisoner’s behavior upon release, but we hardly do that out of love for the convict. We may call the state apparatus that oversees a state’s prisons the Department of Corrections as we do in my home state of Washington. Mostly corrections in that title is a euphemism for punishment. It eases our conscience to call it correction though very little correction actually takes place. Just look at the statistics on recidivism. We don’t send people to prison out of love. We do it mostly out of vindictiveness, a very un-Christian value indeed.

God or gods?

God or gods?

June 19, 2020

Jews are monotheists, right? They believe in one God, Creator of heaven and earth, right? In Judaism there are no other gods. God is God. Period. These statements are certainly true of contemporary Judaism, and they have been true of Judaism for a very long time. Judaism is one of the world’s three great monotheistic faiths. Indeed it is the mother faith of the other two, Christianity and Islam. We owe the Jews a great deal in that regard.

The Jews have always been monotheists, right? The Hebrew Bible, which is the Protestant Old Testament and most of the Roman Catholic Old Testament, expresses nothing but monotheism, right? The Jews always knew that there is only one true God, right? Well, actually no. These statements about Judaism are not right. I want here to examine what ancient Israel’s relationship to God and the gods actually was, and in the beginning it wasn’t monotheistic.

Scholars tell us that for centuries before Judaism became monotheistic it was what we call henotheistic. Henotheism fully accepts that there are lots of gods and goddesses, it just asserts that a particular people has and is to worship only one God. The texts of the Hebrew Bible that were written before the mid-sixth century BCE express henotheism not monotheism. The matter can get a bit confusing because in a few places a later monotheistic editor has inserted monotheistic verses into texts that were originally henotheistic. There’s nothing we can do about that. We are so used to considering Judaism always to have been monotheistic that we read the Old Testament as though all of its texts were monotheistic when many of them really aren’t. I’ll illustrate that point with just a few examples.

Consider for starters Psalm 86:8a. It reads: “There is none like you among the gods, O Lord.” We have here a clear reference to the existence of gods other than Yahweh, the god of the early Hebrew people. Notice how the word Lord is printed here. It’s printed in what’s called “small caps.” Many translators of the Old Testament from the Hebrew into English put Lord printed that way in their translation when the Hebrew text has the four letters YHVH. YHVH is the name of the god of the ancient Israelites. It isn’t a word that means God. It was originally the name of a god. The name is usually transliterated into English as Yahweh (and sometimes for inexplicable reasons as Jehovah) with a w in Yahweh rather than a v because for reasons I’ve never really understood we use the German transliteration in which the Hebrew letter vav becomes w. Many translators put “Lord” there rather than Yahweh out of respect for the Jewish tradition of never speaking the sacred name of God. Be that as it may, Psalm 86 accepts that there are many gods. It names one of them, the god named Yahweh. Yahweh was the only god the ancient Hebrews were supposed to worship and to obey. Psalm 86 is henotheistic not monotheistic because it accepts the reality of many gods but names only one, Yahweh, as the one to Whom the psalmist prays in the psalm.

Next consider the rather obscure story of Jacob which appears at Genesis 35:1-4. In that story God tells Jacob to relocate to Bethel and to build an altar there. We read:

So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, ‘Put away the foreign gods that are among you….’ So they gave to Jacob all the foreign gods they had, and the rings that were in their ears [though Jacob hadn’t asked for those]; and Jacob hid them under the oak that was near Shechem.

There are several striking things about this story. Most important for our purposes is the fact that Jacob’s people had “foreign gods” among them. Notice how Jacob, one of the great patriarchs of Israel, relates to those foreign gods. He doesn’t call them false gods. He doesn’t call them idols. The people clearly gave him physical objects that Jacob at least called foreign gods. He could have destroyed them, but he didn’t. He buried them under a tree apparently for save keeping. He had known that some of his people had had foreign gods for some time. How else would he have known to ask the people to give them to him? There is no suggestion that Jacob was angry at or even upset with his people for having had foreign gods.

We must conclude I think that Jacob fully accepted the reality of gods other than his god Yahweh. He worshiped only the one god of his Hebrew people, but in this story at least it seems that he had no problem with other people worshiping other quite real gods and goddesses. Jacob behaves here like a henotheist not a monotheist. Jacob lived many centuries before Judaism discovered monotheism, so that he was a henotheist not a monotheist is not surprising.

For a final example let’s look at one of the more famous passages from the Old Testament. At Genesis 20:2-3, part of the Ten Commandments, we read: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, our of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” If you’re like most Christians you probably hear this verse as an expression of monotheism. It isn’t. Notice that so far from denying the reality of gods other than Yahweh it tacitly accepts that there are such gods. The verse doesn’t have Yahweh say “there are no other gods besides me.” It says only that Yahweh’s Hebrew people are to have only Yahweh as their one and only god.

There really is no doubt that before the mid-sixth century BCE the Hebrews were henotheists not monotheists, but Hebrew faith changed during the Babylonian Exile.[1] We see that change happening in the part of the book of Isaiah that scholars call Second Isaiah. Roughly speaking Second Isaiah is chapters 40 to 55 of Isaiah. It was written by any unknown author during the Babylonian Exile. At Isaiah 45:5a we find one of the earliest statements of true monotheism in human history:

I am the Lord, and there is

               no other;

       besides me there is no god.

There’s another statement of true monotheism at Isaiah 46:9b,c

Remember this, and consider,

       recall it to mind you

               transgressor,

       remember the former things

               of old;

for I am God, and there is no

               other;

       I am God, and there is no one

               like me.

In verses like these from Second Isaiah we see human beings discovering to discerning their way to true monotheism in human history. The great Jewish faith transitioned from henotheism to true monotheism.

Does the truth that the ancient Hebrews were henotheists not monotheists for much of their history matter to your faith? Does it matter to you that the Ten Commandments state henotheism rather than monotheism? Let me assure you that it shouldn’t. We Christians know full well that there is no God but God even if we say that God is somehow Three in One. My point here is more historical than spiritual. I believe that we really should read the Bible for what it actually says rather than for what we think is says, or what we have been told it says, or that we want it to say. In many but not all of its verses the Hebrew Bible expresses a henotheistic faith not a monotheistic one. Our Jewish forbears in the faith got to monotheism eventually. I for one thank God that they did.

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[1] For a more complete discussion of the development of monotheism during the Babylonian Exile see Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Two, The Old Testament, Coffee Press, Briarwood, NY, 2019, pp.281-290.

The Sin That Dwells Within Us

The Sin That Dwells Within Us

June 18, 2020

Romans 7:14-25a

What difference does it make if we use a word in the plural rather than the singular? Mostly it just means that we have more than one of the thing. I don’t have a coffee cup in my cupboard, I have several coffee cups there. If I said I have a coffee cup there I’d be telling the truth but not the whole truth. If I said I have the coffee cup in the cupboard my listener would wonder which coffee cup I was talking about unless our conversation had already made it clear which cup it was. Either way we would be talking about only one coffee cup. So we could talk about coffee cup or coffee cups, and the only difference would be how many coffee cups we were talking about.[1]

Yet in at least one instance the difference between the singular form of a noun and its plural form is far more significant than that. That instance is the words sin and sins. We often hear of sins, and when we say sin we usually mean just one of the many possible sins. In this meaning of the word a sin is a morally wrong action or thought. Even we liberal Protestants who don’t spend as much time focusing on sins as our conservative coreligionists do have heard of the “7 Deadly Sins.” They are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Each of them is something we do or something we feel. They are external or internal bad acts, or in the case of sloth bad inaction. The Christian tradition has lists of less serious things we are not supposed to do that we also call sins.

In this meaning the word sin can be a verb as well as a noun. Jesus uses it that way at the end of the probably apocryphal story of the woman caught in adultery. At the end of that story Jesus says to the woman “go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” John 8:11b. This sense of the word, sin as a verb, means to commit some act considered to be a sin. The meaning of sins as immoral acts is clearly the way we use the word most these days.

There is however another meaning of sin. It’s in the Bible. We see St. Paul use the word sin with a different meaning when he says that he does what he wants not to do and does not do what he wants to do. When he says “But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” Romans 7:17. At Romans 7:20 he again refers to “sin that dwells within me.” A wrongful act that we do doesn’t dwell within us or anywhere else. It is just an act not something with autonomous being that must dwell somewhere. Paul means something other than a wrongful act by sin here, but what?

To answer that question we must understand that for Paul everything that is has its own spirit. He called that spirit a thing’s “power.” At Romans 8:37, for example, he includes “powers” in a list of things that cannot separate us from the love of God. People of course have spirits. We’re familiar enough with that concept. In ancient Greece however everything had a spirit called a “power.”[2] Institutions had their power. So did ideas. The power was the spiritual identity of a thing even if that thing is only an idea.

This isn’t the place to give a long, detailed explanation of this theory of the powers, but I will give just one example of how the powers work. Big corporations have cultures, and they’re not all the same from one corporation to the next. The particular culture of any particular corporation tends to stay the same even though the people working for the corporation change. The culture of a corporation may change over time, but that change almost always comes very slowly. That’s because the corporation’s power has its own nature that is expressed in the corporation’s culture. That power resists change. So when new people come into the corporation they will almost always adapt themselves to the culture that is already there rather than either work to adapt the culture to themselves or to work constantly butting their heads against that culture. We’re not talking here about the power of a corporation as we usually think of that phrase. We don’t mean the ability of the corporation to do this, that, or the other thing against opposition. We mean the spiritual energy that dwells within the corporation and makes the corporation what it is.

Paul understood sin as one of these powers. It was for him a potent power that dwells, that is, has presence in each one of us. As Paul says in the verses cited above, sin is a power dwelling within him that controls him. It prevents him from doing what he knows is right and makes him do what he knows is wrong. When Paul says sin here he doesn’t mean a morally bad act. He means something more like a controlling force behind all human actions that makes us do what we know we ought not do. Paul understood that the power “sin” was active within himself and within everyone.

Many people in the ancient world, including many ancient Christians, understood sin in this way. It was common for people to believe that we humans are actually captives of sin understood as a power. Our existential problem is less that we commit sins than that we are captives of sin. Paul says as much in the passage we are considering here. Romans 7:14 reads: “For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin.” It’s not quite clear here who sold him and all of us into slavery to sin, but it really doesn’t matter. Whatever caused our enslavement to the power called sin, Paul and many of his contemporaries understood that that power dwells within and controls all of us.

One interesting consequence of this understanding of the human existential problem is that it changes the meaning of salvation. When sin is not something we do but a power that holds us in thrall we don’t so much need God’s forgiveness for bad actions we have taken or good actions we have not taken. What we need is to be freed from our captivity to sin. We need to be ransomed out of it. Indeed the most common understanding of salvation in the New Testament is precisely that Jesus’ suffering and dying on the cross was that ransom. Theologians call this understanding the ransom theory or the Christus Victor theory. It shares with classical atonement soteriology that it sees Jesus’ suffering and death as a price paid. It differs from classical atonement theory in its idea of to whom the price was paid. Classical atonement theory holds that the price was paid to God. The ransom theory holds that it was paid to the devil. In classical atonement theory the price purchased divine forgiveness of human sin. In the ransom theory the price procured our release from captivity to sin.

Paul at least suggests that that is what Jesus Christ has done for us in the pericope we are considering here. He says: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Romans 7:24-25. By “this body of death” he means his physical body enslaved to sin. For Paul sin and death are closely related. He says, after all, that the wages of sin is death. Romans 6:23a. The only way Paul could see us ransomed from our captivity to sin with death as a consequence was through some action by God. We can’t do it ourselves. The action that did the job was Jesus’ death on the cross. When we are baptized, Paul thought, we die to sin because we share in Christ’s death. Then we rise to a life freed from the power called sin. See Romans 6:1-4.

We are so accustomed to thinking of sins in the plural as morally bad acts that we may find Paul’s notion that sin is a spiritual power within us that enslaves us hard to understand and harder to accept. It does however offer an explanation for human behavior superior, in my opinion at least, to that offered by the classical Christian theory of the Fall. We simply cannot deny that much of the time we humans behave badly. We want to know why. Christianity’s traditional explanation is that when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden they “fell” from a state of grace to a state of sin and somehow took the rest of us with them.

Paul’s theory of sin as a power within us says rather that there are evil powers at work in the world. One of them, sin, dwells in people and binds them to itself. The power sin keeps us from doing good and makes us do bad. It’s not that we did something horribly wrong—or that the first humans did—and therefore our nature was changed from good to bad. It’s that there are multiple powers at work in the world, and they are mostly evil. One of them called sin gets ahold of each of us and makes us its prisoner or, to use Paul’s word, its slaves. When we want to do good the power sin (and not the power of sin, in which phrase sin means something different) keeps us from doing it. When we want not to do bad, sin makes us do it anyway.

Is understanding sin as a power within us to which we are enthralled until Christ sets us free a better understanding of sin than that traditional conception of a sin as a bad act and sins as multiple bad acts? I’ll leave the answer to that one up to you. It certainly is a more profound conception of sin and our relationship to it. It changes our understanding of Christ’s saving work on the cross. It moves us away from the classical theory of atonement, and to me at least that is a very good thing. If nothing else, understanding Paul’s conception of sin as a power helps us understand Paul as a whole better than we have before; and that too, I think, is a very good thing.

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[1] Poor Russian. The Russian language of course has singular and plural nouns, but it has neither definite nor indefinite articles. That fact would make translating what I just said about a coffee cup and the coffee cup into Russian harder than it might appear to be—but I digress.

[2] For a good introduction to this concept of powers see Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology For a New Millennium, Galilee Doubleday, New York, 1998.

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[1] Poor Russian. The Russian language of course has singular and plural nouns, but it has neither definite nor indefinite articles. That fact would make translating what I just said about a coffee cup and the coffee cup into Russian harder than it might appear to be—but I digress.

[2] For a good introduction to this concept of powers see Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology For a New Millennium, Galilee Doubleday, New York, 1998.

A Quick Look at Bostock vs. Clayton, County, Georgia

A Quick Look at Bostock vs. Clayton County, Georgia

I present here a legal analysis of the majority opinion in the US Supreme Court case of Bostock vs. Clayton County, Georgia. First a couple of disclaimers. I am not a lawyer. I used to be a lawyer. I have a law degree and many years of legal experience. I resigned from the bar after I switched professions and became a church pastor, but I lost neither my legal education nor my legal experience when I did that. Second, I fully and enthusiastically support the outcome of the Bostock case. I have been committed to and advocated for the equal rights and dignity of LGBTQ people for decades. I intend nothing I say here to contradict that conviction and that support. This is a legal analysis only not a policy position piece. It has happened before that the Supreme Court reached a result I like through a legal analysis I don’t. I have read Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion in the case. I have read only the first line of Justice Alito’s dissenting opinion and have read none of Justice Kavanaugh’s lengthy dissenting opinion.

On June 15, 2020, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in three combined cases that we can refer to by the name of the first of them the court listed in the caption of its decision, Bostock vs. Clayton County, Georgia. In each of the three cases an employee was fired from employment solely because the employee was either homosexual or transgender. The employers, a Georgia county, a Michigan funeral home, and a New York sky diving school, did not contend that there were other, nondiscriminatory reasons for the termination of the plaintiffs’ employment. No employer argued that their firing of the employee was permissible because of the employer’s religious convictions.[1] All plaintiffs contended that their termination violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of sex. In Bostock the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act does not apply to employment discrimination on the basis of homosexuality. In the other cases Six Circuit Court of Appeals held that it does apply to employment discrimination on the basis of transgender status and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held that it does apply to employment discrimination on the basis of homosexuality. The losing parties in all three cases applied to the United States Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, the most common procedure through which a case gets to the Supreme Court. The court granted the applications, issued the writs, and decided all three cases together. It is a 6 to 3 decision. Justices Gorsuch, Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan formed the majority whose decision decided the cases. Justices Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh dissented.

The sole legal issue in the cases was whether or not the prohibition of employment discrimination on the basis of sex in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applies when an employer makes an adverse employment decision against an individual on the basis of the individual’s homosexuality or what the majority opinion mostly calls transgender status. Although the statute in question mentions neither homosexuality nor transgender status as protected classes the majority held that Title VII does apply to such cases. The minority asserted that it does not.

Justice Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion. It is about 33 pages long. It covers a lot of issues. It analyzes and rejects the employers’ arguments as to why Title VII does not apply in these cases. Despite the length and complexity of the opinion—Supreme Court opinions are notoriously long and complex—the basic legal issue here is simple to state: Does Title VII’s prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex apply to these cases or not? Justice Gorsuch and the majority of the court found that it does.

The issue in these cases comes down essentially to what “sex” means in Title VII. There are several issues that can come up in any case in which a court must interpret a statute. The court’s task is to determine the meaning of the statute from the meanings of the words the legislature used in the statute. The basic rule is that the court will use the common, customary meaning of any word. Courts often look up words in a common dictionary like Webster’s to find the meaning of a word at issue. The court will look first at what the word meant in general usage at the time the statute was enacted. This rule is usually straightforward enough, but there are issues that sometimes arise.

Sometimes a word a legislature has used the meaning of which is necessary to the court deciding the case before it may be vague or ambiguous. A word is vague if the court cannot determine what it means. A word is ambiguous if it can mean two different things equally well. When a court finds that a word whose meaning in a statute the court must know to decide a case is either vague or ambiguous the court will look to the legislative history of the statute in an attempt to discover what the legislature that passed the law meant by the word. Legislative history is irrelevant if the meaning of the word is clear. The legislative history of a statute consists of any information the court can find that sheds light on the legislature’s meaning when it passed the statute. It is often not easy to find. It may include transcripts of hearings on the bill or other documentation generated in the course of the legislature’s consideration of the bill. If a court believes that it has discovered the legislature’s meaning of a vague or ambiguous word or term it will use that meaning in deciding the case before it. In rare cases a court simply may not be able to determine what a word in a statute means. In such a case the court may rule that the law is so vague or ambiguous that it cannot be enforced because no reasonable person would know what it prohibits, ordains, or permits.

Sometimes there is an issue about the common meaning of a key word in a statute having changed between the time when the law was enacted and the time when the case before the court arose. In these sex discrimination the court could have considered if the common meaning of “sex” as used in the statute in question had changed between 1964 when the law was passed and a few years ago when these cases arose. It did not do so.

There are two schools of thought about what a court is to do if it finds that the meaning of a word necessary to the decision of a case has changed in that way. Conservative jurisprudence holds that the words of a statute (or constitution) mean what they meant when the statute (or constitution) was enacted and nothing else. For conservative jurists it is generally irrelevant that a word might have meant something different when the case before it arose than it did when the law in question was passed. The word’s meaning when the statute was passed controls. This approach is often called “strict constructionism.” Other jurists, especially more liberal ones, will say that because a society’s values and the issues and circumstances of life change over time the court must use the definition of words in common use when the case before the court arose rather than an older meaning in use when the law was enacted. Strict constructionism tends to lock the meaning of laws down to what they meant perhaps decades or more ago. To conservative jurists that’s fine. They will say that if the meaning of a word needs to change for a law to be just today it is up to the legislature that passed the law not the courts to change it. The more liberal approach to the issue of a changed meaning of a word in a statute gives the court more flexibility in deciding how an older statute (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is now 56 years old) applies to a contemporary case. The US Supreme Court usually has justices on it on both sides of this issue.

In his majority opinion in the Bostock case Justice Gorsuch, generally a very conservative justice, said the he would use the meaning of “sex” as used in the Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act at the time that act became law. His opinion begins with such a strong insistence that the meaning of “sex” in 1964 is all the court need know that one suspects that he is headed toward the opposite conclusion to the one he actually reached. He concluded that as used in 1964 the word “sex” covered and included issues around homosexuality and transgender status. He conceded that Congress very probably had neither homosexuality nor transgender status in mind when it passed the law. He said however that what Congress had in mind is irrelevant because the meaning of the word it used is clear as it applies to the cases before the court. The word sex, he said, clearly covers these cases dealing with homosexuality and transgender status.

My main criticism of Gorsuch’s opinion is that he insists that in 1964 the meaning of “sex” was plain and that it included homosexuality and transgender status. It is not at all clear to me that people 1964 would generally understood that to be the case. As I read Gorsuch’s opinion I found that conclusion difficult to accept though certainly not because I don’t like the result the Court reached. It seems to me that “sex” generally refers to the male/female distinction inherent in what it is to be human. Gorsuch could perhaps have made his conclusion stronger by making a distinction between sex (the word Congress used) and gender (which Congress did not use). He could have concluded that gender was the narrower term applying to the basic physiological differences between male and female human beings. He could have said that sex is a broader term than gender and covers all issues relating to human sexuality. He reached and used that broad meaning of sex without distinguishing it from gender. Gorsuch explained how he claimed to approach the meaning of the word sex by saying that Court has “explained many times over many years that, when the meaning of the statute’s term is plain, our job is at an end. The people are entitled to rely on the law as written without fear that courts might disregard its plain terms based on some extratextual consideration.” At least in these words he made it clear what he claimed to be doing.

Although I found Gorsuch’s reasoning in this respect hard to accept he did say one or two things that make his conclusion that as used in the statute sex applies to these cases seem more reasonable. He said for example  that one cannot explain either homosexuality or transgender status “without using the words man, woman, or sex.” He also said that because you can’t discuss the nature of the issue before the court without mentioning sex the term sex in the statute covers homosexuality and transgender status. He said that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” Gorsuch rather clearly believes (or at least stated in his opinion) that because both homosexuality and transgender status have to do with sex the term sex in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act includes both of them.

It seems to me that although the principle Gorsuch said he was using, that we need deal here only with what he called the “plain meaning” of sex in 1964, is a conservative principle of statutory construction, what he actually did with the word sex isn’t conservative at all. I cannot avoid the conclusion that Gorsuch has given the term a meaning that it simply would not have had in 1964. In common usage the term sex traditionally refers to the physiological categories male and female. That surely is what most everyone would have understood the word to mean in 1964.

Of course people who are physiologically female or male (not to mention the cases in which a person may not clearly be either on the basis of physiology) have different sexual orientations. Sometimes a person who is born physiologically female or male may for whatever reason self-identify so strongly as the other sex that they live as the other sex and even undergo medical procedures to change their physical sex. I have known both gay and transgender people. They are simply people like anyone else who have to deal with powerful personal issues that we cisgendered heterosexual people have never had to deal with and can hardly imagine. I mean to say here only that I cannot believe that in 1964 the common meaning of the word sex included those issues the way Gorsuch says it did.

Let me say again that I am so strongly committed to the full equal rights and equal dignity of homosexual and transgender people that I find it difficult to say what I’ve said here. I am delighted that homosexual and transgender people are now protected against employment discrimination everywhere in this country and not only in states like Washington that have their own nondiscrimination laws that protect them. I just wish Justice Gorsuch had reached the right conclusion through better legal reasoning. He could have said that the issues around sex in society today are not what people understood them to be in 1964. He could have said that the term sex today covers homosexuality and transgender status although in 1964 it did not. He could then have applied today’s meaning of the word to the cases before him and reached the same result. To do that however he would have had to abandon the core principle of conservative jurisprudence that words in statutes (and constitutions) mean what they meant originally and nothing else ever. He didn’t do that, and I assume that he is simply incapable of doing it.

The minority justices in this case accuse the majority of legislating rather than deciding a legal case because, they say, it greatly expanded the meaning of sex beyond what it meant in 1964. That frankly is a hard charge to deny. Yet the Supreme Court could be said to have legislated when it outlawed racial discrimination in public schools, said the Constitution guarantees a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, and that the Constitution prohibits discrimination in marriage on the basis of the sex of the people seeking to marry. That kind of legal legislating is much easier to defend when the Court examines changed societal values and conditions as it did in Brown vs. Board of Education. Gorsuch didn’t do that here. I wish he had.

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[1] The court left open the possibility that such a claim could be made in a future case but did not decide the issue because no appealing party raised it in their petition for a writ of certiorari.