no compelling archaeological evidence

by Israel Finkelstein & Neil Silberman

 

The Bible Unearthed is our attempt to formulate a new archaeological vision of ancient Israel in which the Bible is one of the most important artifacts and cultural achievements. As readers will see, we are deeply interested in what the historical books of the Bible have to say, how they say it, and how they relate to the archaeologically indicated history of the land of Israel.

 

Our main contention is that the historical narratives of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History can be convincingly linked to the ideological and political program of the Judean kingdom in the 7th century BCE. That seems, from archaeological, sociological, and historical perspectives to be the likeliest era in which the biblical epic crystallized in recognizable form. Readers will see how we lay out the argument for this contention by examining how weak is the archaeological evidence for the patriarchs, Exodus, conquest of Canaan, and United Monarchy of David and Solomon.

 

Yet in asserting that there was no single exodus, no unified conquest of Canaan, and no glorious, vast kingdom of David and Solomon, we certainly do not intend to dismiss the Bible as a fact-less fairy tale, a late ideological confection whose unmasking is meant to serve some “hidden” political agenda. We join generations of biblical archaeologists and scholars in the belief that the Bible provides an important testimony for early Israel; it is not just another ancient literary source about ancient heroes, kingdoms, and adventures. It is neither an Israelite Mahabarata, nor a Judean Avesta, nor a Jerusalemite Iliad or Odyssey. For Jews and Christians and to a certain extent for Muslims, the Hebrew Bible is not just another ancient text, raw material for never-ending doctoral dissertations and a solid foundation for academic careers.

 

The Bible is everybody’s concern. It contains our story of creation, our founding principles of monotheistic religion, and some of our western civilization’s most powerful prophecy, poetry, and religious laws. In a word, it contains our spiritual legacy. And that legacy has a thousand shades of meaning and wealth of insight to give. But is it history? Is it an accurate chronicle of a sequence of events, arranged in chronological order? Is that where its power lies? While hardly anyone these days gets exercised over the suggestion that the Mahabarata’s Hindu Prince Arjuna might be a powerful literary creation rather than a specific historical figure, or that a particular Achaean named Achilles might not have slain a particular Trojan named Hector, something strange and emotional seems to happen when doubt is cast on the historical character of the kingdom of David and Solomon.

 

But why should this be so? For the last two centuries archaeologists and biblical scholars have been engaged in a continuous struggle to separate the purely theological or mythic narratives of the Bible from those that contain what might be regarded as reliable history. The Creation stories of Genesis were the first field of combat. In the 1830s, Charles Lyell’s epoch-making geological studies were branded as heretical, and Charles Darwin was condemned a few decades later by respected religious leaders as a nihilistic deconstructionist (more than a century before anyone had ever heard of postmodernism). Of course today, the scholarly disputes over the historicity of a seven-day creation of the world, of the Garden of Eden, and the story of Noah’s Ark are over?even though some nasty skirmishing occasionally flares up at school board meetings and in the scripts of sensationalist documentaries on cable TV.

 

But the battle line dividing the Bible’s history from its metaphorical symbolism has been constantly moving, pressing relentlessly on from the opening chapters of Genesis. At each landmark a pitched battle was waged. And when the matter was decided, the opposing forces trudged on. Sixty years ago, many leading scholars – the legendary W.F. Albright among them – argued forcefully that the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were historical characters who lived in the Middle Bronze Age. Today, most scholars deal with the patriarchal traditions as powerful and influential literary creations; and they consider them no less powerful or influential in the absence of conclusive proof of their historicity. Long gone also are the serious scholarly attempts to trace archaeologically the progress of the Exodus of 600,000 Israelites across Sinai toward Canaan. The Bible offers us a powerful expression of liberation, peoplehood, and covenant painted in the most searing Hebrew prose and poetry the world has ever known.

 

Forty years ago, reliable biblical history was said to begin with Joshua. The blackened destruction levels of Late Bronze Age tells across the Land of Israel, were confidently believed to be evidence of the military action of the massed Israelite tribes. But here too a battle was waged and the frontline of history shifted. The extensive surveys carried out in the West Bank by Israeli archaeologists during the 1970s and 1980s showed that the settlement of the Israelite Tribes in Canaan was not a lightning invasion but a complex process of social transformation. And it was a process in which population groups both inside Canaan and outside were deeply and not only violently involved.

 

Today, the frontline has come to rest in the era of David and Solomon. Indeed there is now an ongoing scholarly free-for-all debate over the historical reality of the Kingdom of David and Solomon in which tempers have sometimes flared, names have been called, and sneering accusations of hidden political and religious agendas have been tossed back and forth. But what exactly is at stake?

 

The Second Book of Samuel describes how David was anointed King of Israel and established his capital in Jerusalem. From there, according to the biblical narrative, David led the armies of Israel on distant campaigns that resulted in the establishment of a huge territorial entity, stretching from the southern deserts to northern Syria. The First Book of Kings describes how under David’s son, Solomon, the vast extent of the kingdom, at least much of it, was maintained and a magnificent temple and palace were built in the royal capital and holy city of Jerusalem. The tremendous importance of these events, variously dated between c.1000 and c.925 BCE are obvious: The Davidic Dynasty and the sanctity of Jerusalem, then established, formed the basis for later prophecies of a messianic redeemer from the House of David and the divine restoration of the greatness of united Israel.

 

Until recently no one seriously doubted that the Bible’s stories about David and Solomon were basically historical. Although the archaeological remains of David’s rule were and are elusive, the sudden appearance of monumental architecture, city walls, and city gates in levels dated to the 10th-century BCE at the Israelite cities of Gezer, Hazor, and Megiddo – precisely those cities reportedly fortified by Solomon according to First Kings 9:15 – seemed irrefutable evidence that archaeology, history, and the biblical accounts were at this point fully synchronized. But it is really that easy? Recent stratigraphic analysis of the Solomonic gates at Megiddo and Hazor and carbon-14 dates from relevant strata suggest that these imposing monuments may have nothing to do with Solomon at all.

 

In The Bible Unearthed, we invite you to follow our line of argumentation, first an archaeological analysis of the patriarchal, conquest, judges, and United Monarchy narratives, showing that while there is no compelling archaeological evidence for any of them, there is clear archaeological evidence that places the stories themselves in a late 7th-century BCE context. We then go on to propose an archaeological reconstruction of the distinct histories of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, differing dramatically in environment, population, economy, and religious forms. We highlight the largely neglected history of the Omride Dynasty and attempt to show how the influence of Assyrian imperialism in the region set in motion a chain of events that would eventually make the poorer, more remote, and more religiously conservative kingdom of Judah the belated center of the cultic and national hopes of all Israel.

 

This occurred in the 7th-century BCE and reached a culmination, we argue, during the reign of King Josiah (639-609 BCE) and the primary history of the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History are the greatest achievements of this complex historical process. But they are not “history” in the modern sense.

 

So where is the boundary between biblical past and present, between biblical history and myth? Archaeology, the study of fragments of past societies, inevitably takes us into the realm of interpretation, and when it comes to the conquest of Canaan and the Kingdom of David and Solomon, the archaeological facts are not as unequivocal as they once seemed. It is time to stop the name calling and bitter polemics between maximalists and minimalists. It is our hope that The Bible Unearthed will provide an opportunity to debate and intelligently discuss new directions in the archaeology of the lands of the Bible and to see past archaeological theories about biblical history as valuable foundations and the starting points for future research, not confrontational lines drawn in the sand.

(source)

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horror show

 

She is light chocolate-tanned, has a raisin complexion, and demonstrates the demeanor of a fiftyish tai tai. She is Lela*, a church acquaintance and new friend in our cosy Sunday small group gatherings contemplating our christian Illiad, the bible.

 

Her rainbowed shadow grows large during the proceedings, as she “shares” about how much she fears God now, after more than two decades of, in her own words, “leading a colourful life”. Isn’t it fun to have a flavoured existence? It seems she believes now that a christian life should be one binary black-and-white affair. Technicolour, plasmic and HD visuals are not the pious christian thing.

 

This mildly megalomaniac loves a confession, and does so augustinianly. She is into real estate, and is working hard to make money for her twenty-somethinger who is heading to university after his mandatory military stint. She had him at twenty two, which means she is fortyish. She blooms into this fiftyish amorphophallus titanium through chain-smoking, binge-drinking and maybe a one-night-stand or two although she makes no admission of any such fleshly pleasure.

 

But – yes, one always expect a conditional conjunction from a pious christian who starts ranting about worldly pleasures –  she no longer smokes, at all. She no longer drinks, not a teardrop.

 

She cannot stomach primetime telly, except the news, and like a hormonal pregnant lass who pisses at certain smells and scents, forbids her son from enjoying his latest fix of contemporary pop noise.

 

She empathises with her son, she says, but she fears God now. I didn’t know this god of hers is petty about people’s tastes in addictions, film and music. She even experiences devilish epiphanies of sweet tobacco at bus stops even though she claims there is no cigarette butt in sight. A “work of the devil”, definitely. One should actually suggest to her that vestigial tobacco scents do linger in the air for a significant amount of time, especially in places like bus stops where smokers enjoy the quickie before their next bus. There appears to be no fag in the proximity because cleaners have done a wonderful job! Unfortunately for them, there will come a time when smokers will be discriminated against, in totalitarian Singapore. Or at least that’s the wish of some ministers in the regime. One can also explain to her that for someone who was a tobacco-addict, there is nothing supernatural about the human brain feeding hallucinations and delusions into the self-conscious mind about past sensory addictions.

 

She fears God now. He gets cross and will bitch if she sits passively by while her colleagues offer joss sticks and suckling pig to some taoist pantheon after a successful transaction. Oh dear, she has become a bigot. A fundamentalist christian bigot who is hormonal against other religions. Oh my fucking Zeus.

 

Several nods of approval from my fellow christian automatons later, it starts to feel creepy. At least for me, the lone sceptic. I don’t wish to be her friend, not now, not later. Never. But she is more than welcomed to divulge her exciting explorations into carnal decadence. I fantasize sometimes, about my embracing the writer’s wretched life with urns of tobacco and caffeine, and waterboarded sips of alcohol. Think of the late Christopher Hitchens. And his oxford mate, Martin Amis. Or Albert Camus, Frank o’Hara, Jack Spicer, Michel Foucault. Damn it, or any human being for chrissake.

 

Anyhow, people like me are just hell money for the bonfire, in her eyes.

 

(*not her real name)

 

*******

 

 

sam harris interviews ex-pastor

by Sam Harris

 

 

Tim Prowse was a United Methodist pastor for almost 20 years, serving churches in Missouri and Indiana. Tim earned a B.A. from East Texas Baptist University, a Master of Divinity (M.Div) from Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, and a Doctor of Ministry (D.Min) from Chicago Theological Seminary. Acknowledging his unbelief, Tim left his faith and career in 2011. He currently lives in Indiana. He was kind enough to discuss his experience of leaving the ministry with me by email.

 

 

Can you describe the process by which you lost your belief in the teachings of your Church?

An interesting thing happened while I was studying at East Texas Baptist University: I was told not to read Rudolf Bultmann. I asked myself: Why? What were they protecting me from? I picked up Bultmann’s work, and that decision is the catalyst that ultimately paved the road to today. Throughout my educational journey, which culminated in an Ordination from the United Methodist Church where I’ve served for seventeen years, I’ve continued to ask the question “Why?”

Ironically, it was seminary that inaugurated my leap of unfaith.  It was so much easier to believe when living in an uncritical, unquestioning, naïve state.  Seminary training with its demands for rigorous and intentional study and reflection coupled with its values of reason and critical inquiry began to undermine my naïveté.  I discovered theologians, philosophers and authors I never knew existed.  I found their questions stimulating but their answers often unsatisfying. For example, the Bible is rife with vileness evidenced by stories of sexual exploitation, mass murder and arbitrary mayhem.  How do we harmonize this fact with the conception of an all-loving, all-knowing God? While many have undertaken to answer this question even in erudite fashion, I found their answers lacking. Once I concluded that the Bible was a thoroughly human product and the God it purports does not exist, other church teachings, such as communion and baptism, unraveled rather quickly.  To quote Nietzsche, I was seeing through a different “perspective” – a perspective based on critical thinking, reason and deduction.  By honing these skills over time, reason and critical thinking became my primary tools and faith quickly diminished. Ultimately, these tools led to the undoing of my faith rather than the strengthening of it.

 

It sounds like you lost your faith in the process of becoming a minister—or did you go back and forth for some years? How long did you serve as a minister, and how much of this time was spent riven by doubt?

I didn’t lose faith entirely during the ministerial process, although a simmering struggle between faith and doubt was clearly evident.  This simmering would boil occasionally throughout my seventeen-year career, but any vacillations I experienced were easily suppressed, and faith would triumph, albeit, for non-religious reasons.  Besides the money, time, and energy I had invested during the process, familial responsibilities deterred any decisions to alter course.  These faithful triumphs were ephemeral and I found myself living in constant intellectual and emotional turmoil. By not repudiating my career, I could not escape the feeling I was living a lie. I continued to juggle this stressful dichotomy to the point of being totally miserable. Only recently have I succumbed to the doubt that has always undergirded my faith journey.

After I read your book, The End of Faith, I could no longer suppress my unbelief.  Since I’d never felt comfortable in clergy garb and refused to accept a first-century worldview, your book helped me see that religion could no longer be an instrument of meaning in my life. I’m sad to say, Sam, this conclusion did not result in an immediate career change.  I didn’t break from the church immediately, but rather feigned belief for two more years.

 

If you could go back in time and reason with your former self, what could you say that might have broken the spell sooner?

I would tell myself to ask questions, to read the text, to wonder, to explore the nuances, to take seriously my intuition and abilities to debate.  I’d tell myself to listen to what is actually being said with critical and reasoning ears.  I’d tell myself to substitute “Invisible Friend” for “God” every time I encountered the word and notice how ridiculous the rhetoric sounds from grown-ups. I would challenge myself to be more skeptical, to study science.  I’d tell myself to find joy in life – it’s the only one you are going to get – don’t waste a second.

 

Believers often allege that there is a deep connection between faith and morality. For instance, when I debated Rick Warren, he said that if he did not believe in God, he wouldn’t have any reason to behave ethically. You’ve lived on both sides of the faith continuum. I’m wondering if you felt any associated change in your morality, for better or worse.

I’d be interested to know what behaviors or impulses God is deterring Rick Warren from acting upon. I doubt very seriously if “God’s goodness” evaporated tomorrow, Warren would begin robbing banks, raping children, or murdering his neighbors!  These types of statements, while common, are fallacious in my opinion.  When Rick Warren uses God as his reason for being good, he is not using God in a general sense.  He isn’t referring to Thor, Neptune, or Isis, either. 

One can find a few biblical passages that do promote “goodness” to use Rick Warren’s term, but only by cherry picking them and avoiding the numerous passages that are appalling, offensive and destructive.

Since God is nothing more than our creation and projection, any talk of God is our reflection looking back at us.  Hence, our morality begins with us anyway. My morality hasn’t changed for the worse since I left the faith.  If anything, it is much more honest because I am forced to consider what is really going on in ethical decisions.  Family, culture, beliefs and values, genetic tendencies, all play a role in shaping morality, but I’m not arguing an extreme relativism.  While I do give credence to certain cultural influences on determining right and wrong, I believe that some issues are universal.  Which is why, unless Rick Warren is truly demented, he wouldn’t begin doing heinous acts if his faith evaporated tomorrow, and if he did, it would be more the result of mental illness than lack of faith.

 

Did you ever discuss your doubts with your fellow clergy or parishioners? Did you encounter other ministers who shared your predicament (some can be found at http://clergyproject.org/)? And what happened when you finally expressed your unbelief to others?

As an active minister, I did not discuss my atheism with colleagues or parishioners. Facing lost wages, housing and benefits, I chose to remain silent.  However, I did confide in my wife who provided a level of trust, understanding, and support that proved invaluable. Unfortunately, some ministers do not enjoy mature confidants.  Some have lost marriages and partners, friends and family, leaving them with feelings of isolation and abandonment.  Hence, many continue living in estrangement, uncertain where to turn or who to trust, waiting for their lives to be completely upended when the truth finally is discovered.

This is why the Clergy Project is so important.  It provides an invaluable resource of support for current and former clergy who are atheists.  It is a safe and anonymous place to discuss the issues atheist clergy encounter while providing encouragement and support that is genuine and heartfelt. It greatly eases the desperation and uncertainty of where to turn or who to trust!  I’ve been a member of the Clergy Project since July 2011, and it prepared me well for the responses to expect from friends and family during my post-clergy conversations. So far, I have not been surprised by the responses I’ve received nor have I lost any significant relationships due to my professed atheism, but time will tell.

 

It is nice to hear that your exit from the ministry has been comparatively smooth. What will you do next?

Repudiating my ordination and leaving faith behind was much smoother than I had anticipated.  Ironically, something I had worked years to accomplish ended in a matter of minutes.  When I slid my ordination certificates across a Bob Evan’s tabletop to my District Superintendent, I was greatly relieved.  The lie was over.  I was free.  This freedom does not come without consternation, however.

Fortunately, a dear friend helped my family by offering their second home to rent at a very reasonable price.  Another dear friend has procured a sales job for me in her company.  While housing and employment have been provided in the short term, long term my future is much more uncertain.  Ideally, I’d love to write and lecture on my experiences; especially concerning the negative impacts faith and church have on individuals and societies. I’d love to write a novel.

I do not have visions of grandeur, however.  If the rest of my life is spent just being a regular “Joe” that will be fine by me.  I have a wonderful family and a few good friends.  My heart and mind are at ease.  I’m healthier now than I’ve been in years and tomorrow looks bright.  For the first time in my life, I’m living. Truly living, Sam. (source)

 

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who or what is god?

by John Hick

 

If you ask the educated man or woman in the street, or in a church, what they mean by ‘God’, they will probably say something like this: God is the infinite personal Being who has created the universe, whom religious people worship and to whom they pray, and who has the power, when He (or She) so decides, to intervene in human affairs in response to our prayerful requests. And so in church we pray for world peace, for the victims of flood, earthquake, famine, war and other disasters, that the rulers of the nations may have wisdom and, in a Church of England service, for the health and well being of the Queen and the royal family; and we pray privately for ourselves and our own family and friends, especially those in any special need or danger. Thus God is seen as an active all-powerful force who is motivated by a limitless love, tempered by justice, and who has knowledge and wisdom infinitely surpassing our own. When our prayers are not answered, this is because God always knows better than we do, and indeed knows infallibly, what is the best thing to do or refrain from doing.

 

I think this is a fair depiction of the concept of God that operates today in western society, and has operated for many centuries. It applies to Jews and Muslims as well as to Christians, and it applies to atheists as much as to theists. This is the ‘God’ whom people wholeheartedly or tentatively believe in, and equally whom people wholeheartedly or tentatively believe not to exist, and whom Nietzsche declared to be dead.

 

This concept of God can be described as anthropomorphic. That is to say, God is a being like ourselves in the fundamental respect that we are both – God and ourselves – persons. But whereas we are finite, created, dependent persons, God is an infinite, eternal, uncreated and omnipotent Person. Some theologians, uncomfortable with such an explicitly anthropomorphic characterization, say that God is not a person, but rather is personal. But this is a distinction without a difference. We cannot conceive of a personal being who is not a person. And we know what a person is only because we are ourselves persons. God, then, is like us – or rather we are like God – in this very basic respect.

 

I am not going to bring in here the doctrine of the Trinity, which distinguishes Christianity theologically from Judaism and Islam, because I don’t think that it makes any practical difference within Christian worship. Trinitarian language is of course firmly embedded in our liturgies; but is not prayer itself in practice invariably addressed to God our heavenly Father? We add “through” or “in the name of” our lord Jesus Christ – except of course in the prayer which he himself taught, the Lord’s Prayer, in which we address God directly. But adding “we ask this in the name of” does not alter the fact that we are consciously addressing the heavenly Father. So I am leaving aside for now the trinitarian complication.

 

The central aspect of this prevailing concept of God, on which I want to focus, is divine activity in the course of nature and of human life. God can and does perform miracles, in the sense of making things happen which would not otherwise have happened, and preventing things from happening which otherwise would have happened. These interventions are either manifest or – much more often – discernable only to the eyes of faith. But it is believed that God does sometimes intervene in answer to prayer. The Bible, and church history, and contemporary religious discourse are full of accounts of such occasions. And prayers of intercession in church and in private devotion presuppose that God at least sometimes operates on earth in these ways. Otherwise, what is the point of those prayers? And how often have we heard in the media someone telling of their miraculous escape when, for example, they survived unhurt in a car crash in which the two others were killed, or even more dramatically how a soldier in war was saved by wearing a medallion which stopped the bullet that would have killed him, or how when a family were at their wits end in some terrible dilemma something unexpectedly happened to save the situation? Or there was recently the American who on winning $5 million in the US lottery said, ‘I just praised God and Jesus’. Of course most of those who speak like this today, in our pervasively secular age, are not using the word “miracle” in a religious sense but merely as an expression of wonder and relief. Likewise “Thank God for that” is usually no more than an expression of heartfelt relief. But seriously devout believers who give God thanks for a lucky escape, or for recovery from a serious illness, or for the resolution of some problem, do often believe that they have experienced a divine intervention on their behalf, a miracle which confirms and strengthens their faith and evokes gratitude to God.

 

It is this serious and literal use of the idea of divine intervention that concerns us here. The problem that it raises has led many to atheism. If, for example, in the car crash case, God intervened to save only one of the people in the car, who then gave God thanks for a miraculous delivery, this implies not only that God decided to save that person, but equally that God decided not to save the other two. It presupposes that it is, so to speak, okay from God’s point of view to intervene whenever God so chooses, and this inevitably poses the question why God intervenes so seldom, leaving unprotected the great majority of innocent victims of natural disasters and of human cruelty and neglect? Some years ago the atheist philosopher Anthony Flew wrote, ‘Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no sign of concern.’ (“Theology and Falsification”, reprinted in John Hick, ed., The Existence of God, p. 227). And given the biblical and traditional assumption that God does intervene miraculously whenever God so decides, one can understand why this belief has led Flew and many others to atheism. It is this implied picture of God as arbitrary, protecting some but not others, and thus as deliberately leaving so many in pain, hardship, misery and peril, that is so repugnant to so many people. If there is such a Being, why regard Him (or Her) as good and as worthy of worship, except by the chosen few who benefit from the special divine interventions?

 

The problem arises from the belief that it is, as I put it, okay from God’s point of view to intervene on earth whenever God chooses. Suppose, however, that, regardless of whether or not it is within God’s power to intervene, it is for some good reason not okay from the divine point of view to do so. Suppose this would be counter-productive from the point of view of a creative purpose which requires both human freedom (which is directly or indirectly the source of much the greater part of human suffering) and also elements of contingency and unpredictability in the evolution of the universe. The kind of theodicy sketched in this brief formula has been developed in a number of works, including my own Evil and the God of Love (2nd ed., 1977). This does not require the idea of special divine interventions in the form of open or covert miracles. However, as we shall see presently, whilst I think this is a viable position I now want to suggest going a good deal further.

 

For a non-intervening anthropomorphic God, who does not act within human history and human life, who does not cause things to happen which would not otherwise have happened and does not prevent things from happening which would otherwise have happened, seems religiously unsatisfying to many practicing Christians, a kind of deism which is little better than atheism.

 

So we have a dilemma. Can we find any way through it or beyond it? At this point I want to suggest enlarging our field of vision – or if we have emerged from the BC (Before Computers) age, extending our data base – by taking account of the other world religions as well as our own. After all, the large majority of religious people in the world are not Christians, and yet their religions involve forms of life and thought that claim to lead to a transforming relationship, of limitless value, with an eternal reality that both transcends, and in the case of the eastern traditions is also immanent within, us. But Buddhism and Taoism and Confucianism and some strands of Hinduism do not see that eternal reality as an infinite Person. Suppose then, as an experiment, we now use the word ‘God’ as our western term for the ultimate reality which some do and others do not believe to be an infinite person. We then broaden the question, Who or what is God? by not confining it at the outset to a particular concept of the religious ultimate. When we do this some prefer not to use the term ‘God’, finding it almost impossible to detach it in most peoples’ minds from the notion of an infinite divine person and use instead such terms as Ultimate Reality, or the Ultimate, or the Real. But let us for our present purpose stick with the familiar term ‘God’, reminding ourselves however from time to time that we are not now using it in a sense restricted to what are called the western monotheisms – although in fact they all originated in the Middle East.

 

Where do we now go from there? I suggest that at this point it will be helpful to take account of an enormously important distinction drawn by some of the great Christian mystics, as well as by mystics of the other major traditions. Although the writer who has been given the derogatory sounding name of Pseudo-Dionysius is largely unknown outside the history of Christian mysticism, he has in fact probably been the most influential single individual in that history. He wrote in the name of Dionysius, the disciple of St Paul (Acts 17: 34), thus assuming a near apostolic authority, and he was a major theological influence throughout the thousand years prior to the Reformation. Thomas Aquinas, for example, quotes him as an authority some 1700 times. He is generally believed today to have been a Syrian monk writing around the year 500, and whether he would have exerted the same immense influence if this had been known before Erasmus and others became suspicious of his identity is one of history’s fascinating unanswered questions. But he did exert this immense influence, and in my opinion it was a very creative influence. For it reinforced the existing emphasis on the ultimate ineffability of God. I am not fond of the word ‘ineffable’ and prefer ‘transcategorial’, meaning beyond the range of our human systems of concepts or mental categories. Theologians have nearly always taken the ultimate divine ineffability or transcategoriality for granted, though usually without taking its implications to their logical conclusion. Augustine, for example, about a century before Pseudo-Dionysius, said that ‘God transcends even the mind’ (On True Religion, 36: 67), but did not develop this further. But Dionysius – or Denys, to give him a more user-friendly name – makes the divine ineffability central and begins at least to struggle with its implications. In his central work, The Mystical Theology, he says in every way he can think of that God is utterly and totally transcategorial. God is ‘indescribable’, ‘beyond all being and knowledge’. God, the ultimate One, is ‘not soul or mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction, speech, or understanding. . . It cannot be spoken of and it cannot be grasped by understanding . . It does not live nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time. It cannot be grasped by the understanding . . It is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness . . It is not sonship or fatherhood . . There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it . . It is beyond assertion and denial’.

 

This last statement, that that to which the term ‘God’ refers is beyond assertion and denial is crucial. For Denys is not simply doing negative theology, saying that God does not have this or that attribute but, much more radically, that our entire range of attribute-concepts do not apply to God at all, either positively or negatively. To apply them to God in God’s ultimacy is, in modern philosophical terms, a category mistake. To say, for example, that molecules are not stupid, although true, is misleading because it assumes that molecules are the sort of thing of which it makes sense to say that they are either stupid or not stupid. And to say that God is not ‘one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness’, although true would likewise, by itself, be deeply misleading because it assumes that God is the kind of reality to which such qualities could be rightly or wrongly attributed. We have to take on board the much more radical concept of a reality which is what it is, but whose nature lies beyond the scope of our conceptual and linguistic systems. When we speak about such a reality we are not, then, speaking about it as it is in itself, totally beyond the range of our comprehension, but about its impact upon us, the difference that it makes within the realm of human experience, to which our concepts and hence our languages do apply.

 

It is worth stressing that the divine ineffability does not entail that the ultimate reality, which we are calling God, is an empty blank, but rather that God’s inner nature is beyond the range of our human conceptual resources. This is also, incidentally, what Mahayana Buddhism intends when it speaks of the Ultimate Reality as Sunyatta, Emptiness: it is empty of everything that the human mind inevitably projects in its acts of cognition. Going back to Denys, although he himself does not make this further qualification, modern philosophical discussions of ineffability have introduced a distinction between on the one hand what we can call substantial attributes, meaning attributes which tell us something positive about the divine nature, and on the other hand purely formal, linguistically generated attributes, which do not tell us anything about the divine nature. Thus that God is ineffable formally entails that God has the attribute of ineffability. And even to refer to God at all entails that God has the attribute of being able to be referred to. But such purely formal attributes give rise only to trivial truths, trivial in the sense that they make no difference and do not in any way contradict or undermine the divine ineffability.

 

But given divine ineffability, problems immediately arise for Christian theology. Denys was, we presume, a devout worshipping Christian monk. And as well as teaching the total divine transcategoriality, he also took for granted the main body of Christian doctrine. Although Denys takes surprisingly little interest in the traditional dogmas, he does nevertheless take it for granted that God is a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that the Second Person became incarnate as Jesus Christ. But how can one both hold that God is totally ineffable and also profess to know all these substantial truths about God? God cannot both have no humanly knowable attributes and also have such humanly knowable attributes as being a Trinity, etc. On the face of it this is a sheer contradiction. And Denys saw this quite clearly. He asks, in his book on The Divine Names, ‘How then can we speak of the divine names [i.e. attributes]? How can we do this if the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and knowledge, if it abides beyond the reach of mind and of being, if it encompasses and circumscribes, embraces and anticipates all things while itself eluding their grasp and escaping from any perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding?’ (593A-B).

 

And he makes at least a beginning in answering this question. He has said that God is self-revealed in the scriptures. But then he goes on to say that the scriptural language about God is metaphorical. He does not use the modern term ‘metaphor’ but a later Denys, Denys Turner of Cambridge, points out very clearly that when Dionysius speaks of symbols he means what today we call metaphors (The Darkness of God, p. 35). Denys – the early medieval one – says that ‘the Word of God makes use of poetic imagery’ (The Celestial Hierarchy, 137A-B), and he speaks of ‘what scripture has revealed to us in symbolic and uplifting fashion’ (121A), and of how the divine Light makes truth known to us ‘by way of representative symbols’ (121B). Further, he says that the function of the scriptural symbols and poetry is practical, to draw us forward on our pilgrim’s progress: ‘By itself [the ineffable One] generously reveals a firm, transcendent beam, granting enlightenments proportionate to each being, and thereby draws sacred minds upward to its permitted contemplation, to participation and to the state of becoming like it’ (The Divine Names, 588C-D). Again, God ‘uses scriptural passages in an uplifting fashion as a way . . . to uplift our mind in a manner suitable to our nature’ (The Celestial Hierarchy, 137B). When I translate this into my own terms I hear Denys saying that in the scriptures we speak about God in true myths, that is to say, descriptions which are not literally true but which nevertheless have the effect of evoking in us an appropriate dispositional response to the ultimate subject-matter of the myths. He does not however go beyond the scriptural ascriptions to apply the same principle to Christian doctrines. If he had he would have been in tune with the teaching of the Buddha, a thousand years earlier, that the function of religious doctrines is to help us onward at particular stages of our spiritual journey and that when they have served their purpose they are to be left behind.

 

But whilst Denys makes a good start – indeed in the context of his time he was an extremely bold and original thinker, – there is another aspect of the religious life which his writings do not cover, namely religious experience. I do not mean at this point the ultimate ineffable unity with the divine of which he does speaks, but more ordinary religious experience – the worshipper’s occasional sense of God’s presence, or sense of being in God’s presence, the occasional vivid I-Thou experience in prayer, the sense of divine presence through the liturgy or in some moments of daily life, the transformed consciousness sometimes found through meditation or, moving up a notch, the mystical visions and auditions reported in all ages. But without moving up that notch, religious experience, particularly the sense of being in God’s presence, and the transformed consciousness reached in meditation, is central to the religious life. Without it, religion would consist simply in human, all-too-human institutions. Within these institutions there has usually also been space for the inner reality of religious experience and its transforming influence in human life. But if there were only the institutions, devoid of the experiential aspect of the religious life, the religions would be simply cultural frameworks and exercises of social control which have done at least as much harm as good in the course of human history.

 

So given the centrality of religious experience, who or what is it that is being experienced? If it is the experience of the loving presence of the heavenly Father of Jesus’ teaching, this is clearly not the ineffable Ultimate Reality of which Denys has been speaking. What, then, is the relation between that ultimate reality and the available God of the Bible and of Christian worship? This is the question which Pseudo-Dionysius does not tackle.

 

Nor do subsequent medieval theologians. Aquinas, for example, declares that ‘by its immensity, the divine substance surpasses every form that our intellect reaches’ (S..c.G. 1:14,3), and that ‘The first cause surpasses human understanding and speech’ (De Causis, 6). He tries to bridge the gap between God’s ineffability and our doctrines about God with his use of analogy. But this does not really help. For although we know, according to Aquinas, that God possesses the divine analogues of human goodness, wisdom, etc, we do not have the faintest idea what these divine analogues are. Although we know what it is for a human to be good and wise, we have no conception of what it is for God to be analogically good or analogically wise. Indeed, according to Aquinas, the divine nature is absolutely simple, not made up of a number of distinct attributes (S.T., I/I, Q. 3, art 7). So such attributes as goodness, wisdom, and love are constructs which arise at the human level as a result of the divine impact upon us, but are not reflections on the human scale of the same attributes in God. Because of the ultimate divine simplicity, which is only divided up into distinct attributes in the human mind, these so-called divine attributes refer to the impact of God’s presence on us, expressed in our human categories of thought.

 

Now let us come down through the centuries from Pseudo-Dionysius to another original genius, the 13th and 14th century mystic Meister Eckhart. Eckhart was profoundly influenced by Denys, whom he quotes as speaking of ‘the unknown God above all gods’ (Sermon 39), echoed in Paul Tillich’s ‘the God above the god of theism’. Eckhart himself distinguishes between the utterly transcategorial Godhead (Gottheit, deitas) and the worshipped God (Gott, deus). ‘God and the Godhead’, he says, ‘are as different from each other as heaven and earth’ (Sermon 27). It is clear that by God, in distinction from the Godhead, he means the God of the Bible and of Christian devotion. He says, ‘God acts. The Godhead does not’ (Sermon 27). Further, he sees very clearly the implication that the known and describable God of Christian experience and worship exists only in relation to the experiencing and worshipping community. ‘For before there were creatures,’ he says, ‘God was not god, but, rather, he was what he was. When creatures came to be . ., then God was no longer God as he is in himself, but god as he is with creatures’ (Sermon 28), so that ‘before there were creatures God was not “God”’ (Sermon 52) , i.e. not the humanly known God. Eckhart does not of course mean that with the creation of humanity the Godhead ceased to exist, but that there then also came to be the humanly experienced God of Christian worship.

 

This distinction between the ultimate divine reality and its humanly thinkable and experienceable form (or forms) is also found within each of the other great traditions. To refer to these very briefly, Advaitic Hinduism distinguishes between nirguna Brahman, which is the totally ‘formless’ or transcategorical Ultimate Reality, and saguna Brahman, which is that same reality as manifested within human experience as the realm of worshipped gods and goddesses. The trikaya doctrine of Mayahana Buddhism distinguishes between the utterly transcategorial dharmakaya and its manifestation in the realm of the heavenly Buddhas (the nirmanakaya), one or other of whom becomes incarnate on earth from time to time. The Jewish mystics of the Zoharic and Lurianic Kabbala distinguished between Eyn Sof, the Infinite, and the God of the scriptures. The Sufi mystics of Islam distinguished between the ineffable ultimate reality, Al-Haqq, usually translated as the Real, and the revealed God of the Qur’an. Thus al-Arabi says, ‘God is absolute or restricted as He pleases; and the God of religious beliefs is subject to limitations, for He is the God contained in the heart of His servants. But the absolute God is not contained in anything . . . Thus, He is not known [as Allah] until we are known’ (The Bezels of Wisdom, 92).

 

Now I want to suggest that this generic distinction within the mystical strand of religion worldwide between, on the one hand, the transcategorial – or if you prefer the older term, the ineffable – Godhead or the Real and, on the other hand, the form or forms in which that ultimate reality is manifested within our human conceptual frameworks and modes of experience, makes possible a religious interpretation of the data of the history of religions.

 

Suppose that, as is in fact the case, I participate in some small degree in the very wide and varied realm of religious experience. And suppose that, as is again the case, I hold the basic religious faith that this is not purely imaginative projection, but that whilst clearly employing my own conceptual and imaginative resources, it is at the same time also a response to the presence to me of a transcendent reality. I then notice that others within the same, in my case, Christian tradition also report moments of religious experience, though often taking different forms. And I then notice that people within the other religious traditions likewise report a yet wider range of such experiences. Applying a kind of philosophical Golden Rule, it would be unreasonable not to grant to religious experience within other traditions what I affirm of it within my own tradition. And so I have to take account of the worldwide varieties of religious experience. I now have the two-level picture of the ultimate ineffable Real, or the Godhead, being responded to in this range of different forms of religious experience, the differences between them arising from our different culturally formed conceptual systems and imaginative repertoires, and – very importantly – our different kinds of spiritual practice.

 

The basic principle that we are aware of anything, not as it is in itself unobserved, but always and necessarily as it appears to beings with our particular cognitive equipment, was brilliantly stated by Aquinas when he said that ‘Things known are in the knower according to the mode of the knower’ (S.T., II/II, Q. 1, art. 2). And in the case of religious awareness, the mode of the knower differs significantly from religion to religion. And so my hypothesis is that the ultimate reality of which the religions speak, and which we refer to as God, is being differently conceived, and therefore differently experienced, and therefore differently responded to in historical forms of life within the different religious traditions.

 

What does this mean for the different, and often conflicting, belief-systems of the religions? It means that they are descriptions of different manifestations of the Ultimate; and as such they do not conflict with one another. They each arise from some immensely powerful moment or period of religious experience, notably the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment under the Bo tree at Bodh Gaya, Jesus’ sense of the presence of the heavenly Father, Muhammad’s experience of hearing the words that became the Qur’an, and also the experiences of Vedic sages, of Hebrew prophets, of Taoist sages. But these experiences are always formed in the terms available to that individual or community at that time and are then further elaborated within the resulting new religious movements. This process of elaboration is one of philosophical or theological construction. Christian experience of the presence of God, for example, at least in the early days and again since the 13th-14th century rediscovery of the centrality of the divine love, is the sense of a greater, much more momentously important, much more profoundly loving, personal presence than that of one’s fellow humans. But that this higher presence is eternal, is omnipotent, is omniscient, is the creator of the universe, is infinite in goodness and love is not, because it cannot be, given in the experience itself. In sense perception we can see as far as our horizon but cannot see how much further the world stretches beyond it, and so likewise we can experience a high degree of goodness or of love but cannot experience that it reaches beyond this to infinity. That God has these infinite qualities, and likewise that God is a divine Trinity, can only be an inference, or a theory, or a supposedly revealed truth, but not an experienced fact. And so Jesus himself will have understood the experienced loving and demanding presence to be the God of his Jewish tradition, and specifically of that aspect of the tradition that emphasized the divine goodness and love, as well as justice and power. But as his teaching about the heavenly Father was further elaborated, and indeed transformed, within the expanding gentile church, it grew into the philosophical conception of God as an infinite co-equal trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And so what we inherit today is a complex totality in which religious experience and philosophical speculation embodied in theological doctrine have interacted over the centuries and have to a certain degree fused. In the other great traditions the same process has taken place, in each case taking its own distinctive forms. For religious experience always has to take some specific form, and the forms developed within a given tradition ‘work’, so to speak, for people within that tradition but not, in many cases, for people formed by a different tradition.

 

There also emerges here an answer to the question, Why should we think that there is an ultimate transcendent reality, the Real or the Godhead, in distinction from the experienced personal Gods and impersonal Absolutes of the different traditions? For surely if it is the case that not only our own Christian experience, but also the different forms of experience within the other great religious traditions, are indeed responsive and not purely projective, it is not surprising that within human awareness many different God-figures have formed. Phenomenologically – that is, as describable, – the Holy Trinity is different from the Allah of Islam, which is different from the Adonai, the Lord, of rabbinic Judaism, which is different again from the Vishnu and the Shiva of theistic Hinduism, and even more different from the non-personal Tao, or Dharma, or Brahman. All these are, in Kantian language, divine phenenoma in distinction from the divine noumenon of which they are its appearances to humanity. Thus we need – I am suggesting – a two level model, with the experienced realities in relation to which the religious life is lived as manifestations of an ultimate reality beyond them.

 

Let me offer a couple of analogies to illustrate this. The sun’s light is refracted by the earth’s atmosphere into the spectrum of the different colours of the rainbow. Perhaps the ultimate light of the universal divine presence is refracted by our different human religious cultures into the spectrum of the different world faiths. Or, in the words of the medieval Sufi thinker, Jalaluldin Rumi, ‘The lamps are different but the Light is the same: it comes from Beyond’.

 

And concerning the different, and indeed often conflicting, belief systems of the religions: our earth is a three-dimensional globe. But when you map it on a two dimensional surface, such as a piece of paper, you have to distort it. You cannot get three dimensions into two without distortion. And there are a variety of projections used by cartographers which are different systematic ways of distorting the earth’s curvature to represent it on a flat surface. But if a map made in one projection is correct it does not follow that maps made in other projections are incorrect. If they are properly made they are all correct, and yet they all distort. Perhaps our different theologies, both within the same religion and between different religions, are human maps of the infinite divine reality made in different projections, i.e. different conceptual systems. These all necessarily distort, since that infinite reality as it is in itself cannot be represented in our finite human terms. But perhaps all are equally useful in enabling us make our journey through life.

 

But finally, let us return to the point at which we started, namely prayer, particularly petitionary prayer, prayer for other people. In my opinion it is an observable fact that such prayer does sometimes ‘work’. I do not however see this as a matter of our asking an omnipotent God to intervene miraculously on earth and of his then acting accordingly. I see it rather as depending upon a mental field or network, below the level of normal consciousness, within which we are all connected and through which our thoughts, and even more our emotions, are all the time affecting one another. These influences are usually largely filtered out by the mechanism that preserves our individual autonomy. But when in ‘prayer’, or what Buddhists call loving-kindness meditation, we concentrate upon some particular individual who is in a distressed state of anxiety, fear, anger, dispair, etc., concretely visualizing a better possibility for them, this can have a positive effect. Even in the case of bodily distress our thought may affect the patient’s mind and sometimes through this his or her bodily state. And I would suggest – outrageously, from the point of view of the contemporary secular mindset – that quite possibly the thou of whom we are sometimes aware in prayer is a reality, but is what the eastern religions call a deva, a god in distinction from God, or in western terms an angel.

 

So here is a large-scale hypothesis which constitutes a religious, as distinguished from a naturalistic, interpretation of religion. And like all such hypotheses, it presents itself for consideration and invites others who find it inadequate to offer a better hypothesis.

(source)

 

*******

 

an interview with bishop john spong

by Religion Dispatches

 

RD: One of the things you are fighting against in this book is a literal reading of the Bible. Why do you believe people insist on reading the bible literally and not daring to ask, or even trying to form, the questions?

 

JS: We put an aura around the Bible that makes it very difficult to look at it any other way than as some mystical book that dropped from the sky. In some church processions, they walk in and somebody is holding the book on high as if it’s to be worshipped. We read from it and say “This is the word of the Lord” no matter what the lesson said. You do that often enough and people don’t think that’s a book to be read. It’s an untouchable.

 

Also, we publish the Bible in columns. No other book is published that way except encyclopedias, dictionaries and telephone books. You don’t want to read those books, you go to them for authoritative answers and you don’t argue with the dictionary. If you’re playing Scrabble you go to the dictionary to settle the argument. We’ve encouraged people to think about the Bible as this kind of book, a source of authority, the final word, not to be debated. I think that helps people to think that it’s inappropriate to ask questions.

 

As a kid our family Bible was on the coffee table in the living room. We never read it. We’d open it to put in somebody’s baptism or death. It was a family record book. I remember one day I put a Coca-Cola bottle down on top of it and I thought that the Lord would strike me dead.

 

I think the Bible is a great book and I think if we can get people to look at it properly and not use it as a weapon to enforce their prejudices we’d be making a major step forward.

 

In this strange political climate we’re in, the Bible seems to be getting tossed around an awful lot. Erstwhile candidate Michelle Bachmann was even asked in one debate whether she believed the Bible required her to be “submissive” to her husband. Politicians are trying to enforce that aura around the Bible and competing to be seen as taking it the most literally. What do you make of that?

 

I think it’s sick, though I think there is less of it now than during the Bush years — we’re making progress, as strange as it sounds. The only one really talking this way now is Rick Perry. He keeps coming out against gays and in favor of being a Christian as if those are two things that go together.

 

I think it’s a reality show. I think it’s the strangest group of candidates I’ve ever watched run for office and I would be embarrassed at almost any one of them being the president of the United States. If the Democrats had any sense they’d run against the Ebeneezer Scrooge Republican Party because they keep running around saying, “Bah, humbug,” and anybody that’s poor ought to stay poor because they probably deserve to be poor and we’ll tax them a little more to be sure they remain poor. I don’t know why they think that’s a winning ticket.

 

The economy is so bad that I think Obama had a really slim chance to be elected, but I think the opposition has given him a good chance of being elected because it is so bizarre. Rick Perry who can’t remember anything, or Herman Cain—he was a comedy. Newt Gingrich? I’m too old, I remember too much about Newt Gingrich. Romney’s got the ability and I don’t think he’s an evil person but he’s been on every side of every issue so I’m not sure who the real Romney is. I don’t see a strong candidate in that crowd. Michelle Bachman was comic relief!

 

I don’t want the Republican Party not to offer a strong alternative because democracy depends on both parties having competent people — one conservative, one liberal — and letting the people choose which direction it wants to take for the next four years. Anytime you play to the narrow, angry base of your party to get the nomination you jeopardize your chances of winning—and you should. This country is basically a center-right to center-left country and if we could rotate a competent center-right with a competent-center left person then I think we’d have a healthy country.

 

I think your book could help people make a critical assessment of how religion is being used in politics because if they understood the Bible then they would recognize when it’s being misused and abused.

 

 It seems to me that what the Christian faith says is that every life is holy, every life is loved, and every life is called and empowered to be all that it can be. That’s not what you hear. Christianity has been a religion of victimization if you look at its history. We victimized Jews during the Crusades. We victimized Muslims in the 14th century. We victimized heretics. We victimized people of color. We victimized women. We victimized homosexuals. We victimized the environment. We’re currently victimizing immigrants. It’s all the same mentality.

 

What is it about Christianity that makes us constantly be a victimizer? I think it’s because we’ve adopted victimizing theology. We spend all our time in church talking about how sinful and evil human beings are. The only way you can tolerate listening to that is to pass it on. We have to pass on this hostility that we have. The idea that God killed Jesus because you were a sinner is a really strange idea. It makes God an ogre. It makes Jesus a sadomasochistic victim and it makes you and me guilt-laden.

 

Guilt never produces life. If guilt is your message, the best you can produce is a hidden righteousness. You repress your negative feelings in public and you pass this guilt on because it’s intolerable. I think what we’ve turned Christianity into is a sick religion and it comes out politically.

 

What do you think about the Occupy movement?

 

Finally, this negativity has been pushed to the extreme by the Tea Party that it fired up the other side. I think the majority is going to be on the Occupy side. That’s my hope. What they are doing is raising consciousness. I also think it’s dangerous.

 

America reminds me of France before the revolution in the 18th century. What you get is polarized politics with an increasingly right wing mentality and then you get a left wing reaction, the center disappears and that’s what leads to civil wars. We’re in a down economy, there’s a lot of anger. It was a depression that brought Adolph Hitler into power—and he had a victim he could denigrate. He united all the Germans against the Jews. It’s cheap politics, but we still have people who know how to do that. It doesn’t lead to anything but destruction.

 

How can re-educating ourselves about the Bible — and educating the non-religious about the Bible — help us regain the center?

 

One of my hopes for this book is that it will provide a textbook to talk about the Bible in a new way. A local pastor doesn’t have to actually say what I say in the book, but if he presents the book then he’s not alone.

 

I had a friend in Wyoming who used my book for a Lenten study and said he would preach against it and lambast it every Sunday. I asked him why he would do that and he said, “That’s the only way I can get them to read it.” I thought that was very clever. That opens the doors and I’m encouraged by that.

 

In your book you argue that there are universalist themes in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. How do you square that with the Christian exceptionalism we see today?

 

Exceptionalism is in every religious system. Religion is a human social invention to keep insecurity in check because being human is a very insecure thing to be. We’re self-conscious. We know we’re going to die and we have to relate to that. Animals don’t have to relate to that, they just live until they die. Human beings are the only animal that commits suicide or uses drugs. Religion is part of our defense system against the radical insecurity of life.

 

In order for religion to make you secure you have to make excessive claims. You have to say that, “We are the chosen people,” or “The pope is infallible,” or “Our way is the only way,” or “the Bible is inerrant.” You have to make a claim that locks security up tightly. It doesn’t work, but it’s popular. There will always be fundamentalist churches. They will always promise things they can’t deliver and people will leave when a tragedy comes. Fundamentalist churches don’t tend to last past the charismatic pastor that got them started.

 

Christianity is not supposed to make you secure. Christianity is supposed to give you the courage to walk into an insecure world knowing that you’re not alone and to embrace the radical insecurity. If you’ve got to spend your time proving that you’re better than someone else — males are better than females, whites are better than blacks, heterosexuals are better than homosexuals — you’re always building yourself up by pushing somebody else down. But, you shouldn’t need to build yourself up unless you’re radically insecure. Religion feeds into that radical insecurity with triumphalism — ours is the only religious route you can take to get to God. That’s a really strange idea.

 

Religion is not about truth, it’s about security. The sort of thing I’m presenting is never going to be the majority view but it’s going to be the minority point of view for those who are bold enough to look at life as it really is and not to need a narcotic to get through it but as something that gives them the strength to embrace the radical insecurity of life, and I think that’s worth doing.

 

Christianity is not about saving people from their sins. It’s about expanding the sense of what it means to be human. That’s a very big difference. I’m tired of being saved from my sins. People say, “You don’t believe in sin.” But, that’s not true. I believe that human beings are incredibly capable of doing evil. We do that because we’re survival-oriented creatures. That means we can’t help but be self-centered—and that’s what the church called “original sin.” Christianity doesn’t rescue us from that aspect of our humanity. What Christianity does is lift us beyond the survival mentality into a kind of humanity that can give itself away in love. That’s what the Jesus story is all about.

 

What do you see as the future of Christianity?

 

I’m encouraged that the Bible says to me over and over again that the Christian movement is always going to be a minority movement. It’s not ever going to be a majority movement. We’re going to be the little bit of salt that gives flavor to the soup, the leaven that causes the bread to rise, or the tiny candle that shines in the midst of incredible darkness. When we get back to understanding our role is to leaven the lump then I think we’ll be effective.

 

Right now we believe we should be the majority. I don’t think that’s ever been the biblical image. The saving remnant was the powerful idea in the Hebrew Scriptures and I think that continues in the Christian tradition. But, we’ve gotten triumphal. We turned Christianity into Christendom and we rule the world. We’ve seated kings and unseated kings. We got drunk with that kind of power and we forgot how to be a Christian. I hope we can recover that and I hope my book will help people see that—because I think the message of the Bible is a pretty powerful one.

 

(source)

 

*******

 

any of these familiar??

 

How to Control People (Mind Control methods):

 

1. Do not let them know you are controlling them.

Most people aren’t consciously willing to be manipulated. It is a subtle art controlling people without them knowing it.

2. Keep them ignorant.

Uneducated people are easier to control than educated ones. But we aren’t talking about higher education, but worldly education. Global understanding. There are PhD’s walking around who are experts in their field but woefully ignorant of the greater issues of life.

3. Do not allow for original thought.

Original thought undermines blind obedience. Tell people everything they need to know and that anything beyond that is taboo.

4. Keep them entertained.

Distraction is the best way of keeping people under sedation. Like the Roman stadiums kept the people docile, so too will mindless entertainment and distractions.

5. Use an authoritative tone when speaking.

Appearance is as good as the substance these days. Sound like an authority and people will believe you know what you are talking about.

6. Have the appearance of power

…and the success that it brings. Smoke and mirrors are known deceivers because they work. Dress for success! Fake it ’til you make it. People respect suits.

7. Take control of every situation possible.

Your control cannot be provincial. It must be global. Dominate every domain and notice how people respect you. Every area of their lives, from their sex lives down to the last penny, must be under your jurisdiction.

8. Dangle the carrot in front of them.

Always keep the shiny object dangling just beyond their reach. Their goal. Their destiny. Their fulfilment. Their vision. Tantalize them. They will keep coming back for more.

9. Instil guilt and fear of the consequences

…of not being controlled. Fear is the greatest motivator for aligning other people’s priorities to yours. And everyone knows guilt is the fastest way to get someone back in line.

10. Manipulate their emotions.

Get into their minds to see what makes them tick and take advantage of it. Build a false sense of security. Pretend to be a close friend and confidante. Identify and sympathize with their emotions and make a heart connection. This will form a bond that’s hard to break.

 

(source)

 

Does any of the tips above look or feel familiar? If you are like me, you would probably be chuckling to yourself by now. I did.

 

Most, if not all of the ten tips apply to either evangelical christian pastors of megachurches or self-help motivational “experts”. Take note: they do not apply only to cults and loony sects – I recognise many of these factors at play in most of the megachurches in Singapore.

 

1. Most pastors do not tell their parishioners that they are controlling them. On the contrary, they often let the bible or God do the controlling for them. It is rather easy for the pastor to do as evangelicals view the bible in very high esteem – many see it as the sole authority for their lives.

 

2. Have you wonder why the places in which evangelical churches are flourishing are usually in uneducated regions like Africa, South America and Asia? Even in modern Singapore, much of fervent grassroots christianity consists of people who are ignorant about the natural sciences, darwinian evolution, neurobiology, psychology and especially biblical studies (biblical criticism, history of the church, etc). Worse still, many of the pastors themselves do not even have theological qualifications.

 

3. Hey hey, this part is also easy for the pastor to impose. Megachurches are known to “expect” its members to toe the party line in the name of subscribing to the “common vision” of the church, yadda yadda, as well as “submitting to spiritual authority”. Have you realise how members of certain churches in Singapore (especially the “big four”) all “think, behave and speak alike”??

 

4. Most megachurch pastors are charismatic fellows who can keep their members “entertained” every week, either by the force of their personality and perceived “holiness” or by their conversational style of public speaking. Do note that most scholars and intellectuals do not speak that way – it seems that the televangelist way of speaking is despised in academia.

 

5. Of course, of course. Even the entertaining preacher has the aura of authority just by the sheer force of his position as pastor (most evangelical christians revere their pastors of “anointed men of God”), especially when he starts spouting rubbish about receiving “revelation” from God.

 

6. No problem here. The fact that they are pastors of megachurches (with weekly attendances of more than 8000) show how much “power” they have and how “successful” they are. Many also live relatively extravagant lifestyles (they live in condominiums or bungalows and drive relatively expensive cars) and wear “branded” clothes. Many of such preachers use the excuse that they have the “blessings of God” and that men of God can be “successful” too. ALL GLORY TO GOD!!!

 

7. Hmm. This one may not apply to the megachurch pastors here, although I suppose they would apply to cult leaders.

 

8. Ah…the carrot in contemporary evangelical christianity would be personal fulfillment, peace of mind, material and financial “blessing”, finding one’s calling, fulfillment of one’s destiny, having children, good family life…almost the same vices and entrapments of any free thinker and atheist.

 

9. Most christian pastors employ this method (of course, unintentionally) by preaching about sin, damnation, the wrath of God, the fires of hell, discipline, moral courage, etc. However, there are the exceptions who use reverse psychology to accomplish the same thing – the grace of God, the unconditional love of Christ, etc.

 

10. I guess if all of the above are at play, one’s emotions would thus be tapped and utilised. Most charismatic personalities employ the use of vague language and emotive vocabulary to “stir” their followers. Not only do preachers employ this, but much of US politics. Just compare the presidential speeches of US presidents with that of our prime ministers. While Lee Kuan Yew and Lee Hsien Loong have always been rather cerebral and thoughtful, their US counterparts are raucous rhetoricians skilled at playing the emotions of the US public.

 

***

 

And after all is said and done, if you are feeling offended in any form after reading this – you are either a megachurch pastor yourself or someone who has been hoodwinked by one. No intelligent and thinking christian should be attending a church that spurns original free thought and individual freedom.

 

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“the king of the bibles” by peter mullen

 

We enjoyed a parish visit recently to St George’s Chapel, Windsor: the Queen’s Chapel. In there was a big sign saying, “Celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible”. I must say, it was a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance. For at Choral Evensong, the lessons were both from some illiterate, godforsaken modern version. I knew we were in for trouble from the start when, in the Old Testament lesson, King Solomon addressed the Almighty as, “You God…” – as if the deity were some miscreant fourth-former in the back row. Of course it went from bad to worse.

 

On Wednesday, the Queen will attend a service of celebration at Westminster Abbey to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. The address will be given by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who earlier this year urged us to read the King James Bible in order to get a glimpse of what he called “the big picture”. Perhaps this was meant to go with Dave’s idea of “the big society”? This is a strange injunction, coming as it did from a man who has been in positions of power and influence in the church for decades. For in that time the same church hierarchy has ruthlessly suppressed the King James Bible, along with the Book of Common Prayer.

 

I can add a personal note on this subject. When I came to the City in 1998 I discovered that St Sepulchre’s did not have a lectern Bible in the King James Version (KJV). So I asked St Paul’s if they would lend me one of theirs.

 

They replied, “Oh yes, and you can keep it. We never use it at St Paul’s, only when the Royal Family comes – awkward people like that.” The King James Bible is a work of literary and spiritual genius. It is the religious register in English and its words and phrases have penetrated deeply into English literature. You cannot read 10 pages of Dickens or Arnold, George Eliot or the Brontës without coming across wholly integrated resonances of the King James Version. And, of course, English poetry is saturated with it. W H Auden said, as he witnessed the sidelining of the King James Bible: “It was our luck to have that translation made when English was at its strongest and most robust. Why spit on our luck?”

 

C H Sisson said that all we really know is what he called “the reluctant deposit on the mind’s floor”. That is to say, what you remember when you’ve forgotten everything else. For centuries, people of all walks of life have carried around with them echoes of the King James Version. So to throw it out as the church hierarchy has done amounts to a savage act of deprivation and, as this deprivation is of the Word of God in English, it is vicious iconoclasm. Sidelining the King James Version especially deprives our children and is therefore a notable case of child abuse.

 

There is no such thing as noble truth expressed in ignoble words. The choice of words determines what is being said. Therefore, we should choose the best.

 

 

“Strips of cloth” is no substitute for “swaddling clothes”. And Mary was “with child” – we think of the Madonna and Child – and she had not “fallen pregnant” as it says in one of the modern versions. You cannot satisfactorily replace “through a glass darkly” with the crass literalism “puzzling reflections in a mirror” or “sounding brass and tinkling cymbal” with “noisy gong and clanging cymbal”. The King James Bible was designed to be read aloud in churches. All the modern versions sound as if they have been written by tone-deaf people with tin ears and no rhythm.

 

What level of vacuity is reached when “Son of Belial” (i.e. the devil himself) is rendered by the New English Bible (NEB) as “a good-for-nothing”? As if the son of the devil is only a truant from the fourth form who has been stealing from the housemaster’s orchard.

 

The real Bible says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The NEB gives us instead, “The first step to find wisdom.” But that is only the way in which babyish primary school teachers speak to their charges. The first step to find wisdom – and then, if you are ever so good little children, I’ll show you the second step. This is infantilisation. Sometimes the New Jerusalem Bible’s (NJB) pedantry, this pseudo-scholarly fascination with all that is merely foreign and obscure, is just silly, as in “You, Yahweh examine me.” But occasionally it is mindlessly un-poetic and banal, as in the substitution of “Acclaim Yahweh” for the mesmerisingly beautiful and timelessly familiar “make a joyful noise unto the Lord”. But in one example of supreme idiocy the meaning becomes impenetrable: The King James Version says, “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord …” In the New Jerusalem Bible this degenerates into tasteless obscurantism: “If you live in the shelter of Elyon and make your home in the shadow of Shaddai, you can say to Yahweh …” The Revised Standard Version (RSV) loves to parade the translators’ acquaintance with the slightest nuances in the ancient languages but their utter ignorance of what will go into ordinary English. It renders the “giants” of Genesis as “nephilim” – to the confusion, one supposes, of elderly ladies everywhere. And the “two pence” that the Good Samaritan gave to the innkeeper as “two denarii” – lest we should imagine that the currency of the Roman Empire was the same as that of England, pre-decimalisation.

 

The RSV makes a habit of iconoclasm, as for instance in its destruction of that very familiar phrase: “Arise, take up thy bed and walk.” The RSV says, “Take up your pallet and go home.” Because we must on no account be allowed to imagine that the poor paralytic slunk off carrying his four-poster, we have forced upon us the literalism pallet: and the result sounds like instructions to a sloppy painter.

 

The NEB also cannot tell the difference between speech that is poetic and metaphorical and speech that is literal and descriptive. That is why for “wolves in sheep’s clothing” we are given instead the pantomime howler “men dressed up as sheep”. We recall perhaps Ulysses’ escape from the Cyclops or that pejorative expression “mutton dressed up as lamb”. In the KJV men are “at meat” or they “sup”; but the RSV mentions a Pharisee who “asked Jesus to dine” – where, at The Garrick or White’s? Likewise, his rebuke to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, “O fools and slow of heart” is emasculated to become “How dull you are!” How dull indeed. Can you imagine for one minute Our Lord Jesus Christ on the evening of his day of resurrection using such language? “How dull!”

 

The KJV’s “pearl of great price” is exhibited in more of that infantilised Blue Peter language as “a pearl of very special value”. And then the end of the world itself is described as if it were only an exceptionally hot afternoon at Goodwood: “My dear friends…” (that is the voice of the NEB’s urbane, housetrained St Peter) “…do not be bewildered by the fiery ordeal that is coming upon you, as though it were something extraordinary.” The end of the world not extraordinary?

 

There is a sort of discreet charm about the KJV’s saying, “It ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.” This is marvellous. It seems to reach up the underclothes of words, as that other great admirer of biblical prose, Dylan Thomas, said. But the Jerusalem Bible was written in the era of sex education, so it can confidently come straight out with “ceased to have her monthly periods”. And the KJV’s “great whore of Babylon” seems to have lost what is left of her character when the New Jerusalem Bible refers to her only as “the famous prostitute”. Who is this – Eskimo Nell?

 

With studied pedantry, the New Jerusalem Bible replaces “inn” with “living space” – I suppose because they imagined readers to be so literal-minded that we might think St Luke meant the Rose and Crown. A similar pedantry removes the KJV’s lovely “coat of many colours” and offers us “a decorated tunic”. The KJV translates Psalm 139: 16 – a beautiful poem in which the Psalmist declares that God knew him “while he was yet in his mother’s womb – as thine eyes did see my substance yet being unperfect.” This is allusive, evocative, tender. Unbelievably, the NJB gives us instead, “Your eyes could see my embryo” – as if God were a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.

 

There is a pervading irreverence bordering on blasphemy. The translation of the Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer is by Miles Coverdale and he renders the Hebrew, “O let thine ears consider well …” The NJB gives this as “Listen attentively Yahweh”. But is that the way to speak to God? What more is there to be said when we notice that the NJB renders “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” as “Sheer futility. Everything is futile.” That phrase will serve as the motto for all the modern translations: “Sheer futility”.

 

How hypocritical and sordid of the church authorities relentlessly to suppress the KJV, only to take it out and gawp at it in an anniversary year, as if it were a museum piece and we were all blundering tourists. The proper place for the KJV is on the lectern in every parish church – to be read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested, week in, week out.

 

***

 

This article was written by Rev. Dr Peter Mullen, the rector of St Michael at Cornhill, and St Sepulchre in the City of London. It was published in The Telegraph UK on 14 November 2011.

 

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are there any liberal “christians” in singapore??

 

Are there any liberal “christians” in Singapore?

 

Are there “christians” in Singapore who accept darwinian evolution as fact, are naturalistic (contra supernaturalistic) in worldview, are pluralistic in their attitudes towards other religions, who value reason, empiricism and the scientific method as one of the main, if not the sole reliable means of discovering the truth about our world, who reject the value of petitionary and intercessory prayer, who sees the bible NOT as an inerrant and infallible but a very human text using the language of myth, fable and metaphor to express spiritual truths, who do NOT subscribe to the mythic elements of the bible such as the narrative accounts of the Tanakh, the birth narratives, miracles and bodily resurrection of Jesus, the Trinity, etc – but view them as symbols and metaphors that aid to explain the ineffable sacred??

 

Or at least “christians” who identify themselves as progressive who realise the very errant nature of the bible and attempts to re-construct a new christianity for the 21st century?

 

I know that there are numerous of such kin in the mainline churches in the United States as well as the United Kingdom, and probably the majority of “christians” in Europe. But there is death all around in this part of the world – only the evangelical and fundamental form of christianity exists in Singapore – a christianity that is anti-intellectual, that spurns the scientific method, that espouses creation myths as natural history, that is homophobic, that consigns practitioners of every other religious tradition to hell, that practically leaves the brain outside the church.

 

Everywhere I turn, there is only wilderness and the desert. Alas, my beloved wife is numbered among such automatons. For almost two hours last night, I almost “exploded” in passionate diatribe against her uncritical acceptance of creationism and her stubborn stance on christian exclusivitity. In her worldview, I am treading on very very dangerous ground, perhaps even bordering on going to hell.

 

I remarked to her that if there is a literal place called heaven after death, it would be APPALLING to any decent human sense to think that good human beings like Gandhi, Mother Theresa and even the Buddha would be absent, burning in hell. It would be insulting to my dignity as a human being to think that genocidal leaders like Moses and Joshua would be in heaven.

 

She would have none of it. Like almost ALL of the evangelical world in Singapore, she is blinded into full acceptance of all of the crimes against humanity as narrated in the bible just because it IS the bible.

 

Can’t I discuss religion without all this idiocy? Can’t I have a civilised and enlightened discourse on religious morality without resorting to fundamentalist tendencies? Can’t I value evolution, humanism and free thought while being part of a religious community?

 

Is there any Singaporean who is going through the same thing as me and understand????

 

Sigh and sob.

 

*******

 

anthony freeman rethinks the resurrection

 

One of the many blessings to flow from my temporary suspension from priestly duties was the opportunity to become a full member of the choir in my local church. I am not a very good singer, but I enjoy it, and if you can make a half-reasonable shot at singing tenor there is no parish church choir in England that can afford to turn you away! A by-product of choir membership was saying in the vestry before every service a choristers’ prayer, which includes the petition: “Grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts.”

 

Those of you familiar with the worst excesses of Victorian hymnody may shudder at the thought of anyone believing every word they had to sing, but right from the start I took those words very seriously. They forced me to ask myself, Do I really believe in my heart the great affirmations of the Christian faith about which I sing week by week?

 

The answer I gave was, “Yes”. But with that answer came a renewed awareness that I could only believe these things because I had been privileged to study the scriptures and the doctrines and to understand them in a way that made sense in the twenty-first century. All too many of the congregation — never mind the public at large — imagined these things had to be believed in ways more appropriate to the first or the fourth or the sixteenth centuries. Small wonder they made heavy weather of it.

 

So to my recitation of the words “Grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts”, I began silently to add the reminder to myself: “And it is your job as a priest and a preacher to proclaim those words in a way that makes them believable today.”

 

This does not imply any kind of spiritual dumbing down. Quite the opposite. It means a spiritual and intellectual sharpening up. It means rejecting the false notion that faith is somehow opposed to reason and intelligent thought, and embracing instead the dictum of Augustine: I believe that I might understand (credo ut intelligam), a theme echoed later by Anselm when he described theological study as Faith in search of understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). My task here is to give you an example of how this works in practice, by tackling the central Christian doctrine — especially topical in Eastertide — of the resurrection of Jesus.

 

Christians celebrate Easter because Jesus is alive. It is no part of my brief to suggest this is a false belief, but it is very much the theologian’s job to ask: What do we mean when we say that Jesus is alive?

 

Quite often the clergy are asked to sign certificates for occupational pensioners, confirming that the person is still alive and entitled to draw their pension. Suppose I were asked to certify that Jesus, carpenter of Nazareth, is still alive and therefore entitled to draw his pension. Could I sign such a certificate? I could not. Whatever we mean when we say that Jesus is alive, we are not using the words in the way that a pensions or insurance company uses them.

 

When we say that Jesus is alive, we are also very clear that he died and was buried. He is not alive in the straightforward ordinary sense of the word.

 

This is both a blindingly obvious thing to say and an absolutely essential thing to say. Essential in the first place, because until we clear the decks of all the things that don’t form part of the Christian faith, there is no space to set out what Christians do believe. And essential in the second place, because there is no shortage of enemies of open, honest, believable Christianity, who are only too pleased to promote the false idea that religious faith means having to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

 

So, to repeat, when Christians say that Jesus is the living Lord, they are not saying — and have never been saying, in all the 2000 years of Christian history — that he is alive in the straightforward ordinary sense of the word.

 

Let’s try another tack. Many Elvis Presley fans will tell you that “Elvis lives!”. They may even (with more than a passing echo of Christian claims for Jesus) give him a royal title and proclaim that “The King lives!”. Now we may feel this language is extravagant, but it is not entirely stupid. We can make sense of it. It is a dramatic way of saying that the power of the man and his music have not been extinguished by his death. 

 

So is this what Christians mean when they say that Jesus lives? Or proclaim that Jesus is Lord, or King? Are they simply affirming the continuing power of his message and his example to inspire millions of people the world over?

 

That is certainly part of what we mean, and I would say it is a very important part. It is important not least because it provides a bridge between the religious use of language and something closer to its ordinary use. Unlike the prosaic pension-company understanding of the words, the Elvis example manages strongly to affirm the “being alive” without in any way denying the reality of the “having died”. It actually offers two ways into the meaning of our religious language.

 

First, it uses the terms “alive” and “he lives” in a metaphorical way rather than a literal one. In the literal sense used by pension and insurance companies, being dead and being alive are mutually exclusive conditions.

 

This is true even of those well-publicised cases where a person has been declared clinically dead and has subsequently recovered, cases that find a biblical parallel in the examples of Lazarus or the widow of Nain’s son. These people are temporarily dead, and then alive again for a shorter or longer time, before dying permanently. 

 

By contrast, when Christians say that Jesus is alive, we do so in a way that affirms his dying and its permanence. It is because Jesus has already died “once for all” that his disciples can confidently proclaim that he will never die again, that “death has no more dominion over him”.

 

This is crucially important. Insisting on the reality and the permanence of Jesus’ death is not a sop to a modern scientific culture that cannot cope with traditional red-blooded belief in the resurrection. It is part of the central claim of Christianity from New Testament times onward that — uniquely — Jesus did not “come back” from death but rather “burst through” the death barrier. Small wonder that Christians and non-Christians alike find themselves struggling even to imagine what this might mean.

 

This brings us to the second way in which the Elvis phenomenon can be a pointer — albeit a very inadequate one — to a better way to understand our religious language about Jesus and his resurrection. Elvis lives on to the extent that his fans still respond to his music.

 

And it is in the words and deeds of his disciples, and in the context of their changed lives, that the words “Jesus is alive” have their meaning. Whatever it was that the disciples experienced on the first Easter Day and the weeks immediately following, it enabled them — more than that it compelled them — to say, “No longer does death make a mockery of life; no longer does it make life meaningless. Indeed, death has become the key to life’s real meaning.”

 

One common way of expressing this has been to speak of death as the gateway to new life. There has been envisaged a succession of events: earthly life, followed by death, followed by eternal life. This has been presented (for instance in the Epistle to the Hebrews) as the pattern set by Jesus and promised to us all. But we have already seen that such language cannot be taken literally. Saint Paul underlined this when he said that for Christians eternal life begins at their baptism, that is to say the occasion of their “dying to sin”, and does not have to wait for physical death.

 

So the Church has always taught that eternal life is a new quality of existence that begins here and now. It is the change that comes about when we hear the story of Jesus and see the limiting factors of life in a new light. We are all tempted from time to time to be overwhelmed by the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. Pain, sickness, cruelty, above all death itself, seem to make a nonsense of life.

 

The Christian claim that “Jesus lives” is an affirmation that — on the contrary — it is life’s limitations that make sense of it, because they give it the boundaries, and therefore the shape, which are necessary to meaningful existence.

 

By this point some of you will be feeling short-changed. “He was advertised as speaking about the resurrection, but he’s not mentioned any of the difficult questions at all. What about the empty tomb? What about passing through locked doors? What about the lack of recognition?”

 

Well, in one way you are right to be sceptical. For me the thing to hang on to is the experience of millions of Christians, the undeniable fact that their lives on earth have been transformed by the story of Jesus’ triumph over death. Never mind how far the details of the story can or cannot be understood as literally true. In whatever way we are able to hear it, that story surely has the power to bring a new quality of life to each of us here and now.

 

This is eternal life. This is what Easter is all about. This is what it means for the Church to proclaim that “Jesus lives!”

 

I can appreciate, however, why the nuts and bolts questions of “what really happened?” do worry many people more than they do me, and I am happy to talk about my interpretation of the resurrection accounts in the New Testament.

 

Unfortunately that is not a task that can be undertaken in isolation from my approach to the entire Bible, the kind of writing it contains, and the proper — and improper — ways of using it.

 

Very briefly, we should not treat the Bible as a telescope, but more like a Hall of Mirrors. With a telescope we are presented with a close-up picture of a distant scene, and to use the Bible in this way is to imagine that it gives us access in accurate detail to events that happened long ago and far away and even in the heavenly realm. But the Bible cannot deliver that kind of clear precise information. As in the Hall of Mirrors, the scenes we perceive are the result of multiple reflections and images laid one upon another, so that little if anything is quite what it appears at first sight.

 

Nowhere is this more true than in the accounts of the resurrection, which are notoriously difficult to weave into a single coherent account, and even when taken individually are far from straightforward. For me the most striking aspects of the resurrection appearances are the ambiguity — Mary Magdalene thinks he’s the gardener, the fishermen see a figure they don’t recognize, most curious of all, the disciples dare not ask him, Who are you? because they know it is the Lord — and the emphasis on eating.

 

Taking it all together — especially the story of the Emmaus disciples and the repeated appearance to the disciples in the locked room on the first day of the week — I see the Eucharist as the clue to the Easter stories. It was in their table fellowship together that the apostles were aware of Jesus’ presence among them, but it was a sensed presence rather than a straightforward physical one. Precisely how this ties up with the events of the Last Supper I do not know, but tie up it undoubtedly does.

 

As for the empty tomb, all four gospels mention it, but the accounts differ, and the most elaborate — that in John’s Gospel — is clearly influenced by theological considerations. Most obviously there are the detailed differences between the raisings of Jesus and Lazarus, which can hardly be accidental. More thoroughly worked out is John’s theme of the second Adam, which runs right through his account of the passion and resurrection of Jesus. I see no way in which from this distance we can ever piece together the actual events of the first Easter Day.

 

But as I have said, for me that does not matter. What does matter is that faith in the resurrection should be expressed as a confidence in the power of life over death, not seen as test you have to pass in order to become a Christian. And the best way to achieve that is by bringing a contemporary understanding to the traditional texts and teachings.

 

I began with an allusion to the choristers’ prayer. To round off in similar vein, I will put this sentiment in the words of Paul that the Royal School of Church Music have as their motto: “I will sing with spirit, and with the understanding also” (psallam spiritu et mente).

 

***

 

This article was written by Anthony Freeman and first published in 2005 on the website, Radical Faith.

 

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ignorant article on the christian post

 

There was a recent article, posted on the 23rd of October (US time) by a Dan Delzell, entitled Does Christianity Stand on Faith or Evidence? at The Christian Post website.

 

The article attempts to articulate an empirical and reasonable defence of the reliability of the Bible by regurgitating very outdated stuff that the author probably got from books by Josh McDowell, Norman Geisler or any of evangelical christianity’s so-called apologists. He is either very ignorant of contemporary biblical scholarship or he is simply blinded by evangelical prejudice so as to filter out any research or data that is contrary to his views on christianity.

 

I would reckon that, from reading the article, the author presupposes that the bible is INERRANT since it was “inspired” by God. This would explain why he attempts to state very silly assertions like:

 

“There are over 300 Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The statistical probability that Jesus of Nazareth could have fulfilled even 8 such prophecies would be 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000. If you are willing to think rationally when it comes to religion, you will discover that it is impossible that the Bible did not come from God. No scheme of man could have pulled it off over those many centuries. In order to reject the Bible, a person must have a strong predisposition against it from the outset. Otherwise, the evidence makes it a ‘slam-dunk case’.”

 

Sigh. It would be reasonable to assume the validity of these prophecies only if the probability of natural causes can be, by and large, ruled out. But since the writers of the New Testament had access to the Old Testament, or more accurately, the Hebrew scriptures, it is very reasonable to propose the idea that these writers re-create the Gospel accounts so as to make the “prophecies” fit.

 

One might argue this is simply my naturalistic bias. But has Dan read any credible scholarship on the gospels? Doesn’t he realise that the canonical gospels cannot be interpreted as accurate historical and biographical accounts in the modern sense of the word(s)? The majority of mainline biblical scholarship has discredited the birth narratives of Jesus as metaphor and theology, not history. Has Dan acquaint himself with the fact that much of the birth narratives of Jesus are uncannily similar to ancient “son of god” myths that also propose virgin births, sons of gods and resurrections?

 

Another point is that most of the alleged “prophecies”, if interpreted in their original historical and social contexts within the Hebrew canon, were never intended to refer to Jesus at all! Most of them have already been fulfilled in the era purported in the Hebrew scriptures themselves.

 

Another ignorant assertion which Dan made in the article was:

 

“There is no dispute among scholars regarding the historical accuracy of the Bible.”

 

Huh? Where did he get his information from? From Josh McDowell again? Come on. The archaeologist from which he quoted, William Albright, was from a very outdated archaeological school that has since been discredited by modern archaeological research. Much of the historical narratives in the Penteteuch (the first five books of the OT) are now known to be myth and fiction – there has been no archaeological verification of any of the patriachs, the battle of Jericho, the Exodus from Egypt, etc. Has Dan really done his homework?

 

The moment one attempts to use external verification from extrabiblical sources, one will realise that there is a disparity.

 

Dan also claims that the bible was “scientifically accurate”. Duh. Is he going to mention stuff like the laws and regulations that Moses implemented for his people such as the laws of hygiene? Is he going to mention the alleged verses that mention that the earth is a “circle” - and thus claiming that the bible knows about the global nature of the earth? Is he going to mention about currents and circuits in the oceans which the bible also mentioned? Etc etc.

 

All of these do not prove anything at all. The Quran also offers several mentions that apparently corroborate with science, as would most of their apologists would love to suggest. It would be no leap of logic that ancient communities do have some knowledge of the natural world, albeit incompletely. This does not prove that the bible has its origins in the divine.

 

Dan also mentioned manuscript evidence as well as the notion that the bible is rather forthright about its protagonists’ successes and failures. If only Dan dig a bit deeper into the field of textual criticism, he would come out agnostic about the whole thing. As for the latter, it is one of the silliest statements around. What is the apologist trying to prove? Ancient mythologies and legends abound with accounts of very flawed and errant heroes as well. Does that prove that these myths were divinely originated? Duh.

 

Much of what the Christian Post author offered as “evidence” for the Bible’s inspiration from God are inconclusive and very much debatable, like in the fields of textual criticism. Issues like historical and archaeological research has now been more or less conclusive that the bible cannot be relied upon for real history.

 

He claims to be open-minded. If evangelicals are genuinely open-minded and willing to go where reason and evidence leads them, they would no longer be evangelicals. The fact of the matter is that evangelical christians have always been CLOSE-minded, interpreting data to simply fit to their already accepted conclusions and ignore or explain away any data that contradict. That is not honest scholarship.

 

I was an evangelical christian too. I was open-minded and was willing to study the facts. Arguments proposed by Dan are all too familiar to me, of which I myself have used them in the past. But were soon found wanting when scrutinised in the crucible of rigorous scholarship.

 

The bible is a collection of writings written by human beings living in ancient communities far removed from our own. It is written in myth, fable and metaphor and was never intended to be historical fact.

 

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biblical authority – a vestige of premodernity?

 

Yesterday was the “Day of the Sun”, a pagan-inspired day that commemorates the Roman goddess of the sun, as would all the other days of the Gregorian calendarial week. But of course, the early Christians love to remake such occasions to make it their own, and hence, the tradition of the “Lord’s Day” emerged.

 

Therefore instead of worshipping the sun goddess, who is nothing but a fiery star in the middle of our solar system, my family worships the only deity left in the modern world that has yet to be eliminated, the god who goes by the name of Yahweh to the ancient hebrews, simply “Abba” or “the Father” to the early Christians and Allah to the muslims.

 

However, due to the evangelical tradition in which my congregation belongs, we ascribe to the notion that OUR god is THE true deity, and even though we owe so much to the Jewish tradition in terms of our theology and history; we appear blind to that fact. We read back into the Hebrew scriptures our own christian biases, reinterpreting ancient Jewish-owned verses as though they are our own. As a result, we have relegated our Jewish precursors to a bygone spiritual age and a tradition that is destined for damnation for rejecting Jesus as the Christ. And towards our muslim brethren? Oh, we shrug them off as deluded – poor folks.

 

And although historical evidence weighs heavily against the hebrew scriptures as real history, we interpret the Hebrew scriptures (our Old Testament) as though the myths and fictions therein are historically true. And even though there isn’t much in the four canonical gospels that can be trusted in forming an accurate picture of Jesus historically, we pretend that they are and just go with the flow.

 

But why are we so blind and probably anti-intellectual as well?

 

Oh, our pastors would wax eloquent about the “authority” of the bible – GOD’S WORD – and that as evangelicals, we are a people who places our total trust, albeit in ridiculous ways most of the time, in the bible.

 

Sigh, even though MUCH of it cannot be collaborated with historical and archaeological evidence, let alone mainstream biblical scholarship.

 

It is akin to placing our trust in aesop’s fables or Journey to the West or any of the world’s great ancient, but fictional, literatures.

 

That was what I gathered from the rambling sermon yesterday morning, a 50-minute impish vitriolic against nominal christian living.  

 

And from the small group discussions that afternoon, in which my family is regularly involved every fortnight.

 

Personal holiness, according to the evangelical tradition, is a childish preoccupation with personal conduct, an unwritten set of do’s and don’ts that the church imposes, despite what all the dishonest spin-doctoring might cause one to believe. We often pay lip service to the notion that christian salvation cannot be earned by our doing good works yet we ARE EXPECTED to do good works as christians – otherwise we are not “true” christians. This in effect rules out the “grace” factor. In all practical terms, we are still like any other religious tradition that promotes the universally accepted golden rule, which predates christianity and even Judaism.

 

We are often expected NOT to think critically, even though many of these same evangelicals adopt critical thinking in other areas of their domestic and professional lives. They would adhere to peer reviews, rigorous scepticism, sound scholarship, rational analysis, etc when it comes to their understanding of medical science, management science, world history, military history, sociology, and all sorts of stuff. But when it comes to christianity, when it comes to the bible, they throw all that away. The bible is one work of fiction that cannot be scrutinised - they just have to accept it by faith in spite of the evidence.

 

No reasonable human being would trust something with no evidence. But when it comes to the bible, all hell seems to break loose.

 

It is sad. Certain questions and views are just taboo in evangelicalism. And when one asks such questions or hold on to such views, one is often perceived as lacking faith or being too intellectual for one’s spiritual good. In other words, a spiritual individual in the evangelical tradition is someone who does not think, is anti-science, anti-evolution, anti-homosexuality, and perhaps anti-world too.

 

I am definitely NOT an evangelical christian. At most, I see myself as a liberal christian, a child of the Enlightenment who values the empirical method, rational analysis and a synthesis of all of the various strands of inquiry in my understanding of reality and truth. The bible is not a book that I believe in, but a collection of ancient writings in which I use as a lens through which I perceive the ineffable and the sacred.

 

God is but the Ground and Foundation of Being, the “something more” of human experience and the absolute principle that weaves across the fabric of our material universe. God is neither Yahweh and Vishnu nor Jesus and Allah. These are but human attempts at personifying what is ineffable and abstract, metaphors and symbols that point, faultily, to the Real and the Good, which is beyond human language to depict.

 

Thank goodness I am not a child of the premodern or the pre-Enlightenment age, of which I would have been burnt at the stake or hung at the gallows.

 

For this, religion was indeed evil.

 

*******

 

book review of “the god delusion” by terry eagleton

 

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

 

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature. There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice. For a lot of academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion.

 

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

 

A molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to suffice. Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins’s own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most sensitive, civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself.

 

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.

 

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

 

This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.

 

Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.

 

Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge. Dawkins’s Supreme Being is the God of those who seek to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered Jesus.

 

Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don’t look eagerly forward to death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide. The suicide abandons life because it has become worthless; the martyr surrenders his or her most precious possession for the ultimate well-being of others. This act of self-giving is generally known as sacrifice, a word that has unjustly accrued all sorts of politically incorrect implications. Jesus, Dawkins speculates, might have desired his own betrayal and death, a case the New Testament writers deliberately seek to rebuff by including the Gethsemane scene, in which Jesus is clearly panicking at the prospect of his impending execution. They also put words into his mouth when he is on the cross to make much the same point. Jesus did not die because he was mad or masochistic, but because the Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation. Several of Jesus’ close comrades were probably Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement. Judas’ surname suggests that he may have been one of them, which makes his treachery rather more intelligible: perhaps he sold out his leader in bitter disenchantment, recognising that he was not, after all, the Messiah. Messiahs are not born in poverty; they do not spurn weapons of destruction; and they tend to ride into the national capital in bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey.

 

Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed ‘derive his ethics from the Scriptures’ (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)

 

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.

 

The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough.

 

The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.

 

Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.

 

Some currents of the liberalism that Dawkins espouses have nowadays degenerated into a rather nasty brand of neo-liberalism, but in my view this is no reason not to champion liberalism. In some obscure way, Dawkins manages to imply that the Bishop of Oxford is responsible for Osama bin Laden. His polemic would come rather more convincingly from a man who was a little less arrogantly triumphalistic about science (there are a mere one or two gestures in the book to its fallibility), and who could refrain from writing sentences like ‘this objection [to a particular scientific view] can be answered by the suggestion . . . that there are many universes,’ as though a suggestion constituted a scientific rebuttal. On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

 

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the time, betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are ‘euphemisms’ for Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn’t know the difference between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican. He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics.

 

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don’t actually know where he lives.)

 

There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion.

 

It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with just the occasional ‘reversal’. ‘The whole wave,’ he rhapsodises in the finest Whiggish manner, ‘keeps moving.’ There are, he generously concedes, ‘local and temporary setbacks’ like the present US government – as though that regime were an electoral aberration, rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can foresee. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish way, that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue.’ So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up.

 

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such outrages go, however, The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.

 

*******

 

This “free version” of the review is taken from the London Review of Books and is written by Terry Eagleton, a British literary theorist and critic.

 

*******

 

some pointers on the bible

 

1. Historical criticism has effectively undermined the validity of the great majority of Old Testament citations by the authors of the New Testament.

 

Indeed, it is seldom possible even to imagine that Old Testament writers can have had in mind the persons and events that New Testament writers claimed they did. The oft-proposed thesis that this issue cannot be resolved either negatively or positively does not hold.

 

The long and short of it is that New Testament authors have systematically mistaken or distorted the meaning of Old Testament texts in the service of polemical and doctrinal agendas. Matthew’s five citations of prophecy in his nativity account are among the best-known examples of the practice, and perhaps the most comically inapposite.

 

In the interest of honesty and better communication with the public, academic theology needs to demonstrate the same kind and degree of intellectual honesty that long ago led natural science to disavow the Ptolemaic world picture.

 

2. From the standpoint of critical scholarship, Israel first entered history not during the Patriarchal period, nor that of the Judges, but with the establishment of the Davidic kingdom.

 

This political dynasty saw the slow emergence of monotheism from Israelite polytheism and competing forms of Yahwism, culminating after the shock of the Exile (587–539 BCE) in the exclusive veneration of Yahweh.

 

The narrative combination of “Yahweh alone” with the legends of Moses and the Exodus constitutes a projection of the belief system of a subjugated Israel of Persian and Hellenistic times onto the beginnings of Israel more than 700 years earlier. Historically speaking, the Old Testament is not so much the literature of ancient Israel as it is the Jewish Bible of Persian and Hellenistic times.

 

3. Broad sections of the Old Testament are understood as historical reports to whose factual nature their pious and revered narrators attested.

 

Where cultic, legal, or wisdom traditions did not involve historical narratives, Jewish theologians nevertheless anchored them within the historical framework of Israel and looked on them as the authentic words and deeds of Old Testament persons.

 

As a result, the historical value of the Old Testament for events and persons preceding the time of the Babylonian Exile is actually slight.

 

4. Biblical tradition has to be rejected because of research into biblical criticism.

 

None of the books of Moses come from Moses; none of David’s psalms from David; none of Solomon’s sayings from Solomon; none of Daniel’s visions from Daniel. Only a very few words of the Prophets stem from prophets whose names grace those books. There was no Exodus out of Egypt, no revelation in the Sinai, and no handing down of the Ten Commandments.

 

Abraham, Isaac, Moses and Joshua are mere names; Jericho was never captured. These statements cannot be repeated often enough, for they are necessary correctives to a fallacious sacred story that allowed church functionaries and collaborating politicians to maintain power for almost 2000 years.

 

5. Within the theological faculties of German universities the primary (if not the only) validation of the Old Testament is its testimonial support of the divinity of Jesus Christ.

 

But since many Old Testament scholars consider Christological exegesis of the Old Testament to be scientifically unsupportable, they no longer belong to the confessional Christian faculty.

 

One would think that in the interests of intellectual honesty they ought to speak openly about their confessional dilemma. For colleagues from other areas of the theological faculty, this might serve as a salutary challenge to collaborate on both curricular and confessional reforms, to loosen the chains of doctrinal bondage, and thus advance the cause of academic and scientific freedom.

 

6. When the relation of the Old to the New Testaments is assessed using objective criteria alone, one cannot rationally understand the New as the fulfilment of the Old nor the Old as the preview of the New.

 

Rather, the New Testament must be seen as an independent body of writings, and the “Old Testament” – more accurately termed the Hebrew Bible – as an anthology belonging first and foremost (though perhaps not exclusively) to Judaism. This recognition will throw light on the fact that from its beginning the Christian Mission met with little success in most Jewish communities. The missionaries quite understandably encountered both a lack of understanding and resentment at their misappropriation of the holy scriptures of those they sought to convert.

 

7. Statements central to Christian theology such as “God brought his people Israel out of Egypt” or “God raised Jesus from the dead” are untenable.

 

In the first case, the Israelites were not driven out of Egypt, and in the second Jesus’ physical resuscitation never took place. Failure to acknowledge these and other crucial errors of fact continues to eat at the heart of Christian doctrine – at the belief system of a Church that has always understood itself to be part of the 2000-year-old story of God acting in history.

 

*******

 

This article is based on Gerd Ludemann’s Altes Testament und christliche Kirche: Versuch der Aufklarung (2006).

 

 

why morality doesn’t need religion

 

The bible tells us that God gave the ten commandments to Moses. A Babylonian column, preserved in the Louvre Museum in Paris, shows the sun-god Shamash presenting the code of laws to Hammurabi. Such traditions are common, and imply an equally common conclusion: morality must have a divine creator.

 

Independently of which origin story one recounts, religion has consistently been used as a support for morality. But the converse is also true: it is often argued that we should not deny the truth of religion, for if we do, then morality collapse – and none of us would want that. Religion constrains human nature’s vices. Either it gives us a moral compass for travelling the road to virtue, or it provides the whip that keeps us willing to go in that direction at all.

 

Yet problems abound for the view that morality comes from god, or any divine entity. One is that we cannot, without lapsing into tautology, simultaneously say that god is good, and that he gave us our sense of good and bad. For then we are simply saying that god is in accordance with god’s standards.

 

Related to this is the problem Plato pointed to in the Euthyphro: does god command us to do something because it is good, or is it good because god commands it? If we choose the former, then there must be a standard for something being “good” that is independent of being “commanded by god”. If on the other hand, something is only good because god commands it, then if god had commanded us to torture babies and forbidden us to feed the hungry, it would have been right to torture babies and wrong to feed the hungry. On that view, god seems to be an arbitrary tyrant.

 

A third problem for the theory that morality has a religious origin is that there are no moral principles shared by all religious people but not by agnostics and atheists. This observation leads to a further problem: atheists and agnostics do not behave less morally than religious believers, even if their virtuous acts are mediated by different principles. They often have as strong and sound a sense of right and wrong as anyone, and have been involved in many progressive reform movements that we now acknowledge were ahead of their time. Thus even if agnostics and atheists never received a moral compass from the divine creator, they nonetheless managed to find a moral course.

 

We can observe this today if we compare more religious and more secular societies. Among industrialised nations, the obvious comparison is between the United States, which is unusually religious for an industrialised nation, and Europe, which over the past century has become increasingly secular. As far as we can tell, European morality does not appear to be on the verge of collapse. Indeed, Europe is, by many measures, a morally better society than the more religious United States.

 

The murder rate is much lower, as is the number of people in prison. Although Jesus is reported as saying that god will save those who have fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty and clothed the naked, if you are weak and vulnerable, you will be fortunate if you are in Europe, with its much better safety net and systems of universal healthcare, than in the United States. When it comes to helping the world’s poorest people, the record of almost all of the European nations is far better than that of the United States. Sweden gives more than four times as large a proportion of its gross national income to foreign aid as the United States. In fact, putting aside the former communist nations, which are still much less prosperous than their European neighbours, Greece is the only country in Europe to give as small a proportion of its national income for foreign aid as the United States.

 

If there is no evidence that religion generally makes people more likely to do the right thing, there is ample evidence that religion has led people to commit a long litany of horrendous crimes. Starting with god’s command to Moses to slaughter the midianites – men, women, boys and non-virginal girls – and continuing through to the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years war, and innumerable conflicts between Sunni and Shiite muslims, we arrive in the present with one of the greatest threats to peace: religious fanatics who blow themselves up, based on the confident belief that this will assure then a place in paradise.

 

Lest we charge them with a blinkered view of the world, atheists have also committed their fair share of heinous crimes, including Stalin’s slaughter of millions of people in the USSR, and Pol Pot’s creation of the killing fields in which more than a million Cambodians were murdered. Putting these threads together, the conclusion is clear: neither religion nor atheism has a monopoly on the use of criminal violence.

 

The fourth difficulty for the view that morality has its origin in religion is that moral attitudes and practices appear more universal than one would expect, given the sharp doctrinal differences between the world’s major religions. Even when we compare religious cultures as a whole with more secular ones like ancient China, where philosophical outlooks such as Confucianism have been more influential than religious beliefs, we find significant common elements in morality across these distinct cultures. How can this be explained?

 

It is possible, we suppose, that a divine creator handed our ancestors the universal elements of morality at the moment of creation, and they survived intact despite cultural and religious divergence. An alternative view, consistent with the facts of biology and geology, is that we have evolved, over millions of years, a moral faculty that generates intuitions about right and wrong. The good news is that for the first time, research in the cognitive sciences, building on theoretical arguments emerging from moral philosophy, has made it possible to resolve this ancient dispute about the origin and nature of morality.

 

Further highlighting the role of biological factors in guiding moral judgements are studies using brain imaging and patients with selective lesions. Specifically, when healthy research participants respond to moral dilemmas in a scanner, areas of the brain involved in emotional processing, intentional analysis and outcome-based reasoning are active, and if a conflict emerges between these processes, a different area becomes active and then shuts off once the conflict if resolved and a moral judgement delivered. In addition, when there is damage to an area of the brain linking decision-making and emotional experience – the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – these participants show normal patterns of judgement for most moral problems, but, for a small set of dilemmas, are more likely to answer the dilemma along utilitarian lines.

 

These studies begin to provide empirical support for the idea that we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgements for right and wrong, not unlike other psychological faculties of the mind, including language and mathematics. The moral faculty is universal, but interacts in interesting ways with local cultures. These intuitions reflect the outcome of millions of years in which our ancestors lived as social mammals, and are part of our common inheritance, as much as our opposable thumbs are. It is difficult to reconcile these facts with the story of divine creation.

 

Our evolved intuitions do not necessarily give us the right or consistent answers to moral dilemmas. What was good for our ancestors may not be good for human beings as a whole today, let alone for our planet and all the other beings living on it. It is significant that over the past century, many of the insights into the changing moral landscape that have been taken up and widely regarded as desirable changes have not come from religion, but from careful reflection on humanity and what we consider a life well lived. Examples include greater concern for animal welfare, liberal abortion laws, the rights of terminally ill patients to refuse further medical treatment, and, increasingly, the right to a physician’s assistance in dying.

 

In this respect, it is important for us to be aware of the universal set of moral intuitions so that we reflect on them, know that they will influence us, understand how they can potentially be used against us, and if we choose, deliberately act contrary to them. We can do this without blasphemy, because it is our own nature, not god, that is the source of our species morality. But we should not fall into the opposite trap, of believing that because our moral intuitions come from nature, we should follow them because to do something different would be unnatural.

 

Understanding the origins of morality, therefore, frees us from two putative masters, god and nature. We inherit from our ancestors a set of moral intuitions that, presumably, contributed to their survival over the millions of years in which they were evolving as social mammals. Some of them, no doubt, still serve us well, but others may be poorly adapted to our rapidly changing world. It is our task to work out which of them need to be changed.

 

*******

 

This is an article written by Peter Singer and Marc Hauser.

 

 

when the state kills, it is pro-life

 

Southern Baptist and Calvinist leader Albert Mohler made a comment recently that “capital punishment is pro-life”.

 

He also said that “the death penalty is not about retribution.” It is about “underlining the importance of every single human life.”

 

Baptist Leader says that executing murderers is pro-life

 

He doesn’t seem to think that what he was saying is utterly illogical and a semantic contradiction. If EVERY SINGLE human life is important, that includes the lives of every individual who committed murder. Human sentience and self-consciousness itself warrants the beholder the right to life, even if that beholder is another Hitler, Mason, Stalin or Dahmer.

 

So, what is the reason he gave for making that assertion? How did he argue for capital punishment? Economic reasons? Life imprisonment being too costly for taxpayers? More effective deterrant?

 

No. As the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest in the country, Mohler used Genesis 9 as his defence.

 

This speaks a lot about the nature of intellectual scholarship in evangelical seminaries today. Did he not know that an appeal to authority, especially to man-made ancient texts, is one of the silliest arguments around?

 

This is one of the weaknesses of having to abide to a religiously fundamentalist morality. Moral ethics in the public square have to be discussed and debated in rational and empirical means, in light of modern and contemporary research on human well-being and human life here on earth; not quaint dictates of some antiquated text.

 

It is indeed a moral travesty and a plot for a horror epic to imagine a scenario if the bible has statements that the life of the homosexual has to be taken, instead of just someone who takes the life of another.

 

Such statements of “ethics” in ancient texts like the hebrew scriptures have to interpreted in context of the ancient culture and times of the hebrews. One has to understand why moral norms were made and expected in such cultures. As such, one cannot interpret such texts as face value, as though they were moral commands to people in the 21st century.

 

Really. If the State has the right to kill anyone, I wish it would be people like Mohler and his kind, along with John Macarthur, RC Sproul, Michael Horton, John Piper, and many of the leaders within the current New Calvinist movement.

 

Bah!

 

*******

 

my statement of beliefs: in progress

 

As a former evangelical christian (with a calvinist streak), I used to write personal statements of beliefs for myself – they were more like personal statements of theology – what I believe about the world, human origins, the nature of god, and theological positions like predestination, free will, human depravity, eternal security, etc.

 

As a “christian” humanist with a very liberal tendency, I have yet to really sit down and think about what I really believe, now, about the nature of our world and its state of affairs.

 

It will always be a work in progress though, unlike the evangelical’s creed. And so here goes:

 

1. The most reliable method to discover the truth and reality of the world is the empirical and the rational. In other words, via observation, experimentation and rational analysis. As such, it is science that best explains the nature of this world and is best capable of solving problems and developing technologies that will benefit humankind.

 

2. Current scientific evidence points to neo-darwinian evolution as the only accurate explanation about terrestrial origins which occurred from a single self-replicating molecule about 4.6 billion years ago. Hence I recognise that humankind is part of nature and kin to every other species on the planet. 

 

3. As such, I interpret the imago dei (image of god) of christian theology as a metaphor for human dignity and human worth, not as a literal fact about human origins. We are not created by god literally, but are products of millions of years of evolution. We are african primates and our closest cousins are the chimpanzees, followed by the bonobos and the gorillas.  

 

4. There is no evidence to suggest that supernatural entities exist apart from the natural world and thus all phenomena can be explained by the laws of physics, chemistry or biology. In other words, there is no evidence to suggest that a supreme, supernatural being who “created the universe” exist. Besides, the kalam cosmological argument is fallacious and assumes on a model of the origins of the universe that is already outdated and defunct. Modern cosmology asserts a universe that had no first cause, due to research in quantum mechanics.

 

5. Thus as someone who identifies with the christian community, I define “god” in the tillichan and bonhoefferian sense – the ground of Being or the Beyond in our midst. I resonate with the Dutch pastor Rev. Klaas Henrikse when he associated “god” with human experience. Thus in the classical sense, I am an atheist who denies the existence of a supernatural supreme Being.

 

6. As a “christian” who acknowledges the bible as sacred scripture, I interpret the bible as a man-made product of two ancient communities – the ancient Hebrews and the early christian communities. Due to advanced biblical scholarship in the past century or so, all evidence points to the bible as an ancient work of literature that is filled with myth, metaphor, fable and legend. Proper interpretation should be premised on the human nature of the bible and the manner in which it was a cultural product of its times.

 

7. The trinity is not a statement of fact about god, but a metaphor for us to understand the importance of relationships – namely human relationships.

 

8. Jesus, if he existed at all, was a man of his times, a charismatic Jewish peasant who was also the bastard child of Miryam who had sexual intercourse with an unknown man before her marriage to Josef. The Virgin Birth is a myth, along with all of the other similar Virgin births in ancient legends. He had a brief stint as a populist preacher among the Jewish public but was seen as a revolutionary suspected of treason by Rome and was ignominously executed soon after.

 

9. I no longer accept the traditional concept of prayer as effectual or valid as it creates a god in our own image. Prayer should be communion with nature, centreing on the breath of existence and the weightiness of silence. As such, prayer is but meditation and contemplation, more than petitionary or intercessory.

 

10. Morality is inherent in human nature, a product of human evolution. One does not need god or a religion to be moral or live the good life. And thus I view morality as values that are derived from human need and interest, as tested by experience. The moral code of the homo sapien can thus be summarised as the avoidance of harming others physically, emotionally or psychologically.

 

11. Meaning and significance in life should emerge from human participation in the service of the ideals of human rights, human justice and living in a world of mutual care and concern, free of cruelty and its consequences, where differences are resolved cooperatively without resorting to violence.

 

…still in progress…

 

*******

 

 

born-again evangelical gullibility

 

A dear friend of mine sent me an email last night which read:

 

Dear Brethren,

I received this attachment from a brother in Christ few months ago, just thought of sharing with everyone.

 

 

 

 

 

God’s Word in the Holy Bible – has once again been proven – about Giants. It sure was scary for me and broguth chill down my spine for a moment…..That is why we should never doubt in God’s Word!

Subject: GIANT ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIND IN GREECE Archaeology in the middle east is always interesting but can you imagine what it would be like to be on site when such a find was made. I probably wouldn’t sleep for a week.     once again the  Bible proven to be TRUE!!!!!!!           GIANT ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIND IN GREECE           These astounding photos are from a recent archaeological discovery in Greece ; this totally unexpected find furnishes proof of the existence of “Nephilim”.           Nephilim is the word used to describe the giants spoken of in Biblical times by Enoch as well as the giant that David fought against (Goliath). It is generally believed that most of these giants came about when the fallen angels had union with earthly woman.  Note the incredible size of the skull…           Gen 6:4 – There were giants on earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bear children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.           Num 13:33 – And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.           Just to show that the Bible is true with history lessons that is applicable both then and today and it is not just a spiritual book. This is amazing. Not that the scriptures haven’t already proven true, but now more evidence for our times.

 

Here was my reply to him:

 

Hi Bro.

I am not sure if the brother who sent you those information know about it, but the supposedly “archaeological giant in Greece” is a hoax.

The National Geographic Society has confirmed that the pictures were fraudulent sometime in 2004 when the pictures became viral in the Internet.

It somehow had a revival again in 2007.

I don’t know about you guys, but try to be discerning in what you read, see and hear from either the Internet or even from well-meaning and sincere Christians (most of the time from sincere and zealous christians, can’t fathom why).

Any thing that seem to “prove” the bible (either archaeologically, historically or scientifically) will be accepted hook, line and sinker from unthinking Christians (no offence to anyone, nothing personal).

Sigh….most Christians tend to be “unthinking” anyway. (cheeky cheeky )

Oh, for your information, credible and good critical scholarship has already debunked the “Noah’s Ark” discoveries by some fundamentalist Christian group (I am sure most of you guys are aware of some video circulating about it) as a fraud and a feeble attempt by fundamentalist Christians to prove the Noah’s account.

To set the record straight, there is NO archaeological evidence so far to shed light on MOST of the narratives in Genesis. In fact, contrary to the biblical account, much of current archaeology has shown a stark discrepancy between the critical findings of archaeology and the biblical record.

******

Now, before people start calling me heretic or unchristian (which has been one of the many evils of the Christian church…think about the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witchhunts and the numerous marginalised peoples – women, negroes, slaves, and now gays – that has been suffering under the hands of “holy” Christianity), please note that the early Christian communities do not take the bible literally.

The bible does not claim to be a historical or scientific book in the modern sense of what the words “history” or “science” means. Ancient communities (in this case ancient Israel) do not write history the way modern people write it. They often employ mythological and legendary language to tell their faith stories.

As such, one cannot read Genesis as though it is a work of history, like say, any of the books written by modern historians. One cannot also read Genesis as though it is a scientific treatise or tome. It is written in the language of myth and theology – meaning that although there are central events that might be historically true, it is mixed with metaphors, hyperboles, exaggerations and fiction.

BUT…

that does not mean that the bible cannot be “true” in the sense that poetry is true, or that art is true, or that music is true. One christian scholar puts it this way, “the study of God (theology) is poetry plus, not science minus”

Although God is the originator of the bible, so to speak, He uses the agency of human authors. And as such, the bible has to be read and understood IN CONTEXT within its ancient near eastern and greco-roman cultures. The bible is a culturally-conditioned product, since the miscellany of texts were written by human beings, but mediated and used by God.

God is still REAL and TRUE. God still speaks in and through our sacred scripture. God still resonates in the air of our frail human existence, in the post-easter faith image and icon of the divine Jesus.

 

*******

 

It is sad that one of the most gullible people groups in modern societies is the group that call themselves “born again” Christians, a sub-culture of which I am a part of. I don’t blame them for allowing themselves to be part of a culture that is anti-intellectual and anti-critical thought. 

 

There are some of us who crave certainty and certitude. We simply cannot digest open-endedness and questions, and thus we hope and wish to have even the clearly mythological bible to have historical ”proofs”.

 

*******

 

 

man-ipulated

 

 

The discordant mess of strings and percussion reverberate in my head, stinging my ears all too soon the moment I tried to open my heart to the sacred.

 

It is always so difficult for me to worship God in the contemporary Church. I cannot fathom as to what is disturbing me but the music often jars me to disgust and irritation. Not that the music isn’t entertaining.

 

I love rock music. I used to enjoy Metallica in my youth.

 

But I also realise that music is manipulative. It can deceive the mind and seduce the heart. I don’t want to be thrilled or entertained when I come into God’s house. The purveyors of contemporary “praise and worship” music like to believe that music can be an effective medium and tool to “bring people into the presence of God”…as though the presence of God can only be manufactured by man-made artifices.

 

God is.

 

He just is. His presence cannot be manufuctured nor manipulated. He is the beyond in our midst. And as such, he can never be adequatedly named or presented by human words. Although I use the traditional “he” to call God, it is purely designatory and for the sake of convenience. God is neither male nor female. As pure Spirit, He has no gender. As pure Spirit, no human language can utter his glory fully.

 

The bible is but one (among many) sacrament through which we attempt to perceive God, albeit in very human and thus faulty ways. It cannot and should not be interpreted propositionally, otherwise we pervert the divine.

 

Many evangelical Christians today assume the bible can be read propositionally. They are often ignorant of the very human process of writing the biblical texts and thus believe mistakenly that the bible is THE Word of God, wholesale.

 

If it is, the “God” that is portrayed in such an interpretation of the Bible is a cruel, vindictive, jealous and very barbarous deity.

 

I don’t believe in such a God. And so are many atheists and agnostics today.

 

But the mistake that atheists make is that they have thrown out the baby along with the bathwater. They have denied themselves to know the REAL God of the ancients, the sacred Beyond in their very midst.

 

Thus when one attempts to connect with the Ineffable and the Inscrutable, one enters with stillness and awe.

 

The trivial and ridiculous lyrics of current praise and worship music will not do.

 

They manipulate the worshipper into imaging God in so finite and concrete ways that they belie the very nature of the sacred.

 

Who is the More and the Beyond.

 

But because the More is also all around us, we are able to tune in to Him.

 

Yet only in sacred silence. And in sacred space.

 

And in the mess of this world.

 

As we open our eyes and hearts to perceive the sacred in unlikely places.

 

*******

 

 

i did not choose to be heterosexual

 

 

Prejudice, based on unwarranted assumptions, runs very deep in the religious community, especially evangelical Christendom, which prides itself on the authority of the bible.

 

Many evangelical Christians I know claim to base their beliefs solely on the Christian bible but they can be one of the most biblically illiterate people I know! There are many atheists and agnostics who are more knowledgeable of the bible and church history than evangelical christians. Of course they should be, otherwise they wouldn’t be agnostic!

 

I would too, if not for my lack of confidence in empiricism as the only way to truth.

 

One very common misconception that evangelical Christians have is the idea that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice.

 

??!!

 

Come on. Do you mean to say that one can wake up one day and decide to be gay?

 

Do you mean to say that a person chose to be homosexual just like he chose to be a Christian, or he chose to like rock music, or he chose to like crime fiction?

 

I am a heterosexual but I did not choose to be one. I was born like that! I am as sexually averse to being intimate with a bloke, no matter how gorgeous a hunk he can be, as my gay friend to a drop-dead gorgeous chick!

 

Time and again, evangelicals love to use the “gay is a choice” mantra so as to buttress their presuppositions that God cannot create someone homosexual since He himself condemns it.

 

Bah.

 

One might as well legalise slavery all over again since the christian bible condones it (the apostle Paul himself wrote an entire letter, exhorting a Christian slave to be a better slave!).

 

Contextualise. Contextualise. Contextualise.

 

 

*******

 

 

reading biblical texts

 

It is not uncommon to hear someone say, “Let’s just read the Bible literally. Let’s forget about all this interpretation stuff and just read the Bible for what it says.” The impulse for this can be appreciated.

 

Serious interpretation of the Bible takes a lot of effort and sustained study, and sometimes all of this effort in the end only seems to work against certain cherished and long held religious beliefs.

 

Many people want the Bible to sustain them. They do not want to be confronted by strange and new interpretations of it. And still others are opposed to the critical study of the Bible because they think God and God’s word are beyond human understanding. They can only be understood by the power of the Holy Spirit and not by human reason standing alone. Moreover, digging into the scriptures seems to make human beings the final arbiter of God’s word instead of God. These concerns are real, and the forces that motivate them should be understood.

 

Even if a person is of two minds about the critical study of the Bible, however, the problem of a “literal reading” of biblical material is an issue that is more complicated than might first appear.

 

What is meant by the term “literal reading?” What makes a reading “literal” as opposed to something else? And is “literality” the same for all types and varieties of texts in the Bible? If we are to think about this question of literal interpretation, we must address the issue of what is meant by the expression, “literal reading.”

 

The term in popular usage seems to refer to the surface reading of the text. In this sense, “literal” refers to the straightforward adherence to the surface level of the material and its wording, the face value of the text in other words.

 

But extreme versions of this sense of literality could have strange results. For example, in Mark 12:1-9, Jesus tells a parable about a man who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for a wine press, built a watchtower, and then rented it to tenants before leaving for another country. When the harvest came, he sent a slave to collect the rent, but the tenants seized and beat him instead of giving him the owner’s share of the harvest. Other slaves were sent, and they, too, were beaten or killed. Finally the owner sent his own son thinking that the tenants would honor him and give him his share of the rent. Instead they seized him, killed him, and threw his body out of the vineyard.

 

If a reader of this story were simply to read the surface level of the text, the entire point would be missed because this is a parable that takes the form of an allegory. In other words, the characters in the story refer to other figures: God, prophets, Christ, etc.

 

A meaningful, dare we say a correct reading of this text, requires more than a literal adherence to the surface level of the words. In that sense of “literal,” a surface reading of the text would be anything but a sound reading of the text. An insightful reading would require other judgments about the text to be made, for example, the literary genre of the text, in this case an allegory.

 

This is a rather simple example, but it illustrates that other decisions about the biblical text are usually required if one is to achieve a sound interpretation of a text. A “literal reading” of the text cannot be reduced to a surface reading.

 

Judgments about literary genre, for example, will need to be made. An allegorical story as in this case requires that the reader look beneath the surface of the text. Decisions about the genre of biblical material need to be made on a case-by-case basis, and the manner in which this is done will affect the way a “literal reading” is understood.

 

Again, if a person were to read a novel as though it were a historical description, the interpretive result may be a surface reading of the text, but it would clearly be an unsound reading according to both the character of the text and the intent of the author.

 

If one were to read the seven day account of creation in Genesis 1 as though it were a primitive scientific explanation of how the world came to be, the surface reading of the text would be very different than if it were read as a mythic account.

 

Or if one were to read the New Testament gospels as narratives rather than biographies, the resultant surface reading of the text would likely take a very different form. Furthermore, all figurative forms of biblical language are by their very nature not literal. Drawing the line between figurative and nonfigurative language is not always easy and often requires that some interpretive judgments be made.

 

The upshot of this discussion is that even a “literal reading” of biblical material, understood as a surface reading, necessarily requires that certain prior interpretive decisions be made if an interpretation is to be sound and reliable.

 

The claim that one is engaging in a literal interpretation of biblical texts is not devoid of interpretive judgments, and very often those interpretive judgments can be rendered differently by different people.

 

A so-called “literal reading” of a biblical text is virtually always relative to some other claims about the text, whether that be matters of literary form, literary context, figurative use of language, or divine inspiration. In each case, the face value of the biblical text may not be what it appears to be at first glance. A sound reading of biblical texts, even if one wishes to achieve a literal interpretation, will invariably require interpretive judgments to be made about the nature and meaning of the text, judgments that will govern how the material is in the end understood.

 

If a “literal reading” of biblical material is not simply understood in terms of the face value of the text but is also understood to include the intent of the author in writing the text, another interpretive dimension is added.

 

Some may say that an author’s intention in writing a text is always made clear in the act of writing the text. Few who have thought seriously about this issue would agree, however. I, for one, would contend that there is always a gap between what an author intends and what an author actually produces.

 

If that is true, the reader who seeks authorial intent will always be making judgments about how to close the gap between what the text appears to say and what was in the mind of the author. Needless to say, this is slippery business and is open to all sorts of legitimate differences of view. To the degree that authorial intent is included in a “literal reading” of biblical texts, interpretive certainty will be difficult to achieve. A “literal reading” in that sense will not stem the tide of multiple interpretations of biblical texts; and it, too, will require that numerous interpretive judgments be made.

 

Another element often implicit in calls for a “literal reading” of the Bible is the claim that the Bible is accurate. This is not really a matter of reading the Bible literally so much as it is a claim about the Bible’s truth or accuracy. But it often goes hand in glove with pleas for the “literal reading” of biblical material. Very often this means that the surface meaning of a biblical text is asserted to be an accurate description of what actually took place.

 

This is so because a prior religious claim is made that governs all other judgments about the Bible: by definition the Bible is God’s true word and the truth of the Bible is understood in terms of descriptive accuracy. When it says Jonah was swallowed by a whale, Jonah was swallowed by a whale. If it says Jesus exorcised an unclean spirit, he exorcised an unclean spirit. It is that simple. But is it so simple in fact?

 

Once again, this approach to biblical material can lead to rather questionable readings of texts. If the book of Jonah was never intended to be read as a descriptive account of what took place, why should the reader of Jonah expect the truth of the text to depend on the text’s descriptive accuracy? How can that be considered a “literal reading” of the material?

 

 As indicated above, readings of texts always involve some decision about literary form or genre, and those judgments affect how literary material is read. And certainly truth claims regarding figurative language cannot always be determined on the basis of their correspondence to some nonfigurative historical reality. That is simply not possible. Moreover, the truth value of a text cannot be reduced to a mere matter of historical accuracy, without severely limiting the concept of truth.

 

To illustrate this point, we can use the example of a novel once again. Most novels, according to older systems of classification, are designated as fiction writing. The reader knows that in most cases the characters never lived, and the events never took place. The elaborate plot of the story and the development of the characters are the literary creation of the author.

 

In that sense, the words of the text do not correspond to historical characters and events. The text of the novel is not accurate, but that is also irrelevant. Does one want to say that the novel is not true or has no truth value? Of course not. In the case of a great novel, the truth value of the text may be found in the insight into human experience that is generated as the story line unfolds and the characters develop. In this case, descriptive accuracy is not a factor of truth. The text could still be true but true in quite a different way.

 

Similar distinctions also need to be made with other forms of biblical literature. The Psalms, for instance, are not examples of descriptive literature, and they may not be forms of literary material where the question of truth is very helpful. Is a poem true? Is a liturgy true? Or a lament? And how would one determine their truth value?

 

In any case, descriptive accuracy certainly cannot be applied as the basis for deciding their truthfulness. The meaningfulness of these kinds of biblical texts must be decided on some other basis. The same is true for many other types of biblical material as well: epistles, prophecies, fables, and apocalypses to name but a few.

 

A historical correspondence notion of truth is often brought to the reading of biblical material, and it frequently frames questions of biblical truth. If the historical facts are correctly reported, then the text is true. Otherwise, it is false. But this is a very limited understanding of history writing and truth.

 

History has to do with more than data and evidence. It involves the ordering and arrangement of data. It involves the interpretation of data and evidence, as well as judgments about the meaning and significance of the evidence. In other words, history is not a mere report of facts but an interpretive retelling of what happened, what the events mean, and how they are significant. History is how we remember the past, and those remembrances may not always be the same, from person to person or from time to time.

 

It is too simplistic to claim that all notions of historical truth can be reduced to the mere reportage of facts. Being more dynamic than that, history requires that judgments be made about what is more important and what is less so. Does this mean that there is no way to judge historical truth? Probably not, but it certainly places the discussion in a different frame of reference.

 

To illustrate the way a historical fact can be invested with meaning and significance, let us think about a specifically Christian claim: Jesus died on a cross for the redemption of the world. This statement contains at least two factual kinds of claims: Jesus died, and he died on a cross. The first of these is hardly subject to debate, whereas the second is not self-evident and the truth of the statement could theoretically be tested according to evidence, assuming evidence is available. But both of these claims are rather mundane to say the least. Not much of significance is at stake in either one.

 

To call the fact of Jesus’ death on a cross historical is probably correct but not very unusual. But the claim that Jesus died for the redemption of the world is, on the contrary, a monumental claim. It has the potential to be of enormous significance. It is a religious way of investing a historical fact with meaning and significance. This death was not just any death. Others, too, died on crosses, but this death was special. This one had redemptive significance for the world. Can this claim about Christ’s death being redemptive be tested according to factual evidence? Not obviously so. It is difficult to imagine any kind of factual historical evidence that could substantiate this claim.

 

The truth of any assertion regarding Christ’s redemptive death would need to be made on some basis other than sheer historical evidence. But the important point to notice is the way a historical claim is shaped in such a way that meaning and significance are attributed to certain historical events. It shows the way purported historical events are fused with theological claims and the way a historical model of truth is highly inadequate to judge the truthfulness of a theological assertion such as this one.

 

This example illustrates some of the problems associated with evaluating the truth of biblical material. It points to the fact that any truth claims that the biblical texts may offer or that we as modern readers of the Bible may desire to make need to be tested according to standards that are appropriate to and commensurate with the claims that are being evaluated.

 

To do otherwise, even unwittingly, is to mix apples and oranges. It can lead to the validation or invalidation of biblical material by fallacious means. When making truth claims about biblical material, sensitivity to the models of truth being employed and the standards for evaluation being used is essential. To say that something in the Bible is true or false begs for a reply to the question: relative to what?

 

What are some other ways of judging the truth value and truth claims of biblical material? One way that many religious people implicitly arrive at religious truth claims is what we might call truth by definition. Certain assertions are claimed to be true by definition and then other truth claims can be deduced in turn from them.

 

For example, Jesus is God’s son, a statement claimed to be true by definition. If that is true by definition, then other truth claims can be derived from it by inference and extrapolation.

 

To say that God created the world, or that God forgives sins, or that Christ will come again are all examples of assertions that have been declared to be true and have been used to draw further inferences about the truth of biblical material. This way of discerning truth will probably always have a role to play in religious communities, as people probe the depths of human experience. But claims declared to be true by definition should always be open to critique and evaluation, if critical thinking is to avoid becoming narrow, parochial, and merely self-interested.

 

A related way of understanding truth claims is to see truth relative to a culture’s world view. This is close to the idea of truth by definition but moves the issue further into the realm of basic cultural assumptions, assumptions that may be accepted as true without much consideration or awareness on the part of the people in that culture. These basic assumptions govern the way the people look at the world and how they make judgments about truth.

 

To use an example, Americans hold dearly to certain notions pertaining to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. American culture is shot through with ideas of individual liberty and free market economics. In the great mass of American society, notions related to these ideas are virtually given to be true. For Americans, they are part of the fabric of the world view. That is simply how reality is and how it works. Truth claims about many of life’s issues are made relative to these kinds of assumptions, and the most fundamental of these assumptions may rarely be challenged. Different cultures will have different assumptions, but all cultures will have them. They are not optional.

 

We shall use the concept of myth to illustrate some of the implications of this. There are many definitions of the word myth, but the most common is that it refers to something that is false. It is commonly used as an antonym for the word true. But people who study and think about the concept of myth do not think of myth as something that is simply false. They have developed many quite sophisticated definitions of myth and studies of how myths function.

 

Since we cannot engage in an extended discussion of these, let me simply suggest the idea that myths deal with peoples’ fundamental views of life and struggles to understand their world as told in story form. Once again, myths express something of a culture’s world view. In this sense of myth, both the biblical world and our own operate with certain mythic notions, and both are quite willing to make truth claims for their mythic conceptions.

 

If we think about the many ways Americans express their basic conviction that individual human beings have inalienable rights, I submit we are thinking about American mythology. This myth has been told in countless forms over the years and deals with a fundamental conception of how Americans understand the human person. Geneticists will never find a human gene that identifies a human right. Surgeons will never find an internal body part that contains a human right. That, of course, is ridiculous.

 

Nevertheless, many Americans have been willing to fight and die to defend the idea of basic human rights and freedoms. It is an extremely powerful idea that has profound implications for all sorts of claims about human life and social organization. Americans are overwhelmingly committed to the truth of this idea.

 

Similarly there are many examples of biblical myths. The Israelite idea of covenant is one of the most conspicuous examples. Israelites and subsequently Jews believed they had a special relationship with Yahweh, God. This covenant entailed divine promises and human responsibilities. And part of this covenant relationship involved the conviction that a certain piece of real estate, the promised land of Israel, was given to them by God. This covenant idea clearly has mythic proportions, and it is not an idea that all people would agree with, especially the ancient Canaanites and the modern day Palestinians.

 

But there are Jews to this day who will fight, die and go to great hardship to live out the implications of the covenant and occupy the land. It is part of their conviction about the world and their place in it. It is clearly mythic, and for many Israelites and Jews it is true.

 

Other examples of myth, according to this definition, are the accounts of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke. If one were to use a historical accuracy notion of truth to determine the truth of these stories, one would probably assert that they are true only if the events and biological facts of the story happened as reported.

 

But if these stories are mythic, something else is going on in them other than the simple reportage of facts. What could this be?

 

As myths these are not stories that primarily report events. They are stories that probe the deep mysteries of how the divine encounters the human, and the miraculous birth story is the form these myths take.

 

The divine, God, impregnates a human, Mary, and the tangible result is Jesus Christ, true God and true man. He represents the linkage between the heavenly and the earthly, the mundane and the transcendent. Does this mean that the birth stories are untrue? No. But it does mean that truth claims about these stories need to be assessed according to some other standard than historical facticity. They are true relative to a basic assumption about the nature of reality: Jesus is the incarnate son of God. This is a truth claim of Christians but not a claim that all people would accept.

 

There are many biblical themes and stories that fit into these mythic categories. For illustrative purposes it will be helpful to list a few of these. The claim that God created the world and that human beings have dominion over the created order is mythic. This is a powerful idea but one that may not be subject to empirical verification. It may, however, have truth value.

 

The idea that Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit, fell from divine favor, suffered the consequences of toil, pain, and enmity, and forever affected the destiny of human beings is another conspicuous biblical idea. This is a powerful concept that may very well be true but is not subject to empirical verification. Or consider the idea that there will be a final judgment. It cannot be said that this is a claim that can be objectively verified, but it is a claim that may, nonetheless, be true relative to certain assumptions about divine justice and activity.

 

These few examples highlight the mythic character of many biblical claims, and they illustrate that the validity and truth of these biblical statements need to be assessed on some basis other than historical correspondence or accuracy.

 

One final observation about the discernment of biblical truth should be made. Many truth claims, many biblical truth claims included, should, in my judgment, be subjected to moral critique. When we look at the consequences of historic and religious truth claims, what have been the social and human consequences that have followed from them? Can we discern any consequences? If so, how have these claims played themselves out over time? Are the consequences morally laudable or morally reprehensible?

 

At a minimum, we should ask ourselves if these claims can be true when we see what they have done. When Matthew in his gospel implies that the blood of Christ is not only on the hands of the Jews in Jesus’ day but also on the hands of their descendants, can this statement have any claim to religious truth, given the way this has contributed to the horrible reality of anti-Semitism?

 

When seen in light of the Christian gospel itself, the consequences of this rather direct Matthean implication seem to be suspect, if not altogether devoid of theological truth value, that is if the Christian gospel is in fact good news and not bad news. Moral considerations may not finally settle questions of biblical truth, but they ought to be considered.

 

Assessing biblical truth is complicated and cannot be reduced to a single notion of truth. Multiple levels of meaning and truth can be discovered in biblical material, and the critical reader of the Bible needs sophistication and flexibility in evaluating them. In some cases, the question of whether the biblical material is true or not is beside the point. It only leads one away from the significant features of the text. Yet truth claims that are made are always made within a social and communal context.

 

Likewise, those of us who try to assess them do so in social and communal contexts. In historical and religious matters, truth is social in character, and the apprehension of it is similarly social. Understanding the social dimensions of truth is important for critical readers of the Bible, just as it is important to understand the historical and literary dimensions of biblical texts and their interpretation.

---

taken from James Aegeson’s essay, Reading Biblical Texts: Truth, Fact and Myth.

 

*******

 

an ordinary christian’s thoughts on the historical-critical approach

 

I love the bible.

 

It is the only work of ancient literature of which I have read and re-read ever since I learnt to read.

 

Of course, it was in the English language. A translated work. And any lover of literature will know that the only way to enjoy the full texture of any piece of literary work is to read it in its original language.

 

And thus many have done so by learning hebrew, aramaic and koine greek.

 

I wished I could too but my current station in life does not permit me to. Then again, it has always been one of my fantasies to revel in the world of biblical academia, of poring over delicious texts of ancient literature, of delighting in fresh discoveries of how the ancient world was and what the historical Jesus might really be.

 

It is so fascinating.

 

As a Christian, I take the bible seriously. And because I take the bible seriously, I treat it as any other sacred text – perusing them with a critical eye for historicity, authenticity, authorship, forms, traditions, etc. I try to get at the meaning of the texts by placing them in their appropriate historical contexts, within a framework of parallel ancient near eastern literature, ancient Jewish and graeco-roman culture, etc.

 

And my past training in undergraduate level theology forces me to view the Christian bible like any other product of literature, namely, a human product that is relative to its cultural and historical moorings.

 

But as a Christian, what about my confessional priority? What about my faith presuppositions?

 

As I speak for myself, I know that many others in Singapore and probably Asia would not agree with me. The ordinary Christian in the pew (of whom I am a part of) rejects any notion that the bible is a human product. He/she wants to believe that every jot and tittle of the bible is accurate and true, without any mistake whatsoever.

 

He/she wants to believe that God really created the world in six days (what about geological dating?), created Adam and Eve as our human ancestors (what about our pre-human ancestors?), put a real talking snake in the garden who eventually deceived the couple and brought “sin” into the world (where does it say “sin” in the actual portion of the text?), sent the ten plagues upon Egypt (why did such a momentous event not recorded in any ancient record?), used Moses to part the Red Sea, used Joshua to bring down the walls of Jericho (what about archaeological evidence that contradict this?), impregnate a virgin via the Holy Spirit to give birth to His Son (when it is so common for ancient deities and even great men to have virgin births), in Bethlehem (when all the evidence points to Nazareth as the authentic birthplace), and raised a God-man who would eventually die for the sins of the world.

 

The ordinary Christian would accept, by faith, the bible at face value and reject any EVIDENCE, history or otherwise, that would somehow undermine his/her belief in God.

 

I cannot.

 

Just because I believe in the sacred, just because I believe in the beauty of existence; does not give me a moral right to reject what the fields of modern enquiry has given me. A faith presupposition will do much damage to a serious study of the bible. It is a mockery of the standards of historical inquiry that we know today.

 

I know that Christians in the past have rejected the view that it was the sun and not the earth that was the centre of the solar system; that the earth was flat and not globish, that the male sperm is all that is needed to create life (the female contributes only the container), etc; but they were all wrong! They can reject science all they want – but history has recorded their mistake for all to see.

 

Similarly, many Christians today, and even some pig-headed scholars, definitely of the evangelical and fundamentalist stripe; stick stubbornly to the “face value” of the biblical text; rejecting our evolutionary origins, rejecting a very old earth, rejecting the very human origins of Jesus but would one day be found out as sorely mistaken.

 

Just like the Christians of old.

 

They seem to think that the ancient peoples write just like we do. They seem to think that they value historicity, factuality and science just like we do.

 

The future histories of the world will vindicate liberal theology as the correct path to tread as Christians. The future histories of the world will expose religious fundamentalism for what it truly is. A pig-headed enterprise.

 

Hmm. I am still a Christian. I still profess my standing in the community of saints that for two thousand years have been proclaiming the resurrection power of our Living Christ.

 

I still follow Jesus in desiring to demonstrate the kingdom of God here on earth. Through social justice and compassion for the poor, the diseased, the less fortunate, the marginalised, and the weak.

 

But then again, this Jesus of whom I follow, need not be divine in the historical sense, although he is the Son of God who has risen and is alive today in his post-easter incarnation.

 

The Bible need not be historically true to be an effective sacrament through which I see and perceive the world. It is not a set of propositions that I have to believe. It is a window through which I experience the sacred, the God in the mess of things.

 

Ah. I love that phrase.

 

God. In the mess of things.

 

*******

 

 

 

some thoughts on judaism

 

Popular Christian thought , for decades now, have often been disfigured and marred by a theological prejudice against Judaism and its followers. Churches in Singapore have often taught that although the Jewish people should be loved as a people, they would perish in an eternity without God if they do not embrace Jesus as their messiah.

 

Although much of evangelical Christianity, especially the dispensational premillennial camp, have prided themselves in supporting the nation of Israel, there is often that theological discrimination against Judaism as a credible religious theology, capable of standing on its own ground.

 

The moment we Christians open our bibles, our discrimination is there for all to see. Our Christian bible, whether Protestant or Catholic, labels the first three quarters of the text as the “Old Testament”, followed by the “New Testament”. It is common knowledge among Christians in the pew that the New supercedes the Old, that the New Covenant in God through Jesus is much more superior than the Old Covenant in God through Moses.

 

It is to their credit that the Reformers still at least hold to the view that the Old Testament is still valid for the New Testament christian, via the universal moral law of the Ten Commandments. Modern dispensationalists, however, tend to view the ten commandments in very derogatory terms. They view the law as not binding on believers today as Christians follow the “law of Christ”.

 

To come back to the bible, we Christians also have this misguided tendency to interpret the Hebrew scriptures (I prefer this term to the Old Testament) with the lenses of the New Testament. We read many of the texts in the Hebrew bible as though they are texts originally intended for the Christian.

 

This is so incorrect. They are never meant for us at all! They are for the Jews. They are to be interpreted with Jewish lenses! I could still remember when I was a young Christian when I often wondered why the Jews are so stupid in rejecting Jesus as their messiah. I thought that because there were so many “prophecies” in the hebrew scriptures of which Jesus the man fulfilled, how could the Jews miss it?

 

Were they spiritually blind? Were they corrupt in their sin?

 

It was only when I was a bit older and a bit wiser that I realised the truth.

 

Christian scholarship (with the exception of the pig-headed fundamentalists) had never understood those alleged prophetic verses as prophetic in the first place. If you sit down and read the Hebrew Scriptures as they are meant to be read (throw away your Christian bias), you will discover that many of the so-called prophecies have either been fulfilled in Old Testament times (such as the famous “virgin” verse of Isaiah 7), or are interpreted as refering to the nation of Israel itself and not Jesus (such as the Suffering servant in Isaiah 53).

 

Besides, as the Hebrew scriptures were written and compiled first, before the Christian scriptures, there is no way to “prove” that those alleged verses were prophetic and hence testify to the divine origins of the Scriptures – as often espoused by fundamentalist apologists like Josh MacDowell and Norman Geisler.

 

It should be common sense that the writers of the New Testament, especially the four gospels, used the Hebrew Scriptures as their foundational texts and from there, penned the gospels as theological and metaphorical narratives, with bits of historical fact laced here and there.

 

Thus the gospel writers “interpreted” the person of Jesus as fulfilling the Hebrew “prophecies”. It isn’t a case of prophecy fulfilled, but prophecy remembered. There is no evidence, in the first place, that the gospels were accurate biographies and historical accounts, in the modern sense of the word.

 

Furthermore, there is also this impression that the Jews were the ones responsible for the death of Jesus. This is due to the gospel of Matthew and its portrayal of the Jews. But that is not the case at all. It was simply the case of the Roman authorities deciding to get rid of Jesus because they saw in him a potential act of high treason and betrayal.

 

The moment we learn to reread the Hebrew bible not as our own but the treasured heritage of both our theological communities, then we are able to view the Jew as a cherished brother in the faith of our one God.

 

They were our theological precursors and ancestors. And as such, our founding fathers, so to speak.

 

Our co-heirs of the Holy other.

 

Amen.

 

*******

 

 

how to choose a bible

 

The following is taken from the blog Soli Deo Gloria, a very conservative fundamentalist blog.

 

This post concerning purchase of bibles is very enlightening.

 

Here are some tips on what to look out for when you are shopping for a bible.

 

Font size

 

For most bibles, the standard font size of the print would be that of any other book, relative to the size of the page. Otherwise, indications such as “large print”, “giant print” or “super giant print” will be indicated. Most middle-aged readers would prefer “giant print” editions which are usually from font sizes 12 to 14 point type. This makes it easier on the eye.

 

Do note that print size are relative to the bible version and publisher – a “large print” bible from one publisher will vary in size from a “large print” bible from another publisher. So it is important to actually read the print for yourself.

 

There is usually a sample of the actual font type at one corner of the box of the bible from which you are holding.

 

Bible size

 

Physical size of the bibles range from extra small to compact and personal size to large and extra large. Most people these days would prefer a small bible that they can carry almost in their palms. The compact-size bibles usually have a variety by which there is a clip at the side to “close” the bible. Study Bibles would usually come in large sizes or bigger – unless you want to compromise the font size.

 

It is ridiculous to look for a study bible with as much study notes and helps in it while being in personal size or smaller. One of the traits of a Singaporean customer is to squeeze as much value into the buck as possible. Stingy.

 

Leather type

 

Churches would usually purchase hardbound bibles which are more popularly known as pew bibles. As for the individual believer, a leather bound bible would be the common preference. There are different types of leather used for the bibles, and these usually are:

 

• imitation leather/leather look/soft leather
• bonded leather
• genuine leather
• calfskin leather
• french moroccan leather
• goatskin leather

 

The first three types are the most common types found in most Christian bookshops. Imitation leather is fake leather, pure and simple. The surface would crack and bend very easily. Another name for imitation leather would be leather look. Soft leather is another form of fake leather, normally in a very unique two-tone colour design. This is of slightly better quality.

 

The bonded leather type is not wholly leather but a mixture of synthetic materials and leather. It is of a much better quality than imitation and is the most common type purchased by people.

 

Genuine leather is the real deal. It often feels softer, more pliable and plusher. The most durable form of leather among the three is this one. Genuine leather gets better as one handles it more and more, moisturises by the natural oils of the hands.

 

The type of leather is always stated at the lower right hand corner on the back cover of the bible.

 

Now, luxury types of leather would be calfskin, french morrocan and goatskin. They are not as common and are not available by the more common publishers like Zondervan, Thomas Nelson, Hendrickson, Kregel, Broadman & Holman,etc.

 

If you are looking for such leather, you should try Oxford or Cambridge University Press bibles. They publish one of the best qualities of bibles in the world.

 

Of course, the price is very exquisite too!

 

Binding

 

Most people have problems with the binding – having the pages of their bibles fall off – over time. And they often associate this with the type of cover – bonded leather, genuine leather, hardback, etc. This is a misconception. The pages of the bible, like any other book, are usually glued to the spine, regardless of whether it is a genuine leather, bonded leather or hardback edition. Thus wear and tear will in due time cause pages to fall off.

 

One tip of looking after your bible is never to insert slips of paper into the bible. I know this is a very common practice, as people would leave their church bulletins, song inserts, or notes in the bible. Never do that! It will spoil the bible!

 

Some publishers offer smyth sewn editions. The pages of these bibles are sewn into the spine and are made to be able to open flat on the desk. This is another option.

 

Cambridge Press bibles are usually smyth sewn or hand sewn.

 

Colour

 

The colours of bibles usually include black or burgundy, for leather options. The more unique ones include duotone, british tan, purple, pink and white.

 

Text/Reference

 

Unless it is a study bible, the bible you are holding is probably a text or reference bible. A text bible is like a pew bible. It has no other feature except the plain text of the bible, whichever version it is. A reference bible would include cross references (either at the end of the verses or in a centre column on each page) as well as a brief concordance or dictionary at the back.

 

Tabs

 

Some bibles would have tabs, or indexes at the sides which show where the books of the bible are. Many people find it useful as it aids in looking for the book more quickly. However, I would recommend that you do away with this feature so that you can train yourself to remember where the books of the bible are and in which order.

 

Paper quality

 

Most bibles would be printed in india paper or bible paper, which is very thin and often a bit translucent. This often offer a problem to people who wants to highlight verses on the bible. Hence I suggest highlighting with a normal ballpoint pen instead of a highlighter.

 

Maps

 

They can be useful when you want to know where the places actually are in ancient times. Most, however, would find the maps redundant.

 

*******

 

 

some thoughts on the apocalypse

 

 

The final book of the Christian bible, namely the Revelation of Jesus Christ to John, or The Apocalypse, is one of the most difficult and problematic texts for the Christian.

 

It is difficult as it contains so much figurative and literary language that nothing can be made of the text even as one reads it as often as one wants, unless help is sought from commentaries, bible dictionaries and lexicons.

 

Even then, commentaries abound that differ from one another in terms of initial presuppositions and premises, theological viewpoints and hermeneutical emphases. Reading commentary after commentary may not be of any benefit to the Christian if he or she wants to understand the book in order to nourish the soul.

 

For centuries, biblical scholars have differed in their interpretations of the book and as such I have to proceed with much caution so as never to appear even remotely dogmatic. The following is a mere taste of my personal thoughts and how I personally opine such a literary work should mean and apply to me.

 

There are basically a few ways in which to understand the book of Revelation, of which the Futurist approach is the most popular and most widely accepted in the contemporary Church. The Futurist approach to reading Revelation is a form of hermeneutic which views the book as focusing on events that are primarily in the future, not only of the times of the first disciples but also of our times.

 

It is basically the crystal ball approach, understanding the book as an unfolding of contemporary world events that would culminate in the return and judgement of Christ.

 

The majority of Christians who read Revelation this way are normally those who subscribe to a premillennial view of the end times, refering to a view that sees Jesus Second Coming as before the physical millennial (1000 years) reign on the earth. Christ’s coming is actually preceded by the secret rapture of the Church either before the tribulation (pretribulation view), in the middle of the tribulation (midtribulation view) or after the tribulation (posttribulation).

 

The main problem I have with the entire futurist approach of reading Revelation is the way it disregards how the first century readers would understand it. If the events in Revelation are refering to events ahead of our own time in the 21st century, then how would the early disciples read the book? Did they read Revelation as such? Did they understand it to be a revelation of very very far ahead future events?

 

If the book was written actually for the first century readers to understand, which I think it was, then the futurist approach is theological goobydegook.

 

The next immediate problem I have with the Futurist approach is hermeneutical boundaries. By positing that much of it is in the future, then interpretation becomes a guessing game. No matter how erudite a scholar might be, no matter how “objective” he might claim to be, it would all be a guessing game.

 

And history has taught me to be sceptical of such futurist interpretations, especially of those who claim to know which current events the language of Revelation is refering to. For centuries, Christians have made a fool of themselves by making sensational claims of Nero, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Hitler, Stalin, the Pope, numerous President of the USA, etc as the anti Christ. In current times, some fundamentalists have even claimed Barack Obama as the next anti Christ.

 

And so and so forth. The sensation will never end.

 

On the other hand, it is my personal opinion that a historical-idealist approach would be a more sober and sound way to read the text of Revelation. It is my belief that the only way to understand the apocalypse is to place it in the setting in which the text was written – the past. The questions to be asked would be:

 

• What was the apostle John’s intention when he wrote Revelation?
• How would his readers in the first century understand Revelation?
• Who were the dominating powers of the time?
• What were the contemporary world events at that time?

 

The book is thus read not as a predictive text, not even to predict near-future events in the disciples’ time. It was more of an encouragement to the disciples, an exhortation for them to persevere in the hard times that has come and will come.

 

A three-fold theme runs through the book as such:

 

• Despite all appearances to the contrary, Caesar is not Lord – Christ is.
• God will soon intervene to overthrow and overcome the beast and the anti Christ in Caesar.
• Therefore persevere, endure, be confident, take heart and have faith.

 

A historical reading will also raise the question concerning the Second Coming of Christ. Most if not all of the early Christians and the apostles believed that Christ was coming soon – even in their times. But all of them were wrong. So did they get the timing wrong even though their expectation was correct?

 

In this sense I concur with Marcus Borg in his view that a Second Coming of Christ is to be viewed metaphorically and not literally. Admittedly this is a very minor view within modern Christianity, especially among evangelicals. But I don’t think it is far off the mark for thinking Christians.

 

Ever since the golden age of the Pax Romana, many of the Emperors of Rome had been given divine titles like Son of God, Lord, God and even Saviour.

 

Throughout the Empire, worship was offered to the Emperors in the temples. Now, against this backdrop, the apostle John was proclaiming the exclusive Lordship of Jesus instead of Caesar. Most of the titles and divine imagery designated for Caesar were given to Jesus instead! So much of Revelation is like a doxology, a hymn of praise to Christ.

 

Raymond Calkins captures the chief message of Revelation in terms of five propositions, in his The Social Message of Revelation (1923):

 

• It is an irresistible summons to heroic living
• It contains matchless appeals to endurance
• It tells us that evil is marked for overthrow in the end
• It gives us a new and wonderful picture of Christ
• It reveals to us the fact that history is in the mind of God and in the hand of Christ as the author and reviewer of the moral destinies of men

 

*******

 

 

contentment is great gain

 

Thank God for my parents who are looking after our three children today.

 

My wife and I took some time in the early afternoon to make a brief trip down to the showroom for the new series of HDB flats that would be ready in three to four years’ time.

 

The flats are located in downtown Tampines, just beside the MRT station and bus interchange.

 

My wife had a keen interest on those flats due to the location, albeit to my consternation. I am very contented with our current accommodation, thank you very much, a 4-room HDB flat situated in the very heart of a serene and quiet park, deep in the heartlands. We purchased this home several years ago, before the property boom and as such got it at about SGD$195,000. With the HDB “near-the-parents” scheme, we finally had to pay only SGD$160,000 for it, via a mortgage loan.

 

The current market rates would render our home at about SGD$350 to SGD$400,000 now. Of course, property value is the least of my concern anyway. What value is an affluent and high-valued flat without a family kindled with love and a devotion to God?

 

In stark contrast, the 4-room flats in Centrale 8 are priced from about SGD$510 to SGD$580,000! And each unit is only a dimunitive 84 square metres!

 

It is madness, actually.

 

The new flats are getter pricier and pricier, smaller and smaller. And the government wants us to have more babies. Sheesh.

 

One wonder how our future generations would be able to live in Singapore comfortably, let alone survive?

 

In such a context, I learned to value the Christian virtue of contentment. There is no intrinsic value in the constant striving after material wealth and personal pleasure – when does it all end? I know of relatives who “invest” in one home after another, not with the intention of accommodation, but of financial investment.

 

Whatever for?

 

Just because everyone else is chasing after these things? Just because society prices such attainments? Just because of one’s vanity and pride?

 

Yes – whatever for?

 

It is a rat race that is morally and spiritually bankrupt in a sense that it will offer nothing but pain, anxiety and strife to the human psyche.

 

The book of Ecclesiastes, which is part of the Hebrew Scriptures, in the first testament of our Christian bible, presents to us a very lucid story of one ancient king’s journey in pursuit of life. He tried everything he could get his hands on under the sun. He sought after worldly possessions. He sought after human pride. He sought after personal pleasure. He sought after human wisdom.

 

And at the end of it all, his conclusions were but existential meaninglessness. He called it “chasing after the wind”. Such strivings are nothing but chasing after nothing, chasing after futile imaginations of the human consciousness.

 

We can learn from this man’s journey and remind ourselves not to make the same mistake. In a similar vein, we can learn from many a dying man’s lips. Hardly an individual, during his or her dying moments, would wish he or she would work more, have a better career or attain more wealth. In fact, to the contrary, one would wish one could spend more time with the family, love someone more, forgive someone, etc.

 

I am NOT an old man. I just reached my third decade of life. Many would presume that a man in my youth would aspire to much more.

 

Yes – I aspire to much more. I aspire to know the More in all of life, the ground of being, the breath that empowers all of the living and the dead. Yes, I aspire to live a life that is rooted in wisdom, courage and hope. Yes, I aspire to be much more.

 

Yes, I aspire to live and move beyond the vain and empty strivings and trappings of a modern society that values perversity. I aspire to be more.

 

But not the more of empty wranglings of this foolish world.

 

I have no interest in the vain riches of this world that can never offer happiness. Just look at all the billionaires in our midst.

 

I have no interest in the cult of celebrity and fame in this world that has NEVER offered any happiness. Just look at the lives of all the famous in our midst. Divorces abound. Extramarital affairs abound. Therapies abound.

 

Bah!

 

As mentioned in one of the historic creeds of Christianity, the chief end of man…

 

is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

 

*******

 

 

on the gospels

 

The common understanding of the four gospels (the first four books of the second testament in the Christian bible) among Singaporean Christians today is that they are fairly accurate biographies (in the modern sense of the word) of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.

 

We often discuss and quote from the Gospels in our reference to the person of Jesus whenever anything about him needs clarifying. Sometimes, when there are discrepancies between a particular view about Jesus and the gospels’, we would usually defer to the gospels as the appropriate source.

 

The majority of Singaporean Christians stand in the conservative evangelical tradition. No wonder.

 

The problem starts when one starts taking an academic course on the bible.

 

Mainstream scholarship would suggest to us that the gospels were never intended to be biographies in the modern sense of the word. Even if they were biographical, as some of these critical scholars posit, they were not biographies as understood in our modern context, where accuracy about dates, events and circumstances are paramount.

 

When compared to parallel ancient biographies within the graeco-roman world, scholars have realised that the gospels are not very precise in their rendering of details regarding the historicity of certain events. Certain narratives are also reminscent of legend and myth during the same period; such as the birth and passion narratives.

 

All in all, the four gospels in the second testament can be viewed as the product of a developing tradition. During the decades between the death of Jesus and the writing of the gospels in the last third of the first century, the traditions about Jesus developed. Oral and written traditions evolve and change as the communities of Christ were being ushered into experience after experience of their “living Christ”.

 

Thus as developing traditions, the gospels contain two layers of material, some back to the historical Jesus, some theology and metaphor. In a sense, to quote Marcus Borg, the gospels are history remembered and history metaphorised.

 

So there would be portions that were true to the historical Jesus and what he said and did, but there would be others that were simply metaphorical and mythological narratives used by the early Christians to proclaim their “living Christ”. So in a sense we can claim that Jesus perhaps did perform some healings and exorcisms in his day – but as to the reasons, methods, significance, etc of those actions, there was not much clarity.

 

The gospels, as products of the early Christian community, serve as vehicles for their theology. As such, they were not accurate accounts in that they were often “biased” to promote a particular point of view. One example is the way the gospel of Matthew portrayed the Jews as somewhat antagonistic towards Jesus, especially the Pharisees and Sadducces. One would also have the idea that the Pharisees were somehow the dominant religious force in first century Palestine.

 

However, after a significant amount of research into first century Judaism, scholars now know that the Judaism in Jesus’ day was never monolithic. There were numerous expressions of Judaism in his time, and thus whenever we read of Jesus’ diatribe against Jewish tradition, we have to keep in mind what form of Judaism he is responding to.

 

Besides, the Jews never did killed Jesus – it was the Roman authorities. Period. Pontius Pilate was depicted in the gospels as somewhat compassionate and understanding. But parallel historical records depicted a different image of Pilate – someone who was very vindictive, cruel and barbaric.

 

These are but a tiny few examples of the numerous historical discrepancies that one can find within the gospel texts, proving that they were written not as history or biography per se, but theological interpretations of what they see of Jesus’ life and times.

 

*******

 

 

some redlights to watch out for

 

The Bible, is one of the greatest works of ancient literature the world has ever witnessed, being the foundation stone of Western intellectual civilisation.

 

It is also, to the detriment of many of our atheist and free thinking friends, one of the best-selling books in the publishing history of our world. Of course, the statistics might have been exaggerated a bit – but no one can disagree with the rudimentary fact that it is a book that has been distributed all over the world through the missionary enterprise.

 

One need not be a Christian in order to enjoy the literary riches of this work, and the immense erudition that has come out of the diligent study of the ancient sources behind the English translation. It is not an issue to many intelligent people that one can believe in God and practise the life of spirituality while at the same time acknowledging the role of the bible in one’s life.

 

It is also not an issue for many educated people that they can accept the discovered truths of science as well as the metanarrative truths of Holy Scripture. There is no contradiction between the knowledge discovered via empiricism and rationalism and the knowledge one “receives” by faith through the sacrament of the Scriptures.

 

The problem arise only when people starts to understand the Bible in a wooden and literalistic manner – overlooking even the numerous portions that are LITERALLY METAPHORICAL and LITERALLY FIGURATIVE. If one makes the mistake of interpreting metaphors as concrete facts, then an apparent contradiction surfaces; such as the Genesis account of origins.

 

But who actually takes the bible literally?

 

Try not to mock. Try not to laugh. There are many in the world who read the bible with that sort of presupposition. And often times, they too commit the indecent sin of bibliolatry.

 

The worship of the bible.

 

Yes. By placing the Bible on the pedestal of the sacred life. By placing an authority on it that isn’t there in the first place. No sensible modern scholar will deny the almost irrefutable fact of history that the various books of the bible were compiled in progression over centuries past; and that what is infallible and divine cannot be determined with any conclusive authority, but by conjecture and consensus.

 

While there are books that were included in the list, there were also numerous others that were not. Many of them were also debated by ancient scribes.

 

If one presupposes the divine inspiration of the Scriptures so as to claim it is infallible and inerrant; then which in the list are indeed divine and inerrant? Why the 66 books and not the apocrypha? Or vice versa?

 

My evangelical brethren will argue that if God is indeed the author of the Scriptures, and God Himself is perfect and infallible, then His words have to be inerrant and infallible as well.

 

I agree. If indeed the Bible is truly verbally and plenarily inspired.

 

But scholarship has already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is a tremendous amount of discrepancies between the biblical texts and historical evidence. Many of them do not synchronise. As such, there is no way that the evangelical can defend inerrancy. Only by glossing over the archaeological discrepancies and ignoring their implications.

 

As human beings, we love to control and order our lives in neat little categories. It makes life much easier to tolerate and endure. And by claiming that one’s interpretation of the Scriptures is the correct one, control over the spiritual life becomes certain. And also, if one claims that God can ONLY speak through the bible (which is the cessationist position within the Reformed tradition), then one indirectly controls God as one can controls what he believes or does not believe in the Bible.

 

The Scriptures are not infallible in the evangelical sense. They are not inerrant in the evangelical sense. They are human documents, created by two different ancient communities, that witness to their individual experience of God within their communities. This results in the modern interpreter having to read the bible in a contextualised way that bridges the gap between the ancient world and ours.

 

Problems of discrepancy does not invalidate the existence of God at all. This might be the fear of many an evangelical or fundamentalist. Since God mediates through the agency of the human enterprise, God will allow His presence and His life to move through the errant texts to the human heart.

 

There is an existentialist presence of the biblical text that transcends human error and fallibility. There is that transcendent power that God uses to pushes through the boundaries of finite human language to evoke a response in the human heart.

 

Thus literalism is not the solution to biblical authority. It is the problem. It is an aberrant way to understand a collection of writings that are as ancient as they are transcendent – they are meant to be read and understood beyond the multiple layers of texts and subtexts to get to the contextualised meaning for the modern community.

 

 *******

 

 

one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century

 

This individual is undoubtedly one of the most influential theologians in the last century, having made a deep impact on the theological landscape as well as on the cultural and political life of Europe.

 

Born in Switzerland into a family steeped in the Reformed tradition, this individual went on to study under the great masters of Protestant Liberalism, the consensus orthodoxy in much of Europe at that time. This was to the consternation of his own father.

 

His name was Karl Barth (pronounced as “bart”).

 

 

Circumstances and events then caused him to be aware of the moral impotence of liberalism and this led him on a lifelong quest to develop a positive acount of the faith of the Christian church that avoids the hazards of theological liberalism.

 

Influenced by the Reformed tradition, Barth believes that true theology can only proceed out of a presupposition of the RADICAL TRANSCENDENCE of God. Liberal theology starts from the premise of a common religious experience – in other words, it was man-centric. It constantly focused on the immanence of God and thus resulting in an almost pantheistic vision of the divine.

 

Barth’s vision was directly the opposite. He envisioned a theology that is dialectic – emphasising an “infinite qualitative distinction” (he borrowed the language of Soren Kierkegaard) between God and man. Thus there is a radical discontinuity between God and the human being, the divine and the mundane, heaven and earth.

 

Quite Reformed actually, Barth’s theology.

 

The departure comes when this transcendent nature of God leads to the impossibility of any possible human talk about Him. Due to this radical discontinuity between the divine and the profane, human language can never be analogical (contra RC Sproul’s affirmation of analogical language). Thus the Bible is but a human attempt to understand God – they are just human documents that witness to the divine.

 

Yet contrary to liberalism, Barth believes, as I do, that despite the obvious human character of the Bible, God still confronts humanity through its pages.

 

His view of apologetics is similar to the Van Tillian version of presuppositional apologetics in a sense that Barth believes that authentic knowledge about God can only be found in the revelation of God alone. Of course, this is a logical step that comes from the previous motif of God being wholly transcendent and apart from humanity and this world.

 

Karl Barth’s theology was unique in his time. He was unique by embracing all the central tenets of the Christian faith while at the same time eschewing the evangelical tendency to literalise the Bible. In a sense, he redefines the terms of the Reformed game.

 

Thus history labelled him as the father of neo-orthodoxy, a new orthodox way of envisioning the Christian faith. Unlike people like Marcus Borg today, Barth did not discard the traditional doctrines such as the Incarnation, the divine nature of Christ, His Virgin Birth and Resurrection, etc. In fact, he embraced supernaturalism in all of its aspects and implications.

 

Yet while allowing biblical criticism to deconstruct the texts of Scripture. Yet still realising that the bible has much to denigrate itself by its numerous inconsistencies, textual errors, historical discrepancies, etc.

 

*******

 

the dew of progress

 

“There are many millions of people who believe the Bible to be the inspired word of God — millions who think that this book is staff and guide, counselor and consoler; that it fills the present with peace and the future with hope — millions who believe that it is the fountain of law, Justice and mercy, and that to its wise and benign teachings the world is indebted for its liberty, wealth and civilization — millions who imagine that this book is a revelation from the wisdom and love of God to the brain and heart of man — millions who regard this book as a torch that conquers the darkness of death, and pours its radiance on another world — a world without a tear.

 

They forget its ignorance and savagery, its hatred of liberty, its religious persecution; they remember heaven, but they forget the dungeon of eternal pain. They forget that it imprisons the brain and corrupts the heart. They forget that it is the enemy of intellectual freedom. Liberty is my religion. Liberty of hand and brain — of thought and labor, liberty is a word hated by kings — loathed by popes. It is a word that shatters thrones and altars — that leaves the crowned without subjects, and the outstretched hand of superstition without alms. Liberty is the blossom and fruit of justice — the perfume of mercy. Liberty is the seed and soil, the air and light, the dew and rain of progress, love and joy.”

- Robert Ingersoll

 

*******

 

 

why i love the nrsv

 

 

 

“Ever since it was first published, I have recommended it to students as the most reliable English translation for study purposes, and as the best for public reading in church.”

- Marcus Borg (historical Jesus scholar)

 

My bible translation of choice is the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). As with all bible translations, NRSV is not a perfect work, riddled with mistakes and errors. So do many of the so-called more “evangelical” versions like the New King James, New American Standard and English Standard versions.

 

“The NRSV is one of the premier translations of the Bible; indeed, it has been a standard for all others. It continues to deserve the widest circulation and use among scholars, students, and general readers alike.”

- Richard McBrien (Catholic scholar)

 

But I love this translation as it is one of the most ecumenical versions available. The edition which I own is published by Cambridge press and contains all the apocryphal and deutero-canonical books of not only the Roman Catholic but the Eastern Orthodox traditions as well.

 

“In my opinion, the New Revised Standard Version is without peer as the best available Bible translation, for both readability and accuracy.”

- Bart Ehrman (New Testament textual scholar)

Such an approach is often criticised by my evangelical brethren who assumed, often uncritically and anti-intellectually, that ONLY the 66 books of the Protestant canon is divinely INSPIRED by God.

 

“I have used the RSV and NRSV with great success in my classes here at Harvard. This is the best edition available (in English) if one wants to know ‘what the Bible really says.’”

- Harvey Cox (former Hollis professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School)

Another reason why I love the NRSV is the way it continues the Tyndale tradition while not adhering to many of the tradition’s puritan bias such as patriarchalism. Both traditional scholars and feminist theologians can enjoy the beauty of the prose.

 

“For many years the NRSV has been my standard biblical text both for daily use and for quotation in my books. I particularly appreciate its careful fidelity to the original texts.”

- John Polkinghorne (British theologian & scientist)

Another reason why I choose the nrsv is because it is the standard text used in almost all of the more theologically astute seminaries in the US as well as the UK, with the exception of the fundamentalist institutions.

 

“The best, simply the best.”

- John Dominic Crossan (historical Jesus scholar)

 

*******

 

why i am a progressive christian

 

I am a progressive Christian because I believe in progress.

 

Yes, progress. The progress of the human race. The progress of the world at large. The progress of life as we see it in our own era and epoch.

 

The progress of Christianity in a world that is largely post-Christian and post-theistic.

 

I am a progressive Christian because I envision the march of the Church boldly across the threshold of modernity into the untouched realms of postmodernity and postliberality. The Church of Jesus Christ has to proclaim the same old gospel of God’s grace to a lost world but in a new language.

 

The language of our times.

 

Human language is finite in a sense that it cannot capture wholly the entire corpus of God’s revelation. It is finite as God is infinite and beyond the reaches of the here and now.

 

You know, I believe in God’s utter transcendence. In other words, God’s holiness, as portrayed in the Hebrew Scriptures. Whenever we use the word “holiness” or “holy”, we always assume the notion of ethical purity. Although holiness encompasses all of that, it is primarily a word that speaks of the utter “otherness” of God – that God is OUT THERE and OUT OF THIS WORLD.

 

Literally. Really.

 

And so, if God is so “out there” and “out of this world”, human language cannot and will not translate adequately the eternal Word of God. And thus the gospel has to be re-imaged.

 

I am a progressive Christian because I see and behold in the Christian Scriptures a worldview that is so unlike the morbid worldviews of our society. It is a story that is committed to change, to progress, to rejuvenation, to liberation, to hope.

 

The Christian Scriptures is NOT the verbal Word of God, as though the totality of divinity can be boxed into mere human words. But they are the ark of the covenant that CONTAINS the words of God. They are the errant vessels that contain the ebb and flow of sacred wisdom.

 

Ultimately, the Word of God, as presented to us in our Story, is the man of enigma himself.

 

Jesus of Nazareth.

 

The issue is not whether one conceives him as the eternal second Person of the Godhead or a mere human sage.

 

The issue lies in the very communities in which we live, the communities of our faith, out of which we read, study and interpret our Story. Modern scholarship has much to say about this enigmatic man. He was probably just a man, so they say. He was probably a wise teacher within the tradition of Judaism, so they say. And so Christianity can be seen as one among the many variegated tributaries of Jewish religion.

 

They are probably right.

 

But whether Jesus was God in the flesh historically is not the issue. He IS God in the flesh in our story. We perceive Him as God in the flesh because of His insight, His wisdom, His life and His death. We understand His God-nature through the very metaphors of the Incarnation and the Atonement.

 

And thus He is our example. We are followers of Jesus in our leaning on the divine strength to embrace our destinies to be a people set apart for God. We will love because He loved. We will sacrifice for others because He sacrificed. We will willingly take up the cross of suffering in this groaning world because He suffered.

 

I am a progressive Christian because I embrace my bible as a sacrament that mediates between me and God. The bible is not history per se even though much of its stories have roots in history. The bible is not science per se even though it speaks of man’s origins and the like. The bible is a story – and thus a metaphor for us Christians.

 

I am a progressive Christian because I also know that ALL truth is God’s truth. And thus there is a innate harmony among all fields of enquiry, such as empirical science, philosophical rationalism and historical research. Empiricism offers us the here and now. Rationalism offers us the tools to engage the here and now. History offers us the window into the past and our heritage.

 

And my Christianity…

 

it offers me the vistas into the now and the future, the whys and the hows of life and purpose, the truths of what it means to be a satisfied human being, totally engaged in my world. Science does not offer that, nor does it have the capacity to. But heartwarming love does. The lyrical beauty of the Grand Story does.

 

And so

 

this is my story and my hope. My why. My reason for being a Christian who is committed to the truths of the living Word of God. Jesus Christ.

 

*******

 

the interpretative journey

 

To read is to interpret.

 

And to interpret the texts of the bible is to tease out the oozing droplets of grace that the Living Word will give as one receives, with open eyes and heart, the revelation of God.

 

It has often been said that the Bible IS the Word of God, as though in a propositional way, an objective way. But if the Bible is indeed the Word of God in full, then it is logical to assume that the Bible is without error, without mistakes, since God is without error Himself.

 

By faith we receive the words of the Bible as LIFE and SPIRIT. By faith we allow the Spirit within the texts to open our eyes to behold the wonderful riches that can be gleaned from Holy Scripture. But by faith we also have to realise that with the human agency involved, the Bible in toto is not without mistake. It is a cultural product of two ancient communities that lived in precritical times, the community of Israel and the community of the early Christians.

 

As two distinct and separate metanarratives, it is fallacious for Christians to interpret the Bible as though it is one organic whole, often READING INTO the Hebrew Scriptures a Christian bias. Examples are numerous as to how texts in the Hebrew Scriptures are actually refering to the nation of Israel but are deliberately misconstrued to refer to the messianic person of Jesus Christ.

 

Hence the claim of messianic prophecies being fulfilled.

 

Anyway, because God IS God – the wholly other, He is able to speak to His people, the covenant community of the Church, today, through the errant Scriptures as we see in its pages the story of our own times. And as such, we also have to be responsible in reading the texts in a way that do not deprive our culture and our times the space to breathe their own stories and together, weave a multi-faceted grand narrative for our theology.

 

And that, is a journey that any thoughtful Christian will have to undertake.