Let's Hang the Bible

 

Let’s Hang the Bible

October 22, 2020

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

On Opening Our Eyes

 

On Opening Our Eyes

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

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

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

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

He's Not Our Savior

 

He’s Not Our Savior

October 14, 2020

 

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

Psalm 146 says:

 

Do not put your trust in princes,

              in mortals in whom there is no

                             help. Psalm 146:3 NRSV

 

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

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

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

Psalm 146 says of princes,

 

When their breath departs, they

                             return to the earth;

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

 

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

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

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

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

On the Supreme Court Deciding the Presidential Election

 

On the Supreme Court Deciding the Presidential Election

October 13, 2020

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War is Madness

 

War is Madness

October 3, 2020

 

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

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

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

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

Where's God?

 

Where’s God?

October 3, 2020

 

Life is complicated. Faith is complicated. Yes, I’ve heard people say of me that I can make anything complicated and do make everything complicated. OK, but I don’t think I make complications up. In the dedication to my first book I wrote that my father “taught me never to be satisfied with superficial answers.” I tend to see complications that most others don’t see, but I don’t make them up. They really are there. In my years to preaching, teaching, and writing theology I have learned that every answer to any question in the Christian faith raises as many questions as it answers. All those questions popping up all the time can drive you nuts, but that doesn’t mean the questions aren’t there or that it’s OK to ignore them. Ignoring them leaves understanding less complete than it needs to be. God doesn’t want us to live with incomplete understandings, or at least God wants us to pursue our questions and to wrestle with the answers we find and all the new questions we ask.

Here’s a question that occurred to me today that perhaps few people ask and fewer people answer. It’s more complicated that it at first appears to be. We know it’s complicated because we know of several different answers people have given to it. The question is, “Where’s God?” As I thought about that question I came up with three traditional answers Christians have given to it. I want here to consider each of them to see if they are true, partially true, or false and to consider what meaning they might have for us, if any.

One traditional answer to the question of God’s location is “up in heaven.” The poet Robert Browning famously said “God’s in His heaven—All’s right with the world.” How Browning could believe that all’s right with the world escapes me, but never mind. He locates God right where a lot of people believe God is. We traditionally think of heaven as being “up there somewhere.” So we often look up when we pray. Perhaps like me you’ve seen kitschy art picturing a young child kneeling by a bed, palms together before her in a traditional position for prayer, looking up. It’s terrible art, but it reflects a common belief that God is located up there somewhere in a place we call heaven. I heard about a colleague of mine who said that as I child he was afraid to lie on his bed looking up because he knew that’s where God was, up there, and he didn’t want God to see how bad he’d been. We express our belief that God is up in heaven somewhere in many different ways.

It’s not that God isn’t in heaven, assuming for the moment that there is such a place. There is nonetheless a big problem with thinking about God’s location in this way. It says, or at least it suggests, that God is only in heaven and not anywhere else. Taken by itself the belief that God is in heaven can lead to a concept of God as separate from us, isolated from us, and distant from us. God being only up in heaven is where eighteenth century Deists thought God was, and Deism didn’t much outlive the eighteenth century because it made God so remote, inactive, and ineffective in the world. Surely we want to avoid those negative consequences of thinking of God as being primarily in heaven.

Another traditional answer to the question “Where’s God?” is that God is in a temple, church, or some other place of worship. Ancient Israel believed that God lived in the temple in Jerusalem. Thus Psalm 84 begins, “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts.” NRSV. Hebrew scripture is full of references to the temple as “the house of the Lord,” and the authors of those texts always meant “house” literally. The temple was where God lived. In our own day people still sometimes call their church a house of God as if God actually lived specifically there. When I was a child First Congregational Church of Eugene, Oregon, which my family attended, always began its worship services by having us sing “The Lord is in his holy temple,” as though First Congregational Church of Eugene were somehow a place where God was particularly present, at least on Sunday morning. This way of understanding has the same negative side to it as does thinking of God as being primarily up in heaven. It isolates God. It puts God in a particular place and thereby suggests that God is not present anywhere else, at least not on Sunday morning.

I believe that these two answers to the question of where God is tell the truth but not the whole truth, to use a bit of legal terminology. If there is a heaven, which I believe is something for which we can hope but the reality of which we cannot know, then God is surely present there. Surely God is with God’s people of different faith traditions when they gather in their places of worship for prayer and other acts of communal worship. God was present in the Jerusalem temple. God was present with us at First Congregational of Eugene. We weren’t wrong when we sang “the Lord is in his holy temple.”

Those traditional answers to our question however, while true, miss the complete answer to the question that we need. The complete answer to the question “Where’s God?” is—everywhere. The traditional Christian characterization of God as “ubiquitous” is correct. Ubiquitous means present everywhere. There is no place where God is not. Psalm 139 knows that truth well. It asks rhetorically, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” Psalm 139:7 NRSV. It knows God is in heaven, but it even insists that God is in the opposite of heaven, the place where we all end up after death that the ancient Hebrews called Sheol. Psalm 139:8. This ancient prayer powerfully proclaims the reality of a ubiquitous God. St. Paul knew that reality too. In the book of Acts he quotes with approval some ancient Greek poet as having said that God is that in which we “live and move and have our being.” Acts 17:28. Everything is in God, and God is in everything.

So where is God? Here. There. Everywhere, and that is very good news indeed. We can discover God right where we are wherever we are. Yes, some places can be what Celtic spirituality calls thin places where we can more readily perceive God’s presence than we can in other places, but God is everywhere. Any place can be a thin place. If you have felt the presence of God in nature, great. God is there. If you feel God’s presence more strongly in your church or other place of worship, great. God is there. If you feel yourself wrapped in the presence of God in the silence and privacy of your own room, great. God is there. The Jerusalem temple was I suppose God’s dwelling place in a sense, but it was that not so much because God actually lived there but because the temple was part of God’s creation, and God is present everywhere in God’s creation. So don’t think that you need to go to some special place to find God. God is everywhere. God is right there where you are as you read these words, and for God’s ubiquitous presence with us, let all the people say, Thanks be to God!

No Conditions Precedent!

 

No Conditions Precedent!

October 1, 2020

 

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

 

When I consider the manifold shortcomings of what popular Christianity has done to itself over the centuries to get it wrong and make itself so unattractive to so many people today one thing stands out for me. We insist on making our relationship with God conditional. We make it an “if/then” proposition. We make it contractual. Both parties to the relationship, God and humans, have their contractual obligations. If either side fails in their obligations the other side is released from its obligations, and we just can’t see how it could be otherwise. We just can’t see how it really is with God and us.

Civil law has a concept that perfectly fits what we humans do with our relationship with God[1]. In contract law there is the concept of the “condition precedent.” A condition precedent is something that one party to a contract must do before another party’s obligations under the contract come into effect. A simple example taken from a Google search is that when a painter agrees to paint a house if the owner supplies the paint, the owner supplying the paint is a condition precedent to the painter’s contractual obligation to paint the house. No paint, no obligation to paint. That’s how a condition precedent works. We humans are forever putting conditions precedent on our relationship with God and God’s relationship with us. I want here to take a look at just how we do that and just how wrong it is that we do. We make our relationship with God conditional, that is, we impose conditions precedent on it, in at least two important respects. We say we will love God “if;” and we say God will love us “if.” I’ll look at these two ways of putting conditions precedent on our relationship with God in that order.

Our making our love of God conditional is perhaps less well understood even by people who do it than is the conditional nature of salvation, but it has deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Psalm 116 for example begins, “I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my supplications.” Psalm 116:1. I love God, the psalmist says, because God has done something for me. This verse assumes this contractual relationship: We are obligated to love God, and God is obligated to hear us when we pray. The psalmist of Psalm 116 believes that God has met God’s obligation under the contract between God and him to hear him when he prays. The psalmist therefore loves God. The contract is intact. God heard the psalmist, so the psalmist lives upon to his obligation to love God. The psalmist here considered God hearing him to be a condition precedent to his loving God.

So what if God had breached God’s obligation to hear the psalmist or at least the psalmist believed that God had breached that divine obligation and not heard his prayer? The way Psalm 116 begins using the word “because” creates the unavoidable inference that then the psalmist would be relieved of his duty to love God. That word “because” gives the game away. The psalmist sees his relationship with God as a contract with a condition precedent clause in it. Like every contract the parties obligations under it are conditional.

Ancient Israel almost always thought of its relationship with God as contractual and therefore conditional. They usually called their relationship with God a covenant not a contract, so we need to ask here what the difference is, if any, between a contract and a covenant. The Google search “define covenant” yields as the first definition simply “an agreement.” The online dictionary meriam-webster.com comes closer to what covenant means in the Bible. It defines covenant as “a usually formal, solemn, and binding agreement.” As a second definition it gives “a written agreement or promise usually under seal between two or more parties for the performance of some action.” The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary begins its discussion of covenant with the definition “a formal agreement or treaty between two parties with each assuming some obligation.”[2] It is clear then that a covenant is a contract. It may be a particularly solemn contract. It may involve some formalities like putting it in writing and sealing it with a seal. It may even have a spiritual element to it as Israel’s covenants with God clearly did. Still, a covenant is basically just a contract.

Another way to think of a covenant is as a treaty. In fact, ancient Israel’s conception of a covenant came from the ancient practice of a stronger nation entering into a treaty with a weaker nation under which both nations assumed certain responsibilities. The stronger nation was most commonly obligated to protect the weaker nation from attack by enemies. The weaker nation was most commonly obligated not to resist what the stronger nation wanted to do and to pay some kind of tribute to the stronger nation. Israel’s conception of its covenants with God fit that pattern well.

Ancient Israel actually had more than one covenant with God. I’ll mention two of them here. God first created a covenant with Noah. See Genesis 8:8-17. God’s covenant with Noah was basically one-sided. God made a promise to Noah never again to destroy the earth with a flood (God said nothing about not destroying the earth some other way) without necessarily placing any obligation on Noah in return. God also made a covenant with Abraham. See Genesis 12:1-3. God’s covenant with Abraham (called Abram in these verses, but don’t worry about it) was more complex. It was two-sided. Abraham has the obligation under the covenant to leave his homeland and go to a place that God would show him. God has an obligation under the covenant too. If Abraham does what God asks, then God will bless him and make him a great nation. We are to infer, I think, that if Abraham didn’t go God wouldn’t be obliged to perform God’s part of the covenant. Abraham going where God sent him was a condition precedent to God’s obligation to bless Abraham and make him a great nation. Conversely, if after Abraham had satisfied the covenant’s condition precedent God failed to fulfill God’s obligation to bless him and make a great nation of him, Abraham would, I assume, be free to return home.

Hebrew scripture is full of other passages in which the relationship between Israel and God is seen in terms of covenants with mutual obligations. Consider for example Isaiah 5:1-10. There God uses the image of a vineyard to illustrate God’s relationship with Israel. The vineyard represents Israel. God has established the vineyard and has tended it lovingly. God has done everything God could do to make it possible for the vineyard to flourish. God asks, “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done?” The question is rhetorical. The answer is of course nothing. God has fully executed God’s covenantal responsibility to Israel to do everything these is to do to allow Israel to prosper.

Israel has its own obligation under this covenant. Isaiah expresses that obligation in terms of God’s expectation of Israel, but we’re really dealing with more than an expectation here. We’re dealing with a covenant obligation. God, the text says, expected the vineyard to produce grapes. Israel’s obligation under the covenant was to take advantage of all that God had done for it. God did everything possible to facilitate Israel’s flourishing, to enable Israel to deliver to God the fruit of a successful, faithful people.

Israel breached that obligation. Isaiah expresses that breach quite tersely here, saying only that God’s vineyard produced “wild grapes.” I don’t know just what the text means by wild grapes, but apparently they are bad grapes rather than the good grapes God expected. Israel has breached its contractual obligation to God to produce good grapes. Israel was to be fruitful with all God had done for it. It wasn’t. Israel breached its covenantal, contractual obligation to God.

This passage in Isaiah doesn’t give any more information about the nature of Israel’s breach of its covenantal obligations. We learn from other passages in Isaiah and other ancient Hebrew prophets such as Amos and Micah that Israel breached its obligations to God in various ways. The people worshipped other gods. The rulers and the elite of society oppressed and exploited the poor and the vulnerable among them. However they saw Israel’s breach of its covenantal obligation with God, the Hebrew prophets thundered that breach its obligations to God Israel certainly did.

In law when a party to a contract breaches a contract the other party to the contract may sue the breaching party, usually for money damages and occasionally for an order compelling the breaching party to perform its obligations obligations under the contract. It didn’t work quite that way with the covenant between God and Israel, but Israel’s breach at least relieved God of God’s duty to protect Israel from whatever threatened it. Our passage from Isaiah speaks of the consequences of Israel’s breach in the metaphor of the destruction of the vineyard. See Isaiah 5:5-6. We know that Assyria conquered and destroyed the northern Hebrew kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE. We know that Babylon conquered and destroyed the southern Hebrew kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE. The Hebrew prophets saw these two disasters as the consequences of Israel’s and Judah’s breaches of their contract with God. That relationship was conditional. The people had breached their obligations to God. God was released from God’s obligations to them.

Ancient Israel saw its relationship with God as contractual, and Israel breached the terms of the contract. The consequence was Israel’s destruction. What the consequence of a breach of the covenant by God would be is less clear, I suppose because no one in ancient Israel could conceive of God ever doing such a thing. We can assume, I think, that if God ever stopped loving and caring for the Israelites, which despite everything God never did, the Israelite people would be relieved of their obligation to worship only the God Yahweh and would be free to worship other gods without negative consequences from Yahweh. However that may be, ancient Israel definitely thought of its relationship with God as covenantal, that is, contractual, that is, conditional.

OK, but what about us? How do we see our relationship with God as conditional? Well, the Christian churches have taught their people that their relationship with God is conditional in a couple of ways. The teachers of the Christian faith have far too often over the centuries (even once being far too often) that if their faith is strong enough, and if they pray hard enough, bad things won’t happen to them or to their loved ones. That contention is terrible, destructive theology, but what matters about it for our purposes here is that it makes our relationship with God conditional. If we do the right things, most especially if the do the right things of believing and praying hard enough, then God will live up to God’s obligation to love and care for us by keeping bad things from happening to us. If we don’t execute our obligations under the contract to do that, then God is relieved of God’s obligation to care for us and keep bad things from happening to us. The common notion that we can prevent bad things from happening to us by believing and praying hard enough makes our relationship with God conditional.

A great many Christians complete this picture of a conditional relationship with God, in effect, by violating their contractual obligation to believe in God and Jesus Christ when they believe that God has not lived up to God’s side of the bargain. An untold but enormous number of Christians have given up their faith when bad things have happened to them, to a loved one, or even simply to so many people in the world who suffer in this life. God, they think, didn’t comply with God’s contractual obligation to take care of people, therefore they are relieved of their obligation to believe in God, or so a great many people have thought and continue to think. When we conceive of our relationship in these terms that relationship it becomes perfectly contractual and conditional.

There is however another way in which Christianity has made our relationship with God conditional that is even more foundational for the faith than anything we have considered so far. It is second of the two ways that Christianity has made our relationship with God conditional that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. We make salvation conditional. We make our relationship with God conditional when we say God will save us if. We say we stand in God’s grace if. Different varieties, what I once heard a wise woman call different flavors, of Christians have asserted different ifs over the centuries. Some look to Bible passages like James 2:14-17 with its famous line “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” and say that God will save us it we do enough good works. Others look to verses like Acts 16:31 with it line “believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved,” or John 3:16 with its “so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” and say God will save us if we believe in Jesus. Either way, salvation is conditional. There is something we must do in order to be saved. If we fulfill our contractual obligation to God, God will fulfill God’s contractual obligation to us and save us. That’s how conditional salvation works. God’s obligation to save arises when the person needing salvation fulfills a condition precedent to God’s obligation to save by doing the right things or believing the right things. Christianity really has reduced the concept salvation to that simplistic, human, contractual way of thinking.

Reducing our relationship to God to a contract with mutual obligations has consequences for how we see God. When we make our relationship with God in any way conditional we fail to let God be God. I once heard a young seminarian say that what she learned in seminary was that her God was too small. We humans make God too small all the time. One of the primary ways that we make God too small is by applying our human ways of doing things to God. We find an example of a prominent theologian doing just that in Anselm of Canterbury’s book Cur Deus Homo?, the classic statement of the classical theory of atonement. In that book Anselm says that God cannot forgive human sin without a price being paid first because human sin is such an affront to God’s honor. To this way of thinking a substitutionary sacrificial atonement becomes a condition precedent to God forgiving human sin. One of Anselm’s essential errors was to apply the human concept of honor as it was understood in medieval Europe directly to God. In doing that Anselm made God too small. He didn’t let God be God. He didn’t understand by how much God transcends our human ways of being.

God just isn’t that much like we are. God doesn’t do things our way. At Isaiah 55:8-9, we read: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” We humans are so prone to forgetting that profound truth. We keep wanting to make God as small and petty as we are. I think we’re afraid of letting God be God, of letting God be as much more than we are as God really is. When we understand just how transcendent of us God really is we know that we can’t control God. We know that we can’t even ever fully understand God. We don’t like not controlling or even understanding God, so we make God like us. We lock God up in an ecclesiastical institution or in a book. We just seem to be determined to make God too small.

That’s what we do when we make our relationship with God conditional. It’s not hard to understand why we do. Our lives are filled with conditional relationships with people we want something from. We get paid if we work. We get medical care and education if we can afford them. People sell us things or perform services for us if we pay them. Sometimes our personal relationships are conditional too. I’ll be your friend if you’re nice to me and not if you’re not. Parents may tell a child you’ll get an allowance if you do your chores and won’t if you don’t. Sadly sometimes even more intimate relationships are conditional. I’ll love you if you do what I want and won’t if you don’t. We humans can make almost anything conditional.

So we make our relationship with God conditional too. We can hardly imagine loving even the people closest to us unconditionally. We certainly can’t imagine loving people we don’t like or who we think are evil unconditionally. Jesus told us to love our enemies. Most of us not only can’t do it, we don’t even want to do it. To us love must be reciprocal. That is, it is conditioned on love in return. So we make God’s love as conditional as ours is. To cite an extreme but common example we can’t forgive Hitler, so we think God’s can’t or at least won’t and shouldn’t forgive Hitler either. Again and again we reduce God to the human. We make God too small. We think of God as engaging in the same kind of conditional relationships that fill our lives. We don’t let God be God.

Well, here’s the thing. Because God so infinitely transcends the human, with God no relationships are conditional. With God there are no conditions precedent. There can’t be because God is so much greater than we mere mortals. Yes, I know. The words God and can’t don’t really belong together in the same sentence, but I don’t know how else to express what I mean here. We condition love. God doesn’t. Our love is limited. God’s love is limitless. Our love is finite, God’s love is infinite. We think we have to be a certain way to earn another person’s love, so we think we have to be a certain way to earn God’s love. We put conditions precedent on love. God doesn’t. Our relationship with God is perfectly unconditional. It’s way past time for us to stop reducing our relationship with God to the human by making it conditional. It isn’t conditional. With God there are no conditions precedent. There just aren’t. And I for one say, thanks be to God! Amen.

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[1] I hope the legal nature of this analysis doesn’t put you off. I used to be a lawyer. I took contract law in law school, so even though I haven’t practiced law for years it’s still easy for me to think in legal terms. I do a good deal of that in this analysis. I think it works. I hope you think it does too.

[2] The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 208.