On the Misuse of the Bible

 

On the Misuse of the Bible

October 30, 2020

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

This morning I saw online a picture of a woman sitting in the driver’s seat of a pickup truck holding a Bible. The caption to the picture said something like “Politician says pandemic may or may not be happening.” In other words, she’s a moron. A while back our Idiot-in-Chief had police clear out protesters near the White House so he could walk to a nearby church to have his picture taken in front of it holding a Bible, apparently upside down. The church is of course closed because of that pandemic that may or may not be happening, so there was no risk of Individual-1 being exposed to an actual Christian worship service. One of the primary characteristics of American religion today is that the Christian Bible gets misused over and over again in support of politics and politicians it simply would never support. Christians who call themselves “Bible-believing” use the Bible to justify hatred and oppression, things it simply cannot legitimately be used to support. They bash gays with it. They oppress women with it. They used to justify slavery with it. They divert people’s attention with it from injustice and environmental destruction here on earth and in this life to some hope for an imagined future paradise either in heaven or on earth after the Second Coming of Christ. None of these things is legitimate, but conservatives masquerading as true Christians  have so distorted the public understanding of the Bible that it is far from obvious to most Americans that these things are indeed a misuse of Christianity’s sacred texts. Those of us who know what the Bible as a whole is really about must speak up and speak out against this unjustifiable misuse of our holy scripture.

If the Bible isn’t about hatred and oppression (and it isn’t), what is it about? I wish that question were easier to answer than it is. The Bible is an extremely complex book. All of it comes from ancient cultures very different from ours. Its different parts were written over the span of nearly one thousand years. It expresses more understandings of God than most of us can possibly keep track of. There are passages in it that at least appear to give divine sanction to hatred, violence, homophobia, and the subordination of women to men. Conservatives use those verses all the time to justify their cultural hatreds and prejudices. We cannot deny any of those truths. Yet the only way you can make the Bible stand for any of those things is to pull specific biblical verses out of context and read them as saying something that the Bible as a whole simply does not say.

So what does the Bible as a whole say? The rabbis say that everything in the Hebrew Bible (the Protestant Old Testament and included in the Catholic Old Testament) is about love. They say if you read something in it and can’t make it be about love you’re still got work to do. The New Testament says quite directly “God is love.” 1 John 4:8. There is a saying that runs through the Old Testament almost like a mantra: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” See for example Psalm 145:8. The “steadfast love” of which that saying speaks translates the Hebrew word hesed and refers to God’s steadfast faithfulness to God’s covenant with Israel. God’s steady, unfailing love expressed as faithfulness to God’s covenant commitments is perhaps the central theme of the Old Testament. Sometimes that hesed is expressed as punishment of Israel’s violations of the covenant, but God never violates that covenant Godself. Even when inflicting punishment on them God loves the Hebrew people. It is a love on which they can always rely.

In the New Testament Jesus gives us the Great Commandment. It appears in three of the four canonical Gospels, but Matthew’s version of it is especially telling. When an expert in the Torah law asks Jesus which of the law’s commandments is the greatest Jesus answers:

 

‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Matthew 22:37-40.

 

The two parts of the Great Commandment are in single quotes here because they are both quotations from Hebrew scripture. The commandment of love of God quotes Deuteronomy 6:5. The commandment of love of neighbor quotes Leviticus 19:18.

The reference here to “the law and the prophets” refers to the two of the three major parts of the Hebrew Bible (the law, the prophets, and the writings) that were already canonical in the Judaism of the first century CE. If all of scripture “hangs” on the law of love then all of scripture must in some way be about love. There are parts of the Bible that don’t sound much like love. Go kill every living thing among the Amalekites as the Bible says God told King Saul to do, 1 Samuel 15:3, sure doesn’t sound much like love. If we can somehow interpret it to be about love, and I can’t, then fine. If we can’t we must simply reject it as not being a true word for us in the Bible. If it affirms love as what God wants from us it is consistent with the Bible’s larger message. If it doesn’t, it isn’t.

Both the scriptures that are common to Judaism and Christianity and the scripture that is exclusively Christian make the love their central focus. In both the Old Testament and the New love is everything. All the rest is commentary. So let’s be done with right-wing politicians using the Bible to justify policies that the Bible absolutely does not justify. Holding it up as some sort of symbol is meaningless in any event. Using it as a cover for anti-biblical politics is worse. Don’t let them fool you. The Bible is about love. Period. Any use of it for anything else is a misuse that we must reject and condemn.

God as Universal Consciousness

 

God as Universal Consciousness

October 29, 2020

 

We can’t define God. We can’t box God up in a construct of human words. Our human words are finite, God is infinite. Our language is therefore incommensurate with the job of talking about God, yet they are all we have. So we have two choices. We can refrain from talking about God at all, or we can do the best we can with the only tool we have inadequate though it may be.[1] We speak of God because we must speak of God. Our lives are grounded in God. God is our ultimate reality, and those of us who know those truths have the urge and believe that we have the duty to share what we know of God with others who are willing to listen. So we speak of God. As we do we must always remember that our language is symbolic not literal and that God is so far beyond us that we can never be sure that what we say about God isn’t woefully wrong. That being said and sincerely believed, I’m going to talk about God here while being fully aware that what I say is necessarily tentative and speculative.

Theological minds much greater than mine have tried to formulate concise characterizations or even definitions of God for a very long time. Ancient Israel understood God in very human terms. For them God was a man writ large, or at least that’s how their understanding of God started out. In the High Middle Ages Anselm of Canterbury called God that greater than which nothing can be imagined. In much more recent times the philosophical theologian Paul Tillich has given us the phrases pure being and the ground of being as insightful ways of speaking about God. These characterizations of Tillich’s are the starting point for the notions of God that I present here.

Tillich taught that God is pure being and that creation participates in that being while not being itself pure. Everything that is subsists in God in an impure way. If God is the ground of all being as Tillich said, then everything that is stands on God. God holds everything that is in being. Tillich’s characterizations of God are impersonal and philosophic. They are about ontology, the nature and source  of being. While we may worship God as Creator we don’t often worship God as the ground of being. Tillich’s characterizations are nonetheless insightful. They help us conceive of God in a way that works for us post-modern people.

Tillich came to mind for me recently as I was contemplating the nature of consciousness. Yes, some of us actually do such esoteric things from time to time. The question of consciousness came up for me as I was wrestling with the question of identity. I tend to think of my identity in terms of my experiences in life. I am what I have done, what I have lived through. But it occurred to me that my identity must be different from my experiences. There must be something constitutes the “I” that has experienced all those things. Somehow that “I” has remained constant throughout my life. I came to think of my identity as a particular instance of consciousness, that is, that instance of consciousness that is a person’s true, underlying reality constitutes the person’s identity.

Consciousness has always been a mystery to me. I’ve often thought of it in terms of sense perception. Scientists can explain how nerves transmit stimuli of light and sound to particular areas of the brain. The brain then somehow experiences those stimuli as sight and sound. But how? Nerves and the stimuli that travel along them are merely physical phenomena. They are inanimate. They do not see or hear. So just what is it that sees and hears? How do we explain the mystery of physical things producing sight, sound, and the other things that we somehow sense in conscious ways? Put another way, what is it that sees and hears, etc. I see, but what is that I? It is consciousness. Things like sight and sound are products of an encounter of the physical with consciousness, that is, with something transphysical, with something that is beyond the material.

What is that transphysical something that constitutes of location not only of sense perception but of identity itself? It is consciousness, but what is consciousness? We can easily find ourselves chasing our tails here. Round in circles we go getting nowhere. I know of only one way to break out of that circle. That way is to introduce the concept of God into our calculations. When I do that I find myself wanting to modify Tillich’s phrases like pure being and the ground of being to fit better with my desire to understand consciousness. Tillich’s phrases help, but they aren’t quite what I need here.

So I have tried to reconceptualize God not as pure being but as pure consciousness, not as the ground of creaturely being but as the ground of creaturely consciousness. Let me suggest that we try thinking of God as pure, universal consciousness. Just as for Tillich God is not some entity that has pure being but is pure being itself, so God is not some entity that has universal consciousness but is universal consciousness itself. Just as for Tillich created being has being because it participates in being itself, so human consciousness has consciousness because it participates in consciousness itself. It exists in the created world of our ordinary lives because it is grounded in and arises from a cosmic universal consciousness that pervades all of creation.

Try thinking of universal consciousness as ultimate reality. Creation becomes fully real only when it becomes conscious of itself. It becomes conscious of itself most fully, as far as we know, in human beings. Human consciousness is unlike pure consciousness because it isn’t pure. It is however truly conscious. It is therefore a true manifestation of human participation in the divine. In divine, pure consciousness creation is fully real. It is fully what God intends it to be. In human created consciousness creation is more real than it would be with no conscious beings in it, though it is not as fully real as it is in the pure consciousness that is God.

In a real sense the chronological development of creation is a process of seeking ever more fully developed consciousness. Does that eons long process end with humans? Perhaps not, for human consciousness is not pure consciousness. It is not pure consciousness because it is created not divine. It is created in finite physical creatures. It depends on the physiological function of the human body, especially the brain. It can become distorted when the body, especially the brain, is affected by disease processes such as mental illness or dementia. Specific instances of it, as far as we can know, end when a person dies. Pure universal consciousness, that is, God, does not depend on a physical body. Pure universal consciousness is never distorted by anything. It never ends. It seems reasonable to expect that over eons yet to come creation will continue to evolve toward ever higher levels of creaturely consciousness.

All of which leads me to this conclusion: The “I” beneath all of my experiences, that is, the “I” that has lived those experiences and continues to live new ones, is an instance in a human being of God, of pure divine consciousness. What is it that sees and hears when mere matter cannot? It is the divine within us. We have consciousness because we are created in the image and likeness of God, who is pure consciousness. We are not created as God, only in the image and likeness of God. It is nonetheless our connection with God who is pure universal consciousness that makes us conscious. It enables our consciousness and is our consciousness. That consciousness is the underlying “I” of our identity. That at least is how I have come to think of my consciousness. I invite you to consider whether it works for you to consider your consciousness that way too.

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[1] On the nature and inadequacy of the language of faith see Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating the Bible, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium (Eugene, Oregon, Wipf and Stock, 2008), Chapter 3, pp. 23-28.

Why Parables?

 

Why Parables?

October 28, 2020

 

It’s one of the most characteristic things about Jesus. It can also be one of the most irritating. Jesus almost never told anybody anything significant straight. He didn’t give logical, coherent explanations of much of anything. Instead he spoke in two primary ways. One was through short aphorisms, pithy little sayings that raise as many questions as they answer—or more. Love your enemies. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Most Christians and many non-Christians know a lot of Jesus’ aphorisms. (I won’t include any from the Gospel of John here because I don’t think Jesus ever said any of them, not that that necessarily detracts from their meaning.)

Jesus’ other way of speaking can be even more confounding than his aphorisms. He mostly taught by telling parables. Some of Jesus’ parables are famous and well known, especially two of them from the Gospel of Luke, the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Others are much more obscure, the parable of the ten bridesmaids for example. Jesus taught through these and many other parables, some of which are famous and some of which are not.

People have wondered why Jesus taught in parables rather than giving his listeners God’s  own truth simply and directly from his day to ours. I mean, why did he tell a whole story about a man beaten by robbers and a Samaritan who helped him rather than just say do what you can to help people in need? Why did he tell a whole story about a wayward son whom his father welcomes back no questions asked rather than just say when you turn to God, God will welcome you home no questions asked? It’s a good question without an obvious or easy answer. Jesus’ disciples certainly heard all of his parables. They knew that he used parables when he was talking to throngs of the people but not when he was talking to them. They asked him at least once why he spoke to the people in parables. He answered, “The reason I speak to them in parables is that seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” Matthew 13:13 NRSV. That’s essentially all the answer the disciples got to their question of why Jesus spoke to the people in parables.

I’ve long been puzzled by that response of his. Jesus seems to be saying that he speaks to the people in parables because they are dull and slow to understand what he has to say. I’ve always thought wait a minute there Jesus. If they can’t understand straight talk about the kingdom of God wouldn’t you want to make it easier to understand what you say not harder by hiding your point in some little story you made up? Parables make you harder to understand not easier. I admit that maybe I say that because I learn better from straight talk than from stories, but still: Why parables?

For some time now I’ve had an answer to why I think Jesus taught in parables, but it’s not quite the one he gives in the passage from Matthew that I quoted. To get at that answer we need to understand just what a parable is. In form a parable is a very short story. A man gets beaten half dead and is left beside the road. A priest and a Levite walk past doing nothing to help the beaten man. A Samaritan comes along and does help him. Jesus says go and do likewise. A man has two sons. The younger of them gets his father to give him what would be his share of his father’s estate upon the father’s death. The son gets the money, takes it to a far away place, squanders it, and falls into dire need. He returns home, and his father welcomes him back no questions asked. His brother doesn’t get it. Very short little stories indeed.

Jesus however didn’t teach in parables because he wanted to entertain his audiences as a great storyteller. He always had a much more serious intention when he told a parable. Jesus’ parables are teaching tools, but they aren’t direct statements of some lesson Jesus wanted people to learn. Sometimes the point of a parable is fairly obvious. Be like the Samaritan and help people in need. Sometimes however the point isn’t obvious at all. Why did that vineyard owner pay all the workers the same amount in wages when some of them had worked far more hours than others had? Even a parable like that of the Good Samaritan that has one quite obvious meaning can turn out to have many more meanings than the obvious one. The Parable of the Good Samaritan has at least five distinct meanings.[1] Perhaps the greatest virtue of Jesus’ parables is precisely that they don’t give a moral teaching directly. Instead they invite the listener in to do her own work of discernment to discover what the parable means for her. The parables’ vagueness and different levels of meaning give the listener room to poke around, look in all the corners and under the rug to see what he can discover. Jesus doesn’t dictate truth to us in his parables. Rather he invites us on a journey of discovery that we undertake in a quest to discover meaning for ourselves and our world.

That’s what I’ve long understood as a possible reason for why Jesus used so many parables. As I recently mused on what Jesus said his reason was, however, it occurred to me that Jesus was probably right in his explanation of the matter. Many of the people of his audiences wouldn’t easily grasp Jesus’ truth if he just laid it on them in straight statements of fact. Very few of them were at all educated or culturally sophisticated. Most of the were desperately poor country folk just trying to get by under very difficult circumstances. Jesus’ truths were radical in the extreme in his day. (They are in our day too, but that’s a subject for another essay or maybe a whole book.) Virtually no one, not even Jesus’ closest disciples, found them easy or their meaning for their lives and their world obvious. So Jesus put them into little stories, told those stories to the people, and trusted that by hearing and entering into the story at least some in his audience would get some important meaning out of them.

Whatever his reason was for doing it, telling parables was Jesus’ primary teaching tool. We don’t know how Jesus’ little teaching stories were received in his day. We do know that many of them continue to be powerful teaching tools today nearly two thousand years after Jesus told them. They invite us in. We can have dialogues with them. We return to them again and again, often seeing a new meaning in them or noticing some little twist in the story that we missed before that offers new insights or at least leads us to ask more questions. So why parables? Mostly because they’re great teaching tools. Jesus’ first audiences learned from them. So do we. Thanks be to God!

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[1] See Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume 3, The New Testament (Briarwood, NY, Coffee Press, 2019) 126-133.

On Law and Spirit

 

On Law and Spirit

October 27, 2020

 

I have an unusual though certainly not unique professional background. Much earlier in my life I earned a JD degree. For more than twenty years I was a practicing attorney at law. Much later in life I earned an M.Div. degree. For most of the last twenty years I have been ordained to the ministry of word and sacrament in the United Church of Christ. Before my retirement I spent years as a practicing church pastor. I have been a professional in both the law and religion. Religion involves more than spirituality, but spirituality is a big part of it. Recently I have been giving some thought to the relationship between law and Spirit. I mean both spirit generally and more specifically the Holy Spirit as understood in the Christian tradition. I will speak of Spirit here and mean the Holy Spirit, but what I say applies as well to spirit in a more general sense. I want here to explore what that relationship is and how we are called to live within it. I’ll start as I so often do with definitions.

The online dictionary merriam-webster.com gives as its first definition of law “a binding custom or practice of a community; a rule of conduct or action prescribed…or formally recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority.” In law school I was taught that law, especially criminal law, is a set of minimal behavioral standards the violation of which can result in punishment imposed by a governmental authority. All secular law deals with human behaviors and the relationships between people or between people and their environment. Secular law sets standards of behavior that are the least that a community expects of its members and violation of which can have consequences imposed by some authority which the community recognizes as empowered to enforce the law in that way.

At it most basic level religious law is similar to secular law in that it relates to relationships between people. Like secular law it specifies minimal levels of behavior and provides for consequences for violation of that restriction by a human religious authority or by God. Religious law differs from secular law in that it also governs the way people relate to God. It typically provides for negative consequences for actions which violate the minimal requirements it sets for a person’s relationship with God, again imposed either by a human religious authority or by God.

Our online dictionary merriam-webster.com defines spirit as “an animating or vital principle held to give life to organisms.” As a second definition it gives “a supernatural being or essence: such as a. CAPITALIZED: HOLY SPIRIT….” That second definition does a decent job of expressing what religious people mean whey they speak of the Spirit. It comes close to what non-religious people mean by spirit, although not all of them by any means would say that the being or essence they experience as spirit is supernatural. Christianity understands the Holy Spirit to which this definition refers as the Third Person of the Trinity, fully God as God is active in creation.[1] Whether by Spirit one means the Holy Spirit in a traditional Christian sense or something less specific and less specifically Christian, Spirit is a nonphysical reality that we can’t see or otherwise sense (at least most of the time) with any of our ordinary senses but which we can experience in other ways. Spirituality is the way we relate to that ineffable but very present reality.

Law, whether secular or religious, and Spirit differ fundamentally in how they function in human life. Law sets limits. It marks boundaries. It consists of more or less specific written provisions to which one can look for reliable (in theory at least) information about what is legally permissible and what is not or what is legally required and what is not. Law creates order. Law gives life structure, a form the primary purpose of which is to improve life by regulating how people live together. Ideally law reduces conflict between people and has substantive and procedural rules for resolving conflict when it does arise. Any specific legal resolution of a conflict may be unsatisfactory to one or more of the parties to the conflict, but law at least gives a resolution to the conflict and, with very few exceptions, does so peaceably.

While law is or at least is supposed to be ordered and certain, Spirit is free and creative. It can also be wildly disordered and utterly unpredictable. The Gospel of John expresses the nature of Spirit brilliantly when it describes the Spirit using the metaphor of wind: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”[2] Law is concrete or at least as concrete as something expressed in human words can be. Spirit is fluid. Law is more or less predictable. Spirit does what it chooses, and what it chooses is often wild and surprising.[3] Law, especially secular law, is what humans make it. Spirit makes itself, and what it makes itself is transhuman such that we humans can never fully comprehend it. Law and Spirit have in common only that they both interact with humans and affect human behavior, but they do it in radically different ways.

Law and Spirit always exist in tension with each other. They aim at radically different things. Law seeks order and certainty. Spirit seeks creativity and freedom. We humans are cast into the midst of that tension, and for the most part we don’t much like living with tension. It makes us uneasy. We want to resolve it so that we can be more at ease. So in the case of law and Spirit we often decide to live with one and ignore, reject, or even deny the value of the other. When we opt for law without Spirit our thinking becomes concrete and logical, for the functioning of law is always logical in the extreme. It may also become mechanical and wanting in true humaneness. When we opt for Spirit without law we may become creative and free, but we will probably also become unpredictable in our lives and may adopt practices or ways of life that that are unhealthy and put us at odds with others with whom we live. It may also cause us to do things that are downright immoral or destructive because we think we’re following the call of Spirit, not that Spirit ever actually calls us to anything immoral or destructive. Both law and Spirit have distinct shadow sides, and it is far too easy  for us to be trapped by them. Examples of that truth are sadly easy to find.

The temple authorities of Jesus’ time as they are presented in the Gospels of the Christian New Testament are good examples of the shadow side of law. Those worthies understood the essence of their Jewish faith to be compliance with Torah law and more particularly with the holiness code (also called the purity code) of the book of Leviticus. Their passion for compliance with that code sometimes led them to fail to do things that we and most everyone would consider simply to be the moral and humane thing to do.

We see how the shadow side of law led them to such moral failings in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. You’ll find it at Luke 10:30-37. In that famous parable we’re told that a man going on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was attacked and beaten by robbers who left him by the side of the road half dead. Two other men came along the road. The first of them was a priest. That means he was one of the leading Jewish authorities of his time who worked in the Jerusalem temple. He sees the beaten man but passes by on the other side of the road without doing anything to help him. The second a man is a Levite, a sort of lay assistant to the priests, who also worked in the temple. Like the priest before him he too passes by the beaten man without doing anything to help him. Jesus rejects this behavior and affirms the actions of a Samaritan, that is, a non-Jew whom Jews were supposed to despise and avoid, who does all he can to help the beaten man.

We usually think that the priest and the Levite failed to help the beaten man simply because they were hard hearted and uncaring. The situation here is however considerably more complex than that. As officials of the Jerusalem temple the priest and the Levite believed that what God wanted from them was that they obey the laws of the holiness code at all times and in all circumstances. That law forbids contact with blood. It also forbids priests from coming in contact with or even being in the presence of a dead body. Luke tells us that the beaten man was half dead. We must assume that he was bloody and to all appearances could well have been or even probably was dead. The priest and the Levite knew what their law required of them. It required them to avoid all contact with a bloody, possibly dead body. So they passed by on the other side of the road leaving the poor victim of robbers to his fate. The priest and the Levite were trapped in the shadow side of the law. They let their behavior be dictated by a written regulation that they believed themselves bound to follow. So they failed to do what Spirit clearly would call them to do, namely, stop to do what they could to help the beaten man.

Thus it always is when we devote our lives exclusively to the law. The priest and the Levite of Jesus’ parable knew what the law said, and that’s all they cared about. They could not allow specific circumstances with which they were faced to temper their adherence to the law. Strict followers of law make the same mistake all the time. For example, there is a line in Leviticus that says that a man lying with a man as with a woman is an abomination. Leviticus 18:22. Generations of Christians, believing themselves to be bound by that law and thus by God to condemn all homosexual people, overlooked realities that would have been obvious to them had they just open their eyes and ears. They didn’t hear the explanations of homosexual people that their sexual orientation was not a choice but was an innate part of their personhood that they discovered in exactly the same way that heterosexual people discover their heterosexuality. They overlooked the fact that a great many homosexual people entered into committed, monogamous relationships that lasted a lifetime in the same way that many heterosexual people do. The law, they believed, calls homosexuality a sin, and that’s all there is to it. These Christians’ commitment to the law as they understood it led them to acts of prejudice, discrimination, and even violence against God's LGBTQ+ people. The law stopped them from being decent, humane people at least in this regard.

Strict adherence to secular law can lead people to inhumane beliefs and actions too. For example, in 1994 Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia stated that actual innocence of a crime for which a person has been convicted and sentenced to death does not make the execution of that person unconstitutional. In other words, Scalia asserted that newly discovered proof of the convicted person’s innocence of the crime for which he or she was convicted was not grounds for reversal of a death sentence. I oppose capital punishment in every case mostly on moral grounds, but I am also trained and experienced as a lawyer. When I heard of Scalia’s statement about innocence not being grounds for reversal of a death sentence I got it. It upset me that I got it, but I understood why Scalia would say such a thing. In the case before him the law and the judicial system had worked the way they’re supposed to work. The defendant had what the law considers to be a fair trial. His constitutional rights had not been violated. Therefore there was no legal reason to reverse the judgment of death that had been imposed upon him. From a purely legal perspective Scalia was absolutely right. From a moral perspective what he said is an outrage, bur from the legal perspective it is no such thing. Thus it often is with too strict a commitment to the law as the sole determiner of human thought and action. Morality and even common decency give way to a mechanical application of the law even when the law produces grossly immoral and indecent results.

Spirit has a shadow side too. When people commit their lives to living only as they believe Spirit has told them to live they far too often become untethered from standards of morality or even common decency in the same way that people do who have a one-sided commitment to law. The example of a spiritualistic sect from the history of Russian religion may be extreme, but I believe it makes the point. The sect I have in mind is called the Khlysty. They were known for their unrestricted sexual practices. In worship they would dance themselves into a frenzy, then fall to the floor and engage in orgiastic sexual acts. They believed that only a true sinner could truly repent of sin, so they came to see behavior that nearly everyone considered to be immoral in effect at least not to be immoral at all. They believed that all of this came from the Holy Spirit. Although they were nominally members of the Russian Orthodox Church they rejected all of the ritual practices of that church as well as its moral teachings. They chose instead to live as the believed Spirit inspired them to live without any counterbalancing legal restraint, a decision that led them to with utterly immoral actions.

The Khlysty are an extreme example of the dangers of an unbalanced commitment to Spirit, but that danger appears in less extreme forms as well. People who believe that they are living only by Spirit often end up estranged from their families and from society at large and living in unhealthy ways. Back in the 1960s many of the people called hippies believed that they were living the life of Spirit. Much of what they stood for was proper, peace and love in particular; but they became so detached from the necessary constraints of law that they lived sexually immoral lives and became isolated from all of human society other than their small group of hippie friends. Many of them consumed drugs that were not only illegal but more importantly were physically harmful and even fatal such as heroin and LSD. Many of their cultural icons died of drug overdoses, Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix being prime examples. In their commitment to the freedom and creativity they found in the life of Spirit they came unmoored from necessary restraints and ended up living self-centered, unproductive lives. Such is always the danger of too great a commitment to Spirit without law.

Thus there are great dangers in both the law and Spirit when we commit ourselves too completely to one and ignore or reject the other. As is true in so many areas of human life, wholeness and fulfillment of God’s call to us to be who God created us to be lie in maintaining a proper balance between conflicting values. The restrictions law imposes must be balanced with the freedom of Spirit. The freedom of Spirit must be balanced by the grounding of law. We humans need both order and freedom. We need both set limits and free creativity if we are to be who God created us to be. Religion properly understood and practiced can be an effective way of finding and living the balance that we need, but whether we are religious or not we have the same need for that balance. We must perform a never-ending balancing act. It’s not easy. We keep falling off to one side or the other, but it is the only way to be truly and fully who we really are.

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[1] This isn’t the place to get into the morass of Trinitarian theology. In that theology each of the three Persons of the Trinity both is what it is and is not what it is at the same time. Don’t worry about it.

[2] John 3:8. The connection between wind and Spirit is stronger in the Greek original of this verse than it is in English translation, for in Greek the word used here, pneuma, means both wind and spirit.

[3] In my own life the Spirit decided that what I really am is a Christian church pastor. It was right about that, but that I turned out to be a church pastor was so surprising and unexpected to me that it took me a long time and a lot of trouble to realize that the Spirit was right about me. Thus it often is with the Spirit.

Something is Seriously Wrong

 

Something is Seriously Wrong

October 27, 2020

This is the text of a post I just put on Facebook. It reflects a conclusion I have come to only recently, but it is a really important one.

Something is seriously wrong with the way this country is structured politically. A president who received fewer votes than his opponent and a majority of Senators who represent significantly fewer Americans than the minority just confirmed an extremist judge for the Supreme Court when something like 70% of the people wanted the next president to nominate a judge to fill that slot on the court. We claim to have representative government. We don't. We have citizens in small, conservative states dictating results that the majority of Americans do not want. It's way past time that that system change. American federalism may have made sense in the eighteenth century when it was created. It makes no sense today. I just wish there were any hope of changing it. Sadly, there isn't because at least many of those small, conservative states would have to approve it. They never will. Why would they vote to give up their power? They won't, and we'll all continue to suffer as a result.

Let's Hang the Bible

 

Let’s Hang the Bible

October 22, 2020

 

We Christians all know Jesus’ Great Commandment. It appears in each of the first three Gospels of the New Testament. Our oldest version of it is in Mark. There Jesus answers a question from a scribe, that is, a teacher of the law, about which commandment is first of all by saying,

 

The first is ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. Mark 12:29-31.

 

This oldest version of the Great Commandment explicitly ties it to the Shema, the creedal statement of Judaism. At Deuteronomy 6:4-5 we read, “Hear [Shema in Hebrew] O Israel, the Lord [Yahweh in Hebrew] is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jesus’ Jewish audience would immediately have recognized the first part of the Great Commandment as the basic statement of their faith.

Luke handles the Great Commandment a little differently. There we read that a lawyer, that is, an expert on Torah law, asked Jesus “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Luke 10:25. Jesus responds to this question with a question, something he did often that must have driven people nuts: “What is written in the Law? What do you read there?” The lawyer answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Luke 10:27. Jesus responds by saying, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” Luke 10:28. Luke’s version of the Great Commandment differs from Mark’s in that a lawyer speaks it rather than Jesus. Luke also leaves out “Hear, O Israel….” Otherwise the Great Commandment is the same in both Gospels.

I want here to focus on Matthew’s version of the Great Commandment because it includes an important line that the other two versions of it don’t have. At Matthew 22:34-40 we read:

 

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’[1]

 

It’s the last line of this passage that I find so important: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

To get at the significance of that line we need to start by understanding something that most Jews know but most Christians don’t. If you do please bear with me while I explain it for those who don’t. In the Jewish tradition the Hebrew Bible, which is also the Protestant Old Testament,[2] is said to consist of three distinct parts or types of writings. They are the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. The Law is the Torah law and consists of the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Prophets are the books with prophets names on them plus what scholars call the Deuteronomic history—Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. All the other books of the Hebrew Bible constitute the Bible’s third section, the Writings. Though the books of Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah have personal names Judaism does not consider them to be part of the Prophets and includes them in the Writings.

The first thing to notice about the line “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” is that it mentions two of the three major divisions of the Hebrew Bible, that is, the Law and the Prophets. The line clearly refers to some but not all of the books that are now part of the Hebrew Bible. The question arises of why the line does not mention the Writings. The answer is almost certainly that in the first century CE, that is, in the time of Jesus and the somewhat later writing of the four canonical Gospels, the Law and the Prophets had attained the status of holy scripture in Judaism, but the Writings had not. There is some disagreement among authorities on the question of when the Writings became canonical. At least one authority I saw put the date back as far as the fifth century BCE, a dating that is impossible because not all of the Writings had yet been written by that date. The Writings not having been canonical in the first century CE is a good explanation of Matthew’s mentioning the Law and Prophets but not the Writings. I accept that the Writings became canonical only later, probably in the third century CE.

We understand then that when Matthew’s Jesus says that the Law and the Prophets “hang” on the two parts of the Great Commandment he is saying that all of scripture hangs on them. For us, and in a partially different way for Jews today, scripture is more than the Law and the Prophets parts of the Hebrew Bible. Jews add the Writings to the Law and the Prophets. We Christians add the Writings too but also add the books of the New Testament to our Bibles. Yet there seems to be no reason why what Jesus says in Matthew about the Law and Prophets wouldn’t apply to those other documents as well. Jesus’ statement that the Law and the Prophets hang on the Great Commandment just becomes more meaningful for us when we understand that all scripture hangs on that Commandment as much as the parts of it that were canonical in the times of Jesus and Matthew.

Which brings us to the really crucial question here. What does it mean to say that all of scripture hangs on the Great Commandment of love? Some English translations of Matthew try to avoid that question by translating the Greek word used in the original of Matthew as “depend” rather than “hang,” although my Interlineal Translation of the Greek Scriptures which gives the Greek original along with a perfectly literal translation of it translates the Greek word here as “hangs” not “depends.” Yet perhaps the translation of the Greek as “depends” gives us a clue as to what hang means here. Just what could the word “hang” mean in this context? We are of course dealing with metaphor. Jesus wasn’t telling us to hang our Bibles up somewhere for storage when we put them down. So what does the image of one thing hanging on another thing convey about the relationship between the two things? The thing on which the other hangs is holding the other one up. When I hang a picture on the wall the hardware on which I hang the picture holds the picture up on the wall. If the hanger isn’t strong enough to hold up the weight of the picture the picture will come crashing down to the floor. A sufficient hanger permits the picture to function as a picture, that is, to stay up on the wall for people to look at. The hanger enables the picture to be what it really is and to fulfill its proper function as a picture.

Surely Jesus had that sort of relationship between two things in mind when he said that scripture hangs on the Great Commandment. The Great Commandment of love enables scripture to be what it really is and to function as it should function. Without hanging on the love of God, neighbor, and self all of scripture comes crashing down. It can’t be what it is supposed to be. It can’t function as it is supposed to function.

A couple of things I’ve learned from the Jewish faith help make the point clear. The great ancient Rabbi Hillel is said to have answered the question of the greatest commandment by saying “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary; go and learn it.” I have also heard that the ancient rabbis said that everything in the Bible is about love. If you read something there and cannot make it be about love you still have to work to do. I readily admit that I still have work to do, but I guess that’s beside the point. That scripture hangs on the Great Commandment of love of God, neighbor, and self means that the message of love of God, neighbor, and self is what scripture is all about. Detach scripture from love and it all collapses. Detach scripture form love and it becomes useless at best and destructive at worst when it breaks into sharp, shattered pieces.

So let’s be done with any reading of anything in the Bible as being about something other than love. Let’s be done with thinking that the Bible tells us to reject, condemn, or hate anyone. Let’s be done with reading the Bible as ever saying that some people are better than other people or that violence against any people is ever morally justified. All of those things violate the Great Commandment of love. Whenever we read anything in the Bible let’s view it through a lens of love. Not love as a feeling or a sentimental emotion but as the selfless, giving, even sacrificial love that we see in and learn from Jesus. That is what Jesus is telling us to do when he says that all of scripture hangs on love. Let’s make what Jesus says true for us and for our world. Let’s hang the Bible. Let’s hang it on love.

---

[1] This may be the place to explain something that’s going on here with the word rendered in the Great Commandment as Lord. In the Deuteronomy text I quoted the word is spelled in what are called small capital letters. It’s Lord not Lord. In many English translations including the NRSV I use here the word Lord, typed that way in small caps, is a rendering of the sacred Hebrew name of God usually rendered in English as Yahweh. The Shema could appropriately be translated “Hear O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone. You shall love Yahweh your God….” The Christian Gospels mean something different in their use of the word Lord, typed that way and not as Lord. They mean that God is our Lord in the sense of our ruler and guide. They don’t mean Yahweh. That doesn’t mean the Shema is wrong. Not at all. In the ancient Hebrew tradition Yahweh became synonymous with the one true God of all creation and was often called the people’s Lord.

[2] I say Protestant Old Testament rather than Christian Old Testament because while the Roman Catholic and other Christian versions of the Old Testament contain everything in the Protestant Old Testament they also contain books that are in neither the Hebrew Bible nor the Protestant Old Testament.

On Opening Our Eyes

 

On Opening Our Eyes

In the Christian Gospels there are several stories about Jesus curing blindness. It is I think his most common healing miracle. When John the Baptist sent disciples to Jesus to ask if Jesus were the one to come or if they should wait for another Jesus answers by describing what he has been doing. The first thing he mentions is “the blind receive their sight.” Matthew 11:5 NRSV. Many of my progressive Christian friends and colleagues have a hard time believing that Jesus actually made blind people see. I have no reason to deny that he did, but whether he did or not these stories of Jesus opening the eyes of the blind have another meaning that is far more important to us than is the claim that something good happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. Essentially every story in the Bible loses most of its meaning when we think of it simply as a statement of facts. Jesus giving sight to the blind is a perfect example of that truth. Jesus giving a blind person their sight, whether he actually ever did as a matter of fact or not, is a perfect metaphor for what Jesus can do for every one of us and indeed for the whole world.

When we take Jesus seriously, when we really listen to what he says, our eyes are opened metaphorically speaking to a whole new universe of reality, of truth and meaning. There are exceptions of course, but on the whole the world is for the most part occupied with and committed to so many wrong things. It values the material over the spiritual, wealth over personal integrity, violence over nonviolence, and war over peace (at least to judge by how often and how easily we go to war). It esteems what it calls success over moral and ethical responsibility, the individual over the common good, flamboyancy over honesty, and the showy over the decent. In so many ways the world just gets things wrong. It did in Jesus day. It does in ours. In so many ways the world is blind to what is good and true.

If we will let him Jesus can cure that blindness. He can open our eyes to God’s values and ways that are so different from and so much better than the values and ways of the world. Jesus lifts up spiritual values over material ones. He is the world’s greatest prophet of nonviolence. He call us to creative, assertive, but always nonviolent opposition to evil. He lifts up the poor and disabled and calls them the beloved children of God that they surely are. He condemned the rich, sometimes outright but always for the way they so often oppress and despise the poor. Jesus calls us to put our trust in God rather than in ourselves or anyone or anything else worldly. He praises those the world condemns and calls to do the same. He showed us and taught us that God always prefers substantive justice and compassion to pietistic delusions of moral perfection. He calls us to care for our neighbor as we care for ourselves, and he makes sure we know that everyone everywhere is our neighbor. Jesus’ teachings and actions stood his world on its head. They’d turn our world on its head too if we’d let them.

That’s what Jesus giving sight to the blind means for us. When we can literally give or restore sight to a blind person of course we should, provided that is that the blind person wants to see. For those of us who are not physically blind (and for those who are too) Jesus calls us to open our mental and spiritual eyes to the realities of the world and to the revolutionary vision of the way God calls the world to be that Jesus called the kingdom of God. We all need our metaphorical eyes opened in that way. So when we read the Gospels’ stories of Jesus giving sight to a blind person let’s understand that those stories aren’t just about something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. Let’s understand that they are about us too. Then let’s do the work of opening our own eyes to the ways our world is disordered and the ways God calls it to be. Then let’s get on with making it that way.

He's Not Our Savior

 

He’s Not Our Savior

October 14, 2020

 

The 2020 general election takes place three weeks from yesterday. People call it the most consequential election of our lifetimes, and I think that’s correct. It’s correct because the power duo of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell is so powerfully destructive. They have perhaps done more harm to our country than even Ronald Reagan did with his greed is good economic policies and his rampant militarism. They have continued Reagan’s benefit the rich, greed is good economic policies while destroying the environment and attempting to destroy the pathetically weak social safety net that’s all this country has. It’s not that the Democrats are all that good. They are nearly as beholden to big money as the Republicans are, though their tax policy isn’t nearly as bad a the GOP’s is. They won’t stand up for the universal, single-payer health insurance system that we so desperately need. They won’t adequately condemn and reduce the amount of our national wealth that we spend on the military and ever more efficient ways to kill people. They won’t repeal the cap on the amount of income on which Social Security and Medicare payments are made, another thing we desperately need to save those two indispensable programs. The list of the Democrats’ shortcomings goes on and on, and still the Republicans are so bad that the Democrats are our only real choice.

Psalm 146 says:

 

Do not put your trust in princes,

              in mortals in whom there is no

                             help. Psalm 146:3 NRSV

 

As I reread those lines recently I thought: We need to stop looking to Joe Biden as our savior. That really is how a lot of us have been thinking of him. We tell ourselves he will save us from Donald Trump. Indeed he may save us from Donald Trump, although that very much remains to be seen. The frightened, bigoted, ignorant American electorate made him president once. How certain can we be that they won’t do it again? What we forget in our desperation to be rid of Donald Trump is that Joe Biden is, like the rest of us, is one of Psalm 146’s mortals in whom there is no help. Yet of course I just said two contradictory things about Biden. I said that he may save us from Donald Trump and that he is a mortal in whom there is no help. Clearly I have some explaining to do.

How Biden can save us from Donald Trump is clear enough. Trump is a profoundly immoral man. Biden is or at least comes across as a truly decent one. He is a man of faith. As far as I know he has lived a moral life. He is a committed family man. He has lived through unspeakable tragedy in his family life, and it has not crushed or warped him. He has overcome the stuttering he had when he was younger, and he seems to have true empathy for people dealing with personal difficulties in their lives. He doesn’t treat women or anyone else as objects there only for his personal use as Donald Trump does. At the very least he would restore personal integrity and decency to the White House. His policy proposals are far from perfect, but they are orders of magnitude better than those of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.

So why shouldn’t we look to Joe Biden as our savior? There are I think two parts to the answer to that question. The first is that the conditions of our politics is up to us, the American people, not to Joe Biden or any other mere mortal. The second is that we have a true Savior, one who is immortal and never fails us the way Joe Biden and every other mere mortal, ourselves included, inevitably will. I’ll address these two reasons in that order.

Psalm 146 says of princes,

 

When their breath departs, they

                             return to the earth;

on that very day their plans perish. Psalm 146:4 NRSV

 

We of course do not have princes in the traditional sense of having rulers who inherit their position of power. We have public figures we elect to public office rather than princes, yet our elected officials are as mortal as any prince. They are mortal in two ways, one literal and one metaphorical. They inevitably die just like the rest of us. We’ve had presidents die in office, John Kennedy be the most recent and tragic example. When their mortal lives end so does their ability to be political leaders. They are truly literally mortal.

The way that our elected officials are metaphorically mortal is that their terms of office come to an end while they’re still alive. That end is written into the US Constitution for presidents. They may serve no more than two four-year terms. Some states have similar legal limitations on the terms of their governors and perhaps other state officials. Where there is no legal term limit our elections can act as term limits at least in theory. All of our politicians’ time in office ends one way or another. They are replaced by other politicians whose political perspective is often quite different from that of their predecessors. Exhibit A? Donald Trump succeeded Barack Obama. No politician’s policies last forever. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes it’s not, but it’s always true.

There is however a much more profound reason why we Christians should look neither to Joe Biden nor to any other mere mortal to save us. We have a real Savior who is radically different from any mere human being. Our Savior is Jesus Christ. He is immortal, eternal. He is not a mere human being though he lived among us as one of us some two thousand years ago. Yet even as Jesus of Nazareth he wasn’t merely human. He was God the Son Incarnate. Today he is always with us. He holds us always in love and grace. He forgives our failings and always calls us to newness of life, newness of purpose, newness of love. He rejoices with us when we rejoice, and he grieves with us when we grieve. Princes and other mortals always fail us. Jesus Christ never has and never will.

So let us not put our trust in princes, be they hereditary or elected. We may rescue ourselves from Donald Trump by electing Joe Biden president, but he will never save us. We Americans must save ourselves from the political morass we’ve gotten ourselves into, with God’s help of course. We are the ones who must overcome the twin scourges of racism and white supremacy. We must save our planet from the havoc we are wreaking on it. We must solve the crisis of homelessness. We must solve the gross inadequacies of our health insurance and educational systems. Joe Biden and the Democrats will do more to help us do that than Donald Trump and his destructive Republican minions ever will, but they are not our saviors. We have an eternal Savior. With his help perhaps we can save ourselves.

On the Supreme Court Deciding the Presidential Election

 

On the Supreme Court Deciding the Presidential Election

October 13, 2020

 

President Donald Trump has said, without any justification whatsoever, that the 2020 presidential election will be decided by the courts. The 2000 presidential election was decided by the US Supreme Court, although how it decided that election is often badly misunderstood. In a perfect world the courts would have nothing at all to do with elections. Elections in this country are conducted by the states or by a subdivision of a state like a county or a city. There are federal laws that apply to elections, most importantly the Voting Rights Act of 1965; but elections are primarily conducted by the states not by the federal government. In theory the legislatures of the states and the proper election officials have set up fair and effective election processes and procedures that function properly with no involvement of any court whatsoever. A court becomes involved in an election only if some person or entity that is a legal person (like perhaps a candidate’s campaign organization) believes that an election has been conducted in a way that in some particular violates applicable law. The applicable law would probably be the state law of the state where the election took place or the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. A person who believes that they have been disadvantaged by some improper aspect of an election may file a civil (i.e., not criminal) lawsuit in the appropriate court seeking some kind of judicial relief, probably an injunction against whatever it was that the court finds to have been improper. That’s how a court can become involved in deciding an election.

Courts of law exist primarily to do two things, determine the outcome of criminal cases and try civil cases to resolve non-criminal disputes between parties to a lawsuit. Such a lawsuit begins when someone with legal standing to do so files pleadings called a summons and complaint in the appropriate court. In the United States there are several different systems of courts with different jurisdictions that are authorized to hear different types of cases. The two basic and most important ones are the federal courts and state courts. Because President Trump has said that the 2020 presidential election will be decided by the US Supreme Court, we are concerned here with federal courts. The US Supreme Court is the highest of the federal courts. That statement by the president may actually mean nothing, but he did say it. So the question arises of just how the federal courts might become involved in the upcoming election.

To understand the role any federal court could play in deciding a presidential election we must first understand the particular types of cases a federal court may hear. The federal courts are what is called courts of limited jurisdiction. That means that they may hear only those types of cases which the US Constitution or other federal law specifies that they may hear. There are several different kinds of cases the law gives federal courts authority to hear, but the two most important are what is called diversity jurisdiction and what is called federal question jurisdiction. Diversity jurisdiction provides that the federal courts may hear civil cases between citizens of different states that are for the recovery of money in which the amount of money at issue exceeds $75,000.00. Diversity jurisdiction does not include cases between citizens of different states brought under state law for what is called injunctive relief, that is, a case in which the plaintiff wants the court to order another party either to do or not to do some specific thing. These cases do not fall under diversity jurisdiction because there is no amount of money at stake. A party to an election wishing to file a lawsuit in federal court alleging some improper action by state election officials would have to invoke a federal court’s federal question jurisdiction. In other words, they would have to raise a question of federal law rather than state law.

Both state and federal court system have different levels of courts. The basic court in both systems is usually referred to as the trial court. In the federal system the trial court is called  The United States District Court of some specified area. Where I live the federal trial court is the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington. A person with standing, that is, a person with the legal right to bring the lawsuit that person has brought, who wanted to base a lawsuit relating to an election in western Washington on a violation of federal law would file the case in the District Court for the Western District of Washington. There are two layers of federal courts above the District courts. The first level up from the District court is The United States Circuit Court of Appeals for a particular circuit. The country is divided up into several different circuits for the purposes of the Circuit Courts of Appeal. Where I live the relevant Circuit Court of Appeals is the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the Ninth Circuit being primarily the western part of the United States. The second level of court above the District courts is the United States Supreme Court. There is no appeal from a decision of the Supreme Court because there is no court above it in the system. Its decisions are binding on all other courts.

A party who thinks the District court has made some legal error in the party’s case that adversely affected that party may file an appeal. In the federal court system appeals are almost always filed in the relevant Circuit Court of Appeals. Every party has an absolute right to an appeal to the Circuit Court of Appeals, although that court may impose sanctions if a party has filed a frivolous appeal. A party to a case that has been heard on appeal in a Circuit Court of Appeals may ask the United States Supreme Court to review the case and reverse the decision of the Circuit Court of Appeals. There are different ways that a case may come before the Supreme Court, but the most common way is by what is called a petition for a writ of certiorari. If the Supreme Court does what lawyers always call granting cert the case comes before the highest federal court. In most cases whether or not the Supreme Court accepts review of a case is entirely within the discretion of the Supreme Court, though the Court has said many times what it considers to be aspects of a case that support granting cert such as an important question of federal law that affects a large number of people or where a case involves an important question of law that different Circuit Courts of Appeal have decided differently. Most petitions for cert are denied, which means that the decision of the Circuit Court of Appeals becomes the final decision in the case. The Supreme Court would almost certainly grant cert in a case about the presidential election because the outcome of the case would affect every American and would have to be decided quickly. On very rare occasions the Supreme Court may grant cert in a case directly from a trial court, bypassing the Circuit Court of Appeals. A case involving the election of a president might well be such a case because it would be a case for the same reasons that would lead the court to grant cert at all.

Appeals of trial court decisions almost always involve only questions of law not questions of fact. One of the primary roles of the trial court in the court system is to determine what the facts of a case are. An appellate court will virtually never change the trial court’s determination of the facts of the case. A simple example (that would be unlikely to come up in a federal case, but never mind) would be a traffic accident case in which the plaintiff says the stoplight was red and the defendant says the stoplight was green. If the outcome of the case depended in any part on the color of the stoplight that trial court would decide that issue. The decision of a question of fact like that would be decided by a jury if there was one or by the judge presiding over the trial if there was not. Unless there were no evidence in the record of the trial to support the court’s decision of that question of fact all appellate courts will accept the trial court’s finding as the facts of the case.

Appellate courts deal primarily with questions of the law applicable to the cases before them. It is often unclear just what law applies to a particular case or what a law that everyone recognizes applies to the case means when applied to the facts of the case. That’s what appellate courts decide. Some of decisions of the United States Supreme Court that determine important question of law are quite famous. Roe v. Wade is a classic example. In that case the US Supreme Court held that the United States Constitution guarantees a woman the right to an abortion. That holding is the decision of a question of law, the law being the Constitution and the question of law being whether a state may ban or restrict the medical procedure of an abortion to end a pregnancy. The Supreme Court held, roughly speaking, that it may not because of the provisions of the US Constitution. Most appellate cases, including those at the Supreme Court level, never get anywhere as well known as Roe v. Wade nor anywhere near as controversial. A decision in a case about the presidential would of course be well known and almost certainly controversial at least for a while.

In theory the Supreme Court would decide only the legal issues in the case that the parties to the case raise for the court’s consideration. In theory the Supreme Court’s role would be only to decide what the applicable law is and how it applies to the case before the Court. In theory the Justices’ personal political preferences would play no role in the case. It is, in theory, not legitimate for any court to decide any case on the basis of the judges’ political convictions or personal preferences. The court’s job is to determine what the law is and to apply it to the case before it. We all know, of course, that courts rarely  function that purely. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore the way it did because a majority of the justices wanted George W. Bush and not Al Gore to win the election.

That’s how it can go with legal appeals. Everyone involved knows how the system is supposed to work, and everyone involved knows that it often doesn’t work that way at all, although judges of course will rarely if ever admit that they did anything improper like decide a case on the basis of their personal preferences. The political preferences of the justices of the Supreme Court could become decisive if the outcome of the 2020 presidential election comes to depend on a decision by that court. Especially if Judge Barrett is confirmed by the time a case about the presidential election comes before the Court, which she almost certainly will be, the big conservative majority on the Court may well want Trump to win, and that desire may skew the outcome of the case. It’s not supposed to work that way, but often it does. Courts are human institutions, and judges are human beings. There’s nothing perfect about either the system or the judges. A Supreme Court decision about the presidential election doesn’t necessarily mean that the Court has overruled the voters, as the liberal media so often says it would. Still, this presidential election like all elections must be decided by the voters under proper and properly applied election law. That’s the only way the result can be legitimate. A legitimate result may or may not involve the Supreme Court. We can only hope and pray that whether it involves the Supreme Court of not it comes out that way it should under applicable law.

War is Madness

 

War is Madness

October 3, 2020

 

This evening I watched the film Lawrence of Arabia on Turner Classic Movies. I’d never seen more than bits and pieces of it before. It is a magnificent and apparently very expensive bit of filmmaking. It’s dramatic and disturbing images of the death and destruction of war have led me to this commentary on a truth I have known for a very long time. War is madness. War is insane. War is human failure at its worst. Von Clausewitz was wrong when he said war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means. No, war is the tragic and always avoidable consequence of the failure of diplomacy and other peacekeeping measures. War is nothing less than the failure of humanity to be human. It is always the abject failure of us humans to be the people God created us to be and calls us to be. I cannot condemn it strongly enough. War is human beings killing and maiming other human beings whom they don’t know and against whom they have nothing personal except the hyperbolic hatred generated not by the people you’re killing but by that failure of diplomacy and humanity that produced the war in the first place. There has to be a better way. There always is a better way if we’ll just act on it soon enough.

World War II is a perfect example of that truth. People say we had to fight to stop Hitler. Well, Hitler was indeed monstrously evil, and maybe things deteriorated to the point where we did (or at least most of the people thought we did) have to fight him, but we wouldn’t have had to fight him if the international community and the Germans themselves had taken him more seriously on. We wouldn’t have had to fight him if we humans hadn’t created a situation in Germany that he could exploit in his rise to power. We wouldn’t have had to fight him if the victorious nations in World War II had treated Germany fairly after the war rather than vent their irrational anger at the Germans in the Treaty of Versailles. We wouldn’t have had to fight him if world economies, our own here in the United States first of all, had been regulated well enough to prevent the irresponsible speculation that led to the financial collapse of 1929. That collapse made conditions in Germany, already bad because of the Treaty of Versailles, much worse. Hitler was just about finished in 1928. The Nazi Party performed very badly in the German national election that year. The collapse of 1929 revived his movement of hatred and by 1933 made him Chancellor of Germany. We wouldn’t have had to fight him if Christianity hadn’t been virulently and utterly irrationally anti-Jewish for centuries by the time Hitler came along, thereby preparing the seedbed from which the Holocaust grew. World War II really was as much a product of human failure as every other war has been.

War is human failure writ large. It results from the failure of humans to treat other humans with dignity and respect. It is the result of the human failure to be committed to the principles of Christian and other forms of nonviolence at all times and in all places. It is the product of human hatred, greed, and bigotry, all human failings that we should be able to avoid but don’t. It results from human failures to anticipate developments that could lead to war and heading them off before they reach that tragic end. War destroys precious human lives. That’s its methodology, and that’s its purpose. Armies exist to kill soldiers in other armies, and those armies exist to kill soldiers in ours. Military recruitment propaganda sometimes wants us to believe that what the military mostly does is rescue people from floods and wildfires. Soldiers may do some of that, but what they’re trained to do is kill other human beings either hand to hand to through ever increasingly more complex and effective technologies of destruction. I once heard and American soldier say on a TV newscast that his job was to kill people and blow up their stuff. A retired Marine officer told me once that the politicians tell the Marines who to kill, and the Marines go kill them. That’s what the military’s about. That’s what war is about. Death and destruction, destruction of human lives every bit as precious as the lives of the people doing the destroying.

We will never be the people God created and calls us to be until we stop making war. Until we stop fighting. Until we stop thinking that violence solves problems rather than just creates new ones. Until we overcome the hatred that seems to come so naturally to us. Until we start creating a world of restorative justice, the world Jesus called the kingdom of God, a world in which everyone has enough because no one has too much and everyone receives the care they deserve as children of God. Until re realize that opposing war doesn’t mean accepting evil, it just means opposing evil by nonviolent means. War is madness. War is failure. That’s all there is to it. Lord how I wish more of us understood that divine truth.