Today's Facebook Post

 I'm sorry, but this country is simply insane. Congress is about to take money away from poor, needy people like my twin brother so they can give more money to the fat cats who don't need it and most of whom don't give a damn about the rest of us. In Idaho, as I write, a madman is shooting at first responders in Coeur d'Alene and may have started the fire they were responding to so he could shoot at them. But gun control? Oh hell no! We can't do that! Well, like hell we can't, it's just that we won't. We've killed hundreds of innocent people in Iran, and that's just the most recent incident of our irresponsible use of our military. Save the environment? Hell no! That would cost money! Well again, like hell we can't do it, we just won't. End racism? Hell no! To do that we'd have admit that we white people are still racists and that racism is alive in our institutions. You can't expect us to do that! Admit we're not perfect? Hell no! We can't do that! Value people over profits? Hell no! That's not the capitalist way! Well, no it isn't, which is why this country must become less capitalist. This is the greatest country in the world! Well, like hell it is.

Am I A Literalist?

 

Am I A Literalist?

June 22, 2025

 

Those of you who have followed my writing about the Bible even a little bit know that I have criticized and deconstructed biblical literalism from many different angles. I consider it to be a deadly sin that will kill our great, ancient Christian faith if we can’t overcome it because it so out of touch with the cutting edge of our culture, with where that culture clearly is headed. I am not a literalist. I am not a biblical literalist, neither am I a literalist about any other Christian document or statement of faith. About that I have no doubt whatsoever.  So my answer to the question that is the title to this piece is: No, I am not a literalist.

Yet a friend and colleague of mine, with whom I do at least a little bit of Bible study nearly every week, has called me a literalist. Not to my face but apparently to others, perhaps including my wife. So I have to wonder: What is it about me that would cause him to call me that? What about my approach to the Christian faith could possibly seem literalistic? I’m so convinced that I am not a literalist that I’m not sure I can really answer that question, but I have given it a good deal of thought. So here are those thoughts, which may or may not actually answer the question of what about me could seem to be literalistic.

I’ll start by asking: What is a literalist? In other words, what, for our purposes, is biblical literalism? It is the belief that we must read everything in the Bible as literally correct. To put the matter in other but equally true terms, it is the belief that we must take everything in the Bible as factually correct. This belief is false in large part because it almost always rests upon the assumption that God wrote or at least directly inspired everything that is in the Bible. I won’t go into all the reasons why that assumption isn’t just wrong but is actually absurd. If you want to know, ready my book Liberating the Bible, especially the first volume of that book’s Revised Edition, which has the subtitle, Approaching the Bible. I’ll just say here that the Bible is so full of statements that are just factually false, and it is so full of obvious factual contradictions, that God can’t possibly have written it or even much inspired it.

Next I’ll present what I have been taught and believe is a foundational principle of biblical exegesis. The purpose of biblical exegesis is to understand the biblical passage one is considering. Exegesis means to bring out of. It doesn’t mean to read into.[1] And it perhaps is, and it certainly should be, obvious that to do exegesis of a biblical text you have to start with the text itself. Even when we read a biblical text in translation, which nearly all of us do nearly all of the time, we have to start with what the text actually says. With what the words of the text are. We cannot start with what we wish the words were. We cannot start with what we want to words to be. We cannot start with a meaning that we read into the words. We have to start with what the words of the text actually are.

And we have to start with what the words of the text actually mean. Now, knowing what the words of a biblical text actually mean can often be more difficult than we might assume it would be. After all, the biblical text were (almost all) written in either Hebrew or koine Greek, ancient languages that most of us, you humble author included, don’t know. We have to rely on our translations and on whatever we’ve learned about specific translation issues. Once we’ve taken any translation issues we know about into consideration, we can proceed with our exegesis relying on our translations.

We read what the words of our text actually are. Unless we’re doing it because we know of a specific translation issue, we read the translated words that we have just as we have them. We don’t replace them with words we prefer. We don’t replace them with words we wish were there, that we want to be there. What are the words of our text? What do they say? We have to know that before we move on.

Then, when we do move on, we must recognize that our text, whatever biblical text it may be, was written nineteen hundred or more, sometimes a lot more, years ago in and for cultures very different from ours. We must make an effort to understand what the words meant in their original context. We’re starting with the words, and those words weren’t written in a vacuum. They were written in and for the people of a particular time and place, the people of a particular culture. We need to understand what the words of our text meant in their original context before we ca move on.

Understanding our text in its original context isn’t always easy. Scholars spend lifetimes studying just small aspects of the ancient cultures that are the original contexts of every biblical passage. We non-scholars, ordained or not, don’t do that. We can’t. We don’t have the time. We don’t have the training. We have to rely on what we’ve been taught and what we’ve read about those cultures as we seek to understand our text in its historical context.

Sometimes a word, phrase, or passage will have meant something quite different in its original context than it means to us. A good example is the word “adultery” in the Ten Commandments. We all know that those Commandments prohibit adultery. See Exodus 10:14. What far too many of us don’t know is that “adultery” meant something quite different in ancient Israel than it means to us. Most of us take it to mean a married person having sex with someone other than their spouse. Some of us understand the word more strictly as meaning any sexual act outside of marriage.

That, however, is not what the word meant in ancient Israel. It is not what it meant, originally at least, in the Ten Commandments. In ancient Israel, only women were prohibited from having sex outside of their marriage, which was, of course if unfortunately, always to a man. Men were not prohibited from having sex either when they were not married or outside of their marriage.

The reason for this dichotomy had nothing to do with sexual morality as we understand it. It had to do with property rights. Property belonged to men not to women, perhaps with rare exceptions. Ancient Israeli culture put great emphasis on a man’s property passing to his biological offspring after his death. If a man’s wife had had sexual relations both with her husband and with someone other than her husband and become pregnant, the man would have no way to know if a child to whom his wife gave birth was his biological child or not. Therefore, married women were prohibited from having sex with anyone other than their husbands. That’s what adultery was, a married woman having sex with someone other than her husband. It is not what our culture means by the same word, by adultery. Yet, it seems, nearly no one in our culture is aware of the truth that that word originally meant something different in the Ten Commandments than it does in our culture today.

Which raises an important question about exegesis applied to this prohibition of adultery. Is it appropriate for us to apply our definition of adultery to that prohibition when we understand the word differently than the word’s author and its original audience did? I have long insisted that words can have meaning beyond what the author originally intended the words to mean. I have long understood that words can have an “excess of meaning,” that is, they can mean more than its author took them to mean. I have long insisted that we must allow the meanings of ancient texts to evolve as culture and language evolves. That’s post-modern hermeneutics in a nutshell. That’s what I was taught in seminary.

Yet as I write this post I’m struggling with that concept. I’m thinking: Really? It is supposed to be legitimate for me to read something written something like two thousand five hundred years ago as meaning something different today than it did way back then? I guess the answer to that question has to be yes, but for me it has to be a qualified yes. Perhaps it can be yes, but we can make words mean something different from their original meaning only if we truly understand that original meaning.

In the case of the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery, we must always remember that that prohibition had to do with property rights not sexual morality as we understand it. So in determining what, if anything, that ancient commandment means for us, we must begin by asking not about sexual morality but about property rights. We have to ask whether property rights have anything to do with sexual acts in our culture the way they did in the ancient culture of the Ten Commandments. The answer to that question, I think, is no, they do not. Even if one is concerned that a man’s property pass only to his biological offspring the way the ancient Hebrews were, we have DNA tests that can determine definitively who is a man’s biological offspring and who isn’t. Ancient Israel, of course, had no such thing. So the first thing we have to conclude about the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery is that its original reason for being in those commandments no longer applies to us.

So, does that make the commandment’s prohibition of adultery irrelevant to us? Well, not necessarily. The Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery, obviously, applies to sexual acts. And, of course, we all know that the morality vel non of sexual acts is a vital issue in the lives of us humans. Of course, we know that truth quite apart from the Bible. So I think the use we make of the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery is to understand what the prohibition meant in its original context and then to ask: What does a prohibition of adultery mean in our context? Adultery is about marital relations. In the context that produced the Ten Commandments, marital relations weren’t really about love. They were mostly about procreation and property rights. In our context, marital relations are different. They are, or at least we believe that they should be, about love.

And that change of context makes a huge difference in what the Bible’s prohibition of adultery means to us. In our context, adultery is a violation of the bonds of love. To us, adultery means, or at least I am convinced that it must mean, sexual relations that violate that bond. That bond may be expressed in a marriage or not, but the value of the bond of love is that it directs the people who have entered into it to be faithful to the person with whom they have done so and to conform their behavior to the terms of the commitment they have made to the other person. It follows that where there is no bond of love between the people engaged in a sexual act, and when neither of them has formed a bond of love with another person, the sexual acts between them are not adultery. Those acts may or may not be legal. They may or may not be moral; but, in any event, they are not adultery.

So, am I a literalist? No, I am not. I do insist that in seeking meaning for our lives in any biblical passage, we must first understand what the passage meant in its original context. We must understand what the words of the text really are not what we perhaps might wish them to be. Then we must remember that no biblical text arose in a context anything like ours except that the people of biblical times were every bit as human as we are. But while any text may have a surplus of meaning, it also has an original meaning. That meaning may be one the author intended, or it may be one we must assume the text’s original audience would have found in it whether that was the author’s intended meaning or not.

We cannot legitimately go reading any meaning we want into a text. Every text has its own integrity, and any meaning-making we do with the text must understand and respect that integrity. We may draw a meaning from the text that its author never intended, but we can do that legitimately only if we can truly assert that the text means something in our context different from what it meant in its original context. That’s what I have done with the example of the Bible’s prohibition on adultery in this piece.

Perhaps it will help if I give another example of what I mean. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples to love one another. John 13:34. In its original context, the words the gospel attributes to Jesus applied only to Jesus’ inner circle of disciples, the people he was talking to when he spoke the commandment. The context of this verse is that it was told from and to a very small, insecure, an perhaps persecuted group of Christians. Clearly, those Christians had to love one another if their community and their faith were to survive at all.

Christians today are not a very small, insecure, and perhaps persecuted group. Christianity is, rather, the largest faith tradition in the world, and it has been that for a very long time. It doesn’t exist only in small communities in the Roman Empire the way it did when John was written. It exists everywhere in the world. It doesn’t exist almost exclusively in one culture the way it did in John’s time. It exists in every culture there is in the world. Jesus’ directive to his disciples to love one another is still important inside Christian communities, but the changed context in which we read it today gives the directive a much broader meaning. The “one another” the author of John had in mind was the Johanine Christian community. To us, “one another” must mean everyone. Everyone in the world. I have heard this verse quoted for that meaning many times, though I have never seen an exegesis other than my own that explains how it came to have this meaning that is so much broader than its author ever intended. To read this verse as saying “love everyone” is legitimate even though that’s not what it originally meant. It has a surplus of meaning. It can mean more than its author intended, and to us indeed it does.

So, I’ll ask once again: Am I a literalist? No, I am not. I am, however, professionally trained in both history and ministry. When I was writing things that were history only I had no interest in considering whether an historical text I was working with could have a meaning for me and my world other than the one it had for its author, though I suppose some of them could have that surplus of meaning. Doing that is not the historian’s job. It is, or at least in many circumstances it can be, the Christian minister’s job. Yet the minister’s job when doing exegesis must begin where the historian’s job both begins and ends. It must begin with the text itself. It must always respect the integrity of the text. No one doing exegesis of a biblical text can ever legitimately make it mean something totally unrelated to the text itself. If you’re going to do that, just write your own text. Don’t do it an call it legitimate biblical exegesis. It isn’t.

So no, I am not a literalist. I do insist on staying closer to any biblical text one is considering than many of my clergy colleagues do. I object to reading any meaning into a text that is simply unrelated to the words of the text. I don’t go in for speculation about things we might want to know about a story that the story doesn’t tell us. I consider such speculation to be a waste of time. No. I am not a literalist. I just respect biblical texts more than many of my liberal/progressive Christian colleagues do, something for which I have no intention of apologizing.

 

---

[1] Reading something into a biblical passage that isn’t actually there is called “isogesis,” something any decent biblical scholar will always seek to avoid.

On Juneteenth

 This is a post I put on Facebook today, June 19, 2025. It's short for a blog post, but I think it's important enough to post nonetheless.

Juneteenth is almost over for this year as I write, but it is still worth commenting on. Black Americans have celebrated it for a long time, but it became a federal holiday only recently. It is a day to celebrate and thank God for the liberation of millions of Americans from chattel slavery. Slavery was by no means the only one, but it was by far the most brutal, unjust, and sinful manifestation of America's original sin of racism. Juneteenth reminds us that it took a civil war to end slavery. Donald Trump, who is minimizing Juneteenth as much as he can, reminds us that we still have a long way to go to overcome racism. Today let us acknowledge the progress we've made in improving race relations in this country, but, more importantly, let us recognize how much work we still have to do. Then let's keep doing it, perhaps in part by making sure that the racist Donald Trump never succeeds in his effort to turn this country fascist and turn the clock to the bad old days after northern Democrats abandoned the South to southern racists and the US Supreme Court tragically and wrongly said that "separate but equal" does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Sound of Sheer Silence

 

The Sound of Sheer Silence

A Sermon for liberatingchirstianity.blogspot.com

June 17, 2025

Decades ago, when I was an attorney-at-law, a voice from deep within me told me that what I really am is a "preacher." I've come to believe that what I really am is a pastor, but preaching has been a big part of my pastoral work. I don't get to do it much anymore. So, I thought I'd try the practice of writing sermons for this blog using texts from the Revised Common Lectionary. Here's the first of them. 

Scripture: 1 Kings 19:1-4, 7-15a

 

It really is a very strange story. Elijah, supposedly the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, the one Jews expect to return before the coming of the Messiah, the one for whom they leave an empty chair at the Seder meal, is running for his life. He has good reason to be fleeing. He has just spent a fair amount of time in Israel, the northern of the two Hebrew kingdoms at the time, prophesying against the evil king Ahab and his evil wife Jezebel. In the process he killed 450 prophets of Baal. She Jezebel vowed to kill him, so he runs. He runs south and eventually ends up at Mount Horeb, another name for Mount Sinai, in the wilderness of the Sinai peninsula. He’s gotten some help on the way, but he is clearly still in despair  or at least is still very frightened. When he gets to the mountain, the Lord, that is, Yahweh, asks him what he is doing there. So Elijah gives a little speech. He says:

 

I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed the prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away. 1 Kings 19:10.

 

I guess Elijah didn’t equate what he did to the prophets of Baal to what the Israelites supposedly did to the prophets of Yahweh but never mind. The Lord doesn’t take Elijah’s life away. Instead, he tells him to go stand on the mountain because he, God, is about to pass by.

Then we come to the part of this story that is important for our purposes here. Three normally natural phenomena take place. First there is a great wind, but the Lord was not in the wind. Then there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. Then there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. All of these natural disasters were followed by “a sound of sheer silence.” That phrase is more famously translated as “a still, small voice,” but I’ll work with “a sound of sheer silence.”

Once again a voice, presumably that of Yahweh, asks Elijah what he’s doing there. Elijah replies:

 

I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed the prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away. 1 Kings 19:14.

 

In other words, Elijah has no other, no new, words. He answers God’s question the second time exactly as he had answered God’s same question the first time. Word for word.

What can we learn from this story? The key to the lesson for today is in the phrase “the sound of sheer silence.” Now, that’s an oxymoron, or, perhaps better, a paradox, a contradiction in terms, isn’t it? Our text says there was sound, but sheer silence has no sound. That’s why it’s silence. So how can there be a “sound of sheer silence?”

Well, I’ll say first of all that all profound truth in faith comes from paradoxes, things that can’t be true but are true. The Trinity is perhaps the main one. It says God is Three and One at the same time, which doesn’t make a lick of sense. It is, nonetheless, profoundly true. Moreover, I, and a great many other people, have experienced the sound of sheer silence. I’ll share my story of hearing it with you.

I used to be a lawyer. I burned out on law pretty badly. I was convinced that there was something else I was supposed to be doing, but I had no idea what it was. Then, the Roman Catholic university near where I lived opened its School of Theology and Ministry to Protestant students. That meant I could go there and earn a fully accredited Master of Divinity degree, the degree my denomination required for ordination at the time. (Don’t get me started on what it’s done since.) No one told me to go do it. I didn’t hear a voice tell me to go do it. Yet somehow I knew deep in my soul that doing it was what I was supposed to do. I couldn’t have told you how I knew. I couldn’t have told you why I was supposed to do the work and spend the money to get an MDiv. I just knew in the marrow of my bones that that was what I was supposed to do, what I had to do.

So I did it. I earned the degree, and in March of 2002 I got my first call as a parish pastor. I was ordained in the United Church of Christ in June 2002. Here’s the strange thing: The moment I walked into my church’s office as the church’s called pastor, I just knew that I was already a better pastor than I had ever been a lawyer, not that I was all that bad a lawyer. Tragically, my first wife was dying of cancer at that time, but while she was still well enough to understand and express ideas, she said to me: “I am so glad you finally are who you really are.” It turned out that, indeed, what I truly am is a pastor. Somehow, God had spoken to me in silence. My discernment around going to seminary had nothing to do with anything audible, yet I know that God was speaking to me in silence. I got it.

Elijah didn’t. In the story we’re considering, God asks Elijah twice what he’s doing there on Mount Horeb. God asks once before the natural phenomenon the story describes and once after they had occurred. Then we get what the text calls a sound of sheer silence. Elijah responds to God’s question of why he’s there exactly the same way both times. His responses are word for word the same. He pretty clearly didn’t get it. He didn’t discern God’s call, what God was trying to say to him, in the sheer silence the way I discerned my call to parish ministry.

Why did Elijah and I react so differently to God’s call? All I can do is speculate, but here’s what seems to me to be the answer to that question. I was open to God’s call. It’s not that it came at a quiet, peaceful time of my life. Far from it. But I knew there was something other than practice law that I was supposed to be doing. I was willing and able to hear a call in sheer silence. Elijah wasn’t, but it’s not hard to understand why not. He was running for his life. The wife of the king of Israel had sworn to kill him. He’d had to flee quite some distance from Israel, and he probably still didn’t feel safe. He had asked God essentially to kill him because he felt himself a failure. There was, it seems to me, so much noise in Elijah’s mind and spirit that he couldn’t hear God calling him. God has eventually to say something to Elijah out loud.

There’s a lesson there for us today. God’s primary way of communicating with us is to communicate in silence. To communicate in a way that is beyond human ability and is beyond human understanding. It’s not surprising that that’s how God prefers to communicate with us most of the time. After all, as Isaiah says, God’s ways are not our ways. See Isaiah 55:8. Elijah’s mental and spiritual turmoil shut out God speaking to him in sheer silence, and it’s horribly easy for us to do the same.

To hear God speaking to us in sheer silence two things must be true for us. The first is that we must be open to hearing God in silence. It is so easy for us to shut God out. Most of us do it most of the time. We go about our lives as though God were not going through them with us, or at least I know that I do that far too often; and I know that nearly everyone else does too. If you’re not one who does it, count your blessings. But we won’t hear God say something to us in silence if we don’t believe that God ever does that and if we’re not open to hearing God speak in silence, and most people don’t and aren’t.

Second, we must be silent. Silent both externally and internally. Nearly all Christian church people I know don’t like silence. I used to build a couple of moments of silence into my worship services, but I knew I had to keep them short because my people really didn’t like them. Most other church services I’ve experienced don’t put silence in them at all. We Americans are very bad at silence, and that is most unfortunate. The great mystics of every faith tradition know the value of silence. Practitioners of some eastern religions, and a few practitioners of Christianity, spend a great deal of time in silence. If we want to hear God talk, we’ve got to shut up. We have still our physical voices, and we have to still that voice in our heads that, it seems, never goes still on its own.

Doing both physical and mental silence well takes practice. That’s why practicing some sort of meditation regularly is so important, for in meditation the whole point is to silence one’s mind. Like with nearly anything else, the more one practices silence, the better one becomes at it. Which doesn’t mean it’s easy, for most of us, after all, when we meditate, are working to overcome a lifetime of noise both external and internal. For some of us, the lifetime we’ve lived has been very long by human standards. For others it is shorter, but for all of us it has been filled with noise. God speaks in the sound of sheer silence. It is so easy not to hear God, and it is so important to do so. So, let’s be silent and listen for God, shall we? May it be so.

On Our Fascist Rulers

 Donald Trump, the convicted felon fascist guilty of sedition against this country, in thrall to his uber-fascist advisor Stephen Miller, has set out to deport every "illegal" in this country. Never mind that doing so would bring American agriculture to its knees. Never mind that doing so would bring the American construction industry to its knees. They ignore, or deny, the truth that our contemptible immigration laws are in place not to continue the American tradition of welcoming people from other parts of the country who come here seeking a better life but to bar the gates and keep what is "ours" ours, the rest of the world be damned. Never mind that everyone who is here without proper documentation is still constitutionally entitled to due process of law. Never mind that no president has ever nationalized the National Guard for the purpose of suppressing people's constitutional rights, both those the ICE detains and those who protest ICE's unconstitutional actions and has done so without the consent of the governor of the state in which the president has nationalized the Guard. (Kennedy did it without the consent of racist southern governors to protect civil rights not to enforce violation of them.) 

How are we to understand what's happening in our country? Here's how. Look at what Hitler did toward Germany's Jews right after he came to power in early 1933. There were actually very few Jews living in Germany. They were not the cause of any of Germany's problems. Yes, some of them were successful in business, academics, the arts, and other areas of human endeavor, but that was a good thing not a bad one, for these good people had found ways to use their abilities for their own good and for the good of their country. 

Now, translate what Hitler did into an American context. Trump surely knows that using the Jews for his fascist purposes wouldn't work in this country. But using immigrants in the same way just might. It is, after all, true that there are a lot of people present in this country without proper immigration documentation. It is also true that a great many of them are people of color whose native language is not English. Attacking "illegals" plays into American racism and xenophobia. Those great sins of American culture will assist Trump in his effort to because an authoritarian fascist ruler. Trump hasn't actually enacted new laws against America's immigrants the way Hitler did against Germany's Jews, but he hasn't had to. He can use the bad law we've got, and he can ignore and violate the good, constitutional law we've got, to accomplish what he wants basically with the law be damned if it gets in his way. Trump's tactics aren't exactly like Hitler's, but that's not because he isn't trying to do the same thing Hitler did. It's because Trump is operating in an American context not a 1930s German one.

One thing is certain. Trump doesn't really give a good God damn about people being here illegally. Legality has never meant anything to him. It does matter to him that most of the people he attacks aren't white and aren't native English speakers. But mostly what matters to him is that he can use immigrants and Americans' bigoted fear and dislike of them to advance his goal of becoming an un-democratic dictator just as Hitler used Germany's (and Poland's and Hungary's and Austria's) historical anti-Judaism to advance his goal of becoming an un-democratic fascist dictator. 

That's what he's doing, folks. We have to stop him. I wish I know how to bring the entire federal government to a screeching halt to force him to knock it off, though of course I don't. And I will never advocate violence as to way to make him stop. But we need to start, nonviolently, throwing sticks into the spokes of the federal government. Trump will bring American agriculture to its knees if he can, though that may be a consequence of what he's doing that he isn't smart enough to see. We need to bring the federal government to its knees--nonviolently of course. Doing it would get lots of well-intentioned people arrested and attacked. It would provoke violence on the part of American fascists the way the nonviolent civil rights movement provoked violence from American racists. 

So be it. Something has to be done and waiting for the next off-term and presidential elections isn't enough. Trump's actions call for massive, nonviolent civil disobedience. It's the only solution we have. I'm a writer and a speaker not a protestor. I'm 78 years old, and I must confess that I almost certainly won't do anything to get myself attacked or arrested. But civil disobedience is what we need. I just hope and pray that enough Americans will do it to stop the American fascist Donald Trump from destroying our country.