The Ten Commandments? Really?

The Ten Commandments: Really?

Republican voters in Alabama have nominated Roy Moore, twice deposed former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, as their candidate to fill the vacancy in the United States Senate created when Jeff Sessions became US Attorney General. He will face a Democratic opponent in November; but Alabama hasn’t elected a Democratic US senator in roughly forever, so it is a virtual certainty that Moore will become Jeff Sessions’ replacement in the upper chamber of our federal legislature. Moore first came to notoriety and was first removed from the state supreme court because he refused to obey an order from a federal court that he remove an installation featuring the Ten Commandments from state property. Moore is but the latest right wing Christian who has insisted that the Ten Commandments should be displayed in courthouses all over the country. Displaying them on public property is beyond any shadow of a doubt a violation of the Anti-Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. I certainly object to displaying them on public property on those grounds, and I’ll come back to that objection at the end of this piece. There is however another question about the Ten Commandments. When we really understand what they are and what they say (as opposed to what we may have been told that they are and what they say or that we may want them to be or to say) it becomes clear that they are hardly the infallible guide to moral behavior that their advocates seem to think that they are. I want to share here an analysis of some of the Ten Commandments (similar to the one I included in my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians). Perhaps if we better understand what the Ten Commandments are and what they say we won’t even have to get to the constitutional arguments before we will strongly oppose posting them in any courthouse.

The Ten Commandments are found first at Exodus 20:1-17.¹ Exodus says that Moses has been up on the mountain communing with God. He comes back down with the law that the people’s god Yahweh has given him. He begins to share that law with the people. Jewish tradition gives the total number of laws that Moses got from Yahweh as 613. The Ten Commandments are the first ten of those laws. To understand them we must first of all understand them in their historical context. When we do we see that some of the commandments don’t really say what we think they say because we don’t read them carefully and others don’t say what we think they say because words didn’t mean the same thing in the commandments’ original context as they do today. So let’s look at some of them and see what we can find.

The first of the Ten Commandments is one of the most misunderstood. It reads: “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20:2-3² The way the word Lord is printed here tells us that the Hebrew original is the four letter name of God that we usually transliterate as Yahweh. In the very early stages of the Hebrew people’s understanding of God Yahweh was their tribal war god. We see that understanding of Yahweh a little bit earlier in Exodus in what we call Miriam’s Song. At Exodus chapter 15 the people have just successfully escaped the pursuing Egyptians through God’s trick of parting the Red Sea, then closing it down on the Egyptian army. At Exodus 15:20-21 we read:

Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing And Miriam sang to them:

‘Sing to the Lord, for he has

triumphed gloriously

horse and rider he has thrown

into the sea.’

In these lines, which may be the oldest preserved bit of oral tradition in the Bible, Yahweh, rendered here as “the Lord,” is clearly a war god. He is the god who has fought the people’s battle against the Egyptians and won it. He is not necessarily more than a war god here. In any event, he is the god of the Hebrew people who has liberated them from Egypt by drowning all of pharaoh’s soldiers.

Yahweh as the god who freed the people from Egypt appears at the beginning of the Ten Commandments too. The Ten Commandments begin: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”³Christians invariably take this commandment as containing a statement of strict monotheism. We read “you shall have no other gods” as “there are no other gods,” and we pretty much overlook the phrase “before me.” Yet this sentence clearly is not a statement of monotheism. So far from denying the reality of gods besides Yahweh it clearly assumes it. It doesn’t say “there are no other gods.” It says “you,” that is, you Hebrews, shall have no other gods before Yahweh. The text would hardly bother telling the people not to have other gods if it assumed there were no other gods. It would say there are no other gods, but it doesn’t. The first of the Ten Commandments is a statement not of monotheism but of henotheism. Henotheism is a belief about the gods that says there are lots of gods. In fact, it accepts that every people has their own gods and goddesses. Henotheism says not that there are no other gods but that a particular people shall have only one god. Let the others have their gods, it says; we have only one. In the case of the Hebrews that one was Yahweh. Does Roy Moore or any other Christian today want to put a statement of henotheism in their courthouses? I assume not. They want to put the Ten Commandments in courthouses in part because they erroneously assume that the first commandment is a statement of monotheism. It isn’t.

We run into another big problem with the Ten Commandments in the next commandment, the prohibition of idolatry. At Exodus 20:4 we read that the people shall not make for themselves an idol that looks like anything on earth. The next verses, Exodus 20:5-6, read:

You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Does Roy Moore or anyone else believe that God punishes the children of wrongdoers through three and four generations though the people of those generations may have done nothing at all to offend God? I doubt it. Even if an extremist like Moore does, surely most American Christians and other Americans don’t. Does Roy Moore or anyone else believe that God is unaffected by the sin of persons of subsequent generations descended from a person who was faithful to God? I doubt it. Even if an extremist like Moore does, surely most American Christians don’t. The text of Exodus 20:5-6 expresses an ancient understanding of generational responsibility for wrongdoing, an understanding that the Bible itself reverses later on. See for example Ezekiel 18:1-4. Does Moore or anyone else really want that understanding on display in the local courthouse? I doubt it, for it simply isn’t our contemporary understanding of how God works.

Now let’s turn to Exodus 20:14: “You shall not commit adultery.” Now, I think, or at least I like to think, that all Christians and most other people believe that adultery is a bad thing (although of course it is no longer illegal under our secular law). Yet there is a hidden problem with the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery. The problem is that in the ancient Hebrew world in and for which the Ten Commandments were written adultery didn’t mean what it means to most of us today. Today to commit adultery is usually understood as being having sexual intercourse with anyone to whom one is not married. At the very least it is a married person having sexual intercourse with a person other than the person’s spouse. Both women and men can commit adultery in our understanding of the term. In the ancient Hebrew world adultery was understood much more narrowly. Adultery was only the act of a man having sexual intercourse with a woman who was married to another man. A sexual act was adultery only if the woman were married to a man other than the one with whom she had sexual intercourse. The reason for this understanding of adultery was clear enough. It had nothing to do with sexual morality per se. It didn’t even have to do with marital fidelity in anything like our sense of that virtue. It had to do with property rights. A man could be sure that a child born to his wife was really his child only if his wife never had intercourse with anyone but him. If she had sex with another man a child born to her might not be her husband’s at all. If the child were not his, his family estate would pass to someone not of his family, something the ancient Hebrew world considered to be a great evil. That’s what the Ten Commandments’ prohibition of adultery was trying to prevent. That certainly is not why we consider adultery to be immoral today, but it is why the Ten Commandments consider adultery to be immoral.

The last of the Ten Commandments also bears some consideration. It reads: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Certainly coveting things that belong to your neighbor is a negative thing. This commandment against such coveting could work to reduce tensions and hostility within a community. But look at one thing that this commandment takes for granted. It says you shall not covet your neighbor’s “male or female slave.” The Ten Commandments take the existence and acceptability of slavery for granted. Indeed, nowhere does the Bible condemn slavery other than the slavery of the Hebrew people in Egypt. In this day and age we all (or nearly all) see slavery as an abomination, as profoundly unjust and immoral. Today we see the earlier existence of slavery in our country as something of which to be ashamed. Some of us think it is something for which we should still make reparations to the descendants of the slaves. In today’s America, where we generally reject slavery but in which racism and white supremacy are still very much with us, do we want to put an ancient document that takes slavery for granted up in our courthouses? I trust not. I sure don’t.

It is clear then I think that one problem with the Ten Commandments is that we often misunderstand them because they were written in and for a culture so different from ours. Yet even if we assume that most of the people who saw the Ten Commandments displayed in a courthouse wouldn’t understand that reality about them, putting them up in public, governmental structures is still quite obviously illegal. Roy Moore refused to recognize that truth when a federal court told him to take them down from the Alabama Supreme Court building. Yet the federal court that ordered him to so was clearly legally correct. Putting the Ten Commandments up in a courthouse is illegal first of all because a courthouse is a governmental structure. The courts are part of our system of government. They are operated for the benefit of all Americans by institutions that belong to all Americans. Because courthouses are governmental installations, the First Amendment of the United States Constitution applies to them. The First Amendment has within it what we call the “Anti-Establishment Clause.” It reads: “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion.” That provision of the First Amendment applies to the states through the operation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Now admittedly, the Anti-Establishment Clause doesn’t seem to say much. Yet all Constitutional provisions become effective and gain their meaning from the ways the federal courts interpret and apply them. The federal courts have long held that the Anti-Establishment Clause means that no governmental agency may do anything that privileges one religion over another or that privileges religion over non-religion. So the only way that the First Amendment would not prohibit displaying the Ten Commandments in a courthouse would be if the Ten Commandments were not a religious document.

Yet of course the Ten Commandments are a religious document. They come from two of the books of Hebrew scripture that are part of the Torah, the most sacred texts of Judaism. Because long ago Christianity adopted Hebrew scripture as Christian scripture, they are also part of the sacred texts of the Christian religion. They appear nowhere except in the parts of the Bible that are sacred to both Christians and Jews. For many of us that means that we must treat them with great respect and deference, and I trust that I do even though I don’t accept all of them as still valid. It also means, however, that the Ten Commandments are undeniably a religious text. That the notions they express are shared by many of the world’s other religious traditions besides Judaism and Christianity is beside the point. Similar passages that might be found, say, in the Koran would also be religious texts. It would be illegal to post them in a courthouse too. Even putting up similar texts from several different faith traditions would not solve the problem, for those text too would be religious texts. The Ten Commandments are religious in their very nature. They come from sacred scripture. They talk about God. There simply is no way that putting them up in a courthouse could comply with the First Amendment of the US Constitution or with similar provisions in many state constitutions.

I could object to the idea that morality consists only of obeying the Ten Commandments on other grounds as well, but I trust the point is made. The Ten Commandments are not the pure statement of good morals that people like Roy Moore take them to be. Putting them up in any public facility violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution. So let’s be done with this nonsense about putting them in courthouses, shall we? And let’s be done with people like Roy Moore who refuse to recognize the obvious truth that putting them up there is illegal. Let’s be done with people like Roy Moore who claim to be state court judges, who take an oath of office as a state court judge, then refuse to obey directives from a federal court on a matter of federal law. Moore didn’t deserve to serve on the Alabama State Supreme Court. He doesn’t deserve to serve in the US Senate either.

1They appear in virtually the same form again at Deuteronomy 5:1-22. The differences between the two versions of the Ten Commandments are not significant for our purposes.

2The scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version bible, copyright (c) 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

3Exodus 20:2-3

On Racism and White Privilege

On Racism and White Privilege

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

August, 2017

I’m not happy that I have to say this, but some conversations I’ve had recently at First Congregational Church of Maltby as well as things I’ve heard in the public media convince me that a great many white Americans simply do not understand the breadth and depth of racism among us, nor do they understand the wide-ranging effects of the white privilege they all have even if they are unaware of it. So I am going to attempt here to state some basic truths about racism and white privilege in the United States of America. Only when we white Americans become more aware of and sensitive to the racism and white privilege that pervades every aspect of American life will we have any possibility of overcoming them and creating the society of which Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed, a society in which all people truly are judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.

It almost sounds like a cliché to me today, but racism is America’s original sin. Those words sound like a cliché to me today, but for most of my life I probably wouldn’t even have understood what they meant. I grew up and was educated in a mostly white, mostly middle class culture in Eugene, Oregon. There were very few Black people in the Eugene-Springfield metropolitan area as I was growing up there in the 1950s and early 1960s. My father was a history professor at the University of Oregon, and there were always some people of color around the university, mostly if not quite exclusively from foreign countries. There were a few Black students at South Eugene High School when I was there (class of 1964), but few if any of us whites knew them or had anything to do with them. My education began in the public schools of Eugene. Yes, we were taught American history—sort of; but the racism prevalent throughout American history was hardly mentioned. We were taught that the Civil War was about slavery, and the South was on the wrong side of that issue. Yet when South Eugene High School played its annual football game against North Eugene High School we played the South. Someone dressed in a Confederate uniform and carrying a Confederate battle flag would ride a horse around the field, and we would all cheer. That we were cheering for symbols of racism, slavery, and white supremacy never occurred to us, but of course we were. I once began a sermon on American racism with the line “I was lied to.” I was lied to mostly by silence. No one told us that Washington and Jefferson were slave owners and that Jefferson fathered children by one of his slaves, a women who had no say in the matter whatsoever. We enjoyed Black entertainers. We listened to Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr., and no one told us that they were not allowed to stay in the Las Vegas hotels where they performed. I received a typical white education, one that paid next to no attention to the horrors of white discrimination against Black Americans and never once hinted at the truth that white Americans committed genocide against Native Americans. That racism is America’s original sin didn’t sound like a cliché to me then. It wasn’t even a truth that I ever heard.

Consider for a moment the issues of race and slavery in the founding of our nation. In 1776 slavery was legal in all thirteen American colonies. It was far more prevalent in the southern colonies than in the northern ones, but it existed everywhere. Although not all Black people were slaves, all people who were enslaved were Black. They were Africans or the descendants of Africans forcibly brought here against their will under horrific circumstances under which many of the abducted people died before ever reaching America. Washington and Jefferson were slave owners, but so were many others of the so-called founding fathers. When our forbears drafted the US Constitution a few years after they achieved independence from Britain the issue of slavery came up, but not whether or not to abolish it. The issue was only whether or not Black Americans should be counted for purposes of determining representation in the House of Representatives, where a the number of a state’s representatives was and is based on population numbers. The southern slave owners of course wanted them counted, for if they were the South would be much more heavily represented in Congress than if they weren’t. Some Northerners objected, perhaps because they objected to slavery but also because they said that since slaves weren’t really citizens and couldn’t own property or vote they shouldn’t be counted at all. The solution the framers reached was a compromise. Each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of determining Congressional representation. This provision was repealed by the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War, perhaps only because after the Civil War there would be no slaves, so the provision was moot. Still, Blacks as less than fully human was written into our Constitution at the very beginning.

It is only in recent years that I have begun to learn something of the horrors of American slavery. People who were slaves simply weren’t people. They were property. They had no human rights that their owners had to respect. They could be beaten at will. They could not marry. They could not own property. It was often illegal to teach them to read and write. Slave owners did not have to respect slave families, and families were regularly torn apart when some member was sold to and taken away by another owner. It wasn’t just in the South that Blacks had no rights. In 1850 the US Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Act, which said not only that any escaped slave who was apprehended was to be returned to her or his owner but also that people everywhere in the country were legally obligated to cooperate in the enforcement of that law. In 1857, in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, the US Supreme Court held that any “Negro,” whether free or enslaved, whose ancestors had been imported into the US and sold as slaves could not be citizens of the United States and had no standing to bring suit in federal court. Yes, in those years and earlier there was a significant abolitionist movement in the north. Most abolitionists were Christians, but then most slave owners claimed to be Christians too. Yet the abolitionist movement never succeeded in abolishing slavery in the south. That happened only after the Civil War, four years of brutal slaughter in which more Americans died than in any other American war, a ghastly statistic that is still true today.

After the Civil War slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. During the period known as Reconstruction Blacks in the south had a freedom they had never had before. Some of them were elected to positions in state government and even became US Representatives and Senators. Yet even during Reconstruction the conditions of life for the former slaves were hardly easy. They had been freed, but they had not been given the “40 acres and a mule” that so many of them had hoped they would receive. The racism in southern whites was if anything made worse by their resentment over having lost their “property,” their former slaves. In 1876 the Democrats agreed to the disputed election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as President in exchange for a promise by the Republicans to withdraw federal troops from the former Confederate states and to end the policies of Reconstruction. Thus began the era of the “solid South,” when southern whites supported Democratic candidates because the Democrats had become the party of segregation. Blacks were excluded from public life. “Jim Crow” laws were passed in all the southern states that sought to enforce through legal means a strict separation of the races. Blacks were denied access to public services and to white businesses. Lynching of Black people, mostly but not exclusively men, became common. A Black man could be lynched simply for looking at a white woman, and many were. Schools were segregated, and Black students suffered in schools that were wholly, and intentionally, inadequate. In 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the US Supreme Court upheld Jim Crow laws under the specious reasoning that separate could be and presumably was equal. That hateful doctrine was overturned only in 1954 by the case of Brown v. Board of Education.

There were no Jim Crow laws in the north, but the north was hardly free from racial prejudice. Northern cities became strictly segregated. There were white parts of town and Black parts of town. Banks practiced “red lining,” the practice of refusing to give home purchase mortgage loans to Blacks seeking to move into white areas. Residential neighborhoods were segregated, and public school attendance was based on neighborhoods. Thus in the north there came to be white schools and Black schools nearly as exclusively as in the south even though there were no Jim Crow laws. Racial discrimination in housing, public services, and education may not have been legally mandated in the north; but it was perfectly legal, and it was nearly universally practiced. In American law people are free to make any decision they want on any basis they want, including a discriminatory one, unless some law provides otherwise. In the United States before 1964, there were no national laws prohibiting racial discrimination in housing, employment, or the provision of public services (although some states had such laws by then), and such discrimination was the nearly universal rule not the exception.

Throughout American history, then, whiteness has been considered the human norm. White Americans have seen Blackness as somehow deviant, a departure from the human norm, and therefore inferior. Most of us white Americans don’t like to admit that that’s how it has been with our country, but our reluctance to admit it does nothing to impair the validity of the statement. We are even less comfortable admitting that that is how we see things ourselves, yet here’s an uncomfortable truth all of us white Americans must face. We grew up and were educated in a racist culture, and we have not escaped the effects of that racist culture. Virtually all of us are racists. That doesn’t mean we hate Black people. It doesn’t mean we think discrimination against Black people is a good thing. Statistics are hard to come by and are probably unreliable, but most of us don’t think those things any more. Yet our opposition to acts of racism doesn’t mean we aren’t racists. To see if you’re a racist, don’t look at the political positions you adopt. Be honest about your first, gut reactions when you see a person of a different race, for us whites especially a Black man or woman. Do you immediately think less of that person because of her or his skin color? We have to honest in answering that question. We have to answer it yes even if we immediately become aware that our negative reaction to a person’s skin color is wrong and we are quite prepared to overcome it in our dealings with that person. The truth of the matter is that very few of us do not have that reaction. That’s because we grew up in a culture that has always said and still says in so many ways that Blacks are inferior. We whites have been conditioned by our culture to be racists, to think that it is better to be white than to be anything else. We simply must admit that truth. We will never truly overcome racism until we do.

Moreover, in a racist culture that considers white to be the human norm and Black to be a negative deviation from the norm, white privilege exists. Each and every one of us white people has it. That most of us are unaware that we have it doesn’t mean we don’t have it. We do, and we will never overcome it until we get a whole lot more honest than we have been about having it. White privilege is the ability to go through life without having to worry about how the dominant culture sees you because of your skin color. White privilege is not having to be substantially better than every other applicant to get a job for which both Black and white people have applied. White privilege is not needing affirmative action to get you into a good university. White privilege is not having landlords from whom you wish to rent an apartment give you obviously specious reasons for not renting to you when you know the real reason is your race. White privilege is having a legal system that systematically if not always consciously treats you better than it treats a Black person in the same circumstances. White privilege is not having had to grow up in a culture that makes you less just because you aren’t white. White privilege is not having to to be afraid every time a police car drives by. White privilege is not having to train your children to be afraid of the police and how to act to avoid unwarranted police attention or harassment. The manifestations of white privilege are numerous, and we white people enjoy them all the time without even thinking about them. For a long list of instances where white privilege is in play see http://www.antiracistalliance.com/Unpacking.html.

I know very few white people who are truly aware of the privilege they carry with them every minute of their lives in our racist society. Because we don’t see our privilege we don’t see how deep-seated racism is in our culture. Because we don’t see our privilege we don’t have a clue about what it means to live without that privilege. We blithely tell ourselves that we don’t hate people of color, so we convince ourselves that we aren’t racists.

We probably aren’t being totally honest with ourselves when we tell ourselves that we aren’t racists, but even if we are honest when we say it we do not deal with the institutional racism that pervades American life. Institutional racism is racism that is seen not in individual acts of discrimination but in the racially disproportionate results American institutions produce. The easiest instance of institutional racism to see is the case of the criminal justice system. Blacks consistently receive harsher punishments than whites for the same crimes. As a result, Blacks disproportionately populate our prisons. The juries who convict Blacks of crimes surely don’t think of themselves as racist. Most of the judges who determine sentences probably don’t either, yet the racially disparate results of the court system are undeniable. That’s institutional racism. It exists in our courts to be sure, but it exists in most of the systems of our society. It exists in employment. It exists in education. It exists in health care. It exists in housing. Until we white Americans become much more aware of the evils of institutional racism among us we will never overcome those evils.

So we live in a society that was formed in racism and that has lived with racism ever since. Yes, we passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yes, we passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, although the Supreme Court not too long ago took most of the teeth out of that one on the false premise that racial discrimination in voter registration and districting no longer exists among us. American society is racist to the core, and we white Americans benefit from that racism every day. Our first task is to become aware that we do. Only then can we begin to dismantle white privilege and move toward a truly equal society.

The Gospel of Justice

This is a sermon I wrote on Saturday, August 19, 2017. I didn't give it at my church. I had another one that still spoke of justice but that I thought fit my congregation better than this one would. Here it is, for your consideration.

The Gospel of Justice

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

August 20, 2017

Scripture: Matthew 25:31-46

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

The issue of justice is always before us as Christians. There simply is no doubt about that. Jesus was more about justice than he was about anything else. We claim to be Christians. We claim to be followers of Jesus. Well, if we’re really going to be followers of Jesus we need to speak up and stand up for justice. The Romans didn’t execute Jesus because his death was part of some great cosmic albeit brutal plan of God. The Romans executed Jesus because he lead a justice movement. He called his vision “the kingdom of God.” The kingdom. Not the country club of God. Not even the community of God or the fellowship of God. He called it the kingdom of God, and the word kingdom is nothing if it is not political. The world in which Jesus lived and worked was organized into kingdoms. Some of them were so big they were called empires, but an empire is just an oversized kingdom. God’s kingdom is about nothing if it is not about justice. God’s kingdom is a vision of how God wants the world to be structured and run. It’s about this world, not some other world. It’s about the world restructured to be grounded in justice for all, not privilege for some and oppression for others. Today the fundamental justice issue of American life stands before us in the bright light of recent events. That issue is racism. Racists held a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Some of them wore Nazi insignia. All of them advocated white supremacy. They came ready for violence. Right wing extremists always resort to violence. They are violent people. A crowd of peaceful people showed up to demonstrate for love and justice against those apostles of supremacy and hate. Those apostles of hate got what they wanted. There was violence. One of them rammed a vehicle into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators and killed a woman who was committing the egregious sin of walking across the street.

The racists had gathered to protest the removal of a confederate statue, a statue honoring one who was a traitor to the United States in the cause of slavery. Advocates of white supremacy put up statues like that one throughout the Confederate states during the days when Jim Crow was the law of the land; and they did it to say to Black people we rule you, we’re superior to you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Everyone in that crowd was a racist. Everyone in that crowd wanted whites to be supreme in our land and Blacks to be oppressed. They want to return to the days of Jim Crow or even to the days of slavery. They were a racist rabble intent on causing nothing but trouble. Again, there simply is no doubt about that.

And the President of the United States said that there were good people among them. No, Mister President, there weren’t. No good people advocate what that mob advocated. People who support what that mob advocated are not good people. They are engaged in evil even if they themselves are not violent. The reaction against Trump’s remarks has been swift and strong, even among some members of Trump’s own political party. That is a very good thing. But most of those racists in Charlottesville claim to be Christians. Most racists throughout our country claim to be Christians. They’re not. In their hatred of many of God’s children they betray everything that Jesus came to teach us, everything Jesus stood for and stands for. So we who truly are Christians must speak up. We must speak out. We must stand up for justice against the evil some baptize with the sacred word Christian.

I have a new hero these days. His name is The Rev. Dr. William Barber. Rev. Dr. Barber is the pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Goldsboro, North Carolina. He heads an organization named “Repairers of the Breach” which advocates a progressive political agenda grounded in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Rev. Dr. Barber is the most powerful Christian voice for justice in our land today. He is not a politician. He is a preacher. He is a pastor. He has the potential to become today’s Martin Luther King. He is ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). That’s not the denomination of my church, nor is it mine. But my United Church of Christ is closely allied with the Disciples, and as one who holds ordained ministerial standing in the UCC I also have a kind of standing in the Disciples. Rev. Dr Barber makes me proud to be a Christian. He makes me proud to be a member of a denomination closely aligned with his.

I saw Rev. Dr. Barber again on the MSNBC program “AM Joy” yesterday. In his remarks on that program he said we must be concerned not only with statues but the statutes. We must demonstrate against Confederate statues and the evil they represent, but we must also work against statutes that take away voting rights and that perpetuate poverty and discrimination. In his remarks he referred to the Judgment of the Nations parable in Matthew, and he said something important about it. It is not individuals who get separated into the sheep and the goats, into those who cared for the needy and those who did not. It is the nations that get separated that way. That text says “all the nations” will be gathered before the risen Christ as judge, not all people individually. I have always called that text the constitution of Christian social justice work. Rev. Dr. Barber called it an “evangelical” text, and I suppose it is; but mostly it is a justice text. In it Christ says “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” And “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” NIV The great judgment of the nations scene calls all Christians to the work of justice. It calls us first to the work of charity, the work of feeding the hungry and housing the homeless. But it also calls us to the work of justice, the work of dismantling social, economic, and political structures that keep people hungry and homeless. That deprive people of education and medical care. That depend on there being a large number of poor people so that a small number of people can be immensely rich. The events of recent days force us to decide: Are we with the blessed sheep? Or are we with the condemned goats?

Our world and our faith put that choice before us, and to decline to make a choice is itself a choice. It is a choice to stand on the side of the goats. It is a decision to stand on the side of the racists. Racism is the American norm. To say nothing is to support it. To say nothing is to let it stand as the American norm, to remain the American norm. Silence perpetuates the cultural norm. Silence props up racism. Silence props up economic disparity and cultural oppression. And yes, I know. Many of you don’t want to hear that. I don’t much want to hear it myself. Life would be so much easier if it were not true. But it is true, and people not wanting to hear it doesn’t make it false. It remains true whether we want to hear it or not.

The choice between justice and injustice is always before us. Today it is before us as sharply and forcefully as it has ever been. The highest elected official in our land refuses to denounce racism unequivocally. He starts to, then goes off script and says the violence in Charlottesville came from “many sides.” We cannot read his remarks as saying anything other than there is a moral equivalence of the haters and the lovers, the racists and the those who resist racism, the advocates of oppression and the advocates of justice. I know you don’t want to hear politics from the pulpit, but in times like these we Christians truly have no choice to be prophets of justice. Jesus, our crucified and risen Lord and Savior ,was a prophet of justice. He picked up the voice of the ancient Jewish prophets of justice—Isaiah, Amos, and Micah—and proclaimed their truth—God’s truth—to the powers of his time. As Christians we must proclaim God’s truth to the powers of our time. I have written my Congresswoman. Have you? I have spoken out in every public forum I have, limited as those are. Have you?

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not only about justice. It is also about peace both in the world and in our souls. It is about salvation, although it sees salvation mostly as something that happens in this life not some next life. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not only about justice, but it is most definitely also about justice. Our Bible tells us that God created women and men. It doesn’t say God created different races of people. In the Bible people of all nations come to the house of the Lord in Jerusalem. In the Bible both Greeks and Jews are saved. Eunuchs are blessed. Women are disciples. The downtrodden are lifted up and their oppressors are condemned. In the Bible prophets demand justice for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. In the Bible rulers act in their own interest not in the interest of the people, and the prophets damn them for it.

Folks, our country today is sliding back into the worst of our history, into racism and racial discrimination. It doesn’t have to be that way. People like us, ordinary and without great power as we are, can be part of reversing that slide. This isn’t a partisan issue. Both Republicans and Democrats have been appalled by our President’s remarks. That’s probably because Christians are both Republicans and Democrats. Rev. Dr. William Barber and so many other voices of justice, both Christian and non-Christian, call us to heed the better angels of our national character. The Gospel of Jesus Christ demands no less. So what are we going to do about it? Amen.

America 1933

This is a slightly edited repost of an essay I wrote not long after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. In light of Trump's recent rant in which he called neo-Nazis and other white supremacists simply decent people lawfully demonstrating, I'm reporting it here. Some of the specifics have changed since i wrote this essay. Trump is now President, not President-Elect. I haven't heard more about a Muslim registry. Those changes however don't change the substance or the truth of the text. Today even more clearly than in November of last year we are living in America 1933.

The American fascist Donald Trump is President-Elect of the United States of America. Next January he will succeed Barack Obama in the highest office in our land. I have already expressed my anger and rage at that result in this blog, but I can’t stop being affected by it. Today one parallel in particular won’t leave my mind. It is the parallel, or at least the possible parallel, between Germany on February 8, 1933, nine days after Hitler became Chancellor, and the United States of America today, nine days after Donald Trump was made President-Elect. Of course I know that the parallel isn’t perfect. I am a professionally trained historian, so I get it that there are never perfect parallels between different places and different times. Still, one recent bit of really bad news out of a band of right-wing zealots Trump is installing around him is that they are planning to create a “registry” of American Muslims. I don’t know if the Nazi’s first act against Germany’s Jews was a registry, but it wasn’t the death camps. Those came later. They came as the logical conclusion of a policy of hatred and discrimination that began much more innocently. When I heard about Trump’s proposed registry of Muslims my first thought was: What’s next? Yellow crescents? If you don’t get that, go look up the yellow Stars of David the Nazis forced Jews to wear. In February, 1933, Germany was just starting to deal with Hitler and the Nazis. In November, 2016, we are just starting to deal with Trump and his followers.

Some people know how I have reacted to the election of Donald Trump as president. Readers of this blog know. And people say to me: Give him a chance. We don’t know yet what he’ll do. Get over it, we’ve had bad presidents before. And I think: Is that what the Germans who didn’t like Hitler should have said in February, 1933? Should they have said don’t worry, the worst won’t happen? Of course not. Part of the problem was that far too many Germans said things precisely like that. There’s a powerful scene in the movie version of the musical Cabaret. The setting is an outdoor German beer garden on a beautiful day somewhere outside Berlin. Ordinary Germans of different ages are sitting peacefully enjoying the sunshine and good German beer or white wine. A young man stands up. He’s wearing a Nazi uniform of some sort. He is the model of supposed Aryan racial perfection, tall, blond, and handsome. He starts to sing in a beautiful, trained high tenor voice. One by one the people in the beer garden stand and sing with him. First the young, then nearly everyone. As he ends his song he gives the Nazi salute. His song has a refrain:

O Fatherland, Fatherland, give us a sign.

Your children are waiting to see.

A future will come when the world is mine.

Tomorrow belongs to me.

Only one old man remains seated. He drops his head in despair. The English character Brian says to the German character who is with him witnessing the scene “Do you still think you can control them?” The German character shrugs his shoulders and drives away. We know what happened. We know decent people didn’t control them. World War II happened. Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau happened. Stalingrad and the blockade of Leningrad happened. D-day and the Battle of the Bulge happened. Does tomorrow belong to Trump and the right-wing, racist fringe in our country? To the so-called alt-right? To the KKK? To the deniers of climate change? Will we just shrug our shoulders and drive away? Will we get over it? Will we give him a chance like the Germans gave Hitler a chance? I can only pray that we won’t.

I don’t think Trump and his band will create an American Auschwitz for Muslims. I don’t think they’re that bad, but I do know that one of Trump’s people cited the internment camps for Japanese Americans at the beginning of World War II as a precedent for a registry of Muslims today. I do know that Trump has said we should ban all immigration by Muslims. I know that he considers all Muslims to be suspect because there are terrorists who say they are Muslims regardless of how badly they violate the basic tenets of that faith. I know that Trump has called immigrants from Mexico rapists and murderers. I know that he scapegoats Muslims and immigrants much the way Hitler scapegoated Jews. And I’m supposed to get over it? I’m supposed to give him a chance? I’m supposed to think it won’t be that bad?

I’ve heard all of that, and to all of that I shout a loud and vehement No! No, now is not the time to get over it. Now is not the time to give this American fascist we’ve elected a chance. Now is the time to work to prevent the worst, not just to sit around thinking the worst won’t happen. I’ve said before in this blog that now is the time for anger and rage. It is, and it is time to turn our anger and our rage into action. I don’t know yet what action (although as a Christian I am convinced it must be nonviolent action), but it sure seems that we are America 1933. We are where Germany was at the beginning of Nazi rule. No, I don’t think Trump is as bad as Hitler; but Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons. Hitler didn’t have a planet on the brink of irreversible climate change. Trump does. He may not be as bad as Hitler, but his potential for causing irreparable damage to God’s earth and her people is far greater than Hitler’s was. So America, wake up. It’s 1933.

The Spirit of the Republican Party

The Spirit of the Republican Party: A Study in Demonic Power

Institutions have spirits every bit as much as individual humans do. They have at their core an invisible spiritual nature that both controls and expresses their innate character. St. Paul knew that truth well. He spoke of the spirit of institutions using words like “the powers.” See, for example, Romans 8:38-39. For a brilliant modern examination of the spirits that rule the earth and its institutions see Walter Wink’s three volumes Naming the Powers, Unmasking the Powers, and Engaging the Powers.¹ An institution’s spirit, that is, its “power” in Paul’s and Wink’s sense of the word, not only governs the institution, it endures over time. That’s why an institution tends to continue to function as it has before or changes the way it functions only very slowly even when the people who make up the institution change. It’s why institutions often do things collectively that the people who make them up would never do individually. Wink gives us an important mantra about the powers, about the spirit of institutions. It goes: The powers are created good, the powers are fallen, the powers can be redeemed. All of us who work in the church, I think, have experienced how hard it is to introduce change into a church. Introducing change in a church or other institution is hard because the institution has its own power. It has its spirit, invisible but powerful, that works always to maintain the institution’s status quo. Institutions resist change because the spirit or power of institutions resist change. Their resistance to change is an expression of the fallen nature of their power.

Because they are creatures every bit as much as human beings are, the spirit of an institution is at least fallible. That’s what Wink means when he says the institutions are fallen. They are apt to function in ways other than the way God created them to function. To the extent that they do that we can say that they are demonic. Demonic here means that a power is functioning in a distorted, fallen, or even evil way. We often think that demonic means possessed by a demon. The certainly is what the concept means in the Bible. Possessed by a demon is a proper way to think of a power being demonic as long as we understand that “possessed by a demon” is a metaphor, not something to be taken literally. For example, large corporations often do things that are harmful to the people who work in them. Say a corporation is laying off a large number of employees and moving its operations to Mexico or China because labor is so much cheaper in Mexico or China than it is in the US. We decry the harmful effect of the corporation’s decision on its employees, their families, and the places where they live and work. The corporation’s response is likely to be “It’s just business.” Yes, it is business; but more significantly it is a corporation operating according to its demonic spirit. It is acting in a way that is harmful to people. The CEO of the corporation would never intentionally harm an employee in his or her personal interactions with the employee, but the corporation harms a great many employees and others who depend on them with no qualms of conscience. That’s because the corporation is operating according to its spirit, its power, and its spirit is demonic, fallen.

Like any other institution the Republican Party of the United States has its spirit, its power, and the spirit of the Republican Party today is almost entirely demonic. The demonic nature of the party’s spirit is seen in the destructive things for which it stands, which it advocates, and which it tries to enshrine in federal law. Here are just a few of the demonic things that the spirit of the Republican Party and/or some of its prominent representatives stand for:

1. Taking health insurance away from millions of Americans.
2. Giving tax breaks to wealthy individuals and corporations and cutting benefits to ordinary people to to it.
3. Destroying the environment by repealing or refusing to enforce environmental regulations and essentially destroying the Environmental Protection Agency.
4. Increasing spending on the military, already by far the most powerful military in the world.
5. Refusing entry into the country to refugees, would-be immigrants, temporary workers, people seeking medical treatment, and students from Muslim countries on the specious claim that they are a security threat.
6. Demeaning the Muslim faith as inherently violent.
7. Building an immensely expensive and utterly ineffective wall along the Mexican border to keep out people who actually are a vital part of our economy.
8. Destroying the American system of public education by advocating so-called charter schools that have the effect of diverting funds from schools for underprivileged areas and maintaining white privilege.
9. Demeaning and discriminating against people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
10. Turning federally protected land, including national monuments, over to rapacious private developers.
11. Nominating the American fascist Donald Trump as the party’s candidate for President.
12. Creating a culture in which truth is simply irrelevant.

This list could I suppose go on and on, but I trust the point is made. All of these positions of the Republican Party are harmful to people and to God’s earth.

The Republican Party wasn’t always as demonic as it is today. There used to be far more decent Republican politicians than there are today. In my own home state of Oregon we had Republicans like Governor Tom McCall and Senator Mark Hatfield who were reasonable men who advocated many reasonable policies. My adopted state of Washington had Governor Dan Evans, another decent man who was also a Republican politician. I didn’t agree with any of these men on all issues, but they rarely advocated policies as evil as those the Republican Party stands for today. None of them would be at home in today’s Republican Party.

What happened? How did the Republican Party become as demonic as it is today? I’m not sure I can answer that question fully, but I can point to when the change started. It started in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan as President. Some of Reagan’s policies actually weren’t as demonic as those advocated by the Republican Party today, but Reagan started the Party on the path of tax cuts for the wealthy and a reduction of governmental services for ordinary people and people in need. Reagan’s domestic motto could have been “Greed is good.” His foreign policy motto could have been “America first an an enormous military to keep it first.” Many Americans love Reagan because they say he made them proud to be Americans again. I am ashamed that we made him President of the United States. He was a mentally dull B actor with no real qualifications to be President, and he started the Republican Party down a road that has now led us to the American fascist Donald Trump.

The Republican Party has sold its soul to big money interests and benighted social conservatives who think Christianity is mostly about hating people who aren’t like them. It happily sacrifices the wellbeing of people in need to give money to enormously wealthy people who hardly need more money. It does that only because those people give money to Republican candidates. It nominated Trump for President, a man with no sense even of common decency, much less any higher moral standards. When Trump became President I wrote these words to the song My Country ‘Tis of Thee:

My country ‘tis of thee,

Dear land that used to be,

Of thee I sing.

Thou has betrayed thyself,

Sold out to fear and wealth,

Stored thy best values on the shelf,

Tears of sorrow sting.

That is what the demonic spirit of the Republican Party has produced. Pain at what has become of our country. Sorrow at the loss of our better values.

Wink insisted that fallen powers can be redeemed. As a Christian he could take no other position on the matter. I’m a Christian too, and I do believe in redemption and resurrection. Still, the demonic spirit of the Republican Party has become so strong among us that it is hard to feel anything but despair today. Can the Republican Party be redeemed? Can America be redeemed? I hope so, but hope is hard to cling to these days. There are a few signs of hope. Three courageous Republican Senators (Collins, Murkowski, and McCain) just stopped the Republican Party from depriving millions of Americans of health insurance. Trump’s approval ratings hover around 36% or so. It is appalling that over one third of Americans approve of him, but at least most Americans don’t. Maybe in the 2018 Congressional election and the 2020 Congressional and Presidential election our people will rise up, stand for what is right, and remove the Republicans from power. I hope that we will. I pray that we will, but the demonic power of the Republican Party is strong among us. And by the way, it’s not that the Democrats are perfect. Far from it. They have their demons too. Yet the problem with the Republicans is not about individual politicians. It is about a demonic spirit. Demonic spirits are exorcised (that’s a metaphor again) by discernment of the truth, starting with the reality of a demonic possession followed by a turning to what is right, what is true. I pray that the Republican Party will undertake that process of discernment and return to its better angels. Until is does, we must pray for redemption and consistently reject the Republican Party, its representatives, and its policies.

1For a shorter version of Wink’s work written for a more popular audience see his The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium, Doubleday, New York, 1998.

A Challenging Reading Ahead

A Challenging Read Ahead

An Introduction for the Maltby Congregational 9 am Group

to

Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium

By the Author

The Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson, Pastor

You have told me that you want to read my book Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium. I will be happy to walk you through that first published book of mine. I continue to be convinced that it is one of the best things ever written on contemporary Christian theology. If that statement is insufficiently humble, forgive me. I am quite proud of this book. I think it is really important. I hope that you will find it at least interesting if not always convincing.

 Before we start reading Liberating Christianity I want to make sure that you have some idea of what you’ll find within its pages. This book is not an easy read for most people who either do not have an advanced formal education in Christian theology or who have not educated themselves in that field through extensive reading of the right kind of literature. I don’t mean to suggest that you can’t understand it. I’m sure you can. It may just take a bit of effort and patience on your part. Some church people have told me that they find the book liberating in the ways I hoped it would be when I first wrote it in the fall of 2006. More church people have told me that they find the book challenging. One common comment is that a person has had to read each paragraph several times in order to understand it. So here for your consideration is an introduction to the book and some of the challenges it presents. This is not the “Introduction” from the book, although some of what I will say here is found there as well.

First of all there is an issue of the language and style of the book. Liberating Christianity is more academic in tone than is my other book you know about, Liberating the Bible. The language is often a bit terse. One criticism I have today of what I wrote back in 2006 is that some statements are made, then not developed or explained as well as they might be. As I wrote the book I always struggled with the question of who the audience for the book was supposed to be. Was it supposed to be the lay people of the church? Or seminarians? Or academic theologians? All of those groups? The language of the book is perhaps not as accessible as it would have been had I written it more specifically for the lay people of the church. It is not as accessible as is the language of Liberating the Bible, a book I did write specifically for the lay people of the church. I hope the book’s somewhat academic nature won’t put you off.

Just what is the content of this book? Why did I write it? Liberating Christianity is my attempt to do a couple of things. One purpose of the book was for me to think through, clarify for myself, and write down my most basic understandings of the Christian faith. On one level the book is my confession of faith. I wrote it over ten years ago, but my understanding of the faith has not changed in any fundamental way in the interim. On another level the book is my attempt to make Christianity accessible and understandable for people of our time and place who find Christianity as they have understood it unacceptable. The book is thus an exercise in the theology of “apologetics,” the field of theology that works to speak Christian truth to its particular context.

 In addition to those aspects of my task in writing the book, I wrote it in an effort take Christian theology for church people deeper than Marcus Borg ever did. I wrote the book in part because I think that Borg, while useful and widely read, is philosophically superficial. In calling Borg superficial I mean that he does not explicitly ground his ideas in the most basic aspects of human thought, that is, he never gets to the level of philosophy, more specifically to the level of ontology and epistemology. Ontology is the study of what is real. It considers the foundational level of being. It asks: What is? What is not? What does it mean to say that the physical world, or anything else, is real? Ontology asks what seems to some a silly question, namely, what does it mean to say that something is? Actually, that question is not silly at all. Most any human intellectual endeavor is an attempt to discuss what is real, what exists, what is. Therefore most any intellectual endeavor requires an understanding of the basic nature of reality if it is to be grounded at the deepest level. Here’s an example of what I mean. Is only the material, the physical, real? Does only the material, the physical exist? Or is there something beyond the material, the physical? If so, just what is it that is real but that is beyond the material? Those are questions of ontology.

Epistemology is the study not of what is real but of how we know anything at all, including our knowledge of what is real. What are the processes of human knowledge? How do we know what is real? Does human knowledge come only from observation of the physical world? How, in fact, do we know about that which we take to be the physical world, and can we in fact know that what we observe as a physical world is real? Are there valid ways of knowing beyond observation, measurement, and experimentation? If so, how, if at all, do those other ways of knowing differ from the ways of science, the ways of observation, measurement, and experimentation? These are questions of epistemology.

I included an ontology and an epistemology in Liberating Christianity.[1] The book’s ontology says that there is a level of existence, a level of reality, beyond the physical. In the book I mostly call that level of reality “the spiritual.” This level is what we have seen Borg calling “the More.” Philosophy and theology give it other names as well. It is the depth dimension of reality. It is ultimate reality. It is “being itself” or “the ground of being.” We sometimes call it “the numinous.” Numinous is just another word for the divine, the sacred, or the holy, all words that can properly be applied to this level of the real. Our most common word for this level of reality is “God.” Just what the nature of the word “God “ is I address in the book.

 The book’s epistemology is “empirical.” It holds that all human knowledge comes from experience. All reality is experiential. We know anything at all only because we experience it. All human knowledge is ultimately grounded in some human experience. Through our physical senses we experience a world that appears to be external to us. We experience that world as real, but we think it is real only because we experience it as real. It looks real. It feels real. It facilitates our lives to assume that it is real. So we take it for real. Yet all we can really know is that we perceive and experience an external world as real, not that it really is real. To put some philosophical words on it, we perceive the world as an object with reality beyond our perception of it, yet in fact all we have is our subjective perception of it. Because we are created as centered selves who perceive through our senses, such a subjective perception is all we have or can have about anything.

My purpose in putting this kind of analysis into the book is to counter the common belief in western culture that only that which we can observe and measure is real. In the book I hold that we experience the spiritual in essentially the same way that we experience what we take to be the physical. For the most part we do not experience the spiritual, that is, we do not experience God, through the same senses as we use to experience the world; but we nonetheless experience the reality of something beyond the material world. Our perception both of a material world and of the spiritual is a human experience, and the two types of experience (experience of the material and experience of the spiritual) are the same type of experience at their most fundamental level. Thus there is no basis for saying that the material is real but the spiritual is not. Humans experience both, and it is our experience of them that makes them real for us.

I  doubt that many of you have ever been taken through that kind of analysis of what is real and how we know what is real before. You may find it obscure or even pointless. American education rarely takes people into philosophical thinking. I know that you may find that thinking difficult to follow, and you may choose not to follow it because it is difficult and can appear useless. A great many people in our context do. Still, it’s in the book, and it really isn’t useless at all. If you’re going to read the book you need to be prepared to follow it as best you can. You may well find yourself resisting the conclusions I draw. A great many people do. You may find yourself asking: What? I can’t really know for sure that the world is real and exists outside of my perception of it? Your answer may well be “of course I can.” My answer is: No, you can’t. If you can’t accept that conclusion that’s OK. Please just understand that it is my conclusion and that it underlies at least some of the material in the book.

Some of you are likely to find the book difficult or challenging in other ways as well. One of the central concepts in the book that I critique and reject is what I there call Biblicism. Biblicism is the belief that the Bible has its origin in God either directly or indirectly and that we must understand it literally, that is, factually. A great many so-called Christians today are really more Biblicist than they are Christian. That is, they believe in the Bible more than they believe in the God we know in and through Jesus Christ. In Liberating Christianity I reject Biblicism and replace it with an understanding of the Bible as a human creation consisting in large part of symbols and myths.

My use of the word myth in the book is something with which many church people struggle. I say in the book that the language of faith is necessarily the language of myth and symbol. Many church people bristle at my use of the word myth. They bristle at it because they can’t get beyond what has become the popular meaning of the word myth, namely that a myth is something people take to be true that is in fact not true. As you read the book, please be prepared to accept my definition of myth, which has nothing to do with things not being true. In theology a myth is simply a story that acts as a symbol. It is a story about God that points beyond itself to God and through which we find our connection with God. A myth is a story that probably isn’t factually true but that is or at least may be profoundly spiritually true. Many of the stories in Bible are myths in this sense. Some of them are historical myths, that is, they are myths that have some grounding in historical fact; yet any factual grounding they may have isn’t particularly important. What is important is what the stories tell us about the human experience of God. All true myths are grounded in that experience whether they are also grounded in some historical fact or not. When I taught this book before it was published to people at Monroe Congregational UCC my use of the word myth was the hardest thing in the book for them to accept. It may be hard for you to accept too. All I ask is that you use my definition of myth as you think about what I have to say. If you insist on thinking of a myth as something that is false you will find the book difficult or just flat wrong.

Here’s another thing in the book that I suspect many of you may have some trouble with. The book contains chapters with the titles “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement” and “The Meaning of the Cross: The Demonstration of God’s Solidarity.” In these chapters I deal rather harshly with one particular theology that most people think is mostly what Christianity is. It’s called, among other things, the classical theory of atonement. This is the notion that Jesus Christ is mostly about salvation from the consequences of human sin and that he saves us from sin because as the Son of God Incarnate he came to suffer and die on the cross to pay a price to God that had to be paid before God could or would forgive human sin. You have heard me preach against that theology, but not as critically or comprehensively as I do in the book. In Chapter 8 of the book I critique the classical theory of atonement on several levels and conclude that it constitutes a significant obstacle to faith for a great many people today. If the classical theory of atonement were the only valid way of understanding Christianity, I would not be Christian. If it is your way of understanding Christianity, and if that way works for you, fine. I offer a different understanding, but I have no desire to take from anyone an understanding that works for them.

In Chapter 9, I propose an alternative to the classical theory of atonement as a better understanding of both Jesus Christ and God. It’s called “theology of the cross.” You’ve heard me preach it a lot. It holds that in Jesus Christ, as the Son of God Incarnate suffering and dying on the cross, we see how God truly relates to us and to all of creation. We see God entering into and experiencing the worst that human life can bring and demonstrating God’s unshakable presence and solidarity with us when we too experience the bad things life can bring. Whether you go along with my critique of the classical theory of atonement or not, I hope you will find theology of cross to be a powerful understanding of how God relates to us and how we relate to God.

The last chapter of the book, Chapter 11, “Christian Social Ethics: The Teachings of Jesus for our Time,” presents Jesus as a prophet of social justice, nonviolence, and inclusivity. It includes a discussion of the issue of homosexuality that you may find new, and some of you may find it challenging. It considers what the Bible has to say about homosexuality. It concludes that, while the Bible has a very few passages that refer to homosexual acts, it actually says nothing about homosexuality. That’s because homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality is a modern concept of which the ancient worlds of the Bible had no knowledge at all. The Bible assumes that all people are what we call heterosexual. We know that assumption to be simply false. I hope you will find this discussion enlightening.

So, if after you have heard all that, you still want to read Liberating Christianity, I’ll be happy to walk you through it. If it gives you nothing else it will at least give you a better understanding of me and my theology. I think it will also give you a lot to think about. That’s perhaps the most common comment I get on both my writing and my preaching: “You gave me a lot to think about.” I hope that Liberating Christianity will do that for you.

---

[1] Their most explicit exposition appears in the “Philosophical Appendix” at the end of the book. You might want to read it first.

On Church Vitality

Thoughts on Church Vitality

from

The Annual Meeting

of the

Pacific Northwest Conference

United Church of Christ

April 29, 2017

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

On Saturday, April 29, 2017, I attended the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ, in which I hold ordained ministerial standing. There were three presentations that offered ideas on the issue of church vitality. They were presentations by Rev. Courtney Stange-Tregear, the Conference’s Minister for Church Vitality, the Rev. Mike Denton, the Conference’s Conference Minister, and Rev. John Dorhauer (by video), the General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ. Here are some of the ideas about church vitality that I took away from those presentations, with some expansion on my own part.

A vital church knows that it is not there for itself. It is there for God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and their work in the world. A church that focuses too much on itself is not vital and will not survive. A vital church looks out not in.

A vital church is grounded in the threefold vision of Micah 6:8: Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. A vital church does justice. It discerns what injustice exists in its context and works to counter that injustice. It doesn’t just talk about justice, it works to do something about it. A vital church is a kind church. It’s members are kind with each other and with all people, especially those in need. A vital church is a humble church. It knows that it is a fallible human institution. It knows that the world belongs to God not to the church. It humbly responds to the call of the Holy Spirit. It does not believe that it possesses or controls the Holy Spirit.

After every answer a vital church asks “so that?” For example, say a very small church is concerned that it can’t afford to maintain the old building it owns and in which it meets. They say they want the resources to maintain the building. If it is a vital church it will then ask “maintain the building so that?” It answers, so that we’ll have a place to gather and worship. Again, you’ll have that so that? Perhaps it answers so that we can survive as a congregation. So that? So that we can witness to the Good News of the Gospel in this place So that? So that we will respond and do good work in this community. Then back to the original question: Do you need a building so that you can do that? Maybe the answer is no. Maybe this vital church will look at other ways of being church. Maybe it will decide to sell the building that is causing it so much concern so that it can focus on why the church is really there. Every vital church asks over and over again “so that?” Continually asking that question sometimes leads to some unexpected but vital answers.

A vital church believes in its reason for existing and in its future. A vital church first of all knows that its reason for being really is. Asking “so that” over and over may lead it to the answer of why it exists. A church that doesn’t know why it exists will have no focus. It will have no direction. It will just sit there, and eventually it will die. A church that doesn’t believe in its future will do the same thing. It will never live into a future it doesn’t believe in, doesn’t believe is possible or will ever happen.

To put that another way, a vital church knows what its particular mission is and is committed to living out that mission. Just having a mission of being a church isn’t enough. What is the church’s specific mission in its time and place? Every vital church can either answer that question or is working diligently to reach an answer to that question. There are lots of possible answers, but they all relate in some direct way to God’s call to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. A church with no clear mission has no clear reason for existing.

A vital church “fails forward.” That means it dares to do new things, and sometimes those things will not succeed. When they don’t the church doesn’t give up. It learns from the failure and moves forward. A church that is afraid to fail will never do anything new. A vital church sees failure not as a cause for despair but as an occasion for learning. A vital church acts, fails, learns, and acts again.

Perhaps most of all a vital church focuses on the resources it has not on the resources it doesn’t have. Small churches so commonly say we don’t have the resources to…fill in the blank. They focus on the money and the people they don’t have. They think that what they need most of all is to grow. But church vitality is not directly correlated with size. If there is a church, it has resources and can be vital. It has people. Maybe it has only a few people. Maybe those people are elderly. Maybe they aren’t rich. They are still people, and people have gifts. A vital church focuses on those gifts. It discerns what they are, then it figures out how to use them for the life of the church and of the church’s context. Focusing on what is missing rather than on what is present leads to a loss of vitality. It can lead to despair. It leads to the death of the church. A church does not have to be big to be vital. It just has to know why it exists, what its mission is, and what gifts and resources it has without worrying too much about the ones it doesn’t have. For small churches like the one I serve, that is perhaps the most important lesson of all.