Kierkegaard on Exegesis

The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined.

Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament. I open the New Testament and read: "If you want to be perfect, then sell all your goods and give to the poor and come follow me." (Matthew 19:21) Good God, if we were to actually do this, all the capitalists, the officeholders, and the entrepreneurs, the whole society in fact, would be almost beggars! We would be sunk if it were not for Christian scholarship! Praise be to everyone who works to consolidate the reputation of Christian scholarship, which helps to restrain the New Testament, this confounded book which would run us all down if it got loose.

-Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

Ideas v. People: Sketch 2 (St. Paul and Homosexuality)

Could Paul have conceived of healthy, homosexual monogamy? Are Paul's remarks moral proclamations for all time, or the understandably frustrated anti-Roman spite of a politicized first-century Jewish thinker? Does Paul see homosexuality as a symbol of vulgar Roman extravagance? Is there really a heteronormative agenda at work? What does Paul mean when he writes "In Christ there is no male or female"?

Does Paul see homosexuality itself as sin? Does Paul see anything as sin? Does he distinguish "sin" from morally-neutral behaviors? Or is "sin" (to Paul) everything and nothing? Isn't Paul also antagonistic to heterosexual behavior? Does Paul sympathetically characterize homosexuality as a malaise from which people must be saved?

Does the burden of proof fall on me, or on those who claim that homosexuality is sin? If these people appeal to the Levitical code, is their reading selective? What are the assumptions upon which their belief is based?

Don't we have to agree on a few sweeping assumptions before the conversation can move forward? How can I have this conversation with someone if I don't share their view that scripture is inerrant?

Doesn't Jesus himself stand up for the dignity of marginalized people against the moral presumption of the pious?

Can the Spirit of the law be separated from its letter? Are we bound by rules for which we are unprepared?

On First Things (Part One - The Father)

I have long struggled to put what I believe into a coherent written statement, and for the next few posts, I'll be relating portions of my most recent attempt to do this. My views shift and mutate, like anyone else's, but I want to let this writing stand as a reminder of a particular point in my journey.

Originally, I began writing this when asked to contribute a guest-post to a blog on Atheism, and I intended to appeal, first and foremost, to unbelievers, not to proselytize, but to explain myself as a part of a dialogue.

Like most Christians, I share with most atheists a firm belief in the importance of critical thinking and skepticism, and in most of the day-to-day arguments between atheists and Christians (school prayer, evolution and such) I side firmly (I am “excluding the middle” for the sake of brevity) with atheists. I am a secularist not in spite of my faith, but because of my faith. Not only do I wish to keep something that I understand to be a beautiful, complex truth out of the hands of those who would cynically exploit a version of it for political, social (and even moral) purposes, but I also believe that the leaders of institutionalized Christianity have domesticated a radical idea (an idea that should stand in complete opposition to our social, moral, political and economic norms) and turned it into another obsolete dogma alongside others. I believe that the message of Christ is not a religion at all. It is a transformative perception of a Truth (post-modernity, tremble at that capital “T”!) that carries serious implications for our lives.

Thus far my Christian friends and neighbors are likely to agree, but I wish to be absolutely clear that the issue is not semantic; it is not a matter of placing Christianity above “religion” in order to stress Christianity’s privileged place. Not only is the Christian message not a creedal, dogmatic religion, it is an absolute rejection of all creeds, dogmas, ideologies, rituals, and moral laws.

Everything that is a part of religion is renounced by Christ. Even, finally, the traditional relationship with an anthropomorphic supreme being is abandoned. The things gained from humanity’s experiences with these traditions are not abandoned however. If we are willing to rise to the challenge it sets before us, the Gospel (the message that the first Christians derived from their experiences) offers a tenable step forward in the process of which religion is a part; an exit from religion that accounts for the value and meaning of humanity’s religious experiences.

Because the Christian message can only be understood as a leap that follows the leap taken by ancient Judaism, I should say a brief word about the Bible: I believe that our spiritual predecessors, while often brilliant and insightful, were also imperfect people troubled and prejudiced by the mores, political situations and pre-scientific world-views of the times in which they lived. They communicated their ideas and questions through myth and folklore, and their writings should not be understood as inerrant or literal. These stories are not intended as historical stories; they are spiritual literature that uses symbols and tropes that had profound meaning for the text’s intended audience.

This is not a new or unique position. Rudolf Bultmann, for example, said as much in his attempts to “de-mythologize” the New Testament, to lift the meaning out of its mythological construct, and Paul Tillich, (more prone than Bultmann to preserve the symbols), stressed that the symbolic is not less true than the literal, it is more true. Bultmann and Tillich had all the advantages of a 20th Century understanding of the world, but their arguments were not unprecedented. Origen, the 3rd Century Biblical scholar wrote in De Principiis (First Principles) that we misunderstand Scripture when we “understand Scripture not according to the spiritual meaning but according to the sound of the letter” because the mysteries transmitted there are hidden “in ordinary Words under the pretext of a narrative.”

The Old Testament narrative is not simply the surface conflict between the followers of Yahweh and the other cultures they encounter; it is a conflict between a convent with the mysterious God who defies concrete depiction and a worldly need for tangible, graven images and the religious security they offer.

In the beginning, humanity occupies a place of total innocence, represented by Eden. This paradise is lost when human beings eat, not from the tree of “knowledge”, as critics are fond of saying (in order to accuse Judaic faiths of anti-intellectualism), but the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil.” Humanity discovers “good” and “evil”, precursors to the concept of “sin” and this is the beginning of humanity’s great problem. Adam and Eve, the archetypical human beings, become ashamed of their nakedness. This nakedness posed no problem before, but with the burden of morality, they irrationally clothe themselves, not simply in literal clothing, but in divisive social constructions. They are now estranged by sin, but their sins are not the problem. The concept of sin is the problem. “Good” and “Evil” become categories into which behavior and even people are divided. As a result, human beings are estranged not only from an original place of innocence, an authentic life that encompasses the fullness and complexity of human-ness, but also from each other: We are expelled from paradise into a harsh world where brother kills brother (the Cain and Abel story) and people are separated into nations by barriers of culture and language (the Tower of Babel story.)

The decision is made to become “moral” people. Moral codes are demanded by such a decision. Religion is a way to preserve and teach these moral codes. For Israel, the stewards of truth in this narrative, God is kept invisible to prevent a shallow, superstitious faith. However, Israel loses faith, someone erects an idol, this idol is worshipped and the worshippers are severely reprimanded. Clearly, the more nuanced faith now demanded is difficult. Their God is anthropomorphic, and he is understood through their eyes but his Ultimate Otherness is still preserved by the prohibition against turning him into a visible object. This will (to an extent) prevent them from totally obscuring God with a god-image based on their prejudices and ideas. It does not work perfectly, but it is a step in the Process. Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, succinctly summarizes the significance of this:

The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.

This new kind of theology was, I believe, a major step away from obsolete religious formulations. Christianity, then, arises from this tradition in the figure of Jesus, who provides the next major step.

Read Part Two here.

The Well of Sacred Text

"Don't fall down the well of scripture.
Use the words to keep moving.

Thousands are trapped in the Qur'an
and the Bible, holding to a
rope.

It's not the rope's fault.
Let the wellrope pull you out.
Then let the wellrope go."

-Rumi "The Well of Sacred Text"