I'm back

I'm going to, in the 6th year of operation, to try to restart and revamp this blog. I may stay here or move to a new location. But after a number of months of absence I'm missing an outlet for my theological quips. And seminary is providing more such thoughts.So something needs to be done. As that proceeds, I'll try to keep folks up to date.

Jesus vs. The Pharisees

In response to Candace Chellew-Hodge's piece on the site, Religion's Dispatch, which claimed "Jesus never built a bridge with a Pharisee," I raised an issue that I think is key. Some liberals are apt to use the word pharisee for conservative but there's a polemic hidden in there.

Pharisees are after all, the basis of what would become Rabbinic Judaism. If one put the headline "Jesus Never Built a Bridge with a Jew", that could perhaps highlight why using the word Pharisee as an anti-type is problematic.

Maybe we could raise the question of what does it mean for a religious position (including those found in the New Testament) to be so dependent on an "other" to define itself over and against? Christianity's other in some measure was Judaism and that history is an ugly one.

I'm worried when liberals have an "other" too. Contending over real differences is important. But we ought to be mindful of what spirit we contend. So we don't repeat the mistakes of the past and so we can be open to what God might call us to be in light of engaging others.

Her response indicated that she did not mean anything by the use of this anti-type and in any case, it's found within the New Testament. I respond by noting the history of this anti-type, ie one of pitting Judaism as everything that is not Christianity.

If it's been used for ill (which it has), if we use this idea or this language, we have to be careful. It's not so much a matter of personal intention as how our language can be take by others, (especially if that language has a long and unfortunate history).

And while I agree that we do find this in the Gospels that doesn't lessen the problem. If anything it may make us more critical in looking at how the communities that formed the Gospels defined their status against other people.

The Pharisees prominence as a competitor to Christianity, especially after the fall of Jerusalem, makes these stories of Jesus clashing with the Pharisees all the more suspect.

Especially as the stories of Good Friday confront us, with "the Jews" and how that has played out historically in anti-semitism, we ought to rexamine our language and history and ask how we want to relate and not relate to those who are different.

Religion in America: Not Encouraging

Here's a take on the decline of the mainline, the rise of folks not identifying with religion, the way the religious right has defined Christianity, and how that has closed off the resources and possibilities of the religion in the wider society.

Key quotes:

"The problem was the issues the evangelicals focused obsessively on- abortion, gays often seem warped to many others. Those who might once have called themselves Christian suddenly found the label toxic, if it meant identifying with such a specific political agenda. And so as evangelicalism rose, atheism and nonaffiliation emerged as a reaction."

'What one yearns for is a resuscitation of a via media in religious life-the role the established Protestant churches once played. Or at least an understanding that religion must absorb and explain the facts of modernity...It seems to me that American Christianity, despite so many resources, has ignored its intellectual responsibility"

Mainline Decline

”It looks like the two-party system of American Protestantism—mainline versus evangelical—is collapsing,” said Mark Silk, director of the Public Values Program. “A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the US.”

What does that do? Anybody who is liberally minded just assume the religious right defines Christianity and will have nothing to do with it. Christian faith has ceased to be a live option and during the Bush years when Christianity became identified with this, even more so.

It was something I had to cut through a lot doing campus ministry. To plant the idea that there was another way of doing Christian faith. It worked for some students, but overall it’s a hard proposition to break through.Thus the UCC advertising campaign.

I think it ends up being a shame, because it feeds into itself. The more mainline decline, the more rise of the religious right, the less likely folks who are liberally minded would even consider Christian faith.

It shuts off a religious option, reduces the diversity and plausibility of the faith for many, cuts off possible and creative sources of interaction between the church and the wider society that the mainline had engendered for over a century.

It becomes established enough that genuine anger is had when someone challenges it. I remember a piece about a women reform rabbi in Israel and she was verbally attacked by the orthodox and secular Israelis. They found a third way incomprehensible and unsettling.

That worries me. I run into it from the right and left, both upset that I could identify as a progressive and a Christian. Both invested in this polarized religious environment. Some of that is found in the debates with Orthodox and Time for Change.

Folks like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens count on and stoke this religious polarization. Folks like Al Mohler do too. As a liberal Protestant, I’m still interested in breaking out of this unfortunate religious situation.

Why the Bible is Important

As a liberal protestant ; here’s my stab at the question of why we ought to engage the Bible even if it's all too human origins has become apparent.

How is revelation determined? Presumably determining the good in life, the wise would be of a similar basis as how you would go about the same question. The difference is we’re engaging a particular story, the resources of a given tradition.

What is revelatory, we couldn’t be dead certain but whatever points to life, to community, to well being, etc. in the tradition tells us something about God. Could other traditions do likewise? Yes. But this is our story.

It doesn’t mean there aren’t other good stories. It does mean this is the one we’ve been shaped by, our imaginations caught by. And from it, we get the good the bad the ugly.

If you think of it like family, we can recognize the value of other families and recognize something uniquely valuable, important to our self constitution in our family. They don’t simply get replaced even if we recognize there are other loving families.

There is no “clutter free” zone, so that dumping the Bible doesn't place one in an "easy place." There's no place where we escape our history. It’s a question of what tradition to engage and why.

No story is not uncomplicated, problematic, including that of the western enlightenment. So there isn’t an easier route. There’s much to commend western humanism but being easier is not one of them. Nor should it be. Otherwise it wouldn’t be true to life and it’s own history.

Pannenberg on Gay Marriage

Wolfhart Pannenberg is a noted German theologian, along with Jurgen Moltmann, required reading among most Lutherans I know. I feel a bit embarrassed that I haven't had a chance to read him yet.

Sadly, the first piece I read is one against gay marriage and the argument hinges on the most flimsiest of claims. Gender essentialism. Apparently Paul's "there is no male nor female in Christ" is thrown out and the marriage metaphor (with the husband and wife) is lifted up.

That marriage metaphor is moving. But that this must be used so as to attack gay and lesbian love achieves a result that I think overturns the logic of Christianity (increasing love of God and neighbor) versus the historical way churches have related to glbt folks.

Pannenberg goes with the history. I'd try to go with the underlying logic of the tradition. And yes Pannenberg tries to anathematize churches that support gay and lesbians, but that language (who is in and out of the true church) is the oldest of rhetorical tropes.

One which I suspect would be used to condemn Pannennberg himself depending on who is using this trope. But there must be a better way to talk to each other. I hope Pannenberg's writings on other subjects are marked by more charity in any case.

Pluralism pt1

This portrait of Jesus is from the BBC. It makes Jesus a bit less Anglo and a bit more connected to first century Palestine. Theologically I try to parse this out in my Jewish Christian dialogue course concluding:

To critique and to seek to undo the damaging stories we Christians tell about our neighbors (ones which find their origins in the NT) would call for a fundamental recasting of the Christian story. We would need to have a much more expansive vision of God’s revelatory activity.

Such revelatory acts would be seen ever present and at work not just in the life of the church and in Jesus but in Judaism too, both then and now. So we ought not to be worried (or surprised) if Jesus echoes themes that place him within Judaism and the hellenized world.

God’s revelation should be seen as being found within Judaism and in other religious and secular contexts. Whatever is to be cherished in the story of Jesus and Christianity, can be cherished for what God has done in it, without limiting what God does in other stories and communities.

I also wonder if there isn’t a handicap when it comes to how we've spoken of Jesus. The early church, cutting up Jesus determining what ratio was human and divine, Jesus as the God-man and Jesus as moral exemplar carry a sense of Jesus apart from history and his context.

Is there a way to see the incarnation as a total complex historical event, which includes Jesus but also all the people, ideas, institutions, he touched (and was touched by)?

As Henry Nelson Wieman wrote, “The creative transformative power was not the man Jesus, although it could not have occurred apart from him. Rather he was in it…It required the Hebrew heritage, the disciples...and doubtless much else of which we have little knowledge.”

So the focus is on the God of Jesus and God’s reconciling activity, as found in people, traditions, communities, (including those that helped shaped Jesus, founded the church as well as those in very different contexts) that proves to be liberating and transformative.