On Divine Forgiveness of Sin

On Divine Forgiveness of Sin

We’ve all heard it. Jesus Christ suffered and died to pay the price for sin and thereby procure God’s forgiveness of our sin. That way of understanding the salvific work of Jesus Christ is called the classical theory of atonement. A fancier term for it is the theory of substitutionary sacrificial atonement. It says Jesus took our place (the substitutionary part) and became the sacrifice that the theory says was necessary before God could or would forgive human sin. Although we often read scripture through a lens of the classical atonement theory, that theory actually has scant biblical support. Much more frequently the New Testament authors see Jesus paying a price for sin but not one paid to God as in the classical theory of atonement. It’s paid to the devil to procure our ransom from sin. This theory is called either the ransom theory of salvation or the Christus Victor theory. I subscribe to neither the classical atonement theory nor the ransom theory but to a third way of understanding the saving work of Christ called theology of the cross. For a discussion of the failings of classical atonement theory and an explanation of theology of the cross see Chapters 8 and 9 of my book Liberating Christianity.[1] Here I want to set forth an objection to the classical theory of atonement that I don’t cover there, namely, that it posits that there was no divine forgiveness of sin before Jesus. That theory says that Jesus had to suffer and die before God forgave sin. Jesus’ sacrifice comes first. God’s forgiveness of sin follows. That is something I cannot and do not accept. God is a God of love and grace. Love and grace aren’t love and grace if they don’t include forgiveness. Beyond that I want to look at a few pre-Christian Bible passages that knew full well that God forgives human sin.

There is no doubt that centuries before Jesus the ancient Hebrews knew that God forgives sin. Consider for example this passage from the eighth century BCE prophet Micah:

Who is a God like you, pardoning

               iniquity

       and passing over the

               transgressions

       of the remnant of your

               possession?

He does not retain his anger

               forever,

       because he delights in showing

               clemency.

He will again have compassion

               upon us;

       he will tread our iniquities

               under foot.

You will cast all our sins

       into the depths of the sea. Micah 7:18-19.

More than seven hundred years before Jesus Micah knew that God forgives our sin. Not will forgive our sin after some event centuries in the future. God forgives our sin now says a prophet who never heard of Jesus or the classical theory of atonement.

The Hebrew Bible, which is the Protestant Old Testament and part of the Roman Catholic Old Testament, contains many verses about God’s forgiveness of sin. Consider for example this passage from Numbers:

Forgive the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of your steadfast love, just as you have pardoned this people, from Egypt even until now.

Then the Lord said: “I do forgive, just as you have asked….

Numbers 14:19-20.

Numbers tells stories from the Exodus, but in its present form it probably dates from hundreds of years after the Exodus. Nonetheless Numbers as we have it was written several hundred years before Jesus, and it knows that God forgives sin. Not will forgive sin. Does forgive sin.

Or consider these verses from the Psalms:

The Lord is merciful and

               gracious,

       slow to anger and abounding in

               steadfast love.

He will not always accuse,

       nor will he keep his anger

               forever.

He does not deal with us

               according to our sins,

       nor repay us according to our

               iniquities.

For as the heavens are high above

               the earth,

       so great is his steadfast love

               toward those who fear him;

as far as the east is from the west,

       so far he removes our

               transgressions from us. Psalm 103:8-12.

The psalms can be hard to date, but the most recent of them was written at least a few hundred years before Jesus. Yet they too know that God forgives sin. It simply contradicts Christian scripture, that is, Old Testament texts from hundreds of years before Jesus, to say that God forgave human sin only after the Son of God Incarnate paid a horrible price of suffering and death to procure that forgiveness.

When we add this consideration to all the other reasons why the classical theory of atonement is unacceptable, for example that it constitutes cosmic child abuse, we see that God always has forgiven human sin just because it is in God’s nature as love and grace to forgive human sin. Jesus didn’t have to suffer and die to buy forgiveness for us. It was already there. That doesn’t mean Jesus death is without salvific significance. For what that significance is see Chapter 9 of Liberating Christianity that I mentioned above. God has always forgiven human sin. God always will. On his death bed the German poet Heinrich Heine is supposed to have said “Of course God will forgive me; that’s His job.” That is a rather flip way to put it. I would say of course God will forgive all of us because that is God’s nature. The point is the same. God forgives. God always has and always will. God forgives free of cost and without requiring any substitutionary sacrificial atonement. Thanks be to God!

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[1] Sorenson, Thomas C. Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, 2008.

On American Racism and Police Violence Against Black People

On American Racism and Police Violence Against Black People

When I was first in London, England, as an eleven year old kid in 1958 the Bobbies were unarmed. Those London police officers patrolled the city and enforced the law without weapons. Even back then I never quite understood how they could do that. I mean, surely the bad guys had guns. I understand that they don’t do it anymore. I’ve never seen an American cop in uniform without a holstered pistol on his or her hip. I have I suppose heard of police shootings my whole live. Especially in the US with its culture of glorifying the gun and addressing almost any problem with violence I can’t imagine the police being unarmed. I don’t believe in the salvific power of violence the way most Americans do, but I imagine the police are convinced with good reason that at least the threat of deadly violence is necessary in their work for their own protection and sometimes for the protection of others.

In recent times we have heard of case after case of white cops killing unarmed Black people. Sometimes they shoot them. Sometimes they strangle them. Sometimes their use of deadly force may be legally justifiable. Yet we see case after case in which it sure doesn’t appear to the outside layperson to be justified. In far too many of those cases the cops have gotten away with it either because they were never prosecuted or because they were tried and acquitted. Today it looks like maybe that is beginning to change.

On May 25, 2020, four Minneapolis cops arrested and unarmed Black man named George Floyd for the minor offense of trying to pass a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. A bystander, a seventeen year old girl, shot a video of white officer Derek Chauvin getting Mr. Floyd on the ground and pressing his knee against Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. Mr. Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. At the end he called out for his deceased mother. Chauvin would not let up his pressure on Mr. Floyd’s neck. Three other police officers on the scene did nothing to stop what Chauvin was doing. One of them may have applied pressure to Mr. Floyd’s back. George Floyd died of suffocation. Chauvin has been fired from the police force, arrested, and charged with second degree felony murder, the underlying felony being assault. The other three cops have been fired, arrested, and charged with aiding and abetting second degree murder. None of them has been convicted yet, and they are therefore legally presumed to be innocent despite the evidence from the damning videotape of what happened.

Not just Minneapolis but the whole country exploded in protest. Demonstrations continue as I write these words on June 14, nearly three weeks after Mr. Floyd was killed. Every city in the country large and small has seen demonstrations. There has been some looting, especially at first; but most of the demonstrations have been peaceful. There has been some police violence, but for the most part the police have controlled crowds without violence. Some law enforcement officers have knelt with the protestors in memory of Mr. Floyd. The president had police tear gas and shoot rubber bullets at peaceful protestors so he could go have a photo op in front of a boarded up church near the White House he has never attended though it is called the church of presidents. Some jurisdictions have enacted laws or policies to reform police practice, including banning choke holds. Demands continue for more meaningful reforms to end police brutality generally and against unarmed Black people specifically.

On June 12, 2020, two white Atlanta police officers responded to a call about a man named Rayshard Brooks sleeping in his car in a Wendy’s drive through. His car may or may not have been blocking the drive through. The police say they administered a breathalyzer test to Mr. Brooks which he failed. Other witnesses say the police did not administer that test. The two police officers arrested Mr. Brooks, apparently for the offense of driving while intoxicated although they had not seen Mr. Brooks driving his car. When they tried to apply hand restraints to Mr. Brooks he resisted arrest. Video shot by a bystander shows him wrestling quite violently with the police officers. He grabbed a Taser from one of the officers and started to run away from them as shown by the surveillance at the Wendy’s. At one point he turned and fired the Taser at one of the officers who was chasing him though the officer was well out of the range of the Taser. I understand that under Georgia law a Taser is not considered a lethal weapon. The cop shot Mr. Brooks in the back. Witnesses say the two officers spent at least a little time picking up the shell casings from the fired shots before calling for medical aid for Mr. Brooks. Mr. Brooks, whose daughter’s eighth birthday was the next day, died of his wounds.

Atlanta exploded. Some fool set fire to the Wendy’s where the incident took place though the Wendy’s was only the setting of the event and otherwise had nothing to do with it. People blocked traffic on Atlanta freeways. The mayor said the shooting was not justified. The police chief resigned. The officer who fired the fatal shots has been fired. The other officer present has been placed on administrative leave. Whether these responses were justified or not all or at least most of them were perfectly foreseeable in today’s atmosphere of increased sensitivity to and outrage at white cops shooting unarmed Black men. I could easily cite other cases of white cops (or other white men) shooting unarmed Black people, but I trust the point is made. It happens far too often. Once is too often. I want here to look at two cultural phenomena that explain but in no way justify these shootings.

First, Black Americans are afraid of the police in a way white Americans aren’t. We hear all the time of people’s experience of being stopped for the violation of driving while Black. We hear how Black parents teach their children how to behave in public so they won’t be arrested—or worse—by white cops. I can hear white racists respond to these stories by saying that Black Americans are overreacting. They’re blowing things out of proportion. We white people however have no right to tell Black people how to react to Black experience. Our task is to listen, to try to understand, then to be allies to Black people in ways that Black not white people define in the effort to change things for the better.

We have no right to tell Black people how to respond to their life experience first of all because no people have the right to tell any other people how to react to their own experience. Beyond that the situation is much more acute between Black and white Americans for the second of the two phenomena I want to discuss here. We white Americans have no right to tell Black Americans how to react to their life experience because we are the bearers and beneficiaries of American racism. The United States of America is a thoroughly racist country. White police shooting Black people is but one ugly manifestation of a culture rotten to its core with racism. Racism is what the late theologian Walter Wink would call a power, a spiritual force alive and functioning within American culture. It functions to benefit white people and disadvantage Black people in all aspects of American life. It appears as personal racism in many white Americans, but more importantly it functions as institutional racism even when the white people in those institutions don’t think they are and may not be racists. Statistics from every aspect of American life show the effect of institutional racism. Whether the statistics be about the economy and wealth, education, medical care, the criminal law system, or any other aspect of American life, Black Americans fare significantly worse than white Americans.

This country was born racist. It’s economy was largely built on the backs of enslaved Black people. White Americans kept Black Americans poor and un- or undereducated for decades after the end of slavery. The US Supreme Court made racial segregation in public schools illegal in 1954. The federal government banned racial discrimination in interstate commerce (understood very broadly) in 1964 and in voting in 1965. Supreme Court decisions and federal laws, however, don’t necessarily change people’s behavior. They are largely ineffective in defeating institutional racism. We have made some progress toward a more just America, but we still are a thoroughly racist nation with a long way to go before true equality is achieved.

The manifestation most in the public consciousness right now is police violence against Black people. That is a hugely important issue, and we must do all we can to curb it. It is however only one manifestation of a much deeper issue, the issue of endemic American racism. How do we overcome that endemic racism? American racism effects everyone but is mostly our white people’s problem to solve because it is our racism that causes the problems. I don’t know how we do it. I doubt that anyone has all the answers. Whatever it takes we just have to do it no matter how much that means we have to change or give up. It’s way past time.

A Double Occupation

A Double Occupation: A Brief Analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian Problem

The Hebrew Bible tells a powerful story of how the Hebrew people came to occupy the land that became Israel. That story says that after Moses died God commissioned Joshua to lead the people across the Jordan to take Canaan, the land they said their god Yahweh had given them. See Joshua 1:1-11. They fought various battles against the people who lived in the land. Eventually they conquered and subdued these people. They then created an Israeli kingdom (or two) in the land that had belonged to other people. Scholars may doubt that that’s really how the Hebrews became the dominant people in that land, but that’s how the Hebrew Bible tells their story.[1]

The Hebrew Bible presents the Israeli conquest of Canaan as a very good thing. It has God making a promise and that promise being fulfilled. It is a story of the creation of a homeland for a people who spoke Hebrew and worshiped a god named Yahweh. I suppose the creation of Israel was a good thing for the Hebrews. Whether it was a good thing for the Canaanites is a question we shall return to anon.

In 1948 the modern state of Israel was created in the place where ancient Israel had stood, or at least in part of that place. After World War II the world’s powers enabled the creation of a Jewish state as a homeland for the Jews, who had suffered so horribly in the Holocaust. Jews everywhere along with many Christians rejoiced at the creation of Israel. Yet the new state of Israel stood on land that had hardly been unoccupied. It was the home of a great many Arab people. Arabs had lived on that land for many centuries by 1948. There hadn’t been a Jewish state there for more than two millennia. Was the creation of the Jewish state of Israel a good thing for the Arabs who lived there? That too is a question to which we will return anon.

We know from the Bible what the Hebrew conquest of Canaan looked like to the Israelites. What did the Hebrew conquest of Canaan look like to the Canaanites? It must have looked like an unprovoked invasion of their land by foreigners who had no business being there. Those foreigners attacked them, took their land, and disparaged their religion as idolatry. They said that their god Yahweh had given that land to them. The Canaanites must have asked when their land had ever belonged to Yahweh so that he could give it to anyone. Their chief god Baal certainly hadn’t given their land to foreigners who called him a false idol. To the Canaanites the Hebrew conquest of their land was hardly a good thing.

When the state of Israel was created in 1948 Jews took the land of and displaced huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs. Many of those Arabs became refugees, mostly in Jordan. Arabs in many countries condemned the creation of Israel and even fought a war (and eventually other wars) against Israel in an attempt to destroy it and give the land back to the Palestinian Arabs. They failed. These displaced Arabs knew they weren’t responsible for the Holocaust and must have wondered why they were being punished for something they didn’t do. When the Arabs whom Israel displaced left their homes many of them took their keys with them thinking that their displacement was temporary and that they would return home soon. Their descendants still live in refugee camps. They display keys as the symbol of their desire to return to the land the state of Israel took from them. To the Palestinian Arabs the creation of the state of Israel was an act of aggression against them by the Jews and their international supporters. Israel has acted aggressively toward them ever since.

The history of Israel is a history of two occupations millennia apart of the same land that each time belonged to non-Hebrew people, first the Canaanites, then the Arabs. Jews today still claim that God gave that land to them. The theme song of the 1960 movie Exodus says it clearly. Speaking for the Jews the lyrics say “This land is mine, God gave this land to me.” The ancient Canaanites certainly didn’t think that their god had given their land to foreigners. Palestinian Arabs, most of whom are Muslims, don’t think that the God they call Allah gave their land to the Israelis.[2] To both ancient Canaanites and contemporary Arabs the creation of Jewish states on their land is nothing but an act of imperialist aggression.

So what are we to make of this history of two separate occupations by Jews of land belonging to others? The first thing we must do is recognize that the Jewish occupations of Canaan/Palestine are settled fact. They happened. The Romans eventually undid the first one. The second, existing one won’t be undone as long as Israel maintains military strength and foreign alliances sufficient to defeat any attack by their Arab neighbors or by Iran, which is not Arabic but is an implacable foe of Israel. Many Arabs would love to defeat Israel and take the land back. They aren’t strong enough to do it, and world powers like the US would never let them do it. The modern state of Israel is here to stay.

We must next recognize that while the Israelite occupation of Canaan more than three millennia ago may have been a good thing for the ancient Israelites, the modern state of Israel has definitely been a blessing for contemporary Jews. The cultures of Europe and the United States have been viciously anti-Jewish for a very long time. In the High Middle Ages crusaders on their way to fight Muslims would stop and raze Jewish villages in Europe on their way. In 1290 King Edward I expelled all Jews from England. (In 1657 they were let back in.) In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella, famous for their sponsorship of Christopher Columbus’ voyages to America, expelled all Jews from Spain who would not convert to Christianity. The Spanish Inquisition was created to investigate whether Jews who had converted to Christianity were still practicing Jewish worship under a guise of Christianity. Imperial Russia had pogroms. France had the Dreyfus Affair.

The worst Christian persecution of the Jews took place under Nazi rule. Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders were viciously anti-Jewish. They used the Jews as scapegoats for Germany’s ills after World War I.[3] Heinrich Himmler and his SS arrested Austrian Jews after the 1938 Anschluss and introduced policies that evolved into the Holocaust, the Nazi’s “final solution” to the nonexistent Jewish problem. The Germans murdered around six million Jews. In the 1930s the United States turned away a great many Jews who were fleeing the Nazis. Western culture’s history of anti-Judaism is shameful, sinful, and something for which we must all atone.

Despite the hostility of its Arab neighbors modern Israel has been a place of relatively safe refuge for Jews since its founding. Jews have emigrated to Israel from all over the world. A great number of Russian and other Jews managed to emigrate to Israel from the Soviet Union. The plight of the Soviet Jews who were denied exit visas, called “refuseniks,” became an international cause. The victors in World War II established Israel largely in response to the Holocaust. Israel has given safety and hope to God’s Jewish people ever since.

All that being said and truly meant, it is also true that what has been a great blessing for Jews has been a bane for Palestinian Arabs. A great many of them lost their homes, and generations of them ended up in refugee camps outside of Israel. They’re still there. Israel had been established on certain Palestinian land. It wasn’t enough for the Israelis. In 1967 they seized the West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza Strip from the Arabs. They have abandoned the Gaza Strip but blockaded it and made it one of the most miserable places on earth. They rule the West Bank with iron fists. They continue to usurp Arab land by building illegal Israeli settlements on it. Palestinians nominally control the West Bank, but they can’t do anything Israel won’t allow, and Israel can isolate the West Bank from the rest of the world anytime it wants. Israel has built walls supposedly for security that block Palestinian farmers off from their land. The Arabs who live in Israel proper may have relatively comfortable lives. On the whole however the creation of the modern state of Israel has been nothing but bad news for the Palestinian Arabs. The second Jewish occupation of Canaan has been no better for the people it displaced than the first one was so many centuries ago.

So what are we to make of Israel’s two occupations of land belonging to others? The first occupation ended nearly two thousand years ago and is largely only of historical interest. The second occupation continues and shows no signs of ending. The state of Israel is an established fact under international law. We must wish for Israel security and prosperity. Israel’s existence isn’t actually grounded in a promise God supposedly made to Hebrew patriarchs millennia ago. It is a consequence of Christian guilt over the Holocaust and the ability of western powers to assuage some of that guilt by giving the Jews a secure homeland, something they hadn’t had for a very long time.

While we wish security and prosperity for Israel we must wish the same for Palestinian Arabs. Creating those things for those people won’t be easy. There are no simple answers to the myriad problems they face. That some of them keep committing futile acts of violent aggression against Israel only harms their cause. It forces the Israelis to dig in, stay intransigent, and respond to violence with violence. A so-called two state solution seems the obvious way to peace, but it would require both sides to do things they so far have not been willing to do. Israel would have to let the Palestinians have Jerusalem (or at least East Jerusalem) as the capital of their state. It would have to withdraw all Israeli settlements from the West Bank. The Palestinians would have to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel, recognizing its right to exist. They would have to stop all terrorist or military attacks on Israel and Israelis by all Palestinian groups. Sadly, none of those things seems likely to happen soon. Attempts have been made for decades to negotiate a two state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian problem. We seem no closer to making that solution a reality than we were decades ago. We can only hope and pray that both the Israelis and the Palestinians will someday find the courage to do what must be done for peace.

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[1] Archeological evidence suggests that the Hebrews were originally one of the peoples of the Canaanite hill country. Over time they grew and became dominant in that part of the world. That may be historical reality, but it’s a whole lot less interesting than the story the Bible tells. Moreover, the story the Bible tells is one of the foundational stories of Judaism, which makes it immensely important even if it isn’t historically accurate.

[2] “Allah” is a form of the Arabic word for God. Muslims worship the same God as the Jews and Christians do. Arab Christians also call God Allah.

[3] Nazi attacks on the Jews had their effect. In 1958 our German landlady in Berlin, whose husband had been a Nazi, said to my parents and me that it was too bad what happened to the Jews, but something did have to be done. It didn’t of course, but Nazi propaganda convinced a great many people that it did.

Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me

Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me

Exodus 20:3; Acts 7:35-43

It’s a famous line, particularly in the language of the King James Version: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Although this verse actually is not a statement of monotheism we can take it to mean for us that we are to have no God other than the one true God.[1] We call having a god other than the one true God idolatry, worship of an idol. An idol is a false god, i.e., a supposed god that isn’t actually God. For monotheists like Jews, Christians, and Muslims it is never acceptable to have any god than God. Islam states this principle strongly and clearly in the first line of the Shahadah, the creed of Islam: “There is no God but God.”[2] I assume that all Christians would accept that it is impermissible to worship or follow any god but God.

One of the perhaps maddening things about theology is that every answer you give just raises more questions. The statement that we are to have no god before God raises at least two important questions. One is: What is a god? The other is: What does it mean to put an idol, a false god, before the one true God? I will attempt to answer those questions here. To do it I will turn to the great twentieth century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich.[3]

We start with Tillich’s conception of what a god is. A god, he said, is anything that is a person’s “ultimate concern.” An ultimate concern is that which is more important to someone than anything else. The one true God can be a person’s ultimate concern, but more often something else is what is the most important thing to us. I have gotten lots of nods from people when I have suggested that what is most important to many people is their family. I confess that that is true of me. I say I confess that it is because I know full well that my family is not the one true God. Yet while Abraham was willing sacrifice Isaac to God, I would never do such a thing no matter how convinced I was that God was telling me to do it (not that God ever has or ever will tell anyone to do such a thing).[4]

Tillich suggests a couple of things that function as an ultimate concern for many Americans. Wealth functions as a god for far too many of us. Our culture so values wealth that a great many of us will do anything to get it. We expect it to make life full and meaningful. We turn to it to solve all our problems. We will oppose and avoid anything that we think is keeping us from making more money. I saw that dynamic at work decades ago at the downtown Seattle law firms I used to work for when I was a lawyer. Some lawyers saw legal ethics only as something that stopped them from doing certain things to make more money. They weren’t professional lawyers, they were professional money makers who happened to practice law as their way of making money. Wealth was their god, their ultimate concern.

Tillich’s other suggestion for something that is a god for many Americans is the nation. What will most Americans die for? The nation. What will most Americans kill for? The nation. To what do most Americans look for safety and security? The nation. In my neighborhood I never see people displaying the cross, a star of David, an Islamic crescent, or any other religious symbol unless you count gawdy Christmas decorations as Christian symbols (which I don’t). I do see the American flag on people’s houses all the time. Two of my neighbors are displaying them as I write. Consider: Which will get you in more trouble faster in this country, blaspheming God or denying the greatness of the United States? Clearly the latter. Most Americans are far more protective of this country than they are of God. They comfort themselves for their patriotic idolatry by merging God and country into one entity they call a Christian nation, never mind that our country have has been and never was meant to be Christian.

We Americans make family, wealth, the nation, or other things our ultimate concern all the time. In other words we commit idolatry by make those things our god. An idol is a false god. It is anything that people take as a god that is not truly God. It is something people take as ultimate and transcendent that is neither ultimate nor transcendent. It may be the family, wealth, or the nation as I’ve suggested. For many Americans it is the Bible. For others it is some church. We humans are infinitely creative in making idols for ourselves, and most of them look nothing like a golden calf.

Tillich insisted (correctly) that anything a person takes as ultimate that is not ultimate will eventually fail them. Wealth, it turns out, doesn’t actually satisfy the soul. The nation does evil things and adopts policies that are harmful rather than constructive. The Bible is full of contradictions and states as true things no rational person could accept as true. Your church preaches harmful moral dogmas and fails to act for justice and peace. Even your family will fail you. Parents get frail and die. Children go astray and reject you when you try to help. Marriages devolve into nothing but arguments and end in divorce. A younger generation ignores an older generation and leaves older people to live unsafe lives in lonely isolation. Nothing that we take to be ultimate that is not truly ultimate, that is not truly God, will not serve us well for long. Every last one of them will fail us.

The ancient Jews of Moses’ time and the less ancient Jews of the first century CE knew about the temptation to idolatry. In his speech to the Jewish council that got him stoned to death St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, pointed to the idolatry of the golden calf as one of the failings of the Jews. Acts 7:39-41. After the text declares that Yahweh (“the Lord”) was the Hebrew people’s God the Ten Commandments ordain: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20:3. In other words, you shall not commit idolatry.

Originally when this text says “other gods” it almost certainly meant the gods and goddesses of peoples other than the Hebrews. I seriously doubt however that many of us are tempted to worship Isis and Horus of the Egyptians or Ashera and Baal of the Canaanites. We are much more likely to worship money or America, the Bible or our church. All of those things and many others besides can easily become idols for us. They will fail us. The one reality that is not an idol, the one true God, will never fail us the way false idols do. God is faithful always. God is compassionate always. God is grace always. God is love always. God saves us and all people always. God is the only ultimate concern we can trust our whole lives long. So let us always keep the admonition of Exodus 20:3 in mind: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” May it be so.

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[1] The verse is actually a statement of something called henotheism, which is a kind of faith that says that while there are many gods a particular people is to worship only one god. The ancient Hebrews were henotheists until the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE. For how they developed true monotheism during the Babylonian Exile see Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Two, The Old Testament, Coffee Press, Briarwood, NY, 2019, pp. 281-290.

[2] You will see this line translated as “There is no God but Allah,” and some uninformed (and probably prejudiced) people will say Allah is not God. Wrong. The word Allah is a form of the Arabic for God. God is its correct translation. When it’s left as Allah it’s just left in the Arabic original.

[3] If you want to read Tillich himself on this subject see his book Dynamics of Faith. Although this book was first published in 1958 it is still important (it changed my life) and is readily available on line.

[4] Yes. I know. Genesis says God told Abraham to do it. God never did. What we have in the account of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac is a story told to make theological points. It isn’t history. It is true, but it never happened.

Our Deranged President

Our Deranged President

June 11, 2020

 

Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America, is deranged. I’m not a medical doctor, and I don’t intend that statement as a medical diagnosis. From my layman’s perspective, however, Trump seems completely deranged. There are lots and lots of examples of Trump’s behavior that seems erratic at best and psychotic at worst. Here are two recent such examples, the photo op in front of St. John’s Church and his reaction to a public opinion poll that CNN recently aired.

There were massive protests of the police murder of George Floyd, of police brutality against Black people generally, and of America’s intrinsic institutional racism. There were hundreds or perhaps thousands of people peaceably protesting near the White House. Trump decided he wanted to have his picture taken in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church located a short distance from the White House. Trump however couldn’t walk to St. John’s with all those protesters there. They were peaceful, just exercising their constitutional rights of free assembly and free speech. For Trump to have his photo op at St. John’s however they had to be cleared away. So someone in the Trump administration, perhaps Attorney General Barr or perhaps Trump himself, ordered Park Service police and National Guard troops to get them out of Trump’s way. Those forces attacked the peaceful demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets. The only thing that keeps this action from being totally fascist is that no one shot live rounds at the unarmed, peaceful people they were ordered to attack. At least we had no repeat of Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg in 1917 when tsarist forces opened fire on peaceful demonstrators.

So Trump, our Idiot-in Chief, walked across the street to St. John’s trailing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Attorney General with him. The church building was all boarded up. There hadn’t been worship services there for a long time because of the coronavirus pandemic. Individual-1, as the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York called him when that office named him as in effect an unindicted criminal coconspirator in the Michael Cohen case, stood awkwardly in front of the church. He held a Bible as awkwardly as he stood. Some official photographer took his picture. It is truly a bizarre photograph of an obviously uncomfortable Trump looking as awkward as he ever does standing in front of a boarded up church holding a Bible. We can only hope that that photo plays a role in him losing next November’s presidential election.

No president who was in touch with his oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States would ever use tear gas and rubber bullets against peaceful demonstrators. Trump obviously cares not one whit about Americans’ constitutional rights, but that is more of a political problem than a mental health one. Still, Trump’s use of grossly excessive force against peaceful protesters just so he could have a photo op suggests a megalomania that is hardly healthy. Beyond that, only someone out of touch with reality would think that getting a hopelessly awkward picture of himself clumsily brandishing a Bible we know he never reads and knows nothing about would do him any political good at all. That he used force to get that picture pretty clearly suggest that he has some sort of mental health issue.

More recently Trump came totally unglued because CNN broadcast the results of a nation-wide public opinion poll that showed former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president this year, leading Trump by fourteen percentage points. Trump went nuts. He has demanded that CNN air a retraction of its story on the poll and that it keep all records relating to the decision to broadcast the poll, suggesting that he or his reelection organization may sue them. He has said that pollsters generally are conspiring against his reelection.

Trump’s attack on CNN airing the results of a poll he doesn’t like seems downright paranoid. Yes, the poll in question shows Trump farther behind Biden that most polls do, but so what? Both print and broadcast media print and air things presidents don’t like all the time. Moreover, a mentally stable person would just brush this poll off as an outlier that will have no effect on the outcome of the November election whatsoever. Not so Trump. He throws a paranoid tantrum and threatens legal action he would have absolutely no chance of winning. Federal and state court judges, even utterly unqualified federal judges Trump has nominated and the rubber stamp Republicans in the Senate have confirmed, know that there is in this country something called the First Amendment to the US Constitution. They know that it guarantees freedom of the press including broadcast media. Most courts would throw any action Trump brought against CNN for airing the results of that poll on summary judgment.

I once lived for a year in a place where there was no freedom of the press, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I got to know a young man there who was a journalism student at Moscow State University. He once said to me that he was allowed to write only about what was good but everything he saw was bad. In the Soviet Union journalists were free (or even required) to write paeans to the Communist Party and the Soviet government. With the exception of a very few areas such as the shoddy construction of so many new apartment buildings they were prohibited from depicting anything negative in their reporting. The Soviet press was not free. The Communist Party and the organs of government controlled it so that served not the truth but the interests of the Party and the Soviet state.

That’s the kind of press Trump wants. He’s an American fascist, and that’s the only kind of press fascists can tolerate. Yet with Trump it’s not just that he thinks free media outlets are a bad thing because they say bad things about him. When he sees things in the media that he takes as negative he gets paranoid. Again, that’s not a medical diagnosis; but what he does sure seems paranoid to this lay observer. People inside his administration say he throws temper tantrums. He threatens utterly untenable legal action. He accuses people of conspiring against him when there is no evidence whatsoever of any conspiracy. My layman’s understanding of paranoia sure explains much of his behavior better than any other explanation I’ve heard.

So here we are, stuck with a deranged president until at least January 20, 2021. We don’t know what sort of irrational actions he’ll take before then. We just hope they don’t involve the nuclear weapons he has the power to unleash. We don’t know what paranoid temper tantrums he’ll throw between now and then or what their consequences will be. We just know he’ll throw temper tantrums. We just know he’ll be paranoid, all of which means we can’t be rid of him soon enough.

How Far Will You Go?

How Far Will You Go? 

Genesis 22:1-14 

It’s a story we all love to hate. We read that God said to Abraham “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering….” God is telling Abraham to kill Isaac and burn his body as a sacrifice to God. Abraham sets out to do it, and only at the last second before Abraham kills Isaac does God present a ram that Abraham sacrifices instead. The story is a little bit ambivalent about whether or not Abraham would actually do it because Abraham doesn’t actually do it, but surely the story wants us to assume that he would. We’re horrified. God told Abraham to kill his son, and Abraham was willing to do it? That’s horrific in any context, but it’s even worse here. God has promised Abraham that Abraham would become the ancestor of untold numbers of people, and when it calls Isaac Abraham’s only son it assumes that that promise could be fulfilled only through Isaac.[1] Yet of course we don’t need that detail to be horrified by this story. Go commit infanticide? And you’re willing to do it? No way. Never, we say, and we’re perfectly right to say it.

So what’s up with this story? To answer that question we need to start by understanding that it is a story not history. We don’t have to accept that God ever actually told Abraham to kill his son for this story to have meaning, and I don’t. The God I know never did that and never would. Scholars say that the ancient Hebrews may have told this story precisely to say not that God orders child sacrifice but precisely that God rejects it. Many ancient cultures practiced child sacrifice. Ancient Hebrews long before we have any historical record of them may have done so themselves. There are other Hebrew texts that mention and reject child sacrifice. See Leviticus 18:21. If that’ why they told this story that’s nice, but it doesn’t mean much to us. We don’t need this story to tells us that child sacrifice is wrong. We just have to be marginally decent human beings. So does this story have no meaning for us at all? No, I think it does have meaning. To see that meaning let’s turn to the great Danish philosopher/theologian Søren Kierkegaard.[2]

Kierkegaard wrote a whole book about this story that he titled Fear and Trembling. In that book he says that Abraham was justified in his willingness to kill Isaac. We want to say: What?! How could Abraham possibly be justified in his willingness to kill his son? That’s one of the worst kinds of murder! If somebody killed his son today and tried to justify it by saying that God had told him to do it we’d commit him for mental health treatment or sentence him to life in prison—or worse. Justified? You’ve go to be kidding me!

Not so according to Kierkegaard. He insists that Abraham was and has to be justified in his willingness to kill Isaac because that’s how radical faith is. For Kierkegaard if your faith isn’t that complete it isn’t really faith. I don’t think Kierkegaard would ever say that Abraham would be justified in killing Isaac if he did it on his own, but that’s not what happens here. Abraham acts because God tells him to act. That’s why Abraham is justified, at least according to Kierkegaard. His faith is complete. That means that he will do anything God tells him to do, even kill his son as a sacrifice to God.

Now, God’s not really going to tell anyone to kill anyone. That’s not now it is with our nonviolent God of love. I think the story of God’s call to Abraham to sacrifice his son is still important for us.[3] It’s important for us because it raises the question: Just how strong is our faith? Strong enough to kill for, not that God ever wants us to do that? Strong enough to die for? That one’s more likely to happen than that God will ask us to kill someone, yet for most of us it isn’t too likely. Is our faith strong enough so that we’ll attempt difficult or seemingly impossible things for God? That one’s a whole lot more likely than our either killing or dying for the faith. Is our faith strong enough to give up an old way of life and adopt a new one? Many of us Christians have done that. Is it strong enough to take stands for justice and peace that get you rejected by family and friends? An awful lot of Christians have done that one too.

I think we all have to consider just how strong our faith is today. There is a new movement afoot among us for an end to racism in our country, a movement some up to and including the president oppose. Is our faith strong enough to enable us to stand up for what’s right when what’s right isn’t popular? I sure hope so. Is our faith strong enough so that we’ll speak and act (nonviolently of course) for justice whenever we see racist acts or hear racist words? I sure hope so.

No, I don’t think God ever actually told Abraham to kill Isaac. That story however comes from a world that used stories rather than essays to make important points and raise important questions. That’s what the story of the sacrifice of Isaac does. Faith in God sometimes makes radical demands on us. We must constantly ask ourselves what we are and aren’t wiling to do for God. Kierkegaard says there must be nothing you won’t do for God up and including killing your son if God tells you to do it. I doubt that any of us is prepared to go that far, and not just because we don’t want to prosecuted for murder. So how far are we willing to go? I hope that both you and I will give that question a good deal of prayerful consideration.

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[1] Isaac isn’t Abraham’s only son. He had another son, Ishmael. We know, although Abraham here may not have, that Ishmael is still alive. Arab people trace their lineage back to Abraham through Ishmael. God’s promise to Abraham was actually fulfilled through both of his sons. It would have been fulfilled through Ishmael even if Abraham had gone through with it and killed Isaac.

[2] Our family name was originally spelled Sørensen, the Danish spelling. It means son of Søren. My father used to say he thought he was the reincarnation of the Danish theologian. I doubt it, but it would be cool.

[3] And not because it foreshadows God’s sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as some Christians have claimed it does. It absolutely doesn’t do that. It doesn’t do it first of all because this story was Jewish long before it became Christian. No Jew would ever have told a story about some problematic theology about a man who wouldn’t live for over one thousand years after this story was first told. It also doesn’t do it because Jesus wasn’t a sacrifice the way so many Christians insist he was, but that’s a matter for another day.

Not Peace But a Sword

Not Peace But a Sword

June 9, 2020

Matthew 10:34

It’s a disturbing thing for Jesus to say for people like me who claim to be adherents of Christian nonviolence: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Matthew 10:34. I confess to once trying to explain this quote away.[1] I explained there that the verses that come right after this one all talk about discord within families. I concluded that verse 34 is actually a later creation not from Jesus himself that describes situations in Matthew’s community near the end of the first century CE. I still think that’s correct, but when I reread this passage recently something else struck me. It’s that something else that I want to consider here.

I live in and am a citizen of the United States of America. I’m white, my genetic heritage being slightly more Irish than anything else despite my Scandinavian name. Late in my life I have grown in the realization that my country is rotten to its core with racism. As I’ve said before, this country was founded in racism, and a significant part of its economy from the beginning was based on enslaved people from Africa whose skin was noticeably darker than the skin of us Americans of European descent. We were racist in our genesis, and we’re no or not much less racist today than we were four hundred years ago. I won’t bother to give the details of American’s racist heritage here other than to say that when I was young and in public school no one told me that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but they did. I won’t go into the evidence of contemporary American racism other than to direct your attention to the statistics on the racial imbalance in the ways the American legal system treats Black as opposed to white people and to remind you that Black Americans live in fear of the police while most white Americans don’t. Please just accept that the United States of America is a deeply racist nation, for most tragically it is.

Two weeks before I wrote these words four Minneapolis police officers killed a Black man names George Floyd whom they had arrested. A cop named Derek Chauvin pressed his knee onto Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, and Mr. Floyd died as a result. These facts are undisputed. In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd protests against police brutality and racism broke out all over the country. They continue as I write these words. There have been demonstrations and marches on the east coast, the west coast, and in a great many other places in between. There has been some violence and looting, but most of the protests by far have been peaceful. There has been police violence against peaceful protesters, but most police and National Guard men and women called in to control the crowds have been peaceful too. Some of them have even kneeled with protesters in memory of Mr. Floyd. President Trump has reacted despicably to the protests calling only for more law enforcement violence against the protesters. Most state and local authorities have reacted better, not that it’s hard to be better than Trump.

The protests against the police killing of Mr. Floyd and police brutality against Black Americans are huge, and they’ve already gone on for a long time. They show no signs of letting up. All kinds of people are protesting. Black people, Brown people, and white people. Woman and men. Young and old. They are demanding justice for George Floyd. They are demanding reform of police training and practice. Many of them are demanding defunding of police departments. A few of them are demanding abolition of police departments altogether. All I all these last two weeks of protest have truly been remarkable. We white Americans, or at least some of us, are becoming more aware of and informed about the specifics of American racism than we’ve ever been before. Some of us are becoming more aware of our own racist attitudes, attitudes we inhaled with American air when we were young even if no one actually taught us racism. Many of us are becoming more aware of the truly radical nature of the transformation this country needs if we are ever to overcome our centuries old tradition of individual and institutional racism.

Some of us are coming to realize that the last thing our country needs is peace. We don’t need or want violence, but calling for peace carries a great risk. Peace can mean quiet. Quiet can mean inaction. Inaction means that the sinful status quo of American racism remains in place and nothing changes. We have a long, dishonorable history of nothing changing. Yes, the Civil War ended slavery. Yes, Brown v. Board of Education made school segregation illegal. Yes, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made racial discrimination illegal across the country in many aspects of our national life. Yes, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to secure everyone’s right to vote. Those are significant developments, and I don’t mean to suggest that they aren’t. Yet Black Americans have demonstrated and even rioted against American racism for over a century, and very little has actually changed. American racism is as intractable as ever. Black people demonstrated, peace was restored, nothing changed. Black people rioted, peace was restored, nothing changed.

To bring abut the transformation our country so badly needs we don’t need Jesus’ peace, we need Jesus’ sword. A nonviolent, metaphorical sword, but still a sword. The sword of justice, a sword to cut the Gordian knot of American racism. A peaceful sword to suppress and root out white supremacy. A peaceful sword to cut through the darkness of racism and let the light of justice and equality in. A nonviolent sword to cut through white people’s denial of their racism and their smug acquiescence in a racial reality that privileges them in ways they won’t even recognize. A sword of the Word to get us up and moving, open us to new possibilities, and make us agents of transformation. We need peace in our hearts to sustain us in the struggles ahead, but we must never let internal peace lead to external inaction.

So Jesus, bring the sword. We know you are always nonviolent and want us to be nonviolent too, but come and cut through our ignorance and indifference. Cut through our inertia and stagnation. Rouse your people to action. Make us messengers of you peace, but today more than that make us agents of your transformative justice. It’s way past time. Cut us loose, Lord. I pray that we are ready.

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[1] See Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, 2008, pp. 167-168.