All the poets were dying of a silence disease

December 31, 2018 By Fred Clark

• It’s New Year’s Eve, so I hereby give you permission to give yourself permission to empty your inbox. As in “Select All” followed by “Delete.”

Think of it as email Jubilee:

And ye shall hallow the fifty-second week, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every one unto their possession, and ye shall return every person unto their family. A jubilee shall that fifty-second week be unto you: ye shall not trouble thyself with that email to which thou didst mean to reply, nor shalt thou read the multitude of unopened emails in thy inbox. For it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you. Ye shall not therefore oppress one another; but thou shalt fear thy God: for I am the Lord your God.

Your debts are forgiven. Forgive others in kind.

If enough of us do this, then it will just become a Thing People Do and we will all be forgiven, or at least accommodated.

(Oh, and if you sent me an email in November, or in maybe March, it’s gone now. So you might need to resend that.)

• I expected, eventually, to see further confirmation that Michael Cohen has been to Prague. I did not expect that Little Steven would play a role in any of that.

• Morgan Guyton pegs something here talking about “The Evangelical Zeal for Zeal,” which he says is “the best and worst aspect of evangelical culture”:

There’s no way to distinguish fairly between people who are genuinely fired up about Jesus and people who are performatively On Fire For Jesus, but a culture that promotes zeal as a value in and of itself creates a lot of pressure to put your piety on display for others.

Yes. And the script for this presentation of appropriate/expected/required zeal is all too easy to learn, to perform, to fake.

This is what makes me suspicious of this kind of pious zeal/zealous piety. I don’t mean only that, because it can be easily faked, it can be difficult to distinguish mere performance from the genuine article. I also mean that faking it does not seem to be a path to the genuine article.

And that suggests it is not a virtue — at least not in the sense of what we usually think of as virtues.

“Fake it ’til you make it” Aristotle said (I’m paraphrasing). That applies to the virtues. Courage or patience or justice or love can be developed as habits. We can nurture and develop them by pretending we already possess them. (“I hated everyone,” Leonard Cohen wrote, “but I acted generously / and no one found me out.”) If you act like a patient person, you will act like a patient person. The action itself — the behavior — is what matters, not any accompanying emotion or feeling, not any degree of passionate sincerity or sincere passion.

But sometimes faking it doesn’t lead to making it. Sometimes it’s simply hypocrisy and duplicity. This kind of fakery is, as Guyton notes, “performative” — it requires an audience of others. The emphasis shifts from the thing itself to the perception of the thing. What gets practiced and rehearsed and learned is not the virtue itself, but the trick of tricking others into thinking we possess it.

I worry that the expectation of being “performatively On Fire For Jesus” can lead evangelicals to practice, and thereby acquire, the odd skill of being sincerely duplicitous. I don’t think that’s healthy.

• In America, every “Christian nationalism” is or has been white nationalism. While there have always been white nationalists who were not also Christian nationalists, there is not now and never has been an American Christian nationalism that was not also white nationalism. Show me a Christian nationalist and I will show you a white nationalist.

That’s why it’s appropriate that this poll was conducted by Winthrop University.

• This news item is a good companion piece to Morgan Guyton’s post above. Jeremy Morris of Hayden, Idaho, believes that his calling as a disciple of Jesus Christ involves putting 200,000 Christmas lights up on his house as part of a wowza holiday spectacle that includes Santa Claus, Roman centurions, and a live camel (“See the Temple tumble and the Red Sea part …”):

Morris said he always struggled with what he was supposed to do for his Christian faith. Seeing families turn out in droves for his Christmas display helped him understand: this Christmas show was his calling. He could use it as a way to witness to people, he said.

I might gently want to help Mr. Morris explore, perhaps, the possibility that God might have additional opportunities or callings available that are maybe a bit less Griswold, but I do admire the man’s dedication. Once he decided he was called to this form of ministry, he jumped in with both feet. And I suppose you could make a Babette’s Feast-type argument that this is his way of anointing Jesus’ feet with perfume. Or something.

But while I may be of two minds about Morris’ chosen form of “ministry,” and we seem to disagree quite a bit in our understanding of evangelism, I am unambiguously on his side when it comes to his inevitable legal dispute with the West Hayden Estates Homeowners’ Association. When HOA’s lose, we all win.

• Hurray for the Riff Raff.

Advent Calendar Day 15: Magnificat is comin’ to town

December 15, 2018 By Fred Clark

The original version of this post, from 2015, began by recognizing Kay Starr as one of the few still-living artists included in the old-fashioned Christmas music playlist constantly looping at the Big Box during December. Alas, Kay Starr passed away the following year — more than half a century after her recording of “The Man With the Bag” became a holiday favorite back in the ’50s.

This is a song about waiting and anticipating, so if we squint a bit, we can think of it as something like an Advent hymn. Of course, all this waiting isn’t for the Nativity of Jesus. The titular “Man With the Bag” is, rather, Santa Claus.

Many of the most popular Santa songs are kind of Advent-y in this way. They advise or even command us to wait and watch and prepare for the One Who Is to Come, bringing Joy to the World and good will to all, etc. So perhaps it would be useful to look more closely at one of those Santa-Advent songs and see how it compares to the very first Christmas song/Advent hymn ever recorded.

Let’s go with the big one: “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” That song dates back to 1934 and it’s been a seasonal hit for Perry Como, Bing Crosby, the Jackson 5, and (my personal favorite) Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band. Whether or not you’ve ever intentionally learned them, you probably know all the words:

You better watch out
You better not cry
Better not pout
I’m telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town

He’s making a list
And checking it twice;
He’s gonna find out
Who’s naughty or nice
Santa Claus is coming to town

He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake …

Et cetera. And what is it that Santa will be bringing when he comes to town? Well, some versions of the song choose to dwell on the different kinds of toys he may have in his sleigh — “little tin horns and little toy drums,” one version suggests, while another verse lists “Curly head dolls that cuddle and coo / Elephants, boats and kiddie cars too.” But the word that jumps out at me is the one that harks back to that far older, first-ever Advent hymn. “The kids in girl and boy land,” the song says, “will have a Jubilee.”

Yes.

Granted, by the 20th century, that word “jubilee” had gotten watered down beyond all recognition. In context, I’m sure, it’s probably just meant to suggest a really fun time — a synonym for “party” that came to mind because it happens to rhyme with “tree.” But the word still carries a whiff of its original meaning — especially here, when anything less would seem like a let-down after all the jubilant anticipation the song encourages, and also considering this is a song celebrating the day on which we mark the birth of the person who claimed to be Jubilee personified.

But this promise of a coming Jubilee isn’t for everyone. Alongside that promise there’s also a repeated warning, almost a threat — “You better watch out.”

Both of those things — the promise and the warning — recur in that very first Christmas/Advent song as well. Here it is, Mary’s Magnificat, as recorded in the Gospel of Luke 1:46-55:

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.

Mary makes a list, and those of us reading Luke’s Gospel with 21st century American eyes will need to check it twice to see what it actually says. We expect Mary’s song and the rest of the Gospel to follow the pattern we’re accustomed to of blessings for the nice and punishment for the naughty. And so we presume we know what she’s getting at when she sings that God’s “mercy is for those who fear him.” And we presume we already know what that means.But look again at who makes Mary’s “Nice” list: the lowly, the hungry. And look at who the naughty list includes: the proud, the powerful, the rich. The poor and the lowly will have a Jubilee. The powerful and the rich will be brought down and sent away. We’re tempted and conditioned to layer all sorts of piously moralistic assumptions on top of that. But those layers aren’t there in the song. The poor and lowly are not blessed because they are also in some way virtuous. They are blessed because they are poor and lowly. Period. The rich and powerful, likewise, are warned that they will miss out on the Jubilee simply because they are the rich and powerful.

That’s pretty much the same thing we hear from the child Mary was carrying when she wrote that song. Think of Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Lazarus goes to Heaven (sort of — that idea wasn’t quite there yet). Why? Not because he was devout or pious or because he had prayed a sinner’s prayer and accepted Jesus as his personalordandsavior. He was a poor beggar and he goes to Heaven because he was a poor beggar. The rich man, on the other hand, didn’t wind up in “Hell” (again, sort of, because that idea wasn’t quite formed yet either) due to his failure to pray the words and accept his personalordandsavior. He goes to Hell for one reason exclusively: He was rich and he didn’t do anything to help people like Lazarus.

This is, in fact, what the Bible always says about “Hell.” Most of the Bible never mentions the idea. You won’t find anything about Hell in Paul’s letters or in the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament). The “Hell” stuff is almost exclusively from the words of Jesus in the Gospels, and in the stories and sayings where he talks about Hell it’s always in the same sense as the Magnificat or the story of Lazarus. Hell is never a danger to the poor and the lowly. It is, rather, a warning — a threat — to the proud, the powerful and the rich.

Again, we expect all the Bible’s Hell talk to be about something else. We expect it to be about “salvation” and forgiveness of sins and personalords and such. But it’s not. It’s always a warning to the rich and powerful, a reminder that they’ll miss out on the coming Jubilee if they neglect the beggar at their gate.

We better watch out, indeed.

Without him you’re toast

November 26, 2018 By Fred Clark

• The previous post here ended by quoting from Charles Langston’s speech at his sentencing after the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. In that speech, Langston mentions that his father fought in the Revolutionary War alongside Lafayette. Langston’s daughter passed his surname on to her son, the great poet Langston Hughes, who lived until 1967. If you want to understand America and its history, take a look at those few generations of this one remarkable family.

• Here’s a story from the Netherlands that Charles Langston would have liked. Cornelius ten Boom would have liked it too: “A Dutch church has been conducting religious services for 27 days to protect a refugee family.”

Sasun and Anousche Tamrazyan and their three children fled Armenia after receiving politically motivated death threats. They applied for asylum in the Netherlands, and were granted it by a judge, but that ruling was later overturned on appeal and the government ordered that they should be deported.

The family is now staying in a small church in The Hague, which has granted them sanctuary. Dutch law forbids the police from entering a church during religious services, so Bethel Church is doing that — conducting a religious service that began almost three weeks ago and has continued, uninterrupted, ever since. Bethel’s pastor says more than 300 other clergy have volunteered to take a turn leading this never-ending service, and thousands have signed a petition urging the government to reconsider asylum status for the family.

Inside Bethel church (photo by Etienne Oldman, snurched from Bethel’s website)

• Jubilee.

Whenever I talk about that, some folks respond as though it’s just a nice-but-impractical idea — a bit of idealistic religious nonsense. And it is nice, idealistic, and (for some of us) religious. But it’s also utterly practical. Debts that cannot be repaid will not be repaid. Jubilee, in some form, is necessary — and that which is necessary is never impractical.

The sappily optimistic view that’s utterly not practical is the competing theory, the idea that fortunes built on profiting from ever-increasing debt are sustainable in the long run, or even in the short run of a human lifetime. To repeat an old joke using these new figures: If I owe you $500 that I can’t pay back, I’ve got a problem. If we owe you $13.5 trillion that we can’t pay back, you’ve got a problem.

• Isaac J. Bailey, “Don’t Be Naive: Avoiding Calling Trump Supporters Racist Won’t Convince Them to Vote for Democrats“:

I spent nearly two decades in that mostly white evangelical church, and during much of that time I defended them against charges of blanket racism, prayed with them, broke bread with them, spoke about the complexities of life with them.

And yet, when Donald Trump showed up in our area for well-attended rallies during the 2016 presidential primaries, they flocked to him and his open bigotry. Nothing I had said over those two decades meant a thing. Not even the killing of nine black people in a church a couple of counties over convinced them that rejecting the kind of bigotry Trump was espousing should be a priority for any right-thinking person—especially people who claimed they wanted equality for families like mine.

• “Miscarriage, or the loss of a pregnancy before 20 weeks, is so common that Americans often stay quiet about their pregnancies until after the first trimester, when the majority of miscarriages occur. Improvements in early pregnancy detection and the use of fertility treatments have increased the likelihood that couples learn they have miscarried, when they once might have escaped punishment for their murderous ways.”

Oh, wait. I accidentally translated that last bit into white evangelicalese. That last sentence from this NPR report actually ends “when they once might not have even known they were pregnant.”

Soon, however, in Alabama and Ohio and other states, women who lose a pregnancy in the first 20 weeks will have to know because the legal authorities will know, and those women may have to prove to the legal authorities that they are innocent of deliberately or negligently causing the loss of that pregnancy. And the people compounding their grief with accusation and suspicion will say that they are doing so because of morality.

• The title for this post comes from the Pistol Annies’ new(ish) song, “Interstate Gospel.” The rollicking album version is great fun, but I also like this toned-down, slowed-down acoustic rendition:

Court evangelical makes ludicrous claim about his support for Jerusalem policy

December 18, 2017 By Fred Clark

Johnnie Moore, the former communications VP at Liberty University who now identifies himself as “an informal spokesperson for the evangelicals who advise the Trump administration,” wants you to know that white evangelical support for Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has nothing at all to do with Rapture folklore, premillennial dispensationalism, “Bible prophecy,” or any of the End Times theology taught at Liberty (home of the LaHaye Ice Center and the LaHaye Recreation and Fitness Center).

Certainly not. Such a thing never entered the mind of any red-blooded American follower of Christ and Trump. That’s just an unfair misperception being promoted by the crooked liberal media, Moore says.

The truth, Moore says, is that “Evangelicals support Trump’s Jerusalem decision because we care about the Palestinians“:

Evangelicals in the United States supported President Trump’s decision precisely because of their concern for the Palestinians in addition to their special relationship with Israel and the Jewish people.

Evangelicals are also tired of seeing innocent Palestinians abused and used by tyrants and terrorists. …

Evangelicals close to the administration did not support the president’s decision because we favor Jews over Arabs nor for any obscure (and highly contested, I might add) theological reasons like those speculated about, reported upon and sensationalized in recent days.

Evangelicals supported the decision because we believe it was the smart and right thing to do. Ours was a geopolitical opinion, and not a theological one.

Johnnie Moore exits the RNS offices after dropping off his latest column. — Johnnie Moore conducts a staff meeting at his Kairos PR firm.

I’m intimately familiar with this line of argument. It’s identical to what I used to hear from corporate executives back when I was working on the campaign for divestment from Apartheid South Africa. “Constructive engagement,” the executives all said. “We’re staying because we care for black South Africans and only want what’s best for them.”

They’d repeat these stale talking-points while smirking disingenuously. I appreciated that. Unlike Moore, they at least had the courtesy not to pretend that they expected anyone to find their self-serving cover story credible.

The weirdest thing about Moore’s column peddling this line is his apparent expectation that people reading what he writes for Religion News Service won’t be able just as easily to glance over at white evangelical media — at the websites, TV, radio, and print publications where his people are talking candidly amongst themselves.

Let’s click over to the Christian Broadcasting Network (“the Christian perspective”!) and see how “Trump’s Jerusalem decision” is being discussed there:

Hmm, nothing there about “we care about Palestinians” (Gordon Robertson’s commentary paints them as violent, sub-humans displaying an insufficient gratitude for the benefits of colonialism). But there’s a great deal about the “Biblical Significance” of America’s Jerusalem embassy and about whether it’s “an Opportunity to Build Third Temple.” None of what CBN’s writers have to say contradicts any of the reporting about theological views driving evangelical support — the reporting that Moore complains is sensationalistic. The articles we looked at earlier today describe the very same views described and advocated by the CBN writers.

In short — according to CBN, according to everyone who writes for CBN, and according to the millions of white evangelicals who read CBN — Johnnie Moore is full of it.

For a more honest representation of why white evangelicals “support Trump’s Jerusalem decision,” let’s turn to one of those CBN pieces: “‘Biblical Timing of Absolute Precision’: John Hagee Praises Trump’s Jerusalem Decision.” CBN is reporting on the reaction from John Hagee because he’s the “founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel,” and because he represents the views of their white evangelical readers much better than Johnnie Moore’s attempt to pose as a savvy political insider ever could.

Hagee is positively giddy. He sees Trump’s announcement as a tremendously exciting sign of the End Times. Granted, John Hagee thinks Wednesdays are a tremendously exciting sign of the End Times. This is a man, after all, who has spent 50 years telling us the Rapture was going to occur tomorrow — which is to say that he’s a man who has predicted 18,250 of the last zero Raptures.

Hagee’s response is partly the application of premillennial dispensationalist boilerplate, and partly just a word salad of disconnected phrases from PMD folklore. He explains that he urged President Trump to make his Jerusalem announcement this year because of numerology:

He also talked with the president about the significance of moving the embassy in this “Jubilee Year.”

“…I told him that God measures everything in modules of 50 years,” Hagee explained to CBN News. “And I said this is a principle that’s carried out in Leviticus, the 25th chapter.”

“I said, ‘If you look at 1917, it was a Jubilee Year, and the Balfour Amendment came, and then in 50 years, it was 1967, and Jerusalem was reconnected to Israel,'” he continued.

“‘And you add 50 to 1967, and you’re in 2017.’ I said, ‘This is the year to move the embassy and make that declaration because it is a biblical timing of absolute precision,'” Hagee said. “Thank God, he’s going to do exactly that.”

The year of Jubilee — described in great detail there in Leviticus 25 — involves debt cancellation, the release of prisoners, the emancipation of slaves, and the redistribution of the means of production. Hagee’s attempt to twist that passage into something about 50-year intervals of arbitrary “prophecy” milestones doesn’t even qualify as an “interpretation.” He’s just making stuff up.

I wondered what it was, exactly, that made Hagee decide to regard 1917, 1967, and 2017 as “Jubilee Years.” That curiosity sent me down a Google hole that I would not recommend you explore unless you have a great deal of free time, a fondness for mid-’90s Geocities web design, and a high tolerance for incoherent rambling. The saving grace of this experience was realizing that for every weird End Times website advocating Hagee’s “Jubilee” prophecies, there was also a weird End Times website angrily denouncing the scheme in favor of some competing grand theory of premillennial dispensationalist numerology. (I briefly considered offered to mediate between these warring factions as a disinterested third party, but I realized that any such talk of “peacemaking” would lead them all to conclude that I was a tool of the Antichrist.)

I suppose Hagee’s new emphasis on “modules of 50 years” is a bit less astrologically bonkers than his earlier obsession with “modules” of “Blood Moons” — his idea that calendar years involving two total lunar eclipses were the secret code for understanding God’s Plan for History. However goofy his ever-shifting theories may be, though, they fall under the category of “theology” and not, as Moore insists, of “geopolitics.”

The problem is that Hagee’s theology has very real — and very harmful — geopolitical implications:

“God found a man by the name of Abraham and He made a covenant with him,” Hagee continued. “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, recorded in the book of Genesis, that He was going to give them a strip of real estate in the Middle East, and that piece of real estate would be theirs forever.”

That “piece of real estate” — according to John Hagee’s theology, and to the theological view shared by most white evangelical Americans — doesn’t just include all of Israel’s 1967 borders, or even just that plus the occupied territories of the West Bank. What Hagee and his fellow “Bible prophecy” evangelicals have in mind is what they call “Greater Israel” — a “piece of real estate” that covers everything from Syria to the Sinai and from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates. This is, for Hagee et. al., the hoped for and prophesied “one-state solution” for the region.

It’s a weird and recklessly destabilizing idea, and one that seems dangerously comfortable with something very much like ethnic cleansing. But at least Hagee has the decency not to pretend that he supports this idea because of some feigned concern “for the Palestinians.”

Blessed Are the Poor

September 16, 2017 By Fred Clark

Here’s another theological morsel to chew on from David Congdon.

The ones who can be most secure in God’s saving presence are those without any worldly or spiritual security, those abandoned by both secular and ecclesiastical powers, those sacrificed on the altars of history for the “higher goods” of civilization and Christendom. The real question is not whether non-Christians are saved, but whether Christians are saved. If they are, it is only insofar as they put their Christianity at mortal risk, ready to abandon every security in order to find their security in God alone.

Congdon’s framework is exciting for Barthian types like the folks at DET, but its beyond “controversial” for most evangelical types. As he notes, the book in which he argues this case — The God Who Saves — cost him his job. He’s not bitter about that — the “farewell” was mutual here.

But I hope that evangelical folks won’t just tune out everything Congdon is saying here just because he no longer believes in the conscious afterlife of Heaven or Hell that they regard as an essential core belief. I’d ask them to heed what he’s saying above and apply that within their own framework of a conscious afterlife and a “literal” Heaven and Hell.

I don’t mean his attempt “to explain how a universalist soteriology was possible on systematic theological grounds.” Nothing that high-falutin and sophisticated. I’m talking about a good old-fashioned chapter-and-verse exploration in the time-honored evangelical tradition of concordance-driven word-searching Bible study. It will likely prove to be unsettling.

Because here’s the thing we evangelical types aren’t allowed or accustomed to notice: Most of the time in the actual Bible, the poor are already saved. All of them. They just are.

That’s a given. It’s rarely stated outright because, throughout the actual Bible, it goes without saying. It is simply assumed — over and over again. The starkest example of this might be Jesus’ parable of the rich man (sometimes called “Dives”) and the beggar Lazarus. How and why is Lazarus “saved” in that story? He just is. Salvation belongs to him because nothing else does. The only drama in that story involves Dives and his wealthy relatives. Can they be saved, too? Yes — because they need to be. No such need is attributed to Lazarus.

But surely Lazarus — like all people — is a sinner. And surely that means he needs to be saved from his sins? Probably so. But if his Jubilee and salvation also involves the forgiveness of his sins, then it doesn’t occur in that story due to his confession and repentance. It is granted to him and attributed to him because he is a beggar. That’s how Jubilee works. It makes demands from creditors and extends grace to debtors — whether or not they seek it or even know it.

WhoIsTheRich

Or consider the parable of the Sheep and the Goats, in which the nations and the people of the nations are judged based on how they respond to the hungry, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned. Some of these folks are “saved” and some are not, but there’s a whole other category unaddressed in this judgment — the hungry, naked, sick and imprisoned themselves. They seem exempt from the summons to stand before the throne. There’s no sense questioning whether they meet the standard of this judgment because they are the standard. Their “salvation” is never in question. The only question is who from among the rest of us will be joining them. (And the answer, in that parable, is those who have already joined them.)

One of my favorite early Christian texts is, like Congdon’s book, an exploration of soteriology that caused great controversy in its day. In “Who Is the Rich Man Who Is Saved?” Clement of Alexandria offered the then-startling suggestion that salvation might be possible for some wealthy people. This was a contested idea at the time. But the point here is not whether Clement’s argument was right or wrong. The point here is what was not being argued by Clement or his disputants — the thing they all agreed on and assumed and didn’t even need to bother stating. There didn’t need to be a corresponding text titled “Who Is the Poor Person Who Is Saved?” because everybody Clement knew already knew the answer: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”

There are, of course, plenty of other soteriologies that we can find in our Bibles, many of which seem to have nothing to do with matters of wealth and poverty. But one could make a case that these various plans or paths of salvation(and they do vary, surprisingly, quite a bit) do not supplant or negate that basic premise of Lazarus and Dives. Their discussion of a need for salvation certainly seems to apply to Dives — and to me — but I’m not sure they apply to Lazarus. It’s possible that Lazarus, in any of those frameworks, doesn’t need to get saved, because salvation already belongs to him.

The Defenders of Slavery Taught us How to Bible

June 29, 2017 By Fred Clark

Presbyterian pastor William Stell offers four reasons why he’s giving up the Bible debates. Yup, me too.

The “debates” he’s talking about are the endless and unendable arguments over the handful of clobber texts cited as the exclusively authoritative final Words of God on subjects like the role of women in the church or the ethical status of LGBT people. They’re not really debates at all, because debates eventually end, and these never do.

The only such exegetical debate to ever really go away was the one that dominated American Christianity for the first century of this nation’s life. The exegetical debate over the clobber-texts used to defend American chattel slavery wasn’t settled by some conclusive book or study or monograph on the subject, but by the surrender of the Confederate Army at Appomattox. It was laid to rest, as Mark Noll wrote, by “those consummate theologians, the Reverend Doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman.”

Consider the ongoing “debate” over texts employed to prohibit women from preaching or leading in the church. Those opposed to such roles for women — the so-called “complementarians” — are basically the Washington Generals of Bible debates (except the Generals won that one game back in 1971). But losing all those debates doesn’t matter — the point isn’t to settle anything, just to keep debating. Forever.

I respect the patience and thoroughness of the biblical scholars who seem willing, every time, to take a deep breath and re-engage in such debates with the clobber-texters. I admire their work, their effort and erudition, their painstaking respect for the scriptures they study. But I don’t think that approach is helping.

We can’t exegete our way to justice.

We also can’t have meaningful exegetical discussions with people who do not share our hermeneutic. Especially not when those people insist on pretending that they do not have or need a hermeneutic of their own.

That’s fancy seminary-speak, so let me try to say this in plainer language. We can’t agree — or even disagree — about what the Bible says if we can’t agree on how the Bible says. These disputes aren’t about what we Bible, but about how we Bible.

Which brings us to an even more basic problem with these endless “Bible debates”: they reinforce a confused and confusing idea about how to Bible. They’re based on the misleading premise that this is the way to read and understand and interpret the meaning of scripture. First, isolate the key passages that mention the disputed topic, then dissect those passages in granular detail.

This isn’t how we read anything else. It barely counts as reading at all, but is more of a sub-literate form of concordance-ism. It treats the Bible the way politicos treat those tell-all books that come out after every big campaign. They turn to the index, look up their own name, and then read whatever pages mention them. Then they all pretend they’ve read the entire book. “Studied” it, even.

Where did anybody get the idea that this was a useful or meaningful approach to reading and study?

It goes back to that early American “Bible debate” referred to above — the one that led to, and ended with, the Civil War. It’s a way of reading and appealing to the Bible that was designed in an attempt to defend the indefensible: American slavery. This peculiar institution wouldn’t easy to defend on biblical grounds. Sure, the Bible is an artifact of the ancient world, and various forms of slavery were a constant part of the ancient societies of those by whom and for whom its various books were written. But none of those forms were analogous to the brutal lifelong chattel system that was woven into American life. Wherever one turned in the Bible — the Gospels, the prophets, the Psalms, the histories, the wisdom literature, the apocalyptics, the epistles — one could find ample condemnation of everything that slave system produced and depended on. It was simply irreconcilable with the Golden Rule.

And everybody knew it. Yes. They did.

So there wasn’t much prospect for a “Bible debate” on the matter.

“What’s the name of the first book of the Bible?”

“Genesis.”

“And what’s the name of the second book of the Bible?”

“Exod–“

“We’re done here.”

You’re reading this as part of a culture shaped by centuries of diligent work by the “biblical” defenders of slavery and their exegetical heirs. They are the people who taught us white Christians (and white former Christians) how to Bible.

And because, like most of us, you probably learned how to Bible from those defenders of slavery, your mind right this very moment is likely doing just what they’ve taught it to do — leaping to cite the handful of isolated clobber-texts that might be employed as a defense of slavery and considering that those passages should by some undefined mechanism be understood as outweighing and negating everything else — the Golden Rule, the Gospels, the prophets, the Jubilee, the entire book of Acts, and all of the major themes and trajectories and values of all of the book apart from that handful of weaponized texts.

That’s what they taught us to do. That’s the way they taught us how to Bible. But it’s not how Christians used to Bible. (The biblical writers themselves certainly didn’t Bible this way.) It’s a way to read and interpret the Bible that had to be invented. It had to be crafted, and relentlessly propagated to make it seem compelling.

tunnelvision

Even today, this seems to be the only way that most white American Christians know how to Bible — even though it’s not the way we read or interpret any other text. That’s why it’s the only approach to the Bible permitted in our current “Bible debates” on the status of women or of LGBT folk and their relationships.

This approach makes us all a little less literate and a little less smart. It prevents us — forbids us — from seeing and making connections, only permitting us to consider isolated passages in isolation. This isn’t just due to the paramount, trump-card significance attributed to those carefully curated clobber-texts, but due to the clumsy concordance-ism by which those few texts are chosen.

Consider the actual mechanism at work in that “Bible debate” over slavery. Consult the concordance and look up passages containing the words “slavery” or “slave.” But don’t look up passages containing the words “kidnap” or “captive” or “rape” or “oppression” or “bondage” or “justice” or “theft” or “wages” or “children.” Those passages are not allowed to be considered. The idea of a “biblical defense” of slavery only became possible once it was painstakingly extracted from the otherwise inextricable fact that such a defense would require a “biblical defense” of kidnapping, torture, theft, rape, abuse, oppression, and the forced destruction of families.

Concordance-ism, in other words, does as much to distort our understanding of the “controversial subject” being debated as it does to distort our ability to read written language and understand it. And so these ongoing “Bible debates” shaped by the ideology of concordance-ism aren’t likely to help any of us better understand either what the Bible says or whatever it is we imagine we’re “debating.”

William Stell has the right idea. Walk away.

Why we can’t have Nice Things (cont’d.)

April 5, 2017 By Fred Clark

I’m an evangelical Christian (albeit one who is now, I’m often told, unsanctioned, exiled/expelled). So I retain the evangelical belief that everybody can be saved — can be liberated and reborn and transformed. When I see someone expressing hateful ideas or living a life shaped by resentment of those who are worse off, I reflexively think, “That person needs Jesus.”

And let me be very clear: I believe that’s true. I believe they do. (I do. We do, etc.)

The problem, though, is that nine times out of 10 here in the US of A, it turns out that person already has Jesus. They know and believe in some version of Jesus, anyway, one they learned from their parents and their church and maybe even their Christian school or Bible college. And the Jesus they know and follow, worship and pray to, turns out to be a Jesus who shares their hateful ideas and blesses their punching-down resentment.

So it doesn’t seem like a big come-to-Jesus moment poses any threat to injustice, oppression or mass-plunder. Or even that a massive outpouring of some spiritual something that produced tens of millions of such come-to-Jesus moments would change much of anything.

I still retain my evangelical impulse to look at any massive social injustice and think: We need another Great Awakening. We need revival, repentance, and conversion to a new way of life. But when that thought comes to me now, I don’t invest much hope in it.

How to Recognise Jubilee From Quite A Long Way Away. No. 1: The sycamore. The. Sycamore. ("Christ and Zacchaeus" by Niels Larsen Stevns, 1913, via Wikimedia) — How to Recognise Jubilee From Quite A Long Way Away. No. 1: The sycamore. The. Sycamore. (“Christ and Zacchaeus” by Niels Larsen Stevns, 1913, via Wikimedia)

For one thing, I’ve studied enough about Great Awakenings to realize they’re really not that great. No matter how widespread the “awakening” seemed to be, it didn’t help most people get woke or stay so. Consider the First Great Awakening, led by figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. Edwards was interested in eschatological justice for sinners, but not terribly interested in justice here in this life. Whitefield, on the other hand, proved to be an effective campaigner for political and social change — he helped to legalize slavery in the colony of Georgia so that he could run a more profitable plantation.

The Second Great Awakening is perhaps a bit more hopeful. It was led by folks like Charles G. Finney, who argued for abolition and women’s suffrage (and temperance, and anti-Masonry, and other causes of the day that haven’t aged quite as well). But the revivalism of this period didn’t always, or even usually, include such integral concern for justice. Confederate soldiers, too, saw Jesus in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps. And many of the revived and awakened took up arms again after the war, leading or joining the terrorist militias that repealed and replaced Reconstruction, imposing a century of Jim Crow in Jesus name, Amen.

Some religious historians talk of a third and even a fourth “Great Awakening,” but the evidence for any such thing is not terribly convincing, and the idea is depressing to contemplate. The claim that such events ever took place requires us to define Great Awakening down to something utterly inconsequential.* (If a Great Awakening falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it still make a noise? What if they threw a Great Awakening and nobody came?)

I still appreciate the idea of such a thing. I see the resurgent ugliness of ethnic nationalism here in America and in Europe and I think that another Pentecost might be a very good thing right about now. But Pentecost is a church thing, and it’s no use looking to the church to provide the solution to a problem that seems most acute and most deeply rooted in our churches themselves. Frankly, it’s when I look at our churches that I most often think, “Those people need Jesus.”

Not that I’m giving up on our churches, mind you. Like I said, I still believe that everybody can be saved — even white American Christians. And our churches certainly have the resources and the stories that ought to enable them to rediscover the virtue and duty of solidarity, to repent from hatred and be liberated from resentment.

But such a rediscovery, should it occur within or without the church, suggests that our path forward lies in a “change of heart.”

George Orwell noted that “”A ‘change of heart’ is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo.” But he also conceded that the idea wasn’t necessarily pure humbug: “‘If [people] would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.”

That’s from Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens, whom Orwell loved, even though the great novelist seemed incapable of imagining any substantial, political, structural or institutional change:

It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong’s school being as different from Creakle’s “as good is from evil” Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions without a “change of heart” — that, essentially, is what he is always saying.

If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A ‘change of heart’ is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. I said earlier that Dickens is not in the accepted sense a revolutionary writer. But it is not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as ‘revolutionary’ — and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down. … Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old — generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. … The central problem — how to prevent power from being abused — remains unsolved. Dickens, who had not the vision to see that private property is an obstructive nuisance, had the vision to see that. “If men would behave decently the world would be decent” is not such a platitude as it sounds.

In any case, though, the efficacy of a “change of heart” as a strategy relies on being able to answer a prior question: How can we bring about such a change? And how can we hope to do so on a large enough scale to change the big picture?

It’s one thing, after all, to smile at the happy ending for Tiny Tim thanks to Ebenezer Scrooge’s individual change of heart, but that doesn’t do anything to help any of the thousands of other poor and sick children in Dickens’ London. (We’re going to need more ghosts.)

The idea of Dickens’ Christmas Carol, I suppose, is that Scrooge is to serve as a model for social transformation based on individual transformation. The same could be argued for the story of Zacchaeus, on which Dickens’ story seems partly based. But Zacchaeus’ repentance involved his embrace of Jubilee — of a whole system and structure of economic justice, not just of his deciding to be a nicer person. Zacchaeus didn’t become a moralist, he joined a revolution. And he was only able to do that because there existed a revolution for him to join — one that consisted of something more substantial than just the maintenance of good cheer and Christmas spirit the whole year ’round.

A “change of heart,” I think, belongs more in the category of outcome. It’s a worthy goal, but not also the path to achieving itself. And it requires some idea of what it is that all these hearts are changing to.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* The purported “Fourth Great Awakening,” if you’re interested, supposedly took place from ca. 1950-1980. I’d argue that this was, in fact, a period of religious revival, one in which prominent Christian leaders prophetically called for national repentance and rebirth. But the people who talk about a fourth Great Awakening ignore that. They’re not talking about the Civil Rights Movement, but about, like, Billy Graham and the explosive growth of Pentecostal churches.

Ignorant jerks abusing ‘the poor will always be with you’ will always be with you

March 3, 2017 By Fred Clark

Rep. Roger Marshall, newly elected Kansas Republican, is quoting Jesus. He’d better hope that all that stuff Jesus had to say isn’t true. Because, if it is, Marshall is in for a world of Woes, millstones, a whip of cords, and a big ol’ “depart from me” when, ultimately, the same measure he’s used to condemn the poor gets used to condemn him.

Here’s Marshall misquoting half of something Jesus said while rejecting the other half of what Jesus said and completely ignoring both the Torah passage Jesus was reciting and the fierce warning in that Torah passage against doing exactly what Marshall is doing here:

The [ACA’s] Medicaid expansion, which Kansas has not adopted despite support from many hospitals, including some of Marshall’s former colleagues, is one of the big sticking points for Republicans. Many GOP-led states adopted it and want to see it preserved in some form.

Marshall doesn’t believe it has helped, an outlook that sheds light on how this new player in Washington understands health policy.

“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’” he said. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.”

Pressed on that point, Marshall shrugged.

Does this make Roger Marshall a bad person? That’s not for me to say. Jesus and Moses, however, had no reservations in saying, emphatically, yes, this makes Roger Marshall a bad person.

What I can say for certain is that this tells us that Marshall has never read — or, at best, never understood — Mark 14 or Deuteronomy 15. But yet, strangely, he still feels confident enough to attempt to quote them.

We’ve been over this before many times. See, for example, “Dives will always be with us — and so will selfish rich jackwagons who misquote the Bible” and “Ignorant Christians need to STFU about ‘the poor you will always have with you’ until they can be bothered to understand what Jesus actually said.” But it seems we need to go over it again.

So, then, did Jesus say, “the poor will always be with you”? Well, according to Mark 14, that’s half a sentence spoken by Jesus. What Jesus said was “For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish.”

Right away, then, it’s clear that Marshall is bungling things because he’s drawing the opposite conclusion from what Jesus says. Instead of “the poor will always be with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish” Marshall is arguing “the poor will always be with you, so you don’t ever need to bother showing kindness to them.”

Jubilee

But the problem is even bigger than that. Because Jesus never actually said, “The poor will always be with you.” That’s our English translation of a Greek text translating an Aramaic speaker reciting a Hebrew scripture. What Jesus actually said there in Mark 14 (and in Matthew 26), was “there will never cease to be some in need on the earth” — that’s how our English translations render this phrase when cutting out the Greek and Aramaic middle-men and translating the Hebrew original directly.

Or, if you like, Jesus didn’t say “the poor will always be with you.” Jesus said, “‘the poor will always be with you.'” See those nested quotation marks? That’s us quoting Jesus who was, in turn, quoting something else. Specifically, he was quoting Deuteronomy 15.

Jesus was quoting the Torah to his disciples, and he knew that they would know that was exactly what he was doing. He knew his disciples — first-century, second-Temple-era Jews — were so saturated in the books of Moses that they would recognize the passage he was quoting. And he therefore knew that they would recognize the harsh rebuke it entailed.

The authors of Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels, likewise, shared this assumption of basic biblical literacy for their readers. They didn’t see any need to insult their readers by inserting an explanation of this basic and obvious point — “that bit’s a quote from Deuteronomy.” Besides, this was Jesus yet again reciting (and appropriating) one of the Jubilee passages from the Torah, something Jesus did all the time. Here, at the end of their respective Gospels, Mark and Matthew can be forgiven for assuming that their readers should by now have recognized that pattern.

Alas, the Gospel writers didn’t realize that their words would also be read, thousands of years later, in translation, by stiff-necked greedheads on another continent whose culture, religious practice, and prideful obstinance would conspire to prevent them from ever noticing this massive, central theme in Jesus’ teachings.

And but so, if you want to know what Jesus meant when he quoted this bit from Deuteronomy, you need to look at this bit from Deuteronomy. Here’s the relevant passage, Deuteronomy 15:4-11, with a bit of bold text to help folks like Marshall understand what Jesus was quoting, and why:

However, there need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today. For the Lord your God will bless you as he has promised, and you will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. You will rule over many nations but none will rule over you.

If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. Rather, be openhanded and freely lend them whatever they need. Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: “The seventh year, the year for canceling debts, is near,” so that you do not show ill will toward the needy among your fellow Israelites and give them nothing. They may then appeal to the Lord against you, and you will be found guilty of sin. Give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to. There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.

So Moses says “there need be no poor people among you,” but it’s conditional. “If you fully obey …” the Jubilee laws and the other commands he’s just laid out for them, which includes a massive program of land reform, property redistribution, the safety nets of gleaning and gathering, tithes for the poor, and periodic debt cancellation. Do all that like you’re supposed to, and there will be no poor among you.

And then, a few sentences later, Moses acknowledges that this condition seems unlikely to be met. “There will always be poor people in the land” — or, as our translation of a translation of Jesus reciting this in the Gospels says, “the poor will always be with you.” Moses concedes and expects, in other words, that the people will not “fully obey the Lord your God and be careful to follow all these commands.” He expects that they will try to game the system with “wicked thoughts” about how to exploit the poor despite the Jubilee mechanisms set up to prevent that. He expects that they will “show ill will toward the needy,” that they will be “hardhearted” and “tightfisted” and “grudging,” and therefore that, despite there being no need for there to be poor people among you, there will always be poor people among you.

That’s what Jesus is saying. “The poor will always be with you” because you are disobedient, hardhearted, exploitative and devious. The presence of poverty is not some inevitable law of the universe, it’s the consequence of sin — your sin, the sin of the wealthy, not the sin of the poor. The fact that the poor are with us is a rebuke. It is evidence of our guilt and failure and wicked thinking.

So we’re left with Plan B — the generosity and open-handedness and charity that can help to mitigate the suffering of others that endures due to our enduring disobedience, sin and selfishness. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus summarizes all of that by saying, “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want.”

But for scripture-abusing jackwagons like Roger Marshall, even Plan B is apparently too much to ask. He cites the first half of Jesus’ quote to argue that “the poor you will always have with you,” so there’s no point trying to do anything about that.

This is the argument we hear 99.9 percent of the time we hear anyone reciting those words from Jesus. It’s an anti-biblical, anti-Christ argument. It’s biblically illiterate, stupid and cruel. It is used, always, to harm and to deny help to others.

And, if Moses and Jesus were not wrong, then those others may appeal to the Lord, and the abusive abusers of scripture will be found guilty of sin.