Liberating Christianity

Thursday, June 4, 2020

On Homosexuality and the Bible

The text that follows is a very slightly edited version of a portion of my book Liberating Christianity. The issue of homosexuality is less of a hot button issue than it was when I wrote Liberating Christianity in 2006. Still, prejudice against LGBTQ persists, and some people still justify it by reference to the Bible. What I wrote may still be of some use.

The primary text that opponents of gay rights use to support their position that all homosexual behavior is necessarily immoral in all contexts is Leviticus 18:22, which reads: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Less often cited except by extreme bigots like Fred Phelps is the corollary passage, Leviticus 20:13, which reads: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.” We cannot, and do not, deny that these passages condemn as worthy of death sexual relations between two men. On their face they do. The issue for us is not what the words of Leviticus are but whether those words are the eternal and binding will and law of God, as those who would continue the church’s legacy of hatred toward gay and lesbian people contend.[i]

The answer surely is that they are not. Perhaps the major reason that this condemnation of all homosexual acts between men[ii] is not binding on us is that the ancient world had no conception of homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality. That understanding is of very recent origin. Only in 1973, for example, did the American Psychological Association remove homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders. People in ancient times simply assumed that everyone was what we would call heterosexual. They did not even have words for homosexual and heterosexual. Cultures do not produce words for concepts they do not have. Leviticus 18:22 does not say “homosexuality” is an abomination. It calls lying “with a male as with a woman” an abomination. The assumption is that sexual relations between men and woman is the norm for everyone. One reason Leviticus condemns male homosexual acts is that they were considered unnatural, for everyone. We know better. We know that while same gender sexual relations are not natural for the majority of people, for those whom we call heterosexual, they are natural for some people. The Levitical condemnation of male homosexual acts is grounded in and reflects an ancient anthropological understanding. That understanding has changed. The modern understanding of human sexuality has rendered Leviticus 18:22 irrelevant.

The text of Leviticus itself reveals another reason Leviticus condemns same-gender male sexual acts. Leviticus 18:22 is part of the Levitical holiness code, the same holiness or purity code that Jesus so forcefully rejected.[iii] One of the primary purposes of the holiness or purity code is to keep the Hebrew people separate and different from the Canaanites, the people of the land the Hebrews were to inhabit. Thus the code states: “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not follow their statutes.”[iv] Leviticus is a book written by and to a considerable extent for Jewish priests after the return from Babylon in the late 6^th century BCE. Their concerns are not our concerns. Maintaining the identity of 6^th century Jews is not a concern of ours. Indeed, it is not a concern of at least the more progressive of our Jewish brothers and sisters, many of whom have views on homosexuality similar to the one expressed here.[v] Leviticus deals with ancient concerns on the basis of ancient understandings. It is not God’s law for us.

The frequent use of Leviticus 18:22 by opponents of the equal rights and dignity of gay and lesbian people raises another significant issue, the issue of the selective use of Scripture. As we have said, Leviticus 18:22 is part of a much larger holiness code. That code contains numerous prohibitions and requirements that no one today (except perhaps the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel who want to bring back animal sacrifice because it is commanded in the Bible) pays any attention to. The Leviticus holiness code prohibits all contact with a woman during her menstrual period.[vi] It condones the purchase and ownership of slaves, provided only that they come from neighboring nations.[vii] It prohibits eating seafood that does not have scales and fins, i.e., shellfish.[viii] It provides that no person with any physical defect may serve as priest.[ix] It prohibits planting two different crops in the same field or wearing garments of mixed fibers.[x] These are but some of the prohibitions in the holiness code of Leviticus that even the most vehement opponents of the rights of gay and lesbian people ignore. Indeed, in my experience, most of them are not even aware of these other provisions of Leviticus. I do not deny accepting some of the Bible as authentic and authoritative and rejecting other parts as false. I have tried to explain my basis for doing that in this book. The problem with those on the other side of the gay rights issue is not that they read Scripture selectively. The problem is that they deny doing so, or, in the case of many less sophisticated Christians, are not even aware that they do so.[xi] They therefore do not articulate the basis for their selection, something that makes discussion with them all the more difficult. A great many Christians use Leviticus 18:22 selectively to harm gay and lesbian people by denying their full and equal God-given human dignity. Liberating Christianity in our context requires that we expose the fallacy and even the hypocrisy in their use of the Bible.

Some unsophisticated Christians, who are unaware that the Christian tradition condemned Marcionism as a heresy more than a millennium and a half ago,[xii] counter any rejection of Leviticus by saying something like: “Well, it’s in the Old Testament. So you can ignore it. But the New Testament says the same thing.” In making this claim they are referring primarily to Romans 1:26-27. Opponents of the equality of gay and lesbian people also use this verse to say that because the new Testament affirms Leviticus 18:22 but not much of the rest of the Levitical holiness code that one verse from the code remains valid while the others do not. Upon examination, however, it turns out that Romans 1:26-27 does not support their position either.

Unlike Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:25-27 is a very complex passage. In the first chapter of Romans Paul contends that even pagans who have not had the Jewish law to guide them are accountable for sin because “what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.”[xiii] God’s “eternal power and divine nature” have always been revealed “through the things he has made.”[xiv] Paul’s argument is essentially one from natural law, in which the truth about God is evident to all who will seek it. Yet the pagans did not seek and discover the truth about God in God’s works of creation. Instead, they descended into idolatry: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.”[xv]

Because of their idolatry, which they could have avoided though they were without the law, God inflicted punishment upon the pagans. Because they “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator…God gave them up to degrading passions.”[xvi] Those degrading passions included homosexual acts. In a passage that includes the only reference to lesbian sexual acts in the entire Bible Paul wrote:

Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.[xvii]

The first thing to note about this passage is that homosexuality is not itself the sin that Paul is condemning. He is condemning idolatry. Homosexual behavior is the penalty, not itself the sin. Beyond that, the reason that Paul considers homosexual behavior to be a punishment is that it is unnatural. Paul assumed that both female and male homosexual relations were unnatural for the people who engaged in them. We know, however, that it is not true for men and women with a naturally occurring homosexual orientation. For them heterosexual relations are unnatural and homosexual ones are natural.

Like everyone else in the ancient world, Paul had no such understanding. The only male homosexual behavior with which he was familiar was probably the Greek practice of pederasty, in which an older man took a young man or even a boy essentially as a sex slave. If that practice is your only image of homosexual behavior, of course you condemn it. Paul simply had no awareness of natural homosexuality. He had never experienced the kind of loving, mutual, committed, and faithful same gender unions with which we are, or if we’ll just look can be, familiar today. Like Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26-27 is not an expression of the immutable will of God. It is an expression of an ancient cultural understanding leading to what we call prejudice.

We have insisted in this work that the Bible becomes true myth for us, that is, it truly connects us with God and God with us, when we hold it up to the mirror of our own experience of God to see whether or not a particular Bible passage agrees with and confirms or contradicts that experience. Because all truth is grounded in perception and experience, including even Biblical truth, we can and indeed must trust our own experience of God, even when the Bible seems to contradict it. The passages we have examined here, and the very few others that mention homosexual acts, contradict my experience of homosexuality. They contradict the experiences of a great many people today, both straight and gay. For me, as a heterosexual man, homosexuality is unnatural. For my many gay and lesbian friends it is natural. It is an intrinsic, God-given part of who they are in exactly the same way that my heterosexuality is for me. The use of the Bible to condemn these children of God simply for being who they are is an abuse of our tradition’s holy book. It will not stand. Because it is such a major obstacle to faith in our context today, liberated and liberating Christianity must and will overcome it.

[i] I am of course well aware that Christians who condemn homosexuality as inherently sinful generally deny that they hate homosexual people, or perhaps better, people who have engaged in homosexual behavior (since these Christians generally deny that homosexuality is a natural and inherent personal characteristic for some people). Having given the matter much thought, I have concluded that these denials of hatred are unconvincing. The Christians who make them may not feel the emotion hatred toward homosexual people. The fact remains, however, that they condemn and reject an intimate and intrinsic part of these persons’ humanity. In doing that they necessarily condemn and reject the people themselves, since our sexuality cannot be separated from the rest of our being. If condemning and rejecting a person is not hatred, I do not know what is.

[ii] The author of Leviticus apparently did not care enough about women even to condemn their homosexual acts as he did the homosexual acts of men. Or perhaps he really did not consider lesbian acts to be the abomination that he thought sexual acts between men were. Either way, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 can be used to condemn lesbian acts only by analogy. They don’t mention them.

[iii] The term holiness code means the same thing as purity code. It comes from the frequent admonitions in Leviticus that the people are to be holy. Leviticus 19:2, for example, reads: “Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

[iv] Leviticus 18:3.

[v] The only Jewish wedding I have ever attended was a “wedding” of two women in a Reformed Jewish synagogue.

[vi] Leviticus 15:19-24.

[vii] Leviticus 25:44.

[viii] Leviticus 11:10.

[ix] Leviticus 21:16-21.

[x] Leviticus 19:19.

[xi] After my church had received considerable local publicity for being Open and Affirming, a woman whom I do not know called me up and asked me how I could claim to be a Christian pastor if I teach things contrary to Scripture. During that conversation I asked her if she ever wore clothes made of mixed fibers, a cotton wool blend for example. She said yes, she supposed that she did. I told her that Leviticus prohibits that too. She said incredulously: “It does?” I assured her that it does. She was surprised, but I will give her her due. She at least tried to be consistent. She said: “Well than I suppose we shouldn’t do it.”

[xii] Marcion held that Christ had superseded the Law and that Hebrew Scripture was therefore no longer Scripture for Christians. The Church held otherwise. The Hebrew Bible is also part of the Christian Bible. We cannot dispose of things in it simply by saying that it is the “Old Testament” and therefore not applicable to us.

[xiii] Romans 1:19.

[xiv] Romans 1:20.

[xv] Romans 1:22-23.

[xvi] Romans 1:25-26.

[xvii] Romans 1:26b-27.

Wednesday, June 3, 2020

More on the Charges Against Derek Chauvin

It turns our that there is a type of murder in the second degree under Minnesota law that I missed in my earlier analysis of the criminal charges against former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin. The type of second degree murder I analyzed there requires the prosecution to prove that the defendant intended to kill the victim. However, Minnesota Statutes Section 209.19, Subdivision 2 states:

Unintentional murders. Whoever does either of the following is guilty of unintentional murder in the second degree….

(1) causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense….

The other provisions of this statute do not apply. This is the statute under which Chauvin has been charged with second degree murder. Intent to kill is expressly not an element of this crime. The commission of or attempt to commit an underlying felony is. The underlying felony charged in the Chauvin case is assault.

There are at least five degrees of assault under Minnesota law, but only two of them that are felonies could apply here. Minnesota Statutes Section 609:22 Assault in the First Degree, states:

Subdivision 1. Great bodily harm. Whoever assaults another and inflicts great bodily harm may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 20 years or payment of a fine of not more than $30,000, or both.

Assault in the second degree is assault with a deadly weapon and does not apply in the Chauvin case. Minnesota Statutes Section 609.222 Assault in the Third Degree. Substantial bodily harm, criminalizes assault that inflicts “substantial” bodily harm. I assume that “great bodily harm” and “substantial bodily harm,” which clearly is intended to be less bodily harm than great bodily harm, are defined somewhere in Minnesota law. There seems to be no doubt that Chauvin inflicted great bodily harm on Mr. Floyd, but the state can convict Chauvin of second degree murder simply by proving that the inflicted substantial bodily harm on him.

Living Waters of Justice

John 7:37-39

John 7:37-39 is a rather odd little pericope. Jesus has been at the festival of Booths, or Sukkot, a Jewish fall harvest festival. On the last day of the festival he cries out, for no apparent reason: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” John 7:37-38. That’s not really a quote from scripture but never mind. This isn’t the first time John’s Jesus has spoken of living water. Shortly before this passage he has told the Samaritan woman at the well that if she knew who she was talking to he would have given her living water. John 4:10. It makes a certain amount of sense to put these two passages together and understand Jesus to be saying that out of the believer’s heart shall flow the living water the believer gets from Jesus. It’s an odd image. We don’t usually think of water flowing out of the heart, but of course Jesus uses a metaphor here so I guess it’s OK.

Jesus refers to people who are thirsty coming to him and drinking, presumably drinking his living water. Yet these days when I think of living water flowing out of faithful Christian people I think of it being the whole world that is thirsty. The world isn’t in very good shape these days. We are still in the midst of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. That nasty virus has infected more than one million Americans and killed more than one hundred thousand of them. Worldwide numbers are of course substantially higher. So many people are so anxious to get life back to what used to be normal that we’ll certainly see those numbers go up substantially as businesses, offices, and other things reopen. Some church people seem particularly anxious to resume in person worship disregarding the well-known dangers of people gathering together even in church.

The economic impact of the pandemic has been catastrophic for tens of millions of Americans and far more than that around the world. Our federal government has botched its handling of the pandemic from the very beginning thereby making the impact of the coronavirus even worse than it had to be. The world desperately needs both an effective treatment for COVID-19 and a vaccine against it if we’re ever going to get over it. Lots of highly qualified people all over the world are working on those medications, but we still don’t have them.

Then in the midst of the pandemic four Minneapolis police officers killed a defenseless Black man named George Floyd. Protests against police brutality, of which Mr. Floyd’s death is only the most recent and best known example, broke out all over the country and even beyond our country. Most of the thousands of thousands of protesters have been peaceful, but a small number of people bent on theft and destruction of property have caused large amounts of property damage and economic loss across the country to businesses whose owners have nothing to do with police brutality against Black people. Some of those business owners are themselves Black. President Trump has responded to the demonstrations not like a concerned American president but like a fascist dictator, using the US military to stop protests (or try to) in Washington, DC, and threatening to do it outside of the capital city where he has no legal authority to do it. As if the pandemic weren’t causing the country enough pain, the killing of George Floyd and its nationwide aftermath have torn open the country’s deep wound of racism in dramatic and powerful new ways.

Our country desperately needs to be flooded with living water. So does the whole world. We all need the living water of justice, the living water of peace. People of faith can be a source of that living water. We can speak out strongly for racial justice, as many faith leaders already have and continue to do. We can resist demands that we resume communal worship when it isn’t safe to do so no matter what the civil authorities are doing. Beyond that I’m not sure what we can do. Pray of course, but faith leaders don’t have much prestige or influence in the US these days, so our influence probably won’t be what we would wish.

Yet we know what our call is. God calls us to water the wasteland of American culture and politics with the living water of justice and peace. All we can do is speak up and speak out every chance we get. Most of us don’t have that many chances to do it (especially if our congregations object to “political” preaching), but we can look for opportunities to create more opportunities. We can join organizations that work for racial justice. We can support political candidates (especially candidates of color) who have good policy proposals for improving racial justice including but not limited to good ideas for police reform.

Will anything we do make a difference? Maybe. People of good will speaking out in support of what is right changes things if enough people do it loud enough for long enough. Yet our call from God is what it is whether our individual efforts make a difference or not. We do what is right because it is right. We don’t need more reason than that. So let’s stream as much living water of justice and peace out of our hearts as we can. It’s all we can do. As people of faith it is what we must do.

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Say Yes to the Trinity

June 2, 2020

I have on occasion asked people attending some Bible study I was leading how many times the phrase Father, Son, and Holy Spirit appears in the New Testament. No one has ever known for sure, but they’ve all been sure that it must appear dozens of times at least. They are surprised, shocked even, when I tell them that appears only once. They may not even believe me so unlikely does that assertion seem to them. There are other places where something a bit like the classical Trinitarian formulation appears. 2 Corinthians for example ends “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” 2 Corinthians 13:13. Yet The only place in the Bible where Christianity’s foundational Trinitarian formula appears more or less in pure form is at the end of the Gospel of Matthew. There the risen Christ says to the disciples “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 28:19. That’s it. That’s all there is. The roots of Christian Trinitarianism are in the Bible, but classical Trinitarianism is not. It took Christianity over three hundred years after Jesus to develop a complete Trinitarian theology.

So what is Trinitarian theology, and should we keep it or move to a more unitarian understanding of God and Jesus Christ? The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a way of understanding or at least talking about the nature of God. It says that God is “Three in One.” God is both three “Persons” and one God at the same time. Trinitarian theology is monotheistic. It confesses the reality of one God. That one God however subsists as three Persons traditionally named the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God is not complete without each of them, yet each of them is fully God in its own right. No, that doesn’t make any sense. More about that below. Trinitarianism understands God as being what to our human minds nothing can be, three separate and distinct entities that are at the same time one entity. Three and One, One and Three at the same time.

People have been trying to reduce the Trinity to something that makes rational sense ever since the doctrine reached its classical form in the fourth century CE. They have called each of the Persons a separate manifestation of a particular aspect of God’s being. The Christian tradition says no, that’s a heresy. They’ve said that sometimes God appears as Father, sometimes as Son, and sometimes as Holy Spirit. The Christian tradition says no, that’s a heresy. They say the Father is the Creator God, the Son is Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit is God present in creation. It may not hurt much to think of the Trinitarian God that way, but the Christian tradition still says no, that’s a heresy. None of these ways of explaining the Trinity retains the fullness of the Trinity. I’ve often said to people that there is no way to rationalize the Trinity that isn’t a heresy. I’ve also told them that’s OK, heretics are often more interesting than orthodox people. Still, I’ve never heard any Christian lay person say anything about the Trinity that isn’t a heresy.

So if the Trinity makes no sense and nearly anything we say about it is a heresy, does it have any value that makes it worth keeping? After all, we all like things to make sense. We want one to be one and three to be three—period. When someone says One is Three and Three is One as we do in Trinitarian theology our rational and rationalizing minds say Wrong. One is one and three is three. Three isn’t one and one isn’t three. I can have one thing or I can have three things, but I can’t have anything that is one and three at the same time. Fair enough, yet I am convinced that the Trinity has immense value as a foundational way of understanding, or rather not understanding, God. I will discuss the value of the Trinity here under three rubrics, that the Trinity makes God dynamic, that it makes God relational, and that it preserves the mystery of God. I will then briefly discuss one big problem with the way we always name the Persons of the Trinity.

The three Persons of the Trinity are not static. They are constantly in motion moving with, through, and around each other in an eternal cosmic dance. Theologians call this movement perichoresis, which means dancing around. I do not mean to demean anyone’s religious faith, but compare the dynamism of the Christian Trinity with the God of Islam. Islam places enormous stress on the radical oneness of God. It rejects anything that in any way detracts or even seems to detract from the total oneness of God. There is truth in this understanding of God. There is indeed no God but God as the Islamic confession of faith confesses. There is great unifying power in the oneness of God, for if all is one then all is united. Yet somehow Islam’s radical oneness of God makes God seem static to me, inert, unmoving. Perhaps Islam doesn’t intend to convey God as static, yet especially when you combine the radical oneness of God with the orthodox Islamic belief that the Koran comes directly from God and can never change you get an image of God as frozen in time. Remote. Unrelational. It’s not that Muslims don’t have a valid relationship with God. They do. Yet to me the God of Islam just seems relatively static and unmoving.

Not so with the Trinitarian God of Christianity. This God is in constant motion in the eternal dance of perichoresis. This God is a God of infinite energy, of constant energetic motion that fills the universe with power and light. This dynamic God models sacred dynamism for God’s people. This God says I am eternal motion, so you be in motion too. Don’t stand still. Keep moving. Keep moving forward to new insights, new truths; for my truth is infinitely greater than your truth, and I always have more truth for you to discover. So keep moving. Keep seeking. It’s the way of the Trinitarian God.

God is dynamic, and God is dynamic in relationship. Relationship is the very essence of the Trinitarian God. Of course God is in relationship with creation, but to God creation is an other. It is not God. The relationships between the Persons of the Trinity are different. They are mystical relationships of Self with Self, with Self as both the same and different simultaneously. Relationship isn’t something the Trinity does, it is something the Trinity is. In God the distinction between being and doing disappears. The Trinitarian God is relationship, and the Trinitarian God calls us into relationship with God, with all of creation, with each other, and even with ourselves.

God is relationship, and the nature of that relationship is love. If God is love—and God is—then God’s relationships must all be relationships of love. Try thinking of it this way. In God’s internal relationships we see demonstrated the three-fold love of the Great Commandment, love of God, neighbor, and self. Each Person of the Trinity loves the other Persons of the Trinity, yet those other Persons are both different from each other and the same as each other at the same time. Each of them is also God. So when the Holy Spirit for example loves the Son she loves God, another, and herself all at once. I know. It doesn’t make sense. It’s just true.

The Trinitarian God is love in motion, and God is both so much love and so much motion that the love that God is spills out of God into creation. God’s love in motion can’t be constrained. It pours out and brings creation into being. It even pour over and into the likes of us fallible, mortal earthlings. If we’ll let it God’s dynamic love will move us the way it moves in God. Less perfectly of course, for we certainly are not ourselves God, but still. When we truly feel God’s love filling our hearts and moving our souls we will move. We will join the heavenly dance of God. We’ll do it here on earth, spreading God’s love for all people to everyone who needs it, spreading it into the world’s broken and hurting places of which there are so many.

I’ll say it again. I know it well. I’ve said it many times before. None of this makes any sense. That undeniable truth however brings us to the last great virtue of Trinitarian theology that I want to discuss with you. Perhaps the greatest virtue of Trinitarian theology is precisely that it makes no sense. It insists that the impossible is true. It says One is Three and Three are One. Not some of the time, all of the time. It says that something called a Person both is and isn’t fully God at the same time. It says that when a Person of the Trinity relates to the other Persons of the Trinity that Person relates to him/her/itself at the same time because the other Person both is and isn’t the same as the Person doing the relating. It makes no sense, that’s clear; but how can it not making any sense be its greatest virtue?

Trinity not making sense is its greatest virtue because of what it is that Trinitarian talk talks about. It talks about God. It is human speech expressing human thoughts about that which utterly transcends human speech and human thoughts. That transcends human speech immeasurably. Infinitely. Like all theology Trinitarian theology is an attempt to define in human terms that which absolutely cannot be defined in human terms. That’ why every time we think we’ve got the Trinity figured out we turn out to be wrong. After we’ve wracked our brains for a while trying to figure it out we realize that we will never figure it out. We can’t figure it out. No one can. It remains always an unsolvable mystery.

That’s a great virtue because that which it seeks to describe is itself an unsolvable mystery. Trinitarian thinking preserved that mystery. It is an unsolvable mystery about an unsolvable mystery. The way that Trinity makes no sense points to the reality that God is infinitely beyond the capacity of our human minds to understand. It’s easy to forget that foundational truth about God. We do it all the time. That truth is that whenever we think we’ve got God figured out and reduced to concepts our human minds can grasp we’re wrong. The same is true of the concept Trinity. Every time we think we’ve got it figured out we’re wrong. We learn that the same is true of God. Making no sense is Trinity’s greatest virtue because it preserves the mystery of God better than any other theology ever has or ever will. That more than anything else is the reason why we must hold on to our Trinitarian understanding of God.

In closing let me discuss briefly one thing about traditional Trinitarian language that is not a virtue. The Christian faith has traditionally used exclusively male language for two of the Persons of the Trinity and gender neutral language for the third. Some people say the Trinity is two men and a bird. Many Christians today avoid especially the Father and Son terms for the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. We often say Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer instead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I suppose that’s less offensive to our gender equality sensibilities than Father and Son, but why don’t we avoid the problem by changing Father to Mother? Feminist theologians like the great Elizabeth Johnson have taught us that feminine language for God works as well, and as badly, as masculine language for God. They have also taught us how harmful using male only language for God really is. So let’s not get stuck using only the traditional language for the Persons of the Trinity. Mother works as well as or better than Father. Try it. It could change how you think about God, and that might be a very good thing. Just remember please always when you think of God to think Trinity.

Monday, June 1, 2020

Peace? Now? Really?

June 1, 2020

I participate in a weekly clergy lectionary study group that functions more like a clergy support group. We’ve been meeting by Zoom since the coronavirus lock down. At the end of each meeting we pray. Yes, clergy people actually pray. Today of course we talked a lot about the civil rights protests, the looting, and the sometimes violent police response that’s been going on across our country over the past week since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Today as we prayed one of our number prayed for peace. Now, I’m generally very much in favor of peace. I’ve written about my commitment to peace on this blog more than once before. Normally I consider peace to be one of humanity’s greatest blessings. Jesus said “my peace I give to you.” In Jesus Christ our souls do indeed find peace. Thanks be to God!

Yet today when my colleague prayed for peace I had an unusual reaction, unusual for me anyway. I thought: Is peace what we need right now? No, I thought. At the very least we need to be peaceably agitated today. We need to be nonviolently assertive, aggressive even, in the cause of racial justice. After my colleague prayed for peace I prayed that we not miss the challenge and the opportunity of this moment actually to do something right. Is peace what we need today? Yes and no. Let me explain.

The culture of my country, the United States of America, is rotten to its core with racism. Our country was born in racism. European settlers began importing, buying, and selling African and African-descendant human beings virtually as soon as they got here. The Constitution of the United States said that any person who was not free was three-fifths of a person, and that meant almost exclusively Black slaves. Several of our states fought a brutal civil war in an attempt to preserve race-based slavery, and the states that stayed in the union were nearly as racist as the ones that pulled out. After the Civil War the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, did some good racial justice work in the south, but then it cynically sold southern Blacks out to racist Democrats for short-term political gain. There followed a century of legal apartheid in the south and de facto apartheid in the north. White Americans across the country considered Black human beings to be less than human. A century after the Civil War our national government passed significant civil and voting rights legislation, but making racial discrimination and voter suppression illegal hardly put an end to individual and systemic racism in this country. Not even having a Black president from 2009 to 2017 did that. Our country remains nearly as racist as it has always been.

That’s why all hell has broken out all across the country these days. A white cop pressed his knee onto the neck of an unarmed Black man named George Floyd until Mr. Floyd died. Mr. Floyd was under arrest and in handcuffs as a cop named Chauvin snuffed out his life. Righteous protests against police brutality started all over the country, for Mr. Floyd was hardly the only defenseless Black person white police had killed. Looting and property destruction broke out too, some of it by people who had been legitimate protesters and some of it by white supremacists intent on making the legitimate protesters look bad. The lawlessness of some detracts from the righteousness of the protesters’ cause and gives right-wing forces like Donald Trump and his minions an excuse to try to stop the legitimate demonstrations.

Do we need peace today? It depends on what you mean by peace. If peace means that the demonstrations die down, legitimate protesters go home, the status quo ante reasserts itself, and nothing changes then no. If that’s what peace means it is the last thing we need today. We certainly don’t need violence. I will never advocate for violence. But we need to be angry. We need to be angry about American racism. We need to angry about both personal and institutional racism. We need to be angry about police brutality against Black Americans. We need to be angry about a president who calls white supremacists fine people and sounds racist dog whistles to his bigoted followers. We need to be agitated. We need to be stirred to action. We need to demand reform and demand that it be done now. The peace of Jesus Christ in hearts to sustain us and give us courage yes. Inaction, complacency, and acceptance of the way things have always been in this country not just no but hell no!

Are the Charges Against Derek Chauvin Appropriate?

First a couple of disclaimers. Derek Chauvin hasn’t been convicted of anything, and like any criminal defendant he is presumed innocent until proven guilty. I respect that presumption of innocence and Mr. Chauvin’s constitutional rights to due process. Second, I am not a lawyer. I used to be a lawyer. I have a law degree and years of legal experience. I however never practiced criminal law. My analysis here is based on general principles of statutory interpretation and what I remember of criminal law from law school. For those of you who don’t want to read all that follows I’ll say here that my analysis of the legal issues around the charges brought against Chauvin leads me to believe that the Minnesota prosecutors made the right charging decisions. Now on to my analysis.

The Minneapolis police officer who killed Mr. George Floyd is named Derek Chauvin. He has been arrested and charged with third degree murder and second degree manslaughter. We hear people demanding that he be charged with first degree murder, a charge that under Minnesota law carries a mandatory life sentence. There are several considerations in analyzing these charges, both those made and those not made, of which most lay people may be unaware. Here are some of them.

To understand criminal charges we must understand some basic things about criminal law. The first is that the law is, in theory at least, thoroughly analytical and not emotional. What Chauvin may be criminally guilty of, or whether he is criminally guilty of anything, does not depend on the abhorrence with which we react to the video we’ve seen of what he did to Mr. Floyd. The prosecuting attorneys must approach this case analytically, rationally, in a way that may seem cold to the average layperson. So be it. That’s how it is with the law. That’s part of what it is to be trained to think like a lawyer.

Then we must understand that no act is criminal unless it falls under the specific language of a statute, that is, a written law enacted by a legitimate government, that makes the act criminal. People do awful things all the time and are never charged with a crime because no statute makes the thing the person did criminal. Because acts are criminal only if a statute makes them criminal the act in question must fit the specific language of a particular statute not some general concept of what constitutes a particular crime. The relevant statutes here are the Minnesota state criminal statutes.

Next, the prosecuting authority that brings a criminal charge against a person has the burden of proving every element of the crime charged as specified in a relevant statute in court beyond a reasonable doubt. A prosecuting attorney making a charging decision must be convinced that she can prove every element of a crime to that standard before bringing a specific criminal charge against any person.

Many criminal statutes specify different degrees of a particular criminal offense. In the case of one person causing the death of another person state criminal codes often specify different degrees of murder, usually first and second degree and sometimes third degree murder. Those codes also typically specify one or more degrees of a crime called manslaughter, which is typically a lower order of crime than murder. Manslaughter generally carries a lighter punishment than murder but is still a serious criminal offense. What each degree of a crime entails is entirely a matter of the specific wording of the relevant statutes and the way the appellate courts have resolved any legal issues that arise from that wording.

The criminal statutes of the state of Minnesota specify three degrees of murder and two degrees of manslaughter. All five crimes are serious felonies carrying significant possible prison sentences. In dealing with which of these crimes to charge Chauvin with the prosecuting attorney had to compare the available evidence at the time the charge was brought to the relevant Minnesota statutes, remembering always that the standard of proof in a criminal case is beyond a reasonable doubt.[1] The prosecutor can file additional charges against Chauvin is new evidence warrants them.

These are the relevant Minnesota criminal statutes:

1. Murder in the First Degree. The relevant portions of Minnesota statutes Section 609.185 provides that a person is guilty of murder in the first degree if the person “causes the death of a human being with premeditation and with intent to effect the death of the person or another.”

2. Murder in the Second Degree. The relevant portions of Minnesota statutes Section 609.19 provide that a person is guilty of murder in the second degree if that person “causes the death of a human being with intent to effect the death of that person or another, but without premeditation.”

3. Murder in the Third Degree. Minnesota statutes Section 609.195(a) states: “Whoever without the intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree….”

4. Manslaughter in the First Degree. Minnesota statutes Section 609.20 provides that a person is guilty of manslaughter in the first degree if that person “intentionally causes the death of another in the heat of passion provoked by such words or acts of another as would provoke a person of ordinary self-control under like circumstances….”

5. Manslaughter in the Second Degree. Minnesota statutes Section 609.205 provides that a person is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree if that person causes the death of another “by the person’s culpable negligence whereby the person creates an unreasonable risk and consciously takes chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.

Given that these are the potentially relevant criminal statutes, what are the facts that we know beyond a reasonable doubt? The prosecutors in this case may of course know more facts than we do, but I can only work here with the facts I know. We know for certain that Chauvin pressed his knee into Mr. Floyd’s neck when Mr. Floyd was flat on the pavement for more than eight minutes and that as a result of that act by Chauvin Mr. Floyd died. At the time of Chauvin’s actions against Mr. Floyd, Mr. Floyd was under arrest and was restrained by hand restraints. Three other Minneapolis police officers were present at the scene. One of more of them applied pressure to Mr. Floyd’s back, and none of the officers did anything to stop Chauvin from doing what he was doing to Mr. Floyd. At the present time we in the public know no other relevant facts.

Which of the Minnesota murder or manslaughter statutes apply or applies to these facts?

1. We can quickly dispose of manslaughter in the first degree. There is no evidence that Chauvin acted “in the heat of passion” as that section of the law requires. The video of the subject incident shows Chauvin being perfectly calm and collected as he pressed his knee onto Mr. Floyd’s neck.

2. Murder in the second degree requires that Chauvin have acted without premeditation but with intent to cause Mr. Floyd’s death. Intent can be very hard to prove. Proving it requires evidence of what was going on the defendant’s mind as he committed the criminal act in question. Did Chauvin intend to kill Mr. Floyd? We don’t know. Unless Chauvin said something like “I’m going to kill this son-of-a-bitch” as he applied pressure to Mr. Floyd’s neck it is probably not possible for the prosecutor in this case to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin intended to kill Mr. Floyd.

3. Murder in the first degree is the charge we hear people saying Chauvin should be charged with. The Minnesota statute on first degree murder keeps the requirement of intent to cause death that is in the statute on second degree murder and adds the element of premeditation. The prosecutor would have to prove both premeditation and intent to convict Chauvin of first degree murder. We have already seen that the prosecutor probably couldn’t prove that Chauvin intended to kill Mr. Floyd. Failure to prove intent is itself enough to defeat a charge of first degree murder. Add the element of premeditation, that is, that Chauvin somehow planned at least some time in advance to kill Mr. Floyd, and the chances of convicting Chauvin of first degree murder become even more remote.

4. Murder in the third degree is one of the charges the prosecutor has brought against Chauvin. A third degree murder charge does not require the prosecutor to prove that Chauvin intended to kill Mr. Floyd. Intent is explicitly not an element of third degree murder under the relevant Minnesota statute. The prosecution must first prove that Chauvin caused Mr. Floyd’s death “by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others.” That seems easy enough to prove in this case. Pressing your knee on someone’s neck for more than eight minutes is quite obviously eminently dangerous to anyone including Mr. Floyd. The third degree murder statute also requires the prosecution to prove that Chauvin’s act was “evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.” This element could be harder to prove. There seems first of all to be a legal issue here. Does this part of the statute specify only one element of the crime or does it specify two? In other words, are having a depraved mind and acting without regard for human life the same thing or different things? Does acting without regard for human life establish by itself that the defendant had a depraved mind, or does proving a depraved mind require some other proof? I suspect that the Minnesota appellate courts have answered that question, but I’ve done no research to try to find out. It seems clear enough that Chauvin acted without regard for human life. If having a depraved mind is a separate element of the crime it might be harder to prove.

5. Manslaughter in the second degree is the other charge the prosecutors have brought against Chauvin. This is almost certainly the easiest charge for the prosecutors to prove. There is a legal question in this statute about what “culpable” negligence is. Is it worse negligence than simple negligence such as could support a civil case for wrongful death? Probably, and the Minnesota appellate courts have probably specified what “culpable” means, or maybe it’s even defined by statute. I will assume for purposes of this analysis that a jury would find that Chauvin acted with “culpable negligence,” whatever that term may mean. Did Chauvin’s culpable negligence create an “unreasonable risk” and did he “consciously” take chances of causing Mr. Floyd’s death as this statute requires? I think it is clear that the prosecution can prove this element of manslaughter in the second degree.

This analysis of the relevant facts as we know them and the applicable Minnesota criminal statutes convinces me that the prosecuting attorneys in this case made the proper charging decisions. I know of no facts that would prove that Chauvin acted with intent to kill Mr. Floyd as required for both first and second degree murder. Nor do I think the prosecutors could prove premeditation as required for first degree murder.

The prosecution may well be able to prove third degree murder. That is a very serious felony. One convicted of it can be sentenced to prison for up to 25 years. The standard sentencing range for this crime is probably less than that, but if Chauvin is convicted of third degree murder he will spend many years locked up.

Second degree manslaughter is the charge of which Chauvin is most likely to be convicted. It too is a serious felony. A person convicted of it may be sentenced to up to ten years in prison. Once again the standard sentencing range is probably less than that, but even if second degree manslaughter is the only charge of which Chauvin is convicted he will be looking at a significant number of years behind bars.

[1] Jury instructions in criminal cases don’t typically define reasonable doubt. I’ve heard it defined as a doubt for which there is a reason. I guess that comes as close as anything to defining it.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God?

June 1, 2020

Psalm 104:35a

Even though I’m now retired I regularly use something called the Revised Common Lectionary for suggestions on scripture passages to look at and write on. A lectionary is a schedule of Bible readings. There are two Revised Common Lectionaries, one for every Sunday and other significant days of the Christian calendar that don’t necessarily or ever fall on a Sunday like Christmas and Good Friday and one for daily use. Sometimes the lectionary does sort of an odd thing. It will sometimes leave a verse, or a few verses, out of a reading that you’d expect to be in it. Take for example the reading from the daily Revised Common Lectionary for today, Monday, June 1, 2020. One of those readings is Psalm 104:24-34 and 35b. When I saw that I thought what happened to 35a? Why did they leave it out? When I looked at those verses I saw a couple of reasons why the lectionary folks might have left 35a out. Verses 24 to 34 are basically a hymn of praise to God as creator especially of the seas and the creatures that live in them. Verse 35b reads “Bless the Lord, O my soul.” That fits well enough with most any psalm. Here’s 35a: “Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more.” Perhaps the lectionary people left 35a out of today’s reading because it doesn’t quite fit with verses 24-34 and 35b. Or maybe they left it out because they don’t like it. I don’t like. I’m happy enough that they left it out, so maybe I’m projecting my dislike onto the people who put the lectionary together. Yet verse 35a raises a significant issue for me, and it’s that issue that I want to address here.

When I read verse 35a to see why the lectionary might have left it out I thought: If all sinners were consumed from the earth there’d be no one left. I’ve heard all my life that we’re all sinners. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard and myself quoted Paul saying “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23. I know that a lot of people in my liberal progressive United Church of Christ don’t agree and don’t like being told that they have anything for which they need to be forgiven. I think they’re wrong about that though I usually don’t know what a particular person’s particular sin is. See, I’m ordained in the United Church of Christ, and I came out of the UCC’s Congregationalist predecessor denomination. Congregationalism arose initially as a Calvinist movement within the Church of England. Calvinist Christianity has always stressed that we all need God’s forgiveness. Not that most of us are all that Calvinist any more, but still. We do all need God’s forgiveness. I and many of my colleagues believe that God offers us that forgiveness freely and without condition, but our Calvinist forbears didn’t usually agree with that belief. Witness the famous Congregationalist preacher Jonathan Edwards.

In 1741 Edwards preached a famous, or infamous, sermon with the title “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In that sermon Edwards really let his congregation have it with powerful if highly problematic hellfire and brimstone preaching. There are in this congregation, he said, sinners who are in deep, deep trouble precisely because they are terrible sinners. It isn’t clear from Edwards just what their sin was other perhaps than relying on themselves rather than on Jesus Christ for salvation. Never mind. These unidentified members of the congregation were, in Edwards’ opinion, in great peril. Edwards thundered: “There is nothing that keeps wicked Men at any one moment, out of Hell, but the Pleasure of GOD.” Justice, he said, calls for “infinite punishment” of sinners, and only God’s sovereign will keeps them from being cast into hell this very minute to receive that infinite punishment. He cited John 3:18: Those who do not believe are condemned already.

He described the peril of sinners this way:

The Wrath of God burns against them, their Damnation don’t (sic) slumber, the Pit is prepared, the Fire is made ready, the Furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the Flames do now rage and glow. The glittering Sword is whet, and held over them, and the Pit hath opened her Mouth under them.

And it’s all because of our sin. We’ve just got it coming: “There is laid in the very Nature of carnal Man a Foundation for the Torments of Hell….” It is only the “restraining hand of God” that keeps sinners from being case into eternal torment.

Edwards used language we could almost describe as flowery except that he’s hardly describing anything pleasant:

O Sinner! Consider the fearful Danger you are in: ‘Tis a great Furnace of Wrath, a wide and bottomless Pit, full of the Fire of Wrath, that you are held over in the Hand of God, whose Wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the Damned in Hell: You hang by a slender Thread, with the Flames of divine Wrath flashing about it, and ready every Moment to singe it, and burn it asunder.

Yikes! And there’s nothing you can do about it other perhaps than to run to Jesus for salvation.

Sinners in the hands of an angry God. Really? Are we all really so bad that we deserve the eternal torment Edwards describes? Is it really in our physical nature that that’s what we deserve? Is it really only the sovereign will of God that saves us from it? Is God really so vicious and vengeful as to damn us with unspeakable torment for eternity? Jonathan Edwards thought so, and he’s hardly the only Christian to have thought that way. Hundreds of years before Edwards, Anselm of Canterbury thought that human sin was so bad that nothing a mere human could do could atone for it. To him that’s why God became in human in Jesus to pay the price for our sin that none of us could. Two hundred years before Edwards, Martin Luther thought his own sin was so bad that nothing he could do could procure its forgiveness. That’s why he figured out that salvation comes from God not from anything we do. Were these giants of the Christian tradition right? Are we really nothing but sinners in the hands of an angry God?

No, I don’t think so. It’s not that we aren’t sinners. With the bulk of the Christian tradition I believe that there has ever been only one sinless human being. His name was Jesus of Nazareth. Paul was right about the rest of us. We do sin and fall short of the glory of God. Whatever may be true in theory, it simply isn’t possible for any of us to live sinless lives in practice. Who doesn’t get unrighteously angry? Who can honestly say they’ve never hated anyone? Not me. I hate Donald Trump. I know that in theory he is a beloved child of God whom I should love, but I nearly gag on those words as I write them. Maybe God somehow can love him, but I can’t. Back when I was a lawyer I’d get self-righteously angry at other lawyers who had done something I thought was underhanded, and that happened a lot. I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never been unfaithful to my wife, but I sure have coveted a lot of other people’s possessions, especially really nice cars and boats. And let’s not even mention coveting beautiful women, although I guess if Jimmy Carter can confess to it I can too. I’ve hardly done all I could to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visited the imprisoned, or house the homeless. I don’t think I’m a particularly bad person. At least I don’t think I’m worse than most other people, and I like to think that I’m better than some. Am I a sinner? Yes. Are you? Yes. We all do things that are wrong. It comes with being human.

So is God as angry with all of us as Jonathan Edwards said God is? Does God have a hell of eternal torment all fired up and waiting for us? Is it only God’s totally autonomous will that keeps us out of it? No. See, the God I know, I know in and through Jesus Christ. Our misdeeds probably do in some sense hurt God, but God is far above being angry with us. God is a God of grace. That means that it is not in God’s nature to be angry, it is in God’s nature to love and to forgive. Brother Jonathan, we aren’t sinners in the hands of an angry God. We’re sinners in the hands of a gracious God. We’re sinners in the hands of a forgiving God. We’re sinners in the hands of a loving God. God holds us always in divine hands of love. We aren’t threatened there. We are safe there. If all sinners were consumed from the earth as Psalm 104:35a prays for, we’d all be gone. The great good news of Jesus Christ includes the assurance that it’s not in God’s nature to do it. For that great gift let all the people say, Thanks be to God.