2015-03-13T17:10:32-04:00

OK, I’m about to need to say some frankly critical things about the Rev. John Hagee, so let me start by saying something nice first. The pastor plays a mean saxophone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiJ_MsLphYw

Hagee’s son, Matt, also has a fine voice. (I think he might be happier, and the world might be a better place, if he stepped away from the family business of anti-gay vitriol and “Bible prophecy” nuttery and headed off to Nashville or Branson to follow his musical dreams.)

Anyway, Hemant Mehta directs our attention to John Hagee’s recent appearance on the Trinity Broadcasting Network where, alas, he’s not playing the saxophone. Hagee is, rather, offering what he sees as the evidence that proves his belief in “Bible prophecy.”

Hagee, you see, is a “Bible prophecy scholar,” just like Tim LaHaye — a premillennial dispensationalist who regards the whole Bible as a series of predictions about the future and the End of Days.

On TBN, Hagee addresses “All the Prophecy Skeptics“:

This is for those of you who are riddled with skepticism about the accuracy of the inerrant Word of God. Only God could orchestrate this. This is a prophetic overlay that I’m about to give you. A prophetic overlay is something that is revealed in the Old Testament and becomes very obviously clear in the New Testament by an exact set of circumstances, but it involved another life centuries later.

Hagee believes the Bible is “inerrant” (excepting, of course, all that stuff in the Bible that says Jesus is the “Word of God”) and that it should be read “literally.” This “prophetic overlay” business is a way of getting around that. It’s his way of telling himself that he’s reading the Bible “literally” while he veers off into allegory.

He goes on to present a series of supposed parallels between the character of Joseph in Genesis (he of the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) and the character of Jesus in the Gospels. These parallels are strained, to say the least. As Hemant says, Hagee “sounds like he’s reading the (debunked) chain letter about the coincidences between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.”

But most of these alleged parallels don’t even rise to the level of coincidences. Hagee’s not wrong when he points out that both Joseph and Jesus had Jewish names, that both had fathers, and that both wore garments. But he is wrong to imagine that these things are worth pointing out.

To be fair, most of the writers of the New Testament also stretched and strained to find echos and allusions for Jesus in the Hebrew scriptures. They found — or invented — some rather creative and imaginative ways to make connections between Jesus and those scriptures. Sometimes that meant tweaking Jesus’ story a bit to better fit the scriptural allusion. Sometimes it meant imposing wholly new meanings on those passages of scripture.

Those New Testament writers — Matthew, Luke, Paul, the author of Hebrews — had a different agenda than Hagee. They weren’t trying to demonstrate the “accuracy” of biblical prophecy. They were making comparisons to teach their readers about Jesus. So unlike Hagee’s “prophetic overlay,” they didn’t just look for parallels, but for points of contrast. They tried to show how Jesus was like David, but also how Jesus was not like David.

John Hagee wants us to see Joseph as a “type” of Jesus — a prophetic precursor “revealed in the Old Testament,” the full meaning of which “becomes very obviously clear” in the prophetic fulfillment of Jesus Christ.

And that is horrifying.

The story of Joseph has been defanged and deformed by Sunday school storybooks and Broadway musicals, but it is not a happy story. Joseph is a predator, not a savior. He is, in this story, an evil, evil bastard.

GoGoGoJoseph

You probably remember the bit with Joseph’s dreams foretelling seven years of plenty to be followed by seven years of famine, and how that allowed Joseph to store up food during the years of plenty to save the world from starvation during the years of famine. Yay, Joseph! Well done!

Except Joseph saved the world for a price — a very high price. He made the world an offer it could not refuse. Joseph took everything from everyone. He extorted all their money, all their property, and all their land. And when they had nothing left to extort from them, he enslaved them. He didn’t so much save the world, in other words, as he took it over.

Like most of Genesis, this is an origin story. It is the story of where tyrants come from. It is the story of Joseph inventing totalitarian rule:

So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh. All the Egyptians sold their fields, because the famine was severe upon them; and the land became Pharaoh’s. As for the people, he made slaves of them from one end of Egypt to the other. …

It’s frightening, and probably blasphemous, for John Hagee to claim that Joseph’s tyrannical extortion matches the “exact set of circumstances” that the New Testament presents about Jesus Christ. When Jesus said “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” he was not talking about making slaves from one end of the world to the other. He was talking about this:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Jesus called himself the embodiment of Jubilee. Joseph was the anti-Jubilee.

Even more appalling is the climactic final point in Hagee’s “prophetic overlay.” Joseph, he says, was released from prison “to stand by the side of the most powerful man on the Earth, which was Pharaoh.” That’s just like Jesus, Hagee continues, who was released from the “prison of death” and came “to stand at the right hand of the most powerful person in the universe, God Almighty.”

Hagee’s “prophetic overlay” of Joseph and Jesus thus ends by identifying God with Pharaoh. By presenting Joseph as a “type” of Jesus, he thereby winds up presenting Pharaoh as a “type” of God.

Oy. Not good.

This is particularly weird coming from a guy like John Hagee — a man who is obsessed with “Bible prophecy” and the book of Revelation. The ghost of Pharaoh haunts that book, from the beastly machine that Joseph first invented, to the liberating plagues of divine wrath sent to destroy the thrones of power.

Hagee’s weird little “prophetic overlay” about Joseph and Jesus thus highlights the way his “Bible prophecy” scheme turns the book of Revelation on its head. It portrays God as Pharaoh. It portrays Jesus as Joseph — “saving” the world by enslaving it with lethal coercion.

Like Tim LaHaye and the rest of the PMD “prophecy” crowd, Hagee doesn’t so much believe in a Second Coming as he does in a Second Chance. Like LaHaye, Hagee believes that Jesus got it wrong the first time around with all that proclaiming Jubilee and all that humbling himself unto death, loving your enemies, and all that regrettable inasmuch-as-you’ve-done-it-to-the-least-of-these business. So Hagee longs for a Second Coming in which Jesus returns to get his revenge, to destroy his enemies, ushering in the Millennium in a military coup.

This is how John Hagee’s “Bible prophecy” imagines the Second Coming of Jesus — as a replay of the story of Joseph. No thank you.

 

2015-03-03T15:45:37-05:00

• “Fireworks and Brimstone: The Personal God of Katy Perry.” Laura Turner paints an insightful portrait of the pop star’s Pentecostal roots and how it shapes who she is now. For an alternative view, you can check in with Christian-brand radio ministers/lobbyists Dave Daubenmire and Linda Harvey.

• Here’s the thing, Millennials, you’ve got the numbers. There are more of you than there are Baby Boomers, and there are fewer of them every year. Right now, they run the show — which means keeping you in perpetual debt (to them) and passing tax cuts for themselves rather than maintaining the infrastructure their parents’ generation built. But you’ll get to change that, if you want to.

• Those of us who do not pay for digital access to The New York Times can only read a limited number of articles each month. It’s well worth using one of those slots to read David Amsden’s piece for the Times magazine, “Building the First Slavery Museum in America.” John Cummings seems to have stepped out of the pages of a Walker Percy novel.

• Your periodic reminder: Franklin Graham is awful. Just awful.

Samoas
Samoas are my favorite kind of lesbian abortion cookie. (Click pic for link.)

• “While we are on the subject of things conservatives say and do that would get liberals strung up from the nearest lamppost, check out this …”

• Reach down, punch up. Always punch up, never punch down. These are good guidelines. But here in the messy real world, their application can be complicated. It sometimes happens that someone is simultaneously up and down, oppressor and oppressed. What then?

Well, maybe something like this: “Wonkette Commenters Teach Obamacare-Hating Sheriff A Lesson By Paying His Medical Bills.” Well played, Wonketeers.

• As John Fea says, it’s hard to be sure exactly what just happened at Mid-America Nazarene University. But the chaplain of the Kansas college was recently demoted after a “controversial” chapel talk in which he suggested that maybe American Christianity shouldn’t celebrate war and killing quite so much as it does. As Fea writes, “It seems like Mid-America President David Spittal caved to outside pressure from a constituency that probably equates Christianity and American patriotism.”

This is a pattern with white evangelical institutions and it involves two problems. First, big donors have undue influence over the the identity and operations of those institutions. And, second, those big donors tend to exert that influence in support of horrible ideas.

 

 

2015-02-04T18:39:33-05:00

• The Vatican remains confused, but they retracted this video promoting the upcoming conference on “Women’s Cultures: Equality and Difference” (or Plessy For Women, for short).

I wish they’d done a better job publicizing that #LifeofWomen hashtag, because it’s never not hilarious when anti-feminist efforts are surprised to realize women are capable of hijacking such astroturf campaigns. Still, as bad as this video is, it’s better than the conference artwork revealingly chosen by the Vatican Pontifical Council on Culture — a headless naked woman’s torso bound with golden rope. (William Lindsey has a fine collection of responses to that image, seen here on the right.)

ManRay
“Venere Restaurata,” by Man Ray (1936).

• Could this be the Christian Sasquatch movie we’ve all been waiting for? Let’s hope so, because if this flops, it could become that much harder to get funding for the evangelical chupacabra movie I really want to see.

• Doktor Zoom responds to the imaginary science of Matt Walsh’s anti-birth-control rant by giving Walsh all the respect that he and his argument deserve.

• Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is outraged over the history standards in the new educational Common Core. Those standards, Paul says, amount to “anti-American propaganda” and “revisionist history that ignores the faith of our Founders.”

Just one problem with Paul’s critique: Common Core doesn’t include history standards. It’s about math and English.

Paul shows an enormous capacity for being outraged over non-existent grievances. He has a bright future in today’s Republican Party.

• “Lizzie Sheppard: Took a White Supremacist Pastor to Court and Won.

Jubilee.

• Oh, Delco. Don’t ever change. “Man Clogs Toilet With Potatoes, Pulls Fire Alarm to Get Help Quicker.”

2014-12-18T18:57:53-05:00

Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon about “10 things conservative Christians got horribly wrong.”

Looking over the long history of people claiming to be speaking for God’s wishes, it quickly becomes evident that Christians are frequently on the wrong side of history. Here are 10 things that American Christians of the conservative stripe got completely wrong when they were so sure they were speaking on God’s behalf.

I realize that Marcotte is both an atheist (gasp!) and, even worse, a feminist, and thus she’s not someone that conservative Christians are inclined to listen to. So let me point out that many politically conservative white evangelical men would agree with her on at least some of the items in her list.

For example, the first item on Amanda Marcotte’s list of “things conservative Christians got horribly wrong” is slavery. Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore agrees with her. Here’s what Moore recently said on that topic:

The founders of the Southern Baptist Convention were wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery. And the problem wasn’t just that they were on the wrong side of a social issue; they were on the wrong side of Jesus and the gospel when it came to brothers and sisters in Christ made in the image of God that they treated with injustice.

Moore would probably (I think) agree with about half of Marcotte’s list. I’m guessing he’d also agree that conservative Christians who defended segregation were “horribly wrong.” And I’d guess he would agree that Prohibition was a mistake, and that opposing women’s suffrage was wrong (but not opposing women’s ordination). And I’m pretty sure he would say now that evangelicals’ hostile anti-Catholicism during the 19th and most of the 20th centuries was something that shouldn’t have happened.

But he would likely disagree — strenuously — with the other half of Marcotte’s list, which includes things like evolution, official prayer in schools, contraception and marriage equality.*

On all of those points, of course, Moore and his fellow “conservative” Christians would insist that their own opinions aren’t the issue here. What matters, rather, is what the Bible clearly says. It’s not that “conservative Christians” reject evolution, but that the Bible insists it’s wrong. And same-sex marriage is anathema not because “conservative Christians” think so, but because that is what the Bible clearly teaches. And contraception is wrong because the Bible clearly says so (right there in … um … I’ll have to get back to you with chapter and verse on that one).

These conservative Christians would object to Marcotte’s assertion that they are wrong on these matters. What she’s really saying, they would say, is that the Bible is wrong about such things.

The problem with that argument is that this is exactly what those earlier conservative Christians said about slavery, segregation, women’s suffrage, Prohibition, and the Papist Menace. If Russell Moore’s Southern Baptist predecessors had been confronted with Moore’s claim that they were “wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery,” they wouldn’t have defended their opinion — they would have said it wasn’t about their opinion, but about the clear teaching and inerrant authority of the holy Word of God. And then they’d have viciously attacked Moore for his refusal to accept the clear and unambiguous authority of scripture.

"You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you ..."
“You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you …”

This isn’t speculation about how they would respond. This is what they actually did. Those pro-slavery Southern Baptists were — regularly and repeatedly — accused of being wickedly wrong about slavery. And their response — documented in thousands of volumes — was always to attack their accusers for infidelity to the clear teaching of the Bible.

Anti-slavery Christians, in response, insisted they weren’t criticizing the Bible itself, only the way that pro-slavery Christians had chosen to interpret the Bible. The problem isn’t with what the Bible says, they argued, but with how the pro-slavery Southern Baptists were reading it and misusing it.

But that response only made those pro-slavery Baptists angrier. There can be only one way to read the Bible, they insisted. There can be only one way to interpret it. More than that, really what they were arguing was that the Bible didn’t need to be interpreted at all.

That claim is the identifying characteristic of the people Marcotte identifies as “conservative Christians.” They all share this idea that the Bible is uniform and unambiguous — that despite being a diverse collection of ancient texts written over a period of centuries in diverse contexts for diverse audiences, it never displays a diversity of perspectives. The Bible, they insist, never contradicts itself and never presents opposing views, and thus requires little interpretation for a contemporary reader.

Unfortunately, while this view of the Bible is horrifically misleading, it’s also widely accepted not just by conservative Christians, but by many of their critics. Thus we see things like Marcotte writing “the Bible clearly has a positive view of slavery” — uncritically accepting not just the illiterate anti-hermeneutic of the fundies, but even their favorite thought-suppressing adverb (“the Bible clearly …”). 

The Bible does, in fact, contain a great deal of material that endorses various forms of slavery. That is undeniable. Slavery is, in various parts of the Bible, commended and commanded. In some places in the Bible, an abundance of slaves is presented as evidence of God’s blessing.

But the Bible also does, in fact, contain a great deal of material that attacks slavery. That is also undeniable. Slavery is, in various parts of the Bible, condemned as contemptible. In some places in the Bible, an abundance of slaves is presented as evidence of wickedness, disobedience and rebellion against God.

Such contradictory arguments can be bewildering if you haven’t got some way of determining which part of this biblical argument is the winning side. (Jubilee, people, it’s always about Jubilee. All of it.)

But there’s no way of doing that if you’ve decided ahead of time that such intra-biblical disputes cannot be allowed to exist. Pretending they don’t exist doesn’t make them go away. Refusing to acknowledge their existence doesn’t make them vanish in a puff of smoke — no matter how much “conservative Christians” wish that it were so.

This is a huge problem for 21st-century white evangelicals. Like Russell Moore, they’re mostly convinced — now — that white evangelical support for slavery had been a terrible mistake. Yet they still want to cling to the pro-slavery Christians’ insistence that the Bible is uniform and unambiguous and that no interpretation is necessary to understand what it clearly says.

So while they’re pretty sure those earlier, pro-slavery Christians were wrong, they’re not able to explain how or why they were wrong. And thus, today, they are also unable to explain how or why they themselves are right about all the things they claim “the Bible clearly says.”

If those early Southern Baptists were wrong about slavery, then they were wrong about the Bible — wrong about how to read the Bible. They were wrong about slavery because they were wrong about how to read the Bible.

Contemporary white evangelicals want to retain the same approach to reading the Bible, but not the same conclusions about slavery. That doesn’t work.

If you want to retain the anti-hermeneutic of the early Southern Baptists while rejecting their pro-slavery views, then you can’t say, “The founders of the Southern Baptist Convention were wrong and wickedly wrong on the issue of human slavery.” You have to say, instead, that the Bible itself used to be wrong and wickedly wrong on slavery, but somehow isn’t anymore (even though it never changed).

If you’re not willing to reject that anti-hermeneutic, then you have to say that the Bible itself used to be wrong about a lot of things.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* I’m a bit worried about mentioning item No. 4 on Amanda Marcotte’s list:

4) Pain relief for childbirth. The Bible explicitly lays out pain in childbirth as Eve’s punishment for sin, so unsurprisingly, that’s what many Christians in the 19th century believed had to be so. Once reliable pain relief in childbirth began to be developed, therefore, there was a lot of resistance to it from Christians who feared it defied God to let women have some relief. … Eventually, the argument that women owed it to God to suffer through childbirth faded to the fringes of right-wing Christianity.

It’s true that this was once conventional wisdom — a widespread argument that shaped common practice. Childbirth was seen as something that ought to be painful, because Eve. Today, though, that argument is a mostly forgotten relic of history.

But today we also have a reflexively polarized religious right that trips over itself in a rush to oppose anything and everything that we evil liberals and baby-killers view approvingly. Just by mentioning stuff like this, we may be giving them ideas. If Amanda Marcotte approves of reliable pain relief in childbirth, that probably means that Barack Obama does too. And Sandra Fluke and Rachel Held Evans and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi and Brian McLaren and Planned Parenthood. Probably even Rob Bell.

And once they realize that, they’re likely to start angrily opposing such pain relief as another evil symptom of women’s lib and the sexual revolution. After all, if bearing children isn’t as painful and dangerous as it was back in the Golden Age, then it’s like we’re giving these wanton hussies permission to go out and do the sex without the fear of pain and suffering that God intended to accompany such filthy behavior, etc., etc.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, keep in mind that this is exactly what has happened in recent years when it comes to the abruptly newfound white evangelical opposition to contraception — a position that has surged to prominence without any credible biblical, ethical, scientific or logical argument to support it.

2014-12-10T14:27:22-05:00

Rick Perry is biblically illiterate, sanctimonious, and … um … and I forget the third one.

But he’s not alone. The governor of Texas is just the most recent of many, many, far too many Christians who have disgraced themselves by misquoting Jesus to support the precise opposite of what he said. And this needs to stop.

“Biblically, the poor are always going to be with us in some form or fashion,” Rick Perry said in an interview published yesterday in The Washington Post.

The reference there is to a story in the Bible, one repeated in three of the Gospels. Matthew and Mark both tell us the story happened in the house of Simon the Leper. John’s Gospel says it happened in the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus. But they all agree it happened in Bethany — in the house of the poor. Here’s the story from Matthew’s Gospel:

Now while Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she poured it on his head as he sat at the table. But when the disciples saw it, they were angry and said, “Why this waste? For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor.”

But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. By pouring this ointment on my body she has prepared me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

The bit Rick Perry was attempting to quote is from verse 11 there: “For you always have the poor with you,” or, in the King James Version, “ye have the poor always with you,” or in the NIV, “The poor you will always have with youa.”

People love to quote that bit. Christians especially love to quote that bit — Christians who claim to have read and understood their Bibles.

And, like Rick Perry, they all get it wrong.

Completely and utterly wrong. Backwards wrong. Perversely, cruelly, anti-biblically, priggishly, prickishly, sinfully, hellishly wrong.

Almost every time you see someone citing this passage, they’re invoking it the same way Gov. Perry is there — a shrugging acceptance that poverty is just the way it is and that there’s nothing we can do about it.

And that’s not what Jesus was saying at all.

You see that little superscripted “a” at the end of that phrase in the NIV translation? That’s a footnote. Scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see that footnote reads “See Deut. 15:11.”

That’s important. Jesus was quoting from the Torah. And you can’t understand what he said — or what his disciples heard him saying — unless you understand what it is he was quoting.

So let’s do that. Let’s “see Deut. 15:11.” Here it is:

Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”

Already you can see that Jesus’ statement can’t be made to mean what Rick Perry et. al. are trying to twist it into meaning. The passage Jesus was quoting is not a complacent description, but an if … then statement. “Since … therefore …” Deuteronomy 15:11 says. Jesus only quotes the “since” part because he didn’t need to quote the “therefore” — he knew that his disciples knew the rest of that verse: “I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.'”

That is what “The poor will always be with you” means in the Bible. In Deuteronomy and in Matthew, Mark and John. It means, therefore, we are commanded to open our hands to the poor and needy.

I took this picture in Bethany in 1990, not far from Martha and Mary's house. (Or, at least, not far from where Constantine's mom thought Martha and Mary lived.)
I took this picture in Bethany in 1990, not far from where Martha and Mary and Lazarus lived. (Or, at least, not far from where Constantine’s mom thought Martha and Mary and Lazarus lived.)

But we’re not done yet. Because just as Jesus’ remark in the Gospels is a quotation from Deuteronomy 15:11, that verse is also a direct reference to the verses that come shortly before it.

If you want to understand the verse Rick Perry is mangling, you have to read not just Deuteronomy 15:11, but also Deuteronomy 15:4-5:

There will, however, be no one in need among you, because the Lord is sure to bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession to occupy, if only you will obey the Lord your God by diligently observing this entire commandment that I command you today.

That’s the NRSV. Here’s the same passage from the NIV:

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.

So here in Deuteronomy we read that “there need be no poor people among you” and then, shortly thereafter, that “There will always be poor people in the land.” Which is it?

Well, it’s the second one, because the first one is conditional. “There need be no poor people among you … if only you fully obey the Lord your God.” And then, six verses later, “There will always be poor people in the land.”

Zing. Moses is delivering an unsubtle slap there. “If you were obedient, there would be no poverty among you. … Since there will always be poverty among you …” Yes, he’s telling the people not just that they’re a bunch of disobedient bastards, but that they’ll probably always be a bunch of disobedient bastards. He’s telling them that poverty is the result of their disobedience — that they are to blame for its existence, and that they are responsible for it.

And that’s the same message Jesus is delivering to his disciples in all three versions of that Gospel story.

But that’s the exact opposite of what ignorant Christians misquoting Jesus are trying to say when they babble about “the poor will always be with you.” Those Christians are perverting that verse in order to deny all culpability and responsibility for or to the poor.

That’s wrong. That is, according to Moses and to Jesus, evil.

But we’re still not done, because the rest of Deuteronomy 15 is also important here if we’re going to understand what it means about following “all these commands I am giving you today.”

This is about Jubilee. This is about the year of the Lord’s favor — about the very set of commandments that Jesus quoted in his first public sermon, the Jubilee that Jesus identified himself with. So let’s look at this whole section from Deuteronomy, chapter 15, verses 1-11:

At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require payment from anyone among their own people, because the Lord’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed. You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your fellow Israelite owes you. 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.

Whether he knows it or not (and he clearly doesn’t know it), this is what Rick Perry is accidentally affirming when he tries to quote that passage from the Gospels. All of this.

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts.”

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “do not be hardhearted or tightfisted.”

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “be careful not to harbor this wicked thought.”

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “do not show ill will toward the needy.”

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “give generously and do so without a grudging heart.”

Whenever you say “the poor will always be with you,” you are also saying “be openhanded toward the poor and needy.”

And if — like Rick Perry or countless other lapdogs for the rich and powerful — you try to say “the poor will always be with you” without also saying all of that, then be warned. Because the poor may then appeal to the Lord against you, and you will be found guilty of sin.

 

 

 

 

2014-12-10T03:48:22-05:00

I wonder if Russell Moore has ever heard of his fellow Baptist leader John Leland.

Leland wasn’t technically a Southern Baptist. Leland was born in Massachusetts, for one thing. And for another he died in 1841, several years before the Southern Baptist Convention split away from other Baptists in defense of slave-owners’ rights to serve as missionaries. But Leland also spent many years building churches and ministering in Virginia where he served in a leadership role as a member of the Baptist General Committee for that southern state.

Leland is remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for two events in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson. He helped to found the Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut, to which President Jefferson sent his famous 1802 Letter to the Danbury Baptists — the letter in which Jefferson wrote of the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between Church & State” and reaffirmed “the rights of conscience” as a natural right of all people.

More memorable, if less consequential, was Leland’s response to that letter, provided in the form of cheese. A lot of cheese. As an expression of gratitude to Jefferson for his shared commitment to religious liberty, John Leland organized the creation of the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese — a 1,200-pound, four-foot wide cheese wheel made from the milk of every cow in Cheshire, Mass., where Leland was then serving as a pastor.

The big cheese had to be transported by sleigh, and it was John Leland himself who drove that sleigh the 500 miles from Massachusetts to Washington. The journey took three weeks, with the strange sight of the Mammoth Cheese drawing crowds at each stop along the way. As a Baptist preacher, Leland couldn’t resist such crowds, and he preached his way from Massachusetts to the White House, standing in the pulpit of his sleigh next to a ginormous cheese wheel which bore the inscription “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

Cheshire
The Cheshire Mammoth Cheese Monument in Cheshire, Mass. (Creative Commons photo by Makeitalready)

But the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese was only the second most audacious thing John Leland attempted.

His more audacious project was undertaken during his years of ministry in Virginia. In 1789, Leland authored a resolution put before the Baptist General Committee of Virginia. That resolution called for a “great Jubilee” and the abolition of slavery in the state. It also declared slavery to be a “a violent deprivation of rights of nature” and “contrary to the word of God.”

Leland’s resolution, remarkably, was initially met with some enthusiasm. Consider that for a moment — it’s more startling than even the image of a sleigh-riding itinerant preacher bearing a half ton of hand-crafted, revolutionary cheese. In 1789, in the state of Virginia, a gathering of southern Baptists who were not yet officially Southern Baptists entertained a proposal from a Massachusetts abolitionist that would have freed all their slaves and declared the practice of slavery in Virginia to be “contrary to the word of God.”

Leland wasn’t laughed out of the convention and sent packing back to New England. His fellow Baptists in Virginia took this resolution seriously. They considered this proposal as something they might actually affirm and embrace and do. Leland’s resolution was sent out to the various regional Baptist associations throughout the state.

That’s when the push-back started.

The good Christians of the Strawberry Baptist Association, near Lynchburg, did not explicitly dispute the resolution’s argument that slavery was incompatible with scripture and human rights, but they worried that Leland’s Jubilee would create a humanitarian crisis among all those abruptly unemployed former slaves. The pious devout of the Roanoke Association fretted that the General Committee’s resolution took too simple a view of what they saw as a “very abstruse … set of complex circumstances.” Surely such a complicated issue was best left up to local congregations to decide.

Leland’s resolution was returned to the statewide General Committee in 1792, which quickly voted to dismiss it.

The non-cheese-related history recounted above is taken from Garrett Ryland’s 1955 book, The Baptists of Virginia, 1699-1926. Ryland says that this same pattern — initial support for abolition and Jubilee followed by local resistance and ultimate reversal — was repeated at the local and regional level in Baptist associations throughout the state. The Ketocton Association, for example, adopted a plan for the “gradual abolition of slavery” in 1796. Angry resistance from local congregations led to the repeal of that plan just two years later.

The resistance to Leland’s proposal from the regional associations shows that it probably never really had a chance, but this is still a tantalizing story. In 1789, the Baptists of Virginia came to a crossroads and saw that something else, some other way, might be possible. And they paused, for just a moment at least, to consider that before passing by on the other side.

Maybe that’s all that’s happening now with Russell Moore’s surprising “prophetic moment.” But maybe too, there’s some value in such brief pauses at the crossroads, even if those pausing are unable or unwilling to change direction just yet. Maybe such glimpses, however brief, of the possibility of a different path are helping to prepare them for the next opportunity, or for the one after that. Maybe someday …

2014-07-04T07:02:35-04:00

Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852:

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. …

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. — There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to bum their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

2014-06-26T15:42:57-04:00

In 1850, at Andover Theological Seminary, the biblical scholar Moses Stuart wrote Conscience and the Constitution with Remarks on the Recent Speech of the Hon. Daniel Webster in the Senate of the United States on the Subject of Slavery.

Webster had spoken against “the subject of slavery.” Stuart’s thought on that subject was, in his view, more nuanced. Like all Very Serious People, he sought a Third Way between polar extremes, taking great care to avoid what he saw as the impieties of the radical abolitionists who were disregarding the clear biblical principles affirming slavery as an institution. But on the other hand, Stuart also agreed with some of the abolitionists’ critique of American slavery as practiced in 1850, and so he called for a gradual, voluntary emancipation.

This Third Way compromise was regarded as eminently reasonable by the Very Serious People of Stuart’s day, but from the vantage point of 164 years later, his thoughts “on the Subject of Slavery” seem reprehensibly clueless because they fail to give due consideration to the subjects of slavery — to the very real injustice suffered by the very real people who were then enslaved.

Stuart’s book enlists Jonathan Edwards in defense of his argument that slavery was permitted and affirmed by the Bible, writing:

Who does not know that the immortal Edwards — immortal as much for his great piety as for his intellectual power — left behind him in manuscript an Essay on the Slave-trade (probably still extant), in which he defended the trade with all his ability, on the same ground that Moses required the fugitive heathen slave to be detained, viz., on the ground that it would bring the perishing heathen within the reach of the Christian influence.

If the manuscript Stuart cites was still extant in 1850, we cannot find it today. What we do have, however, is a letter written in Jonathan Edwards’ own hand in which the great theologian angrily defends a fellow clergyman and a fellow slave-owner. That letter was published and discussed by Kenneth P. Minkema, who also highlighted the above quote from Moses Stuart.

Minkema published Edwards’ letter defending slavery and offered a detailed context for it in two articles,* and I want to quote extensively from them here just to provide a better sense of what his identity as a slave-owner meant for Jonathan Edwards.

Here is Minkema on the basic outlines of this subject:

Whatever questions Edwards had about the institution of slavery, he accepted it. In fact, he owned several slaves: Joseph and Lee, a woman named Venus, purchased in 1731, and, listed in the inventory of his estate in 1758, a “negro boy” named Titus. Edwards’s willingness to participate in the practice of slavery is readily evident in the letter. After complaining about the injustice being done to the minister, he pointed out that many things, such as “Eating & drinking,” led to sin, “but,” as we cannot stop taking nourishment, “we are not theref[ore] to abstain.”

Moderation in all things, then, including slavery.

His responses to opponents of slave-owning suggest that he espoused the conventional view that holding slaves was permissible as long as they were treated humanely (as Massachusetts law required) and encouraged to become Christians. Defending slaveholding by pointing to its cultural and religious benefits for the slaves had been commonplace in New England since at least 1680. Acculturation and Christianization of slave were among the traditional duties to which ministers exhorted slaveowners. Edwards acknowledged that slavery could be a cruel and sinful thing, as when Europeans encouraged Africans to seize fellow Africans and sell them into slavery, yet slave-owning was justified if the slave was purchased legally and treated decently.

Here we see one of many wrong turns taken by white theology as a consequence of slavery. This is one of the roots of the contemporary belief in white Christianity that, in its language, the Great Commission outranks the Greatest Commandment. The spread of the gospel — evangelization — becomes the paramount concern, eclipsing everything else. The matter of justice no longer matters. Or, rather, justice is redefined as that which best permits and promotes the spread of the gospel. The Golden Rule is reinterpreted and reinvented to mean that our foremost concern is to ensure that our neighbors hear “the gospel” by any means necessary — even if that involved kidnapping them, torturing and enslaving them.

Jonathan Edwards eventually came to oppose the Atlantic slave trade while still defending slavery and slave-owning itself. He came to criticize the cruelty of seizing free Africans and slaughtering them by the thousands in the Middle Passage, but not because such atrocities were, themselves, inherently unjust. He opposed them, again, because he feared they could create a hindrance to the spread of the gospel. As Minkema writes:

Continuing excursions into Africa (or anywhere else) for slaves created resentment against Christian Europeans that could ultimately thwart evangelization. Quite opposite from providing an opportunity to Christianize, as its defenders claimed, the slave trade actually decreased the chance to spread the gospel elsewhere.

That’s not entirely wrong — the slave trade surely did create such resentment and this cruel injustice certainly did “thwart evangelization.” But to regard this as the primary reason to oppose the slave trade reveals again how slave-owning came to twist and distort white theology into something warped, half-blind and incapable of comprehending the prophets or Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom.

And that brings us closer to the crux of the problem — the way slavery caused white Christianity to elevate “spreading the gospel” over the substance of that gospel itself.

Minkema credits Edwards, as others have, for including outreach to African Americans in the revivals of the Great Awakening, but reminds us to keep that credit in proportion:

Scholars have commented, in passing, on the implicit leveling impact of African Americans on full church membership during these awakenings. Theoretically, full membership accorded equal status to blacks and whites as fellow Christians. In his published treatises on revivals, Edwards time and again pointed to black converts who, he declared, had been “vindicated into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” The “liberty” he assumed for blacks was not a social and political liberty on a par with whites, but a solely spiritual one. Even ontologically, Edwards harbored a typically paternalistic outlook that saw black and Indian adults, before conversion, as little more than children in the extent of their innate capacities. To be sure, both blacks and whites were equally in need of the means of grace and of salvation, but that was as far as equality went.

There we can see a hint of what was done and of what, therefore, will need to be undone if we are not to be undone by it.

Owning slaves required Jonathan Edwards to redefine and compartmentalize his understanding of “the glorious liberty of the children of God.” This “solely spiritual” liberty was bounded. In order for it to be compatible with Edwards’ slave-owning, it could only be allowed to mean one set of things and it could not be permitted to mean more than that.

This “solely spiritual” salvation is part of the heritage white Christians inherited from Edwards, Whitefield and others like them. You won’t find it in the teaching of their contemporary, the abolitionist evangelist John Woolman, but white theology today is not derived from people like Woolman. It is derived from people like Edwards and Whitefield. It is derived from people who owned slaves.

The spread of the gospel became paramount, but the gospel being spread was “solely spiritual.” The gospel being spread was no longer the same gospel.

Minkema traces this distortion within Edwards’ own preaching:

At the very start of his preaching career in New York City, he delivered sermons that equated sin with slavery and presented servitude in terms of personal spiritual reformation. Although these strategies were typical in Puritan rhetoric, Edwards’s presence in a slave-trading center may have given them new meaning for him. In one sermon in particular, “Christian Liberty,” Edwards presented, as Wilson H. Kimnach described it, “the image of a Messiah literally freeing slaves as a radical abolitionist; there are no qualifiers,” no use of metaphors, at least at first. The very opening sentence, in fact, originally stated that when the Messiah came “he should proclaim a universal liberty to all servants, slaves, captives, vassals, [and] imprisoned [or] condemned persons.” Before Edwards actually delivered the sermon, he went back and, in an apparent tactical withdrawal, deleted the word “slave” from this litany. All the same, the Messiah was not yet come; the time of Jubilee had not arrived, nor would it likely come for some time, and until then slavery was sanctioned.

Justice and Jubilee get punted to the sweet by-and-by. This is white theology.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus said after reading that passage.

“No it hasn’t,” said Jonathan Edwards. “No it hasn’t,” says white theology.

One of the more interesting things about Edwards’ letter in defense of slavery is that the clergyman he was defending was a staunch Arminian — a man whose theology was anathema to Edwards’ own Calvinist views. Minkema addresses this:

To say the least, Edwards found himself in an awkward situation, a situation that wonderfully illustrates how slave owning made for strange bedfellows. Here he was, placed in the position of defending an alleged advocate of Arminianism, the very disease he was so actively fighting to root out, against fellow evangelicals, some of whom were Northampton transplants who espoused Edwards’s Calvinist doctrine and method of revivalism. Nevertheless, a range of issues, ecclesiastical, political, and military, took precedence. Edwards upheld a high concept of the clergy as “ambassadors of Christ” that obliged him to come to the aid of a besieged fellow clergyman in order to restore deference and respect among the laity — a laity excited to occasional insurgency by the awakenings. Salary had long been a sore point between Edwards and his church, and he, like Doolittle before him, would soon come under attack for being “lavish” and of a “craving disposition.” In 1744, a number of his parishioners insisted upon an account of his own expenditures, an action suggesting the jealousy and resentment aroused by the family’s taste for jewelry, chocolate, Boston-made clothing, children’s toys — and slaves.

Edwards was indignant that his fellow clergyman was criticized for the supposed lavish lifestyle he enjoyed as a slave-owner. He wanted to discuss slavery as an abstract idea, not as a matter of pecuniary interest. What mattered, he insisted, was what the Bible said about slavery and the clear meaning of the many texts of scripture that affirmed it. Such arguments should be considered separate from, and unsullied by, talk of money.

This, too, is part of our inheritance. We like to think of “the Subject of Slavery” as distinct from the subject of wealth, but those things were inseparable. They still are.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery.” Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 4, Race & Slavery, 2002. And, Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave Trade” in The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Oct. 1997).

Both are fascinating reads. Check them out if you’ve got a JStor account or access to a good academic library.

 

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